(First published on Kiltr Mar 2017)
There are multitudes of things to be wary of as we enter the age of non-linear kleptocratic geopolitics, not least the appropriation of language, as much as fact. Donald Trump is not a successful businessman or entrepreneur...
...he is a confidence man for the trickster dance. This is not a post about Trump, it wasn’t even wholly inspired by him. It was inspired by the polar opposite of him, his life as an ideological concept, not what he or any of his administration would have you believe is the polar opposite of him, but the actual one.
When Trump talks about deals they are the backroom, board member, knuckle shuffle type deals, done on the type of nod and a wink, and some weird approximation of a power-play handshake, not the kind of deal which brokers peace or brings prosperity, at least not to anyone outside the ‘circle of gold’. Witness, as evidence to the jury, Trevor Noah’s breakdown of the embarrassing meeting between the (ghost written) deal-broker in chief for a brief summary, just in case you hadn’t been following events, before I get mired in perenially morbid fascination:
You see, this was the wider backdrop to some far more localised statistics, which brought the absurdity of the self proclaimed status of the grand deal maker into sharp relief lately, and of real change effected by real deals I was fortunate to be witness to recently too. I have long thought of myself as a social entrepreneur, for better or worse in the eyes of those who have understood or failed to understand what that means. There’s no banging of my own drum there, it’s just a highlighting of how much it has become a way of life for me, for others who want to effect change too, for around fifteen years. Having met with some like minded souls, ploughing a similar lonely furrow for a similar length of time, recently, venturing to work together on some mutually beneficial ‘deals’, gave me further cause to question the recent self employment statistics released by the Federation of Small Businesses.
What ‘self-employment’ is has changed irrevocably and I am absolutely certain the statistics released are worked up through outmoded notions. When the policy convenor of the FSB points out the glaringly obvious and says, ‘We find high levels of unemployment and low self employment in towns that bear the scars of Scotland’s industrial decline, suggesting that poverty is a barrier to self-employment and the social mobility that comes with it’, it is clear he is speaking from an ideological perspective which fails to account for the exploitation of the redundant workforces in our post industrial towns by rapacious global corporations or for the fact that social mobility within a top loaded, stratified society is not necessarily the most desirable outcome of 'entrepreneurship'. As a term it needs reclaiming, redefining in conceptual terms to take it back from those who have so abused it, for a whole myriad of social, economic and perceptual reasons.
Some of the same people who protested working conditions at the Amazon warehouse in Dunfermline are the same people who stood on picket lines in the Miner’s Strike, older, wiser, but still had to take the job because it was all there was for them in the local economy after long periods of unemployment. They were aghast at what they found, not only in working conditions but in terms of what workers were willing to accept. I know some of them personally. It is a footnote of some telling significance that local bus services, run by a corporation also of note in Scotland's suppressed economies, run direct routes to the warehouse from all but one of the Fife towns mentioned below, with specific shuttles bearing it as the only destination also being added recently.
In the bottom ten towns for self employment in Scotland on the FSB list, many of them former mining towns, were three places I know all too well. In High Valleyfield and Leuchars my company, @sa4creative, support three and two social enterprises respectively. On such small numbers included in the survey, those might just be enough, given that each was formed by a group of self starting individuals taking a risk to meet a need, if a different, more progressive approach to what a small business/self employment is, was used in formulating the statistics, to paint a more positive picture. In Ballingry, Crosshill and Lochore, with Lochgelly included, not only do we support a total of 10 social enterprises/revenue generating arms of charities or non-profits, but we ourselves initially set up shop in the excellent facilities provided by the Benarty Regeneration Action Group in Crosshill. Their small business centre there supports a rolling incubator of some 25 community based, small businesses and social enterprises, with the facilities duplicated in Lochgelly. Very few of these enterprises are members of the Federation of Small Businesses or were included in their survey.
So whilst it is laudable for the FSB to call for a ‘response to support, not pity those who choose to work for themselves’, we should do more to support those who choose to support others, communities and the economy in ways which directly impact, not in a woulda, coulda, shoulda way. Stating ‘Research shows that you’re less likely to set up on your own if you have few skills; have little in the way of cash reserves; if you dont have a car or own your home’, simply emphasises the failed ideological reasoning of the statistics in the first place and the circular logic of the waged labour system. How much more positive an outlook would there be if instead of showing 200,000 people out of 5.2 million self employed in Scotland, if those figures showed what we need to change the nature of our economics and included those who start non-profits, blend for profits, cooperatives and social entrepreneurs generally?
