Asleep at the Wheel

As the reality of capital-biased technological change (more robots, fewer jobs) begins to bite, the supporters of social democracy become ever more desperate to find a silver lining. Will Hutton in The Observer tells us that "Suddenly a robotised, automated economic reality is moving off the science fiction pages and into daily life". Of course, there's nothing sudden about this. His article is illustrated by a contemporary photo of robots constructing Tesla sport cars (below), which immediately recalled for me the famous Fiat Strada "Hand built by Robots" advert from 1979.

There are three features of this picture that I think are worth noting. The first is that the robots are painted blood red, as if in an attempt to indicate some residual corporeality: once were workers. The Fiat opus celebrated the absence of the human in the manufacturing process, which was satirised by the Not The Nine O'clock News's "Hand built by Roberts" sketch. The second thing that strikes me is that you cannot immediately tell what is being manufactured here. It could be anything. The Strada advert understandably foregrounded the car, but in so doing suggested that robots were a heavy industry application and no threat to whitecollar jobs. The third feature is the clean room environment, enhanced by the use of white paint and grey metal, which contrasts with the Fiat advert's classically dark and grimy industrial setting. There is a practical aspect to this, inasmuch as keeping dust and dirt out is good for equipment maintenance, but there is also an ideological resonance in the pretension to a sterile lab.

The one thing the Strada advert couldn't do was excise the test drivers of the newly built cars. The measure of the distance we've come since 1979 is that the Google driverless car is already a proven technology, though not yet commercialised (unless they're charging a fee for media appearances). You wonder why? Hutton talks up the benefits of this technology (though he omits drunk-driving) but fails to put it into a social context. Automation costs money, and there is no offsetting saving on you, the erstwhile driver, so most people will initially forgo the benefits for a cheaper, non-automated model. Many of the collective benefits, such as increased road capacity and lower (possibly non-existent) driver insurance, will only arrive when automated cars are mandatory and the non-automated outlawed. It should be obvious that automated cars can only succeed as a result of government diktat, which means they'll probably happen sooner in Europe and Japan than the US (anti-gun regulation will be augmented by anti-car regulation as a leading libertarian identifier - just think of the bumper stickers: "Defend your right to crash!").

Hutton's social naivety is also clear in this statement: "Some argue that a dystopian world is emerging in which good jobs and full-time employment will become the preserve of an educated, computer-literate elite". Doh! Despite the consistent trumpeting of the benefits of education (skill-biased technological change), there will be no correlation between "good jobs" and computer literacy. While there will obviously be a class of highly-skilled and well-paid techies (atop a pyramid of digital peons), most "good jobs" in the future will be rent-extracting and their occupants (increasingly hereditary owners) will continue to pride themselves on their lack of IT skills (a corporate lawyer using a Blackberry does not constitute "skill"), just as the bourgeois of the first industrial revolution prided themselves on their uncalloused hands. As a social democrat, Hutton believes there is still hope that the future economy may produce large numbers of well-paid, skilled jobs. He identifies four areas.

"The first is in micro-production. There is going to be a huge growth in micro-brewers, micro-bakers, micro-film-makers, micro-energy producers, micro-tailors, micro-software houses and so on who will deploy the internet and micro-production techniques to produce goods at prices as if they were mass-produced, but customised for individual tastes". If the small number of goods we produce are at mass-production prices, then our turnover and profit will be tiny. We could make a living through customisation, but that means charging a premium price. These are middle-class dilettante businesses that assume a lot of well-off buyers - i.e. our fellow artisans supporting their own lifestyles through a trust fund, share portfolio or property rents. The future looks like Mumford & Sons.

"The second is in human wellbeing. There will be vast growth in advising, coaching, caring, mentoring, doctoring, nursing, teaching and generally enhancing capabilities". While there is certainly a market for life-coaching, assisted navel-gazing and other indulgences, mass-market "human wellbeing" services are already being automated, where they aren't being de-professionalised, such as in teaching and nursing. The reality of Hutton's vision for most people will be an increase in low-paid jobs providing care for the elderly. The future for many smells of wee and boiled cabbage.

