Before Ireland’s third pandemic lockdown began, in December 2020, I paid a visit to my local library, in the hope of stocking up on books and films to sustain me in the months ahead. And I’m glad I did: the long weeks of isolation would have been far heavier, more dispiriting and lonely, without the hoard of soul-food I gathered from the library’s gloriously ample and eclectic store.
Among the titles which have so enriched my days since, was a retrospective collection of work by the indigenous Peruvian photographer, Martín Chambi, born (to my rather boyish delight, exactly a hundred years before myself) in 1891. I can say without exaggeration that it’s become one of my favourite books.
Cataloguing and celebrating the work, migration, landscapes, and customs of primarily Quechua-speaking peoples in the Peruvian Andes, where the Inca empire reigned until the late sixteenth century, Chambi’s images form a mesmerising record of the effects of social and political marginalisation; while at the same time seeming nearly to sing, in festive tribute, to such communities, his own.
“He was the first great photographer not to regard us through the eyes of the colonist”, observed Sara Facio, founder of the Museum of Latin American Photography in Argentina (Hopkinson, 2). “I am representative of my race”, he said himself: “my people speak [through] my photographies.”
I’ve never practiced or studied in the visual arts, and so my response to photographs tends to be intuitive and instantaneous, rather than analytical and honed. In so far as I’m able to classify my preferences, I seem to share François Truffaut’s belief, “that a successful film”, for example, has “simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of cinema,” and moreover to sympathise with his demand “that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema.” I expect the same from photography.
I’m most attracted to those artists who deploy their techniques and draw on their chosen traditions skillfully, of course, but also with a view to making a statement on reality. And by reality, I mean any space of experience and interaction in which other people – their rhythms, labours, presence, and visual attention – are implied or acknowledged.
Also with Truffaut, I like to glimpse, if I can, something of the artist’s own peculiar passion from the work they’ve produced: to trace beneath the surface of a photograph, or indeed a poem, some shadow of that human fixation, that otherwise private and unresolvable neediness and knottiness, which partly impelled its making. In other words, I go back to images and artworks that seem, however delicately, to dramatise a tension I also feel in my own life, between outwardness (love of the world) and introspection (the ability to self-examine). These, broadly, give some indication of the shaping concerns, and no doubt also the limitations, of my appreciation for photography: what I look for, and why.
Such reflections also drive to the heart of what I found, and what I value so much, in Martín Chambi’s work specifically. By approaching his “people” in a spirit of creative sympathy and affection, camera in tow, he was also, I believe, asserting and defining his own life in the world: taking a side, but in a way that affirmed his deepest needs and sense of belonging; the instincts of his evolving self, as an inheritor of Amerindian culture in a rapidly, often violently modernising era. All of this, moreover, shines, easily and entrancingly, in the images he left behind.
Importantly, to the extent that he was photographing indigenous, peasant, and labouring people as people, with the warmth of recognition and respect, Chambí was not only offering a series of social documents on his time, but elaborating a visual rebuke to those discourses and forces (of metropolitan disdain, colonial hegemony, economic plunder) that thrive on the invisibilisation of some classes and communities, and the elevation and sanctification of others. His photographs are a defiant counter-narrative to the schematism, relentlessness, and embedded calculation of such world-histories.
Within (or alongside) this quality, however, is another. In fact, there’s a baseline atmosphere in Chambi’s work, difficult to describe, but which I find totally captivating. Its main element, I think, is intimacy: an intimacy, reached for and reciprocated, with his subjects. In real terms, after all, almost anyone can point a camera in a given direction, and click: anyone can take a photograph. But it’s surely a rare observer who can sight and salute, in every other portrait, the exact individual and their humanity. Trawling his work today, it’s as if Chambi has seen some inner light in each person, each scene, a light that even they had only been foggily aware of before, and handed it back to them, in praise and thanks – for it was theirs to give, theirs to keep.
I’m thinking of the so-called “Giant of Paruro” (7 ft tall), pictured by Chambi in 1925: the gentleness in his face and hands, the intense, unobtrusive quiet of his stance, raggedly clad and yet majestic. Or a year later, the portrait of Miguel Quiespe, known as ‘El Inca’ after tramping barefoot across the mountainous region of his native Paucartambo, organizing for the cause of land rights and reform; later (I learn) he was found dead in Lima, assassinated. He sits before the camera, both statuesque and bristling, in native garb, seemingly immersed in thought, as he raises a (criminalised) coca leaf in one hand, his eyes turned downwards, hidden in shadow and light. Then, one of my favourites, a photograph in which Chambi himself appears, pacing a hand-woven, local rope bridge in Cuzco, 1929, a trail of bent-backed, quick-stepping pedlars passing on either side of him, as they haul their loads against a backdrop of wide, sun-white sky.
And there are many more: carefully glanced and emotionally laden images of life and the living, in the far reaches of an epoch hostile to both, promising only poverty and physical erasure. In Chambi’s work, by contrast, every presumed margin seems to gleam, a vital centre and a known locale, human to the root. Linger long or attentively enough over these pictures, and you might just hear their chatter and talk, the lithe exchange of their moment, break out – photographer and friends, laughing shyly with one another.
Speaking for myself, I look at these social portraits with a sensation that blends vivid familiarity and strangeness, awake to the dauntingly vast distances (of time, place, circumstance and experience) over which my nevertheless visceral certainty of identification must travel. Perhaps this is an effect of the artist’s own kinship: the impression, always, that the particular gaze – directed as it may be, curated as its chosen vistas undoubtedly are – is not so much motivated by acquisition and judgement, fixing people in their places, as filled by what is surely a kind of joy, the capacity for human affinity and recognition.
As our twenty-first-century pandemic rages on, as vaccines are tested, staggered, and accumulated unevenly across the globe, I realise that we live in an era, as Eduardo Galeano once said, “of powerful centres and subjugated outposts”, ruled by regimes of in-/visibility and engineered inequality – whose dominance is never total (267). I believe that’s why these photographs speak so eloquently: with their art, vision, feeling, and friendship. We still live in Chambi’s world.
References
Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America (NYU Press; New York, 1973/1997).
Amanda Hopkinson, Martín Chambi (Phaidon; London, 2001).
François Truffaut, The Films in My Life (Da Capo Press; Boston, 1994)
Conversations, perceptions and priorities change over time. About a decade ago, most energy and ‘green’ talks highlighted examples such as Brooklyn Bridge Park, once the greenest destination in New York city; Solar Power Towers in California; planning for the renewable energy ‘supergrid’ in Europe; the U.S. Navy’s plans for a Green Fleet; or Los Angeles’s centrally planned mechanism for ending the use of coal by 2020.
This explains in large part the recent emergence of triple-helix connection between research, industry and government, and a green emphasis found in university curricula and other educational institutions. This draws on global evidence of the effectiveness of renewables in transforming rural livelihoods, the nature of community development, and addressing the energy-poverty nexus.
We are now witnessing a steady increase in the proportion of renewable energy sources; this is a gradual transition from mere ‘additives’ to ‘alternatives’ within the total energy mix in rural areas of developing nations.
About two-thirds of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas. Among the numerous factors that lead to the eradication of rural poverty are increased access to goods, services and information, requiring increased participation from institutions at all levels.
The alleviation of poverty is hindered by two inter-linked phenomena: a lack of access to improved energy services and worsening environmental shocks due to climate change – which severely affects the vulnerable, poor, most of whom live in rural areas. Mitigating climate change, increasing energy access, and alleviating rural poverty are thoroughly entwined; this overlap leads to an energy-poverty-climate nexus.
Improved access to energy services alone will not eradicate poverty, but it does create immediate and visible impacts. Up to 1.5 billion people still live without access to electricity, another billion only have access to unreliable electricity, and close to half of the global population depends on traditional biomass fuels for cooking and heating. Energy-poverty results in unmet basic needs and depressed economic and educational opportunities that particularly affect women, children, and minorities.
Electricity catalyses rural economic activity and increases the quality of services available to meet basic business and domestic needs through improved lighting, labour-saving devices, and access to information via TV, radio and cell phones. The provision of high-quality public lighting can increase security and improve delivery of health and education services. Improving the delivery of affordable, reliable energy services to rural communities is critical for helping them develop human and economic capacity to adapt in the face of a changing climate.
The largest wind farm of India in Muppandal, Tamil Nadu
Sustainable Development and Energy Access
The umbrella term ‘sustainable development’, can be viewed as a water tank having two-leaks, one leak being ‘poverty’ and the other ‘environmental degradation’. Both these challenges, i.e. the leaks, need to be dealt with simultaneously. In modern times, no country has managed to substantially reduce poverty without greatly increasing the use of energy, or utilising efficient forms of energy and/or energy services. Without ensuring minimum access to energy services for a significant proportion of the population, countries have been unable to move beyond a subsistence economy.
However, merely introducing cheap, easily available ‘green’ energy is insufficient. Its utility lies in facilitating human development. The energy sector has strong links with poverty reduction through health, education, gender, and the environment.
One of the most important factors in sustainable development is a fully sustainable supply of energy resources. About one-third of the world burns wood and other biomass for cooking, heating and lighting, accounting for more than 13% of global energy consumption. In rural areas conventional cooking fuels, burned in traditional cooking stoves, emit toxic emissions resulting in more than 1.8 million premature deaths per year, according to WHO estimates, with children younger than five accounting for half of all fatalities.
A secure supply of energy it thus an essential requirement for development within a society. In the long term, moreover, a sustainable supply of energy resources should be available at a reasonable cost, and without negative societal and environmental impacts, assuming an effective and efficient utilisation of energy resources.
A typical rural peasant Indian village in Rajasthan, India.
Sustainable Energy Development Strategies and Renewable Energy
Sustainable Energy Development Strategies typically involve three major technological changes: energy savings on the demand side; efficiency improvements in the energy production; and replacement of fossil fuels with various sources of renewable energy. This is important because, energy savings and energy efficiency are critical components for achieving sustainable development, as suggested by several researchers. In addition, however, efficient renewable energy technology management is also required.
While energy saving and energy efficiency are two issues that public policymakers consider when formulating a strategy to maximise available energy potential, management of renewable energy technologies involves a wider variety of private and public actors along with the participation of users at the grassroots level.
India, in particular, has seen how the public-private-people partnership mechanism works for renewable energy technology applications in rural areas. The public and private sector work together to bring solar energy technologies to rural users, working closely with NGOs, VOs, suppliers, universities and think-tanks to create a win-win for all stakeholders involved.
Additionally, evidence show how renewable energy-based entrepreneurship has transformed rural lives and rural development management. The use of solar lantern, lamps, irrigation pumps, home lighting systems, amongst other innovations, have proved useful for businesses and families in many rural areas. This not only raises income levels, but also brings the community closer together, thereby generating social capital through increased connectivity and collaboration.
Woman harvesting wheat, Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh, India.
Renewable Energy and Rural Livelihoods
From alternative job creation in rural households to electrification of schools for children’s education, along with uses in the health service and maintaining biodiversity, renewable energy promises a wide range of development options to rural areas. In rural India, RETs provide lighting to thousands of remote villages that cannot access electricity through grid extension. This provides clean energy to rural households in the so-called electrified villages. It can also supplement electricity in households with poor electricity supply (ranging between 5 to 8 hours per day) through grid tail-end injection systems (which have increased costs and are difficult to adopt in households without an initial induction).
There are huge market development possibilities wherever the government establishes renewable energy markets for rural population. Central governments in developing nations (especially in emerging BRICs) can target key provinces for the development of specific renewable energy option, and also explore and encourage potential government-industry partnerships to spur market technology.
Adoption of effective policies – the building of an institutional framework to support renewable energy development; the establishment of effective financial mechanisms to provide capital for renewable energy development; the implementation of market transformation strategies to encourage renewable energy development; and the enhancement of international co-operation to promote renewable energy technologies; will together create the necessary and much anticipated level playing field, essential to enabling renewable energy technologies to compete with conventional energy options.
Solar Power Plant Telangana II in state of Telangana, India.
Solar Energy-based Entrepreneurship in South Asia
The South Asian experience with Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs) and its dissemination to low income, rural households, along with developing solar energy-based entrepreneurial opportunities, have been highly successful. Initially, it was a success story from Bangladesh, which claimed the title of ‘solar nation’ due to its proactive rural development plans, tied to alternative energy use. This in turn inspired neighbouring countries.
