MattKennard.com

MK: I’ve been reading your book The New Culture of Capitalism. You are ambiguous about whether this is a good thing for the new generation in terms of political activism. At points you say it’s not positive then you say it’s a fresh page. Do you see this generation as more politicized than the one before?

RS: Yeah they are. Both in Britain and here in the U.S.
What I was thinking about in the book was the fact the way this new capitalism – the financial industries, the culture industries, high tech – it’s very elitist, so that people with incomes in the middle who work in this sector stagnate and people at the top as we know get very rich.
People who enter the system – contrary to the advertising about it – just like you they start in a way that very seldom uses their skills, the chances of getting to use their skills is miniscule, journalism is a great example.
So what I had in mind is that this cutting edge of capitalism makes lots of promises about growth to young people and about opportunity and they are very rarely fulfilled and it might have a very energizing political effect.

MK: Do you think it’s related to war in Iraq? Was it there pre-9/11 or did that jolt it? You’re talking about a longer drift…

RS: Well it depends who you are talking about. In Britain, the Iraq war turned a whole generation not just against Bush but against the US as a kind of model society. For your generation it just turned the key in the lock.

MK: Is the political platform for socialism, or is that a dead idea?

RS: Not to me! But it’s not going to look like the socialism of the 20th century. I think we will have to find lots of parallel institutions to these corporations that help people keep their self-respect and keep some continuity in their lives.
What I’ve been involved in is attempts to rethink how labour union work so they are more focused on the life narrative that workers have, not just wages, you know what I mean?

MK: Yes, definitely, but how do you get this life narrative back? Is there not a logic to these corporations, if the model is successful why would they change?

RS: Well the thing is it’s not a black and white answer about whether they are successful. I’ll give you a really long answer to this because it’s complicated.
When the high-tech sector – which I know the best – when it started up people have the notion that the company was a project, you kept it going for two or three years, you had an initial public offering, something the public could buy., then you took the money and ran. That was the idea in the 1990s.
It turned out that this was a fantasy. Many of these companies to survive at all had to think longer term than they were thinking, they had to think of themselves as human organizations rather than projects and that and at that point a whole new set of variables kicked in, like why would somebody want to stay, were they only going to employ cheap young labour, which is how Microsoft and Google started. Organizations where you had to be willing to work 18 hours a day which basically meant you were single and had no children in your 20s.

They survived and they had these growing pains about how do you get people to actually make a life and stay in the organization.
So it’s not so simple for them to simply say, Take it or leave it, which was the attitude in the 1990s. They themselves can’t be projects anymore, they have to stay in the market to get capital funding, they have to be something longer term, and that’s a very hard thing for people who rund these companies to deal with.
The same is true of investment banks like Bear Stern which were basically run as projects, and now suddenly they have discovered they have these things called stockholders, I mean amazing!
So in other words, it’s not as simple as take it or leave it. But on the other hand what they have to offer is very uncertain.

MK: So the people in the labour movement and the unions, are they conscious of this life narrative conception?

RS: Absolutely.

MK: It’s not framed as in we need better wages, it’s that we need a life narrative?

RS: Yes, the issue for unions like EGAY NATALL, it’s the biggest skilled labour union in Germany, is they have people who are moving in and out of skilled manual labour. Sometimes they become white-collar workers, sometimes they get a different kind of craft that one thing leads to another.
What the union wants to do, which I think is great, is stay with those workers no matter what the work they are doing.
Another way you can do is which is so have in a trade where people are very uncertain, have a union which acts as a kind of booking agent for people, I thought for journalist this is going to the future, that is relying on the Guardian or BBC, which has three month contracts.
You get this intermediate institution and its purpose is to keep going longer term. There is a government side to that and it works better like the Netherlands where the government is willing to put in money for people who are part-time employees to bring up their salaries to a minimum.

MK: Do you think there should be government legislation that says how long a minimum length contract should be?

