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Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick-MakerLifeworlds and Work Identities
with particular reference to the South Wales Valleys
Molly Scott Cato
We should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society. Albert Einstein epigraph to Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted Following the rapid rise in unemployment across Europe during the past two decades economists have focused on explanations and solutions originating from the supply side of the labour market. Workers are required to ‘price themselves into jobs’ and threats to worker flexibility ranging from over-generous welfare benefits to trade unions are undermined at the policy level. More recently, sociologists have responded to this near-consensus by questioning the social consequences of such policies. Both Forester (1999) and Gorz (1999) have concluded that full employment is no longer economically possible, and it is therefore inhumane to make it a basis for individual well-being. Sociological analysis has also been brought to bear on the consequences for personal identity of a world where work is both homogenised and unequally shared. Beck (1999) addresses this issue, as does Bauman (1999) in his extension of the postmodernist point that modern citizens derive their identity from their consumption rather than their production. It is against this background that this paper is offered. It addresses one particular, although widespread, response to rising unemployment: namely, job creation, and particularly job creation by multinational companies and funded by FDI. Discussion of job creation is situated firmly within the discipline of economics, yet its consequences are clearly social as well as economic. It is important that the sociological insights concerning the identity consequences of the jobs that are created are brought to bear in a critical discussion of job creation. This paper makes a start in that direction, focusing on an area that has seen more variants of employment policies than most: the South Wales Valleys. One aim of the paper is to open the discussion about the future of work beyond the academic community and to seek to include some of those who will actually be the incumbents of the jobs that may emerge during this century.1 This means that I will be drawing on varied sources of inspiration and suggestion: from photographs and novels to more academic contributions from a wide range of disciplines. Secondly, it means that I will try to express all that I need to express in simple language. I hope this will facilitate the discussion of this important issue. 1. The Centrality of Work to IdentityTraditionally, identities within society have been determined largely by the work that people do. We all know the first question asked in many situations of primary social encounter: ‘What do you do?’ by which we really mean ‘What is your job?’ The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has a passage describing this in his Risk Society (1992): Nowhere, perhaps, is the meaning of wage labor for people’s lives in the industrial world so clear as in the situation where two strangers meet and ask each other ‘what are you?’ They do not answer with their hobby, ‘pigeon fancier’, or with their religious identity, ‘Catholic’, or with reference to ideals of beauty, ‘well, you can see I’m a redhead with a full bosom’, but with all the certainty in the world with their occupation: ‘skilled worker for Siemens’. If we know our interlocutor’s occupation then we think we know him or her. The occupation serves as a mutual identification pattern, with the help of which we can assess personal needs and abilities as well as economic and social position. At the start of the 21st century in Britain work has taken on immense political importance. It is at the centre of Labour’s social policy. Leading Labour politicians display an ideological commitment to work that verges on the religious: the Welfare to Work scheme was launched under the banner of ‘A New Crusade for Jobs’. The government’s welfare reform strategy focuses on work as the solution to social problems, particularly social exclusion and poverty, and the crime and social breakdown which result from them. Work is now seen as the solution for all members of society, even those who may traditionally have been considered outside the labour market, such as those with childcare responsibilities, and those with physical and mental disabilities. The need to create jobs has become such a powerful ideological theme that environmental and social standards will be overriden if the jobs promised are numerous enough. But rarely is the quality of the jobs considered. The weakening of union power over the past 20 years has been so thorough, particularly in mining areas following the Miners’ Strike of 1984/5 and the consequent pit closure programme, that unions willingly sign single-union deals and no longer demand quality guarantees, apart from basic training levels (Undy et al., 1996). In this paper I seek to address one issue concerned with the quality of jobs created: their impact on the identity of those who have to do them. The following section begins this discussion by offering a contrast of the identity