How about if we also were genuinely inclusive of, and recognised the contributions made by, those people who only claim the minimal disability support they need for care and mobility, PIP not ESA so they can remain in the workforce as self employed, but are counted as disabled claimants not self employed on all statistics? Wouldn't it be a less ideologically loaded start in supporting them recognising they are self employed too? Instead they are discriminated against even on a statistical level, as they are in so many other ways.
Traditionally, an entrepreneur has been defined as ‘a person who starts, organises and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk’. Entrepreneurial spirit is most often characterised by innovation and risk taking.
As an individualised ideal, the notion of entrepreneurship can be an alluring one. The weight of risk is often offset by the ability to become self-determining, to step outside the delimiting world of ‘wage slavery’. As a result there are often mixed social reactions to a move into the world of entrepreneurship, or any kind of self-employment. Somewhere, certainly in a contemporary sense, this is rooted in the exposed lie of ‘trickle down economics’. In a stratified society, where the majority depend upon waged labour to survive, a ‘self-made’ entrepreneur doesn’t generally gain respect for refusing to comply, taking on all the risks in order to escape the yoke.
Instead, somewhere in our society, a resentment simmers, a feeling remains that somehow a betrayal has taken place. That is of course until the entrepreneur can offer the contemporary economic panacea, ‘jobs’. Then the resentment is grudgingly tempered, at least a little and/or temporarily, with respect.
Some of how all this circular like process happens is rooted in the fight against slave economies, which built much of the establishment wealth of Europe, the UK and US, and their replacement with waged labour as the predominant means of fuelling the Industrial Revolution. In 1763, the French journalist Simon Longuet published a description of wage slavery, as his definition of the waged labour system, which is as poignant today as it was then:
‘The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him...They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market...It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live...It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get permission to enrich him...what effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought? He is free you say. Ah! That is his misfortune...These men...(have) the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need!...They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?’
As third wave capitalism flounders and somehow reasserts itself as corporatism with barely veiled fascistic intent, hard won worker’s protections have either fallen by the wayside or are directly under threat from a globally emboldened, self serving, right wing corporatist base. In the post-2008 period, and now as behind the smoke and mirrors the new US administration, underpinned by, totally not 'swampy' honest, former Goldman Sachs high heid yins, is in the process of removing the safety measures put in place to avoid its repeat, and more rapaciousness besides...(thank goodness for comedians for summarised light relief!):
...we should consider ourselves returned not to the 1950s that never was, or even the proto-nationalistic 1910s, but rather further back still to the early/mid Industrial Revolution, just post abolition. An era which saw Thoreau echo Longuet in lamenting the difficulties of anyone having had to endure the worst of having a slave overseer, yet pointing out the changes meant it was ‘worst of all when you are slave driver of yourself.’
Whilst we remain in ‘Black History Month’ and wait for the Trump administration to do their homework...:
...it is worth noting the opinions of vested interests first time around. Some abolitionists expressed a belief in the analogy between waged labour and slavery as spurious, with ‘honest’ Abe Lincoln and the Republicans arguing the conditions of waged workers were different to those of slavery mainly because they offered the opportunity for advancement to future self employment, to entrepreneurship in the face of penury and precarity.
Upon taking his first job as a waged labourer, the abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass, initially declared, ‘Now, I am my own master!’. Later in life, given time to reflect upon his position, he contrarily concluded ‘experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.’. Douglass campaigned for the rest of his life against these conditions which he saw as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the capitalist class and the labourer class within a compulsory monetary market. He summarised thus:
‘No more crafty and effective a devise for defrauding...labourers could be adopted than one which substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty while it puts the labourer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper.’
In our contemporary retread of events, for shopkeeper also read merchant in the widest sense, credit broker and mortgage lender. For land-owner we of course need to also read property owner/developer/speculator and landlord too.