However, research shows that India started its work with RETs well before most other nations (East or East), led in particular by organisations that have built or supported solar energy entrepreneurs, which have been instrumental in transforming rural livelihoods and wellbeing, using solar energy technologies.
The penetration of RETs in the form of Solar Home Systems (SHS) in rural households and the use of that technology for creating micro enterprises has been widely cited as a successful case of solar RE contributing to rural development. Households who received the SHS used the technology to start micro-enterprises from home by making and selling different home-made handicraft goods e.g. jute and silk products.
These micro-enterprises, particularly those run and managed by women, also hired and actively engaged workers from the local community.
In addition to SHS, there are entrepreneurs who have started energy-based businesses in rural areas using solar lanterns, solar mobile charging stations, solar headlamps, amongst many other forms of solar technologies. Rural women are often the ones leading the way in assembling solar accessories in village-based technology centres. Solar engineers are increasingly employed in designing SHS, working in battery factories, and other accessory-related businesses.
India International Trade Fair, Pragati Maidan, in New Delhi on November 15, 2006.
Who is a Solar Energy Entrepreneur?
In this context, a ‘Solar Entrepreneur is someone who would do one or a combination of the following – buy, rent, borrow, sell, maintain, service, manufacture or install – any or a mix of solar energy technologies for setting up an income-generating energy-based enterprise/s.’
Examples of these technologies include solar home lighting systems, solar lanterns, solar crop dryers, solar kilns, solar wax melters, solar cookers, solar lamps and headlamps, solar irrigation pumps, solar mobile phone chargers, solar vans, and short-haul transport mobility vans amongst many others.
The applications and multi-faceted use of these technologies are visible in both rural and urban areas. A wide range of local-level applications, however, is largely seen in rural areas where communities are involved in the process of use and expansion of these technologies amidst a growing realisation that solar energy technologies are not merely ‘additives’ or ‘add-on’ energy options, but an ‘asset.’
Research shows that solar energy entrepreneurs typically develop community-based initiatives, and are drawn from both sexes, work with various institutions and different partnership arrangements. For example, prior to the introduction of new technology in a rural area, an NGO or VO (informal institutions) works on sensitising the region before any change takes place.
This would ordinarily involve trainers and educators coming from universities, thinktanks, governments and also informal institutions. This is also a stage where potential entrepreneurs are identified and supporting mechanisms are discussed. The technology would be provided by a thinktank or a corporate body and, in some cases, indigenous renewable energy-based enterprises who work closely with local SME-ranged suppliers.
The finance required to secure a solar energy technology can come from entrepreneurs’ personal savings or family/community borrowing. Increasingly, there are also options available from cooperatives, regional rural banks and microfinance bodies.
The building of solar energy entrepreneurship is generally activised by a host of actors (both public and private) at the initial stage until it catches on in rural areas. As it grows through community adoption, many more individuals and groups tend join in to expand the scale and operational effectiveness of solar energy technologies. Community involvement in projects where local-level entrepreneurship is generated is not optional anymore, similarly, the importance of locally sourced enterprises cannot be stressed sufficiently at a time when indigenous products need to gain more markets, locally and nationally. While cheaper ‘made in China’ products can be more accessible, this won’t help local suppliers and nested institutions that are committed and engaged in supporting indigenous solar energy businesses.
Feature Image: Social forestry near Mothugudem of Khammam district in Andhra Pradesh, India
The attention in W. G. Sebald’s writing to the fascist era in European history anticipates many of the controlling measures of our time. Images abound throughout his work, leading to observations and recollections both of historical incidents, literary tradition and the lives of friends and immigrants, as well digressions on nature. We find a unique blend of memoir, historical and philosophical disquisitions, and a form of narrative storytelling based on fact with the occasional intrusion of fiction.
W.G. Sebald
Sebald’s oeuvre represents a novel semi-fictional genre with precedents in Nabokov’s Speak Memory (1951). In effect, he subverts fiction and its use of metaphor. He may be considered British in the sense that every European émigré from Otto Khan Freund to Sigmund Freud has been, and the speckled observations of an outsider about a new homeland permeate the texts.
A professor of literature for many years in East Anglia University, Sebald died in a car crash following a brain aneurism. This ended a meteoric rise, and thwarted the possibility of a Nobel Prize for Literature. Albert Camus at least lived to receive the accolade before dying in similar circumstances.
At many levels, Sebald’s books display a sense of impending mortality and certainly schadenfreude. He invokes a feeling of being among the last of the U.K. émigré intellectuals of cosmopolitan sophistication, and his work merits inclusion in the great Middle European intellectual canon of Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, among others. There is an abundance of cultural references that recalls this heritage.
There is also an unmistakable Proustian feel to the descriptions, though oddly that author is never expressly invoked in what is Sebald’s factual narrative of ideas, or of images which play with memory though reflections distinct from Proust’s technique. Thus, we find no attention to high society, or social politics and love affairs, as much as memories of dislocation, a recurring outrage at man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man, and an acute sense of transience and fungibility.
The Rings of Saturn
The Rings of Saturn (1995) is the most obvious example of an exhumation of the European intellectual tradition. It begins with an admission that this is a reconstruction of notes a year after a hospital admission.
An evocation of Rembrandt’s painting ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’ (1632) suggests more than a brief flirtation with the possibility of his death. He also compares himself to Grigor in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, when he awakens as powerless as a slug, and indeed Kafka is omnipresent throughout his work.
Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’
Visits to the most mundane of buildings or scenery stoke foreboding and evanescence. In a striking passages he visits the British coastline, where he equates declining fish stocks with human destruction and desecration in Belsen. It is a shocking juxtaposition of ecocide with murder and genocide, especially the Shoah or Holocaust, which also pervades this work, and indeed is all-pervasive as a backdrop or synonym.
The great Irish humanitarian revolutionary Roger Casement features heavily in The Rings of Saturn (1995), with the inherent contradictions in his life – receiving a knighthood prior to negotiating with the Kaiser during World War I – examined thoroughly. Casement’s gun running led to a show trial culminating in his execution, a scene masterfully conveyed in Sir John Lavery’s painting ‘High Treason: The Appeal of Roger Casement’ that hangs in the King’s Inns in Dublin where I lectured for many years. It is a sage warning that sympathy with the oppressed rarely, if ever, coincides with the interests of the establishment.
High Treason: The Appeal of Roger Casement by Sir John Lavery.
Vertigo
Vertigo, (1990) is another non-novel featuring a trip to mainland Europe. It succeeds in stirring the same reflections on human infamy and cruelty as in his other work. This includes a disquisition on the incarceration of Casanova by the authorities for vice. Vertigo represents a grand tour through historical sites, with attendant horrors recollected, and brought into a contemporary frame.
Italy is a prevalent and semi-fictional narrative chapter where we meet Kafka’s Dr K, before proceeding through personal narratives on friends and relatives disappeared, or driven mad or suicidal, with linkages to landscape and cultural artifacts. Here, we seem to be witnessing the unravelling of the immigrant through displacement.
The book concludes in England with a vertiginous dream of environmental destruction influenced by a passage from Samuel Pepys – a description of the Great Fire of London of 1666.
It occurs to me that it is exactly the sort of book that fascist authorities, presently resurfacing throughout Europe, would ban or burn. Or perhaps it is more likely to be the victim of a broader loss of historical memory, best described as a social media auto-da-fé.
The Great Fire of London, depicted by an unknown painter (1675).
Other Works
The Emigrants (1992) is a story of dislocation obviously personal, but using the lives of others to show how awfully sad immigrant experiences can be. Suicides are much in evidence along with mental institutions. Cultural adaptation is always difficult for the emigrant.
Furthermore, the grim industrial buildings of the North of England are wonderfully evoked in an analysis of the life and work patterns of the artist Herbert Ferber, who he met many times in Manchester.
The book concludes with images of Jewish graves and a fascinating codicil on how even the ghettos maintained an appearance of normalcy, with functioning post offices and judicial systems, throughout the carnage of the war.
The most famous and lyrical of his books is Austerlitz (2001), stemming from an apparently fictional conversation with a gentleman of that name in Belgium. Among his works, it is the one that most resembles a conventional novel.
The oeuvres is virtually unclassifiable, albeit threading through it we find a transplanted and expatriated lens on a European history of cruelty, barbarism and murder – also evoked in Francisco Goya’s black paintings.
Goya’s (La romería de San Isidro), A Pilgrimage to San Isidro, 1819–1823.
Through the endurance of his writing, as the perpetual outsider, Sebald operates from outside time to provides a distinct perspective on what is happening in our present age.
In a clairvoyant way Sebald’s books anticipate the revived relevance of the Holocaust, and spotlights the immigrant experience, while emphasising the importance of civility and culture. He also presage an impending environmental collapse.
One of the last of the great European intellectuals seems to have anticipated what we are seeing in this period of greatly diminished civil and human rights; yet at a certain level he was merely asking us to remember, in a culture of casual forgetfulness.
Feature Image: The Liberation of Bergen-belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945 Overview of Camp No 1.
A brand can be a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a mix of them all[3], which are used to identify goods or services of one or a group of sellers. Branding helps in differentiation and enables consumers to recall memories, thereby facilitating the initial buying process, or perhaps triggering frequent purchases which brings customer loyalty.
Historically, branding was pursued via effective advertising, both above and below the line. In the East and South Asian markets, however, word-of-mouth remains a key channel of marketing communication, leading to changes in the way branding has come about.
The 3Es of Business Branding are Efficiency, Effectiveness and Experience[4]. It can be argued that although a business needs all three of them to sustain a successful brand, increasingly it’s the ‘experience’ component that differentiates one brand from another. Thus, it is not always about what makes you different, but more importantly, what differentiates you from others.
Enrique Iglesias
It’s increasingly difficult to have an efficiency advantage, or even an effectiveness advantage. Take for example, Enrique Iglesias – performing a selected list of his all-time hits and going live in a large music stadium. The auditorium is packed with two thousand people and even the cheap seats went for about $100 a pop. At the end of the performance the whole auditorium erupts in ecstatic applause.
Later on, Enrique ran a social experiment (as he often does) to test what would happen if he took the same ‘product’ and placed it in a different context. So, he decides to go into a subway station in New York city (which had great acoustics). He dresses up as a busker, posing as a random musician on the street trying to earn a crust.
Iglesias sang the same hits with the same gust one weekday morning. There is security around, nonetheless. You can imagine what happened next. A crowd gathered and everybody was hushed and mesmerized, and it all ended with a big applause at the end.
No, it didn’t go that way.
Only a few people stopped. Few gave him money and a thousand people simply passed by without paying the least bit of attention to a busker playing a few hit songs.
So, what was different in this situation? Well, everything really – maybe it wasn’t the right audience. It was not the right time. They weren’t in the right state of mind or mood. They weren’t expecting it; they didn’t desire to hear this music.
Or they simply couldn’t appreciate it without the branding; without the context; the stage; the auditorium; the advertising, and maybe the ticket prices they paid in the first place also led them to appreciate the pieces more. It was just not the same experience when he played for free.
Among the famous products from that time was the Ford Model T. The famous car available in any colour as long as it was black.
Ford Model T.
The major innovation of that time was the assembly line. And the assembly line was all about efficiency. The objective was to try and get a certain level of output with diminished input to achieve economies of scale. And management of the time was all about the ergonomics of reducing waste in that sense. Their objective was to reduce waste by maintaining the same or reducing input with time, and increase the output – then finally to increase the value at the end of the day.
Efficiency is alive and well today. Recently, Price Waterhouse Cooper interviewed a handful of CEOs, and asked them what were some of the major projects they were launching. 70% said a major cost cutting initiative[6].
So, when it comes to cost cutting, it’s okay to cut the bad costs, and not cut the good costs.
Effectiveness
Our next concept is effectiveness, at the industry level, whether a firm is into making automobiles, or maintaining a green supply chain, the focus is largely on value creation. As mentioned earlier, efficiency was all about having a certain level of output with less input – but value chain is quite different.
