Now to begin, I am an unrepentant capitalist. I hold no
faith in idealised political systems composed in the late 19th
Century to resolve our issues in the early 21st Century.
Capital is
the means through which all endeavours are undertaken. Without capital, even
the greatest idea, the most brilliant invention, and the most soul lifting work
of art simply cannot exist; it is the patronage of our age. It is essential to
acknowledge this fact because it is fact and not just political
rhetoric.
Capital is the blood that courses through the entire world.
No nation on Earth has no capital. Most nations have very little capital and
its people get by on very low wages and barely-there services while a select
few nations have far too much capital and are wasteful with what they enjoy
now; let’s call them the ‘G’ Nations. Nearly two centuries of human development
has been powered by this substance called capital (as opposed to gold, silver
and currency) yet it is intangible.
You can’t get a certain weight of capital, you can’t buy
capital – that sounds incongruous but try – nobody knows what capital looks
like. Capital is the Holy Ghost of business and capitalism is its religion. At
least, capitalism was its religion
until the reformation of the late 80s. This schism ushered in the petulant brat
that is anti-capitalism. Before then the opposition to capitalism was either
socialism or communism depending on how close the army was to the throne. With
the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the surveillance state in
Europe and Asia, Capitalism won the cold war.....or so we were told.
It’s a truism that the more you fight against something, the
more you begin to resemble it. The hero slowly becomes the villain, the rebel
becomes the establishment. Thus, capitalist countries, bereft of their nemesis regimes
embraced a tinselled version of politburo centralism, replacing the State with
the New World Order. In terms of our day-to-day lives not much changed quickly
but in real terms it was as historic a shock as the Fall of the Roman Empire. History
just happens. We really don’t notice it other than something in the backdrop to
our daily lives, ambient chatter which we drown out with our diversions and
obsessions, just rolling thunder in the distance.....Then the storm hits.
Every place the G nations have visited to discuss the NWO so
have the anti-capitalists. We’re familiar with the chorography of tear gas,
water cannons, baton charges and Molotov cocktails, as anti-capitalism is also
a religion, it also demands that we suspend our disbelief and trust in the word
of great men who are also (handily) dead. Just like the religious reformation,
our modern capitalist reformation has provoked a counter reformation – a
souped-up, turbo-charged, super white toothed, orange skinned version of
capitalism called globalised capitalism or globalisation with its ‘prophet’ neo-liberalism.
Like the Spanish Inquisition and the pogroms against
European Jews of that period, globalisation has profoundly changed our world,
changed how our world replenishes and threatened the security of our place in
that world. We have been in constant war
for the longest period of time in our history.
That’s war with modern weapons of mass destruction,
biological weapons, chemical weapons, depleted uranium shells, drones and the
arsenals of austerity, terrorism and mass migration. The teaching of the new
religion is clear: We are not in
charge of our destinies anymore.
What human rights can we lay claim to when so many fellow
humans are being drowned and washed up on Mediterranean beaches all year
round....and we do nothing?
Where is the dignity of mankind when children are being openly trafficked
across continents, enslaved by the most perverted of masters ....and we do nothing?
Who will argue for us when we pay taxes into an unaccountable political machine
that is gearing up to host a devastating mass war on European soil....and we do nothing?
This new religion is NOT capitalism it is the inverse of
capitalism. The ranks of anti capitalists and anarchists may find this hard to
admit but they are actually fighting FOR pure capitalism and against this new
hybrid regime called globalised capitalism because, they argue that the wealth
should be fairly distributed – which is capitalism rewarding both labour and
investment. Worse, their complaints against their imagined version of capitalism
is actually aiding and abetting the spread of neo-liberalism and globalisation.
Here is capitalism. Here
is how we have been able to build amazing cities, develop remarkable systems in
logistics and supply, land humans on the moon, and where our increasingly
powerful personal electronics come from.
The society made up of the people pay into the state to
provide services and infrastructure; the state through government does what the
society demands dispenses subsidy to (and thus can regulate) capital actors
(banks and investors) to free up monies into industry which provides work,
products and services back into the society. Along these transactions of course
many middle-men take their cut. It’s a somewhat flabby design but most of the
fat finds its way back into the system and thus capitalism puts the power in
the hands of people who are capable of transmuting it into tangibles and
quality of life for everyone else who can work and supports for those who
can’t.