"The third is in addressing the globe's 'wicked issues'. There will be new forms of nutrition and carbon-efficient energy, along with economising with water, to meet the demands of a world population of 9 billion in 2050". These aren't new industries, merely the evolution of existing ones. For "nutrition" read agriculture and food processing. If you think this is about to produce a huge increase in employment, then you haven't been paying attention. At this point Hutton starts to spin giddily out control: "Space exploration will become crucial to find new minerals and energy sources. New forms of mining will allow exploration of the Earth's crust. The oceans will be farmed". Sweet, suffering asteroids - we're going to exploit space! I presume by farming the oceans he means harvesting those creatures, you know, fish.

"And fourthly, digital and big data management will foster whole new industries – personalised journalism, social media, cyber-security, information selection, software, computer science and digital clutter removal". This is techno-nonsense that could do with some serious "clutter removal". Personalised journalism is just a euphemism for targeted advertising. It doesn't mean you get Jon Pilger or Peter Hitchens to give you their undivided attention for a day. It will not produce any more jobs, beyond the unpaid artisan-microblogger. While it is true that techno-bollix like big data will be used to create supernumerary, rent-extracting roles, these will just displace similar roles based on older bollix, like PR. Parkinson's law operates at the aggregate as well as the individual level.

I can't be too harsh on Will Hutton. Though he is trying to keep his spirits up with the power of positive thinking, he does at least recognise the reality of the transformation we're going through, the current absence of any "double movement" to protect society from its effects, and the ideological role of neoliberalism in ruling out the possibility of resistance.

He concludes: "Britain will need the open innovation structures, financing mechanisms and social support institutions to capitalise on the opportunities quickly, rather than be overwhelmed by the risks". The problem is that these very mechanisms and institutions are currently being reengineered to preserve the interests of the few in the face of the incoming tide. Translated into plain English, education ("open innovation structures") is being forced to readopt its traditional role as a class filter rather than a talent amplifier; The City ("financing mechanisms") is determined to restore the ancien regime under which the interests of society are subservient to the interests of Money Capital; and the welfare state ("social support institutions") is being picked apart and the profitable bits handed over to Big Capital.

The historical irrelevance of social democracy stems from its belief in the necessity and desirability of full employment, and the associated use of universal income tax to redistribute wealth via a welfare state. It can cope with temporary unemployment, and may even benefit from a small, persistent underclass as a goad to keep the mass of workers "respectable", but it has no answer to a society in which a growing minority are simply surplus to requirements. Inventing fantastic jobs, from micro-tailor to ocean-farmer, simply avoids confronting this.

Arsenal Do That Thing Again

And so we finished fourth. As predicted. And we won one-nil away from home, no less. Talk about retro. I've held off writing about Arsenal since the aftermath of our home defeat by Bayern Munich. Not because of any rabbit's-foot paranoia, but simply because it looked to me like the second half of the season was going to follow a familiar trajectory, though I confess the victory away to the new "best team in Europe" in the return leg almost had me attacking the keyboard, if only to wonder why we make a habit of doing this Jekyll and Hyde thing (see AC Milan in 2012 and Barcelona in 2011).

I admit that the away defeat to Spurs, shortly after the loss to Bayern, was a downer, but not wholly unexpected. Tottenham have put together a decent squad, while ours has been poorer than usual, which is why they ran us close. What I did expect was that we would gradually erode their points advantage. Andre Villas Boas's mistake, which he probably won't make again, was to think that a 7-point gap in early March was conclusive. As many a Spurs fan pointed out, they enjoyed the same gap after their 5-2 defeat at the Emirates at roughly the same point last season. Arsenal fans could feel confident because we usually out-point Tottenham over the closing straight. In the event, Spurs didn't implode in classic style. Over the last 12 games, they've been 3rd best in the form league. Unfortunately for them, Arsenal have been the top form team.