This approach demands to know: how do you get more out of limited inputs? For example, if you think about it from a people perspective, one aspect of this is about: can I achieve the same end with fewer labour inputs? Basically, would firing people be a good option? Or from a value perspective effectiveness, can you train them?
At a product level, we can look at something like a razor from the perspective of effectiveness. Think of Gillette’s original safety razor? It was a single blade and the idea was that you wouldn’t cut yourself.
The next big innovation was the second blade. The first blade gently lifts the hair out of the follicle. The second one swoops in and cuts it off, giving your face the feel of a baby’s skin.
This idea of effectiveness leads to a race in terms of performance. But all of these competitions lead to diminishing returns. The second blade adds a lot over the first blade, the third a little less, and so on. The more and more blades you get the greater the diminishing returns.
When it comes to computers or smartphones companies are competing with diminishing functional benefits. Most people don’t even know what the RAM is on their PCs anymore.
Now do we choose our Mac or iPhone based primarily on its quality? Do we really get a better battery life, higher screen resolution? If we did, we might have chosen an HTC or a Samsung. Therefore, the value chain missed out on a critical component, and that is the consumer of that value chain. Consumers pay over good money for what the companies have created, but they’re not part of the value creation process in any way.
If we consider value within the chain, experience is where the real focus should be. The argument is that no value is created outside of the customer or consumer experience.
Attention to ‘the three Es’
Therefore, a few questions to be asked when working on your brand development. First, how much effort and attention are the top management paying to each of these three Es?
Does the product or service actually have efficiency advantages? If they do, are they actually trading at a lower price compared to the competition? Is that their only differential advantage? Or are they similar to the competitors on the functional and utility benefits? And maybe, whether the firm knows it or not, the experience is actually what is differentiating them from the competition.
A really important question is: if it really is about experience, how are you going to design and deliver experiences? This includes examination of how that experience is different to the design of the product or service itself. There have to be real and radical changes in the way firms design and deliver value to their consumers depending on the market.
For effective cross-cultural branding, go ‘Glocal’ while still staying Global
For example, you may recognise Nike from its symbol or slogan (‘Just Do it’) faster than you would identify Adidas from theirs; Mercedes, BMW and Suzuki are most identifiable through their logos in their sectors, along with Coca Cola or McDonalds in theirs.
Rear light of a Mercedes-Benz C-Klasse.
Companies have continued to leverage these brand assets for decades now. At the same time, they have gone global, and through that internationalization arrived an understanding of the importance of global branding, but also a nuanced awareness of local factors, a phenomenon referred to as glocalization.
Just think of HSBC’s slogan for example: ‘the world’s local bank. Local banks staffed by local peoples,’ which highlights the importance of local knowledge and inclusiveness.
Lux entered the Chinese market in the 1980s and a popular Hollywood actress did their TV commercials then. While bathing herself in a large bathtub (certainly an exotic scene to the Chinese viewers at the time), she said seductively “I only use Strong Man. How about you?” Lux became a household name within a few weeks!
However, given that the Chinese use characters based on ideograms and the majority of people are unfamiliar with the Roman alphabet, international brands have to be careful in choosing an appropriate Chinese name.
In Taiwan, Lux means ‘beauty,’ which matches the packaging and how the image of Lux is projected in adverts. Marketing localization focuses on expressing a culturally appropriate message, whereas transcreation creatively transforms the message in order to maximize cultural resonance.
As a language and culture loaded with symbolism and imagery, a direct translation can often lead to comical or negative results. A brand name that has some meaning to the consumer will be more easily recalled. In addition to linguistic cues, other factors that affect the translation/naming process are identified as follows: a) Reflecting product benefits or industry characteristics; b) Quality and brand positioning; c) Links to logo or packaging; d) Country of origin effect, and finally; e) Traditional values, Beliefs and customs.[13]
The social standards of customers differ from culture to culture; one wo/man’s meat is another wo/man’s poison. The ethical values of an organisation determines its corporate image, and ultimately its brand identity.
The company’s culture, heroes, stories and beliefs play a significant role in shaping how its brand and related components are built. An example is how innovation and knowledge inform the different themes or logos owned or used in the Google search engine every day.
Google’s glocal initiatives gives it a secure, trusted and all-encompassing image around the world. Albeit, there are privacy concerns now leading to serious accusation of wrongdoing. In addition to privacy issues, Google has also been a bad boy when it comes to paying taxes and exploiting tax loopholes. Such factors detract from a company’s brand image.
Another example of a ‘glocal’ initiative is with how local level managerial delegation works for Microsoft. Similarly, in order to celebrate its long-term market share and participation, Coca Cola in Turkey briefly renamed itself Koka-Kola[14].
Other examples from the fast-food market include how McDonalds serve dishes and meals that are specific to country contexts and diets. Thus, a meal in the Middle East would have very different ingredients (reflecting local tastes and taboos) from one served in India and China. Similarly, KFC in China serves rice with most orders.
Cultural and cognitive connections are also crucial in international marketing initiatives as companies compete for market dominance. Marketing should establish immediate, cultural bonds with target audiences. Equally important, however, is to guard against over-indulgence in some markets. There may be a danger of patronising a culture when a brand is obviously trying to localise its offering.
In a world in which brands ruled for more than a century (e.g. Coca-Colonization, and Tesco-ization, or McDonaldization as presented in research on Globalization), what explains this trend? The ease of accessing information should theoretically make consumer-choice processes easier. Of course, even in the virtual world, full information is not possible.
For brands striving to maintain ‘global-ness’ in their adverts and action, some suggestions would include effective communication of goals, messaging and brand values to stakeholders. This involves explaining, developing and encouraging your vision with employees as much as with customers.
The next issue is to increase communication with your transcreation team, throughout a project timeline. You should be on hand to to answer questions, discuss disparities, and offer support.
Finally, it is necessary to spend time building trust in your team, by asking generic as well as specific questions, such as will the translation of a German slogan work as well in Canada or another European market? Will your imagery convey the same meaning in China as it does in the US?
A well-established content in one market may not be appropriate for the new market and you have to trust that your transcreation team knows what is the best move. Thus, it is vital to choose a localisation or transcreation team that are aware of cultures and customs.
Featured Image: Enrique Iglesias, Vilnius, Lithuania 2007.11.29 by Kapeksas
Say it to me if you have something to confess
I was born on the wrong side of the tracks like Ginsberg and Kerouac Bob Dylan, Key West (2020)
Notwithstanding my loathing for fundamentalisms of all strands, I have always preached from a gospel of love, or at least a form of reason that leads to moderation in the Public Intellectual Series.
Ideas about religion and the existence of God based on reason, such as that articulated by Thomas Aquinas, must yield to the facts as these emerge. The ideas contained in natural philosophy – with its harmony of the spheres – available to a medieval monk has been superseded by the discoveries of the Enlightenment that brought the hitherto unknown field of science. Yet, this yielded quantum physics that permits a layer of uncertainty, wherein the nature of an object may shift depending on one’s perspective.
The ‘uncertainty principle’ seems to have been anticipated by the Ancient Greeks, as Albert Camus explains in his essay ‘Helen’s Exile’ (1948):
Greek thought always took refuge behind the conception of limits. It never carried anything to extremes, neither the sacred, nor reason, because it negated nothing, neither the sacred nor reason. It took everything into consideration, balancing shadow with light.
This he contrasted with ‘Our Europe’ which:
off in the pursuit of totality, is the child of disproportion. She negates beauty, as she negates whatever she does not glorify. And through all her diverse ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason.
We may find, therefore, an excess of reason breeding dogmatism that gives rise to unreason, or even scientism. Thus, the subtlety of the Greek mind, now reflected in the thinking of Jurgen Habermas, permits a space for religion in the public sphere, but certainly not the rule of religion, or a single moral vision.
An awareness of the limitation of reason, or really any one individual’s capacity to reason in a divinely inspired way is not, however, to dismiss the true nature of objective facts in a given situation. As Karl Popper (‘On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance’ (1962)) points out:
belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts; not merely in this particular case, but in any other case; and that the judge cannot have made a factual mistake because he can no more be wrong about the facts than he can be right.
Therefore, dogmatism of all kinds – especially couched in religious terms – should be excluded, but we must also accept facts insofar as we are capable of ascertaining these, using the intellectual tools inherent in science and history that have served public intellectuals through the ages.
Extremism of Our Times
Where divine revelation is treated by true believers as factual is truly dangerous. Thus moral philosopher Professor John Finnis assumes the existence of one God ‘the Almighty’ to be self-evident, leading to a fixed moral view that does not allow for diversity, or even mild eccentricity, within our private lives.
In recent writings, Finnis illustrates a dominant extremism of our time. Marriage is for him exclusively between a man and a woman. Therefore, gay marriage is not a good. Furthermore, marriage involves sexual congress, which has as its aim the production of children. Not sex for the sake of having sex, but only for conception. Thus, Finnis considers homosexual congress and sex outside marriage as intrinsically shameful, immoral and harmful.
Some argue that he derives such normative conclusions about homosexual relationships from factual premises of heterosexual physical contact. Moreover, in the civilised world, many of the practices Finnis sanctions are considered by homosexual and heterosexual couples both within and outside of marriage as part of normal sexual congress and behaviour.
The issue highlights how sexuality has warped contemporary Christianity, negating more important issues around the real suffering of human beings in this world, a concern that Pope Francis is at least beginning to address. In his latest encyclical Fratelli Tutti (‘All Brothers, 2020) Francis condemns, ‘a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies … creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests.’
Shaming Culture
The advent of shaming culture as opposed to a justice culture, involves the demonisation of others and is a reversion to social primitivism, akin to burning witches at the stake, or René Girard’s idea of the reconciliatory victim or scapegoat. It is allied to a rise in Populist hysteria and religious mania.
The leading contemporary Jewish philosopher in the U.K., Jonathan Sacks, in a balanced way seeks to exonerate religious belief from its critics. In God’s Name (2016) is a defence of religion in terms of the values it produces. Sacks rails against extremism, a theme he revisits in Morality (2020), where he outlines positive religious values, including a focus on dignity, associative levels of responsibility, community and a sense of public service and the common good.
Jonathan Sacks
Christian jihadism encompasses such forays as the invasion of South America by Spanish Conquistadors and the Crusades, leading to mass slaughter and the destruction of indigenous civilizations. In modern times the Blairite justification, couched in Christian terms, for the war on Iraq was also used to mask narrow self-interest in oil.
Sacks equates altruistic evil with the thinking within the neoconservative group, wherein we are considered good and those outside our group are evil. This leads to the arrogant assumption that we are doing it for ‘their’ own good, killing multitudes will pave the way for democracy.
Crusades, whether modern or ancient, are invariably cloaked in the garment of religious ideology, but are really about resources and the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. They also still permit mass murder. The connection between religion and unbridled capitalism has long been evident, and is, alas, woven into the fabric of institutionalised religion.
All of these examples are truisms historically about the search of the Church and its believers or fellow travellers for gold and money – the Kingdom of Mammon, as opposed to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Both Christopher Hitchens, and indeed Richard Dawkins, have written extensively about the new forms of religious extremes we are witnessing, with the finger of blame primarily being pointed at Islam. That religion of course provides graphic examples of brutal beheadings, mass executions, stoning to death for adultery, planes hitting the Twin Towers, as well as the murder of journalists. All of this is unconscionable, but much of the rage can be traced to neo-imperialism in the Middle East, culminating in the invasion of Iraq. Christopher Hitchens’s greatest intellectual error was to support the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq.
Power Vacuum
So what is the root cause of Islamic extremism and Evangelical and Catholic extremism?
Blame is rightly attached to the misguided and illegal wars in Iraq, and going all the way back to the 1920s, the creation of client regimes in the Middle East. The unintended consequences of the occupation of Iraq led to a power vacuum in Syria, which gave an opportunity to well organized religiously inspired militants.
This, however, was the culmination of long-term trends within Islam, wherein successive generations had been radicalized by preachers who exploited a loss of identity in the face of Western consumerism, segregation and enduring poverty.
In Marxist terms, religious fundamentalism can be traced to growing disparities of wealth and structural inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities to gain a rounded education, with all too great an emphasis on technical or scientific education for economic advancement, as opposed to a broad liberal education that inculcates critical thinking.
