Why there is no escape for the West. And why the solution in every country that can achieve it is a Denmark. - Terry Field
In the first decade of the twentieth century, some economists ‘blue-skyed’ the future – indeed probably the remote future – and came up with some prescient anticipations for the world. Not only did the future look radically different, it looked immensely challenging – in ways that would demand profound social conversations and actions in order to deal with the worst of the expected events.
The 'Little Mermaid' in Copenhagen, a symbol of Denmark's openness to the sea, trade and egalitarian policies. Is Denmark the future of humanity?
These economists were from outside the powerful imperial structures. They were Scandinavian; they looked at the world more dispassionately than would a British, a German, a French or an American economist. For them, the world was in a strange condition, and they searched for the future time when ‘normality’ had returned.
For them, the militarised and imperial power-structures so distorted normal economic ‘power relationships’, normal economic ‘potential’ if you will, that it begged the question, ‘what would the world be like, when trade and commerce could proceed on a ‘level playing field’ with equal or near-equal power and bargaining authority distributed across all buyers and sellers across the globe.
The idea of a ‘first world’ had not really gained common currency then, although certainly the characteristics of manufacturing centres placed in the great European nations, and in the United States, with Japan rapidly catching them up, assumed a centre of control of terms of trade and the concentration of skilled employments also to be found in those countries.
The colonial systems integrated raw material supply, semi-finished goods and inexpensive massive labour supply into a mutual trading system that supplied the European centres with the ‘factors of production’, to use the jargon of the day, and also offered markets for their finished goods. At the same time, investment of the ‘surplus’ wealth created by these activities were funneled through the fast-developing banking system, with surpluses available for new ventures, with insurances to protect the risks undertaken. All happened within almost ‘hermetically sealed’ colonial systems, and in the case of the United States, very much within the bounds of the continental power itself.
As these activities generated more and more capital reserves and more banking potential, then more and more people became prosperous, pulled up with the rising tide of exciting commercial and industrial activity, thus more and more people fully committed to the social project of being a citizen of the particular ‘western’ society accomplishing these new everyday miracles.
Almost the entire world began to integrate into commerce. Human beings from the German and Anglo Saxon worlds dominated an entire continent, replete with previously quite unimaginable resources. The United States was, to all intents and purposes, possessed of an impact on European society equal to having colonized a new planet. Nothing was any longer the same.
As the social structure changed, the middle classes and the educated dominated politics. The demands for responsive political life was unstoppable, and each society moved quickly towards a recognisably modern ‘representative’ democracy. Even Germany – a state with an exaggerated military power-structure – developed a parliament with strong social democratic parties and values.
Political and social democracy developed in lock step with economic democratisation; goods and services searched for markets, and sought out all who would and could consume them. Social advances enshrined in legislation empowered the citizen, since he had more and more power to exercise control over the legislators.
Never before has the newly developed world experienced such an intoxicating mix of economic, social, cultural, political and environmental control. The problems seemed to be as nothing compared to the gains. All seemed sunny and bright.
Listen to the great music of the time. Wonderful sounds with uplands of virile power, and romantic intensity.
The colonial suppliers experienced a different world. Often, the traditional social structures were enhanced, since it was via these structures that the new commercial relationships were formed, and in particular the British experience was to create an over-arching commercial structure that encompassed the authority and power of the local tribal chiefs, the great rulers of Indian states, the elites of the islands such as Sri Lanka from which traded spices and warship provisioning was organised.
These societies did not change as did the centres of empire, and certainly the radical egalitarianism of the USA also exhibited a massive technical middle class.
The disorder of war disturbed the flow of wealth, but it did not change the fundamental relationships between the centres of capital and power, as contrasted with the centres of raw goods supply.
The structure of Terry's life is Mrs. Josephine Field who tends the flowers in their Normandy estate in France. 'Fina' is a musician, a gardener and fluent in both French and English.
The structures collapse. And the expected world appears.
After the second world war, the global imperial system collapsed in less than forty years. At the same time, the colonised regions began to act with economic freedom. The United States continued as it had, but now with unparalleled relative power. From 1945 until about 1980, the world systems continued quite undisturbed. The ex-colonies supplied raw goods, foodstuffs, metals, and the capital-rich Europeans and Americans continued to supply the world now free of paternalistic responsibility once exercised over their colonial dependents.
There was a new player – Japan – whose economic prowess, carrying with it an accent on quality of manufacture that was without precedent, and with a financial system that offered very long term partnership with the discipline of design right through to distribution of the finished goods, unlike that offered by both American and European banks.
