Six Things that Matter and One that doesn't

PageIntroductions: 'Hello!' - 'Who said that?' 1

Why equality matters and why it comes first. 4

Why history matters, but which history? 12

Why democracy matters and why republicanism is an essential consideration in its remaking 16

Why trust matters and why we need to rebuild it. 24

Why responsibility matters and why it needs our commitment 28

Why growth doesn't matter 34

Introductions: 'Hello!' - 'Who said that?'

Do I need to introduce myself? Don't panic – this is not going to be a chapter all about me. This is not autobiography in disguise. But there are some things you need to know, or at least I'd like to convince you that this is the case. I have been a teacher all my working career, so I will illustrate my points from that experience which covers literature and arts and business management - quite a sprawling career. I began my teaching career in an English department. When I asked students to prepare for the next class by reading the next novel on our course I would suggest they took it off into a quiet spot to enjoy. Novels, I argued, were written to be enjoyed, a point that can get lost when reading with a view to passing exams or writing assignments. But the next step for the student of literature was to ask a whole lot of questions about why they had enjoyed it or not, as the case might be. These included, high up the list: 'Who is writing this?' 'What is the point of view s/he brings to bear on the issues?' and then, 'What have other said about this text?'

When we got onto the last of these questions, I would suggest a different way of reading. First, 'Look who is writing and when.' Looking at these issues of point of view is fairly fundamental to the study of literature. But even if you are not very much of a reader of novels or even newspapers, you can't escape these days from listening to people telling

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you what to think. 'Experts' fill the air waves with their opinions, directing us how to think, or trying to. Try counting how many you have listened to in a day, perhaps even in an hour in front of the television. Beware of experts bearing gifts, and ask where they are coming from!

Much later I have found myself working in a business management department. But I am still obsessed with the importance of finding out who is writing before you start to read. In fact, this seems to me even more important in this discipline, though much less obvious.

Today everywhere in academia researching and publishing are important, in fact, they have become all-important for the career-minded. You need to know the rules for how to research – we do it by the book these days - and in the social sciences and especially in business management the glories of quantitative methods and their roots in scientific methodology and rationality are extolled as the pinnacle of human achievement. Along with this goes the mantra of objectivity, the view that the researcher must be objective. For business management research, of course, that is also linked with the objectivity of economics as a 'science', as well as the slightly newer glory of statistics. In business management's analysis of the organisation, objectivity has been the order of the day, to which qualitative methods have played a poor second fiddle. Indeed the qualitative has been carefully defined. In a valid research plan the qualitative views of the public or workers need to be scientifically captured. The views of the researcher, on the other hand, should not be heard, only his/her objective interpretations of the information gathered.

I think this is a nonsense, and quite a dangerous one too. In terms of the simple research project, the choice of subject and methods of testing it and the conceptual framework within which the work is undertaken and so on, are all choices to be made by the researcher though we are often asked to assume that they are some kind of 'given' authority. In reality these choices constitute a framework for thinking, a way of seeing the world which may be personal, or may be conforming to a particular ideological position. Within the business context the latter is largely the case. This is not an esoteric problem, restricted to business management departments. In practice, business as the workplace fills a large percentage of our daily lives and impacts on us all through the mass media for the rest of the time. And those experts we have to listen to are all working within the same framework and often this is a scientific research approach. They have measured what can be measured but are often blind to everything else. That is – they are not 'objective' authorities – could they ever be?

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I am not suggesting that we should condemn them for this or that we shouldn't listen to them. It is quite simply a matter of asking where they are coming from. Simple, if you really can ask the question: a problem if the speaker is in a studio and you are listening to them on the car radio. But in fact, I wonder whether even on the many phone-in programmes these days how often the question is asked of speakers -'Where are you coming from?' 'What's your ideological position on this subject?'

The scientific, economic and statistical norms that have come to dominate in the global culture of the 21st century, both have their roots in the early 19th century. Both were challenged at that time. It has been suggested that they were not unrelated to the desire of the ruling class at that time to reassert their dominance and control over the ideological ground at a time of demographic, technological and social changes in UK society. The doctrines of economics evolved to fulfil this role. By the end of the 19th century Britain was well on the way to subsuming all opposition to the status quo into a reformist stance of liberal and then socialist politics. Economic criteria became the authoritative voice deciding on the state of society. We are now totally controlled through processes and structures that can only take account of what they can measure and record as a statistic: a selective blindness that has drawn a veil over the very foundations of well-being on the one hand and the inherent inequality of British society on the other. The objective and measurable leave no room for moral criteria. The authority of objectivity has been asserting itself with little to challenge it for many decades now. I wonder whether we are slipping relentlessly into submission, philosophically, ideologically, morally. Authoritarianism seems to be a fluid concept defined by its latest empirical manifestation of a punitive denial of any ethical base of our humanity. Are we already living the next incarnation of authoritarianism as global capitalism?1 Could we begin the fight back by asserting our right to have opinions based on criteria other than those which serve the bottom line of corporate profit?

But to return to the research issue. There objectivity has not gone totally unchallenged. It has been countered with the view that in fact all research is subjective to a point. Feminist work in particular has taken up the challenge, perhaps because women's experiences of life are different and create a distance between them and the 'male' norms, a distance which as researchers or writers they feel a need to explain. It is much more usual to find women writers explaining where they are coming from than men

1E.P. Thompson (1980) Writing by Candlelight , p. 10: 'Too many of our liberal intellectuals fail to see the encroaching authoritarianism of the Business Society...'

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(my work here merely follows this pattern!) By comparison men appear to have been socialised more securely into the normative position in society. As these gender norms blur is the potential for outsiders to appear who are willing to challenge increased or decreased? Are more women drawn in to 'behave like men' or more men being bold and stepping out of the normative positions? These are interesting times!

If we bring economics into this analysis on the side of objectivity we find that economics appears to have convinced us all that it is not merely a social norm which could be challenged and change through time, but that it is indeed a natural order so that anything that might undermine the well-being of the economic system is a danger to us all. This in turn leaves studies of business, for instance, with no base outside of the objective, economic ideology from which to present an alternative view. If women have struggled to have their perspective accepted as valid, 'anti-capitalists' are taken to be per se simply oppositional and destructive, their position invalid. In our pluralistic culture they can of course speak. But, falling outside the boundaries of the objective and rational, their perspective, whatever that might be, will be invalidated by the incomprehensible or even horrifying nature of their nonconformity.

I hope this work falls into the latter category. I have tried to give you some indications of where I am coming from. Let me be a little more forthright. I will keep referring in the discussions that follow to the 'good society'. It has become for me a short-hand to indicate a number of principles that matter to me: freedom; equality; caring for people and planet; taking responsibility; trust; non-violence. But please take note if you think I am adding in others along the way. Even openly acknowledged subjectivity may not be what we think it is...

Why equality matters and why it comes first.

Why do I need to say that equality matters? Don't we all know that? If in reality that is not the case, is it because we have been taking this for granted, or, that we have allowed ourselves to be deflected by spurious arguments put forward by people who know that they are superior, and have actually given up on equality?

If we are taking equality for granted, it could be because we believe our present social and political structures constitute the best of all possible worlds in this respect. Democracy surely has encapsulated processes based on equality. Why else would we be 'selling' this around the world

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and making it the key achievement that distinguishes 'bad' regimes from 'good' ones? So, along with democracy, is equality already something done and dusted in the UK, already achieved and not for further debate?

Statistics on income distribution give the lie to such an assumption in the UK and across the world. The gap between rich and poor has been growing rapidly for several decades. Where does this leave us in terms of understanding how to build a good society? What to do about democracy will be the subject of a later section. In this section I want to consider evidence that equality has to come first, and just how important this is for the building of the good society.

I want to argue that equality has to come first: that a basic lack of equality in our society is inhibiting the effectiveness of creative initiatives from the left intended to build the 'good society' of the future. Such initiatives cannot in themselves create equality and unless our society is already egalitarian - unless we put fairness back into the system first - may only be reinforcing the existing inequality.

I think at this point I should tackle head-on the common arguments against equality. To put this simply using a 21st century scientific buzz-word, we are not all born with the same genes, so how come we can talk about being 'equal' or in what way can we talk about equality? There are many angles from which this topic can be approached. One study that starts by considering these various angles seems to me to come to a most convincing proposition, in relating equality to the subject of freedom. Freedom can be considered as 'non-domination': 'Non-domination involves the absence of domination in the presence of other people, it is a social ideal...'.This is about getting rid of deference on the one hand and giving of universal respect on the other. It can be seen as a significantly egalitarian 'good' so that maximising this non-domination 'with equal intensity' might be seen as a characteristic of the good society, as a realisation of equality in action.2

The concept of equality of course has a long history, of which I will say a little more later. But since I am talking about the relationship between our democratic system today and equality, I want to briefly to look back as far as the end of the Second World War to take up the story of the state of equality in the UK and consider how society and ideas have changed in this respect. Equality was very clearly not the order of the day in the nineteenth century, nor in the 1930s. Poverty oppressed the working

2Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism : A Theory of Freedom and Government. Clarendon: Oxford; Pettit, P. (2001) A Theory of Freedom: from Psychology to the Politics of Agency. Polity: Cambridge.

