03.08.1995

Bosses find utopia

LAST WEEK saw the the publication of the eight-strong Liberal Democrat-inspired Dahrendorf commission report.

After 18 months of strenuous and worthy deliberation, the commission decided that reality was not quite to its liking, retreating into the misty realm of utopianism. Consequently, the report issued a clarion call for “a vocabulary of change”.  The noble Lord Dahrendorf wants to abolish old-fashioned terms like “rich and poor”, “employees and employers”, etc.

For instance, the working class no longer ‘officially’ exists. Rather, it is now classified - somewhat mysteriously - as “the excluded”, who can no longer participate fully in society. Naturally, the commission wants to reintegrate “the excluded” back into society and create a society which “makes every effort to involve all its citizens in the labour market, in the associations of civil society, in the political process”.

The classless nirvana of the future outlined in the Dahrendorf report has inspired the ‘anti-establishment’ wing of the bourgeoisie. The Guardian, with glorious silliness, gushed about “transforming people into stakeholders rather than workers, shareholders or customers” (July 26).

The presence of Will Hutton on the commission is illuminating. Hutton’s ‘big idea’, peddled in his best selling book, The state we’re in, is that the current casino-type ‘nasty’ capitalism (or “shareholder capitalism”) needs to be replaced by regulated, ‘nice’ capitalism (or “stakeholder capitalism”). For most of us these ideas are neither new or ‘big’ - indeed, they come wrapped in intellectual mothballs - but for the liberal middle class they are the words of a new intellectual messiah, who will avert the coming crisis of capitalism.

Obviously intoxicated by the buzzwords of the commission - such as “social cohesion”, “citizenship”, “public domain”, etc - Hutton has laughably declared: “Stakeholding, for all its modesty as a word, is full of threat to the current order” (The Guardian, July 26).

The Dahrendorf report contains no threat to the current order. Indeed, it is written with the specific intention of maintaining capitalism and destroying the idea of the working class as a class for itself, which liberates the whole of society. Instead, the commission prefers us to remain a permanent slave class.

Danny Hammill