Groucho Marxism

Two recent articles in the Socialist newspaper once again highlight the callous stupidity of neoliberal capitalism. The first tells an all-to-familiar story of public services being cut to save money: in this case, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire Service is facing £1.6 million of cuts, which will result in 30 firefighter jobs being axed, as well as cuts to vital safety equipment. The second describes the inevitable failure that has been the privatisation of the National Grid, using the power outage earlier this year at Heathrow Airport to illustrate the point. What unites these stories is that they both involve public services getting worse for the sake of improved efficiency. In the first case, improved efficiency means fewer firefighters; in the second, it means reduced resilience and a higher likelihood of power outages.

Where does this drive for efficiency come from? In the fire service example, it stems from the erroneous belief that public services are funded by taxpayers’ money, and therefore that they should be run in as efficient way as possible so as to ensure value-for-money for the taxpayer. In fact, there is no such thing as taxpayers’ money: all money ultimately comes from the government, not from taxpayers (as I explained in a previous blog post). In the National Grid example, this drive comes from the category mistake of treating the National Grid as a company rather than what it actually is; namely, a piece of critical national infrastructure. This means that it becomes beholden to the profit motive, and one way to increase profits is to reduce costs – in this case, by not completing essential maintenance.

More generally, this drive comes from the neoliberal capitalist ideology which permeates our world, under which success is measured in terms of crude financial measures such as efficiency, value-for-money, and profit. This is bad enough in the private sector, but measuring the success of public services in this way makes no sense whatsoever. For public services to function effectively a certain amount of redundancy must be built into their operations. Take the fire service example: a certain number of firefighters need to be on hand in case a particularly big fire needs to be put out, but for the majority of the time these firefighters won’t be needed to put out any fires. On a purely financial basis, the fire service is operating inefficiently and therefore, according to neoliberal doctrine, must be defunded.

The problem of course is that when a particularly big fire does occur, there won’t be enough firefighters around to put it out, and people will die as a result. And let’s be clear: people will die as a result of these cuts. In fact many people already have died under the drive for efficiency that has stemmed from the UK government’s pointlessly cruel austerity program. Research suggests that between 190,000 and 335,000 excess deaths occurred in the UK since 2010 due to austerity policies. To put this into context, the latter figure isn’t much lower than the number of UK citizens that died during WWII. Furthermore, this program, which included cuts to local government funding and social security benefits, is also associated with a reversal of life expectancy.

You may wonder why a government would willingly implement a policy that kills so many of its own citizens: surely they must have no choice, right? Wrong! The vast majority of economists agree that the austerity is at best pointless and at worse wantonly destructive. Even economists who buy into the completely wrong-headed ‘government as household’ analogy argue that austerity measures depress economic growth and ultimately cause reduced tax revenues that outweigh the benefits of reduced public spending. So, why do governments do it?

There are two possible answers to this question. Either our politicians are so brainwashed by neoliberal ideology that they genuinely think they have no choice but to slash government spending, even if it does result in widespread suffering; or, they know that they don’t need to slash spending, but do it because they want to cause widespread suffering, or are at least indifferent to it. Perhaps the most likely answer is a combination of the two: our politicians have been brainwashed by neoliberal ideology and have no incentive to re-educate themselves because they just don’t care about the suffering they cause.

What’s particularly insidious about austerity is that although it kills people, it does so in a way that isn’t entirely obvious, so people often don’t make the connection between austerity and the suffering it causes. It’s also instructive to note that the people most affected by austerity are generally the worst-off in society. Put simply, austerity is eugenics by stealth. Neoliberal capitalism is a dystopian system that values saving money over saving lives. The sooner we get rid of it, the better.