consequences of a modern, globalised job compared with those of a craftsman worker in the 18th century. This comparison is based on a literary analysis, since this provides useful qualitative material that is missing from numerical economic accounts, within the framework of the understanding of personal identity provided by Jürgen Habermas. Section 3 relates this theoretical discussion to the South Wales Valleys and discusses the consequences for local people’s identity of the job creation strategy pursued there over recent years. The repackaging of industrial heritage in the Valleys is critically analysed using the theory of imagery provided by Jean Baudrillard. Section 4 generalizes Baudrillard’s discussion of consumption rather than production as the source of identity within a postmodern society and questions the viability of such a process from the perspective of sustainability. Finally, Section 5 explores the cul-de-sac generated by much postmodernist theory, appraises a range of responses, and suggests a way out based on retaking control of the local economy. 2. The Impact of Globalisation on Work-Based IdentitiesI want to move on now to consider the sorts of identities we might find in our work in a globalised, capitalist economy. I intend to do this by drawing contrasts between work as it is currently structured with work as it was structured before the industrial revolution and using the novel Adam Bede by George Eliot. The eponymous hero of the novel is a carpenter who lives in a village in rural England almost exactly 200 years ago. Like all George Eliot’s novels the book has many themes running through it: several disastrous love affairs and a great deal of social comment and beautiful description. But the underlying moral position of the book is about work, with a view of work heavily influenced by the ‘Methodies’, several of whom feature as characters, especially Adam’s eventual wife. So work is central to the novel, which actually opens with a description of Jonathan Burge’s ‘roomy workshop’ where Adam works. The afternoon sun was warm on the five workmen there, busy upon doors and window-frames and wainscoting. A scent of pine-wood from a tent-like pile of planks outside the open door mingled itself with the scent of the elder-bushes which were spreading their summer snow close to the open window opposite; the slanting sunbeams shone through the transparent shavings that flew before the steady plane, and lit up the fine grain of the oak panelling which stood propped against the wall. This is, of course, a romanticised view of work even at this time. I am certainly not supporting Eliot’s picture of work as joy and salvation (E. P. Thompson’s critical review of Methodist ideology (1963) makes this impossible). The reason the focus is on Adam Bede is that his reality can illustrate the complex network of social relations that bound people together through their work in the days when work was locally based. This point is best illustrated by another, longer, quotation from later on in the novel. Adam is dreaming of Hetty, the girl he has set his heart on, and planning how he can make fancy furniture to generate enough money to afford to set up on his own and take a wife. No sooner had this little plan shaped itself in his mind than he began to be busy with exact calculations about the wood to be bought and the particular article of furniture that should be undertaken first--a kitchen cupboard of his own contrivance, with such an ingenious arrangement of sliding-doors and bolts, such convenient nooks for stowing household provender, and such a symmetrical result to the eye, that every good housewife would be in raptures with it, and fall through all gradations of melancholy longing till her husband promised to buy it for her. Adam pictured to himself Mrs Poyser examining it with her keen eye, and trying in vain to find out a deficiency; and, of course, close to Mrs Poyser stood Hetty, and Adam was again beguiled from calculations and contrivances into dreams and hopes. (p. 318) Hetty works in Mrs Poyser’s dairy, so Adam’s aim in manufacturing the cupboard is twofold: he hopes to win the money and the girl. But the point I want to draw from this is a general one: that in a locally based economy people know who made the articles that they use every day in their homes. And the people who manufacture those items have an idea where they will be sold and to whom. So the actual work of making and selling and using items provides identity to everybody involved in the exchanges. What is the nature of the workshop where my MFI sofa was made? Of course, the answer is that I don’t know and I probably cannot find out. Various uncomfortable images come to mind: Manila sweatshops, rainforest destruction, children sewing footballs. My trip to a furniture warehouse to buy a ‘fitted kitchen’ only serves to undermine my identity, as the identity of the person who worked in the factory making the kitchen units, whether in Huddersfield or Havana, is similarly undermined. There are no connections and the result is a feeling of alienation, confusion, and loss of identity. I illustrate this point with some photos of my home town, Aberystwyth. The photos are clearly selective, since it would be impossible to represent all work