We're all in this together: Kapo-logic (or #ukuncut)

We're all in this together: Kapo-logic (or: hashtag ukuncut)

 

In the second world war, the Nazis would single out certain Jews, grant them privileges, and employ them to implement their directives. These people worked for their life. When the time came, they lost theirs too. You cannot blame these people. What would you do? I know what I would do. In Vichy France during the second world war, the entire government smoothly implemented Nazi directives, most notoriously, delivering horrifying numbers of Jews to the death camps.

 

Although my comparison may be regarded as obscene, I will make it anyway. The plight of those in government departments, social services, the NHS, education, and any occupation that relies on public funding is more and more playing itself out according to what we might call kapo-logic – based on a hope, a lifeline, that relies on the sacrifice of others and ultimately maybe even suicide.

 

For, how are the cuts being implemented? What does it look like to face the cuts? This is how it is happening to friends and family of mine: line managers are asked to restructure their departments, sections and teams. Restructure means cut costs: sack people. So everyone gets up and dances and when the music stops, there are fewer chairs and one or more people in the team are out. Then the line manager looks at their line manager, who has been doing the same thing. She gets up and dances, and dances and dances, for her life, and when the music stops she may or may not have a seat. Either way, people will be out. This is what's happening at the front line, all across the board, all over the UK. Everyone's position is reviewed; departments are redrawn, and everyone has to reapply for their former job, or a lower-paying version of something similar.

 

It's a terrible situation to be in. How is this kind of process to be addressed? Oppositional political thinking would demand that 'we' oppose 'this' and that we oppose 'them'. But how can you oppose this? If you try, you are out: problem solved; one cut made, one inefficiency exposed and expelled. This is the problem.

 

But what is the alternative to oppositional thinking, which all too often plays into the hands of the power it seeks to oppose? I would suggest: instead of opposing, ask for consistency. Instead of opposing, say: ok, if we are all in this together, then let's all be in this together. If we make cuts to teams and expenditures at the coal-face here, how far up through the chain are line managers making equivalent or proportional cuts?

 

The fact that it is not very far and certainly not all the way up to the top, is what is currently driving people insane with frustration and desperation. The most famous and clear-cut case here is that of the banks and the bankers. These were the people and institutions that caused the financial crisis in the first place, by speculating money on speculative money and then running to the government for unspeakably huge handouts when the lie could be sustained no longer. Instead of bailing them out with strict conditions, the governments simply panicked and gave them a bailout with no strings attached. And then the poorest in society, via the denudation of essential frontline public services, has been made to pick up the bill. This is obscene. Everyone can see this.

 

There are many other equally clear-cut examples too. Universities face an 80% reduction in funding for teaching and a 100% cut in the funding of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Just to twist the knife, and for good measure, the cuts are being implemented now, even though the universities are not allowed to start charging the extra to cover the loss at this time, and so have to take a huge financial hit this year. Plus, of course, despite this being rushed through with arguments about market mechanisms, the universities are not, after all, going to be allowed to charge whatever they like (or need) for their provision of what is no longer a public service but is henceforth a private commodity (education).

 

So the universities are taking a double hit – a bit like administering a double-dose of medicine at the start of a course of treatment to really get things going in the direction you want. So the universities are having to cut the lowest paid, most vulnerable and most easily sacked, including, of course, part-time lecturers, tutors, teaching assistants, support staff, estates services, and so on, and reduce spending on all manner of thing… But, at the same time, university vice chancellors are still awarding themselves massive pay rises. And these people often earn six figure salaries as it is.

 

The same is true at the top and bottom end of very many other public services: job losses and pay cuts at the bottom; financial rewards for those at the top.

 

So we are clearly not all in this together. So what is to be done?

 

If there were consistency and communication networks and accountability that were not simply top-down but also bottom up, then maybe there could be an avoidance of politics. If it were possible in any institution to say, as equals to equals, ok, if we're all in this together, then we will take a hit down here, provided that you take an equivalent hit up there. Indeed, if this really were about the money, about the actual financial figures involved, then surely a matching percentage pay cut at the top or an equivalent sacrificial body-count at the top would be a much more prudent and logical course of action to pursue. You know: perhaps reducing six figure incomes to, I don't know, five figure incomes might even offset the need to cut any frontline services or lower-paid jobs.

 

But there are no non-top-down or bottom-up management structures. There are no smooth communication networks that can ask for or impose consistency and coherence. Institutions are not democratic. They are closer to totalitarian regimes, whether in the public or the private realms. (And it is not only public services that are bureaucratic, inefficient and positively Kafkaesque, as anyone who has ever been on the telephone to an insurance company will be able to testify.)

