Health, wealth and happiness (in that order?)

This morning as I was clearing out my spam folder (I suspect a rather common Monday morning displacement activity – as, indeed, is blogging) I idly clicked on a link to a message from some people called ‘real age’ (goodness knows how I ended up on their mailing list) and it took me through to this extraordinary statement:

Are you happy? It’s such an important question because happiness has such a huge impact on your health, from your arteries to your heart, from the glow in your skin to the pep in your step. Happy feelings influence your brain and body chemistry in ways that make you better able to cope with pain and stress and to fend off colds, flu, heart disease, and even cancer.

What I found so extraordinary about it was the assumption that what is of supreme importance is to be healthy. I imagine that most Europeans, like me, would argue the other way round: that the reason for staying healthy is to be happy, rather than the contrary. It was this contrary logic, more than any details of graphic design or English usage that told me, straight away, that this was an American site.

And thinking about it I realised that for citizens of the United States at this moment in history, the fear of ill-health is widespread and overwhelming. Because (unless you are a multi-millionaire or are already in such poverty that you have nothing to lose) becoming unwell, especially from a slow and lingering condition, brings with it an almost certain prognosis that you will slide inexorably into penury. The fear of being ill, in other words, is to a considerable extent also a terror of poverty. And, conversely, health means wealth – or at least a significantly higher chance of hanging on to such wealth as you have. So no wonder, in a materialistic society, that health takes precedence over happiness.

This is the future that the Cameron government has in store for us in Britain too, unless we can find some way of preventing the Health and Social Care Bill from coming into effect and saving what is left of our National Health Service (many of whose underlying principles have already been eroded by New Labour’s commodification). Even if you don’t actually pay out money directly for it, you are increasingly aware of the cost of every treatment and the likelihood of its being rationed. And this is why it matters so much to defend the NHS: it isn’t just the service itself that is important but the value system that is represents. (Read this book if you are not yet convinced of this: http://www.merlinpress.co.uk/acatalog/THE_PLOT_AGAINST_THE_NHS.html )

Do people really want a world in which one’s very body and its parts have become independent sites of capital accumulation – and happiness itself is reduced to an instrumental means of retaining some sort of autonomy over one’s own being?  I certainly don’t.

Dalston clubbers

It is Sunday morning and Dalston is at its calmest. Cans, bottles and remains of fried chicken takeaways still litter the pavement; the puddles of urine are still wet in the Rio doorways, the direction of stream revealing the lie of the land; the shops are shuttered. A few straggling clubbers are still wandering up and down Kingsland High Street, with who knows what on their poor stoned minds. Trying to remember who they were with last night? Smarting from sexual rejection or a hazy memory of being found out in some act of uncoolness? Just looking for breakfast? Soon the Council workmen in their green and yellow livery will come to start clearing up and neighbours will venture out to walk their dogs or fetch a pint of milk and a newspaper. Round the corner, no doubt, the all-night cafes will be serving comforting cups of coffee to the night’s survivors.

To tell the truth, I am feeling pretty spaced out myself, it being my first morning out of bed after my most recent anaemia treatment last week. I am already starting to feel better but staring at me out of the mirror this morning from a parchment-coloured face were two black-ringed panda eyes (something to do with the way the hit of iron affects my liver which reacts to it as to a toxin, which indeed it is). So this is as good a moment as any to reflect on my profound ambivalence to the Dalston clubbers, poisoned by other substances.

I am in many ways as entertained and charmed by the Dalston hipsters as I am by the overheard self-absorbed play of four-year-olds. There is something poignant about the fragility of the boundary between looking cool and looking ridiculous, often only upheld by an enormously brave effort of self-belief; the determination to be individual in a world of mass consumption; the diligent inventiveness of their dress.

I find myself moved by the obvious high seriousness of their artistic pretentions. One morning last summer I passed a local cafe on a Sunday morning, just like this one only warmer, and there was a group at a pavement table one of whom was reading poetry aloud to his companions – who were not mocking. And a couple of months ago I went with a friend to a club in Haggerston to attend the first gig of the daughter of a housemate of hers. What this singer/keyboard/guitar trio were performing was arrangements of 19th century poetry, including a very funny and inventive version of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rush glen’ complete with animal sound-effects.

The atmosphere reminded me not so much of the later 60s, when most of the people I hung out with would have been a bit embarrassed by the reactionary connations of such highbrow pursuits, but of the late 50s/early 60s, which I indirectly caught the tail end of, when jazz poetry was taken seriously in little coffee bars in Soho and Liverpool.

Surely these must be kids who were seriously bullied at secondary school for their nerdiness and one cannot but admire their stamina.

And yet… I suppose it is a characteristic of all Bohemias that they carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. Artists need audiences and most of them actively seek hangers on, even if there are some who are irritated by the poseurs and plagiarists who attach themselves to them. An artist without a fan lives with the daily risk of seeming simply sad or mad. It takes colossal courage to remain convinced of one’s own originality in a crowd of others equally sure of their own genius. And I suppose too that as long as there have been Bohemias there have been rich young people who realise that attaching themselves to artistic milieux will give them access to a sort of social status (as well as sexual opportunities) that flashing their money around in more obvious ways will not buy.