situations. These are drawn from my local reality to illustrate my view of the work situation in these settings. The first contrasts a local wood-worker with the MFI shop as two alternative locations to buy furniture. The following four photographs are pairs of contrasting sales outlets in the service sector: contrasting supermarket shopping with shopping in local shops. The pride and ego-reinforcement of the local shopkeepers is obvious in the beauty which they create in their shops; contrast this with the utilitarian design of Safeway, with its overpowering array of advertising boards, and the extreme impersonality of McDonalds, where the market exchange has become devoid of any human contact, as money and food are exchanged through a plate-glass window. Fig. 1. A local wordworker contrasted with the impersonality of the MFI frontage
Fig. 2: Two local shops in Aberystwyth
Fig. 3: The impersonality of Safeway supermarket and McDonalds
This loss of identity in economic and social structures has been observed and commented on by numerous sociologists, particularly those of the Frankfurt School. A prominent example is the work of Habermas, who developed a critical response to modern social life, which developed from his initial Marxist position. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas appraises the social philosophy of G. E. Mead, and extends it to provide an explanation of the process of identity development in modern society: Corresponding to the ideal communication community is an ego identity that makes possible self-realisation on the basis of autonomous action. This identity proves itself in the ability to lend continuity to one’s own life history. In the course of the process of individuation, the individual has to draw his identity between the lines of the concrete lifeworld and of his character as attached to this background. The identity of the ego can then be stabilised only by the abstract ability to satisfy the requirements of consistency, and thereby the conditions of recognition, in the face of incompatible role expectations and in passing through a succession of contradictory role systems. The ego-identity of the adult proves its worth in the ability to build up new identities from shattered or superseded identities, and to integrate them with old identities in such a way that the fabric of one’s interactions is organised into the unity of a life history that is both unmistakable and accountable. (p. 98) As I interpret this rather complex and translated passage, Habermas is suggesting that the key to an individual’s identity lies within his own private lifeworld and in contrast to the system world, which includes social and economic structures. Habermas acknowledges the need to change through life, and indeed he stresses this as the key to successful identity-building. But the reintegration of former identities, and their combination with present roles in an overall personal identity, is to be carried out against a ‘background’. It is clear that this process is complicated by changes in that background. Change is a pervasive and one might argue the dominant feature of the globalised economic system, with its emphasis on flexible work patterns and employment provided by a network of international companies, whose base in any given country is always contingent. If Habermas’s view of the building of identity is correct then a global economy inevitably undermines this process, and hence undermines our ability to build secure personal identities. It might again be helpful to draw a distinction between the lifeworld of Adam Bede and that of an employee in a multinationally owned furniture factory to illustrate this point. Early on in the novel Adam’s drunken father is drowned in a flood. This represents, in Habermas’s words, ‘incompatible role expectations’ and part of ‘a succession of contradictory role systems’, since Adam will now become head of the household. Adam’s role is to take control of the funeral arrangements and bury his father, as well as supporting his mother and brother. Adam’s work as a carpenter plays a central part in this process, since he will make the coffin himself, staying up all night in what becomes a testament of love for his father, expressed through work. So the central role of Adam’s joinery in linking his two identities becomes clear. In contrast we may think of an employee in a furniture factory, whose work has no meaning outside the money economy. Such an employee will not even feel an identity as a skilled worker, since he is likely only to play one small part in the process of manufacture. He will have no idea who will purchase the furniture he produces, or where it will be transported to. He has no human connection with his product or its purchaser. His is an entirely market relationship with his work: it is narrow and money-based. What is more his employment is insecure, as a change in the relative prices of wages in his country and another country may well result in the movement of the productive unit overseas, possibly to the other side of the globe. In such a situation it is impossible for him to create a meaningful identity. I shall now proceed to explore this point further in the context of one specific Welsh economy: that of the Valleys of South Wales.
