Robin McAlpine – A shift to the angry

Capitalists and politicians have driven Western society to the brink. What comes after the anger?

Robin McAlpine is Head of Strategic Development at the Common Weal think-tank in Scotland.

Cross-posted from Common Weal

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that across the western world the public is moving sharply to the right. Like many universally acknowledged truths it just isn’t that simple. In fact, for not exactly the first time in human affairs, we’re mistaking effect for cause. If I’m right about what follows, it gives us reason for hope and a light to guide our path forward.

Here’s the thing; nothing that is happening just now is happening at random. It’s not just those who are moving to the right who are reporting serious unhappiness with ‘things’. Almost every social institution we have is suffering from a serious drop in confidence from almost across the board – government, corporations, journalism, law.

It is not only the right who are angry, and it is most certainly not the case that everyone who is angry is moving to the right. This should tell us that being angry isn’t a function of being on the political right and moving to the political right isn’t an inevitable function of being angry.

(Throughout this I will use angry as a shorthand for a range of negative emotions including frustration, disillusionment, feeling betrayed, lost patience and so on.)

Therefore if we move back upstream a bit from ‘voting for fascists’ we’ll find that a lot of people are increasingly pissed off and some of them are then moving to the political right. Others are moving to the left, some are simply disengaging, some are just screaming at the telly trying to work out what the hell is going on and what to do about it.

This then opens up two questions; why are people angry and why do angry people have a significantly higher-than-average likelihood to move to the right? First, why the anger? I’ll defer to any social psychologists out there but I’d argue there are broadly three things that make people feel angry – suffering, exploitation/victimisation and disrespect.

If we’re made to suffer we will be angry at what makes us suffer. If we are pushed around and exploited or if we feel like we’re not being treated fairly in relation to others, we get angry. If we think our own category-of-being is not taken seriously (for example if we hold religious beliefs and they’re mocked), we get angry.

All of these factors are currently in play. The pandemic harmed a lot of people who made big sacrifices and have received nothing in response. The west’s sanctions on Russian energy and the failure of monopolised supply chains caused crippling inflation. People really suffered.

And it is easy to feel disrespected just now. It is the nature of our era for our various categories of person to be polarised and set against each other – i.e. identity politics and the casual hostility of social media. I have enthusiastically supported feminism all my life but even I am starting to bristle every time I here a lazy ‘all problems are because of white men’ jibe.

But it is the exploitation and victimisation which I think is the key here, because it usually is. We are as likely to be resilient in the face of suffering and defiant in the face of disrespect but the only response to exploitation and victimisation is anger. By definition you’ve already lost and there is no way back.

The problem is that exploitation is sort of fundamental to capitalism but with neoliberal surveillance capitalism it is the fundamental goal. In the west, modern capitalism bears little resemblance to the ‘combining capital with labour to increase the value of the capital’ model of capitalism we have in our head. Less than ten per cent of the UK economy actually makes anything.

The reality now is that western capitalism is much better understood as ‘combining capital with political power to maximise wealth transfer’. It is the political power that is important here. Let me give you some examples.

Meta (Facebook) can only make money like it does because of a range of political gifts such as classifying it as not a publisher so its costs are lower than a real publisher (which is what has enabled it and Google to take all the advertising revenue away from real publishers). Google is only profitable because of the very, very patent failure to impose monopoly law appropriately.

There is now a massive low-pay economy of delivery drivers which make Amazon possible, in large part made possible by the deregulation of the postal system in the UK driven by the EU and New Labour. And of course nothing has exploited us more than the financial industries who had all restraints taken from them first by Thatcher and then by Gordon Brown.

In fact the direct merger of state and the corporate world is more or less what is happening in the US just now; Musk is a Trump boy because of his pathetic inadequacies and distorted worldview, but Zuckerberg is taking the knee so that Trump will use trade negotiations to prevent the regulation of Facebook in other jurisdictions, particularly Europe.

This keeps happening in cycles throughout history. Wealth and politics are so similar that they cannot avoid tripping over each other – one wields economic power and the other legal power. But it’s still power, and both sides pursue it above all else, both sides believe they deserve it and both sides fear losing it. Politicians identify with the economically powerful.

So what happens is that the economically powerful get more and more favours from the politically powerful, making them even more powerful again. As they gain more and more power they use it to further their own ends. That inevitably leads to greater and greater exploitation of everyone who doesn’t have economic or political power (i.e. the rest of us).

And it is us who confer power to the politicians, so we eventually demand something is done about it, the system that enables the exploitation is reformed somewhat and the whole cycle resets. Rockefeller, JP Morgan and the robber barons, Zuckerberg, Musk and the oligarchs – same thing.

We’re definitely reaching peak exploitation. When we ‘buy’ a digital good these days we don’t buy anything at all, we pay for a license to use a thing. But that thing can then be taken away at will later. If you buy a movie or an album or a book online then at some point in the future you’ll discover that you didn’t at all. You open up ‘your’ library and it is gone.

I use that example to explain that it isn’t just poor delivery drivers who are being exploited, affluent middle class book readers are too – because everyone is. One of the most common comments I hear in my personal life is ‘why can’t I just talk to a real person?’. Many of my conversations revolve around house prices, one way or another.

These are both the result of the merger of government and commerce – reducing consumer protections and inflating house prices are both government policy, purely to benefit corporations. The 2007 financial crisis and the 2020 lockdown policies are quite stunningly blatant forms of the merger of the two, both representing quite startlingly big transfers of wealth from us to them.

If we accept that things are really a ‘shift to the angry’, we need to ask why that seems to send people to the right. Put simply, it’s because the centrists are responsible for all of this and the left is scared to touch anger.

When the left plays with angry sentiments, commerce pulls out all the stops to punish them for it. Look at what happened to Corbyn. Look at the treatment of the left in France. This phase of exploitation has resulted in the utter submission to the idea that two people can only communicate if a billionaire is in between them, either with a newspaper, a PR man or a social media app.

Here is the cause for optimism; this lot are the dog that caught the car. Look at the way Trump talks about ‘reforming the swamp’ even at the point at which he is the swamp. He said he was going to slash grocery prices but will instead probably end the antimonopoly enforcement in the US supermarket system, making things worse.

Put simply, the way most on the right of politics channel anger is to lie about it. There are some who are at least consistent, seeing immigrants and corporations as twin evils. But most of them are just old-school right wingers, always quick to give the rich what they want. I suspect the fine line they are walking between channelling anger and creating it is going to collapse.

In the past the cycle from exploitation to reform has been anything but smooth. Pre-democracy, kings were overthrown or revolutions kicked off, creating much more chaos before things get better. The last big cycle went through the Second World War before the reform. It would be good to skip that stage.

All of this means that unless some form of power committed to economic reform manages to channel a lot of anger which isn’t going away and which will get worse with the climate crisis, we can expect worse. Which is to say, unless the left finds a way to channel angry into change, there is reason to worry. But if we can…

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