Dalston is being pummeled from two directions right now. On the one hand there has been a huge influx of such rich kids, who, in the interval between boarding school and going to work in the family business or the City and/or marrying a millionaire and/or moving to Gloucestershire or Tuscany or Provence, have decided that moving to, or at least partying in Dalston will provide them with just such an attractive aura of hipness. Ten or fifteen years ago they would have moved to Shoreditch, where there was rather little in the way of a local community for them to destroy. Now they are here in their thousands. The local police estimate that 15,000 people from outside the borough come every weekend to congregate in the couple of blocks between Dalston Junction and Shacklewell Lane. It is evident from the braying public school accents that wake us up between 2 am (when most of the clubs close) and around 5 am that these well-heeled kids make up a significant proportion of them. There is something comical in the conviction of the more naive among them that they are venturing into a dangerous slum. One summer evening last year I was disturbed by a young woman, with the accents of Roedean, telling the entire street at high volume that her erstwhile friend ‘is only jealous of me because I’m a lesbian. Well I’m not really a lesbian I do go with guys too but, like, she SO obviously doesn’t get me’. She was addressing a group leaning against my front wall, most of whom had a bottle in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. I stuck my head out of the window preparatory to asking her to turn it down a bit and she looked up at me with genuine amazement, as though she had been accosted by a peasant in Ibiza, and (well-brought up as she no doubt was) asked me very slowly and clearly what my name was, as though addressing a foreigner. Everything in her manner suggested that she believed she was conferring a favour on the whole neighbourhood by gracing it with her presence. It had not crossed her empty little mind that she might be annoying anyone. On the contrary, she seemed to think she was so interesting that any listeners would be flattered to be taken into her confidence.

But, although they have by far the most irritating voices, the young English rich are not alone. The fame of the area has spread across Europe and we are also visited by large numbers of people, wealthy enough to arrive in black cabs, speaking various European languages. Again, when they are not so drunk as to be incapable of communication, they seem on the whole to be well-mannered middle class kids. About a month ago I saw one member of a Spanish-speaking group opening his flies to pee against my front gate and asked him not to. He half zipped himself up again and inquired politely if it would be all right if he peed between two cars instead. When I said that actually the people living in the street preferred it not to be used as a urinal at all and suggested he find a public lavatory he put on the injured expression of someone who is used to being found charming – a look that said ‘but i need to pee and you look like a Mamma and Mammas are supposed to LOOK AFTER nice boys who need to pee’. But, when I refused to relent, he sloped obediently off round the corner to relieve himself. Of course there are many who don’t respond in this way. One needs to be skilled at decoding the signifiers of class and race before daring to accost anyone. ‘Why don’t you just sell your property and move somewhere else’ one guy yelled venomously at me on an occasion when I hadn’t said a word, merely appeared at the window to see what was causing a ruckus. What I found so depressing about this was first the assumption that I was an owner-occupier (which surely no-one would have made thirty years ago) and second the use of that awful word ‘property’ – the assumption that a home is just an investment. ‘But I LIVE here’, the outraged cry of millions of people around the world whose lives are disrupted by development, quite beyond the comprehension of these alienated kids.

The other aspect of the double whammy is the, quite understandable, way that copycats are trying to cash in on the cool Dalston boom. Every week there are two or three new applications for planning permission or licenses to open new bars, clubs and off-licenses or extend the opening hours of existing ones. Several of us local residents are now much more familiar than we would like to be with the green leather seats and art deco furnishings of Hackney Town Hall where we have to attend endless hearings to voice our objections, most of which fail. The entrepreneurs are becoming ever more cunning. Applications rarely spell out their true intentions. We are told that premises are going to be used for the sale of organic food or for exhibitions or the showing of artistic films or ‘community meetings’. Since the success of the Efes snooker club (where the likes of Florence and the Machine play live till the small hours in what was once a snooker hall) there has even been a spate of people wanting to host ‘indoor sports’ until 5 am. Some of the local Turkish-owned cafes trying to get in on the act haven’t quite mastered the subtle art of hoodwinking Councillors – one application currently going through the committees is for a venue with the commendably honest name of ‘Tipsy’.

With the exponential growth of what the planners coyly call the ‘night-time economy’ in Dalston, the original Bohemian cachet of the area of course starts to wear thin. It seems only a matter of time before, like Shoreditch before us, we will become a destination for stag night parties, with lurching lager-louts driving out the fey hipsters. In the process a lot will have been destroyed. Dalston is a place where many different communities have muddled along together over the years: the old white East End working class (the original model for Albert Square is only a few blocks away); a large community of West Indians who arrived in the 1950s, and more recent influxes from Turkey, Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East as well as the hippies and lefties who moved here in the 1960s and 70s and the middle class public sector and media workers who followed them here later. The chaotic and happy mixture of cheap shops, street markets, cafes, Turkish restaurants and small businesses may seem resilient, but if it were to be unbalanced would be almost impossible to reproduce. Once a high street with several cinemas and a department store, Kingsland High Street has avoided the fate of most other London high streets (killed by the Medusa glare of the chain stores) and kept its vibrancy, thanks to the cussedness of its local inhabitants and their customers. It is now in mortal danger, not so much from the planners (although some of the new developments are not helping) but from the very effects of its own vibrancy and the affection it inspires in those seeking some sort of authenticity. Like a Greek island or a Cornish fishing village, it is dying from the very consciousness of its own charm. What we love we destroy. Or, perhaps, more accurately, what we love those who copy us destroy, but we are responsible – for pointing out its loveability. (When I say ‘we’ here I mean self-referential observant intellectuals – and yes, you too Iain Sinclair).