3. Global Production and Identity in the South Wales Valleys‘We want people who thrive on change and are not the victims of it.’ This statement is drawn from a Labour government economic consultation paper, Pathway to Prosperity. In the previous section I outlined how personal identity, based on Habermas’s definition, is undermined by constant change. Such an understanding of personal identity suggests that a workforce that thrives on change may be an unattainable goal. The South Wales Valleys is one area of Wales which has experienced rapid social and economic change. In this section I will consider the economic policies pursued in Wales, within the framework of a globalised economic system, and focus particularly on the impact these policies have had within the economy of the Valleys. Recent economic development policy for Wales has been based on the creation of jobs through FDI (foreign direct investment). The commitment to attracting foreign investors has been successful, with an increase of 47 per cent in the level of employment in the foreign manufacturing employment sector compared with a decline in employment of 5.5 per cent in domestic manufacturing employment in Wales. By 1994 the foreign manufacturing base in Wales comprised 353 plants employing 67,800 people: this represented 31 per cent of all Welsh manufacturing employment (Munday and Peel, 1997; for more detail see Cato, 2000a). Until recently the strategy seemed to have been gaining momentum. According to the ‘Statistical Profile’ of Wales published in Contemporary Wales, 1996 was: a record year for inward investment, with more than 15,000 jobs being created. The new investments included 300 jobs by Halla forklift trucks in Merthyr, 300 at Matsushita electronics in Cardiff, a further 1,000 by the Sony corporation at Bridgend and 300 by the Bertrand Faure Group who manufacture car seats in Tredegar. The most serious criticism of this job creation policy is that it is insecure. There is not even a solid guarantee that the jobs promised will be created. According to a Radio 4 investigation (BBC Manchester, 1998), only two-thirds of the jobs promised by inward investors in the UK are actually created. The forklift truck company Halla, who, as part of the ‘record year for inward investment’ of 1996 promised 300 jobs, never actually employed more than 50 people, and by mid-1998 had closed their gates altogether. There is no loss to the multinational in moving elsewhere, since grants that have been paid cannot be reclaimed.2 The most renowned example of an unsuccessful inward investment, and also the largest ever in Europe, is that of the LG plant near Newport announced in 1996. The exact size of the grant was kept confidential for at least a year, but was finally pinned down in evidence to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee (WAC, 1998) as £1,663m. for the promised creation of 6,100 jobs. The size of public-sector support was also a record at £248m. A simple calculation makes it apparent that the cost per job of this scheme is slightly in excess of £40,600, a sum which has called into question the cost-effectiveness of this sort of employment scheme (WAC, 1998: para 6). The project was in two parts: an integrated monitor plant and a micro-chip wafer manufacturing plant. Although the TV assembly plant is functional, the larger semiconductor operation has been cancelled. Following a glut of micro-chips on world markets, and the exposure of the vulnerable financial position of the South Korean chaibol, LG’s semiconductor division merged with a competitor, which already had spare capacity in semiconductor manufacture. The result is that the new factory, subsidised as part of the incentive package, stands empty. The promised jobs will never now materialise and most of the £250 million of development grants has already disappeared into LG’s international debts. The Welsh Affairs Select Committee concluded that Even when taking into account the potential multiplier effect of such a large enterprise, the value of the public investment in LG must at best be unproven. There has been widespread concern in Wales, outside the Newport area at least, that public sector resources intended to stimulate indigenous industry have been redirected to fund LG (WAC, 1998: para 6). This statement suggests that the financial lessons may have been learned, but what about the qualitative impact of the creation of these jobs? For the thesis of this paper it is also relevant to question the nature and quality of the jobs that are created, and the nature of their impact on the identity of the employees. It is surely worth noting that the range of production and national origin of the companies listed in the quotation from Contemporary Wales is bewildering even to academic observers, never mind to local people. Companies we have never heard of, frequently from countries we would have difficulty pinpointing with confidence on a world map, are to be the underwriters of our financial future. This future for work requires considerable mental flexibility. What is more, there seems to have been no strategic planning, no