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classes whose labour produced the wealth of Empire. The glaring inequality brought the country much closer to revolution than the establishment historians cared to note for many years. Then, after all the hardships of a second world war, the majority of people expected change and having gained universal suffrage this was the moment to make that change a reality. The step to providing universal welfare may not have been a huge financial leap towards equality, but it was a change of mind-set. It was a realisation of identity and rights, embodied in the UN declaration and slowly developed over the next two decades. So did the UK finally become a classless and equal society in the post-war period? It has been argued that at least it felt like this at the time for a while. The ruling class gave ground only grudgingly as ever. Many of the lasting media images of the 1960-70s are negative ones of the working class. The assault on the Trade Unions was particularly effective. These people now had potentially power to hurt shareholder profits. They needed to be kept in their place. The deference of class was still a potent tool. In that sense society was much further from equality than it is today. In economic terms too the life of the working class could so easily be derided. No wonder many working class families were soon voting Tory. This was where their desire for equality lead them, more for me first, rather than a more equal society and the Trade Unions played the game. Workers were encouraged to have aspirations. They had democracy so they must be theoretically equal, so it was just a matter of earning more than the next man in order to get up there and join the bosses. The people lost sight of equality and what they got was a Thatcher government appealing to their aspirations, but in reality determined to remove all the rights they had gained and their defences in the union movement.

The campaigning platform on the left during the Thatcher era was undoubtedly about equality. It was self-evident to those on the left and increasingly to the country as a whole, that her policies were designed to increase not decrease inequality. But in a society now well-engaged with consumerism in the 1980s-90s, those on the political left campaigning in elections were having conversations on doorsteps in which voters relayed the views hot from the pages of 'The Sun' that 'we can't all be equal can we?' As long as individuals continued to feel OK about themselves and their consumerist status, equality slipped way down their list and slogans of choice and personal freedom took the conservatives to election victories.

With all the media supporting her, it took a long while for the majority of people to see that this was the old ruling-class declaring war on them.

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Finally they voted to put a halt to this trend. The Labour Party won an election. This was also potentially an ideological and moral victory. Sadly the Labour Party leadership threw away these latter victories and committed themselves to working 'within the budgets set by the previous government'. Materially things felt a little better. The consumer society boomed for a while. But what Labour actually did when they took office was to sign up to support Thatcherism's progeny, the neoliberal ideology as it was being propagated by the international economic institutions. There is now plenty of evidence that it is the policies of these institutions that have had the effect of widening the gap between rich and poor countries across the world and within countries over several decades. Right now we are confronted by a sudden surge forward in these policies in the UK and the prospect of increasing inequality is becoming clear for everyone to see.

The progress our society in the UK made over the first decade of the 21st century towards a culture of equality was therefore only minimal. Its limitations are well illustrated in Labour's flagship policy the Surestart Centres. It is hard to fault these in principle. The policy gave children from poorer backgrounds a boost in their early years, that could be expected to carry through their later years as a greater confidence, as well as learning and academic abilities. But there was a down side. It certainly raised abilities of children and also expectations, but the sad fact is that these expectations were hard and will now be even harder to fulfil. A debt for higher education which daddy could easily write off is no debt at all. A debt when there is no help at all, is a burden for life: more equal at 5 years old, even less equal at 20 seems to have become the reality.

This is the difficulty that inequality inbuilt in the social systems puts in our way. Politicians and academics alike have thought that they could tweek the system a little to makes things a bit fairer. It seems to me that equality, as I have defined it above, is something you either have or you don't. If you don't have it embedded in the principles of your society then the inequalities in the system will distort any attempts at modifying things.

This can be illustrated by a number of new initiatives or ideas that have appeared in recent years: new ideas for creating more empowering organisation of society at its grass roots level. Some have been taken up in some form by government in the UK. However, I would argue that these initiatives cannot in themselves deliver equality and as the underlying inequality persists their effect is merely to pacify the lower orders.

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Here are two examples of new ideas that have been offered as addressing the problems of poverty and inequality, which, in my view, can do little because of systemic inequalities. Both are applications of an idea known as co-production: Cahn's Time banking and co-production,3 and the application of co-production to education by NEF4. Co-production is based on the idea that if disadvantaged people are given a sense of self-worth through being involved in the production of a solution to their problems they will 'own' the whole undertaking and it will work. Cahn values people and the good and the potential he finds in them. Time banking, he argues, is about finding this potential and valuing it. Individuals are able to earn time-dollars by using their skills and knowledge to help others. In return they can get services and help from others who have joined the scheme. No money changes hands, but someone has to run the system for this exchange of labour. Cahn's book is packed with illustrations of how this has worked in practice. He has also theorised what is happening here. He sets out the values on which his system is based - a redefining of work, reciprocity and social justice - and contrasts this non-market system with the market system as two separate economies. He argues that 'Co-production supplies an interconnectedness based on core values' (p.34) and in redefining work challenges many of the assumptions of the economic market.

So how can I argue that this is not helping to bridge the gap? The people who were outside the economic system, whether through illness or simply unemployed, find meaningful work activity and receive recognition for their work as time credits which 'earn' them the services they themselves require. It seems to be a win-win situation. I think the problem is pointed up by Cahn himself when he refers to this as the non-market economy. Not that I have a problem with that concept itself either. The problem, as I see it, is that this exists alongside the other 'real' economy: the market economy, which meanwhile is busy delivering consumerism, creating the wealth and allocating power. In that higher world that is increasingly distant from the majority and especially the poor in their ghettoes busy with their time-banking schemes, the market economy continues to cream off the wealth for itself. In spite of all its good principles and ideals, time-banking becomes just another means to keep the people happy while the gap widens.

3Cahn, E. S. (2000) No more throw-away People: The Co-production Imperative. Essential Books: Washington.4Steuer, N. and Marks, N. (2008) University Challenge: Towards a well-being Approach to Quality in Higher Education.. New Economics Foundation: London.

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Cahn's principle of co-production has attracted much attention and other ways of applying these principles have been suggested. Their application to education from NEF illustrates again the frustration of seeing good ideas perpetuating inequality5. Their starting point on co-production in Higher Education is 'the inequality of quality'. They argued that the curriculum offered to the majority in the university system is distorted by the so-called needs of employers - an 'over-dominance of economic interests' - which is resulting in 'an increasingly instrumental approach to higher education and crowding out the space for HE Institutions to fulfil other vital purposes for individuals and for the economy' (p.10). The factors they feel are missing from the HE system are summed up as 'the dimensions of personal and collective well-being' and their transformative power (p.14). The scope of what a graduate should know should not be limited to the requirements for being 'a worker' and the NEF report set out a list of seven things a graduate should know that are to do with a role as citizen and human being.

Most lecturers I think and particularly those who have been in HE for some time, and whose own educational experience was 'more equal', would give enthusiastic support to these thoughts. They are to do with what many thought education was all about, with a central notion of learning to learn, so that the individual can continue to fulfil an active role as citizen, knowing and learning about the world around us in order to defend its values. To re-instate these values NEF, therefore, advocate a system of co-production to engage the learner in these wider tasks and to produce 'quality' learning defined by these principles as 'enhancing collective well-being' (18).

They have practical suggestions for how to move this forward through seminars, tutor meetings, conferences and fairs as empowering opportunities. All these activities are time-consuming. Perhaps that is the point. They would reintroduce into the university experience for the majority, for instance, the shared learning experience that was once the norm of the tutorial debate in small groups or one to one guidance, founded on lengthy personal study time. I presume this has survived in the upper echelons of the Higher Education system. But it is no longer the norm elsewhere.

The inequality in time available, the relative time which the students from different backgrounds and in different institutions have to give to their higher education experience was not addressed. Within the two days a week that some students in full-time education are on campus (with four 5Steuer, N. and Marks, N. (2008).

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days for paid work to cut down on the debt burden for their education) there is obviously less time for these activities compared to the Oxbridge (or even red-brick) university student's seven days. This is the reality of inequality in the mainly grant-free world of Higher Education today. The co-production plan that would bring teacher and student together in a new or renewed kind of relationship is undermined by the basic inequalities of the society in which it is proposed to operate such a system.

The same could be said for other initiatives that involve empowerment from the bottom up. They cannot in themselves correct the fundamental inequality of our society and so can only at best help to ameliorate the experience of those placed on the margins of society. For the rest of society they are even more dangerous because they make believe that inequality has been addressed. They consume the energy and commitment of those who want to change things, to help create a more equal society, and deflect from the focus that is needed to change the system itself.

It would seem to me that before we can begin to apply such policy proposals with any hope of achieving the desired outcomes, we first need to reconsider how equality can be enhanced systemically. Our society is a democracy but we do not live in a society which could be described as delivering equality for all its citizens, certainly not in terms of opportunity, income or indeed well-being. This is a challenge to the very definition of democracy.

In the 'democratic' republic of America in the late 19th century the journalist Henry George described the society of the time as one in which industrial development was providing growing wealth for the few, while poverty oppressed the majority. He noted that, 'there can be as much tyranny and misgovernment under democratic forms as any other'. He felt that at that time in the US a new elite had come into existence and that the inequalities of power as well as wealth which were being created needed attention. He maintained that 'Democratic government in more than name can only exist where wealth is distributed with something like equality'6 and that democracy itself cannot deliver equality. Equality, he felt, had to come first. I think that the experience in the UK over several decades confirms his findings.