Primarily, however, this extremism speaks of a need to belong to a cause, leading to belief in something ethereal, no matter how ludicrous. Belief in an afterlife defines people’s existences and justifies, as far as they are concerned, even self-immolation.
But the secularist response in France especially – under the aggressive application of laïcité – to ban or regulate the wearing of the burka or nijab, upheld in the European Court of Human Rights in the SAS case, only appears to inflame the issue. This is really little more than a sideshow to a wider collapse in values.
A Group of Women Wearing Burkas. Afghanistan women wait outside a USAID-supported health care clinic, Afghanistan, 2003.
As the wheels come off the economic system as we know it, and where people are searching for words and expressions to convey their understanding of the withering of societal bonds, extremist Christianity has stepped into the void to provide solace.
In the United States, at least, we are seeing an unholy synergy developing between Evangelical Christians and right-wing Catholicism. Far-right demagogues, led by Trump, have articulated a view that ‘our’ country is being overrun by immigrants and that the dominant ethnic group must ‘take back control’ from a phantom intellectual Marxism, liberal elites, or straight socialism – all emanating from the decadence of the mixed race cosmopolis.
This a descent into the racist abyss, where those we disagree with are scapegoated and targeted. It is a product of a dangerous dualistic mode of thinking, which Sacks identifies with a need to define God in relation to the Satan residing in others. This is the demonisation of those we disagree with, which is also evident in social media vilification.
Real Suffering
The suffering expressed through religion is the genuine sigh of oppressed creatures. In Marxist terms, the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
In a world of poverty, of diminishing resources and human degradation the appeal of an afterlife is obvious. What the Christian far-right in the United States and elsewhere offer is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which involves a veneer of protection against the unbelievers. This leads to isolation of the righteous few in gated communities, segregating the chosen people from the disaster they have inflicted on others.
The pandemic has led to the recrudescence of a millenarian ethos and sense of doom that is creating a society not dissimilar to that found in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, enforced against men and women alike.
The philandering Donald Trump is merely a front man for larger interests, who control the puppet on the chain. He dances to the beat of the dark money of the Republican Party, appointing the Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was his parting gift.
End of Days
Another hallmark of the present distorted religious influence of the neoliberal world order is the denial of climate change, and the employment of post-truth reasoning – the denial of objective facts underpinning the rule of law as Karl Popper saw it – to justify this.
The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his simple and illuminating Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, closes his account, with a reflection on how centuries of discoveries affect an understanding of ourselves. While generally positive, one stark passage stands out for its relevance to the challenge of addressing climate change.
I believe our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilisation.
Carlo Rovelli
This exemplifies the difference between a man of science and objective facts, and those of a fundamentalist bent that place mankind atop the pyramid of Creation.
More terrifying than where Ravelli places us in the grand scheme is the end of days preacher who cannot countenance that we may indeed be just an irrelevant blip on this Earth, but instead sees the Earth as something created for us to plunder and exploit.
Cognisant of this threat, Noam Chomsky recently claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history’ He has deliberately corrected many interviewers who mistakenly stated that in fact he said it was the most dangerous organization in the world today.
Chomsky also mentioned in a BBC Newsnight interview that there has to be connection between the denial of science, and active attempts to undermine it, with the belief of nearly 40% of the American public that the Second Coming will occur by 2050.
Why would a deluded mind bother saving life and civilization, when it is prophesised that it will all be over soon? Christian End of Day’s logic, or lack thereof, is not so prevalent in agnostic Europe at present, but the breakdown of the social order through the austerity shock doctrine, and now the coup de grâce of the pandemic, leaves the continent exposed to those same forces, which may be articulated in an equally millenarian scientism that sees human beings as vectors of disease.
Loss of Meaning
In a 2004 essay Václav Havel foresaw much of what we now find in a piece called ‘What Communism Still Teaches Us,’ describing ‘supposed laws of the market and other invisible hands that direct our lives.’ There remains an abject lack of humanism in neoliberal politics and society, comparable in certain ways to Communist totalitarianism, not least in the brainwashing of the young through solipsistic social media.
With the loss of religious forms, however, many living in modern technocratic societies experience a loss of meaning, and even a moral void. The social structure of religions fostered close relationships and inculcated a sense of community, as well as charity, the protection of human dignity and a commitment to public service. The Bible injuncts kindness towards strangers, and to do unto others as you would wish them to do to you, which also derives from Aristotelian philosophy.
To rectify contemporary problem such as poverty and environmentaldegradation, undoubtedly we need to shift from a conception of ‘I’ to ‘we’ as Sacks argues.
In The Godless Gospel, Julian Baggini also calls for a form of religion shorn of hatred for our age, where we develop personal and social goods through deeds not pious words. Through this we may realise our best intentions and develop empathy and compassion, a commitment to personal humility and an obligation and commitment to the truth. Above all we should try and do as little harm as possible he asserts.
All of these are good values that Christianity may teach to those of a secular persuasion lacking in moral clarity.
Thus from a secular perspective, Jürgen Habermas understood how religion engenders social integration, and is the basis for communicative action. As far back as 1978 he argued, from an agnostic perspective, for the necessity of religious ideas to humanise society. Those of faith must learn to communicate reasonably, which means the renunciation of violence and extremism. We must learn to talk and communicate our differences, agreeing on facts to ground the rule of law.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires appears to have shaped an empathy towards those afflicted with extreme poverty and subjected to degradation. He preaches tolerance, engagement and social and economic justice. This has largely been stripped of the condemnation of sexuality and sexual expression evident in his predecessor John Paul II.
Let us hope the liberation theology that is intrinsic in Francis’s message is not tainted by the dark money of the Vatican, and he does not go the way of John Paul I, or ‘God’s Banker’ Roberto Calvi, found hanging from Blackfriars bridge in 1982, just outside the site of my Chambers.
Christian socialism is a potentially vital force if it reflects the values of what Philip Pullman calls that great man Jesus, but not the values, as he equally presents, of that scoundrel Jesus Christ. This latter is a distortion of New Testament values, dedicated to the accumulation of capital, a lack of compassion and political manipulation.
If inequality grows any further – amid ever-greater accumulations of wealth – then neoliberalism may well give way to neo-feudalism. Viewed in this regard it is easier to understand the potential for an alliance between church and capital in subjugating the masses. The Book of Genesis sanctions man’s dominion over the earth which has led to a scorched earth approach towards environmental regulations that will ultimately impoverish us all. For too long Christianity has married the exchange of goods with the exchange of gods.
Scopes Trial
In parts of American Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is accorded equal weight and validity as Creationism in schools. Children are taught that the world was created by God the Almighty in the space of seven days.
It’s been a long time coming. In the Scopes Trial of 1925 – where a High School teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwinism – the legendary American attorney Darrow anticipated what happens when a society abandons reason altogether.
Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? In addition, tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. Soon you may ban books and newspapers. Then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!
In a period of declining belief in a broad liberal education, and where the art-repeneur has taken over from true artists, there is a desperation for something to cling on to, whether Creationism, neoliberalism or even scientism. We are living in an age of pervasive ignorance, which can be traced to our putative higher educational institutions, where students are taught to believe and comply. Or as Foucault would have it, punishment is becoming internalized through control vectors.
Lost in all of this is the message of Christian socialists such as Pope Francis, Sacks, and even their ideological fellow-traveller Habermas. This is a form of Christian decency that reflects the needs of human beings battling for survival in an increasingly hostile environment, where adequate nutrition, shelter, health care, education, housing and even dignity are denied.
Thus organised religions appear to be experiencing an existential battle between the neoliberals and Christian socialists. Exclusionary family values that are a hallmark of religious neoliberalism conceal a corporate existence and controlled sexuality. Its tenets are designed to diminish any radicalisation among the young.
But let us hope a new-found empathy with the Wretched of the Earth can emerge, in Catholicism at least under Pope Francis, and perhaps other Protestant more tolerant faiths. This would reflect the moderation and human decency of public intellectuals in this series such as Jürgen Habermas, Albert Camus, George Orwell and Edmund Burke, all of whom in their own ways rejected the moral absolutes that lead to human degradation.
No Time to be Making Enemies
On his deathbeds the great Enlightenment intellectual Voltaire (1694-1778) was asked by a priest in attendance to renounce the devil. Voltaire considered this advice, but approaching the pearly gates he decided against doing so: ‘This is no time,’ he said, ‘to be making new enemies.’
At this stage in our history it is important to be open to all belief systems, including Christianity in spite of its diabolical history. Christianity, and other religions, must confront a dark past, but can provide moral guidance in the face of a culturally dominant neoliberal cost-benefit analysis of life. Dogmatic secularist should concede that there are lessons to be drawn from religions. These may help generate a genuine brotherhood and sisterhood among human beings to confront the real evil in this world.
The Public Intellectual Series offers inter-disciplinary journalism, focusing on relevant authors and subject-matters crucial to negotiating our current age of extremes. We avoid specialisation, demystifying topics to provide readers with access to a broad view on contemporary challenges. Our aim is to contribute to a revival in the idea of the public intellectual, which we consider a necessary ingredient in a healthy body politic.
A public intellectual is a generalist, who brings together disparate strands of knowledge with a view to placing events in context. At one level this is a Sisyphean task, but throughout the ages intellectuals have faced the same challenges as today, forcing heavy objects up steep hills only to see them roll down again the following day.
The news media focus on the particular and the immediate sensationalism of soundbites, or the bric-a-brac of our existences, which occludes a wider field of vision.
In authoring this series as a lawyer I have strengths but also weaknesses. I studied history and lectured on the philosophy of law for many years. I read widely and as a mongrel – half-Irish-half-Austrian, now resident in London, and formerly a student in the London School Of Economics and Harvard University in the U.S. – I am lucky to have enjoyed a wide variety of cultural, educational and workplace settings.
I pride myself on tolerance and open-mindedness, although I am given to anger, and even despair at times. I am honouring a peripatetic intellectual tradition – of Stefan Zweig or even Walter Benjamin – that is now in serious danger in these dark times.
I am especially keen to preserve those parts of the European and global intellectual heritage under threat of extinction. I regard these as repositories of a civilisation which is currently being assailed by greed, religious fundamentalism and overly technocratic interference in our daily lives.
The first article in the series is concerned with Albert Camus, and when I wrote that piece he was less relevant than he is now. Camus was a man of substance, and of independence and reason in the French Enlightenment tradition. Especially through his prophetic novel The Plague (1947), but also in book-length essays such as The Rebel (1951) he speaks from the grave to our troubled times. He endured great difficulties throughout his life for taking a stand against the fashionable extremisms of left and right, and the same middle ground moderation he occupied is being eroded today.
Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards
The second piece is on Edmund Burke, who is generally associated with the political right, but Burke’s conservatism was a reasoned form and, in common with Camus, he abhorred the Jacobin bloodletting. His generally benign outlook was distorted and ultimately abandoned by exponents of rampant neoliberalism – inspired by ideologues like William F. Buckley – which lies at the heart of many of the difficulties we now face.
Burke urged us to conserve and preserve that which is good, and to oppose unnecessary violence. He emphasises the inter-generational compact and indeed the importance of protecting the environment, which both John Gray and Greta Thunberg (who also feature in this series) also embrace. It is the Burkean sense of community, including with nature, that has broken down.
The third piece is on George Orwell and he is a crucial figure for our times. First, he demonstrates that when we have lost sight of the truth then all is lost, and he clearly understood the ever-present danger of totalitarianism developing through modern communication tools. His emphasis on uncluttered and precise language is also vital in our post-truth age.
Noam Chomsky
Another public intellectual notable, Noam Chomsky is also an adherent of fact over fiction, and an upholder of the truth in intellectual discourse. He provides evidence for how consent is manufactured, and truth distorted by the message managers. His views on how an evil triage of religious fundamentalism, post-truth and moral relativism espoused by the Republican party of America has seized control is all too relevant now. Alas, the recent ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court is another nail in the coffin of the rule of law.
As a half-Austrian I have had some Germanic values instilled into me, and thus I turn to Jurgen Habermas for his crucial idea of communicative action, and preserving the salon culture now in danger of being lost forever. This is speech purged of ideology, or ideal speech. Habermas’s repugnance towards post-modernism is also shared with Chomsky and is the slippery slope to post-truth. His crucial understanding that technocracy is insufficient for good governance, and that technical solutions need to be mitigated by moral outcomes is vital to engage with in a valueless age.
