Abstract

‘The Establishment’ is an abstract institution. Its purpose is to organise a population into a coherent whole. The way it does this is by shaping their minds, disseminating ideas which make them think and act in reliable ways. Owen Jones’ book, The Establishment, shows how the ideological bent of the UK establishment has shifted away from statism and towards ‘free market absolutism’. The effect of this has been to alter the ideology of the populace. I sketch his account very briefly, in order to sum up the ways the establishment operates to control the minds of its subjects (and why it does it). Then I look at the odd effect that the current Establishment ideology has on our minds, and think about how to change it.

Introduction

‘Neoliberalism’ is the move of the moment. You’ve probably heard of it. Its basically the idea that the state should not intervene in economics: that ‘market forces’ are ‘self-organising’; that they will optimise if left to their own devices.

This claim is used to justify rolling back the power of the state. State interventionism is considered by neoliberals to impede progress: let the market get on with it, they say, and the effect will be maximal prosperity for all. Neoliberalism claims to champion individual freedom: ‘the state has controlled you for too long’, it says, ‘and we must now be freed to organise ourselves into groups as we see fit (i.e. businesses) and take the power for ourselves’.

This principle can be described as Free Market Absolutism (FMA). It challenges statism as the central organising principle of British society.

The challenge it poses is particularly interesting because of the way it sets itself up. Because neoliberalism rejects the state, it is able to present itself as if it is ‘for the people’. It is able to claim that transferring power away from the state and towards the market amounts to transferring power into the hands of people. This image is compounded by the freedom such models supposedly offer us: with state intervention rolled back, the spirit of entrepreneurship is nurtured within us, and as businesses pay homage to mental health, sexuality and community values, they send the message that this is what we want, that jolly competition is our nature, and that we are free as individuals so long as we can keep the state’s hands out of our minds.

The Establishment

According to Owen Jones, neoliberalism has entered the Establishment. He sees the current trend of privatisation and tax-avoidance to be transferring power away from the state and into the hands of private, corporate interests. The state has ceased to be the thing that spends our money, he says, and has simply become the thing that distributes it.

Jones thinks that this is due to the ideology of Free Market Absolutism infecting The Establishment. The government pushes for continued privatisation, allows accountants from the ‘Big 4’ to advise them on tax policy (only to go back to their clients and advise them on how to get around it), and refuses to challenge the ‘scroungers’ at the top, turning their attention instead to the ‘scroungers’ at the bottom for fear that big business will ‘take its ball and play elsewhere’. A ‘revolving door’ between parliament, media and the city ensures that the individuals who occupy the Establishment are committed to the ideology of Free Market Absolutism, rather than that of statism, for the simple reason that it benefits them better.

Wealth, then, is concentrating into the hands of a growing ‘business elite’. Because the Establishment has such a firm grip on our minds, having the power of the media to extend itself through space and time, it has convinced us that this is the fairest, the best, the most natural game in town: ‘humans compete, and look what happens, we win!’

It would be very easy to give up at this point. You can’t challenge the principles. Humans are animals, we do compete, and ‘they’ (the current elite) are winning. They’ve got the resources and they can use those resources to control enough of us that they needn’t worry about an uprising. We know this, and we still can’t do anything about it. Or can we?

How the Establishment Changes

In order to answer this question, we have to look at the way Free Market Absolutism got into the Establishment in the first place. If the Establishment controls what we think, and statism had been the order of the day, then an idea like FMA shouldn’t even be possible for people living within statism’s influence. So what happened?

Jones’ basic argument is this: ‘outriders’ come up with an idea like neoliberalism that is unpopular. Then some people pay them to spread that idea. Then, slowly, it becomes the establishment ideology (or it doesn’t). His solution? Just do the same but in the other direction: come up with ideas that champion fairer competition between individuals, resulting in an establishment ideology that doesn’t need to maintain this ‘neo-victorian’ social darwinism of believing that people are where they are because that’s where nature intends them to be.

The problem, of course, is money. Its this simple. Privatisation and the exploitation of tax loopholes is transferring control of the establishment away from the state and into the hands of a new, delocalised business elite. As this business elite amasses wealth, it gains control of the informational apparatus - the media and the government - who’s job it is to propagate ideologies which maintain the internal consistency of the structure. So a new group has gained money, used that to control information, and sewn the whole thing up in to a new Establishment. It is the transfer of money away from the state that facilitates the propagation of the ‘neoliberal agenda’, which creates the conditions for this new group ideology.