The Hackney planners are not really to blame here. They seem to be genuinely trying quite hard to get it right. They know that the area cannot stay still and seem really to be seeking some sort of balance. Like many others around the world they are trying to encourage the ‘creative economy’ in the area. And by some sort of slippage this ‘creative economy’ has become equated with the ‘night-time economy’ (a slippage that is perhaps understandable if you focus only on places like the Cafe Oto, the Vortex Jazz Bar, the Dalson Superstore, the Arcola Theatre and the Rio Cinema but less so when you get to the Tipsy and its ilk). So when local residents start to complain about being kept awake all night and having their doorsteps used as urinals, vomitoria and worse, these local residents are cast as anti-creative. And this is the real irony. Because just about all the local residents I know who are active in the campaign to save the neighbourhood really do create things. They are architects, painters, writers, editors, designers, film-makers, publishers, singers and actors, mostly living and working from their homes, mostly having moved here partly because it was cheap and partly because they loved the racketiness and colour of the area and were tolerant of quite a bit of noise and grime. But it is precisely these people who are now cast as the killjoy NIMBYs. And the incontinent clubbers, most of whom have never done anything more artistic in their lives than choose which ear to get pierced, are now the ‘creatives’.

Early Christmas greetings

I spotted this Father Christmas in Thailand six or seven years ago. I particularly liked his old-style mobile phone and the grubby meringue-like foam on his beer.

But I also liked the way the sculptor had captured the unfocused bleariness of the drunk Caucasian man, no doubt based closely on first hand observation: the kind of amiability that can so suddenly switch to incoherent rage or, alternatively, collapse into maudlin blithering ending in sleep.

(In Thailand, of course, such unpredictability of mood change wouldn’t just make the difference to whether or not the waiter gets a tip, but could also shape the degree of violence experienced by some poor child in the sex industry. One of the things that upset me most when I was there was the sight of young Thai girls walking down the street hand in hand with beer-bellied white men old enough to be their fathers or in some cases grandfathers, wearing that embarrassed expression that seems almost universal among teenagers that says to any passer-by ‘please don’t judge me by the company I am forced to keep’ – but here meaning so much more than just ‘My Mum is SO uncool’.)

You can see Santa’s expression more clearly in the semi-profile view above than in the prettier shot below that shows him among the poinsettias and greenery of his tropical setting

It is extraordinary the extent to which the Western idea of Christmas has been exported around the world. I have heard little Goan girls who have never seen a snowflake in their lives singing ‘jingle bells’, seen huge replica pine trees in shopping malls in parts of the Southern hemisphere which have no indigenous conifers, and countless images of holly and robins (not to mention 19th century stagecoaches hurtling through snowy landscapes) in places where the cultural references must be sieved through so many half-apprehended filters that they have about as much meaning to the local viewer as the cod chinoiserie on a willow-pattern plate did to me in my Welsh childhood.

The unthinking arrogance with which it is imposed is breathtaking. Remember that Live Aid concert where they sang ‘Don’t they know it’s Christmas?’ over montages of images of starving children in Ethiopia? Was I the only person to wonder ‘why on earth should they know it’s Christmas?’? OK so there are quite a few Coptic Christians in Ethiopia but also, as in most other parts of North Africa, very large numbers of Muslims. Can you imagine a song that goes ‘Don’t they know it’s Eid?’ or, for that matter, ‘Don’t they know it’s Diwali?’.

Research in India shows that one of the most resented features of working in international call centres is being obliged to work through the national holidays, missing out on family get-togethers, but being made to observe Western holidays whether they want to or not. But these cultural differences can be turned into an advantage: during the 1990s I came across a BT call centre in the North West of England where the trade union had managed to negotiate a deal whereby the – largely Muslim – local staff were paid to work over the Christmas and Easter holidays, taking calls from other parts of the country where workers wanted to take the day off, in return for other workers covering their shifts during Eid.

Which brings me to my own ambivalence about Christmas. Much as I dislike many features of it, I do really like the idea that there is a time of year when one catches up with friends and family and shares food and company and gifts and other things take precedence over work.

(But the punishing European Commission funding cycle means that January is always the annual deadline for getting in research proposals so that last part of the above statement has to be modified a bit – this year I am working simultaneous on four proposals all of which will have to be finished before I am due to have my next bout of medical treatment in the second week of January. The timetable seems to be set so that the Fonctionnaires can take their Christmas holidays while the Academics sweat over their laptops. Then in the summer, the same thing happens: off they go to the beach in August whilst those researchers who are successfully funded, have to prepare the documents for the September meetings).