This last point highlights a frustration for many Gooners, namely that we could have made a decent tilt at the title had we been as effective earlier in the season. Of course, this ignores the salient fact that we had a lot of new players to integrate into the team, not to mention the need to re-engineer an attack previously reliant on Robin. As I suspected back in January, the increasing familiarity of the team produced a solid groove of decent results - i.e. getting points even when the performance was below par. It was also noticeable that we improved away from home, scoring more but crucially conceding very few - only 1 over the last 5 away games since White Hart Lane. Our home form was decent but not spectacular. Since defeat by Man City in mid-January, the only blemishes in the league were draws against Liverpool, Everton and Man Utd. Had we been in pole position, this would probably have been tolerable.

Attention now shifts to the summer. Given the amount of managerial change among the top four, I suspect we'll see a spike in "making a statement" signings (that rules out Loic Remy, unless the statement in question is being made to the police). In today's Football Focus fag-end, the main topic of debate was whether Gareth Bale will now sign for Manure (along with Baines, Fellaini and Jagielka, no doubt). I really wanted Martin Keown (who loyally insisted that Arsenal now have real money to spend, not just the legendary "war-chest") to innocently suggest that Wenger might make a bid, but his current schtick is the conventional "obdurate defenders make thoughtful pundits" one, so sarky humour must be suppressed until you've served your time and ascended to the 70s light entertainment nether-world of Hansen and Lawrenson. Keown is actually an intelligent observer (though alongside Garth Crooks and Robbie Savage the cast of Made in Chelsea would appear incisive), but much too diplomatic. His future at the BBC is assured (I suspect Lee Dixon parted ways because he could not always suppress his engagingly derisive laugh).

We obviously need another striker. Podolski has proven a useful specialist. If he can get over the injury he's been carrying, he could even hit 20 goals a season, but I doubt he'll ever be the main man. Giroud has been a lot better than his critics have generally allowed, but for all his good link-up play he remains too slow to be the pivot-cum-poacher that the modern game demands. This is why players like David Villa keep popping into the frame. Of course, this implies a possible reconfiguration of Arsenal's game-plan, assuming Wenger keeps Giroud in the starting eleven. Perhaps the most interesting development will be Wenger's decision on Rosicky, who is the closest we have to a central number 10 (Wiltshere and Cazorla tend to drift out towards the sides of the penalty area) and often the catalyst for upping our tempo. I suspect Le Prof will try to resolve this by acquiring a a mobile striker who can play wide, central or deep. Luis Suarez would appear to be tailor-made, despite the houndstooth.

The midfield has improved with every game. Arteta got the recognition he deserved early on, and has been consistently reliable since, while Ramsey has gone from the new Jon Sammels to the new Ray Parlour. Oxlade-Chamberlain looks ready to step up, while no one can deny that Walcott has matured, even if he remains a player of fits and starts. Cazorla has been the player of the season for me, if only because he has never been less than good in what is usually a variable first campaign (cf Giroud). I suspect he'll miss out on the usual "EPL team of the season" polls due to the eye-catching performances of Mata and Michu (and idiots voting for Giggs), but he's been a joy to watch and that promises much for next season.

The defence has been the key to recent results, hence the unwillingness of Wenger to let Vermaelen loose when Koscielny and Mertersacker have been so effective as a partnership. The Belgian has been unfortunate, perhaps suffering from being promoted captain, and I wouldn't be surprised if a move to Barca (who need recruits) isn't on his mind. With Squillaci and Djourou likely to move on, a new centre-back or two is presumably on the shopping list. The same may be true for goalkeepers. Fabianski must have figured by now that he's inherited Dan Lewis's 1927 jersey. As soon as he puts in a few decent performances, calamity (injury or a freak goal) strikes. While Szcsesny probably still has the manager's faith, an experienced backup looks like a prudent investment.

