The Hidden Hand in our Pockets
Lecture 1
Time: 17.57
Annette Rimmings provides a unique insight into the changing face of economics and the implications that it has on young students in the lecture theatre today. In front of the lectern which she speaks from, there is a fifty pound note, suspended on a short cord in front of her.
“The time of 17.57 was both fortuitous and deliberate. It was precisely this very year that the modern British Empire, as we’ve come to know it, was born and with that we defeated the French nation once again – surprise, surprise – and over two centuries worth of trade, colonisation and the old adage that the sun of the British Empire never set became common uses in the everyday language. I, for my own part, have never been an imperialist. It was a case where we take a young, enthusiastic man of integrity, entering politics. All smiles and hopes that this honeymoon never ends. But his morals of black and white become seduced by this ‘shade of grey’, where right and wrong are no longer distinguishable. He, and the entity he severs, becomes an enemy of the people and a victim of what the Economist Adam Smith calls the “law of unintended consequences”. And maybe ‘enemy of the people’ is too strong of an indictment, but that is not so, because who of you here would metaphorically hug your international financial institutions of rather than give them a well-deserved smack for telling you that it was the third time you were overdrawn. That is precisely why we must be careful at this point, because there was once a man who stood on the face of a cliff, about to fall to his death in a sea of oblivion. It was a holiday in the exotic lands of Cornwall if you must know the location. He had a placard on his chest and appeared to behaving in a fashion in what can be described as a deranged town crier turned outlaw. I got the strange emotion of Fredrich’s painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, in its uncanny likeness of man versus nature. The placard read “A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answer all things. (Ecc. 10:19)” Now this was a new experience for me, because before I had only regarded the Bible as a source to diminish the commodity of the flimsy pieces of paper that we’ve all come to know and love. That wasn’t to be the case, but there was a contradiction here: why was a religious man, if it’s assumed that way, on the brink of ending it all when our society is consumed by a need for capitalism? I’ll reveal its conclusion later. We take a Chance card from the Monopoly board and are at a crossroads where we all stand: when, from Wall Street protests evolving from the most subtle political movements such as UK Uncut to the spontaneous riots in London, we have a savvy, but foolish, public knowing their AAA Credit Ratings to Quantitative Easings’. That ‘shade of grey’, between your rich fat cats, and you, the people, are now everlasting. We know too much and never destined to go back to the Orwellian maxim of ignorance is bliss, and that is a frightening prospect. Not only do we love this £50 note, but it is our very own worst enemy and will show that whilst you all look at this with longing desire, it may fundamentally just be our undoing. Perhaps Marx was right when he said that we were all victims of some form of alienation, but whatever the inevitable course of history now, there is the capacity within all of us that seeks to destroy not only the liberal foundations in which a free market is founded, but also having any hope of humanity which the Utilitarian, JS Mill, calls “the mode in which the government can most surely demonstrate the sincerity with which it intends the greatest good of its subjects.” We don’t need government propaganda anymore. Times have changed and we are masters of a fate which we don’t know how to control.”
“I would now like to introduce to you the most consistent and ageless facet of a sentient economy: the value of labour. Since the dawn of the individual capitalist, and subsequent release from the Hobbesian ideology of the 17th century, in which his argument for a breakaway from the “nasty, brutish” state of nature, the monarch would be the principle kingmaker of who owns the possessions they control. But, as many of its principles will be familiar in a modern state, let us have Marx’s cynical Das Capital first. One of the few perspectives where we can only shout and realise “I wish I listened to him”:
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Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant […] the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows, to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage-labour market full for the capitalists.’
The principles of colonialism, and as in many cases with neo-colonialism in the present day, is the exploitation of what industry considers to keep its workers sufficiently at arm’s length and even import people besides ourselves who, shall we say, have what Adam Smith callas a better ‘value in exchange’. The value of labour, as Smith and Ricardo would have it, are matters in which people like me and you are mere commodities to the rightful demands of commerce. The air and water, which without it we would be surely a race non-existent, has no value to which decorative goods such as gold and silver are more worthwhile to the “exchange of quantity of other goods”, as Ricardo defines. But is there any relevance to this argument today? The UK is not an empire any longer, these rich and obviously well-educated economists to their manual labouring communities, which they write about, are so clearly in favour of a capitalist industry, that Smith openly admits that a man can only enjoy life to the extent of labour which can be purchased. We may be fortunate enough to begin ascending that ladder of prosperity and security, but I very much doubt that a population of seven billion will all achieve equal success. So where have we gone so wrong in an industry where, in such a basic system of labour, commodity and profit, the new generation of this century now find themselves caught in a web of no trade, once useful commodities now worthless, and, in my opinion, a condemnation for listening to our optimist friends rather than their pessimist counterparts.”
