Worse is better? (2015)

Book Review from the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Things are Going to Get Worse and Why We Should be Glad.  By Michael Roscoe. New Internationalist. £9.99.

The basic assumption of this book is one we can share: ‘Real wealth creation requires real work, and real work must involve the transformation of nature’s raw materials into something of value to us humans. There is no other way to create wealth.’ This is, of course, the basis of all labour theories of value including Marx’s, even though wealth and value are not the same.

Roscoe argues that, as wealth can only be material, the service sector does not create any, but just consumes it, even if the service is useful and/or contributes indirectly to future material wealth production. Education, healthcare and various personal services do contribute to this by maintaining and improving the workforce that produces the actual wealth. Finance, on the other hand, says Roscoe, does not. It can play a useful role in channelling funds to the productive sector but most of its activities since the 1980s have just been shuffling money between speculators which doesn’t help wealth production at all.

The growth of the service sector reflects  the rise in productivity in the productive sector (agriculture, fishing, mining, manufacture and construction) over the years. The extra wealth produced has gone to maintain and expand the service sector, absorbing the workers displaced from the productive sector by rising productivity.  Why, according to Roscoe, ‘things are going to get worse’ is that this can no longer continue because the service sector is being automated  too (and oil is going to run out and the financial bubble is going to burst). As a result unemployment is going to grow until the system collapses. As ‘it is only in times of crises that real change can be brought about’, this is ‘why we should be glad’.  In other words, worse is better.

This may (or may not) be true, but Roscoe’s ‘real change’ turns out not to be one. He wants to retain capitalism but modify it by government action, a return to the ‘mixed economy’ of before Thatcher which he oxymoronically calls ‘market socialism.’ Actually, it’s not quite a return to those days as one of the things he wants governments to do is to slow down growth (as it’s using up the Earth’s resources) by slowing down the rise in productivity. Given capitalism, that’s like King Canute ordering the tide not to come in. It won’t work and can’t work because capitalism is a system of capital accumulation driven by competition between profit-seeking enterprises,  both private and state, which imposes rising productivity and growth on them as the price of staying in business.

A disappointing book, then, which starts off making a good point but which ends up advocating an impossible reform of capitalism.

Adam Buick