RS: No, I don’t think you can get that far into it, it would be a nightmare. What you can do if you have a union that is speaking on behalf of 10,000 journalists, it could do that, it’s not law, it’s just a deal saying give us 6 months rather than 3.

MK: I wanted to ask something abouyt the present day culture of personal relationships – the facebook, myspace advent, where you have these relationship that have the same fluidity that you have in your work.

RS: Everyone says this to me, everyone says it’s an exact parallel…

MK: I don’t about exact parallel, but the relationships forged are superficial, people can relate through digital avatars and not in person…

RS: I’ve never looked at facebook, the notion of being online in that way is a nightmare to me, but you’re not the first person this isn’t just the logic of work, it’s also the relations of social relations everyday.
Do you use facebook?

MK: Yes.

RS: What is the difference between it and there is a more working class version?

MK: Ah, Myspace. Nothing really, ones owned by Rupert Murdoch, the other by an entrepeneur from Harvard.

RS: But there is a class difference?

MK: Yes, and an age difference, there’s more young people on Myspace too.

RS: What about Socialist Space?

MK: My project is actually for my masters about neo-Nazis, and there is a facebook for Nazi’s at newsaxon.org.

RS: Wow.

MK: OK I was going to ask about the model being put forward by leaders in Latin America by people like Chavez and Morales, that social democratic socialism, is that the model oyu look to?

RS: Well it’s mixed, like everyone I’m very worried about Chavez’s very autocratic tendencies. There are some good things he’s done, like redistribution, but I don’t think he or whoever is dealing for him in terms of actually using this money has thought out how to use it in a very modern way, and it will be able to see if the Cubans can figure that out, I think the Cubans are a little more innovatively minded than either Morales or Chavez.
These are very old socialist models they are dealing with. What they don’t assume is that people are going to be mobile, you have your craft, your job, and that needs to be supported.
You know for socialists the places we have to look are very unexpected, like South Korea, which is very innovative in the way its structures work, started with very little and has made a lot of very little. Finland, you know, Nokia is an amazing operation, some Swedish countries.
You know the model for coping well with global capitalism is not coming out of people who are talking the old 20th century rhetoric.

MK: Are you talking about a sort of Anthony Giddens-style Third-wayism?

RS: Well, no, because he stills sees government as central, as a sort of mediator. What I think we need to do is kind of institutional innovation, a different kind of institution that are realistic about how easy it is for people to get hurt by this capitalism, little people, not the wealthy.
I know what the impulse was he had, but in the end he’s your basic British Labourite, he believes that government is going to be the antagonistic to capitalism, and that seems off to me.

MK: Do you think capitalism should be overhauled? Are you anti-capitalist?

RS: I wouldn’t say anti-capitalist. That’s a crude way to think.

MK: Do you think it’s an antiquated argument?

RS: It is sort of. I think the capacity when you have capitalist organizations they have an immense capacity to do a lot of human damage, and very people win from them, so in that sense I’m anti-neoliberal complete, but so are capitalist countries like Finland, which are run for profit but they are just not run on a neoliberal model.
That’s the problem with Blair and Brown is that they are basically neoliberals when all is said and done, that’s what we had for 10 years.

MK: That’s another thing you say in your book, that the form of capitalism has changed the politics, so we have a one-party state where all parties are different strands of the same business party.

RS: Not so good.

MK: Yeah, is that the same in Western Europe or is it just the Anglo-Saxon model?

RS: Well it seems to me it’s mostly Anglo-Saxon. I don’t know how it is in Latin America, but Germany I know very well, the irony is that each one of these parties, the SDP, the Conservatives, and the old social democratic party are split inside on this.

You can find the equivalent of One-Nation Tories in the Conservative Party who sort of loathe the modern capitalist system.
I mean the one consistent party is this new left party, which is basically anti-capitalist, it’s so neo-liberal. I mean what about the Argentines?