That’s how capitalism works.
Here is globalisation. This is how it fails. This is how we
have laid waste to our own natural habitats, this is how we have been divested
of resources and rights forcing millions into the jeopardy of migration, and this
is why people are dying in factories yet again fifty years after our labour
laws ended such cruel regimes. Capital made up of investors and private funds
pay into states or governments dictating what they have calculated would
provide optimal returns for their investment; government then regulates the
society to provide cheaper labour and conditions to industry which returns
profits not to the society or even the national economy but directly back to
the capital actors via tax avoidance schemes.
That’s globalisation, that’s how it fails not only us but
also them in the long run: Capital is now the client of the state and the
super-state, not the citizen.
The social contract, established at great cost in wars and
devastated rural cultures, by capitalism doing what it is designed to do –
making investment into labour pay dividends – is under threat from a culture
that systematically devalues labour and bumps up the importance of capital
investment. The problem is that capital
investment is now done in ‘credit’ as opposed to tangible currency and yet,
tangibles such as homes, businesses, and entire industries are handed over
perfectly legally.
Worse still, labour is now definitively devalued by
technology. Factories full of child sweatshop labour, or US penitentiaries
stuffed full of cut-price prisoner labour cannot compete with a well designed
automated production process where the labour is done by machines. This has
been true ever since FIAT built the Strada/Ritmo nearly 30 years ago in the
80’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8KdiiVccBo).
With 3D printing and information freely being exchanged over the internet, the need for factories and
logistics to get products to shopping zones and then to consumer homes has been
disrupted as completely as Apple’s iTunes ended the era of the record shop.
People can buy their furniture in flat-pack form from IKEA and then struggle
with the assembly instructions or soon they can simply download the designs and
3D print their items at home. Food will go the same way soon with people able
to download expertly composed meals by celebrity chefs for their smart kitchens
to prepare for them. Labour, either in
production or in the realm of services will soon go the way of the butler and
the chambermaid. There is nothing that
will arrest this inevitable iterative step forward.
Capital doesn’t have a plan to deal with this fact. I stated
that in 2011 in my open letters
and it is even truer today, five years later. There is no Plan B when human
labour is no longer worth the cost of feeding and housing human beings. When we
look at neo-liberal political actions (the truth behind the rhetoric) we see a
pattern of dispossession being studiously followed to the ruthless letter by
all our mainstream politicians and media cheerleaders to ensure that people,
human beings, you and me, feel anxious and helpless.
Anxious and helpless is where we came from many millennia
ago; naked and exposed to the elements, defenceless against nearby natural
predators, shelter, food, and water being fatally scarce, living with no say in
how we lived and what happened to our loved ones when we died. That unbearable
state is why we scraped our civilisations together by our fingernails, with our
blood and sacrifices, and through the support of our ingenuity, labour and
co-operation.
Together, humanity managed to build empires, wonders,
sciences, arts, and unimaginable wealth because of co-operation and trust.
Today, for the sake of this intangible ghost that is a New World Order, we have
been atomised, divided and mistrustful of one another. We have become alienated
from our own elected representatives, our neighbours, our wealth repositories,
and our police.
We are rapidly falling back into chaos and destruction all
because of the abuse of capital.
The amazing servant and genie named capital has been
enthroned by the neo-liberal and now it is the cruellest and most destructive
master over humanity despite the fact that it is humanity’s own invention.
Everything that exists outside of the natural wilderness and its myriad species
is the invention of humanity and as such is the PROPERTY of humanity as a
whole. What mankind has not invented it holds no dominion over nor may it claim
ownership over, nor may it destroy.
This destruction must end immediately but how can helpless
individuals tackle such a hungry beast?
Just like our ancestors did: co-operation, imagination,
faith in one another, and determined action.
I spent some of my time as a bouncer for the local Irish Bar
in a French military town. In that period of time, I received not even so much
as a push to the shoulders let alone being set upon by a gang. It’s not as if people don’t get drunk in Irish
bars, they often bicker and even ‘take it out onto the street’ but never, even
with a full-on Riot Policemen versus Foreign Legion aggro with some people who
were clearly drunk, enraged, insecure or just giddy did I or anyone around me
get injured.
