2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
Due to the cultural context within which they operate, power structures are, unfortunately, largely invisible to Western commentators and, in particular, to Western managers at all levels. They tend to be incorporated as basic assumptions; hidden behind management theory as much as that of market politics. As the first guru of management theory, Peter Drucker's contributions - which understandably incorporated these assumptions - were as much of a philosophical (and even quasi-religious) nature as were those of Marx in the context of the political and economic ideas which fuelled Communism. Thus, in the Western ideology, the realms of politics and economics are - artificially - separated to a high degree. At one extreme the market is supposed to mediate impersonally (and most effectively) between individuals, where economic transactions are supposed to be the most effective mediator. At the other, democracy allows those individuals political control over the few remaining aspects of life which the market cannot address. In recent years it is these two pillars - market and democracy - which have been chosen to symbolise most of what is important to Western political systems, rather than the capitalism which had previously been said to distinguish these systems. The result, for the last half century at least, has been a most comforting illusion; of superiority demonstrated by a God-given right to progress. Those of us in management were able to dedicate our lives to the minutiae of decisions, needed to optimise the performance of our organisations, confident that the wider environment would be run by the impersonal efficiency - the invisible hand - of the market, or by those altruistic individuals who had selflessly dedicated their lives to the (political) service of their fellow beings. Of course, as we all now know, this is bunkum! Yet these are - albeit in rather less simplistic terms - the assumptions, and hence the unwritten rules, which still largely underpin the government of Western society. More important, there is a widespread belief - not least amongst politicians - that, derived from these assumptions, have come the best rules for governing the - modern - society which emerged from the first Industrial Revolution. Indeed, many of them would argue that these are the only (natural) rules; as their victory over Communism (The End of History) demonstrates. Indeed, in these especially uncertain times, the dogmatic certainty brought about by the rules based upon these assumptions, no matter how ill-founded, reassured everyone. Indeed, Clive Crook - deputy editor of The Economist - is still confident that "If market economics retreats, it will not be because the boundary between the political and economic realms all of a sudden disappears, but because governments shift it over a period of years, perhaps inadvertently." Such is the comfortable, if illusory, world in which many governments presently live.
John Gray is correct when he notes that "Social democracy was a complex structure of ideas, policies, institutions and objectives embodied in the social and political settlements in a number of West-European countries during the post-war period up to the 1980s..." He qualifies this by the footnote that it "...was eclectic in its origins and contents, and different in its emphases from country to country and from time to time." Indeed it was too often use as a cover for a multitude of sins. As the central theme of his thesis, however, he claims ""Social democracy recognised a century ago that classical socialism was dead...today we are witnessing the crisis and decomposition of social democracy, [its] successor..." What he does not point out, though, is that such fragmentation and disintegration is one affecting all traditional political systems!
Though, John Gray views these more recent alternatives with even greater alarm "...neoliberalism was the political expression of the belief that market exchange is the primordial form of human freedom. Political freedom and freedom of voice in autonomous institutions were suspect freedoms, compared with the freedoms of exchange, and it was wholly legitimate to curb them when market exchange could thereby be extended...there arose the familiar paradox of market libertarianism, in which it generated a species of authoritatian individualism resting on the political foundation of a centralist state."
Indeed, Clive Crook - deputy editor of The Economist - is still confident that "If market economics retreats, it will not be because the boundary between the political and economic realms all of a sudden disappears, but because governments shift it over a period of years, perhaps inadvertently."
15 May 2003
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