| |
'Many too many are born. The state was devised
for the superfluous ones'. With these pitiless
words from another century, Friedrich Nietzsche
heralds the demise of the nation state as
we enter the next. The industrial Age and
its need for an over-supply of humanity spawned
the nation state. But what is to be done with
the glut as we enter the Information Age?
There will
be no nice, tidy transition, rather a severe
and total distortion with the past. One thing
is certain: the masses will not win in the
natural selection for dominance of an increasingly
élitist and cosmopolitan world. Because
of new technology the costs of production
have dropped to a point where a billion new
workers have entered the job-market. Companies
are globalising and mobilising, chasing "spot
markets" in cyberspace. The costs of overcoming
time and space no longer buffer the impact
of cheap labour. The state has to be part
of the global economy, so it is incapable
of fending off foreign incursions. Mass unemployment
is a cancer infecting every nation state,
sending shock waves through their workforces.
The electronic
transfer of money offshore has made tax avoidance
a bigger business than narcotics. The next
stop is off-planet banking. Unhindered by
national barriers, corporations will be truly
global. They can communicate globally, and
their shareholders, executives and employees
are spread out across the globe. They will
relocate, physically, fiscally and electronically,
to where the profit is greatest and the regulation
least. Their profits are declared in low-tax
countries, while they continue to operate
in high-tax ones. The global company no longer
supports the aspirations of the country of
its birth. Companies large and small move.
When a British plastics company switched its
polythene bag factory from Telford to China,
150 British jobs were lost, but its payroll
bill was cut by 90 per cent. Despite all the
patriotic bleating, companies know that to
remain competitive they can no longer afford
to carry a large and overpriced inventory
of a national "people product" of varying
value and quality.
It is no accident
that most companies are presently downsizing,
delayering and outsourcing. Routine production
jobs can be performed by robots or exported
anywhere on the globe, so wages will converge
world-wide to Third World levels. "Social
Dumping" is also dragging down wages for service
work, a sector which is itself being increasingly
automated. In 1994 the International Labour
Organisation claimed that there were 800 million
sub-employed people in the world; the West
must now suffer its fair share. Job losses
are not the result of some temporary downturn
in the economic cycle, but are the result
of structural changes. It is no good waiting
for the upturn. Fundamental changes as profound
as when agricultural workers left the land
for the cities and the whole fabric of society
mutated. Now work is leaving the office and
the factory for cyberspace.The
idea of a job, born with the Machine Age,
is changing beyond all recognition. Work is
becoming increasingly casual and part time
among the mass of workers. No one will protect
their interests. Released from a single location,
companies are free to ring the death knell
of dinosaur trade-unions. Middle management,
too, is under threat. Under the euphemistic
banner of business process reengineering,
companies are firing a quarter of managers.
The motto for everyone is "add value or perish".
Moralising politicians use the fact of "inhuman"
working conditions in the Third World for
their hypocritical justification of protectionist
import controls in their pathetic attempts
to stem the tide, but large corporations will
ignore their pleas. Even
President Clinton can't control corporate
America in its feeding frenzy over the China
market. Politicians, both the knaves and the
naïve, incant the abracadabra words "training
in new technology" and "jobs through growth"
to conjure new jobs for the huge number of
soon-to-be-unemployed. They
will never learn that technology is the problem,
not the solution. Today, productivity is delivered
by a technology needing only a few machine
minders. National economies can no longer
grow themselves out of unemployment. Growth
has been uncoupled from employment. It is
created by the unique skills of a few entrepreneurial
knowledge workers, not the labour of low-grade
service and production workers. The continuous
innovation of entrepreneurs is the real generator
of wealth. Their income will increase substantially
as countries compete in a global market for
their wealth-generating services, without
which states will drown in a whirlpool of
poverty. Innovation happens in self generating
hot spots with incentives that stimulate investment
and profit.
The
very concentration of innovation acts as a
magnet for established innovators and a spur
for new enterprise. But knowledge workers
refuse to be treated as part of a homogeneous
labour-force, as standardised units. Talent,
entrepreneurship, innovation - the great dividers
of humanity - are diviners of economic success.
