Since the credit crunch turned into the financial crisis two or three weeks ago the media and mainstream politicians have made an important discovery: the existence of capitalism.

Stock market figures.

Previously we had something called ‘the economy’. This was often problematic and an object of debate. Nevertheless the economy was akin to nature in status. In other words it was an inevitable fact of life which might be measured and analysed by economists and business journalists, but whose essential character remained unchangeable. Neo-liberalism, heralded at the turn of the 1970s as a radical shift in economic thinking and practice hardly challenged this idea. What neo-liberal discourse did do, however, was push the term ‘market’ rather than ‘economy’. It turned out that economies were reducible to markets, whose natural qualities of choice and the maximisation of utility were plain for all to see.

The astonishing thing is how fast all this has changed. Suddenly everyone is using the word capitalism: Gordon Brown, BBC journalists, neo-liberal economists, Republican senators in the US … the list goes on. What’s more there’s a new lexicon to describe the capitalists. For instance, this morning’s Daily Express trumpets, ‘Now city spivs try to wreck HBOS deal’ [the giant HBOS bank is the subject of a takeover bid by its former competitor Lloyds]. In effect the British tabloid press is using the kind of language previously reserved for socialists. I’ve been shouting ‘Make the fat-cats pay’ on our city centre stall for months. It’s uncanny now to hear these slogans echoed in mass circulation newspapers.

Of course that doesn’t mean politicians and the media have suddenly become advocates of radical change. Far from it. The remedies being suggested all focus on small-scale correction or adjustment. Still, the shift in language is hugely significant because it involves a profound distancing effect. Where the market was natural, inevitable and we all had a stake in it, capitalism indicates something historical and thus changeable. More, it suggests a system which is remote from us, even alien.

Perhaps the most important thing about this Discovery of Capitalism is that it shows up how thin and flimsy the ideology of neo-liberalism has been all along. The mantra ‘there is no alternative’ adopted by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s had become a banal statement of common sense by the time of Tony Blair’s arrival as British Prime Minister in 1997. Privatisation and marketisation were now obvious goods. Crucially, all such common sense has been thrown into doubt over the last few weeks. The market system, built on private greed and engendering conflict and inequality, now begins to appear much more as itself.

We might say (please indulge me with this metaphor) that split from breast plate to cod piece the ideological character armour is falling from the shoulders of capitalism. I think that the extent to which media and mainstream politicians can do a repair job and strap it back together depends in part at least on the response of social scientists, both students and academics. Now’s the time to use our skills of critical analysis and investigation to show social reality in all its contradictions and help pave the way for real social change.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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Attending the ‘Crossroads’ cultural studies conference at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica I was struck over and over again by the contradictions of being at such an event. I don’t mean to say it was a bad conference. Far from it. There were plenty of terrific papers, brilliant meetings with new colleagues, and extraordinary cultural events.

Kingston, Jamaica.
[image by Chrysaora, some rights reserved]

But here we all were, mostly from the global North, staying in uptown hotels or on the beautiful campus beneath the Blue Mountains. Meanwhile downtown in the decaying sprawl of what was once the administrative centre of the British West Indies the poverty stricken people were scuffling to get a crust, or simply survive one more day in streets where mass murder is a fact of everyday life. Indeed, as a recent UN report makes clear gun crime and gang violence in Jamaica have now reached a critical level. In the last five years alone 300 children have been murdered on this tiny island.

It is all too easy to see the problem as a local one. And it’s perfectly true that there is a local dimension. The well off in Jamaica lament the parlous state of the country and then promptly award themselves tax breaks or erect huge security fences to seal off their properties from the ‘sufferahs’ who have nothing. Yet as is the case with inequality everywhere, there’s a structural dimension to this.

Jamaica was once the market garden and dairy of the Caribbean. Then, in the 80s as neo-liberal policies bit, North American agri-business dumped agriculture products (i.e. exported them to the island at below cost) destroying local farms. At the same time the U.S. administration pushed the Jamaican government into wiping out the cultivation of marijuana thus paving the way for the rise of organised crime and a major import/export trade in cocaine from Columbia.

Now what’s left of the economy is controlled by an unholy axis of multinational capitalists and the ‘doms’ or gang bosses who fight each other – and kill hundreds of local people along the way – as they struggle for power over their ‘garrisons’. These are the fiercely protected patches of territory which make up the Kingston metropolitan area. In effect democracy no longer holds sway in this city. Instead politicians collude with gang bosses in a clientelist political system based on corruption and the delivery of votes for favours.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1970s under the democratic socialism of Michael Manley’s PNP government Jamaica began to move towards a more equitable social order. There was limited public ownership of industry and new welfare programs together with some experiments in radical grass-roots democracy. But towards the second half of the decade, world economic crisis and the new ‘monetarist’ policies of the World Bank and World Trade Organisation did for Jamaican socialism. The economy collapsed and with CIA intervention the bloody election of 1980 (over 1000 killed) brought Edward Seaga and the JLP to power on a neo-liberal ticket. Jamaica has never looked back – though it has never really looked forward either.