Mr Cameron's 'Big Society' is an interesting gloss on this. He would have us accept that there are many vital jobs in our society that can be done by volunteers, that is people who do not get paid anything at all. I agree 6George, Henry (1884/2005) Social Problems, p.15.

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with him. We can all see this for ourselves. If we look around in our communities we can all point to so many things are being done by volunteers already: courses for retired people; local support groups; volunteers driving, cleaning, running charity shops, providing lunches, running youth groups or serving on committees to make these kinds of things happen. The problem is that while this time and labour are given freely and with good will, those undertaking these tasks are increasingly finding that they cannot afford to live comfortably themselves, and that their future welfare is in doubt as public services are reduced. At the same time others in our society continue to take an ever greater share of the wealth. Mr Cameron's big society is clearly so much window dressing, and cleverly going to a situation at the heart of the inequality in society, tries to call black white, to redefine a situation of gross unfairness as something else, and to deflect attention from the neoliberal policies that are increasing the inequality.

But there is here another aspect of the problem of equality that needs to be addressed. There have been many political discussions of whether equality should be defined in terms of opportunities or outcomes. So if people in the Big Society feel better cared for when members of their community volunteer to provide some of the care they are needing, should we just accept this as a more equal outcome? My answer to this would be to return to the definitions of freedom and equality mentioned above and to dig a little further into the possibilities of universal respect. I have to ask you to take an imaginative leap – to imagine that everyone in your town or village is making a contribution to the community. Is this so far from the truth already? You may work in the public or private sectors, but I guess you are convinced that what you spend your time doing has some benefit for others beyond producing the salary for you. And perhaps you manage a few hours a week doing one of those unpaid jobs. There are times in our lives when it is easier to give the time to the voluntary things than at others. Those are all to some degree or other activities through which we contribute to the common good. However, I would question whether in today's society we really acknowledge this. Consider how you would describe yourself if you meet someone for the first time. 'I'm a chemist' or 'I'm a teacher' or 'I'm just a housewife' or 'I'm just a volunteer'. But why are you expecting to be more valued at one time in your life than another or in one activity than another? Why do we downgrade our own service that is not paid for? This is the account of our lives that capitalism wants us to believe. But we need to change the narrative. Could we take an imaginative leap into a future where everyone valued all contributions equally, gave them all due respect? Edward Bellamy, a writer and journalist of the late nineteenth century took that

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leap of imagination and created an account of a society where everyone's contribution was valued. In fact, everyone's life experience included working in low-skills jobs even if they moved on to other more specialist ones. In whatever capacity people served their community at any moment in time they met with the same respect. They were truly free and truly equal.7

If the systemic problem had been addressed then Mr Cameron's big society might make some sense, though it would then be just a statement of the obvious. Perhaps everyone should do at least a year of community service - but that would of course mean everyone and everyone would receive the same respect for their work. But this is speculation because we are a long way from the day when we can implement such policies without fear of making things worse. Equality has to come first.

Thirty years ago the essence of Thatcherism was a set of economic policy choices whose aim was to make the rich richer and by default the poor comparatively or materially poorer. When the reality of this finally struck home the swing against Thatcherism gathered momentum. But the evidence is all around us that the last ten years have not delivered anything like a move to greater equality in our country. Today we have universal suffrage and democracy but a society that grows more and more unequal. Many people are now concerned about this. What I have argued here is that all our ideas for doing things differently and more fairly have to be put down the list or priorities, because none of them can deliver equality as a fundamental principle of social ordering. Equality matters, and it matters most and has to come first. We need to focus on this.

Why history matters, but which history?

In this section I want to suggest that we all need to engage with history. By this, I am not suggesting that there is some truth about the past that we need to uncover and learn. This might have been the deduction from the teaching of history a century ago, but not today. History, which had once been largely the recording of the victories of the ruling class, was democratised by the mid-twentieth century. Recognising the impossibility of pure objectivity in recording events, historians have looked beyond the official records and the life of the palaces to provide alternative accounts that suggest the complexities of social and institutional interactions.

7Edward Bellamy (1887/2009) Looking Backward 2000-1887. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

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A leading thinker in this new school of historians, Ferdinand Braudel, wrote multi-volume texts on European history exploring many newly-uncovered strands of everyday life, leaving the political and intellectual layers which had previously been the dominant study of historians in the shade. In Braudel's work so many aspects of daily life are discovered to have their own histories: strands such as transport and money are traced through the centuries and across continents. Braudel does not set them up as competing for pre-eminence in the history of a period: 'For me,' he wrote, 'history is the total of all possible histories – an assemblage of professions and points of view from yesterday, today and tomorrow'..(p.34). This has been described as a 'democratic practice of history' and while it is underpinned by a degree of scepticism about dominant views, it trusts in the reality of the past and its knowability, and takes up the challenge to uncover what was previously hidden.

Yet in spite of this flourishing of a democratised history, I want to argue that our failure as a society to continue to interrogate accounts of our 'history' are at the heart of today's problems. To make this case I will focus first of all on the realm of business management. If ever there was an area crying out for a history this is it. Not that the history of business has not been written about, far from it. There is a thriving discipline of 'Business History'. The problem is that, with few exceptions, this area of study is shut out from the run-of-the-mill teaching of business. The activity which is studied in Business Management happens in the present; is studied in the present; its theory is based on the present experiences and especially present success. If we have no conception of business as an institution which evolved, we are unlikely to think of it as subject to change or changeable or to look at it critically. In fact, economics as the driver of business activity is often presented to us as a 'natural' process with laws that need to be obeyed and cannot be changed at all. Another way of looking at it is that this is very much an end-of-history story of society. Having reached that point where business has delivered consumer heaven for everyone, we have no reason to question anything that business does, and no reason therefore to look at its past either. Well, I'm guessing you are not taken in by that? I'm hoping also that you can see where the connections will come in, between studying business and living our ordinary everyday lives. We have to shop at the supermarket and work for the bank or corporation. Their story is our story. Anyway, it is surely a truism that everything has a history - a good subject for a debate, unless you believe that we are already at the end of history, and have reached that idyllic condition when the consumer

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society has delivered perfection for everyone so that history can be abandoned.8

So, if I operate within a business environment but have no conception of 'business' as a construct with a history – of processes and changes and issues – I cannot articulate a critical view of it. The same is true of my role as citizen where I interact with business as an institution which impacts on my life and the world at large. To begin to engage in critical debate on the subject and to articulate an alternative vision I would argue that we need to engage with questions about business in the past, and with the present as a moment in an evolving history.

But in case you are not convinced that I am justified in focusing on business here, let me bring in some further historical support. Several writers on the present crisis have recently turned to the work of Karl Polanyi in the mid-twentieth century. Polanyi, writing at the end of the Second World War, felt that a major cultural shift was beginning. To explain what this entailed he looked back to the early 19th century to develop an understanding of the advent of the 'science' of economics. He identified a link between the ideas of Malthus and Ricardo, and others who thought of society in Darwinian terms. He argued that validity had been conferred on this set of ideas which were basically intended to support the dominance of the ruling class, by the use of the label 'scientific'.9 But economics, the study of money transactions, came to be seen as the most important and dominant aspect of human existence, and the 'utopian' enterprise of realising the mythic self-regulating market took control, in reality providing the cover for unrestrained class interests.

These were the ideas that had helped to shape the archetypal liberal economic legislation of the New Poor Law of 1834, which was underpinned by a view that: 'Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse'.10 Essentially only those who could prove themselves to be economically productive units, were worthy of help. But at the end of the 1940s, at the time of the birth of the welfare state, Polanyi was optimistic 8Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. Hamilton: London.9See also the view of Anthony Arblaster, speaking about this period: 'At the same time, the principles of liberal economics hardened, in the minds of many, into dogmas, rigidly adhered to however distressing the results of such adherence might be': Arblaster, A. (1984) The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism. Blackwell: Oxford, p.252. The early nineteenth century work I refer to might be exemplified in Malthus, T.R. ( /1958) An Essay on Population. Dent: London.; Ricardo, D. (1817/1977) The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Dent: London..10 quoted in Polanyi, K. (1944/2002) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time. Beacon Press: Boston, p. 118.

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that, having challenged the dominant historical view of the nineteenth century as the age of progress, a great transformation was about to occur and that economics would be put back in its place as merely one facet of a society that wanted to care for all its citizens. Today we can see that the period from the 1970s has been one of counter revolution, as economics in the form of neoliberalism, the ideology of the ruling elite, has once again taken the dominant role, this time in a global culture. As in the nineteenth century, economics has presented itself as the only show in town pervading not only university business departments but the cultural life of our society: we are all exposed to the economic doctrines day-in-day-out. Clearly another push for the great transition is well overdue.11

To achieve this goal, the nature of business has to be challenged. Many political thinkers today are looking for the green shoots of the alternative society. What I am arguing is that to achieve this we need to challenge the new historical orthodoxy that confronts us: a story of free markets as the only way to do business, the global corporate institutions as the only means to this end and to providing for ourselves and our families, so that we acquiesce in an agenda that condones any means to the end of maximising the profits of corporate shareholders.