Egalitarianism goes out of the window in this
dog-eat-dog world. The role of the state is
to nurture, propagate and supply quality human
raw material. Government is merely the supplier
at the bottom end of the value chain that
ultimately supplies wealth, which is the product
not of labour, but of individual intellect
and determination. If a state cannot produce
a quality "people product" in sufficient quantities,
then it must buy it in from abroad; it must
scour the globe for élite knowledge
workers, no matter what their age, sex, race
or religion. This élite of rootless
economic mercenaries will expect to pay less
tax, not more. Governments everywhere are
being forced to lower top tax rates in line
with declining global levels. They will have
to acquiesce to the will of global enterprises
and their key employees. Tax credits, tax
holidays and "regulatory arbitrage" will be
the name of the game everywhere.
Politicians
must find ways of attracting global employers
in order to employ the local masses. If, however,
the state maintains a greedy collectivist
and populist stance, under the defunct motto
"power to the people", then the entrepreneurial
and knowledge aristocracy will move on to
more lucrative and agreeable climes, leaving
the country economically unviable, composed
solely of the unproductive masses, sliding
inevitably into a vicious circle of decline.
The power in global economic forces means
that the tax burden is irrevocably moving
away from the élite on to the shoulders
of the immobile. When Leona Helmsley said
"only the little people pay taxes", she unwittingly
making a prediction. Very soon, companies
will be negotiating preferential tax deals,
not only for themselves but also for chosen
élite employees. Politicians may promise,
but markets decide. Governments are impotent
as they face a triple whammy: substantially
lower tax revenues, increased social security
payouts, and the need to support "deprived
areas". The books just do not balance.
The liability
of a large uneducated and ageing population
is another problem. The masses, with only
a Saturday night lottery to soften the blow,
will put economic well-being before the dubious
privilege of electing powerless representatives.
The lights are going out for whole categories
of employment, We are entering an age of resentment,
an age of rage. Whole sectors of society who
previously felt their future secure can see
it slipping away. Dissent is fermenting, and
normally law-abiding citizens, who have nothing
to lose, are being sucked into a culture
of protest and crime. In the winter of 1995,
French workers and students took to the streets
against Alain Juppé's government in
a futile defence of their cradle-to-grave
health and welfare systems. But as the peasants
were protesting in Paris, the "gnomes of London"
were profiting from speculation. The slow
redistribution of wealth that has occurred
over the last centuries is being rapidly reversed.
The disposable income of the majority will
be drastically reduced. The rich are getting
richer, and the poor poorer: the future is
inequality. At the bottom of the heap we are
witnessing an expanding underclass. The streets
of London are again littered with beggars.
The self-glamorising "New Age travellers"
cannot disguise the fact that they are just
a bunch of nomadic losers, whose survival
depends on handouts from the tax-payer. Those
tax-payers will demand restrictions on the
mobility of travellers in return for their
charity. The new Criminal Justice legislation
is just the first step to the reinvention
of the Poor Laws.
The
state must behave as an economic institution,
a national firm judged against the new economic
circumstances. No state has an automatic right
to exist. Government, like every other enterprise,
will have to survive on the efforts of an
élite few. It must represent success
not failure; but in the Information Age, governments
chosen by the majority are governments chosen
by losers. The "will of the people" voting
for full employment, a minimum wage and fair
taxation is merely turkeys voting for Christmas.
The politics of envy is suicide. Democracy
will degenerate to being the means of governing
the immobile and dependent service workers. That
citizens elect their slave masters makes their
democracy slavery none the less. Democracy
is an artefact from a time when the masses
were needed. The big political question of
the coming decades is how to find a socially
acceptable means of dismantling democracy.
How
can Middle England trust the present cast
of parliamentary degenerates to lead us into
this Brave New World ? How can we expect leadership
from those who get elected by kissing babies,
and stay there by kissing backsides ? The
Tories, apologists for an aristocracy, have
chosen the wrong aristocracy: yesterday's
rather than tomorrow's. Despite all the spin-doctoring,
Labour is still the party of the peasants;
and the global power equation is unequivocal
- "the sum of zeros is zero". As for the Liberal
Democrats, Nietzsche says it all: "the honourable
term for mediocre is, of course, the word
'liberal'". Who will defend us ? Globalisation
has shown the James Bond myth, where the state
is good and global corporations (Spectre)
bad, to be blatant state propaganda - a morality
tale told by tax collectors. James Bond, the
patron saint of civil servants, the thug of
state, is now a geriatric. Goldfinger has
won. The world belongs to the global corporation.
The nation state is now desperately sick,
and a "desperate disease requires a dangerous
remedy"(Guy Fawkes).
Ian Angell, professor
of Information Systems at the London School
of Economics, appeared in 'The Hollow State',
a two-part documentary on the end of the nation
state, that took place on Saturday 28th 1996
on BBC2)
|
|
