Ping Pong 54: Brother’s Keepers
What rights do I have? What rights do I have over you? These questions are incredibly complex ones. One might say ‘oh we are mere individuals and have no rights but those that the market gives us’. But this answer of course vapidly assumes the power and efficacy of money, and yet money is a collective artefact. It will therefore convey rights in itself, and is as social as anything else. But one needs care here. Money is essentially the minimum point of the social. The social stripped down into a single gold plated medium of trust, and then dismissed. Everything beyond this medium, this single simple standard, is said to belong to the free market and the implied rules of the jungle which this market represents. We all know the rigmarole. The state’s real function is then to define the value and power of money to perform this task. This is of course the exact function that the governments of the last thirty years or so have spectacularly forgotten or lost sight of how to do. Or perhaps the task, given the complex nature of global finance, was simply impossible or beyond every human. The trouble then being that if money is not being watched over, and its value regulated, then it becomes a mere confidence trick. That is, as a social phenomena it becomes bound up by particularly vapid and clichéd social constructions which evaporate when they are looked into in any depth by outsiders. Money only works as a social glue therefore, if its paradox of social but non-social is enforced from outside and by states. Failure to do this reveals it for what it is – the construction of a very small set of society, the City men, and therefore reeking of their social relations and intimacies. Or to put it another way, money essentially belongs in two worlds or has two faces. The one face is the outside face of what it pretends to be to everything else. The gluing non-glue of society. The point which we all pretend falls from outside upon the world. On the other side it is a social construction of a small group of utterly insular elites. These elites farm money and ensure that to the rest of us it appears alien and something ‘falling from…’. The trouble is then keeping the balance between these two very different takes on the same basic stuff. If one listens to the ‘money men’ too much and allows them to control money, then there is really nothing preventing them warping it into their own peculiar plaything up to and beyond the point at which it stops being anything else and anything useful for anyone else.
In short, states must at some point regulate. They have to find a place to ensure that value remains real and vital, and hence that money keeps some kind of exchange. However at this point a quite new problem emerges. Once the state starts regulating and controlling in the name of society, it is of course very difficult to understand or define a point at which it stops this regulating process. Why stop when one might have a rule for everything? Or rather, why should it stop when the game of regulation might actually come to something. That is, it might actually change the value of value itself, and revolutionize how we understand what it is for us to work in the process. Here what matters, is that any one individual loses their pure and simple individuality in relation to the state. The demand of welfare states is therefore that each individual is a collective citizen of the state, and is so at all levels and whether or not they want to be. Individuals therefore are automatically hooked into a far larger system of relations, a process that must be viewed in three main ways; as it operates in terms on the collective that is absorbing the individual; as it feels to specific individuals; and finally how these two (different) takes on the same system then relate to one another.
How then does a state absorb or seek to absorb its people? Here perhaps one needs to understand that two distinct processes are at work. Firstly a state operates in harnessing power within it by setting up natural processes within it as dynamos or rather batteries. That is the state generates power by relating apparently unlinked social elements together and creating a social and economic exchange between them. The Welfare State therefore wants to link people’s ability to work, to their access to adequate healthcare. This link is then made through the rigours of full employment, taxation, (National Insurance numbers), and the demand that everyone who can should work in order that they receive the benefits of the whole. It will of course also become the very basic task of the healthcare available to ensure that every individual remains able to work for as long as possible.
When individuals are therefore taken up into such a system, all their actions are fed into an entire impossible complex system, and thereby given new spins and spun into new consequences. Perhaps the most important of which is of course that everything becomes to a degree political, from the exact number of those who are sick, to the laziness or sexual appetite of the population, all becomes a political problem and the biggest and trickiest of canvasses. Even more problematically at this point, a state therefore opens itself up to a new series of abuses, and new textures on truth (what after all is the ‘truth’ of unemployment?) are created and touted about.
This last problem is made all the more complex and powerful when the second main collective dynamo is taken into consideration. Government by welfare policy is ultimately government by statistics, and yet it then only works or not as those statistics can be said to be useful or relevant to the general population. For example (until recently) the public health policies of the NHS were highly effective, in that they involved a happy marriage between a form of medicine (vaccination) that operates best on the general population (and therefore must be attempt en mass), and an organization (the Health Service) that was able to produce this mass medicine. Medicine and social organization were therefore given in the one move. Whether this happy marriage can now be extended to expensive drugs (where the two naturally pull apart) or whether it can survive in the face of vaccination or other health scares, is of course a current deep problem for the very notion of universal health care.