All in all, a bit of a "transition" season. We've got RvP out of our system, and even the (admittedly unlikely) Fabregas rebound is prompting more concern about Wilshere than anticipation about the return of the prodigal. The danger is that if Vermaelen, Rosicky and Sagna all move on, we could be faced with a further extension of that transition as we integrate more new players with insufficient seniors, even though the squad unquestionably needs to be augmented. Our success, as ever, may therefore be down to who doesn't leave as much as who comes in. In 1970-71, we used only 16 players over 64 games (42 in the league). That was unusually parsimonious even then. In the modern era of rotation and injury caution, a winning squad tends to have plenty of competition. Our squad is probably 3 or 4 quality players short of the ideal. More out of hope than expectation, I'm looking forward to a busy summer.

Targets and Expectations

The Department of Work and Pensions has conducted an internal inquiry into the use of targets for job-seeker sanctions and concluded that there is "no evidence of a secret national regime of targets". The report is the sort of whitewash you would expect from self-inspection. It finds (correctly) that the DWP did not set a Vegas trip target for job centre advisers, with TV displays of a leaderboard against a backdrop of the Bellagio hotel. Though "targets" were not set, it was standard practice to instruct advisers on "what might be expected in their local labour market and for their size of caseload as an aid to judging whether the law is being properly applied". This fine distinction between a target and an expectation is sophistry. As a football fan, my target may be to win the league, but my expectation is to finish in the top four. They are not the same thing. As the DWP do not have formal targets for "exceeding expectations", i.e. the goal is not (yet) to sanction every claimant, then the target is necessarily synonymous with the expectation.

This shows how management can create an environment that promotes and reinforces a particular behaviour while officially denying either intent or responsibility (you can insert your own topical examples here, from banks to online retailers). Perhaps the best evidence of the reality of targets is the DWP's own "scorecard" of referrals and sanctions by office, which interprets a month-on-month increase (i.e. more job-seekers in trouble) as a positive, illustrating it with a green 'up' arrow. A fall in sanctions, which you might think would be welcome, indicating that job-seekers were toeing the line and busily looking for work, is marked with a red 'down' arrow. Anyone would get the message: job centres must find more shirkers.

The tougher regime for job-seekers is part of a wider programme of "structural reform" being advanced under cover of austerity that aims to re-engineer both state institutions and public expectations. It is becoming more widely appreciated that government policy since 2010 (and earlier in some countries - e.g. Ireland) has been focused on the preservation of privilege (both corporate and individual) and the reinforcement of hegemonic control (there is no alternative, public debt is bad etc). While structural reform encompasses real differences of opinion among capitalists, e.g. the division between Big Capital and Money Capital over banking and the frictions between Big Capital and Small Capital over the EU, the broad thrust is unmistakeably neoliberal: the dominance of supra-state agencies, the furtherance of free trade (the actual purpose of Cameron's US visit this week), and the increasing diversion of income from labour to capital.

The last of these is the most profound. The evolution of the neoliberal supra-state framework (IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU etc) continues, however the establishment phase, between 1945 and 1992, is now over. The blows to this framework in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis have not been fatal, but they do herald an era of more gradual and (for now) grudging development. The EU is more likely to go sideways than forwards over the next decade. While the great technological leaps of the last 50 years in logistics and communications have made free trade, in the form of globalisation, the dominant socio-economic story of the period, the current phase is likely to be shaped more by the rise of the robots. Though this has come to the fore in recent years, the harbingers were there in 1979.

Since that pivotal year, we have been in transition from full employment (which was a historic anomaly limited to les trente glorieuses) towards a capital-biased economy with persistent high un- and under-employment. Globalisation and anti-union laws were the initial mechanisms for disempowering labour, but robots (and I'm using that word as shorthand for automation more generally) will be the dominant lever in the coming phase. If the expectations about the speed at which technology will displace labour (without providing new jobs at a sufficient replacement rate) are correct - i.e. that this is accelerating - then the last 35 years can be seen as the ideological preparation of the political terrain for a future in which many people are simply surplus to requirements - i.e. worthless in themselves (as labour) and not owning sufficient assets to generate significant consumption. The coming conflict will not be between people and robots, it will be between those who own robots and those who don't.