So, in spite of it all, here’s wishing you a very happy winter holiday (or for those in the Southern hemisphere, summer holiday) and all good things in 2012. May it bring you  health and happiness and may it bring the world peace, justice and freedom.

Halloween red eye

I should have known it was a bad idea to mention Moorfields Eye Hospital in that last post. My body is much too suggestible. Last year a friend sent me an email saying ‘break a leg’ to wish me luck for an important lecture. Whereupon I stepped clumsily off a kerb, damaged the medial collateral ligament in my knee and had to hobble in on a crutch to do the talk. This time, after only a casual mention of Moorfields, I found myself having to visit the hospital as a patient for the very first time in the forty or so year I have lived in London. At the weekend I glanced in the mirror to see a bright red eye staring scarily back at me. I have burst blood vessels in my eyes before (it seems to be a side-effect of ageing and taking too many long-haul flights) but this was the worst I have seen: not a trace of white left, just a bright red orb with an iris and pupil seeming, because of the change in colour contrast, to be sunk within it. When the kids came to the door trick-or-treating for Halloween I was much more terrifying to them than they were to me with their zombie masks. The most charming visitors were three very polite little girls, the backs of their heads enclosed in Islamic headscarves while the fronts were concealed by masks (with their father waiting anxiously outside the gate, ready to prompt them if they forgot to say ‘thankyou’). Much too well-brought-up to ask, they were clearly fascinated and somewhat repelled by the spooky monster eye so I explained carefully what it was as I distributed the grapes which were the nearest thing I had in the kitchen to sweets. Just as they left, the littlest one decided to make a speech. ‘Do you know’, she said, ‘your house smells of chappatti’. I took that as a compliment.

When the eye continued to get worse and started hurting I followed a friend’s advice and took it to Moorfields to be checked out. It will, they tell me, get better of its own accord but I will have to live for the next two weeks or so with the knowledge that there is a complete mismatch between my perception of myself and the impression I am making on others. This must be something that some people live with all the time but i find it very unsettling that my every glance may be arousing disgust or fear or curiosity rather than simply expressing the friendly intentions that eye contact normally conveys. I suppose it is not very different from being the first black (or white) person, or the first nun, or the first person with a burn-scarred face that someone else has ever seen and makes me reflect on how hard it is subjectively to distinguish the fraught and fluctuating boundary between other people’s prejudices and one’s own paranoia and how easily they can reinforce each other, or be challenged, just by a tiny change in mood or attitude.

The Moorfields experience was an example of the NHS at its best. I was conveyed efficiently between a triage nurse, a nurse who did some preliminary tests and an administrative person who took my details (who gave me the only grounds for complaint: why on earth should the first question they ask be ‘Are you married?’) and then escorted to a waiting area where, after being told I might have to wait for two hours, I was actually seen after one.

Outside, I crossed the Old Street roundabout (now known as ‘Silicon Circle’ -  the most unlikely place to have become fashionable that one could have imagined thirty years ago) and walked down to Finsbury Square, which is now entirely occupied by protestors in their tents – the overspill from St Paul’s. It is extraordinary how quickly they seem to have melted into the local environment, attracting hardly a glance, and certainly not a break in the stride of the many passers by. The only grumblings I heard were from people who were annoyed that the bus stop outside Moorgate station is out of action because the road is, yet again, being dug up. The overwhelming impression is that these protesters have, if not the explicit support, at least the tacit approval of the vast majority of Londoners.

Street naming

I was amused to notice the other day that the street next to Moorfields Eye Hospital in London is – appropriately – named ‘Peerless Street’.

Peer Less Street

This first set me thinking of other terrible eyesight-related puns (Seymour Place, Fuller View … ) but then reminded me of that period in the 1980s when the Greater London Council was being abolished. I remember attending a meeting at County Hall (I forget for what purpose it was called) which started with all the participants introducing themselves, and recall being absolutely astonished at the variety of functions the GLC carried out that this revealed. Some were to be expected (‘I’m A from Planning’, ‘I’m B from Parks’; ‘I’m C from Archives’ etc.) but some exposed aspects of public life I had never thought about – most notably, ‘I’m X from Street Naming’. Once mentioned, of course, it seems entirely logical that there should be such a department. But I cannot begin to imagine what sort of a Quango or public-private partnership might have taken this over after the GLC was abolished. I suspect that any scope they might have had for originality is now much reduced.Was there once, perhaps, some joker lurking in the department for the previous half-century taking secret pleasure from such wordplay, or a group taking bets on whether it would be spotted; or is it the merest coincidence? Whatever the background story, it’s a pretty sure bet that, even if this function has not yet been outsourced, it has been reorganised in such a way that there are standard protocols to be followed and procedures to be adopted so that it can be managed in exactly the same way if it were.

I conjure up an image of a hard-pressed young person at a screen in India, checking new names against a database and then hitting a button that sends the new name to be added to some other database halfway across the world that updates the GPS system in the process, perhaps criss-crossing the boundaries of half a dozen different corporate entities – one tiny unit in a complex international division of labour whose members have at least in common the fact that they can probably not even identify, let alone engage with, any boss who actually controls the system.

