The establishment does not understand the relationship between producers and consumers
What do we do if Wolfie Smith actually gains power? If the country is ruled by the precepts of the Tooting Popular Front? For the young and beardless of today, the reference is to a 1970s TV show which satirised the Teenage Trots of the day. The location was Tooting simply to ensure no one confused it with a documentary about Islington.
Worse than such wondering, what do we do now that we can show that Wolfie is in fact today’s establishment?
For one of the core ideas — satirised in Tooting, acted out further north — was that we’re all mere pawns of the capitalists. It’s the capitalists who decide what gets made, who makes it and how, at what price. We consumers have to simply put up with what is shoved at us. True, there are economies that have worked that way — there’s no other excuse for a Trabant — but is it true of this one, now?
Our rulers — and this means our establishment, not the rosette of one particular party — certainly act as if this is true. This is why they think they can change the world simply by commanding the capitalists to make different things.
Take those heat pump things. I’ve no problem with them (my house has a couple — they work). But consider the method they’re being pushed by in Britain — even, The Method. If you sell the alternative technology, gas boilers, then you must sell and or install a progressively larger percentage of heat pumps. The command has come down from government that it is the capitalists who must carry that weight of changing behaviour. If you — the manufacturer or installer — do not meet those targets then you must pay ever higher fines as the 5 Year Plan targets are missed. Our rulers — and, again, this has been happening under both cheeks of the uniparty — are even trying to finesse production within that constraint. A heat pump that does heat only gains a substantial subsidy. One that does cooling as well — with little more than the installation of a reverse switch — does not. Just to make sure no one even thinks about planet broiling air conditioning, d’ya see?
The very concept reeks of people who in fact believe that it is the capitalists who decide and the consumers who merely accept. So, we need to know whether that’s true of a market society or not?
Those with synapses to rub together will know that it is not. We even have great examples of why it isn’t. Take New Coke. One of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world did lots of research, a great deal of planning and decided that as some people like Pepsi — a slightly sweeter cola — then Coke itself should become sweeter to appeal to both the initial base plus those who like the sweeter stuff. What actually happened is that those who liked it sweeter continued to drink Pepsi and those who didn’t got angry. New Coke lasted 3 months as a prime product. It’s consumers who decide — not producers nor capitalists.
We can go further too. If you are a car manufacturer then you must sell an ever rising portion of electric vehicles. If you don’t then — again — you pay ever rising fines for not meeting targets. This is, as with the Trabant, to insist that consumers are mere passive acceptors of whatever the producers, the capitalists, can be bothered to make. We have our example here too. The Ford Edsel was designed as the next grand new leap upwards by the eponymous car company. Billions in current money spent upon the idea, design, manufacturing and launch. Everyone was really, really, sure it would be a hit. The target actually reached was that dull thud as a business plan met reality — for no business plan ever does survive a first meeting with the market. The Edsel lasted three years at most — a little longer in Canada than the US but, you know, Canada. The grandest and most excruciating failure before Jaguar’s latest rebrand in fact.
In a market economy, one which contains choices, it is consumers who decide by making those choices. The capitalists cannot force us to purchase something. Only a state monopoly can do that — which again explains the Trabant.
But that’s not the way we are ruled. Take this latest debacle:
Planning conditions to approve the runway … depend on Gatwick enabling 54 per cent of its passengers to travel to and from the airport by public transport
Whether or not a jet plane gets to take off depends upon whether the airport can force people to arrive by public transport? What, tickers on the approach roads and no more car drops offs allowed until a bus turns up? Leave aside that the method of local travel simply isn’t something under the control of the airport. We consumers have choices and damn it we’ll exercise that choice too.
Those who rule us are setting targets as if they believe that it is those producers — capitalists — who determine what it is that we consumers do. Making the possibly unwarranted assumption that they are at least internally consistent with their own beliefs, this means that we are indeed ruled by that Teenage Trotdom. Y’know, it’s them — the Illuminati, Rosicrucians, the capitalists, man — who decide what we may have. After all, they did bury that eternal lightbulb, right, and the car that ran on water was killed off by BP. Or maybe Shell, Exxon, innit?
The entire argument for a market economy is that it means that we, us out here, as consumers get to decide what succeeds
Sigh. The entire argument for a market economy is that it means that we, us out here, as consumers get to decide what succeeds. Okay, fair enough, there are a lot of people who think we shouldn’t have such choices, that we must be corralled into having only what is good for us — midwinter turnips to be nibbled, raw, in the dark of our hovels here we come. But think how deluded you’ve got to be to still allow that choice but also think that the producers are in charge in the face of it? But those are who we are currently ruled by. People who actually do think that the capitalists control what the people decide upon and that therefore it’s possible to control consumer decisions just by telling the capitalists.
Folks, really. Wolfie is a satire. But given that our rulers think it’s all true, what do we do now?
