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New economy weighs heavily on real world
Jeremy Seabrook
Monday April 24, 2000
As the economy becomes more detached from obvious human need, and
more people depend for livelihood on inessential work, it becomes
harder to demonstrate the necessity for this or that occupation.
An appeal to the market as arbiter of last resort is a thin
justification for labour in a world of so much suffering and want.
The economy of fantasy depends upon collusion by its participants
that theirs is indeed the most vital work of the world. Hence the
heroics of labour which the privileged have seized in their arduous
calling: high-paid workaholics, helots of the advanced market
economy, driven to work longer hours than were ever imposed by
factory masters in Victorian England.
This explains the urgency of documents, blueprints, reports, plans,
schedules and printouts which must be on somebody's desk by
yesterday, the unblinking stare of banks of screens before which the
burned-out eyes of insomniac whizz-kids monitor minusucule shifts in
the value of currencies. And the perpetual birdsong of mobile phones
in public places - more imperious even than the factory-hooters which
once sounded over the streets of Bolton and Halifax.
People serving abstractions such as futures, derivatives, and other
invisibles must shout louder to advertise their indispensability; and
despite handsome material rewards, they are always complaining of
lack of recognition of their dedication and self-sacrifice.
The importance of display, the burnishing of images and appearances,
presentations and makeovers have loosened our purchase on reality.
Our material needs are wafted in from a distant elsewhere; we are
self-provisioning in virtually nothing.
We must convince ourselves of the value of our functionless activity.
The high-octane busy-ness of executives who are head-hunted for their
vision, and then dismissed within months because of falling profits,
with the meagre consolation of a six-figure bonus.
The self-importance of celebrities talking on television about the
tragedy of their year-long marriage, or the purposeless mobility of
intercontinetal travellers attending conferences in sound-proofed
hotel suites close to airports, whose fluttering diaries are chock-
full until September at the earliest.
Behind the business jargon which is now applied to every human
activity - targets and outcomes, productivity and best practice - can
be detected high anxiety, doubts over its human purposes, the
question not to be asked: what is it all for?
We have never been so busy. We find ourselves doing several things at
once - shopping, eating and phoning; watching television, reading and
helping with the chilldren's homework; travelling, listening to
music, working at the lap-top; making love, planning tomorrow's
schedule and recalling pornographic images taken off the internet.
Our leisure time is even more colonised than our work - so much fun
to be packed into the inelastic hours at our disposal!
The economy has long ceased to serve humanity; and in recent years
even the pretence that it does so has been abandoned.
The "performance" of the economy is now the highest priority.
Bulletins appear daily on its health, whether it is ailing, robust or
recovering, whether markets are nervous, volatile or steady. The
economy has been anthropomorphised, and human beings diminished,
disposable as the trash we become if we cease to be marketable.
Stress, bullying, harassment, discrimination are significant features
of this economy. Older consolations of work-place solidarity have
vanished in favour of a more intensely competitive insecurity: desks
are cleared, pay-offs settled, services dispensed with in the
twinkling of an eye.
This new economy is unpredictable, and we respond to its
arbitrariness in much the same way as the serving classes formerly
curtsied and touched their forelock to more material masters of flesh
and blood.
The greatest growth in employment is in leisure and entertainment: a
pub chain "creates" 5000 jobs; retail outlets promise work for
thousands; fast food companies provide career opportunities.
These are spoken of as "real jobs", unlike the archaic manufacture of
expendables such as shoes, steel, cups, clothes and ships.
The promised liberation of the "knowledge-based economy" remains
elusive. We think we are tooling up for the new millennium, but most
of us are learning to know our place in the have-a-nice-day service
sector.
People who do possess skills and knowledge find these being degraded.
Those in the "caring professions" see their abilities eroded by
industrial disciplines - doctors spend more time on paperwork,
teachers merely "facilitate education", while social workers are busy
avoiding blame for any violence their clients may commit.
Working with people is a debased ill-paid alternative to flying high
in the economy of fantasy.
This economy sounds light and insubstantial, but that is an illusion.
It weighs oppressively upon the damged resource-base of the earth,
and equally upon those who perform the despised labour we have
jettisoned: the factory workers, harvesters of our daily bread in
Asia and Africa, the servitors of global wealth who are pressed into
the maintenance of the precarious and unquiet well-being of the rich.
Jeremy Seabrook is a writer
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