This secret? Kindness. Patience. Co-operation. Good-humour. Listening over talking
and shouting.
Capital has just seen many of its greatest investments go
belly-up in 2008 and is in active flight seeing that China lost 33% of its
value in 2015, and the rest of BRIC are looking decidedly shaky for various
reasons (not least dwindling clean water supply). Where to go for capital? The
Euro is failing to win back any confidence after the EU/ECB/IMF Troika forced
the crushing of the Greek State, precisely because investors do not trust that
level of institutional violence and brutality.
Bankers and Wall Street investor types may express themselves in macho
ways, trying to ‘out man’ one another, but when shit gets real people responsible
for billions worth of investments get scared.
Nobody wants to drink in a bar where fights regularly break
out, risking being bottled in the mêlée. Likewise, capital doesn’t want settle
where brutal crackdowns on personal freedoms and democracy are likely. Imagine
capital as the classy model in designer heels and a couture outfit who just wants
to have her Kir-Royale in a pleasant setting and you get the picture – capital
doesn’t like threat; any kind of threat – lest of all, institutional or
politically motivated threat.
The mania of globalisation, neo-liberalism and the whole
nonsense surrounding a New World Order does not make a comfortable,
unthreatening world; rather its raison d’être is to destablilise,
exploit and enslave both financially, physically and spiritually. One can
resist such ambitions by decrying the symptoms and even seek to remove its
actors but, like the brawling soldiers, that only compounds the confusion and
the threat. Instead, the most efficient way to ensure that capital can put down
roots and do its creative, productive thing is to diffuse the tension, present
an offer that is rational and attractive and let capital CHOOSE long term
benefit over this short-term ‘smash and grab’.
All capital, even international vulture/hedge funds,
requires some return on their investment that is guaranteed. In the world of
business and entrepreneurial endeavour a guaranteed return is akin to the Holy
Grail because one cannot guarantee unknown unknowns won’t happen. After the
crash of 2008 (which, by the way, I was painfully aware of in early 2007!!)
capital fled from risky derivatives and complex financial instruments like a
supermodel from a hobo fight and sought out security. That security presented itself in government
bonds and public debts (no less risky but they had a national seal which looked
pretty). This obviously was a huge mistake both by capital and by those
governments too incompetent to handle an economic shock and thus the domino
effect continued.
Now, even natural resources (remember we didn’t invent those)
are up for grabs and international businesses and corporate bodies are warping
and twisting together like a school of sardines that has spotted a shark in
order to mutate into a form capable of controlling water, oil, gas, and metals.
All this because ‘the smartest guys in the room’ repackaged bad loans with good
loans and confused every available economic model.
The answer is startlingly simple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ay5GqJwHF8
It is time to start
building our civilisations back to robust health by investing in long term
endeavours.
Notice I said ‘civilisations’ as opposed to ‘societies’ or
‘economies’ because the civilisation is something that people can get around,
identify with, and strive to improve. The economy doesn’t inspire the same
allegiance among all strata of our civilisation because it is accurately
perceived by the majority to only benefit a wealthy minority. Likewise the
society cannot capture the imagination because it is the invention of a dwindling
educated middle class to serve that narrow grouping alone; if you’re on your uppers
society can go hang until you’re on your feet again and if you are insanely
wealthy what care do you have for the hoi
poli elbowing their way to your favourite table at the best restaurants?
Only the civilisation can bind a people together across all income groups, social
backgrounds, cultural identities, national boundaries, and personal beliefs because a civilisation represents
what we leave behind for future generations to discover and wonder at. Civilisation is our Time Graffiti; it is our indelible mark on this world.
The only way to ensure that the benefit of an endeavour is
felt by all is to host that endeavour under the umbrella of the all
encompassing ‘Civilisation’ – no matter how this may make free marketers sick
to admit it – and to ensure that endeavour has a concrete, planned, scheduled
outcome. With this level of guarantee
you are a supermodel magnet. Capital will readily invest in any endeavour and
(gasp) even pay tax if the payoff comes with a guaranteed profit on a
guaranteed due date. That is precisely what capital wants to invest in.