Wales-based decisions about priority sectors for development, no attempt to attract jobs which have cultural affinities or match the skills of the people who live in Wales. Rather than a coherent economy with compatible manufacturers participating in positive linkages within a unified economic structure we see a mish-mash of multinationals whose sole common aim to make a profit out of their investment in Wales (see Cato, 2000a). The South Wales Valleys are regularly highlighted for special attention within Welsh economic planning. This is a dubious honour awarded on the basis of the area’s continually high scores on such measures as rates of unemployment and levels of chronic sickness. On all the standard measures of deprivation regularly used by academics the South Wales Valleys appear as an area of persistent and widespread poverty (Higgs and White, 1997). In Pathway to Prosperity the Valleys are targeted for special attention, alongside rural Wales. The strategy for the Valleys, under the rubric ‘Industrial Villages’, is based on the attracting component manufacturers supplying larger corporations outside Wales and marketing the area as one of scenic beauty and loyal workers: the ‘green valleys, green workers’ approach. The Rhondda-Cynon-Taff authority has assiduously followed this strategy. Its campaign for inward investment ‘A Vision for Business Success’ has won prizes for its advertising materials from the UK Property Marketing and Design Awards. The campaign, based at the Valleys Innovation Centre, Navigation Park, presents an image of a skilled and modern workforce. This is obviously designed to appeal to inward investors, and has some basis in fact, but it is interesting to explore its impact on the unemployed people who live within this authority’s area. Many of those seeking employment are ex-miners: their identities are undermined by comparison with a clean-cut, skilled worker in a sharp suit. This is one side of the insecurity of the identity of the Valleys worker. There is another, diametrically opposed, identity available to Valleys workers: the image of the heavy industrial worker, typified by the miner. This is an identity now being repackaged and sold through the Rhondda Heritage Park. As part of what has been referred to as the ‘museumisation of life’, in the Rhondda, as in many former industrial areas, the historical work patterns and images of workers are being used to publicise the area, to attract both tourists and inward investors: ‘the creation of new or reinvigorated cultural identities is now central to the standard response to deindustrialisation’ (Watson, 1991). The genuine historical work experience of the Valleys, and its social consequences for community life, is a fundamental part of the lifeworld of a worker in the Valleys. It was for this reason that many people in the Rhondda supported the idea of a heritage park to celebrate and safeguard their identity in what had been. According to a researcher who studied the progress of what was to become the Rhondda Heritage Park: many local people supported the RHP as a space through which to remember the past. The requirements of a discourse of memorialism are for authenticity, safe-keeping and commemoration of prized objects--which are shared with traditional museum discourse. These were the desires of local residents when they handed over their domestic artefacts to the RHP (Dicks, 1996: 71). The idea for a heritage park came from the people themselves, as a way of safeguarding the past, but they felt betrayed by the way this idea was repackaged and turned into an exercise in image selling to tourists. The difference in motivation is illustrated by the following quotations, which may be contrasted with the wishes of the local people as expressed in the quotation above. First, the view of the Steering Group which was set up to carry through the project: The purpose of the scheme . . . is to assist in the rebuilding of the valleys communities and their economy, on the basis of new and potentially prosperous businesses, be they manufacturing or service industries. To do this requires a change in the character and image, as well as the actual jobs, within the valleys (Dicks, 1996: 59). The second quotation is from a speech made by Peter Walker, then Welsh Secretary, on 14 June 1988: I consider this to be an extremely exciting project which epitomizes many of my aspirations for the valleys. Based on the industrial heritage of the valley communites it involves transforming a derelict site with its symbols of former glories into an attractive heritage park with much needed alternative employment. It will strengthen the local economy through the attraction of substantial numbers of visitors and help to change many of the unwarranted perceptions that still exist about valley life. These two quotations make clear that the work history of the valleys is treated differently by the two groups: for the local people it is a real and cherished part of their community’s identity; for the planners and politicians it is an image that can be used to attract money for investment and from tourists. The distinction between reality and virtualism that distinguishes these two attitudes can be linked to the critical position on modern culture adopted by postmodernist critics. In his essay ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ Jean Baudrillard discusses the distinction between image and reality in the modern social and economic world, focusing on his concept of the ‘hyperreal’. He outlines four successive phases of the image:1. It is the reflection of a basic reality. 