So the growing material wealth of people operating on FMA-assumptions allowed FMA-assumptions to enter into and predominate the mainstream narrative via the establishment. But the troubling fact is this: the whole thing was only possible because individuals, acting on FMA-assumptions (venture capitalism and that), were amassing material wealth. Put simply, FMA assumptions worked: they tracked truth well enough to get results, and those results were paying big dividends to their experimenters. This suggests that FMA is an accurate description of reality and an appropriate central organising principle for our society.

So certain people have acted on an idea and its worked for them, and now its the prevailing idea. Because its the prevailing idea, its very hard to get wealth without adopting it, and because its very hard to get wealth, its very hard to challenge the idea. Owen Hatherley notes that ‘attempts to counter the outriders’ media presence by forming real left equivalents like the New Economics Foundation or Class, a union-funded think tank which Jones helped set up, have been hampered by a lack of business backing and the organisations’ own unwillingness to speak the establishment’s language.’

Our belief that the neoliberal state of affairs is the natural game in town, moreover, is reinforced by the idea that it offers all of us the chance to be the elite, which is what we all want. Hatherley notes the ‘appeal that the ruling class has directed towards a section of the working class since 1979: the promise of a rearranged, if in no way fairer, set of criteria for admission to the ruling class, and a carefully targeted neo-Victorian discourse of class differentiation.’

The argument is this: the laws of group-construction have always been the same, and now we’ve made a group with totally porous outer walls, so that anyone can get into it if they’ll just play the game. So the idea is this: there is one structure, and because FMA fills it better than statism, i.e. affords us more freedom, we should accept it.

It seems like we’ve reached our final form. But have we?

Not quite sewn-up

Of course not! We have to see FMA, like statism, as an experiment with a shelf-life. It works, at the moment, because it is able to control our individual reactions to it, redirecting and repressing our anger.

The long and the short of it is this: there’s no good reason to think that FMA is the only game in town, any more than statism was. Both have functioned to shape our minds at a group level and subordinate our wills to the interests of a central elite.

However, because The Establishment has shifted, we can see that there is no reason to think that neoliberalism is the description of reality. Descriptions rely on acceptance: we accepted the ideology of the state until it let us down by sending us into wars, repressing our sexualities and calling us mad.

‘Hey, we accept you, its cool to be a bit mad, #bluemonday am I right?’ Said the businesses. Power shifted to them.

But as neoliberalism continues to let us down:

as privatised public institutions fail to provide adequate care to the elderly, out-of-work and ill;

as people begin to see through the lip-service businesses pay to our moral concerns;

as a growing class of mega-rich continue to amass wealth without doing anything notable;

as all of this happens, people begin to lose faith in the new establishment and the ideas which support it. Currently, this is erupting in nationalism. The neoliberal engine continues to turn this anger inwards, towards other groups, as it must.

But the challenge is mounting. Controlling the way people think requires spreading beliefs, and beliefs have a way of contradicting one another over time. The lie of Nazism, for example, relied on the belief that Jews are less than human. We see their suffering after the holocaust, however, and we realise that we are common men. When we are exposed to the suffering of others, we empathise with them, and this makes us see our common humanity. It is this common humanity that is put to use in resisting the ideological experiments of the Establishment: the thing that says, ‘No; that can’t be how it is’. The internet massively extends our vision, and compresses time, in this respect. We can see the suffering of everyone, everywhere, stretching back in time (through documentaries) and away in space (through the news). Our primitive instincts tell us, ‘friend hurting’ and we feel for them. Some people will still manage to dehumanise others in order to justify their suffering, of course. Currently, we are easily manipulated by the way people dress, and some people believe that because someone wears a hijab or a turban they are fundamentally different. This will always be a problem. Its easy to dehumanise people when they’re not right in front of you.

However, its much harder when they are right in front of you. The more people mix and interact, the harder it is to convince yourself to be racist. This is well supported: there are studies showing how much less racist the coastal cities in America are compared to the inlands, precisely because people have met each other there. So: as the internet expands our range and opens our minds, it blurs geographical boundaries, encouraging people to go to other places and meet different people. If this keeps happening, the people that don’t want to meet other people won’t have a choice; everyone will be everywhere. So now we have this mad omniscience thanks to the internet, and that makes it harder to spread lies about each other. Given that the present agenda is already crumbling, we shouldn’t worry too much.

Neoliberalism is a high-gain, short-term strategy. It enables people to make a load of money really quickly by making stuff up, but it also creates economic collapses, and economic collapses create starvation, which creates anger, which gets us thinking.

So if you’re feeling a bit stressed at the moment, don’t worry: you’re just living through a collective existential crisis. What we need to do, which is what we do whenever a crisis beckons, is to pick ourselves up, think of a new way to get together and do something good, and then give it a go. We’ll get the money somehow. Nature finds a way.