I have written an article for the latest Socialist Register on the way in which the financial crisis has given a huge new impetus to the standardisation, commodification and outsourcing of public services (see http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/15646 ). This builds on an earlier piece for Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation called ‘the new gold rush’ (which is available free online at http://analytica.metapress.com/content/y865j96l54438251/?p=4e8cbd585492417996d3b277e057f681&pi=0 ) in which I describe the stampede of the new, exponentially growing, multinational corporations that supply outsourced services to the public sector that provides such a profitable new field of accumulation for them.

The price of knowledge (and the knowledge of price)

It’s the start of another academic year – the last in which those students who took a gap year will have remotely affordable fees to pay and for most the first in which the cost of higher education will tip them into serious life-changing debt. With a variety of combinations of anxiety, regret and relief,  parents are contemplating empty teenage bedrooms whilst, with complementary combinations of exhilaration, anomie and panic, their offspring are unpacking their laptops and hanging their clothes in unfamiliar wardrobes. Over them all hangs the question: how will it all be paid for?

My daughter (born in 1982) was part of the first cohort in which parents had to pay fees at all, a generation that was walloped by government policy every step of their way through childhood. Too young to benefit from New Labour’s grudging concessions to working parents (childcare costs were not even tax deductible, let alone subsidised by the state when she was a toddler) yet too old to benefit from the more generous funding of state services for parents in the pre-Thatcher era. Every year, something seemed to be withdrawn that was available to those just a year older. The previous year at her primary school had a one-week trip to Wales for their school journey; her year had to settle for Essex. Hers was the first year to lose the free music tuition that had been available under the old Inner London Education Authority and the first year not to be given free bus passes for travel to secondary school – but also the last year not to benefit from the reduced fares for 16-18-year olds introduced by New Labour, along with Educational Maintenance Grants. This meant paying the full adult fare for the cost of commuting from Zone 2 to Zone 4 in her final two years at school. Hers was also the guinea pig generation for much experimental interference in schools: the first cohort to have to do SATS examinations at primary school, the first to have the choice of GCSEs constrained in such a way that it was impossible, for instance, to specialise strongly in languages, or in visual and performing arts (though in theory producing more all-rounders and reducing the gender gap in subject choice). Not only did this forgotten generation suffer right through their education. They also entered a labour market in which the concept of a job for life had vanished. Apart from a lucky few, there were no apprenticeships or protected graduate trainee positions to be applied for. Suddenly, they had to compete, not just with the contemporaries they had been educated with, but in a global labour market, with similarly qualified kids from all over the world. Without experience it was almost impossible to be employed and the only solution to this Catch 22 on offer to the majority was ‘work experience’ – the unpaid internship that was supposed to confer ‘employability’ (in the process, of course, further undermining wages and conditions for the lucky workers who were actually paid).

The punishment of this squeezed and neglected generation was also, of course, a punishment for their parents, particularly those who, like me, were bringing them up on a single income. We are often presented (including by our children) as privileged baby-boomers, on the one hand blocking the career ladder for our ambitious juniors at work, on the other a demographic time-bomb representing an unsustainable cost to the state and an impossible burden on our childrens’ generation who will have to support us in our decrepitude.

For some, this may well be the case, but for many is is possible to see the economic role of this generation very differently. When we were young we entered a labour market based on a different set of welfare norms. The tax and national insurance contributions we paid went, not towards our own individual pensions, but, in a solidaristic model, to provide for the pensions of our parents’ generation and the  benefits paid to those who didn’t work in a more forgiving welfare state (including the cost of maintaining the mentally ill in – albeit sometimes harsh – mental hospitals).

This model changed when  most of us were in mid-career, in the Thatcher years. We were now supposed to be saving for our own future. But these were also times when the labour market was harsh for many of us, especially women, and even more especially for the growing number of women who were no longer living with a male breadwinner. Far from being able to put money aside, most of us were hard put to find the money just to survive and support our children. And many of us are still having to support them, well after they have reached the age when their parents were economically self-sufficient, in the phenomenon I once heard an Italian statistician describe as ‘Hotel Mamma’. It is not only infantilising and frustrating for them to have to go on living under the parental roof into their thirties and even forties; it is also both expensive and tiresome for their parents: a generation who left home in the 1960s and 1970s to gain some  emotional privacy are now deprived of it by the ever-present critical scrutiny of their children – and sometimes grandchildren.
I have been following the debates over the past few years about student funding with some astonishment. At some point – probably during the 1980s -  a seismic upheaval took place in the consensus that had existed between all political parties in the post World War II period that the cost of higher education should be borne by society as a whole, since society as a whole would of course benefit from the results. If graduates ended up earning more than their peers then, according to this post-war consensus, there was a perfectly simple way for the state to claim back its share of this additional wealth: through income tax. I am still puzzled by how this – to me self-evident – logic broke down. The new consensus, taken for granted as much in the Labour party as in the Coalition government, is that it is unfair for the rest of society to ‘carry the cost’ of tertiary education. Never mind the fact that the many graduates are highly unlikely ever to earn more than the average (think, for instance, of where a degree in theology, or archaelogy or mediaeval history might lead you). Never mind that many of the brightest will be encouraged to leave the country altogether and seek their fortunes elsewhere to avoid paying back their loans; the new common sense holds that it is right and proper that students should spend the most productive period of their adult lives after graduation paying back the cost of their tuition fees and their living costs as students whilst they attended institutions that, to add insult to injury, are rapidly becoming production lines of standardised forms of learning.