2. It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3. It masks the absence of a basic reality. 4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation. (Baudrillard, 1988: 170). The apotheosis of the simulacrum is taken to be Disneyland, that original and prototype of all themeparks. While the Rhondda Heritage Park may only aspire to such status, the image it presents does attempt to relate to what was once reality, and so, in terms of its reflection of the history of work in the Valleys, we might take the Rhondda Heritage Park as representing stage three of Baudrillard’s scale: it provides a false picture of work to conceal the fact that there is no longer any real work in the area. This is illustrated by a visit to the Park or the nearby Big Pit mining museum in Blaenavon, where tourists are shown round by one ex-miner, dressed in what were once work-clothes but what is now costume. Where once thousands were true workers these few who have found work are now mere cast members. Fig. 4: Waxwork miners at the Rhondda Heritage Park John Evans, who has produced a short postmodernist critique of the Valleys communities in his How Real is my Valley, goes even further and suggests that the Heritage Park actually represents Baudrillard’s simulacrum, the copy for which no original ever existed. He describes the creation of the myth of the Valleys through novels such as How Green was my Valley by Richard Llewellyn, translated into celluloid in the Californian dream factory, and sold back to the unemployed workers of the Valleys as a false image of their lost past. Evans quotes at length from the novel Shifts by Christopher Meredith (1988), which exposes this myth-making: ‘Up comes Donald Crisp and Dai Bando on a tandem’, Jack said. He slipped his arm around Keith’s shoulder again and held Jude under his other arm. ‘Look you boy bach’, says blind Dai. ‘There’s been an explosion up at the pit. Hurry you along now begorrah.’ . . . They pedal and reach the scene. Young women in shawls wring their hands. Old women in shawls wail and gnash their gums. Robert Donat bandages Paul Robeson’s arm. ‘Ianto Full Pelt it is’, cries lovely Blodwen wringing her shawl. ‘Stuck he is in the big hole he is look you. Too small is the passage mark you for the big guys.’ Evans’s conclusions is that ‘The South Wales Valleys, and its communities, must understand and meet the challenges of the postmodern condition if they are to survive with any dignity.’ He suggests a threefold solution: the creation of ‘real’ jobs; a thoughtful heritage policy which preserves the genuinely valuable; and a ‘new political art’. According to Evans there is ‘a need in the South Wales Valleys (and elsewhere in Wales) for a local response to postmodernism.’ This is a point I will return to below. The overall conclusion for a worker in South Wales might well be that the choice of the devil you know would be preferable. An interesting light might be cast on this discussion by the activities of the miners of Tower Colliery, the only worker-owned colliery in the world, which was bought by its workforce, using their redundancy money to prevent its closure. The story of the buyout has become a local myth of its own, directed by the charismatic leadership of Tyrone O’Sullivan (see e.g. Llewellyn Jones, 1998).3 The Tower Colliery project is based on the belief that locally based work is vital to sustaining the life and culture of the Valleys; this commitment stands in direct contrast to the profit-maximisation policies of multi-national corporations. It also offers a much stronger identity to the workers employed there. This emerged clearly from interviews conducted at the mine and reported elsewhere (see Cato, 2000b). 4. Identity Based on Consumption Rather than ProductionIn his essay ‘The System of Objects’ Baudrillard identifies consumption as the new basis of the social order, replacing the productive order of an earlier phase of capitalism: we can conceive of consumption as a characteristic mode of industrial civilization on the condition that we separate it fundamentally from its current meaning as a process of satisfaction of needs. Consumption is not a passive mode of assimilation and appropriation which we can oppose to an active mode of production, in order to bring to bear naive concepts of action (and alienation). From the outset, we must clearly state that consumption is an active mode of relations (not only to objects, but to the collectivity and to the world), a systematic mode of activity and a global response on which our whole cultural system is founded (1988: 21). With high levels of unemployment, increasing numbers