MK: They have a weird politics because they have Peronism which is populist, fascist, socialist all at the same time.
What respect do you think the capitalism has in its modern form for culture and meaning? Do you think we are loosing our sense of history and losing our repositories of meaning?

RS: Here’s what I think about this, it’s something I think about because it’s something I did research on. It’s very hard for people in this new form of capitalism to get much sense of self respect out of their jobs and the promise that working 18 hours a day you might get shares turns out not to mean very much to people.
But I think the issue is how we can design work so that people feel they are getting something from it. Part of the deal on this was that the promise of riches, exciting change, all of that practical stuff has turned out hollow.
So the job has just high pressure, long hours, uncertain, it’s very hard for people to get a sense of self respect doing a job like that. For a lot of people who burn out in both high-tech and internet, people burn out, Google is about 14 hour a day work day, you can’t take it after 2 or 3 years.

MK: How much is this culture consciously fomented by these companies? It must help them, keeps people on toes, keeps them alert?

RS: I thought you were asking something else, how conscious are Americans. The thing, someone who lives mostly in Britain but is an American, the thing that has struck me is the low level of material consciousness in the US. People are being screwed, yet they don’t belong to unions, they don’t vote, somehow they still buy into the notion that it all might work out for them.

MK: Hasn’t it been like that for a long while?

RS: Not in the 60s and 70s and there are institutional reasons for that – strong unions that were the echoes of the Great Depression and so on.
Now, there are no unions in high-tech, these people are putting in 14 hour days, they have no collectivety. But what struck me is that Europeans are much more realistic about what’s going on in their lives than Americans. Just look at this campaign, no-one in this campaign is talking about work, or capitalism.
They are talking about saving peoples mortgages, which is a good thing to do, but there’s no systematic analysis of why all of this has happened, no consciousness of that, I think that’s incredible, but it’s allowed the American imperium to flourish because there’s no indigenous resistance.

MK: And how much blame do you put on the media?

RS: A lot. Have you ever watched the financial news on Fox News?

MK: I have.

RS: It’s a kind of brain death, mostly about how you get a new credit card.

MK: I just wanted you quickly to delineate the advent of this New Culture of Capitalism. Various people put it down to the Oil Crisis in 1973.

RS: Well it doesn’t happen all at once. In 1973 what happened was the breakdown of the Bretton Woods institutions, and so you have this global capital, and capital is impatient, it needs returns, so it starts looking arou d the world for investment opportunities where it doesn’t need to wait ten years for a result.
So you have a change in the whole mentality in investment, now you are investing in equity. Then there’s suddenly a premium put on companies that look flexible, that look like they can change. Finally, they change the management culture of those companies to be run for share price. Then, that coalesces with massive mergers and acquisitions and by the 1990s the pressure on companies to behave in the way the market wants, which is not about long –term sustainable profit but to bring up share price becomes great, and the companies begin to restructure.
The beginnings happen in high-tech, and then it spreads to finance capital, then it spreads again to what we think of as creative industry. Then you have got a situation where the social organization at work has been completely transformed by a new type of capitalism.

MK: Has there been a rise in depression among workers?

RS: Well we found in an earlier book, Corrosion of Character, is a rise in alcholism, depression, divorce – 2 people working 12 hours a day not conducive to keeping a family going – and all of that gets compounded because there’s no trajectory, it’s very hard to know what to expect
But people aren’t just passive sufferers, people learn to adapt, but my sense about this is what’s going to happen is that this financial crisis will inaugurate a larger social crisis about how people want to work, it will happen in Europe and Japan, which we forget is the second largest economy. And maybe it will spread to India.

MK: Are you talking about the current crisis?

RS: Yeah. I think this is not just going to be a simple thing of throwing some money at things in a normal business cycle. It’s graver than that, and it’s your generation that will have to sort that out, I’ll be retired.
The serious thing is what to do about this. The system can’t hold together. RS:

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