The Welfare approach is therefore at its best when the wide scale and statistic orientated organizations and the information that they create run parallel to the technology which they impose. If the two are running in the same direction then the system will operate well enough – or at least has a chance to. If however the two fall out of love, then the entire process will come crashing down or at least become highly problematic. In effect therefore the Welfare State creates a new contour in the old Marxist equation of technology and social system. Marx argued that capitalism will be associated with periodic collapses and recessions as technology changes. The Welfare System (ironically in the name of socialism) ensures that this is the case. And yet it also ensures that every such depression, that is every moment when the prevailing statistical system and the technology which that system is meant to represent become unaligned, is always understood as a social and political problem (and not just an economic one). Individuals in such societies therefore have a tendency to turn to their existing political and social structures and seek to reform them (and not to get caught in the politics of revolution). The collapse of the old industries of the nineteen seventies in the face of new technologies did therefore lead to a genuine social crisis, and yet that crisis produced Thatcherism and not revolution.
Individuals in such states are highly likely to be gripped by two rather contradictory forces. On the one hand, the Welfare State always promises rather a lot. It therefore offers the chance for health or the opportunity for education. These promises are invariably made by politicians at a level that is not sensible or even sustainable. They are therefore always in the ‘best in the world’ or the ‘envy of the world’ category. A myth is built up that universality and quality run or at least ought to run together. This myth will of course fly in the face of normal reality (and is made irrespective of whether people are actually prepared to pay for the services). It is almost as if the high ideals of universal medicine or education are enough to convey necessarily extra virtue on that provision.
Or perhaps more realistically there are two real political forces operating in this inflation of expectation. Firstly there are the politicians who are using the improvements (or otherwise) in the system as a football in a wider political game. Secondly there are the natural greed and gripes of individuals who have been encouraged to understand their own situation (without appeal to the wider social order). These two combine therefore in the unrealistic demand that everything not only could be better, but that it ought to have already been better! The problem with such a demand is that it makes the actual debate about improvements (or not) disappear under a wall of rhetoric and defensive and offensive posturing and statistics.
On the other hand and far complicatedly, the individual is always caught up in such a society in a highly problematic manner. Each individual contributes to the system on the level of the abstraction. This level of abstraction is necessary to the system as it is this blind giving that allows the state (in theory) to allocate on need and not wealth or individual preference. Taxes are therefore necessarily anonymous and must be so, so that the entire project of scientific government might continue apace. This fact then creates two deep tensions of its own. Firstly, every individual deprived of any substantive knowledge of where the money that had been theirs goes, is afterwards free to ‘spend’ it in fantasy as they please. The result is that it will seem to the population that the money is never spent on the right things. How can it be? They know they are paying but never know exactly what for… Or again the population have the luxury (not given to the state) of indulging in fantasies of spending the same money twice (as they are spared from the necessity of knowing how much anything actually does cost).
Secondly, and on a far darker level, this form of contribution to a Welfare State makes the problem of inclusion a highly problematical one. If I am paying a lot and not knowing where the money goes, I must always have a sneaking suspicion that it is going on the wrong things or to the wrong people, that in fact there are some ‘undeserving’ OTHERS who are receiving money which they are not working for. This paranoia is a necessary consequence of the system, and yet is highly unfortunate as it combines with other dark paranoias about aliens and becomes then a real political hot potato.
The Welfare State as well as much good, opens out a rather new political territory. It requires two chasms to be opened; on the level of the individual, it opens up a gap between provision and payment; and on the level of society, between statistics and technology. Such chasms are necessary to allow for the kind of dynamos and social ‘batteries’ which drive the system forward. That is they allow for the links between otherwise unlinked elements, which once opened up, provide the system with finance and ability to respond to a situation. However it is apparent that in just such gaps, two sets of unintended consequences lurk. On the one hand into the darkness of these chasms, strange unions can come into being or constructions flourish. Health policies take money and produce statistics but not necessarily improved health care. Or again business invades schools in the name of improvement and money, and yet the result of such improvements are marginal to education to say the least. The problem here is of course that neither of these systems challenge the darkness of the chasm. They are all employed to produce certain outcomes (defined by government or the media or the wider population). These outcomes are necessarily statistical in their nature (they kind of have to be), and therefore any way of producing the figures, the point of agreed light, is allowed. What happens in the dark of the collective chasm is therefore always hidden and problematic. On the other hand, even the points of light that are produced, will have effects elsewhere, beyond the chasm. That is, individuals are faced with the tricky game of balancing statistics with personal experience. A game upon which the careers of news reporters and politicians both hang…
The Welfare System is an absolutely noble endeavour. However, it is caught by the problem or issue of the unspoken which it must create. One can only have welfare for all, if one creates within the middle of the system, points of trust and collectivism. We give at one point and receive at another. We must simply assume that between the two, reality hooks up and behaves itself. The problem being, that there is no real way of checking that this is the case. We can judge the result, but the process is hidden (and probably ought to be, as this is the domain of medical and teaching professional judgement).The problem then of how this system works and whether it can continue (or not) belatedly turns upon an ethic of trust and the meaning which trust creates. If the act of trusting another creates between us a common language, a sequence in which meaning might be, then the system might function well. If it does not, then not only is the system flawed, but we lack a language to tell each other that this flawing has happened and is real. One can have welfare therefore only as one trusts, and it is to the ethic of trust to which the next rant will turn.