of people being outside the workforce due to other factors (long-term sickness or retirement), and with the homogenisation of work (revolving around the computer and the telephone), identity must now be sought outside the work environment, in the shopping arcade. This appears to be the response to the removal of identity from work-roles which has accompanied the globalisation of the economy. Baudrillard’s view of the need for identity being found in consumption is confirmed by our everyday experience. The trademark blazons sported by track-suited youngsters are proofs of tribal identity in a confusing world. Where once young men would have supported different football teams, or opposing gangs (Mods vs. Rockers, Jets vs. Sharks) they now advertise to each other which sportswear company they favour--Nike, Adidas, Kappa, and so on--each with its own meaningless identity badge. These identities are true simulacra when displayed by those who are long past their ability to participate in the sports they were ostensibly designed for. Baudrillard sees the obligation to obtain identity through consumption in modern society as oppressive. It offers us no opportunity to express our individuality, and still less to band together to oppose those aspects of the culture or society which we dislike. ‘Can we imagine a coalition of car drivers against car registration? Or a collective opposition to television?’ (1988: 54) While the workers of capitalism as theorised by Marx had the option of collective action through the strike, the consumers of postmodern society are trapped in their individual or family-based private spheres, deprived of communal identity and politically neutered: Just as The People is glorified by democracy provided they remain as such (that is provided they do not interfere on the political or social scene), the sovereignty of consumers is also recognized . . . provided they do not try to act in this way on the social scene. The People--these are the laborers, provided they are unorganized; the Public, or public opinion--these are the consumers, provided they are content to consume. This is the essence of the postmodernist critique: that the organisation of society and economy deprives us of the power to find our own identities. But this is not the only, or perhaps not even the most significant, criticism of the modern consumer society. From a Green perspective the danger of a consumptive society is that it refuses to recognise planetary limits. If people’s identity consists in their consumption then the dominant motivation of the society is towards the production of more identity-reinforcing products, that is towards accelerating economic growth. The intellectual challenge to economic growth was made by Herman Daly in his appeal for a Steady-State Economics (1973; 1992). As one of the epigraphs in that book Daly quotes Kenneth Boulding, a US economist, as saying, ‘Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.’ (The argument over this point continues: for more details see Cato, 2001b). A more recent critique of a growth-led economic system was provided by Richard Douthwaite in his The Growth Illusion. As well as its deleterious impact on the planet, Douthwaite identifies other problems linked to a growth-based economy. In this Green critique loss of identity results from the breakdown of community. Causes of this breakdown include rising crime rates, as those without money seek their own place within the consumer society (compare Bauman’s characterisation of the ‘new poor’ as ‘flawed consumers’: 1998), and transport and planning decisions that put economic efficiency considerations above human priorities. Human values are left out of economics equations, so that the force of production rules supreme with little consideration of the consequences for the planet and the people and animals who live on it. As Baudrillard recognises in ‘Symbolic Exchange and Death’, ‘today the catastrophic consequences of the industrial process, about which even Marx erred in his dialectical euphoria over productive forces, are in a sense the revenge of the Luddites.’ (1988: 133).
5. The Postmodern Trap and its SpringingWhile Green and Postmodern critics share many of their conclusions about modern society their prescriptions differ. (Table 1 provides a schematic representation of the different dignoses and prognoses of the opposing theories.) The panic and despair of the post-modernists arises from the inability to take control of or even make intellectual sense of the increasingly complex social and economic system. If one had to be able to follow their writings in order to empower oneself this would be a desperate position indeed! If one takes the global perspective the picture does indeed seem overwhelming. This is largely a problem of level and scale. If we merely take our place in the global economy and have as our culture only the global culture of the World Cup, McDonalds, and Nike then we will be powerless. We will have handed our identities over to the power-players in the international global economy: the multinational corporations. But there are alternatives.