Risky resource wars have cost the financial world trillions
and that is REALLY what crashed the sector because the promised payoff never
emerged. Iraq has control over its oil, US tar sands are going to dry up in
less than five years and Saudi Arabia is upping its production, not lowering it
whilst simultaneously diversifying its economic offer.
Why?
Because, as I predicted five years ago, people are seeking
alternative solutions to oil and gas not just for environmental or human rights
reasons but because they want.....security.
Over the last two decades we have witnessed the vertiginous
rise of the statement tower in major cities around the world. From the erection
of Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur in 1996 there has been on average two new skyscrapers
completed per year. Countries that once may have sought to build great armies
and navies now seek to build glass towers that loom over the cities they stem
from. The classic image of the tower
cluster in Los Angeles or Manhattan has now reached China, Hong Kong, South
Korea, Thailand, the Sinai Peninsula, and will soon dominate the Indian Sub
Continent. In 2007 there were 28 registered skyscrapers (buildings the height
of or superior in height to the Empire State building at 380 metres) in the
world, by 2011 that number has risen to 46 towers. I chose these dates as they represent the
high point of the global economic crisis and austerity when ‘there was no
capital for investment or governments’.
In fact, the money simply sloshed towards these building projects.
Capital fled to what it knew best: construction and office space. Whether these
multi-use towers, full of the latest design and material technology will be of
any actual use is debatable.
Already
cities are reporting that the accommodation sections of these super towers are
being purchased by investors and oligarchs not to actually occupy or lease but
to keep the taxman off their cash. More empty boxes where people cannot
live....lovely!
If ever there was a parallel to the Tower of Babel story and its fatal folly,
here we are. The rich are in open panic and there is no separate middle class
left to speak of. Governments are no longer borrowing against their populations
as I stated in the 100% letters, they are now borrowing against predictions of
population– that is, people who have not yet been born.
The punch-line is, of course, that these towers will simply
be ‘White Elephants’ and they will not generate anything like the income their
sponsor cities and nations hope because, as more and more super towers emerge,
their scarcity and thus their value per square metre decrease. Furthermore, on completion, the project
begins the long slide back into the quicksand called ‘depreciation’. Normally cars and machinery suffer from
depreciation and accommodation – well maintained and fit for purpose – gains in
value according to inflation. However,
for that rule to be true they must have people dwelling or working in them. The
average person simply doesn’t want to live at the heights we are talking about;
where visitors can actually detect the curvature of the Earth. I’m hazarding a
guess that one can pick up a chi-chi apartment in Petronas or 101 Taipei at a
fraction of what it would have cost the first owner of that apartment. Capital
moved on and actual occupancy didn’t happen. Like the white elephants in
Thailand’s recent monarchist past, the money needed to build and maintain these
towers drains vital capital from the real wealth creators: the people.
So, what to build?
Right now there is a housing emergency plan in
operation....or at least there will be when the Dáil gets back from their
extended Summer break. Housing is essential, it is a constitutional right and
yet it is prohibitively expensive. We all know that public housing was
neglected over the last twenty to thirty years in Ireland because of how much
private housing was being built around the time of the Celtic tiger. We now see
that this private housing simply isn’t worth the money asked for it. The buyers who hoped to lease their
acquisitions and make them pay for themselves found that the austerity budgets
and the property taxes bit into their margins and they were forced to price their
properties beyond the means of the market. We have a Minister for housing who
last Wednesday expressed the hope of having a €250,000 house in Dublin county.
Think about that for a minute: fully built houses that used to change hands for
IR£70,000-80,000 in 1996 now cost more than a quarter of a million Euros to buy
off the plans. The State needs to invest in housing, certainly, but housing on
its own can’t guarantee a return on investment and thus, won’t attract the
necessary capital.
A national endeavour isn’t a housing estate or even several
housing estates; nor is it commercial zones; nor is it business districts,
financial quarters or even technology hubs. A national endeavour is a radical
rethink on how we live, work, play, and learn. A national endeavour isn’t a
top-down exercise but a co-operative effort involving our entire society. A national endeavour will attract massive
inward investment into our Gross National Product because it will guarantee
those investors their much needed payday beyond reasonable doubt because it
harnesses labour, talent, ingenuity, intergenerational effort and attract more
people to our land to live and work because it will provide not only jobs but
lifestyles and fully funded services.