This new competitor rapidly disturbed the traditional manufactures of the British, the Americans and the French. Factories closed, and consumers acclimatised to buying Japanese cameras, cars, porcelain, indeed a whole host of goods.
Whilst Japan was disturbing, it was still an ‘addition’ to the existing economic fabric. The Japanese provided their own capital (free of a need for a significant and expensive military) designed and made their own goods, shipped them under their own direction to global markets, and sold goods ‘speculatively’, success depending upon the compelling quality and design offer and little else.
Power, wealth, political initiative, military prowess, social dynamism all remained concentrated on both sides of the Atlantic. There were signs of weakening control – the ‘oil shock’ when Shah Reza Pahlavi unilaterally increased oil prices, and OPEC began to flex its muscles – but confidence in the future as a controllable event was really quite un-dented.
Then a series of changes rapidly overtook the existing potentials and expectations of settled societies.
Firstly Dung Shaio-Ping said China was open for business, and American and British businesses, and later European businesses began to move factories to the Far East.
At the same time, digital computing and the internet allowed computers across the globe to communicate at whatever level was needed, and software developed continuously to integrate human activity as if there is no space between people. The revolution in shipping was equally profound, but often overlooked. Shipping technology and containerisation allows costs to ship around the globe to be less than to ship the same item by road for twenty miles.
Global banking effortlessly expanded to accommodate these now possibilities.
In thirty years, all the structures that supported the west and its concentration of control of all aspects of life were removed. Not just made less significant, but simply removed.
Now, in the old West, capital evaporated and re-appeared elsewhere, jobs and skills became memories, political cohesion and shared values were lost, insecurity replaced comfort and safety, extreme wealth held by few jostled with the unhappiness of a battered middle class, and real poverty with little hope of relief spread anew.
Suddenly, the anticipation of the Scandinavian economists of 80 years ago were rapidly becoming reality. Across the globe, significant numbers of extremely rich owners of manufacture, of finance, of the process of wealth concentration found they were less and less tied to place; in old societies, the technical middle classes began to disappear, and the working poor incapable of sustaining life from the fruits of their labours when unaided by transfers from the ‘state’ became commonplace. In China, 800 million people found themselves lifted out of poverty.
As the population of the globe exploded, as education and primary healthcare became commonplace, and as the internet showed all how life could be, vast numbers began to ‘migrate’ across borders to seek comfort and safety.
Almost at a stroke, the worker or aspirant graduate in Leeds or Milwaukee competed directly with the graduate in Shanghai. There were no protections.
There was not any more a ‘first world’.
In less than 100 years it had appeared and disappeared.
Now an utterly new and radical development has begun to add a completely new dimension.
Until now, capital has just ‘moved around’ – generally within the west, now to elsewhere. But a car steering wheel or a copper cooking pan, made previously by workers on old western factories are now made in new Chinese or Vietnamese factories. So far, quite predictable.
But now intelligent automation is doing something more radical than simply moving jobs around the world.
This new productive power entirely replaces human activity.
This was never anticipated by economists a century or so ago. The ‘internet of things’, integrated with intelligent robotics now promises to replace not only human supply of work, but also human demand for the products work used to provide.
Right now, the key problem in advanced western economies is the chronic lack of demand. Few and fewer are in the economic market place at all.
Declining productivity in these countries can in part be explained by the curious phenomena that, as wealth concentrates, as poverty spreads, mass production declines; whereas fifty years ago all drove Fords and Chevrolets and few drove Lincoln Continentals, now many do not drive at all, or they drive less desirable cars or use motor-bikes and the demand for top-end Lincolns, RRs, Ferraris, Maseratis, Bugattis increases. But these high-end goods are stupefyingly expensive, and are often hand-made or hand-finished. Thus the ‘output’ expressed in units per person does not increase - indeed it falls.
The starvation of investment on simple mass manufacture in the old western states is a direct result of massive investment in sub-componentry in new, low-labour-cost countries in the old ‘third’ world. These productivity measurement problems are a pointer to a strange phenomenon. The ‘local’ economy increasingly supplies handmade wonders to the rich, and stripped-down mass-manufactured goods from the integrated ‘local’ economy are offered to the middle classes.
As a simple example, the poor increasingly re-cycle the purchases made by previous generations of western consumers. Hence the poor use old handmade porcelain decorated ‘china’, and the struggling middle prefer newly-factory-made plain white new earthenware.
The same phenomena with furniture, and indeed nearly all goods.
These economic changes have returned the West to the condition of the 18th Century, with the social, and now the political instability that attends such a circumstance, but now with a relatively massive dissociated ‘proletariat’ added on.
Few in the West recognise the permanent nature of this change. They talk about recovery from the 2008 ‘crisis’.
