The Ethics of Capitalism - Social Europe Journal

‘Where the nation state had taken a
moral responsibility for the welfare
of its citizens, this new kind of
market state promised them instead
the economic opportunity to take
care of themselves’
nexus displaced the old social
welfare contract and provided a
foundational structure for the
new liberal market society of
consumers. Change was facilitated
by a state that was itself
being privatised, outsourced
and marketised. Where the
nation state had taken a moral
responsibility for the welfare of
its citizens, this new kind of
market state promised them
instead the economic opportunity
to take care of themselves.
In Britain’s low wage, low skill
economy of limited opportunities,
individual aspiration and
economic growth were both
driven by consumerism and sustained
by the cheap credit of a
dominant financial sector. The
housing market became the epicentre
of a casino economy that
turned homes into assets for
leveraging ever-increasing levels
of borrowing. The lives of millions
were integrated into the
global financial markets as their
savings, pensions and personal
and mortgage-backed debt were
expropriated by financial capital.
A similar compact between the
business elite and shareholder
value engineered a massive
transfer of wealth to the rich and
became the unquestioned business
model of the period.
The neoliberal compact not
only accelerated the redistribu-
tion of wealth from labour to
capital; it has been central to the
modernisation of capitalism in
its new phase of technological
development. In the financial,
knowledge and cultural sectors
of the economy, new practices of
capital accumulation co-opted
the values of the 1960s countercultures
of the young middle
classes. The cognitive and emotional
capacities of the individual
are its productive forces.
Self-expression, anti-establishment
sentiment and emotional
attunement to the world are
forms of economic potential.
The expanding universities
sector provides the communicative
labour for production
processes that extend beyond
output to incorporate consumers
in the co-creating of
symbolic meaning. In this new
economy, consumption involves
the pursuit of experience and
the aesthetic practice of assembling
objects and meaning in
the process of self-becoming.
The economic raw materials of
this effervescent form of capitalism
are intangibles like information,
symbolic meaning, sounds
and images, sensibilities, social
connections and styles of living.
Its economic activities generate
a cosmopolitan modernity of
difference that is deepening
people’s sense of individuality.
Traditional moral collectivities
have been undermined as individuals
reject imposed and universalist
sets of rules and obligations
in favour of an ethics
whose styles are more in keeping
with the ancient Stoic
philosophers and their injunction
to ‘spend your whole life
learning how to live’. 2
The individualisation of class
and culture around these leading
edges of technology driven
production and consumption
has been accompanied by the
destruction of more collective
ways of life. The collapse of the
manufacturing industry, its outsourcing
to low wage economies
overseas and the emergence of a
global division of labour have
undermined the income base of
the working class. In 1976 the
bottom 50 per cent of the population
owned 12 per cent of the
nation's non-housing wealth. By
2003 it had fallen to 1 per cent.
In parts of the country the
working class has lost its productive
role. Sections of the
population exist as a reserve
army of labour either economically
inactive or in casualised
and temporary jobs. The decline
of traditional forms of employment
and the creation of class
segments superfluous to the
needs of capital have destroyed
traditional working class cultures
and their virtues.
Over the last three decades,
the neoliberal model of capitalism
has created a utilitarianism
whose rational, economic calculation
has contaminated all
social relationships. Its creative
destruction, its integration of
personal life into market relations,
the aggressive selling of
cheap credit, and the destruction
of cultural and moral inheritance
have led to an economy without
14 Social Europe Journal Summer 2009