“Alistair Darling, former Chancellor of the previous government, as I’m sure you’re unlikely to forget, made in what is my opinion a very potent assessment of a modern capitalist society. He observed “Safety is relative. You can be so close to the shore you can feel it under your feet, when you find yourself breaking apart on the rocks.” And this from a man whose party who abandoned Clause IV, the clause which New Labour ceased in nationalising private companies, and ending their mandate with ownership of over 84% of one bank alone, which left to its own resources had to fall on its sword – and hard. Darling is defiant that banks “are not like other companies” and if they fail, they will surely take others with it. You, as the new generation, which must tolerate the burdens that my generation created, must surely ask “why not simply create one state bank and have done with this so-called ‘competition’”. The Chinese and other Socialist-led countries have it, and the former country now sits on second on a list of the most powerful countries on Earth. And it grows, and grows, until one day we must accept the inevitable. I do not think the matter is as simple as that. Whilst we had Marx, who said in 1848, of the year of the second French Revolution, that the bourgeoisie population was “unfit”, “no longer compatible with society” and Malthus, who warned that continued population growth had posed threats of long term poverty and starvation, we have come too far now to start listening to voices of centuries long consigned to the textbooks of history. We, as human beings, are all inherently selfish and there is no better line than I think expressed in Dickens’s Dombey and Son in which “the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were made to float their ships” and so forth. Until Copernicus, we believed that the sun revolved around our small and pretty diminutive planet compared to that of others. What proposition can the protests at Wall Street offer except the old anti-corporate mantra of curbing these greedy bankers and divine intervention, guiding us to assured catastrophe? There is no shame in having that feeling of using worthless paper notes, as they are, like the one in front of me, to the exchange of objects we like, ambitions that we ourselves desire to move from A to B, hoping it will all be for the better. It is why the title of my testimony to you today, the ‘hidden hand,’ is again borrowed from Mr. Smith’s essays, but a relevant one I assure you. The hidden hand of the market is to ensure non-state interference in a society where we are free of state control and unfettered to a policy where parliament tells us ‘we know what’s best for you’ when really, the position of ourselves is to take that waggling finger and shove it back in their faces and say ‘without us there wouldn’t even be a ‘you’ to serve’. Whilst you may think the effects of capitalism are poison to the foolish men who should have been locked in their cubicles before making it to the boardroom, the situation we face is this: the rule of the few, the bullying older sibling which looks over to see how much we have in the back of pockets, whatever our circumstance. But in order accomplish this step; we must go backward, which as previously mentioned is impossible. A Hobbesian tyranny ensures that the man who wears the golden crown will prohibit natural human productivity. And without that productivity, we may as well return to that dark cave when man first appeared.”
“Now returning to our suicidal friend, on the final edge of a certain death if he stepped back any further. I thought it wrong to let any individual, and by most circumstances, ignore them in a clear cry for help. I approached carefully and no sooner had I been a few yards from his position.
“Well, it’s good to know somebody likes powerful lungs.”
I’d never seen anything like it. He was so timid and conciliatory in his speech. But this story does have a resolution. There was one last present he wanted to give me and it’s the one you see in front of you right now,
“This is the last £50 I have. No point spending it on useless bric-a-brac if I don’t have a job. You take it.”
That is why I leave you with this. If Smith and Ricardo are too old for you, think of Darwin and the survival of the fittest, and that whilst there is one law for the rich, there will always be another for the poor. Don’t set yourselves the same fate of my Christian friend here. Faith’s all and well, but as Mill argued earlier, government is there to serve us in our endeavours and they must provide the small safety nets when plans go haywire. Life is a golden chalice on first glance, only to look inside and it’s fomented with cyanide. Don’t look back in guilt: your competitors may have that same hand you once thought on your side, taking the potential you once thought was yours.”
Annette takes the £50 and tears it in four pieces and walks away from the lectern.
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