Michel Foucault is the acceptable face of postmodernism, in that his focus is on empirical – adopting historical methods, not absurd generalisations. In that sense he is truth-seeking and many of the ideas stand up to serious scrutiny. He seems to have anticipated the mass surveillance society now upon us in the Covid-19 panopticon, with ever more extreme and intrusive regulation of our intimate behaviours.
Conference de presse sur l’affaire Jaubert. De gauche à droite: Pierre Laville, Michel Foucault, Claude Mauriac Denis, Langlois et Gilles Deleuze.
Christopher Hitchens is a pivotal figure in that he pandered to the Republican right in his endorsement of the Bushman and Blair wars. Yet hIs hatchet jobs on Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton demonstrate his perhaps unrivalled journalistic capacities, especially in terms of exposing the hypocrisy of those who claim justification from a higher power. He may go down in history as among the last compromised but free intellects, willing to put his head above the parapet, while at the same making a living.
Slavoj Zizek is somewhat of an aberrant choice in that some of his arguments are outlandish, yet he is gradually seeming less of an outlier, and a more central figure with his emphasis on how ideology, simplifications and message management are destroying the social fabric; and how a state of derealisation is upon us in a consumerist society disintegrating before our very eyes.
E.P. Thompson also figures because of his focus on how individuals are rendered obsolete in our new technological age, leading to many of us being turned into Luddites. It is not a case of protest and survival, as adapt to the Screen New Deal or perish. He is vitally important in that within the Marxist tradition he offers an argument for legality, reason and the rule of law, which cements the bonds of a fragmented society.
The multiculturalism piece is part of a more disperse band of papers focusing on how extremism has seriously undermined the tolerant consensus, and how imperialism foisted on developing countries by colonialists has given way to a form of internal colonialism, where all are being exploited and where racism is multifaceted and exclusionary.
2/7/1986 President Reagan with William F Buckley in the White House Residence during Private birthday party in honor of President Reagan’s 75th Birthday
The neoliberalism and neoconservative piece distinguishes neoliberalism with its endorsement of an unregulated free market from neoconservatism, a distortion of Burkean conservatism that can actually be traced to the extreme left. Neo-liberalism differs from neoconservatism in that, at least in theory, there is a respect for basic human rights and privacy, as emphasised by Lord Sumption stand in favour of basic liberties in the era of Covid-19. The ‘humanitarian intervention’ of the Iraq War was the apotheosis of the neoconservative project, and new opportunities are opening up for Blair and other neoconservatives in our present era.
The environmental piece mixes different voices all warning of impending ecocide, and also explores the related themes of how our work conditions and the buildings we inhabit, as well as the lack of recreational spaces, are further dehumanizing us.
The last three pieces will cover religion, socio-economic rights and feminism. I shall muster the courage to explore the good of Christian compassion, exemplified by Pope Francis and argue like Habermas for a bridge between secular and Christian decency. The social and economic rights piece is influenced by my teaching of the subject for many years. It will argue that the focus on civil and political rights in contemporary human rights debates, ignore the really crucial issues of our age (and any age) of affordable housing, debt relief, health care and securing a quality of life and a basic income of survivability. Finally the feminism piece, like the religion piece, will endeavour to assess how affirmative action has lost its way, and that gender politics has tended to distract from the more pressing issues of poverty and social exclusion.
I dedicate all of this series and words written and spoken over a number of years to my daughter Lara.
Feature Image: A reading of Molière, Jean François de Troy, about 1728.
Britain has produced its fair share of major public intellectual figures. Having surveyed the legacies of George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, the Irish-born Edmund Burke and contemporary leading lights John Gray and Jonathan Sumption, I now turn my attention to the great radical historian E. P. Thompson.
Intellectuals often stand apart from a mainstream radical tradition. Hitchens, for example, while broadly adhering to Thomas Paine and The Rights of Man was a contrarian and dedicated atheist who tendentiously supported George W. Bush’s War in Iraq, although perhaps the waterboarding he voluntarily submitted to, and declared to be a form of torture, acted as a form of atonement.
It is unthinkable, however, that Edward Palmer (E. P.) Thompson (1923-1993) would have performed such a volte-face. Thompson held himself squarely within the English radical tradition of William Cobbett, Thomas Paine and Robert Owen, as well as his hero the poet William Blake, and to a lesser extent William Morris. Thompson’s ideology was a form of socialitist libertarianism for the ordinary man.
I grew up reading his work, and indeed watching his grey mane flowing in the wind as he addressed CND rallies, although I understand he was a difficult colleague, a hopeless administrator and an egotist. It seems to have been another case of don’t meet your heroes.
The Making of the English Working Class
His lasting contribution is the seminal The Making Of The English Working Class (1980), possibly the greatest work of history of the twentieth century that emphasised a new form of bottom-up history, related to the subaltern history that was emerging at the same time in former colonial societies. Notably, Edward Said’s Orientalism, which was published in 1978.
Thompson methodology is well captured in the following quotation from this canonical text:
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.[i]
Also, In The Making Of The English Working Class, Thompson places himself firmly within the British rights-driven tradition and focuses on The Liberty Tree, and its essential components of freedom under the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, habeas corpus and the spectrum of individual rights now under threat of obliteration.
I suspect, just as Lord Sumption is a libertarian, albeit in a different sense, who has spoken out about the restriction on our current restrictions on liberties, Thompson would be horrified at the course of current events in the U.K. ushered in by Coronavirus Emergency legislation and recent Counter Terrorism Legislation.
Although a Marxist – albeit unlike his contemporary historian Eric Hobsbawm he resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 – he was also a historian in the empiricist tradition, distrustful of great meta narratives and the abstract musings of structuralists, which culminated in his famous polemic against Althusser The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors(1978).
He argued that individuals were agents of activity though caught within the agency of history. They have room to achieve what they do, but only under specific conditions and defined constraints. His sense of the developmental nature of the working class is perhaps best illustrated in the following quote: ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.’[ii]
This led to the famous opening passage of The Making of the English Working Class, and his emphasis in his teaching on bottom-up or grassroots analysis, rather than a top-down, theory-driven, approach. He prized empirical evidence derived from the activities of human subjects. A true historian.
That great book in fact has many resonances for our age, not least in how the chiliasm of despair and poverty awakened renewed religiosity – Wesleyan Methodism in particular. His bottom-up analysis pointed to how religion became the opium of the people. This may also explain the rise of religious fundamentalism in our own period of profound economic security.
Thompson demonstrated how local worker communities were often collective, and how a moral economy operated that distributed goods and services according to the respective needs of those who traded and bartered. These localized and community-driven economies were also explored by the late David Graeber in his Debt: the First 5,000 Years (2011).
key point, "it's not our hedonism that's destroying the planet, it's our puritanism," the fact we feel everyone has to be working constantly, regardless of whether there's anything needs to be done, to justify our consumer pleasures
It would be a mistake to view Thompson as anti-religious, or to put it another way, he saw a values in religion or in certain religions. On the one hand he rejected what he saw as an authoritarianism implicit in the hierarchical structure of Catholicism, but in Protestantism he found a pragmatism that chimed with his distrust of system-building.
Influence of Antonio Gramsci
Thompson was greatly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, in particular his famous concept of hegemony and a war of position for proletarian emancipation. Gramsci identified an ongoing war of position occurring between the elites and workers, a category which extends conceptually to embrace anyone who is not part of an ever-narrowing plutocracy or billionaire class.
Gramsci allocated a substantial role to intelligentsia and politicians, but also to workers’ councils in altering the course of history to achieve a Communist society. The working class would first have to attain a cultural hegemony before gaining political power he argued: ‘The workers could only win if they achieved cultural hegemony before attaining political power.’
Occasionally, he seems to identify it (hegemony) with political power exercised by coercion, but as a rule he distinguishes the two concepts, so that hegemony signifies the control of the intellectual life of society by purely cultural means. Every class tries to secure a governing position not only in public institutions but also in regard to the opinions, values and standards acknowledged by the bulk of society. The privileged classes in their time secured a position of hegemony in the intellectual; as well as the political sphere; they subjugated the others by this means, and intellectual supremacy was a precondition of political rule. The main task of the workers in modern times was to liberate themselves spiritually from the control of the bourgeoisie and the church and to establish their own cultural values in such a way as to attract the oppressed and intellectual strata to themselves. Cultural hegemony was a fundamental and prior condition of attaining political power. The working class could only conquer by first imparting its world view and system of values to the other class who might be its political allies; in this way it would become the intellectual leader of society just as the bourgeoisie had done before seizing political control.[iii]
The Rule of Law
Thompson diverged from conventional Marxist theory in his approach to the role of law. A conventional Marxist view consider this as:
by definition a part of a ‘superstructure’ adapting itself to the necessities of an infrastructure of productive forces and productive relations. As such, it is clearly an instrument of the de facto ruling class: it both defines and defends these rulers’ claims upon resources and labour-power – it says what shall be property and what shall be crime – and it mediates class relations with a set of appropriate rules and sanctions, all of which, ultimately, confirm and consolidate existing class power. Hence the rule of law is only another mask for the rule of a class. The revolutionary can have no interest in law, unless as a phenomenon of ruling-class power and hypocrisy; it should be his aim simply to overthrow it.[iv]
In contrast Thompson was a qualified supporter, arguing that: ‘Law may be seen,’ he argued, not only instrumentally and ideologically, but also ‘simply in terms of its own logic, rules and procedures – that is, simply as law.’
In Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1975) Thompson argues against the idea that the law could be reduced to a superstructure, reflecting the class interest of the ruling class, but offered instead a more complex truth inherent to which was the fact that ‘it could not be reserved for the exclusive use only of their own class.’
He concluded that the law did mediate existing relations and was ‘a superb instrument by which these rulers were able to impose new definitions of property to their even greater advantage,’ for example, in terms of his historical works by extinguishing agrarian use-rights and by enclosures but on the other hand, the law mediated these class relations through legal forms, which imposed, again and again, inhibitions on the actions of the rulers.
Also, Thomson argued that rulers ‘believed enough in these rules, to allow, in certain limited areas, the law itself to be a genuine forum within which certain kinds of class conflict were fought out.’ On occasion the government itself was defeated in the courts: ‘Such occasions served, paradoxically, to consolidate power and to enhance its legitimacy,’ but also ‘to bring power even further within constitutional controls.’
Thompson suggested that this role of law was in essence: ‘a legacy as substantial as any handed down from the struggles of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth and a true and important cultural achievement,’ and further that ‘the notion of the regulation and reconciliation of conflicts through the rule of law’ was ‘a cultural achievement of universal significance’
He asserted that though imperial in its origin, the rule of law inhibited that imperial power such that:
Transplanted as it was to even more inequitable contexts, this law could become an instrument of imperialism. For this law has found its way to a good many parts of the globe. But even here the rules and rhetoric have imposed some inhibitions upon the imperial power. If the rhetoric was a mask, it was a mask which Gandhi and Nehru were to borrow, at the head of a million masked supporters.
His classic position from Whigs and Hunters is encapsulated in the following statement:
But the rule of law itself, the imposing of effective inhibitions upon power and the defence of the citizen from power’s all-intrusive claims, seems to me to be an unqualified human good. To deny or belittle this good is, in this dangerous century when the resources and pretensions of power continue to enlarge, a desperate error of intellectual abstraction. More than this, it is a self-fulfilling error, which encourages us to give up the struggle against bad laws and class-bound procedures, and to disarm ourselves before power.
Later he elaborated that:
If I have argued elsewhere that the rule of law is an ‘unqualified human good’ I have done so as a historian and a materialist. The rule of law, in this sense, must always be historically, culturally, and, in general, nationally specific. It concerns the conduct of social life, and the regulation of conflicts, according to rules of law which are exactly defined and have palpable and material evidences – which rules attain towards consensual assent and are subject to interrogation and reform.
Criticism
Thompson has been criticised for upholding what is considered by some to be the conservative doctrine of the rule of law, and not an unqualified good according to Morton Horowitz; or as Adrian Merritt argues: its logic is ‘the logic of class formation.’