How did this come about? Whatever happened to the idea that collectively passing on knowledge and wisdom to the next generation has a general social value that may not necessarily be measured in high salaries? Might not we all benefit from  intelligent discussion on the radio, well-informed local government, compassionate public service delivery, thought-provoking poetry, joyful music and inspiring sermons from the pulpit at the weekend? Won’t well-educated adults make better and more responsible parents? When did the notion of income tax suddenly become a dangerously subversive political no-go area?

It seems as though the idea of social redistribution which is both intra-generational and inter-generational across a whole society is well and truly dead. The debate has narrowed to a kind of bickering about how the costs are to be redistributed over an individual’s own lifetime (which carries implications of inter-generational subsidy within the family): graduate tax versus various different forms of loan with a few means-tested subsidies for those who can prove themselves exceptionally needy.

In thinking about the unacceptability of the income tax solution it struck me that there is a real basis for a psychological rejection of it as unfair. And this lies in the reality that, to some extent, students really ARE privileged, and always have been. This is not necessarily a financial privilege. Indeed it can plausibly be argued that a combination of the downgrading of the value of an undergraduate degree in the labour market, combined with deteriorating job prospects and the burden of paying back a student loan will lead to the value of many undergraduate degrees being financially NEGATIVE. Rather, students (or at least those students who do not have to combine studying with paid employment or put in long hours in laboratories) are privileged in having a period of three or more years in their lives when they have the leisure to read and reflect and develop ideas, the opportunity to meet and get to know – and if they are lucky find soulmates among – a variety of people from different backgrounds, to follow a thought to its conclusion, to experiment socially and sexually, to experience the satisfaction of seeing creative effort fulfilled and to enjoy relatively unstructured time that permits them to sit up till four in the morning talking about the meaning of life. This is an idealised view and many never achieve a fraction of these things. We know that students are increasingly likely to suffer from depression and anxiety (with an alarming increase in the suicide rate) and that the pressure to earn whilst studying is constantly growing. Yet there is enough truth in it to rouse some resentment in those – still a statistical majority – who do not go to university, or at least to allow politicians to whip up such resentment.

Saddling  students with a choice between crippling debt or emigration does not, however, seem like any kind of a solution. Wouldn’t it be better to ask that this privilege is repaid to the rest of society through putting the  knowledge and wisdom that students acquire to good use? How about requiring all students to put in – say – 30 days a year voluntary work: acting as handymen/women or  gardeners to elderly and disabled people, cheering up residents in care homes, helping organise holiday playschemes for children, redecorating dilapidated community centres or whatever. Or, for those lacking social skills or not to be trusted around the vulnerable, manual work improving the environment?  Maoist-style Red Guards or Cameronian envoys of the Big Society? Either way, I suspect both they and the rest of us would benefit far more from this kind of social redistribution of knowledge and time than by channelling their debt (and that of their parents) through the dubious conduits of the banking system.

Academic publishing – a reply to George Monbiot

On Monday, as luck would have it just after I finished uploading (with great difficulty) the latest issue of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, to the printers and online publishers, my attention was drawn to this article by George Monbiot in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist
Ever since, I have found myself in fierce arguments about it, both on and offline, so have decided the best thing to do is to try to make my position clear here.
I should start by saying I very much welcome the article, which presents the industry as a form of rentier capitalism: Monbiot is SO right in much of what he says, and a public critique of academic publishing is long overdue. However I also disagree profoundly with his conclusion that the problem can be solved by putting all academic articles up online free of charge.
Before explaining my reasons, I should come clean about my vested interests. Actually in relation to this particular topic I have so many vested interests that it is difficult to know what order to list them in.
I will settle for chronological order, in terms of my own life:
First, I am a member of the National Union of Journalists, having played quite a prominent role in the 1970s in the organisation of the magazine and books branch, later divided into two separate branches (I was the founding vice-chair of the books branch and later one of its first industrial council members) representing book and journal editors.
Second, I have been, and still am at times a practising editor.
Third, I have been an independent freelance writer, from a generation that remembers a time when it was possible to make a living writing serious non-fiction articles and books – a career that is now virtually impossible because of all the academics queueing up to do such work without pay.
Fourth, I have been an independent researcher carrying out academic research which I was solicited to publish in academic journals but declined to do because I felt I could not afford to part with my intellectual property (and copyright!) without any payment whatsover. (I particularly resented, in the 1980s, being expected to produce camera-ready copy using the publishers’ standard templates, thus putting a typesetter out of work; this now seems anachronistic, but still a matter for regret).
Fifth, (if you can’t beat them, join them: stage one) I have been employed as an academic in which capacity I have written – and still write – articles for publication in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Sixth, I have sat on the editorial boards of several such journals.
Seventh, I have done a lot of research on the restructuring of global value chains by transnational corporations and the impact on labour, including carrying out case studies of how academic journal publishers outsource work to developing countries, undermining wages and working conditions right along the value chain, as well as bringing about a shocking decline in editorial standards.                                                                                                  Eighth, I have been involved in various research and evaluation exercises connected with the development of ethical standards for the conduct of research, particularly research in the social sciences, including issues relating to scientific integrity, avoidance of plagiarism, avoidance of social harm etc. (see, for instance, the website of the RESPECT project which I directed: http://www.respectproject.org)
Ninth (if you can’t beat them, join them: stage 2), I have set up a peer-reviewed academic journal which I edit and publish myself, attempting to do so in a principled manner which (a) leaves the authors in possession of their own copyright (b) is accessible to and affordable by students and people in developing countries and non-academics and (c) tries to promote an open and collegiate dialogue between scholars of different nationalities and in different disciplines with the aim of really trying to understand what’s going on in the world, rather than build careers or create new sub-disciplines.
Needless to say quite a few of these roles are, at least potentially, in conflict with each other. I expose them here so that readers can make up their own minds, but I like to think that perhaps these potential conflicts give me some insight into the complexity of the issues and some clues to potential solutions. The last couple of days have certainly shown me what an extraordinarily wide range of arguments they can drag one into.
So, where to start?

