INTRODUCTION
There exists a near consensus that people’s lives in Britain into the second decade of the twenty-first century are beset by a cluster of severe and exacting challenges. These range from very basic difficulties of providing shelter, clothing and food for children through a perceived political disenfranchisement to pressing fears of a geopolitically fragile and dangerous world and accelerating climate change. Many adults are developing a growing concern for the futures of their children and grandchildren. I have been documenting and analysing the social and systemic changes that have delivered this scenario for over thirty years. Summarised in a few sentences I have made a case that in combination these changes amount to a shift from a post-World War Two phase of welfare state capitalism to a post-1970s, or ‘Thatcherite’, phase of financialised or rentier capitalism. It is what shall here call rentier capitalism that has been accompanied by rapidly growing economic, social and cultural divisions, culminating in what is frequently called a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ for families and people on low incomes, people with no paid work, or people with or caring for a person with disabilities. The gist of my explanation for this seismic transition, is that a small hard core of rich and powerful people, on the whole white men, have extended their influence over the population as a whole and have taken full advantage for themselves and their families. As Adam Smith long ago argued, if capitalism is left to its own devices the rich will get richer, the poor poorer. And capitalism in its latest phase has been let off its leash.
I have commended the simple and I think uncontroversial formula: capital buys power to make policy in its interests. I have presented this as a class issue, offering a new dynamic between class and state as the prime causal force responsible for the inequities and travails of rentier capitalism for – to call to mind the radical poet Shelley – ‘the many’. It is in this context that I have proposed that the relationship between social class and the apparatus of the state has changed. Britain has become a more class-dominated society over the last few decades, a structural change underpinned and rationalised by an ideology of neoliberalism. The command relations of the state have become increasingly answerable to those of class.
For all that this has been the kernel of the case I have made for explaining the widening gap between rich and poor, clearly a lot more remains to be said. Rentier capitalism’s rewriting of hardship, disadvantage and suffering is not just a class issue, but also involves many other factors comprising a causal chain between class and health and wellbeing. In this Introduction I provide what I hope is a clear and straightforward summary of my writings, essentially elaborating on the shifting dynamic between class and state. The remainder of this contribution is dedicated to sealing cracks in my publications. It owes much to colleagues in sociology, but I have endeavoured to make it accessible to other interested parties by minimising more arcane and abstruse detail and by eschewing references in the text in favour of listing my key publications and other principal sources at the end of the book.
I have in my previous writings devoted more space to elaborating on class relations than on the command relations of the state, a lacuna I seek to address in this volume. As far as class in concerned, I have stressed that the relations between classes have undergone changes during the more-or-less discrete phases of the development of capitalism. In the present era of rentier capitalism the once conspicuous and typically antagonistic chasm between the owners of capital, the bosses, and the wage labourers, the workers, has become mired in confusion. The days of factory owners turning up to park their expensive cars in the forecourt as the workers clocked in to begin their shifts have all but gone, and with it the clarity of their conflicting interests. Marx’s once sharp distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat has grown blunter. This is in part down to the genesis and enlargement of the intermediate or middle classes and the shrinking of a working class committed to manual labour. But more than this, we now inhabit a society in which people’s class location, and the outlook on life long associated with it, is more fluid. The middle classes now include a ‘squeezed middle’ close to breaking point in the current cost-of-living crisis. The world of the small shopkeeper, or petty bourgeoisie, long associated with a traditionally conservative worldview, has been largely displaced by that of the freelancer with a more malleable mix of beliefs, values and emotions. Insecurity and precarity is the new norm for the many.
Returning to the definition of class pertinent to the class/command dynamic, I have put the emphasis on a post-1970s hard core of ‘capital monopolists’, namely, those major corporate shareholders, financiers, bankers, chief executive officers and the like, who: (a) make up well under the one per cent of the British population; (b) are essentially nomadic in the sense that they act transnationally and have shed any residual loyalty to Britain; and (c) exercise a major and often determinant influence over the direction of the domestic and even the foreign policy of the UK. Their strategic, clandestine and unaccountable boardroom decisions steer policy in line with their interests and to the detriment of the many. I have documented this process most consistently in the field of health and health care. In a series of books and articles I have argued that the self-serving decision-making of the capital monopolists is the prime cause of the widening gap between the health, wellbeing and life-expectancy of affluent and poor people in Britain. Why? Because it is this decision-making and its resonance for state politics that has led successive governments from Thatcher onwards – with a brief interlude, but not a reversal, during Blair’s New Labour years in office – to redistribute material and psychosocial resources to the better off at the expense of those most in need. Scandalously, the super-rich have profited most while those struggling daily to work, house and feed their children have found themselves plunged deeper into poverty, insecurity and a pervading sense of alienation and hopelessness.
The health gap cannot be explained by the well-charted decline of the National Health Service, though that has not helped. I have argued that the NHS has been deliberately undermined. Chomsky’s well-known proposition applies. If you want to open up a public service like the NHS to profitmaking, first you starve it of funding; this will create public satisfaction; and the resultant public anger and unrest will allow the government of the day to bring in private sector providers to ‘rescue the service’. So the same factors, crystalized in the class/command dynamic, that precipitated the increase in population health inequality are predominantly responsible for the imminent destruction of the health system. Moreover, at the time of writing this the prospective ‘New New’ Labour government of Starmer, with Shadow Health Secretary Streeting leading the charge, is no less committed than the Conservatives to extending the roles of outsourcing and the private sector in the provision of health care.