Does this mean that we need now a new historical account on which to base any concerted opposition? But I have already suggested that exploring history is a process of rediscovering multiple histories. So I am not suggesting that we are in search of a new truth to underpin our challenge. Rather that, as historians would look at the point of view of the writer of historical documents, we too need in our daily lives to be listening to the views given to us in a similarly critical way. This will not make life easier or simpler. In fact it has been said that: 'There is no problem which does not become increasingly complex when actively investigated.' But I don't think that ignoring this is an option. In thinking about the process of writing history Braudel also noted that every moment is a moment in history. Our every thought, like it or not, is a part of that history – so better surely to consciously think it critically.12

Perhaps the 'factual' accounts of business activity and the statistics on their achievements are no more durable than the lists of kings and queens that we older members of society had to learn at school? Perhaps we need

11See, for example, the work of New Economics Foundation (2010) The Great Transition: A Tale of How it Turned out Right. 12Braudel, F. ( 1969/1980)On History. Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London.

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to question the 'successes' of the companies listed as the top 500 companies in the world. Perhaps, for instance, their 'victories' might be on a par with those of the allies in the First World War, which later historians acknowledged had been bought at enormous costs of human sacrifice and suffering, and benefited only the rich elite.

For business schools to integrate a critical history into their courses would be a major step forward, given the numbers of students who pass through their doors as undergraduates or MBA students. If these students are offered only the ideological framework of neoliberal economics within which to conceptualise their everyday work experience then we effectively offer them up as cannon fodder on the next battlefield of corporate greed.

For the rest of us as ordinary citizens, the alternative history is not something we need to invent. It is already written – we just need to listen harder and listen more critically, pile in with our questions when the media present us with their orthodox accounts of our own historical moment.13 This is why I am arguing that we need history. I suppose I am saying that we need to learn not only from history already written but about the historians role. Our critical listening will be the equivalent of this role, about which it has been said: that there is an obligation for historians 'to search for the motives and incentives present in the historical moment' and that 'what historians do best is to make connections with the past in order to illuminate the problems of the present and the potential of the future'.14 I will predict that what you will find when you start to challenge the mind-set of submission to the a-historical economic orthodoxy will surprise you.

Why democracy matters and why republicanism is an essential consideration in its remaking. The idea of a more equal society has come to be associated in our culture with democracy. But if Henry George in the 1880s could see that democracy in America could not of itself deliver equality, and our country indeed our world today is getting more unequal by the day, what does that say about democracy as we know it? This section will have a lot more questions than answers. We could start with: 'Does democracy matter?' You might answer: 'Of course it matters – and we have it already!' Of course we are able to vote once in five years (Did you vote

13 The resources for the writing of today's 'history' on the web are immense.14Appleby, J. et al (1994) Telling the Truth about History. W.W. Norton: New York, pp.143; 10.

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in the last elections?) and then we let our representatives get on with things. But have they been the policies that benefit the people?

Now let's turn these questions on their head. Are we an equal society? Is our society run fairly? Is the voice of the people heard? If the answer to these questions is 'no', what does that say about kind of democratic society we are? How can we reconcile the fact that we describe our country as a democracy, when we do not in the UK live in an equal society or even one that is becoming more equal – just the opposite. So the basic issue seems to be at the moment that although we have a vote every five years, it is still not clear how we make that equate to or deliver on equality and fairness.

How would you define democracy? The OED says: 'a system of government by the people for the people' and probably many of us would want to add a belief that this should be delivering fairness and equality for society. There are clearly some problematic issues in these statements I think. Even so, our government and others in NATO are busy 'selling' this system around the world. It has been made the excuse or part of the excuse for several wars.

What can we do about this? What follows is not an answer to these questions, but it may help in thinking in this direction. In this section I want to look at our democratic system, how we got here, and influences shaping democracies today, and at some of the history of other forces, notably republican ones, relevant to democracy that have not been included in the main story of our country's history.

My first step is to note some passages from the history of our democratic system. This evolved as the ruling class struggled to give away as little power as possible at different times in our history in the face of rising unrest among the people. One obvious issue was the struggle for universal suffrage. The story of how the right to vote became the focus of workers' hopes to get their needs addressed through parliament is not one I need recount here in detail. There were many campaigns and many small steps forward, the establishment grudgingly giving way first on votes for men and then for women, in each case when the pressure building up from below began to constitute a real threat. For example, in 1830 revolution in France did not spill over into England. The suffrage Bill that resulted from the unrest of the time was a grave disappointment extending the franchise so very little and keeping the important property qualification. The Chartists campaigned hard for universal suffrage in the 1830s and 40s. Another extension of the suffrage came in 1867 and began

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to bring the prospect of voting rights for workers a little closer and this focused the energies of socialists on gaining parliamentary representation rather than revolution. Revolutions were averted again and again through small concessions to keep power firmly in the hands of the rich and the 'nouveau riche'. When universal suffrage was finally achieved, what changed? The period of the 1930s is well-known as one of enormous differences in wealth between classes, and poverty and poor housing remained in spite of the vote. It took another war bringing greater awareness of class division to the fore to produce a government that would deliver homes fit for heroes, and more besides.

Basically my first point is that our parliamentary institutions today were never planned and thought through as the ideal organisational form to produce best results for democracy and equality. Just the opposite. Although thinkers on the left had provided visions of democracy, in practice the parliamentary system evolved as the ruling class conceded as little power as possible through each new reform forced on them.

But why has it become so obvious now that the government is not listening to the people? Is it just a matter of getting voters more engaged and speaking to their MPs more often and more loudly? I want to argue that to answer this question we need to consider the forces and power issues shaping our politics today. So there is a long answer to the question, but in this section I want to try to provide a shorter one. Basically then, when people feel that no-one is listening, perhaps it can be explained by the fact that power has shifted away from parliament (not surprising, therefore, that the ruling elite did not object to being moved out of the House of Lords!). While the silent majority were going about their business, things changed – slowly and steadily over several decades. Government took on roles other than representing the wishes of the electorate, namely to represent the interests of the corporations registered within their national boundaries.

The full history of how these changes came about and the global dimensions to this story are the long answer to my earlier question. I'll try to stick with the short answer and give just a few highlights of the history that we need to dig into here. This takes me back to the end of the Second World War. In 1944 a conference of the allies was held at Bretton Woods. They agreed to set up three international economic organisations to oversee economic stability and growth, founded on a belief in free markets and the dangers of protectionism.15 By the 1970s the

15 The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the bureaucracy of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade).

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bureaucracies of these organisations were dominated by the ideology of neoliberalism. This was in part due to the leading role of the US in all these institutions, but also more specifically to the development of free market ideas by Milton Friedman, and their dissemination through his work at the Chicago University School of Economics, developing a set of policies which became known as the Washington Consensus through which free markets could be delivered on a global scale.16

On the trade front, from 1944 onwards, through a series of rounds of trade talks, known as GATT, that continued through several decades, the global powers came to agreements that covered all areas of trade in goods. In the round of talks that ended in 1995 they agreed to move negotiations forward on trade in services and to create a new organisation, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), to do this and also to enforce the rules of existing and new agreements. On all of these matters at the WTO governments now speak on behalf of 'their' corporations. For instance, if a corporation wants to complain that a country has introduced rules which are blocking its entry to bid for a service contract or to set up a factory, it will turn to the government of the country where it is based to take its complaint to the WTO.

Also in the late 1940s the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created, the former to provide development loans, in the first instance to European countries to rebuild after the war, and the latter to oversee and ensure the stability of currencies, exchange rates etc. The IMF's role evolved to cover giving and monitoring development loans and credit to governments in need of help. Also as currencies were freed from the gold standard, as part of their role in maintaining financial stability, it was believed that they needed to keep an eye on governments themselves, and to this end staff of the IMF began to visit every country's treasury each year to check on what they are doing and advise, and every government sends its treasury minister off to the IMF each year to report to them. These processes are referred to as the IMF role of 'surveillance', the monitoring they argue is necessary to keep the system afloat. The IMF aims to ensure that all governments work to the same set of policies of neoliberalism. These are policies of service privatisation, deregulation of banking and other sectors of the economy, broad-base tax systems that reduce of taxes for the rich and corporations, removal of all barriers to trade and to Foreign Direct Investment such as national subsidies or import/export taxes, or restrictive legislation such as laws on worker rights or environmental controls. The same policies are forced on

16In the UK we first experienced these policies as Thatcherism and they are now known as neoliberalism.

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developing countries as conditions for any loans the IMF provides for them. Neoliberalism argues that what is good for corporate profits is good for everyone. This is blatantly untrue. Statistical evidence abounds that the world has become a more unequal place and that inequality within almost all countries in the world, especially those most under the thumb of the IMF, has increased dramatically. Yet they still maintain that it is just more of the same that is needed.

The push for democracy has gone on along side these policies. Newly elected politicians find that they are unable to deliver any other approaches to economic policy other than those imposed by the IMF. So the democracy that is being peddled around the world is not an institution that can deliver on equality or be the voice of the people, since its hands are tied on economic policies. Should we blame the politicians, as the press are always keen to do in relation to what is happening in other countries? But we are now experiencing the onslaught of the same policies in the UK. Should we also blame our politicians for not listening to the people here too? Clearly it is a universal fact that democracy is already in hock to the IMF and committed to doing things their way. The only consolation for us in the UK as we wake up to this situation is to find that we are not alone in our predicament. Everyone else has the same problem of undemocratic democracies. Their situations will have developed through different circumstances over the decades but the powerful global forces shaping their lives have been the same.