 

And this absence of equality and consistency, and the injustice of the inequality and inconsistency, is one reason why there can be no avoidance of the political vis-à-vis the cuts. We are often powerless as individuals within institutions to avoid axes and swords of Damocles and edicts and injunctions imposed from above and afar. Although we still always need to ask: am I powerless here? Do I need to do this? What are the consequences? Are there alternatives? What are their consequences? And so on. But most institutions will not countenance dissent – especially if they are not unionised.

 

So the frustration and sense of impotence caused by the stranglehold of institutions with top-down directives is one of the reasons why it looks like we are seeing the re-emergence of the political. That is to say, it is why, in this context, certain images and motifs are becoming stark symbols: the bankers who caused this; the governments who signed off on it; those at the top who are obviously not in this in anything like the same way that far too many are.

 

This groundswell, combined with the Twitter hashtag of 'ukuncut' is what seems to be giving birth to a politics that is not party politics, but is simply one of consistency, coherence, justice, openness. It is about verification. It asks: is this necessary? Who or what caused this supposed necessity? Are those who caused it 'in it together' with those who are bearing the brunt of it?

 

This political movement is based on the demand for coherence, consistency, justice and their verification. This whole politicized response is not dominated by denouncing the other as evil and enemy and bad. It is rather taking the form of demanding that words and declarations and promises and public images and brandings and messages are actually actualised. Slavoj Žižek calls this a politics of 'overidentification' – of demanding that what a power edifice says and purports and claims is actually instituted. Žižek suggests that demanding the literal – the literal actualisation of what power says it wants or is trying to do – can be extremely subversive. Jacques Rancière calls it a politics of verification: is what you are saying true? Prove it.

 

So, if the claim is that we are all in this together and that we must all face cuts, the resounding response is 'prove it'.

 

Thanks to the starkness of the image of billionaire bankers allowed to get away with billions upon billions of pounds-worth of free government handouts, and the starkness of the image of governments asking the poorest in society to foot the bill, and asking, among others, universities to implement their cuts at the bottom while vice chancellors reward themselves with pay rises at the top, it becomes clear that this is not about balancing the books or reducing debt. It is about furthering a neoliberal agenda based on the wishful thinking and self-serving tautological justification for inequality of top-down economics and trickle-down economics. Neoliberal trickle-down theory holds that if the rich get richer then the poor get richer. Inequality is necessary and good. History and empirical evidence of all sorts shows that as the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

 

There is a groundswell of realisation of this. UKuncut is pursuing the politics of literalisation or overidentification or verification, by, for example, taking Cameron's guff about 'creating the big society' and asking us to invent new ways of inventing this, such as staging lectures about tax avoidance in Vodaphone shops and setting up libraries in branches of Barclays Bank. But the question is, where does this go?

 

Where does it go when the political opposition party in the UK is entirely culpable; at least as much as the Con-Dem coalition. New Labour picked up the ideological baton of neoliberalism and ran with it, albeit with something of a guilty social conscience. Cameron has regained it with gusto. But it was Gordon Brown's Labour that commissioned the Browne Review. And where is this party now? Apparently nowhere, because it is in basically the same place.

 

I had an email conversation with my Tory MP, in which I argued with him to vote against the proposed cuts to and privatization of education. He was not to be persuaded. In this conversation, he argued that the reason why the banks should not be expected to repay their debts is that they need to 'recapitalize'. Once they've recapitalized, then, we all somehow miraculously reap the rewards and the trickle-down benefits  of their delivery of debt to our door.

 

If this is the case, I would hope that Labour might be persuaded to 're-Labour-ize' – to realise that their sub-Thatcherite and now soiled Blairite brand need no longer be scared of its socialist past. Labour shed its socialist past in order to win in 1997. But the new brand soon turned bad…

 

As all good marketers know: Retro is all the rage. Nostalgia sells in a recession. People are nostalgic for a left. So perhaps we might encourage Labour to relabourize. This would be something. How might we do this? Hassle them to hell. In every quiet moment you have, take out your phone and tweet labour MPs. Ask them: what do you think about #ukuncut? Ask them: why do you never use the word 'neoliberalism'? Is it because you cannot find a way to distance or distinguish yourself from it? Ask them: do you oppose this? Can you give us any reason to vote for you ever again? Are we all in this together? Are you with us? Ask them. Irritate them. Tweet them. Poke them. Insist on drawing this political issue into visibility, onto their radars and into their parliamentary consciousnesses and consciences.

 

We should have learned in recent months that we cannot rely on the mainstream media to represent anything for us, anything about us. So pick up your mobile phones now, and let your fingers do the talking.