Table 1. A Comparison of Three Social and Economic Ideologies
One response to the identity-deprived global economy is to build our own identity communities. The resurgence of nationalism can be seen as just such a response. There is some evidence that in the Valleys a national identity is replacing the traditional work-based identity. Roberts explored how the Valleys identity has changed in response to rapid social and economic changes. Previous research had shown the strength of mining and radical traditions in the Valleys identity but this seemed to be being replaced by a ‘feeling of Welshness’. Respondents sought to establish a Welsh pedigree or ‘roots’ by mentioning Welsh and especially Welsh-speaking antecedents. The Welsh identity, and particularly the Welsh language identity, is more ambiguous in South Wales, where so many people are the descendants of workers who immigrated from England in the last century: The issues surrounding language and nationality raise deep sensitivities and confusions: Welsh nationalism is often equated locally with political extremism (bombing and other violence) and Welsh language use with exclusivity and ostracism . . . there seems to be an emergent, stronger sense of cultural nationalism rather than a discernible trend towards national self-determination as a political demand.’ (Roberts, 1994: 89) The success of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, in the Welsh Assembly elections of May 1999 suggests that the nationalist identity has a strong appeal. However, the nationalist response may not be healthy for society as a whole. Gellner (1983) sees nationalism as a specific response to the modern form of economic organisation, and one that he considers can be problematic for the effective functioning of human society. One particular concern is that the yearning for a national identity, in the absence of an identity with any other foundation, can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians to facilitate their own rise to power. There is disturbing evidence that this may already be happening in many European countries, where percentage votes for far-right nationalist parties are at alarming levels (see Table 2). Table 2. Vote for Far-Right Parties in Last Parliamentary Elections in Various European Countries
An alternative strategy is to seek identity in gender-based groups. As evidence of this we may consider the radical feminist movement, and the newer mens’ movement (see e.g. Daly, 1979; Bly, 1993). These gender-based groups again reinforce the identities of their members, but it may be argued that this is frequently done in opposition to the other gender group. This seems a system of identity-building without a future, if only in biological terms. The postmodern response to these strategies would again be a negative one. Since both in-group and out-group are culturally determined categories, there can be no genuine expression of individuality within them. Indeed it seems that Baudrillard has reached a position of such extreme pessimism that the only available means of self-expression is death: As the politics of the sixties receded so did Baudrillard’s radicalism: from a position of firm leftism he gradually moved to one of bleak fatalism. In Symbolic Exchange and Death he searches desperately for a source of radicalism that challenges the absorptive capacites of a system with no fixed determinations, a world where anything can be anything else, a society, in short, dominated by the digital logic of the code. Baudrillard’s pathetic conclusion is that only death escapes the code, only death is an act without an equivalent return, an exchange of values. (Poster, introduction to Baudrillard, 1988) This suggestion represents the depressing cul-de-sac of the postmodern critique: expressed with typical Gallic panache, and probably followed by a bottle of red wine and four-course meal. What clearer evidence could there be that these social critics have lost their way in the maze of the global economic system? The starting-point for these theorists was a critique of power relationships: critical theory grew up as a development of Marx’s theories in an era of more complex productive and financial systems, but the critical theorists appear defeated by the power of the economic system they sought to challenge. In The Mirror of Production (1973) Baudrillard points out that Marx equates humanity with labour. Marxism does not have enough conceptual distance from political economy to serve as its theoretical gravedigger. But just as Baudrillard criticises Marx for taking the worker as the prototype human being so we can criticise Baudrillard for following the lead of the multinational corporation along the road to globalisation and uniformity of culture and defining the consumer as the prototype human being. The Green critique has an alternative solution. It is a conscious decision to reject the power of multinational corporations dominating economic life (‘tackling the brand bullies’ in the terminology of Naomi Klein) and returning to the local to rebuild our identities in local economies, and primarily through our work in those communities. A handbook of guidance for such a project is Richard Douthwaite’s Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World. As the title suggests, the author argues that it is not only our identities which are under threat by a global production and distribution system. In response to the instability of a global economy he offers suggestions as to how communities can take back control of the most important areas of economic life: energy, banking, money, and the production of food and other goods. In Habermas’s terms we can take control of our lifeworld and build identities outside the globalised domain of production and consumption. This will allow us to fulfil our potential as individuals in a network of mutually supportive relationships and reinforce our identities as members of local communities. Notes 1. The results of a research project aimed at discussing the future direction of employment policy with local workers in Rhondda-Cynon-Taff are reported in my thesis (Cato, 2000b) and also in an article (Cato, 2001a). 2. According to the Department of Trade and Industry, Regional Selective Assistance is paid in instalments against project progress, including job numbers. So monitoring does take place, but it is hard to see what enforcement measures could be taken against foreign-based companies. 3. The new opera ‘Tower’, written by Alun Hoddinott and touring Wales complete with male voice choirs, is a classic piece of image-making. The coal-dusted hero, Tyrone O’Sullivan, is quoted as follows: ‘We were ordinary men . . . We wanted jobs . . . We bought a pit’. References
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