Bob Fine also suggests that the Rule of Law need not be characterized as ‘an unqualified human good’ for one to recognize that it is superior to bald authoritarianism, and that other institutions such as democratic elections limit power and that, rather than limiting power, the law serves in various ways to enhance the power of the ruling class.
Nonetheless, in Thompson’s defence it can be argued he is only suggesting that the rule of law was neutral and not conservative and neither promoted nor impeded substantive justice. In this context Thompson insists that he was ‘not starry-eyed’ about the law. On the contrary he was bent on ‘exposing the shams and inequities which may be concealed beneath this law.’
Nevertheless, for Thomson the rule of law was ‘an unqualified human good,’ because it is invariably superior to unbridled authoritarianism, and what makes the rule of law an unqualified human good for Thompson is the lack of any available substitute mechanism for limiting arbitrary power in complex societies.
His faith in the common man is again evident in his assessment of jury trial.
Jurors have found, again and again, and at critical moments, according to what is their sense of the rational and just. If their sense of justice has gone one way, and the case another, they have found “against the evidence,” … the English common law rests upon a bargain between the Law and the people: The jury box is where the people come into the court: The judge watches them and the people watch back. A jury is the place where the bargain is struck. The jury attends in judgment, not only upon the accused, but also upon the justice and the humanity of the Law.
British Empirical Tradition
Like all British empiricists from Burke to Hitchens and Orwell, and especially as an historian, Thompson was acutely sensitive to issues of truth and lies, shabby cover ups, semi-truths and disinformation.
The Twelve Days of Cassandra Voices: On the 5th day… for those of an intellectual bent, David Langwallner reclaims perhaps Ireland’s foremost public intellectual, Edmund Burke, from the jaws of conservatism:https://t.co/xYR31JeaqH#essentialholidayreading
Thompson’s book on Blake, his last, endorses the attack on the beast, which is in effect the state or state religion classified by Thomson as the whore of Babylon.
As an educationalist he was incidentally a humanist, recognising the importance in his teaching of objectivity and tolerance, but seeing these not as important matters in and of themselves – in that we are all a product of our time – but as offering useful educational and heuristic methods.
His focus on ordinary people, on human rights and the rule of law and his distrust of great systems and absurd generalisation and abstractions is now of great relevance, as are his warnings and research into religious fundamentalism. Alas, E.H. Thompson’s devotion to the determination of facts, detail and accuracy is sorely lacking in contemporary discourse.
[i] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, p.14
Since the 1970s, the consistent presence of neoliberalism in politics alongside short, sharp bursts of neoconservatism have shaped our planet to a greater extent than any other ideologies. This has been to the detriment of all but a shrinking cast of billionaires that profit in periods of crisis, even during the pandemic. The prognosis is not good, even if the pandemic provides a porthole for the possibility of a realignment.
Distinct Ideologies
At one level, neoliberalism is extreme libertarianism, purged of its earlier socialist or anarchist underpinnings that were ultimately communitarian. Neoliberalism has had a tremendous influence on conservative thinking in recent times. Yet it is not conservatism in a traditional Burkean sense of conserving and preserving that which is good. Neoliberals do not advocate moderation, restraint, anti-extremism, perspective, nuance or that ill-defined word ‘balance,’ save in terms of conventional political rights such as liberty, privacy and freedom of movement.
Contemporary neoliberals are not supporters of little people, and in effect operate against the interests of the ordinary working person in the name of economies of scale or other workplace rationalisations. It is unbridled free market extremism, engendering a tragedy of the commons.
It did not begin this way. In its first iteration, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek warned against the excesses of socialism in The Road to Serfdom (1944). This was witnessed in Britain of the 1970’s with the three day working week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the unions. Many of Hayek’s points were valid, and I suspect he would be horrified at the political trajectory his ideas have taken. Similarly, Karly Marx was not responsible for and would have been horrified by Stalin.
The initial idea behind libertarianism was for a combination of unregulated laissez faire economics, and the legitimation of a hedonistic lifestyle through laws and social policies. I see nothing wrong with hedonism per se – or for tolerance of human frailties more generally – and indeed have spent much of my professional career as a barrister upholding the rights of an accused to due process.
Neoconservatism, on the other hand, is hardly even capitalist in outlook. It is really an offshoot of a more authoritarian leftism combined with a fundamentalist, morally self-righteous neocolonialism informed by ‘Christian’ values. It is associated in particular with the administrations of George W. Bush, with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle its most prominent ideologues.
Left to right: Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.
Many neoconservatives made an ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist left to the camp of American conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s, with its intellectual roots in the magazine Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz. But anti-Stalinist does not imply a respect for human rights or the rule of law; its followers’ ambitions were simply global rather than limited to a particular country, as was the case with Stalin’s approach.
Neoconservatism adopts the unregulated free market, but not libertarian permissiveness or due process or a respect for international law: the ends would justify any means. That is what makes it distinctly evil. It attracted money from Christian fundamentalist and the rapture movement and cohabited with authoritarian academics.
Thus, there is a world of difference between former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, a defender of human rights and free markets, and Tony Blair, the UK’s foremost neoconservatives. Blair is a fundamentalist Christian, a self-deluding mediocrity, who exported a destabilising jihadist war based on an absurd world view and sold it as a humanitarian intervention. He cannot really be described as a socialist – although state bureaucracies expanded massively under his New Labour – but nor is he a genuine conservative. He is simply a telegenic opportunist who became drunk on power.
His neocon influencers were Bush and Irish-American pseudo intellectuals like Daniel Moynihan, who fused Christian jihadism with racist fundamentalism and veneration of a deregulated market. The worst of all possible worlds.
Neoliberal Permissiveness
While neoliberals cock a snoop at Christian fundamentalism, some perhaps even going so far as to oppose the war in Iraq, an inbuilt resistance to state intervention means neoliberals such as even Barack Obama, did nothing to heal the wounds, or address the causes of discontent in the developing world.
I suspect the neoliberal endorsement of liberties and indulgence has in one sense been counterproductive. It may have not started with bad intentions. All were in favour of lifestyle ‘choices’: gay and transgender rights, sexual freedoms and shifting the agenda of equality towards formal equality rather than substantive equality. This involved superficial gestures such as including sufficient mixed race women in boardrooms but keeping the cleaners in the poverty trap.
The gender equity and transgender lobby now often act in a sinister way, and represent a branch of neoconservative in all its puritanical absurdity. ‘No platforming’ esteemed academics like Germaine Greer steers young people into sexual confusion and away from political engagement. It is a disaster emanating from a preening devotion to political correctness.
The sponsorship of the gender equity agenda by corporate America negates the real human rights agenda. These companies do not tend to fund advocates of social and economic justice, including rights to housing, healthcare and a clean, safe and aesthetically pleasing environment.
The privatisation of healthcare and even the Bismarckean welfare state began largely under Nixon in the U.S., where neoliberalism first evolved. It was replaced by an insistence that people exercise personal and professional responsibility, which masked a dismantling of social supports.
‘Even Richard Nixon’s Got Soul’ (but not William F. Buckley)
Nixon, a more sympathetic figure in hindsight – at least by comparison with latter day Republicans – was forced into healthcare privatisation by lobby groups from the medical profession, bringing into being the anti-health care system of America, where in 2018 over 17% of the country’s resources devoted to healthcare, yet it has one of the lowest life expectancies in the OECD. Moreover, industry sponsors regularly renege on private health care entitlements, through the machinations of unscrupulous lawyers. The fact of having a health care plan in the U.S. is no guarantee it will pay out.
Nixon had his doubts and did not buy into the ideology wholesale, but by the time of Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 the neoliberals were firmly in the ascendancy, with disastrous consequences for Americans, as Reagan’s advisor David Stockman describes in The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed(1986).
A crucial neoliberal mastermind was William F. Buckley, the satanic ideologue of modern U.S. conservatism, who ostensibly venerated Edmund Burke, but subverted Burkean conservatism. Buckley helped establish the new philosophy of neoliberalism through texts such as God and Man in Yale (1953), and through his editorial of the Republican Party intellectual rag The National Review.
Buckley moved conservatism away from the spirit of Burke’s community of souls, towards naked self-interest. This has led to the undermining, and now the actual buying of the state apparatus by the corporatocracy. Thus, under Buckley’s stewardship conservatism mutated into a form of individualism tat undermined states.
Buckley’s brilliant rhetoric was only matched by his repulsive qualities as a human being. This is all-too-evident in the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies made about his media punditry alongside the almost equally contemptible Gore Vidal during the 1968 American election. Buckley had an enormous, understated, influence in moving the Republican Party, via Reagan, towards libertarianism, and the disaster capitalism now in vogue. Buckley in fact co-opted Russell Kirk, the Burkean conservative author of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953) onto The National Review, seemingly in order to get him ‘on message.’
Yet the Republican Party and indeed much of the present Conservative party in the UK are not conservatives in the Burkean sense as aforementioned. They have become neoliberal fanatics, which is far from the origins of the paternalistic conservatism that emerged in Britain the late eighteenth century.
Why Edmund Burke Provides a Counterweight
Edmund Burke was a moderate conservative in the Benjamin Disraeli mould, who sought to preserve traditions he believed worth maintaining. His career was an idiosyncratic mixture of radicalism and abiding by conventions, and he believed in the desirability of change but not change for its own sake. Change should come about incrementally he believed, and with due regard to tradition; his antennae were attuned to unintended consequences.
Edmund Burke.
Contemporary neoliberalism has engendered a form of corporate fascism that mandates extreme conformity in working days that stretch into long evening. I doubt Burke would endorse its excesses. He believed in a form of market capitalism favouring small enterprise, as do I too. Burke was also anti-monopolist and would see dominant multinational firms, and perhaps the European Union, as anathema to the capitalism he favoured.
Neoliberalism should not therefore be equated with traditional conservatism. Indeed if Edmund Burke was around today he might pen a text entitled: Reflections on Imminent Social and Economic Breakdown!
Burke of course, unlike adherents of neoliberalism believed in the concept of a community, involving associative obligations and reciprocal interactions. A moral and networked community in other words. The neoliberal mentality, on the other hand, leads towards social atomisation and fragmentation, or as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “There is no such thing as society only individuals.”
Thatcherism is contrary to the Burkean ethos. I suspect that in modern times Burke would be regarded as a Keynesian capitalist, which is precisely what Buckley was attacking in God and Man in Yale. Burke ideas also align with environmentalists as he had a sense of community as inter-generational:
Society becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
He held a defined sense of the public good that was not just where the dice landed in the casino capitalism of the market. Further, though a passionate advocate of rights and liberties he was also a passionate advocate of restraint and moderation. He believed that the extension of rights should not extend to untrammelled liberties and licentious anarchy.
Although a conservative in terms of his invocation of habit, tradition and social order, and also with his belief in institutional contribution and preservation – as well as measures of fiscal rectitude – he was, conversely, also its opponent of in other respects.
One drawback to Burke as an intellectual, in my view, was his devotion to religion. Born in Ireland to a Protestant father and Catholic mother, noxious Irish Catholicism shaped him, diminishing his contribution; although one cannot say that he had the religious zealotry of a neoconservative.
The Beginning of the End of History
The Bushman-Blairite wars were an exercise in duplicity in shocking breach of international law. There were no smoking guns or development of nuclear weaponry in Iraq. It was Christian jihadism led by a latter-day Crusaders, including telegenic Tony that most lightweight of British gentlemen.
Neoconservatism is a nefarious dysfunctional ideology that suits the interests of the powerful, which tragically became the consensus. A Dictionary of Received Ideas. There would be no comeuppance for Tony or George Dubya, who now blithely paints portraits of migrants, with all irony seemingly lost on him.
In Britain, Brexit may lead to the gradual dismantling of the Blairite welfare state, even after the Johnson health care crisis, with the chronic under-resourcing and deregulation of the NHS now laid bare by the pandemic. This applies to all other countries, Italy most obviously, which diverted resources from essential services under neoliberal austerity measures. Meanwhile we see America on the brink of anarchy and civil insurrection due to the triumph of these ideas with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, who is the symptom of a very deep malaise.
