Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

*

One of the great triumphs of the Left in recent decades has been the discovery of how, systematically and strategically, to use wealth to destroy.

The great increase in per capita wealth and abolition of objective material poverty in the West might have been presumed to be destructive of the Left, since the Left was originally primarily an economic theory that based its moral appeal on the need for alleviation and abolition of poverty.

However, the Left has instead grown and thriven and become near-monopolistically dominant as objective poverty disappeared (or needed to be imported) and then societies become wealthier,

Yet understanding of how this has worked remains rudimentary - since there are no explanations in the dominant mass media, government propaganda and mainstream education - which fill our minds daily.

*

Asa simple and uncontroversial example, few recognize that government 'subsidy' functions - objectively -  as government control.

Once an organization gets a significant proportion of its income from government it cannot survive the removal of this 'subsidy' - especially when, as in all modern societies, an organization is absolutely prevented from making the necessary adjustments to save money (which would, usually,  involve rapidly shedding the least effective and efficient staff).

All organizations with significant government subsidy become, therefore, branches of government- first responding-to, then preemptively anticipating, government policy (which is itself driven by the mass media - which is intrinsically secular and Leftist).

*

Operating on the insight that the Left is evil, hence its primary strategic objective is destruction of Good, a specific example of the use of wealth to destroy comes from recent UK history.

Under the Blair/ Brown New Labour government of 1997-2010 there was a massive and very rapid transfer of money into the National Health Service (approx doubling of income) and Education system system of schools and higher education (approx fifty percent increase in funding).

The large and rapid increase in funding necessarily wreaked serious destruction in both health services and education - as has been apparent over the past several years.

How did it work?

*

In a nutshell, the increase in funding was used to destroy core function - so health services abandoned the primacy of health care, and education abandoned the primacy of education.

This happened because rapid increases in funding cannot be used to build primary function in expert functionality, due to manpower constraints.

While funding of a large and complex organization can be increased at ten percent a year, the supply of doctors or teachers cannot - because these jobs come at the end of a long pipeline of education and specialized training.

So it was impossible that the hiring of frontline doctors and nurses in the NHS, or of classroom teachers could be increased at the rate of expanding resources - therefore the increased resources were used to hire managers.

*

Management therefore expanded rapidly, and in strength (because it controlled the resource stream).

Frontline workers (doctor and nurse clinicians, class teachers) were subjected to new managerial demands.

Rapidly management became more powerful than frontline staff - frontline staff were pulled-out-of frontline activities with clients (patients and pupils) and set to work on managerial-imposed tasks of many kinds.

A typical doctor spends as much or more time on management-imposed tasks as actually seeing patients - more doctors are part time, and for these the proportion of time spent on management tasks may be considerably greater than clinical activities.  

A typical UK university now has numerically more non-faculty than faculty. The state education has (in man hours) about as many non-teaching teachers as class teachers actually teaching.

*

More fundamentally, the vast injection of resources into management shifted the balance of power such that management demands are now primary, and are taken as structuring of reality.

The nature of the organizational core function (what counts as health care, what counts as education) is now defined and redefined by management in an open-ended fashion and as driven by political demands from the mass media via government.

Functionality is now defined in terms of that which can be managed; so the activities of providing health services and of education are constrained by the necessity that they be auditable, hence explicit and precisely measurable.

That the manageable, auditable activity is not, in fact, the core function - may indeed be unrelated-to, orthogonal-to, actively opposed-to the core function of an organization - is simply unsayable within the bounds of management discourse...

since such a distinction is ruled-out as destructive of managerial legitimacy (or rather, revealing of the illegitimacy of management).

*

Thus we can see how the rapid, large scale flooding of an organization with money will, in general, objectively destroy that organization in terms of its function.

The shell of the organization will, or course, persist and expand in size - much the same people and the same kind of people continue to be employed in much the same buildings...

Doctors see patients, prescribe drugs, do procedures; teachers show-up in classrooms and say words in front of students; academic faculty get grants to do what is called research and publish stuff labeled as research...

But these activities are now orientated towards satisfying management constraints - in essence the activities are conceptualized primarily as auditable units.

*

In the hands of the Left, prosperity has successfully destroyed that which austerity and poverty and even war could not destroy.

*