David Cameron, whose party, according to Electoral Commission analysis, gets more than half of its donations from the City, seeks ‘responsible capitalism’. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband provides us with another load of perfectly recyclable paper but still finds it difficult to come up with a big idea. So let’s face it – speeches and papers don’t make much difference in times when politicians are failing to back them with an appropriate action. For a person brought up in post-Soviet Russia it is a really hard thing to say but… do we really need Karl Marx to sort it all out?
Allegra Stratton wrote a brilliant article for the Guardian earlier this week saying ‘both parties in the coalition subscribe to the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter’. Now fooling-around-mode off. Can mock Ed Miliband later. Question is how long is the list of Schumpeter’s ideas the coalition has put their names to and weather this list is being updated or not?
Stepping in to ‘save capitalism from its purest version of itself’, taking ‘action on executive pay’ and ‘ending City short-termism’ may be only one part of the picture. What lies behind these things is known as Mark II theory.
Mark II was developed when Schumpeter was a professor at Harvard and is based on the idea that the agents that drive our economy are large companies (not the entrepreneur-spirit as Mark I theory stated). Large companies have resources and capital so they can invest in research and development and encourage economic growth. This growth makes large companies even larger and stronger and eventually allows them to ‘gain monopolies’. That’s where it all comes to what Marx (and later Schumpeter) called ‘creative destruction’.
Free-market theory calls it ‘downsizing’, Cameron calls it ‘responsible capitalism’ but no matter which way you look at it, it does have some political outcomes.
Another Schumpeter’s big idea was to make ‘rule by the people’ concept both unlikely and undesirable, to reduce it to competition between political leaders. Although you still need periodic elections to legitimize governments and keep them somehow accountable, you don’t put people first.
In this kind of society you don’t need too much ‘intellectuals’ (and you raise tuition fees to cut their number down), you don’t need protesters (so you can safely let police evict them from outside St Paul’s Cathedral). Actually, come to think of it, all you do is cut some bonuses, kick bank regulation into 2019 and hope by that time we won’t face bankruptcy. Truth is, we might not have less money by 2020s but all of a sudden we can end up being a bit less democratic.
PS. Thanks to Alex!
POWER COMA 