The DWP's exculpatory report was telling in its revelation of the use of personal improvement plans (PIPs) as a way of managing the behaviour of job centre staff and setting expectations. They "should be very clear about the consequences of an individual not fulfilling the personal responsibilities as a civil servant to administer the system in full". The point here is not that PIPs are the mechanism by which informal targets are set and enforced, but that the job centre worker is considered to be as suspect as a JSA claimant and thus equally deserving of coercion. This is in line with the ideological drift of the last 35 years. Back in the 70s, in keeping with the importance of "differentials" in pay-bargaining, recipients of unemployment benefit (who had paid NICs to deserve a higher rate) would often look down (admittedly not from a great height) on those on supplementary benefit. Today, all of the unemployed, and increasingly the disabled, are assumed to be skivers by default, while we are encouraged to see workers on low wages as scroungers if they get housing benefits above a certain level or are guilty of "over-breeding". Everyone who does not own capital is suspect.

Job centre staff are experiencing a work management regime that has become common among middle-tier clerical roles. Their work is increasingly proceduralised and rule-bound, and the latitude for personal judgement and interpretation is minimised. The goal is to reduce the role to one that can be fully automated. When robots do the job, the targets will be internalised within the software. At this point there will be no discernible difference between targets and expectations, but also no need to claim otherwise.

Bad Faith Awards

Back in March, 100 academics wrote a letter to the Independent criticising Michael Gove's proposed national curriculum. Gove's cheerleader Toby Young then invented the Bad Grammar Awards with the apparent objective of ridiculing the letter-writers. A case of playing the man (or men and women, if we're going to be pedantic) rather than the ball. The fisking, by the 71 year old Neville Gwynne (who taught Young's offspring Latin and whose grammar book is published by the fogeyish Idler, the sponsor of the awards), was unintentionally funny because in criticising the use of the phrase "too much too young" the old geezer was obviously ignorant of the Specials' song. Most people reading the original letter would have got the reference. Even funnier was a supportive piece in the Evening Standard, headlined "Academics are the very worst for bad grammar". Any any fule kno', "worst" is a superlative so "very" is redundant. A grammar Nazi would have you shot for that.

The point that should shine through is the commonplace that language is constantly in flux, hence the appearance of new words like "fisking" (a point-by-point rebuttal, originally in an email or blog post), the employment of new idioms like "too much too young" (i.e. without a comma after "much"), and the fact that deliberately breaking grammatical rules for effect is fine (e.g. "very worst"). There are no rules of grammar as such, merely accepted conventions on usage. At any given time there will be rival conventions, some emerging and others falling into disuse, simply because their purpose is to discriminate between "in" and "out" groups that are themselves evolving. It is reasonable to criticise certain grammatical forms on the grounds of style (e.g. a double-negative like "I didn't do nothing" is clumsy), but if the meaning is clear (which it usually is) then you should engage with the meaning instead of indulging in ad hominem attacks like Toby Young.

An obsession with correct form over effective communication has an obvious authoritarian foundation, not to mention a clear ideological purpose in separating the civilised from the uncultured. Official grammar and vocabulary is often just the slang of the ruling classes. In the middle ages this meant using French instead of English, the language of landowners rather than peasants, hence the continuing high proportion of French idioms in administrative and legal terminology. From the Renaissance onwards it meant using Greek and Latin words and phrases (like ad hominen), and even conforming to Latin conventions in grammar, such as the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. Funnily enough, putting the verb at the end of the sentence never caught on in polite society, possibly because the hoi polloi often did it too: "off to market I be".