On many economic issues in the UK some politicians and the media moguls have tried to get us to focus on the influence of the EU as a source of our problems. The reality is that the EU operates on many occasions as the go-between between the Westminster government and the global economic institutions, reinforcing the policy agenda of the latter to which the Lisbon treaty has committed all EU member states. The economic crisis has given the IMF more leverage in Europe through its loan conditions for individual member states. We can rail against the EU, but to some extent we are only being goaded on to 'shoot the messenger'. We are not tackling the powerful senders of the original message.

In this situation it is not surprising that many people here in the UK have had a strong sense that it was a waste of time voting. But also in our unequal society it has become increasingly noticeable that the people who are elected to parliament are not representative of the population as a whole. In the present government this lack of representativeness is illustrated in the composition of the cabinet whose members are drawn

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almost exclusively from the wealthy elite. There is plenty of evidence that the links between wealth and political power that democracy might purport to have broken are still to be intact.

Another excursion into history to look at a long-marginalised aspect of history might provide insights here. I want to look at some evidence from the nineteenth century when a strand of republican thought played an important role in the early days of socialism and to ask whether this might not be a helpful view to explore today. I want to argue that as republicanism was marginalised so was the possibility of a society fundamentally based on equality in our country, a challenge now for the left.

Generally on the left we look to a history of socialism traced back across two centuries or more as our past. However, in the 19th century a republican movement in England sat alongside the developing socialist movement. Its history seems to have been largely ignored. I feel that the marginalisation of republicanism in that period in order to foreground the focus on socialism as a workers movement for parliamentary representation is a convenient oversight which denies us historical roots and precedents to question issues around inequality today.

History as 'key facts' has associated republicanism with a couple of main events: the protectorate of the 17th century in England and the revolution in France more than a hundred years later that removed the king. As regards the former, the figure of Cromwell dominates the popular image of the 17th century. But Cromwell's republic empowered many to speak out. Now there was space for the voices from below to be heard. The writings of the time on such a wide range of subjects from parliamentary democracy and equality to education, law and land ownership deserve our attention. Regarding the later revolution in France, we have tended to see this as not really having much to do with England. We tend to look back from our global village and imagine that no-one ever travelled before our generation, but the links then between England and France were strong enough for the elites here to be extremely worried that revolution would spread. Revolutionary ideas were debated and many leading literary figures who we remember mainly for other things, took part in that debate. Tom Paine's writing is well-known, but the popularity of republican views and their wide circulation way into the 19th century has received less attention. The work of W.J. Linton, for instance, in the English Republic, where he expressed a fundamental belief in the equality of human beings, and the need to establish a system of government reflective of that equality, is still inspirational,

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It is now also an easier matter to read the newspapers of those days and to see accounts of republican meetings in the 1850s, and of marches where the red flag was carried and the red cap worn, as symbols of the republican movement. There is also evidence that popular writers of the fifties, who were committed republicans, were rousing audiences with references to republicanism in popular productions on the London stage. The playwright Robert Brough also published translations of French republican poetry and wrote similar poems of his own. In the introduction to a collection of his own poems from 1855, at the tie of the Crimean War he wrote:

The feeling of which the following ballads are the faint echo and imperfect expression is a deeply-rooted belief that to the institutions of aristocracy in this country (not merely to its “undue preponderance”, but to its absolute existence) is mainly attributable all the political injustice, and more especially the grovelling moral debasement, we have to deplore.

Republicans of the 19th century made links back to the 17th century. Readers were clearly tuned in to these comparisons. For instance, they would recognise the figure of the one great 'Gentleman' our history had produced as Cromwell without more introduction. However, after a slight resurgence of republicanism in the second half of the century the working class were slowly weaned off it as the liberal agenda gave priority to the cause of parliamentary reform, taking the steam out of the republican protest movements and focusing the hopes of the working class on parliamentary reform. Even so, small as it may have been, the existence of a republican movement in the nineteenth century is a part of our history that deserves reinstatement, if for no other reason, because it draws attention to the issue of equality in British society as a piece of unfinished business.

The limitations of democracy, its inability to deliver equality for the people which were noted by Henry George in the late nineteenth century have already been mentioned above. More than a 100 years later in the crisis of the early 21st century, evidence is now growing of the social problems essentially similar to those of 1880s identified by Henry George. The inequality and ineffectiveness of democracy to secure the basic living standards of working people are still with us. For instance, behind all reporting and commentaries on the economic crisis lurks a sub-text about who is responsible for creating such an unregulated system,

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who has benefited from it and hence whose interests are still opposed to genuine reform.

In the UK the image of the ruling class may have changed, but at its heart are still the old aristocracy upheld by the position, power and wealth of the monarch. Our culture of veneration for the celebrity, for instance, reflects and reinforces the status of the aristocracy. What does it mean after all to become famous? Surely it is mainly to have the privilege of rubbing shoulders with the aristocracy? The rest of us are invited to aspire to this. Behind the aspiration for material possessions which dominates our culture, lies the hope of the ultimate reward of a place, however temporary, among the class for whom the privileges of wealth remain permanent. Class division still plays its part in fuelling greed, masked by the excesses of consumerism.

Henry George was quite clear that ' Beneath all political problems lies the social problem of the distribution of wealth'.17 Interestingly he categorises inequality as a social problem not an economic one. Today it is generally measured and presented as an economic one and since interference by politicians in the economic system is now punishable by 'death' at the hands of the IMF firing squad there is such a taboo on challenging the economic system that the issue of inequality is not allowed to rise to the surface, to be seen or discussed. But surely we should not on the left wash our hands any more of the responsibility for inequality as if we really believed in the magic of the market which is making all this happen.

Henry George's desire was to create equality in order to make democracy work for all. This may seem an impossible dream or at best an incredibly difficult aspiration. But, with the evidence of the failure of corporate power piling up and the impossibility that a system dominated by their profit-maximising ideology can ever tackle climate change in time to spot catastrophe, it becomes clearer by the day that George's dream is rapidly turning into an urgent necessity. So why not turn the argument about equality on its head - let's ask why not a republic to remove the most glaring inequalities in the UK? Why not build a democracy on a culture that is about sharing, and caring for all in our society equally? If we listen to the voices from the past we might reconsider whether equality has to come first for democracy to really work. The words of W. J. Linton written in 1850 are a powerful message to today's political left: 'We Republicans indeed are socialists. Let the

17 George, Henry, p. 16.

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Socialists learn Republicanism and some of our utopias may become real.'18

A pattern is emerging I think – equality first as a principle –interrogate our taken-for-granted history and then we can begin to reconsider what we really expect from a democracy and how to achieve it. But as the more you look into a problem the more complex it is likely to get, we might look at firming up our principles ready for the task.

Why trust matters and why we need to rebuild it

Is trust a problem? There is evidence that we are losing trust in many of our social relationships. But is this connected with the other ills of our society? Why should I claim that it really matters if trust is not what it used to be?

In fact, the evidence is surely all around us of the assault on trust – in politics, in the banking sector, and probably for many of us in our own daily lives in work places that are 'under threat'. If politicians are not trusted are we looking at another failure of our democratic system? In fact I want to argue that not only is the collapse of trust implicated in this systems failure but that it could also be a key factor in putting society together again. This section, therefore, will examine the link between systems that are powered by greed and the interests of profit-maximising corporations and the destruction of trust in our society.

Do you need proof that trust matters? Ask yourself how it would feel to work in an organisation or live in a community where you could not trust anyone at all. It wouldn't be an organisation as we know it, or a community at all perhaps. It would be a 'jungle': a constant competition of purely self-interested individuals. That is not exactly what I am suggesting is our condition today. But definitions and studies of trust in business organisations, for instance, seem to me to have already transformed trust into activity in which self-interested predominates. A much quoted definition of trust is as 'a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another',19 and much of the literature in business management on the role of trust in organisations is looking for its utility and service to the bottom-line. What would your own definition

18 Linton, W. J. (1854) The English Republic: A Newspaper and Review.19Rousseau, D. M. et al (1998) 'Not so different after all: a cross discipline view of trust' in Academy of Management Review 23 (3), 393-404, p. 395.

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look like? Mine would have something in it to do with shared values as a basis for trust, as will become clear from the argument below. I want to argue here that writing on 'trust' in the area of business and organisation offers insights into how this assault on trust came about and helps to point us in the direction of ways to put trust back together again.

There is plenty of evidence from a variety of disciplines of how fundamental trust is to human society, from the interpersonal to the institutional levels, from counselling handbooks to historical and economic studies.20 Putnam, in his work on social capital in American society, sees trust as having a crucial role to play: 'Trustworthiness' he believes, 'lubricates social life' (p.21) and this in its turn is founded on principles of honesty and the 'Golden Rule' of doing to others as you would wish them to do to you (pp.135-6). For Putnam, trust is essential to society's well-being and it is rooted in moral principles.

In trying to understand how trust has been undermined I want to refer mainly to evidence from writing in business and organisational management, a discipline that is particularly concerned with institutions that are at the centre of today's problems. Here the need for trust has become problematic. I want to try to summarise how this has come about. In the extensive analysis of trust in academic writing on business, work already undertaken in a wide range of other disciplines has been drawn on. It is interesting to trace the relative influences of these approaches to the subject of trust.