The notion of ‘self-employment’ eschewed by Lincoln as one to be aspired to by ‘wage labourers’ was not that of the entrepreneur as we would see it today, and certainly not anything which would threaten the dominant capitalist class of the long industrial era begun with the Revolution and still sputtering to its last ends now. For most, the best to be aspired to was an initiation into the artisan traditions, which by the later part of the eighteenth century were slowly disappearing.
E.P.Thomson points out that for British workers at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries, the “gap in status between a ‘servant’, a hired wage labourer subject to orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might ‘come and go’ as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right’. The British Builder’s Union of the 1830's declared trade unions would ‘not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each other’, inspiring the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 to declare a two-fold purpose, ‘the protection of workers under the existing system and the formation of the nuclei of the future society...(when unions)...take over the whole industry of the country’. A gradual capitulation of the latter in order to maintain the former, itself in ever decreasing spirals of futility, is the end product of a social contract in which we have deferred the freedom of abolition in order to become Thoreau’s slave drivers of ourselves, serving only to entrench the power of capital further.
Against this backdrop, the real entrepreneurs are not those who have taken questionable measures of risk in order to enrich themselves. A job given, waged labour, under those circumstances is not a boon, a gift from the capitalist. The waged labourer, especially if the wage is less than a genuine living wage, is still on their knees before the would be entrepreneur, begging in order for permission to enrich them. Our captains of industry do not run chemical and fossil fuel hedge funds holding communities to ransom, or monopolise dysfunctional national and local bus and coach (if you think there is no monopolisation, look at the ownership of the companies with differing names!) networks, their failings consistently overlooked in equal measure by the governing party to which their founder is the largest consistent donor.
A socially just, genuinely progressive future Scotland need not depend on our contemporary overseers so need not be held to ransom by them, because, well, jobs. Defunct economics are defunct economics.
Yes, with a few hundred years of entrenching the waged labour system, with no other way to pay the rent, the mortgage, the bills, to feed the kids, of course a job can seem like cure all, snake oil. And it isn’t difficult to see how a resentment can build against the entrepreneur who doesn’t seem to have those same pressures, but has a whole raft of others. But an entrepreneur is not necessarily a capitalist.
In our fast changing world, while those who are capital, corporatist driven, attempt to reassert and tighten their grips, new artisans, makers, producers of product barely conceived of ten years ago can pay those bills, are paying them, without the need for waged labour in the sense we have come to know it. PewDiePie, with all his current exposed and questionable opinions, may not be everyone’s cultural ambassador but, in producing monetised, consumable product is testimony to every teenage gamer’s ideal and a comeback at hectoring parents who insist a livelihood can’t be made 'just' playing games all in one. And he is far from the only one doing it. Technology and innovation, as well as their means of dispersal, have provided new routes for so many creatives to find markets beyond the starving garret too.
But, much more than that, we can look to innovative communities finding ways to support themselves through renewable power generation and community land use/buyout. We can look to the success of old ideas reborn, like cooperatives, and Credit Unions, where corporations and banks have failed us all, small businesses in particular.
And most of all, we should look to the social entrepreneurs, to those who have used the techniques of the start up and the entrepreneur to not only develop, find and implement solutions to social, cultural or environmental issues but also to disrupt the hegemony of corporatist waged labour. Social entrepreneurs are not for profit and blend for profit thinkers who immediately generate a positive return for society. There is no deferral, no trickle down, no reliance on government or funding models. Social entrepreneurship broadens our social, cultural and environmental goals in areas like poverty alleviation, social care, health care and community development. Often social entrepreneurship is facilitated by developing technologies, by the internet, by social networking or by new, innovative, disruptive social media websites.
The communities empowered to buy out the feudal yokes still upon them, the new cooperatives, working laterally not hierarchically, the new makers, creatives and artisans, the social entrepreneurs and the leaders among them (especially those facilitating others to do the same by providing a new infrastructure for, as well as so many other things, the battle of networks against hierarchies), these should be our acknowledged captains of industry. We should cheer them on, laud their efforts, then roll up our sleeves and get involved in whatever they do.
Or start doing it ourselves. The only alternative is relenting to the long pressure in the history of waged slavery. A genuine entrepreneur is not to be resented, it is a position to be aspired to, but only if your aspirations are genuinely right here, right now with a firm eye on the horizons of the future. The world, Scotland, our communities, our towns and cities, our economies need them. The least we can do is include the ones already doing it in the bloody stats.
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