The 16th and 17th centuries are regarded as a highpoint in English literature in large part because the language was so fluid, importing foreign terminology and giving national prominence to dialect words (notably in Shakespeare), employing multiple spellings and variable syntax, and generally experimenting with whatever came to hand. The grammar police start to make their appearance as copyright replaces censorship in the early 18th century. The emerging bourgeois idea of manners, which converted traditional Christian ethics into a social commodity (e.g. charity moved from giving alms to inculcating right behaviour), was extended to the performative realms of dress and speech. As the 19th century brought social dislocation and mobility, grammar and vocabulary (more so than accent) became an identifier of class: talking "proper", as Eliza Doolittle would say. In the 20th century, mass media gradually produced a standardised vernacular and an increasingly neutral accent (I'm always amused to hear David Dimbleby's clipped tones from his youth), which has led to an even greater focus on grammar by social conservatives as the last bastion defending us against the estuarial and the immigrant.

Toby Young and his Tory mates probably think they've been clever in showing up the academics, but what they've actually done is highlight that their own worldview is based on separating the rest of us into right sheep and wrong goats, on an essentially trivial basis, which clearly reflects their assumptions about education in general. They want and expect "good" and "bad" to co-exist: Eton, free schools and selected academies as islands of quality amidst the sea of failing state education. Dissenting opinions are dismissed on a technicality. You can almost hear the Govian disdain: "If you disagree with me, you are by definition wrong". It should hardly come as a surprise that Gove's media outriders then employ personalised contempt (Niall Ferguson is another recent example), or that Gove himself appears to view politics wholly in terms of ego. The issue here is not bad grammar but bad faith.

That's Enough Fergie Time

The decision to announce Alex Ferguson's retirement as manager of Manchester United was presumably timed to allow for a mass love-in at this Saturday's home game against Swansea, the following and final game being away at The Hawthorns. Surely it would have been more in keeping with the tenor of his career, and the Premier League's willingness to routinely oblige MUFC, to add an additional home game at the end of the season. The ultimate in Fergie Time. I'm sure Spurs would have volunteered to be the opposition.

I wouldn't normally quote Simon Jenkins as an expert on football (or much else, come to that), but he made a perceptive point today in noting the parallel of Fergie's career with the era of "vanity capitalism". That Harvard Business School should consider Ferguson an apt subject for a study in leadership is telling, though I suspect this was more an exercise in corporate PR than genuine academic enquiry. There is no doubt that he was a great manager, but we should not lose sight of the underpinning that United's wealth provided during the era of TV money (which started in 1988, two years after Ferguson joined United, ahead of the formation of the EPL in 1992). The challenge for Moyes is that finishing less than first in the league will now be seen as relative failure, but more because of the available resources than the unflattering comparison with Ferguson.

The quantitative comparison of Ferguson's record with previous "giants of the game" is pointless. You might as well claim that Walter Smith (10 league titles) was a better manager than Herbert Chapman (just the 4). Temporal differences are just as great as spatial ones. Even a qualitative comparison is slippery. Where is the common scale to judge Fergie's contribution to United's achievements with Clough's revolution at Nottingham Forest? Ferguson's good fortune was not only to be in charge of the richest club when money became the key factor in football success, but to be able to make his position unassailable in 1999 with the famous last minute victory over Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, which put him on the same pedestal as Matt Busby. This allowed him a full quarter of a century to build up a haul of silverware that is unlikely to be matched by anyone in the foreseeable future. With the possible exception of Arsene Wenger (and few believe he will stay at Arsenal for another decade), who else would be given so much time?

Like all dictators, Ferguson the public persona was a mixture of authoritarian theatre (the banning of journalists and exiling of players who challenged him) and gross sentimentality (the harping-on about humble origins and the "no one is bigger than the club" cliches). He is on record as characterising his management style as a balance between fear and love - the classic psychosis of the paterfamilias. Susceptibility to the cult of the leader is obviously found as much on the left as on the right, hence the willingness to take Ferguson's "socialist sympathies" at face value and even hold him up as an epitome of collectivist culture. Ferguson the political emblem has followed a New Labour trajectory: from leading a strike by shipyard apprentices in his youth to a knighthood, racehorses and counting Alastair Campbell as a mate.

Ferguson is less the product of a collectivist ethic and more the product of autocratic managerialism turbo-charged by a huge influx of money. As a Scot who took the road South and made his fortune, he had more in common with Fred Goodwin than Bill Shankly.