But there was no crisis.
There was simply an adjustment to the realities described above.
A painting from the Skagen School of Art in Denmark. Nineteen Century bourgeois enjoying life, drink and fine art. A foretaste of the good life in the 21st Century?
So where do we all go from here???
The world we live in now is as impermanent as can be imagined.
Of course, in the next fifty years, the world will experience matured power-blocks which reflect mature centres of all the points of control the West used uniquely to enjoy.
Whilst stability will also return to the West, after half a century or so, the pattern of local control will never be as stable as it was for America or any other nation. Resources will never be available as they once were.
If the past is the pattern for the future, then inter-dependency, probable military equivalence, and the jostling of half a dozen wealthy power blocks - perhaps India, China, Japan, USA, Europe, Greater Brazil – will mean there will be competitive impoverishment of the mass of people in nearly every block.
They will be compressed in cities with concentrations of 40000 per square mile and upwards.
If the past is our guide, then there will be no forces acting to reduce the institutionalisation in each block of the presence of the super-rich, the small middle class, the artisan hand-making class, the disconnected proletariat operating purely at the margins, and often violently.
Thus the central question of the age will have to be the following. If traditionally experienced economic and environmental forces, unhindered, will propel most to experience lives of coerced impoverishment and neurosis-inducing sub-urban tedium, with the epidemic of mental illness the UN currently anticipates for the world’s population, can ‘countervailing’ socio-political forces be developed to correct and modify these outcomes? If they can, where are they likely to take root? And what new forces may radically change the future for the better?
This is my provisional anticipation for our old world.
‘Socialism’ as a reactionary essentially 19th century expression of outrage now offers nothing, since required work is going to mostly disappear. Production will be unrelated to consumption.
In a universal global economy, taxation of non-local consumers to subsidise the poor locals would ordinarily be nonviable, since consumers will be possessed of incomes and assets unrelated to a national location. High-income people will work and gain income across the globe as they engage in desired activity free from the constraints of work based location. In effect the intelligent, generative, wealth-generating ‘everyman’ will become an individual, mini-global economy. Blockchain banking frees him or her from local oversight, together with ‘local’, nation-based taxation. Most economically engaged will earn credits outside taxable ‘fiat’ currencies.
Thus, ‘governments’ desirous of offering relief from poverty suffered by the unintelligent purely ‘local’ people will create artificial local demand for base goods such as housing, foodstuffs, clothing, medication, trivial entertainment almost entirely from local fiat currencies, whose entire function will be to represent ‘demand’ at the then purely invented ‘national’ level.
There will, in effect, be a separate, disconnected, limited local ‘money’ economy. Pounds, Euros, dollars, yen, etc, will increasingly be used locally, will slowly wither away and be less and less exchangeable internationally, whilst the ‘real’ global economy will be financed and valued by electronic currencies such as bitcoin, and other derivatives of it. This is happening already, in part since bitcoin has rise in exchange against fiat currencies, and buys non-local goods and services.
UKIP and Trump are local ideas in an abstracted hard-to-understand integrated global world.
Ukip people will enjoy houses, food, holidays, healthcare, the local stuff they can imagine they need supplied by a local demand system furnished by pounds. The international architect, trader, wealth-manager, surgeon, lawyer, corporate manager and large-scale asset-owner will hold their near-liquid wealth in blockchain digital currency.
Unable to be locally identified, unable to be taxed, unable to be sequestrated or controlled by any nation state, these people – the richest, cleverest, numerically fastest-growing productive proportion of the human population of the future globe will be stateless, will live geographically isolated from the ‘local’ rest.
This means the nation state will disappear and be replaced by a new form of local geographical order.
The nation state is now a redundant idea, save for simple ‘local’ administration, since the ‘brain’ of the world will be in every respect non-national.
Why? Because all real intellect, all significant creative activity, all ‘mindfulness’, all universities, all research institutes, all super-advanced goods-delivery and all decision-making will be non-identifiable as to a particular location. The seamless digital power that by then has fully encompassed the globe and functionally ‘disappeared into the wall’ will invisibly integrate all machine-assisted and human intelligence, and the globe will be unified.
Locality will be a lost concept for all who create and control.
Recreational activity with ‘local’ cultural memories will subside as they no longer hold any real emotional traction for non-local people. The future global society will form a dreamscape of imagined cultural memory that reinforces its ever-changing values and resultant prejudices.
The nation state does this now, and that local propaganda effort is losing its traction; for proof, look no further than the attitudes to old ultra-nationalist propaganda from the time of the dictators in Europe.