For me one of the most important starting points is labour and its value. In an era when the tools for publication are so readily available, and so many of us blog or otherwise use new or old media to express ourselves, it is easy to forget that human effort, taking up real time and real energy as well as drawing on real knowledge and skills, is involved in producing any publication. It is particularly easy to forget this if you are fortunate enough to have a secure source of income, for instance from a university salary, a research contract or a well-paid newspaper job (yes I know there are vanishingly few of these left but I suspect Monbiot might come into this category). In such circumstances you do not necessarily measure the value of the time you spend on any particular piece of writing; it is just bundled in with the range of things that you do, indeed that you may enjoy doing. It becomes hard to imagine what it is like for someone who has no such secure source of income and is reliant on being paid by the thousand words, or through a publisher’s advance that will have to be paid back through royalties. As I have written elswhere, it is bad enough to be a precarious worker competing with others who are paid peanuts (for instance a European clothing worker competing with labour in China); but how can any one possibly compete with people who work literally for nothing? Yet this is what has happened in universities around the world.

Academics are now put under incredible pressure to publish in peer-reviewed journals, to meet targets set by their universities, to achieve tenure, or to fulfill the requirements of research assessment exercises like the RAE in the UK (now replaced with the REF). So their output is prodigious. Academic journals have taken advantage of this buyers’ market not only to externalise more and more tasks onto their authors, or would-be authors (telling them what typefaces to use, how to lay out their documents, how to originate their graphs etc.) but, adding insult to injury, many journals now actually CHARGE for submission.  In a conversation this morning with a geologist who has recently completed her PhD I discovered that this is absolutely normal practice in her field (‘the last one I submitted was charged $200 and the one before $140′ she told me). Leaving aside the vexed question of what happens if someone without a salary wants to submit a serious scientific article for publication, if one looks only at such authorial labour it is possible to arrive at the position that the best and most ethical way to distribute such material is free on the internet. After all, if these academics have been paid from public funds to do their research and write it up, and if they already have the technical wherewithal to create easily readable pdf files then surely that is the simplest way to go. Why should large multinational companies charge the academic community for producing this stuff and then charge them all over again for reading it, making a huge profit in the process?

Alas, this is NOT the only labour involved. First of all, readers need to know that what they are reading is not lies or quackery and part of the role of a journal editor is to ensure responsible peer review and manage this process. Even more importantly, most academics are not professional authors and these days probably a majority of those submitting articles to English-language journals do not have English as a mother tongue. Turning their prose into clear and unambiguous English, correcting their spelling and grammar, checking that the figures in their tables add up, that their charts are in the right format, that their footnotes are consistent and that the references in their bibliographies are correct and match those in the text is an enormous amount of work. (I write as someone who has been doing this solidly for the last six weeks or so). And that isn’t the half of it. The work has to be presented to printers or online publishers using software packages that are temperamental and difficult to use. (To give one small example, I discovered too late after the last issue went to press that in version 4 of Indesign when you export the file via a postscript file to be turned into a pdf file through Adobe Distiller the software instructs it to ignore any blank page that has no content on it, so the blank page I had left after the contents page so that page one would start on the right-hand side, or recto, was being deleted, however many times i reinserted it. OK that’s boring but absolutely typical of the sorts of things that you have to develop specialist knowledge about). So, to cut matters short, you need editors. And you might think that, given that the academic publishers are getting all their initial text for nothing from their authors (indeed even being paid to receive it) that these skilled people might be decently rewarded and respected for what they do. But not a bit of it. These are precisely the jobs that are being offshored: in the case of copy-editing, to English-speaking countries like India or South Africa; for non-language tasks, like formatting charts and diagrams, to China and elsewhere. Research done in these locations (see, for instance, http://analytica.metapress.com/content/y706872w23q27523/) shows that the workers recruited are overwhelmingly young, inexperienced and inadequately trained. They are put under such pressure to work in a production-line manner to tight deadlines that few can stand it for long, with the result that staff turnover in these offshore establishments is extraordinarly high – with a negative effect on quality. Switching, for a moment, from speaking as an editor to speaking as an academic author, I have often been enraged to have my prose come back from academic publishers maimed by such editing. Sometimes these distortions are just a result of following old-fashioned rules (like ‘never start a sentence with “and” or “but”‘), sometimes it is linguistic ignorance (like the editor who told me that there was no such phrase in English as ‘set in train’ and demanded that I supply a synonym) and sometimes real incomprehension, when a sentence is reworded to mean its opposite or a word is substituted with a completely different meaning. Here I am not suggesting that somehow Indians have a poorer grasp of the English language than Brits; just that recruiting inexperienced and demotivated people is bound to lead to a multiplication of errors. If you stood outside the arts faculty of a British university handing out leaflets to new graduates encouraging them to come and work for you and then gave them a week’s training the results would undoubtedly be just as bad, if not worse. My point here is that if you want good scholarly publishing you need good editors. But you also need a lot of other people too. Both print-on-demand and online publishing (the two types of publishing I am currently using), not to mention marketing, distribution, processing sales and subscriptions etc. all also require a skilled workforce that should be properly paid for its work.