Sociologists in the mid-20th century drew attention to both the importance of trust and the beginnings of its breakdown. Social causes were identified – the growing complexity of life in modern society, both in terms of time and space were seen as rational explanations for these changes. When the consideration of the subject of trust made its way into the study of management, a concern for its breakdown was soon challenged by a rationalisation of the situation from the economic wing. Trust, it was maintained, was not only disappearing but should disappear. Since rational self-interest was a common human motive, then for the sake of efficiency in the business organisation this should be assumed to be the dominant motivation. This view of the self-interestedness, calculativeness and opportunism of 'economic man' seemed to take us

20 To give just one recent illustration, the point that trust was crucial to the banking system in its early days is made by Mary Mellor (2010) The Future of Money. Pluto Press: London. pp.3; 31. The economist Kenneth Arrow has concluded, 'Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time' (quoted Robert Putnam (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon and Schuster: New York, p.288).

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back to a Hobbesian analysis of life, leaving no space in organisations for the old-fashioned personal relationships of trust.

But in organisational studies and management the debate about trust has drifted on, considering its role in organisations - finding it and measuring it, looking at leaders creating it and vulnerabilities of others trusting them in hierarchical relationships, and also justifying it in the face of overarching aims of efficiency and profit. A number of tensions have beset this work. Accounts of the building of trust associate it with personal characteristics such as honesty and integrity, but the overall justification of trust happens within the rational framework of the economic imperatives. This is reflected in a tension between the economic and the sociological approaches, with writers taking the latter approach arguing that the social aspects of business organisations need to be studied and taken into account, a reminder that the workers in business units are in fact real people who inevitably interact with one another and develop relationships of trust. This is a reflection of the wider debate from the early 20th century mentioned above about the perceived dominance of economics, rather than its embedding as a factor within the social framework of society. The result of these tensions is that it often feels as though writing in this area is busy redefining trust as something that is context-specific and with its own vested interests and limited relevance to rational outcomes.

Outside of management literature trust has been linked to moral integrity and responsibility and ethics. These words have tried to creep into management writing as an account of a values-based trust, but always somehow get squeezed out along the way as we are brought back to objective research approaches, to the measuring of the measurable to the exclusion of the more intangible and ethical, and to the rational context of the profit-maximising organisation.

What all the literature on trust in organisations seems to me to demonstrate, directly or indirectly, is that trust struggles to survive where it is confronted by the profit-maximising motive and is at best distorted by it, and often driven out. But as trust has been shown to be so important to human well-being how can we justify accepting systems in the workplace where we spend so much of our lives that are inimical to trust?

And it is not only in the workplace that trust is under attack. Things get worse for trust when we consider the state of our society today as a 'consumer heaven'. Capitalism has reshaped our social and cultural space

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in its own image. The consumer society sells us cultural norms that are about maximising our personal gain and tells us that material wealth equates to social standing, and that material possessions define us. We seem to accept that marketing strategies will sail as close to the wind as possible, not quite tipping into dishonesty that can be legally challenged as long as they appear to be serving our material interests. But at the same time these strategies damage trust. While some succumb to the temptations of this calculative, self-interested culture in pursuit of the consumer heaven, many more of us are left battling through the daily routine in a cultural space deprived of trust in the producers and dispensers of the basics of daily living. Any day now the profit maximising culture will have succeeded in capturing the spaces where some of our most basic needs have been provided for: local services of education, social services and health.

We had expected that these spaces were secure at least. Politicians have told us that we can trust them to keep them secure. Was politics ever the domain of trust dependent on moral values that are personal and honoured by the individual? Some of us believed it was, I think. So what changed? Here too, I would argue, the lessons from the business world are relevant. Here too a collision of values with the profit-maximising corporate culture has been taking place. Neoliberal ideology which was espoused by politicians in the 1980s and early 90s did not give up when it was removed from the political limelight of parliament in 1997. It had already secured its position of authority within the global bureaucracies of the IMF and WTO. These organisations had been provided with open access to the seats of power in nations across the world, if not directly to politicians then through their national bureaucracies. The UK is no different from the rest. The chancellor and the IMF speak with one voice. That voice is obliged to serve the corporate interests of profit-maximisation. Capitalist self-interest and calculation have succeeded in hijacking the ship of state. At the last election voters puzzled over the choices offered to them: politicians who clearly supported an elite class interest but told them they shared their values, and candidates from the class of 'the rest' - of ordinary citizens - who they expected would share their values, but who had allowed the corporate self- interests of the banking sector to run roughshod over the interests of citizens. Who should they believe? What had happened to trust? Understanding how this situation came about, does not solve the problem of how to rebuild trust but it is a first step towards this. And we should not think we can sit back and wait for something to turn up. When people are looking for someone to trust they are especially vulnerable. Trust that was miss-placed, that was not rooted in shared values, was a key feature of fascist

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triumphs in the past. The battle to rebuild trust is not an option, but a necessity.

Could we tackle this by simply calling for more legislation and regulation in society? This is an interesting question. Williamson's answer to the problem of failings of trust in the business organisation was to assume that there was only self-interest and to legislate through contracts on this basis. The issue of (de)regulation is at the heart of the neoliberal agenda. We have seen above that for some writers the concepts of freedom and equality are essentially linked. My answer to these apparently paradoxical views is to get back to basics. If everyone could be trusted to the same extent we would surely be living in a paradise where there would be no need for any law enforcement of any kind, perhaps even no laws, as we would all implicitly be following the same ethical rules in our daily lives. Given that this is not the case, then we have to find a way forward in an imperfect world and it is the guides we take that matter. There are many aspects of business were more rules are needed rather than less after decades of global deregulation in favour of rampant greed. But policing is not always the answer. In fact we can see in the world of business that rules-based economic activity can drive out trust, and I would argue that our aim needs to be to create a society where trust is possible.

I think this begins with the individual, because from what we can see in the studies of trust in action in the workplace and the assault on it there, it is clear that for trust not to be distorted by power inequalities and hierarchy it must be essentially rooted in shared values. Since we need trust as the glue of our social relations, as the foundation of a caring culture and a functioning democratic politics, perhaps we need to openly reconsider what ethical values had formed in the past or might for the future form the foundations of trust.

Why responsibility matters and why it needs our commitment

Underpinning all the things that matter considered above is surely our personal approach to life: our moral values or ethics. But in our culture today ethics is now considered to be a very private affair. There may be many reasons for this. I would suggest that in part this may be due to a perception that the space between ethics and religious orthodoxies has come to be seen as a slippery slope and accounts of our history are littered with struggles against authoritarian tendencies of religious establishments. A desire for tolerance might make many people suspicious of any hint of a re-imposition of a set of 'religious' values. But

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if we are unwilling to embrace a particular religious code then how do we go about establishing a common ethics that can, for instance, underpin trust. While we ponder on this dilemma, it could be argued that those old religious orthodoxies are already being replaced by the amoral orthodoxy of the ideology of capitalist economics. Has our desire for tolerance also been used as cover for neoliberalism's infiltration of our culture? With a culture already in thrall to corporate interests, to go with the flow means accepting the capitalist dogma. The question is how we can begin a new debate about shared moral values as a basis for building a good society founded on equality, democracy and trust.

A more hopeful starting point might be to consider that while religions have at their worst been guilty of fuelling prejudice and war, there are many common principles shared by all religions, many also embedded in our laws, which most people today still seem to be comfortable with. While the details of the moral position which is needed to underpin trust might be a private affair, perhaps we could all enter into debate about a general ethical approach, an ethics of responsibility for the 'other' along the lines of the old adage 'do as you would be done by', as a space where moral values can thrive as the foundation for a good society.

Having examined the tension between the profit motive and trust in the previous section, again a note of caution needs to be sounded about the relation of ethics and business. Some time ago now, in the light of some outstanding illustrations of unethical business behaviour, calls began to be heard for a more ethical business culture, to which businesses and in particular their marketing departments, have not been totally deaf. The main result was the development of corporate social responsibility policies, the effectiveness of which has equally been called into doubt. I refer to these here because the formulation of a theory behind this practice has resulted in an engagement of business writing with ethics. However, ethics here is recreated in the image of the consumer society. Text books offer the student a resume of a number of possible ethical approaches based on the work of leading philosophers from the past, and invite them to consider which one might best suit a particular situation. I mention this to discount it from my own personal consideration of genuinely ethical business. A pick-and-mix ethics seems to me a contradiction in terms, and hardly the basis for the restoration of trust in relationships. I would argue that we cannot look to business to resolve our questions about ethics.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of responsibility seems to me to come opportunely to offer us an alternative here. Levinas is not

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very widely known in academic circles and certainly not beyond, but his work seems to me to provide a space in which many different religions and viewpoints might find common ground. Levinas puts us in touch some of the deepest, most difficult questions that the experiences of the period of the rise of Fascism and second World War have raised. In terms of his philosophy itself, he offers an ethics grounded in the very essence of being human. But our individual ethics, of course, as was noted above, remain a very personal affair. The summary of some of Levinas' key ideas around responsibility below is therefore offered as a way into the question at the heart in this section: 'Does responsibility matter?'

Although introductions to and commentaries on his work are plentiful they are generally written to engage the student of philosophy and therefore do not necessarily offer easy access for the non-philosopher. My summary of his key ideas, on the other hand, is strictly a personal rather than an expert view.