This unified world is forming, but we do not know how to deal with it. Cities imagine that they are connecting, and that is a first phase. 800 city mayors met in London to discuss connectivity. But that is nonsense. In reality, particular people, in particular functions, institutes, centres of thought randomly connect on a needs basis.
Nothing at all to do with cities. They are where rivers, roads, canals and valleys meet, not where ideas meet. The old world is no guide to the new here.
Change now is so universal, so subtle to the eye, so all-encompassing that it is almost impossible to see by people. Just as a plant grows from the soil, but watch as you may, it never seems to change in an observable way. Yet it appears as from nowhere.
The future is a future of digital neurones connecting people, minds, goods, machines, ideas, re-purposed combinations of technologies. The multi-strand global ‘mind’ that encompasses all this will be one.
Nation states will be as relevant as Offa’s Dyke. (A British clan leader’s ditch dug 1400 years ago to identify a locality).
So, The ‘local folk’ of the country will need to be looked after as in Denmark.
In the nation, equality, fairness, contentment will be one’s lot.
For the great majority, for the ‘local’ people, that will be the offering. The ‘local’ tele-visual media such as the BBC will provide social cement, as they do more and more now. That dispensation will spread across the old Western Europe, do badly in Russia, fail in much of Africa, do well in China and India, and will be adopted last in the United States. Willingness to admit personal humility and vulnerability is a variable good; lost in some parts of the globe, forgotten in others, present now in some. That will be the seed-corn of new fairness; where it is known, equity will develop, where it is not, hope of such is lost.
But the lesson is unavoidable.
There will be a developing and profound disconnection between the ‘local’ (which will be experienced almost everywhere the powerful, the intelligent and thus the rich choose to avoid) and the ‘global’.
Terry, on the left on the Queen Elizabeth at a black tie seminar.
The ‘global’ places will be free of tiresome local administration, taxation, social management, cultural forced inclusiveness, political coercion, indeed any enforced mental ‘framework’ will be almost entirely absent. The old nation state structures will not be able to prevent this, since they are unmanageable in the absence of voluntary tax payments that are decreasingly available and the absence of tax-resident corporations and wealthy family dynasties.
This trend to physical segregation by wealth will increase rapidly as methods of wealth accretion and control move more and more away from the purview of the state where the wealth was and is made.
It is significant that digital ‘currencies’, such as bit-coin, are increasingly traded and exchangeable, valued in terms of local ‘fiat’ currencies, and are exchangeable for real value, real goods, real assets across the entire world. The immediate impact is one of increasing digital currency value, but the long-term impact will allow for two completely discrete societies to develop.
Block chain digital currency wealth is not observable. It is utterly secure. It is the mechanism by which the entire, and growing wealth elite of the globe – can function discretely. There will be other more powerful developments that accelerate the ‘split’ between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’.
An ‘accelerant’ here will be the disaffection the local national administrations will have for the global asset-owning elites. They will look to recover lost taxes less and less; rather they will simply want them gone. To see this happening, simply look at English politics today.
For forty years, the cynical economic model has encouraged the rich of the world into Britain, to buy and control local assets, to ‘invest’, to the point where, today, the international super-rich trade 82.5% of all property transactions in London.
Within a poor country, London has grown rich on the massive injection of foreign wealth into speculative property transactions.
The ABSURDITY and OFFENSIVENESS of the present model of Nation States
In Britain, this week, a nation buried under debt, with a population composed of about 40 percent with almost no real net assets to its name, with poor old people all but left to die in their homes for lack of care, with utterly inadequate mental and physical healthcare, and with child poverty rising rapidly, has reported on the BBC that the British Defence Secretary, a Tory ‘local’ politician named Fallon, has announced the country is preparing for war with – North Korea!
This in a country full of the desperation that comes from looking continually to the past, always regarding the false glory of a world long gone and not in any way recoverable
It will send its new, totally unaffordable super-carriers to the Pacific region to act alongside Trumpian America; to possibly attack a state whose twisted isolated society acts more by fear and terror of the outside world than anything else.
And only in a world that has abandoned the Christian injunctions to turn the other cheek, love thy enemy as thyself, and never to kill, can we think to do this any more.
For the record, nothing Britain does now does in my name.
Vast scarce British financial resources and immense numbers of smashed bodies and lives are expended by Britain in mountainous, tribal, Muslim and truly irrelevant Afghanistan.
Why?
The dead bankrupt idea of the independent ‘nation state’.
Nation-state ‘power projection’ requires that the state find a ‘target’.
With the propagation of the required lies to justify action.
Nation states like Britain seek to act as they ever have since they appeared in number in the mid-eighteenth century, but they cannot any longer do so.
And their desperation is obvious for all to see.