In focusing on the contemporary relations between class and state I have maintained not only that the concepts of class and class struggle have retained their bite since Marx’s day, but that, unlike race and gender, class is intrinsic to the nature of capitalism. It is true that the emergence of capitalism in the long sixteenth century inherited at the outset deep and enduring race and gender divisions, but these social cleavages were not intrinsic to it. Rather, they provided well-worn tracks and grooves which capitalism went on to follow and utilise. Discrimination on the basis of class, or ‘classism’, remains rife today and should be seen as the product of class divisions. Racism and sexism on the other hand are not products but causes of ethnic and gender divisions. This interpretation has largely determined the foregrounding of class and relative neglect of race and gender in my writings. While it is an interpretation I continue to defend, in the chapters that follow I seek to make good my relative neglect of social divisions based on race and gender. Capitalism in the UK in the twenty-first century is after all characterised by internal colonialism and patriarchy.
I have hinted already at the nature of the salience of class relations for the state of contemporary Britain but have admitted to under-analysing in my published work the command relations of the state and to largely omitting analyses of those of race and gender. I will seek to make up for this in the fragments that follow. It is important to note here however that for sociologists the focus of attention is not on individuals and their responsibilities, or culpability, though these of course matter, but on class, command, race and gender relations as social structures. And social structures exert their influence on events and our experience and interpretations of events, as it were, from beneath-the-surface. Like gravity for the physicist, they reveal themselves to us via their effects. But this business of detecting social structures is far from a simple one. Beneath-the-surface structures cannot simply be read off in on-the surface happenings. This is because multiple social structures are simultaneously active, and in some contexts or circumstances the effects of one are neutralised or countered by the effects of others. For example, what may matter most in a particular dispute in a workplace largely peopled by working-class women from a local Asian community may not be class, or even gender, but their race or ethnicity. It is not that class and gender relations cease to exist or inform the conditions and parameters of the workplace, but rather that this dispute is about racism. To complicate things further, social structures and their effects are filtered through cultures, which not infrequently have a life of their own. And then there is our capacity to act freely, what sociologists usually characterise as agency. To cap it all, we must allow for the seemingly random contributions of contingency. I will argue that: (a) humans have agency, though we exercise it much less often than we tend to think, and (b) social structures and cultures can function either to enable or disable agency.
In Fragment One I offer an overview of life in Britain in the second decade of the twenty-first century, giving an indication too of how and in what respects it has changed in the transition from the welfare capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s, through the restless 1970s, and into the rentier capitalism commencing in the 1980s. For all that a sense of continuity can be too quickly sacrificed to a narrative of unremitting change, it is shown how there has indeed been a significant shift in the social order; nor is Britain exceptional in this regard. Several dimensions of change are reviewed, including demographics, or the composition of the population; the nature of paid work; the distribution of wealth and income; the housing calamity; the general dynamics of hardship and suffering; health and wellbeing; and the genesis and consolidation of novel cultures and identities. The result is a portrayal of a much-changed Britain and one which is, to use the term from my own writings, ‘fractured’.
If Fragment One provides a context and a starting point for our analysis, Fragment Two takes up the challenge of setting out how this might be addressed. The perspective on offer is explicitly sociological in that it focuses on those unseen engines of social order and change already mentioned, namely, social structures, cultures and agency, whilst adding commentaries on social institutions and organisations. This family of concepts, I maintain, are vital ingredients of any rationally compelling account of where we are, how we got here, and what we can do about it. We live in a society of enormous complexity and dynamism, ‘open’ in the double sense that (a) nothing is set in stone, and (b) however strong the evidence available to us, our theories about what’s going on and why are always and inevitably fallible and open to correction in the light of further research and contemplation.
Fragment Three opens by considering the transition from welfare state to rentier capitalism and offers a working characterisation of rentier capitalism. This is a scene-setter for much of what follows. I then knuckle down to the business of defining and analysing contemporary British society in light of evolving structural relations of class, command, race and gender, as well as cultures, agency, institutions and organisations. These sociological tools, I argue, are indispensable if we are to gain an understanding how the social world we find ourselves in nudges us towards passivity rather than activity, conformance rather than non-conformance. In the broadest of terms the lens of sociology brings together past, present and future.
It is the goal of Fragment Four to introduce and develop the concept of collective agency and to provide a possible road map to alert, bring together and mobilise people who find themselves trapped in their circumstances and devoid of hope for a better life. Arguably sociology is more suited to analysing and explaining than it is to predicting so this Fragment is necessarily tentative. It will have done its job if (i) it calls to mind the kind of triggers or precipitants of meaningful change that might prove effective, and (ii) makes a case that those discussed are plausible given the present state of affairs.
Fragment Five further complicates an already complex narrative by bringing into the equation urgent global issues and challenges like climate change and the omnipresent threat of warfare. It introduces the notion of a ‘healthy society’. A genuinely healthy society, I contend, is one that looks beyond the quality of life in any single nation state. For Britain to be admitted to the category of a healthy society will require an outward-looking rather than an inward-looking perspective. No healthy society, for example, enhances the quality of life of its citizens by exploiting peoples in the Global South, or by selling arms to autocratic, colonising or genocidal regimes in other parts of the globe.
In Fragment Six I ask the question ‘Where does this leave us? Or to borrow Lenin’s phrase, ‘What is to be done?’ There are seeds in these paragraphs of a manifesto for social change, and I draw attention to other attempts to point to the exit for rentier capitalism and all its calumnies.