It has been argued that like many great writers Levinas has one big idea which is thought in a bewildering variety of aspects. In his case the big idea would be that ethics is 'first philosophy'. This relates first of all to how Levinas sees his task as a philosopher. He is dissatisfied with philosophy to date, as he sees it as reducing 'being' to rational thought. Rather, he says, the philosopher's task should be to open up questions though not necessarily to provide the answers. Whereas philosophy has been concerned with a rational exploration of being, Levinas would argue we must set aside knowing and meaning in order to reach our ethical base, and that this involves moving into the realm of 'transcendence'. Whereas the material(ist) world purports to provide all the answers, the first step away from it is to begin to pose questions the answers to which will be found 'elsewhere'. Levinas' metaphor for philosophy, therefore, is an 'insomnia', that is a continuous awakening or wakefulness in regard to life and its ethical base. Indeed he suggests that the task of such thinking itself is an ethics, a search for and to establish loving kindness: a moral preoccupation. This presents Levinas with the enormous problem of putting into words something that happens before words. As a result he has developed his personal vocabulary and I will try to stay as close as possible to the tone and language of his texts.

Central to Levinas' exposition of ethics is a moment in human experience and also a relationship in that moment. Considered from a lay-person's point of view this might be described as a 'hypothetical' moment. Levinas posits a moment in which the individual 'I' comes face to face with another human being. In this moment, which occurs before words,

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before language has conditioned our responses, the 'I' recognises in the face of 'the other' human need and responds to it by taking responsibility for 'the other'. As this act of taking responsibility occurs before words, before any response of thinking or intentionality, without reward or pressure, it is not articulated as a set of tasks. This moment of our embrace of the ethical is not limited by reason, as Levinas' exploration of its characteristics is at pains to emphasise.

The 'I's response to 'the other' is characterised by 'radical generosity', without an expectation of a reward, to an 'other' who remains totally exterior to itself, at a distance, absolutely 'other'. The moment of recognising and responding to this need is an 'epiphany'. The 'I' becomes a 'for-the-other'. The assumption of responsibility, this core of our ethical being, is not a relationship of power, but of unlimited unconditional commitment to the well-being of 'the other', of putting 'the other' before the self. Such is the nature of the responsibility demanded by the face that our response is always lacking, always falls short, is insufficient, and in deficit. The individual 'I' can just never do enough.

My summary of Levinas' concept of responsibility could begin to make it sound like a burden that we take up. But he is clear that this is not the case. Certainly the 'I' is not threatened or weighed down by the demands of the other. The way he explains this is that this is neither freedom nor unfreedom, but rather like responding to an order before the order is given: this responsibility is characterised by a complete passivity of giving which keeps the 'for the other' from being 'for oneself', a disinterestedness which turns into a 'for the other'. The other is not an obstacle in my way, though he is also what measures me.

In his writing he reminds his reader constantly that this ethical moment he is writing about occurs before language has conditioned our responses. This relationship is not 'a knowledge' and not based on knowledge of the other: nor is our ethical being something we can quantify, write about, or know in this rational sense, but rather something that is 'otherwise than being', that is most private, and cannot be shared or communicated. The unlimited nature of our ethical commitment is expressed by Levinas through many different images: we are always, as it were, saying to the other, 'After you', regardless of whether this is pleasant for us, in fact he argues that the good is often not pleasant.

In reading Levinas' work the reader is dragged into an overwhelming recognition of responsibility which cannot be limited with self-commendations for our good behaviour to family and friends. Nor does

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he allow us to push off this responsibility onto others or on to institutions such as the state. Countering this desire which he considers to be an escapism on our part Levinas, repeatedly articulates responsibility as responsibility for every other, in later dialogues particularly drawing on the language of Biblical sources to speak of the other as both neighbour and stranger. This is a position from which he does not retreat even as he recognises its practical limitations.

However, in explaining this extended concept of responsibility he also gives us a view of our own roles vis-a-vis the state. Firstly he returns to that initial ethical moment in which we have accepted responsibility for the 'other' we have encountered. He argues that when a third party then enters onto this scene of our first encounter with the other, the 'I' is confronted with choices about the prioritising of responsibility. This is where the role of society enters into our pursuit of ethics and why societies have needed to codify such choices in systems of law and justice. While these systems are necessary it follows that because of our unlimited responsibility for the other and all others, any system of justice and law is always inadequate and a compromise, and is always needing to be tested against that first ethical responsibility. He argues that the echo of the ethical encounter will lead us to always test the limits of reasonable justice compared to the unlimited responsibility which constitutes the core of our ethics.

As regards the rethinking of our democracy suggested above Levinas can hearten us simply because he asserts the enormity indeed almost impossibility of getting it all right. What he does also insist on is our responsibility to keep trying. So he argues that the state as the agency built on the rule of law is thus always guilty of violence towards the individual, in the sense that it cannot deliver to all the unlimited responsibility which the 'I' strives to maintain. Similarly he says the democratic state is never democratic enough. The state removes from me the burden of choosing between all the others, but at the same time my unlimited responsibility makes me also responsible for maintaining good political order. Ethics, therefore, demands of us that we constantly review the operation of the state and the rule of law, to test its edicts against our own ethical experience and commitment. It is possible for the demands of the state for coherence to exclude transcendence as a subversive discourse. Justice, therefore, cannot be seen as a system to harmonize all antagonistic forces with a legal regulatory function of itself, justified by its own ends. The moral order of justice must be inspired and directed by the ethical norm of the inter-human encounter. Justice is impossible without the I, or individuals, who take responsibility for the other, who

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are 'for-the-other'. Justice which forgets the face of the other becomes purely political calculation and can no longer discriminate between forms of society so that it can also lead to totalitarianism.

Even as he argued that democracy is always by its very nature going to fall short of the total commitment of responsibility that arises in the ethical relationship of the 'I' to the 'other', he also stressed that the citizen has a responsibility to watch and care for individual needs. I would interpret this as indicating that nobody should feel that their life is discarded, their needs overlooked to the point that they cannot share in the security of the society as a whole. If I choose not to take responsibility for any other in society, but rather to put myself first, then I am as it were, at the opposite pole on a moral continuum from Levinas' view of the ethical responsibility which ideally might guide our lives. Without the participation of all individuals, society as a whole might so easily produce another event comparable with the horror of the 20th

century holocaust. In Levinas' view, our commitment to responsibility for the other, to an ideal of personal ethics, is vital for the well-being of our societies and civilisation. Asked whether his view of ethics was not really too idealistic, Levinas replied that idealism was absolutely necessary. The challenge is huge.

For me the thoughts that Levinas works through as a philosopher mirror what I would call an instinct for caring and responsibility. I think that was what created the welfare state in the 1940s. At that time there was such a huge tide of caring that those in power could not resist it. The mass of people wanted to change society, to embed those principles of caring in it. How has it come about that we are now on the point of losing this? I think two aspects of this situation are particularly relevant here, though they both boil down to our own failures as a society. Firstly it needs to be noted that the creation of the welfare state in which everyone contributed through their taxes as far as they were able and others took out according to their need, creating a more equal society, was a threat to the privilege of the ruling class and their efforts have been focused since on removing this. These efforts have taken the form of a constant ideological assault on us through the media in a growing consumer society. But secondly we are also to blame because we lost sight of the need, in Levinas' words, to be always testing our actions and our social structures in the light of our unending responsibility.

The word that sums up this ongoing ethical priority for Levinas is 'commitment', a term that I want to link back to the debates and tensions in business literature between ethics and self-interested profit-

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maximisation mentioned earlier. In the 1980s when Williamson was arguing that there was no place for trust in business organisations (see p.28 above), Amartya K. Sen took up the challenge. Sen was concerned to answer Williamson's view that since trust is not certain in organisations the motive of self-interest should be assumed to be operating in all circumstances. Sen wanted to engage with the moral dimensions of the trust relationship. To this end, he set out to analyse the ways in which individuals judge whether they can trust another person, and found that this involved not only assessing the other's actions but also their motivation. So if an action is clearly only benefiting an individual personally we can see that his/her motivation is self-interested. If the action does not benefit them but only others more in need we might deduce that their motivation is concern for others. But he found that such arguments to show that non-egotistical behaviour, based on principles other than self-interest may be operating in human behaviour, run into difficulty when considering circumstances where a person's choice happens to coincide with the maximization of his anticipated personal welfare. How do we then know whether this person is genuinely motivated by concern for others and whether he is to be trusted. Sen's answer is to distinguish between deeper motives of sympathy and commitment. He uses the latter term to explain the truly altruistic choice. He argues that if we do trust this individual it is because we impute to him a commitment to the other. We make a judgement about a deeper level of motivation of the action.

Perhaps it could be argued that as a society in the UK we have proved ourselves untrustworthy in relation to the welfare state and the well-being of all others in our society because we lost sight of the need for commitment, for continual testing of our laws and institutions in the light of our personal ethical responsibility. Did we think that having created the NHS, for instance, we could turn away and let our self-interest dominate in the rest of our social structures and culture and that somehow the ethical underpinnings of that one section of society could stand alone? That has clearly proved not to be possible. But if we engage with the problem, we can also find solutions.

