Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

Prefiguration and emergence 39
Corporate executives held responsible for misappropriation of pension
funds, fraudulent liquidity statements, misrepresentation of research on product
health impacts and so on leave with enhanced severance packages.
Corporate employees meanwhile work on insecure short-term contracts in
flexible labour markets – an intensely competitive and insecure environment
where the right to hire and fire is fore-grounded within a climate of corporate
governance encouraging employee cooperation and participation. Within this
‘mad house’ of ‘casino capitalism’ (Hutton 2002) talent migrates rapidly to the
highest bidder, labour market turn over increases and ever more elaborate job
titles and descriptions are conjured up to make people feel valued.
Whilst the British Government emphasise the acts of animal rights protests
in terms of undermining the science base, their actions are far less important
than labour market conditions. Short-term contracts and comparatively
modest salaries promote scientific work nomadism to countries with better
remuneration. At the 2004 London Social Forum a female speaker opened a
session with the observation that having just completed her PhD in biotechnology
she was going to become a school teacher as she knew that having
children was not compatible with laboratory work (Welsh et al. 2005).
As labour markets become increasingly global, nomadism will grow as
individuals with relevant transferable skills seek to maximise their life
chances outside the container of the nation(state). The relocation of sectors
of the biotechnology industry to developing nations inverts the flows of ethnically
constituted labour associated with Fordism and Post-Fordism by taking
the techniques to the subjects. Comparatively relaxed ethical standards in
Southern Asia are easier and cheaper to comply with in areas like stem cell
donation and transplant procedures and these are processes in their infancy.
This is the logic of deregulation – it is something our economic and political
leaders negotiated within the G8, IMF, WB etc. These are the same people who
now assert that ‘globalisation is the only game in town’ – they invented it, they
are the notional ringmasters, they would say that – their political parties
increasingly rely on corporate sponsorship, they have to say that. It is a message
dressed in the benefits of individual choice heralding the introduction of
more and more areas of life where citizens have no choice but to make choices
as high quality universal provision is brought to an end in sector after sector.
The freedom of enforced choice is linked to responsibilities to be effective
choosers within the market options on offer. In their two free hours per day
the adults of the United Kingdom middle class dual income households
must exercise informed choices about their children’s education, their pension
plans, their life style health impacts, etc. whilst being invited to participate
in endless consultation exercises on how to implement new techniques and
technologies they had no part in originating. The imbalance between the
cash rich/time poor and time rich/cash poor in the developed north grows.
Such is modern ‘democracy’. The unelected nature of the state nexus
highlighted since the 1970s (Urry and Wakeford eds 1973, Urry 1981) is
extended to the global domain where it assumes predominantly economic
and technical forms (Stiglitz 2002).