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Remember, Remember The 3rd Of September
national |
worker & community struggles and protests |
feature
Tuesday September 09, 2008 11:49 by Recession Diaries
'Singing Dirges In The Dark'
Remember the 3rd of September. That is the day the economic conservative consensus died, when all the certainties propagated by our one-party state were shredded. Fiona Fail has panicked in the face of rapid economic deterioration, brought forward the budget by a few weeks, and in that simple, technical act has unintentionally composed a dirge. No one day heralds the end of something as complex and layered as an economic cycle. But they can serve up symbols. September 3rd is such a symbol – of a coffin, and the Ministers polishing it. Related Links: The Recession Diaries
But anyone familiar with George Romero’s films will know – the dead may be dead but they can still terrorise the living. Indeed, they can conquer whole cities. Already, Ministers, cheered on by right-wing commentators, are preparing for us a flesh-diet – of spending cuts, real wage cuts, tax increases (guess who’ll pay those), priming the wrong markets with the wrong instruments – just to be doing something, anything. We have had conservative economics, laissez-faire and neo-liberal economics; now we’re facing into undead economics. ‘. . . produces goods that were designed elsewhere, to satisfy market requirements that were specified elsewhere, and sold by other people to customers with whom the Irish operation has little contact and over whom it has little influence.’ We have a financial services sector – which the ESRI sets so much store by – which is laden down with ‘back-office’ activities but short on ‘front-office’ activities; which leaves that sector vulnerable to companies closing up shop and transferring elsewhere. Our economy is part-illusion and part-aspiration – we feed the addiction to feel we’re getting by, and delight in GDP figures, but when you break down the measurements between the foreign and indigenous sectors, we only survive on the former. Take that out of the equation and we’re back to being the beggars of Europe. No wonder Minister Mary Hannafin is so anxious to ‘up-skill’ our workforce: ‘If you have an educated workforce that is your best opportunity to attract foreign direct investment . . . So that when as a government we are there with our American investors, or anybody else, we’re able to say to them, “no matter where you go to in Ireland, whether you go to the West coast or to the east coast, we can guarantee you an educated workforce . . . and we can make that workforce available to you.” And it’s a real selling point for us as a Government in attracting investment.’ Is there something wrong with this picture? Would a Minister in any other advanced European economy justify education and re-skilling in terms of its selling value to US foreign capital? Wouldn’t they, at least, make a nod towards creating their own businesses, their own economic activity? Or maybe home-grown enterprise development is a tad fashioned for our far-sighted, visionary Government. Where to Start That’s the story – about an economy that took a short-cut and found itself lost. Now we must write a new story, retracing our steps and starting over. It’s not all gloom, we still have a (multi-national) export platform and all the businesses that flow from that, something we didn’t have twenty years ago. But there is no silver bullet, slogans will not suffice, maximalist demands predicated on a minimalist economy are a recipe for disillusion and irrelevance. We have to prioritise. And the first priority is to generate wealth – our own wealth with our own resources, in a collective and participatory spirit. In particular, the Left must rid itself of the false dichotomies of market and state, of public and private. These only play into the hands of the right who would have us believe that markets are a kind of natural phenomenon, rather than being socially constructed. All economic assets, including enterprises, are social assets, even if our political structures pander to certain 'owning' constituencies. From this perspective, the Left can start to dictate the terms, co-opt the vocabulary and put it to progressive use. Programmes will come later, let’s start with principles: (1) Entrepreneurship is a collective activity. Ditch that lone-rider-on-the-plains nonsense that passes for theories of the entrepreneur. Wealth generation is a social act, an indispensable part of the public realm (2) We need to do for the indigenous sector what the IDA did for the foreign sector – we have to select and develop, and where there is nothing to select from we have to create. (3) This selection and development process needs to be embedded from the national through the sectoral down to the local level. It requires a new democratic partnership whereby all stakeholders participate equally: employers, trade union, the state, consumer and environmental concerns. (4) This partnership will determine strategies for growth: overcoming problems of scale, investment, upgrading managerial skills, marketing and R&D costs, overcoming export entry barrier costs – all the obstacles to growth, productivity and competitiveness. The state would act as the guarantor of investment and agency supports. (5) Enterprises participating in this democratic partnership will need to commit to the ‘high road’: uppgrading management skills and practice; investing in workplace training, upskilling, R&D and innovation; participating in business networks to share costs, expanding into export markets'; and extending employee participation, recognising employees’ right to bargain collectively and accepting their legitimate role in strategic decision-making. This is the foundation the Left needs to develop in order take on the right – not a ‘free market’ economy, not a ‘statist economy’ but a ‘negotiated economy’ It is open to various interpretations and models. But it must be grounded in democratic and egalitarian structures and in a greater role for the public realm. In this way the Left can start to tell a new story – one not predicated on the addiction to foreign capital or property or the equities market. It can begin to encompass a slow socialisation process of our economic assets, increasing taxation in order to invest into economic and social infrastructure, distributing wealth to share the wealth that everyone has participated in generating. This new story can give people hope – people who are trying to secure themselves against the marauding armies of the undead who are ravaging our land. In time, this hope can give them confidence to come out of hiding and rid the city of these perverted walking ideologies. And make a better place of it – for all of us, together.
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