Why growth doesn't matter: imagining a sustainable future So why I am writing about something that doesn't matter? Should you skip this section? I hope not, though it will be short and I confess that my title is fraught with ambiguity. For decades the myth of economic growth

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has been part and parcel of the account fed to us of the consumer society.21 We are told that if we want a good life, materially, there has to be a growing economy and to achieve this other things have to go by the wayside. The whole system, not just in the UK but globally, runs as if growth matters.

What is economic growth? The word 'growth' has many good connotations - growth in everything in nature, for instance – which probably colour our responses to its use in other contexts. 'Growth' in country terms refers to the figure computed by statisticians called Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which refers to the amount of economic activity in the country. This measures the measurables as all statistics do and ignores a whole lot of other things that we all might agree are quite important. Since so much importance is always given to these statistics in the media you might have thought that this told us all about the useful things we had all been doing. Not really. It measures business activity and in particular profit. It doesn't notice when you make your bed or wash your dishes, though if you didn't your family might notice. It would notice, however, if everyone in your street moved around each morning and made each others beds and washed each others dishes in the evening and of course paid over money for the job. What a nuisance that would be. How wasteful of our time and also less pleasant because it is so good to do things for people because we want to, not because they pay us. But this latter system would greatly increase our GDP.

If growth as measured by GDP is about economic measurable activity it is also therefore directly related to shareholder profit. It follows that growth is essentially the essence of our global economic system – it is a 'growth system', which involves putting the interests of corporations before everything else. It is the system that all the global economic institutions exist to support. It is the essence of neoliberalism.

How this works for the individual corporation is roughly as follows. The corporation is legally obliged to maximise profits for its shareholders. That is its only legal obligation linked to its status. As a result, businesses do not just want to make some profit but to maximise their profit at all times. They generally have done this first of all by trying to

21The fallacy of the necessity of economic growth is a subject that has been addressed by many writers over the last decade or more. See, for instance: Daly, H. (1996) Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Beacon Press: Boston; Douthwaite, R. (1999) The Growth Illusion: How economic growth has enriched the few, impoverished the many and endangered the planet. Green Books: Totnes; Latouche S. (2009) Farewell to growth. Polity Press: Cambridge; NEF (2010) Growth isn't possible: Why we need a new economic direction.

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take as much of the domestic market as possible in their particular product line in the country where they start trading and then to move abroad to other markets. In the process for the same reason they will need to reduce costs as far as possible and raise prices on their outputs (though this is not always the case, if an opportunity is available to increase profit margins on a smaller numerical output). So they will be looking to pay as little as possible in taxes, in overheads like transport costs and so on. Other things that get in the way of their profit- maximisation might be things like regulations on environmental impacts or worker rights. Reducing these regulations might lead to side effects such as polluted rivers or sick workers. If possible the corporation would prefer someone else to pick up the bill for this. This is known as 'externalising' their costs. The corporation has been described by a leading writer on the subject as 'an externalising machine'.22 So it is fair to say that the whole world, tied into the growth system, is also tied into serving the interests of the shareholders of profit-maximising corporations.

Much of the activity in the growth system is hurting people and rapidly killing the planet, though of course that is not the way issues are presented to us in the corporate media. It would seem reasonable to look at an illustration of how the policies of the economic institutions serving corporate interests impact not only on democracy and equality but global environment and sustainability. Let's take the case of food production or agri-business as it is known. We all think of food coming from small farms but around the world food is big business and a lot of the production is large scale too. It now also comes under the guidance and oversight of the WTO and its operation gets included in IMF conditions. If I say that the policies of the IMF and WTO are causing starvation and global food shortages you might reasonably have some doubts if you have been listening to news reports on various food shortages and crises over many years. A whole different set of issues are presented in the media on the food question – by a media of course whose activities themselves are part of the corporate merry-go-round.

The impacts of neoliberal policies in the area of agriculture on countries across the world have been the subject of many studies, so I want to take a hypothetical case only here. Imagine country X accepts loan conditions that involve the whole Washington Consensus package. It waves taxes for corporations, allows foreign companies to buy up land, waves laws on environment, wage levels and working conditions and removes any

22See J. Bakan ( 2005) The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Constable: London.

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agricultural state subsidies that might have been protecting both small farmers and food prices on subsistence foods. The stage is then set for an agri-business outfit to move in, buy the best agricultural land at the head of a water source, produce vegetables for instance for European markets at wage levels well below European ones, move the produce hundreds of miles by land and then halfway around the world by plane and make a huge profit, putting nothing back into the local economy by way of taxes and leaving behind polluted water from pesticides and other previously fertile areas down-stream from the agribusiness activity now without water at all for local food production. The country is more divided than ever between a few nouveau riche who might get shares in the new companies and the rest in increased poverty. A fledgling democracy is undermined as it is helpless to act on behalf of the people as it has already committed to acting on behalf of the corporations. Trust breaks down, perhaps along old lines of antagonisms that are exacerbated along the way and the media across the world make out it is their own fault, and label them failed states.23 This is the condition of many African countries today and perhaps the UK tomorrow. But it does not have to happen that way.

In relation to the food question, on top of all this, since the banking system around the world has also been deregulated as part of the neoliberal package, food as a commodity gets traded on the stock exchanges and bought and sold as 'futures' etc will provide more profit for those who have lots of money to gamble with and more misery and even starvation for those who already had so little. Even the environmental pollution can be traded as carbon credits. A politician, recently asked on radio about the UK carbon emissions reduction targets and whether our carbon emissions should include all the emissions from the production of all our imports for instance from China, did hesitate a moment before saying this would not be appropriate.

We should not be fooled into thinking that we can escape into our consumer heaven indefinitely. It is only one room in a very violent and unequal house. Furthermore it would need to become even more unequal and therefore more violent if we were to maintain our level of consumption and tackle climate change issues. The reality is that our world cannot sustain such excesses of consumption of its resources. So growth that will allow all the world to catch up with 'us' is not an option.

23See, for instance: George, Susan (1988) A Fate Worse than Debt. Penguin: Harmondsworth; George, Susan (2010) Whose Crisis, Whose Future? Polity Press: Cambridge; Chossudovsky, M. (2003) The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order. Global Outlook: Ontario.

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If the principles outlined above matter to us, we have to look for other solutions.

A consumer society is dependent on goods being produced for us to consume. In today's world it is largely corporations that do this. They are producing things we need and others that we don't really need but they are able to persuade us we do. This is our Achilles heel on the question of growth. We are all also consumers and can't imagine a world without it. But let's look at what this really means. How about writing down a list of all the things you think you need. Then look at the list again and see if you can remove any of the items. A car – how many do you need, how big does it really need to be, how many journeys do you really need to make by car? How much carbon is it fair for you to be generating? How much can the planet bear? Who picks up the cost now and in the future? Of course, cutting out the car is rather dependent on public transport being available. But this is a chicken/egg situation – so who is going to make the first move? Then there is the mobile phone. Do you really need one – and what about the ones you threw away.... or keep as spare .... or bought to get the latest technology - ? Have you noticed that a young man in Africa was forced at gun point to go down a hole in the ground so small that it can hardly be called a mine to dig out minerals that went into your phone, and is still so poor he has no other choices.

This is the other side of consumer growth. It is what profit-driven growth produces if it is left to be the sole driving force of human trade and interactions. Many people are now becoming concerned about the threat of climate change and environmental degradation on our planet and of course these are also costs that business activity and the 'growth system' are failing to take into account. The costs to the future need to be counted in alongside all those other costs that are presently 'externalised' by corporations. If you could put the second and third mobile phones in the 'not needed' category you are beginning to challenge 'growth' and prove that it does not matter – does not have to come first. Challenging 'profit-driven growth' is a major step towards sustainability for our world and to creating a good society for us all.24

In a very unequal world there is, of course, a great need for some to have more to create their good society. One of the claims of profit-driven growth in its own defence has been that it would provide more for the poor on the basis of a trickle-down theory. But on this it has not been delivering. There are many voices raised across the globe from those countries most in need, who are asking for fairness to develop their good 24 On the challenge to consumerism see Neal Lawson (2010) All Consuming. Penguin: London.

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society in their own way to meet their own circumstances, and who see the operations of the 'growth system' as a major barrier to this.

In the present crisis in the UK we have been told that our GDP stayed high over several decades because of the business activity of the banking sector. It follows if we believe that GDP matters then that we have to do everything in our power to ensure the survival of these banking organisations. But if growth doesn't matter then a whole lot of new questions become possible: Why then is private more important than public? Why do we accept global systems driven by policies to ensure growth of profits rather than to care for people and planet? Recognising that other things do matter will help in this process.25

Another world is possible if we are all ready to commit to it. Change is difficult and changing ourselves, our country and even our world systems is daunting, so perhaps a little laughter might help to end with – from Sen writing on ethics, trust and economics:

The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool decked in the glory of his one all-purpose preference ordering...26

For the sake of the future let's hope we can agree that other things matter.

Cynthia DereliMay, 2011.

25 Although as yet few politicians are prepared to speak out on the issues raised above, many academics are now bringing forward ideas for policy along similar lines that will change directions. See, for instance, from 2010: Shutt, H. (2010) Beyond the Profits System: Possibilities for a Post-Capitalist Era. Zed Books: London; Mellor, M. (2010) The Future of Money: From Financial Crisis to Public Resource. Pluto Press: London; Chang, Ha-Joon (2010) 23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism. Allen Lane: London; 26Sen, pp.335-6.

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