One of the most disturbing developments in academic publishing over the last couple of decades has been the pheonomenal growth of large multinational companies, rather less publicly known than the publishing chains, to deal with some of these additional roles, many with positions approaching monopolies, or at least duopolies in the market. One of these new roles is that of the library subscription agent. Almost all university libraries make their purchases through these agents (usually one of the two world leaders: SWETS and EBSCO) who are in a position to influence sales quite substantially depending on what special deals have been cut with the publishers. Another group are the online publishers. Whilst the very largest publishing transnationals tend to do their own online publishing, many smaller companies (including my own!) are dependent on these commercial online publishers to bring their work to readers in places that have stopped buying physical books to put on the shelves. Both the subscription agents and the online publishers occupy intermediate positions in this global market that enable them to take money from both parties: publishers and libraries (or, more rarely, individual readers).  They certainly take a large proportion of the profit (or in the case of my  own journal so far, seem to keep us forever on the wrong side of ever quite breaking even). Add into the picture the print-on-demand publishers, which also tend to be subsidiaries of global companies, usually US-owned. These companies also have some other things in common. They tend to have highly automated online systems in which a lot of the labour (and risk) is externalised to customers and suppliers. In my – admittedly limited – experience, it is rare to get to communicate with an actual human being in one of these companies but when one does, they seem to be rather stressed, rather junior staff, though often very friendly and, once one has established personal contact, as helpful as they can be within the constraints of the taylorised straitjackets of their job descriptions and standard protocols. Although the front offices of these companies are often sited adjacent to prestigious academic settings, in places like Oxford, or Boston, the back office staff (when they are not in developing countries) are more likely to be in non-union states in the US South: unlikely, methinks, to be well-paid. Although I try to run my own publishing business without exploiting anyone’s labour (other than my own), I feel that I am implicated indirectly in their poor working conditions.

My general point here is that all this labour is necessary and should be paid for. It is an obscenity that monopolistic academic publishers are able to exploit it. But the problem cannot be solved by simply introducing a system of free publication, at least not unless some alternative means can be found for funding these workers in decent employment.

There are interesting debates to be had about this, but this blog is already getting much longer than usual and I want to end by shifting my attention away from labour and donning my independent publisher’s hat. When I commented this morning on facebook that we need a more open market in academic publishing I was shot down in flames for being ‘neo-liberal’. I was reminded by this of arguments we used to get into in the NUJ back in the 1970s when, whenever a publisher was in trouble and starting to make people redundant, the old Trotksyist demand of ‘nationalisation under workers’ control’ would be trotted out. My feeling at the time was that, while this demand might be fine if you were working in a factory or a shop or a bank, it was somewhat dangerous if one’s work had an ideological content. Would you, I remember asking (to boos and cries of ‘reformist!’), REALLY want your newspaper or magazine or publishing house  to be run by state bureaucrats under a dictatorial government? Surely ideas are one of the few areas where we really do want openness. It seems to me that it is not just for reasons of creating an informed democracy but also to further intellectual thought (including airing heterodox opinions) that we need a pluralist independent publishing community, open to new ideas.

What we have now mitigates strongly against this. Academic publishing is a grotesque parody of a free market. The large publishers, knowing that they own some ‘must-read’ titles don’t sell them individually to university libraries (or not without charging an outrageous premium). What they do instead is bundle them together with a lot of other less-popular titles. The university libraries, with pressure on their shrinking budgets, increasingly rely on these special deals and buy only the bundles, among which there may be journals which will NEVER be read at all by their users. There are none of the usual feedback mechanisms which apply in book publishing, whereby one book might be a best-seller and another, even by the same author, will end up remaindered because it didn’t appeal to the readers or got a bad review. Once the subscriptions are sold, the journals go on being churned out, and consumed, regardless of interest or quality. In such a situation an independent journal hardly even gets a look-in.