The combination of neoconservatism and neoliberalism is a far more deadly virus than Covid-19, which has simply exposed the soft underbelly of societies afflicted by its ravages. From a neoliberal point of view healthcare or a clean environment are not rights but entitlements and part of a libertarian agenda.
The lack of regulation of spiraling accommodation and rental costs in the US and elsewhere brings a situation where, for the vast majority, outright ownership of property is a myth. Ostensibly, high salaries are hoovered up in hyper-inflated rents and mortgages subject to repossessions by vulture funds.
The cost of living is prohibitive, and cramped accommodation makes the possibility of a decent family life almost impossible for most, engendering a dysfunctional humanity. Inequalities, short term contracts, and punishingly long working hours destroy mental health, decrease productivity and render family life – save for a privileged few – a thing of the past. The long-term effects on children are potentially catastrophic.
This leads to short-termism and prevents even a modicum of forward planning for most people, who must live from one pay cheque to the next.
Lacking objectivity and perspective, as we struggle for survival in subhuman working conditions that undermine the quality of life, decline arrives in increments. This leads to petty corruption and greed, in a dog-eat-dog universe where the elderly are replaced once they have outlived their usefulness. Their fate is increasingly to be place in decidedly uncaring privatized nursing homes, or spend their last moments on a trolley in an underfunded hospital.
Nozick the Great Ideologue of Neo-Liberalism
Anarchy, State, Utopia (1974) by Robert Nozick was a subversive reaction to John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice who had promoted a theory of economic justice. It became a neoliberal bible. Nozick suggested that government intervention, meaning taxation, beyond the enforcement of contracts and the control of crime is akin to slavery or theft. I own my body, he argues, so I therefore own everything my body produces, and if the state takes that which I produce away from me it enslaves me or – more elegantly – ‘socialism forbids consenting acts between capitalist adults.’
The egregious fault with his argument is that it does not follow that because you own your body you own everything you produce. Inequalities are inbuilt into capitalism as David Ricardo’s Labour Theory of Value demonstrated. It also does not allow for any understanding of the human condition, other than one informed by radically disaggregated and individualistic behaviour, devoid of co-operation and community.
At the time many thought that him daft, and that his ideas could not be implemented as they would lead to a socially dislocated society. It was even suggested that Anarchy, State; Utopia was an elebatorate joke, or part of an intellectual game. Indeed, Nozick was fond of scholarly conceits and subsequently wrote a book with a radically different thesis. So perhaps he did not take what he said seriously. Others did unfortunately.
The consequences have been economic collapse and surging inequality, the gradual destruction of the middle class, and the privatisation and diminution in healthcare as a right, as well as homelessness and mass evictions
The University of Chicago with its two highly placed judges in Easterbrook (dangling for a Supreme Court judgeship) and the truly nefarious ‘most cited’ legal scholar in the world Richard Posner, have also been responsible for much of the damage.
Here we have the perfect reductio ad absurdum: all of human activity is reduced to the wealth maximisation thesis. Thus rape arises out of scarcity of resources: it is expensive for men to purchase sex so we should have a de-regulated prostitution market according to Posner; or adoption should be de-regulated to deal with a competitive baby market where the product can be purchased by the consumer. Such nonsense is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) in which he satirizes an earlier version of neoliberalism, with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it would serve the polity to kill excess babies for economic gain.
The Middle Way
Keynes fell out of fashion because of the stranglehold of unionism and the imposition of socialist dogma in the 1970s. This created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishist privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of state subsidies. In the late 1970s a retreat by the state made some sense, but the correction turned into an ongoing campaign. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality
Naomi Klein in her bestseller The Shock Doctrine (2007) analyses the growth and development of neoliberalism across the world. She dubs the economic paradigm ‘disaster capitalism’, homing in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s disciple Milton Friedman:
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
Naomi Klein.
That is precisely where neoconservatism and neoliberalism coincide. Proto-neoconservatives remove the democratically elected Allende regime and replace him with Pinochet, before neo-liberal reforms open up the country for exploitation, washing their hands of any blood.
Yet all the best evidence indicates that stable growth occurs in Nordic and Middle European social democratic countries. There is a tangible link between Keynesian economics and sustainable redistributed growth. Neoliberalism does not generate sustainable growth, as opposed to wealth for the few, and does not provide for redistribution. In effect it is a recipe for diminished human welfare, less good for the greatest number.
Where Are We Now
The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz famously described our present state of affairs as ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor’. And the new era of state and corporate feudal control and terror we have entered into will accentuate these trends. Thus during this pandemic some of the wealthiest individuals in the world have actually increased their wealth.
A return to the methodology of neoconservatism can be seen in the emergency legislation that has passed through the parliaments of U.K. and Ireland. In theory these are designed to confront an immediate emergency, but will become embedded, and spiral out of control just as we have with counter terrorism legislation. Enforcing self-isolation and ‘track and trace’ become new norms inflicted by neoconservatives and consented to by neoliberals, many of whom with notable exceptions such as Lord Sumption, forget their libertarian origins as long as the dosh keeps rolling in. Notably Tony Blair is awake to new opportunities.
Tony Blair: If you're not able to test significantly when trying to get large numbers of people back into a normal routine, you're going to be enormously inhibited in how you handle the disease.
— Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (@InstituteGC) August 17, 2020
The very phrase ‘social isolation’ is problematic and euphemistic – like ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘military intelligence,’ a contradiction in terms. In fact self-isolation suits a silo bubble of social atomisation and dealing with people or problems one by one by state authorities. We risk a descent into a new barbarism not least due to the pernicious effects of decades of privatization.
The Indian activist Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neoliberalism and environmental damage have gone hand-in-glove in her book Capitalism: a Ghost Story (Verso 2014). There are the mass evictions in India of ‘surplus population’ (a truly evil capitalism coining). The street vendors, rickshaw riders, the small shops and business people, and not least the suicide of 250,000 farmers.
This forced displacement, often from rural areas to cities, augments the channelling of wealth towards the one percent plutocracy controlling India.
It has been suggested by John Gray and Roy herself that the pandemic may lead to a rethink. I fear not. In fact, rather than becoming, as Roy puts it, a porthole to a sustainable and fair existence for all, I fear increased atomization, semi-permanent social distancing, diminishing social supports and the insidious undermining of civil liberties, supported by a scared and soma-induced population.
We are now entering an age of corporate feudalism and of mercantile state control with sub Malthusian ideas gaining traction. It is an age of extremism nourished by religious fundamentalism. It is a time for the convergence of Burkean conservatism with Habermasean moderate socialism to implement ideas informed by traditions of decency and the green agenda. It is a time for sustainable personal and societal living to be realised.
He wants to work Monday nights but not Tuesday afternoons; she is available on Saturday evenings but not on Sunday mornings… Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises often find it challenging to recruit part-time workers, with abundant choices available to gig workers in different sectors, but the pandemic has vividly demonstrated the nature and depth of insecurity of this form of employment.
Gig economy workers can range from traditional independent contractors to freelancers and temporary employees, who work at different times during the week. A few examples of companies where gig is the norm include TaskRabbit and Lyft in the U.S.; Uber, Swiggy and Zomato in India; and DiDi, Ele.me and Meituan riders in China.
Some may use gig work to supplement the income they receive from a traditional job. In the U.S., research shows that at least one-third of the total workforce[1] relies on gig economy work as a primary source of income.
Trade Unions generally oppose gig work and have tended to be resistant to independent contractors[2]; for years state legislatures have sought to enforce employment law and regulations on companies operating in the gig environment.
Bearing Risk
The platter of risks that gig workers bear not only relate to labour inputs, but also capital investments, as continuing in work is dependent on circumstances beyond the control of the worker.
For example, Uber, DiDi or Ola drivers use their own money, or borrow it, to pay for their cars. Yet companies may ‘decommission’ drivers in the event of: (a) the company changing the amount it pays to drivers or; (b) the ride-hailing industry experiencing increased competition; or (c) if the company gets flooded with new Uber (or other ride-hailing companies) drivers, due to low barriers of entry; (d) a driver may receiving low satisfaction ratings from customers.
A decommissioned driver may then be burdened with debt, with no ready means of repayment. The platform providers ensure that their workers are not classified as employees in any form, and thereby owe no entitlements to workers.
This is despite the gig ‘employee’ paying for and providing a physical asset that the platform relies on to carry out its business. The objective of the platform providers is to ensure that gig workers are considered independent contractors, and not employees.[3] Contractors in the traditional economy, such as truck drivers, may also sometimes supply their own ‘tools’, but the gig economy differs in that the gig worker doesn’t accumulate any goodwill that can be sold-on or leveraged for financial gain. The goodwill accrues to the platform provider, leaving the worker with few options.
Conventional employers attract full-time talent by offering a stable work environment, a retirement plan, along with other ‘soft’ benefits such as a modern office space, free food and drink and other fringe benefits[4].
However, there is a rational for businesses to engage ‘non-employee’ freelancers to work with their internal teams. The most compelling reasons are: (i) flexibility, (ii) access to expertise, (iii) speed, and (iv) cost. Thus in a survey conducted by Deloitte in 2014, 51% of executives said they expected the use of contingent talent to increase over the next 3-5 years.[5]
Temporary, irregular work ideally fits someone looking for extra money on the side, or a person who prefers an ad hoc schedule. However a large demographic among the middle class simply cannot afford instability, and are not getting fairly remunerated for their work. Gig work does not bring sufficient security for anyone planning a family, nor does it fulfil at least three of Maslow’s five Hierarchy of Needs (i.e. physiological, safety, social, esteem and self-actualisation) that many full-time positions come with.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
The insecurity is very real. Recently, the U.S. Department of Labour (DOL) established that many workers, depending on contractual specificities, in the gig economy should be considered contractors for the purpose of federal wage and hour regulations[6].
Just as gig work can increase one’s earnings to an unlimited extent, the opposite can also hold true, with pay rates varying dramatically, and with a fixed minimum wages rare. The ‘feast or famine’ style of income can, therefore, become increasingly stressful; fluctuation in earnings can make it difficult to save for the future. This is exacerbated by not having an entitlement to a retirement package or pension contribution. Then there is the formidable issue of no sick leave – if gig workers are unable to work, they simply cannot earn.
Along Comes COVID-19…
Once the pandemic struck, gig workers’ income plummeted to an unprecedent extent, and most of them were not on healthcare plans either. This has placed many gig workers in an even more precarious situation.
The ILO recently remarked that Covid-19 could lead to ‘the worst global crisis since World War II’. The pandemic is projected to remove 6.7 per cent of working hours globally, in the second quarter of 2020 – this is the equivalent to the annual salary of 195 million full-time workers: accounting for 8.1 per cent, equivalent to 5 million full-time workers in Arab States; 7.8 per cent, or 12 million full-time workers Europe; and 7.2 per cent, or 125 million full-time workers in Asia and the Pacific[7]. This will affect the motivation levels of gig workers too, particularly those who have recently moved into this form of employment from full-time paid work that had enjoyed associated health insurance and other benefits.
The retail, airline, and hospitality sectors have all witnessed significant layoffs. A couple of months ago some of the leading gig-economy companies responded by offering basic sick leave provisions and safety equipment, including hand sanitizer for drivers.
Whether it is Deliveroo in the U.K., or Meituan in China, or Zomato in India, the fragility of ride-hailing, food-delivery or furniture building work is increasingly apparent through extended lockdowns in many countries, with social distancing set to continue indefinitely. As gig workers are considered ‘freelancers’ and not ‘employees’, companies are excused from offering employment protections like guaranteed wages and sick pay, which is particularly crucial during this crisis as sick individuals should not feel obliged to go out to work.
Huge job losses are now expected across higher income countries. The sectors most at risk include accommodation and food services, manufacturing, retail, and business and administrative activities. There is a high risk that end-of-year global unemployment figure will significantly exceed the initial ILO projection of twenty-five million redundancies[11].
Essential Services
As gig workers are not ‘employees’, most of them are caught between choosing whether to remain at home, self-isolating to avoid potentially passing the virus onto others or remaining in ‘essential’ service work to support themselves and their families.