Each nation is different and unique and we will RESPECT that
uniqueness. Ireland’s unique skill, the heritage of its people, is building.
Our national endeavour needs to be something we build and what we build must
benefit all of our society at once.
Instead of a skyscraper, I propose that we reinvent the city itself.
Cities are legacy technology, they began as villages which grew into market
towns which then developed a specialisation such as having a handy port or a
local resource such as tin or coal to mine.
These lucky towns then exploded into boom-towns – experiencing a rapid,
massive influx of people to live and work in them – and, as long as that town’s
endeavour was attractive or useful to the market, the growth spurt could be
supported. Once that mine ran dry or
that port got outmoded by another larger port further up the coast the boom
town fell into decay and dereliction.
The boom town to ghost town narrative was the story of the
19th and 20th centuries which is why we are at the best
possible moment in history to apply some intelligence to what we define as a
city and how we build it. Our legacy
cities are really just amalgamations of villages and towns from the 18th
Century subsumed into a metropolitan ‘whole’ without much thought on how one
element relates to the other and what is actually lost when ground is broken on
a new development.
Dublin, Cork, and Limerick all show signs of this process
growing in an asymmetrical fashion based upon the market value of the land
available to develop and its proximity to work and facilities. Obviously living at the fringe of a city
doesn’t suit someone who must work at the far fringe and arrive at the job at
nine am sharp. Another issue with cities
and towns as legacy developments is the ghost town threat to certain areas
which specialised in a certain industry and that market dried up.
Developing a bright, shiny new quarter or estate or town on
the fringe of the city only serves to increase the pressure upon that city’s core
function. Tallaght and Jobstown taught
us the painful lesson that one doesn’t simply plonk a large body of people in
one area without full access to the city or a viable town centre. Yet, here we
are developing several new ‘motorway towns’ on the fringe of Dublin and Cork
and Limerick. We just do not learn. Right now the overwhelming majority of
Ireland’s population live in the province of Leinster.
A smarter idea is to do away with the urban sprawl idea
entirely and to link our cities together ensuring a continuous urban habitat to
a growing Irish population (I’m estimating a potential of 10 million denizens
by 2050 if we play our cards right). The added benefit to this plan is to
create a ‘Firth of Forth’ bridge economic virtuous circle in which the
endeavour provides the labour and work opportunity on a repeating cycle over
decades. Having Dublin being a ‘Vampire
squid’ which holds a far too dominant demanding position over the resources and
people in Ireland simply because of its untrammeled growth is unsustainable
and physically destructive of our unique natural landscape and wildlife heritage. Dublin city now occupies areas in Louth,
Wicklow, Meath and Kildare, change needs to happen sooner rather than later
before the entire farming culture in Leinster is eaten with overpriced
apartment buildings.
This is where Capital comes in.
In a true public-private partnership agreement Capital –
that’s foreign investors who produce actual products as opposed to specialist
hedge and vulture funds who exist solely to monetise their investment
portfolios within three to five years – may invest in a mid to long term city
project that spans from Dublin’s fringe to Mullingar or Athlone or Tullamore in
which tens of thousands of people may find a home at subsidised cost in order
to being new productivity and investment and commercial activity to regions
that have been largely bled of investment and populace for decades. A major player such as Apple Inc., Microsoft
Corporation or Google Corporation could then invest directly in stretches of
this bridging, linear city (no wider than two kilometres at any given point) to
place their employees and campuses confident in the knowledge that their
products and services can reach global markets efficiently because the
infrastructure is in place and has been planned to serve the long term interests
of the investor and the communities living within the city.
This is how Capital, currently a very panicked and
acquisitive influence, can ally its goals with those of the nation state, data
and energy to generate constant economic benefits. Capital need not continue
with an ill advised ‘endgame’ but open new markets, new economies and new horizons.
Capital has a role and a future in the 3rd Millennium we just have to offer that super-model a nice quiet drink in a swanky winery as opposed to a grubby pint in the local spit-and-sawdust bar.
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