The European Union sets its face against violent nationalism but must move at the speed of the slowest – the country with the greatest desire for nation-state consciousness – France. But France has less and less functional resource applied to the international projection of power. Local defence is dominant.
SO many previously strong states are voluntarily becoming politically weak but armed.
And over the coming century they will increasingly disarm.
And that included the immense civilisation of China.
It already fully understands its authority and power can be exercised by peaceful means. It arms rapidly but it knows it cannot use its power; neither can the United States, which it faces.
The ‘game’ now is about the appropriateness of those civilisations to local order and control.
And to establish such relevance, arms are simply not needed.
Why? Because wealth is built by the mind now, and not by stealing it from others by conquest as has been the only way until quite recently.
Intellect makes the New World
In Britain, the country is so increasingly revolted by the contrast of the wealth in parts of London, as the poor increase and the provincial middle class is more and more marginalised, that there is a proposed half-hearted offer by the crypto-communist Labour leadership to ‘tax’ the capital, yet in the same breath they say they have plans for a ‘run on the currency’, which in practice can but mean one thing - the suspension of free capital movements in and out of the country. And these people are clever – they know that it will mean capital imports will wither and cease, whilst local stores of wealth will become more and more valueless.
Thus only local activity will be sustainable, until a replacement regime, in total desperation, will then agree to remove all capital restrictions, thus institutionalising the total power of the global asset owners and offering a long term stable relationship between their untouchable wealth and the local redistributive potential of the ‘earth-bound’ local people British people.
We are seeing the structure being built now, with the rise of the new local enraged – UKIP, the Trump people, AFD, in Germany, Le Pen in France, all the dislocated and fearful.
But the answer is not what they offer. They offer the idea of the powerful nation-state. There will be no such thing as the ‘division’ of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ world develops.
Rather there will be the powerless nation state. It will not have authority or capacity to make war, ‘project power’, since to do so will require the resources, the acquiescence, the participation of the intelligent educated. And that will not be available any more.
Even now, the high-minded, educated, sophisticated, culturally aware, rich, intelligent and wise reject the violence and coercion of nationalism.
These are the people who will accumulate more and more wealth and act outside the view and control of the nation.
This process will obviously take time, but it is quite clearly happening.
At present nation states try to tax assets since incomes are unavailable to them to tax. But what happens when the ownership and control of capital assets are themselves untaxable, as has been shown in the note above concerning the present plans of the British Labour Party?
Simple.
Planetary asset owners entirely disconnect from the ‘local’ population.
The new morality of two worlds.
As I speak, the ultra-rich are outside any local social relationships. A pattern of modern life is that social relationships are strictly wealth-dependent.
As it was before the industrialisation of the West.
But with a crucial difference.
Whereas the 18th century seigneur felt a continuing responsibility for the people who lived under his and his ancestor’s fixed patronage, as it had been for his ancestors for almost countless generations, disturbed only by war, now the modern global replacement has no relationship to the local, no relationship to other people outside his or her lives.
Thus local national life will of course exclude consciousness of the super-rich; it really does that now. This is healthy as resentment and discontent are thus avoided.
It is funny – in a bitter sort of way – that the British proles hate the incoming poor but educated Polish competitor workers, but are entirely unaware of the existence of the billionaire foreign asset owners who act directly to reduce their life chances.
The local ‘socialist’ administrations will, of course, positively encourage this. It serves their interests as purely ‘local’ representatives.
Thus the bargain will be struck, and the two worlds will finally separate. ‘Global’ investments will be ‘locally’ made, with an agreed dispensation of the ‘division of the spoils’ allowing sufficient for the local weak nation-states to function, the rest being harvested to the inhabitants of the global citizenry.
From time to time, the super-rich will engage in gigantic projects of philanthropy. We see this with Mr Buffet and Mr Gates, acting to reduce health problems in Africa and elsewhere, but they are old fashioned; born and grown in the old, unified world.
That is going fast.
Terry is not only a writer, he is a chef. Here with wine bottle handy, he creates another masterpiece in his Normandy kitchen.
Chinese money is less and less connected in China. Despite the ‘communist party’. The same with India. And of course the entire Gulf.
Thus the moral dimension of economic change needs to be attended to, since at its heart human morality is to be cared about above all else.
The economists at the start of the 19th century dreamed of a just world, where all could flourish free of the violent distortions of the imperial periods., of armies, of powers, of the over-arching nation state.
Now, there is a chance that that vision can become a reality. But the price will be that it will only apply in every region capable of enjoying it. And by virtue of the indulgence of the disconnected global super-rich.
A final proof that human nature is plastic, and one really cannot have everything.