Those affected include medical workers who are taking significant risks to treat the sick. They are, however, generally low-paid grocery store workers, delivery workers, Amazon factory workers, street cleaners, and others, who have not knowingly entered their chosen occupations expecting elevated health risks, but have nonetheless had to work through the lockdown. Otherwise, if they don’t work in an ‘essential’ line of work during the COVID-19 crisis, they are in lockdown along with everyone else, and may not easily secure employment.
Responses to the U.K. Quarterly Labour Force Survey suggest that workers in manufacturing , sales and service, cleaners, among others are unsuitable for adjusting to remote work. While some countries have provided assistance to workers unable to perform tasks from home, there are certain categories of workers who tend to fall through the cracks of these programmes. Among these are zero-hour contract workers, and small or off-market, self-employed workers such as those who deliver food and clean homes.
To insure against a repeat of this crisis impacting on gig workers, we require policies to support businesses, employment and incomes including: provision of essential healthcare benefits, economic stimulus incentivising job creation, enhanced workers’ rights; and, equally importantly, mechanisms for dispute resolution between government, workers and employers. The right measures could make all the difference between the economic survival or collapse of not just individuals but the economy as a whole.
De Blasio Protests the Layoffs of 500 LICH Nurses and Health Care Worker.
‘Chaos is a ladder’
It should be acknowledged that the crisis has also created opportunities for both the companies reliant on flexible employment and even the workers themselves. For example, it has led to partnerships in India between governments and private enterprise including Ola, Flipkart, Swiggy, Urban Company and Uber. This is playing a crucial role in containing Covid-19, according to a report published by the Ola Mobility Institute.
Additional examples include Uber’s announcement in early April of two new Business-to-Business (BTB) partnership arrangements in India. Firstly, with UberMedic, a 24-7 service that works with health care authorities. It provides transport for front-line health care providers to and from their homes and medical facilities. Secondly, BigBasket driver are assisting with last-mile delivery of everyday essential items in four cities.
Also Flipkart, which still competes with Amazon in India, is currently in talks with cab aggregators and the Indian Railways to ensure smooth and hassle-free movement of essential products from vendors to customers. One of the objectives is to offer incentives to supply chain and delivery executives.
These sorts of collaboration allow governments to recognise the potential of gig workers in this crisis, and have produced two non-fiscal strategies; first, by actively engaging the technological capability of the gig platforms and their logistical networks (a hands-on approach); and secondly, passively facilitating their operations through legal protection (a hands-off approach).
The agility of businesses reliant on gig workers brings fewer staffing challenges. This flexibility is certainly of arguable advantage to workers, but at least it may be keeping a small percentage of gig workers in employment that might not otherwise exist.
Also, some gig work employers are sending staff for certification courses run by the likes of Apollo Hospitals in India. This learn how to stay safe and vigilant while delivering goods and services to customers.
In India, many, if not most, gig workers are also economic migrants, and a large proportion returned to their hometowns following the nationwide lockdown. Organisations are now unsure about the extent to which this trend will be reversed once restrictions are lifted.
Analytics on the many impacts of Covid-19 remain thin, apart from some well-researched and presented data available from John Hopkins. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that low-income workers have an elevated risk of contracting the virus, and thus the income support system currently in place will leave some low-income workers exposed if they feel compelled to go back to work. Greater protection of their income should be prioritized around the world, particularly in countries like India and the U.S. where gig work is slowly being formalised.
Research into the motivation levels of gig workers in mainland China demonstrates[12] that gig employers generally prefer to wield ‘sticks’ than offer ‘carrots’ to employees, leading to a precarious standard of living.
So far a few progressive steps have been taken in India, and a few more in the U.S., in companies such as Google, Facebook and Uber, who are coming around to recognise their contingent workers as ‘employees’.
At least this crisis creates the space to re-evaluate the operation of the gig economy, especially as we now recognise how ‘essential’ certain forms of work are. We can effectively rebalance our regulations and reward-systems, safeguarding the interest of gig workers, and creating a brighter future for the gig economy.
[1] Habans, R. (2017). The Gig Economy in Illinois An Exploratory Analysis of Independent Contracting, School of Labor and Employment Relations Labor Education Program
[2] Sparkman, D. (2019) The Gig Economy Poses New Safety Threats and Liabilities, EHS Today
[3] Jelani, V. (2016). In a ‘’Gig” Economy, Workers Taking on More Risk, Harvard University
[4] Alan Kohll (2019) How Your Office Space Impacts Employee Well-Being, Forbes
[5] Schwartz, J., Bohdal-Spiegelhoff, U., Gretczko, M., and Sloan, N. (2016). The gig economy: Distraction or disruption?, Deloitte
[6] Pasternak, D. (2019) U.S. Department of Labor Says “Gig Economy” Workers Are Independent Contractors, Not Employees (US), Employment Law Worldview
[7] ILO (2019) ILO: COVID-19 causes devastating losses in working hours and employment, COVID-19: Stimulating the economy and employment, International Labour Organization
[8] Pandemic Erodes Gig Economy Work, The New York Times, 2020
[9] Higgins, T. and Olson, P (2020) Uber, Lyft Cut Costs as Fewer People Take Rides Amid Coronavirus Pandemic, The Wall Street Journal
[10] Mukhopadhyay, B. and Chatwin, C. (2020). ‘Your driver is DiDi and minutes away from your pick-up point’: A Thematic case of DiDi and worker motivation in the gig economy of China. International Journal of Development and Emerging Economies, 8 (1), 1-17
In a recent survey of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) by Ernst and Young[i], 79% of board members stated that their organisations were not well-prepared to deal with a crisis such as today’s pandemic. Several other analyses also indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic will push down the full-year gross domestic product (GDP) globally from the 2.5% that was forecasted in January 2020 to 0%.[ii]
In this climate, corporations are urgently attempting to satisfy the dual key targets of meeting strategic goals and also customer demands (which tend to be bespoke in several sectors). However, a closer look at these two goals reveals that strategic goals also includes employee wellbeing (a particular problem during this period), maintaining brand image and overall reputation, supply chain and procurement essentials, while staying clear of legal challenges that the current situation might inadvertently throw up.
So, while sending out a responsible business image that needs to be maintained, at the same time longer term stakeholder management and internal coherency in management decisions are equally important. All of this while keeping healthy financial charts, tables and projections in today’s remote board room meetings.
An OECD analyses show that new business registrations in the U.S. fell by more than 75% relative to the prior year from 15-16 March onwards [iii] – the day when lockdowns started. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the number of start-ups dropped by 34% in April 2020 compared to April 2019[iv], in particular in business services and construction.
Also, in China venture capital investment in new companies declined by 60% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the first quarter of 2019. In Canada, a survey suggests that 59% of Canadians are considerably less likely to start a business after COVID-19 than before.[v] While these numbers indicate how deeply the aspiring start-ups and entrepreneurial initiatives have been hit in several leading countries, it also demands an exploratory look into how existing and relatively new businesses (especially, smaller ones) are coping under the circumstances.
They remain the competitive engine of many regions and cities while contributing to the fabric of local communities. Policy makers in several countries, including most BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India, China] have responded by deferring payments and assisting with temporary layoffs, enhancing access to credit, providing grants and wage subsidies – amongst many other short-term measures. However, these quick fixes cannot continue indefinitely. Therefore, strategic action is required to enhance SME resilience by opening new markets and by helping them to adopt new technologies and work practices.
The vigour, agility and the general wellbeing of employees should be a priority for small and large businesses alike. Despite the image portrayed on social media, throughout the lockdown limited working hours, work from home, virtual leadership and new strategies for remote engagement have brought considerable difficulties in all major sectors.
For progressive organisations, small and large, the challenges are on several fronts, beginning with identifying the current bottlenecks, before listing challenges and potential (and implementable) solutions.
The primary concern of any business should be the wellbeing of employees and their families. This should look beyond the ‘duty of care’ component of management and take a more humane and ‘affiliative’ leadership approach.
Secondly, perhaps the most important consideration should be communication. Not only how clear and concise a message should be, but also how well-coordinated and standardised the communication systems is to ensure clarity when engaging with key stakeholders.
A third consideration is the challenge of ensuring sustainable financing and stable cash reserves in the period following lockdown.
A fourth component is to assess what kind of models and constructs are in place for companies to assess risk and crisis management.
Fifthly, despite talks of a ‘new’ normal etc., the empirical demand patterns in some markets will not witness a sea change immediately after the crisis lifts. The challenge is to address the impact of demand disruptions, which businesses will need to recover from. This will hit the supply chain and entail procurement risks that businesses need to mitigate both in the medium and long term. The practical foresight of resilience and prudence will play a colossal role.
Staffing Limitations
The emphasis on driving production efficiency, strong yield, and high first pass quality is even more urgent now as many companies have reduced capacity utilization due to staffing limitations. Data shows that even after the reopening of factories, most sites are still struggling to achieve 50% of their previous capacity.
Most companies are likely to experience significant disruption to their operations and will underperform for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. Companies that are operating in, or exposed, to countries that are significantly affected by COVID-19 will experience disruption to their supply chain and production commitments.
A greater emphasis on employee wellbeing should be as a priority since employees are the one true asset, even more so if they are motivated as much as their line managers towards a common larger goal.
For SMEs, staffing and recruitment should remain key components during times such as today. At least the market has provided a brief window to rethink the acquisition, management and retention of talent. This has as much to do with change management as with determining the culture of the company as it will be in the future. One tip that might prove worthwhile is to be empathetic in reducing employee hours.
Particularly in the case of businesses that have not been in complete lockdown, or those that have been partially open with restricted hours every day, or those slowly expanding their opening hours as lockdowns are lifted in phases: it is often best to speak directly with employees about their financial situations.
Most zero-hour contract workers in retail outlets, food and beverage, fast-fashion and also the hospitality industry are self-selecting towards reduced hours, thereby, saving the time and energy of line manager cutting the hours of those who may be more dependent on the income from that employment.
Provide Reassurance
An equally prudent approach towards customers is to provide reassurance during this period. That is easier said than done for companies that are widely visible on social media. The question is how personalised, accurate and contextual that message should be.
Clearly, there is a temptation to post often on social media, but this also carries challenges and long-term risks. A lack of clarity, and meaningless assurances to customers could do far more damage than not posting at all. A recent survey showed that 34% of customers,[vii] especially concentrated in the Gen-Z cohort use social media platforms channels as an information source.
To keep a business’s head above water, this may also be a good time to reach out to lenders to negotiate short-term reliefs. This could come either in the form of deferred payments or extended credit lines. As mentioned earlier, the focus on supply chain and procurement in this period is essential.
This is also important because there may be significant changes in stakeholder relationships arising out of current decisions. Equally timely and important is reaching out to business vendors to confirm supply continuity. Some of these businesses may be facing their own hardships. This is a good time to work closely with them and explore opportunities for mutual benefits. Some of these businesses could offer deferred payment terms as well.
Going forward, survival, resilience, and renewal strategies need to be independently developed if the pandemic is to teach businesses a crucial lesson or two.
[i] Ernst and Young (2020). Is your organization prepared to respond?, EY Global Risk Survey (accessible at https://www.ey.com/en_ie/covid-19/is-your-organization-prepared-to-respond-)
[ii] World Bank (2020). Pandemic, Recession: The Global Economy in Crisis, World Bank (accessible at https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/08/the-global-economic-outlook-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-changed-world)
[iii] OECD (2020). Coronavirus (COVID-19): SME policy responses, OECD Policy Responses to Coronavirus (COVID-19) (accessible at http://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/coronavirus-covid-19-sme-policy-responses-04440101/)
[iv] OECD (2019), OECD SME and Entrepreneurship Outlook 2019, OECD Publishing, Paris (accessible at http://www.oecd.org/industry/smes/SME-Outlook-Highlights-FINAL.pdf)
[v] McKinsey & Company (2020). COVID-19: Briefing note: June, 2020, COVID-19: Implications for business (accessible at https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business)
[vi] Yoshino, N. And Taghizadeh-Hesary, F. (2016) Major Challenges Facing Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in Asia and Solutions for Mitigating Them, ADBI Working Paper Series, Asian Development bank (accessible at https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/182532/adbi-wp564.pdf)
[vii] The Asean Post (2020). Gen Z’s use of social media has evolved, The Phillipines (accessible at https://theaseanpost.com/article/gen-zs-use-social-media-has-evolved)