Gazing out of my bus as we drove up Orange Street (still the music quarter of this most musical of cities) I wondered what would become of such an extraordinary culture and people. Fatalism is the prevailing mood on the island itself. Yet there are signs of hope in the Caribbean. Looking South to Venezuela it’s possible to see an alternative future. Here was a country also mired in poverty, corruption and the privilege of the wealthy few. Now change is in the air as the Chavez government pushes (albeit very slowly) towards redistribution and a fairer society. The point is, it’s never too late for social change. Or in the terser words of dancehall star Beenie Man we can, we must ‘Reverse De Ting’.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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In the world of art and cultural production the idea of craft retains a low status. Indeed, specific skilled crafts such as pottery, needlework, woodworking, jewellery-making and so on have long been contrasted unfavourably with fine art but also with conceptual art - the art of the radical avant-garde. Indeed, craft has long been seen as functional and utilitarian - a kind of 'wholemeal' art; i.e. something that is admirable and good for you - but not especially exciting.

The craft historian Peter Dormer argued that this attitude stemmed from the Modernist separation of 'having ideas' from 'making objects'. So, for example, after 1917, once Marcel Duchamp has exhibited his selected 'readymades' (urinals, bottle-racks, bicycle wheels and the like) he created the possibility of art without craft. It then became common to think that using skills to make things somehow detracted from the purity of 'higher' conceptual thought. So in modern societies, while the term 'artist' still carries some glimmering traces of romance, glamour and intellectual superiority, to declare that you are a 'craftsman' (or craftswoman) conjures up some distinctly unglamorous images of dusty workshops, parochialism and practicality – not to mention chunky knitwear and country fairs.

But craft is not just about 'making objects'. It is also concerned with a particular philosophical approach embodied and expressed in one's work - any kind of work, not just pottery, basket-making and the like. Paramount here is the idea that 'craft work' should be based on the possession of distinctive learned skills, rooted in a respect for tradition, and operate through a creative convergence (rather than a separation) of mind and body. This is argued in Richard Sennett's recent (and highly readable) book The Craftsman where he also argues that craft focuses on 'objective standards' on 'good work for its own sake' and is always 'quality-driven'. Craft-based work is also locally controllable in terms of pace and quality, and so represents what sociologists often term 'non-alienated labour'.

But while craft has many recognised virtues, being 'radical' isn't usually one of them. Indeed we only think of art as being a threat to the 'establishment' because it is based on extrovert creativity, self-expressivity and rule-breaking – whereas craft is seen as more introvert, obedient and passive. But maybe there has been a reversal of these critical positions.

Mexican craft skulls.
[Photograph taken by gruntzooki. accessed under a Creative Commons licence]

Firstly, as many critics are now arguing, the world of work has itself become more 'art-like' in so far as it is more premised on rule-breaking, visionary intuition, self-expression and creativity. Furthermore, the individualization of work, realised in the promotion of personalized contracts, performances, tests and rewards, the promotion of 'portfolio-working', the ethic of self-responsibility and so on is designed to appeal (like art) to our desires for self-evaluation and individual expression. If this is the case then the 'radical' credentials of art looks a lot less secure – art work becomes indistinguishable from any other kind of work – its values seamlessly absorbed into the mainstream.

Secondly, while the market now appears happy to accept any kind of art production that is premised on a commitment to radicalism, rule-breaking and newness (think of 1960s Situationism, Sex Pistols, culture-jamming, Damien Hirst, Banksy) it is maybe less happy to tolerate a commitment to craft. Which is not to say that craft is not commodified, or that craft objects are not sold, or that high craftsmanship does not sell in elite markets, but rather to suggest that when craft is considered as a political value, as a critical approach to the world, it can exert significant friction and drag on market relations. Craft work of this nature is slow, methodical and historically-orientated. It is a world of quality-driven and communitarian production (think of the LINUX system, the Fence Collective or the Ultimate Holding Company). It appears to wrinkle its brow at the needy demands of fast capitalism and does not present itself for easy commodification – it is stubborn, phlegmatic and inward-looking. It also appears to contradict the incessant demands of the 'new' economy for upbeat 'creative individualism' – valuing anonymity and obedience, disavowing celebrity, and privileging versioning over originality.

In 1892 in The Claims of Decorative Art, Walter Crane called craft 'a protest against the domination of our modern commercial and industrial system of production for profit' – could it still be so? At a time when appeals to radical aspects of art appear ambiguous and uncertain, could a revived politics of craft provide a counterweight to some of the instrumentalizing and desocializing demands of the new economy?

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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