What would have happened had we asked our Poet Laureate to govern rather than (or perhaps as well as) write poems during the credit crunch? I am reminded of another credit crunch about 2,500 years ago. This was in Athens around 594 BC — about 650 years before the Romans founded London as a civitas. Back in Athens we find a poet, Solon (638-558 BC), who, from a modest aristocratic descent, bursts into the scene of Athenian politics around 600 BC with a rousing poem about the war with Megara — another Greek city — over the island of Salamis. So rousing this poem was that Athenians apparently won the war.

Yet it turns out that the war was both an escape from and the cause of real troubles — all wars can make that claim. These troubles concerned the fact that many soldiers perished during the war were poor peasants who were not represented in the assembly (ecclesia), which was the exclusive domain aristocratic warrior-citizens. Many peasants were poor mostly because they cultivated the land as loans from aristocratic warriors.

The Pantheon, Athens.
[image © copyright Photos.com]

At this time Athens was governed as an oligarchy and aristocratic families held land indefinitely. While land was inalienable the right to use it could be mortgaged. Peasants could receive loans by sharing their rights to the product of the land. The peasant-debtor ‘agreed’ to cultivate the land as hektemor, or sixth-partner, surrendering five-sixths of the product to the aristocrat-creditor and retaining the rest. Such mortgaged land was physically marked by horoi, or mortgage stones as concrete symbols of mortgage slavery.

There had been ongoing struggles by peasants to free themselves from mortgage slavery but the situation was exacerbated by the war as many peasants fell into abject poverty and faced debt enslavement (sold as slaves). So there was really a credit crunch in the sense that peasants defaulted on their loans and were sold as slaves. The problem was to find peasants who would cultivate the land and generate income for aristocrats. (Going to war with credit never seems to work.)

Then Solon was elected archon, or governor, c. 594 BC. His first act was to free the land and destroy the horoi. His act, known as the seisachtheia, or ‘shaking-off of the burdens,’ cancelled all debts, freed the peasants and gave land to its cultivators. Solon’s second act was the ban on the mortgaging of land and mortgage slavery.

This was a bold act. Solon not only canceled all debt (which was not incurred as money) but he also abolished enslavement for debt, destroying the horoi. This act of destroying the horoi became a symbol of liberation. Solon’s reform was retrospective as well as prospective: he brought back people from overseas slavery who no longer spoke the Attic language.

More importantly, as Gregory Vlastos taught us long time ago, Solon’s act was much more than cancelling debts. Until then aristocrats had claimed the giving of justice as their exclusive prerogative. But Solon made justice -- or rather claiming justice -- an essential aspect of everyday rather than divine politics.

Could the government have not shaken off of all the mortgages owed by the poor? Could it not have abolished mortgage slavery? Instead, by part-nationalising banks, the government essentially mortgaged our future by bailing them out. So rather than shaking off of the burden of the poor our government actually doubled it. Perhaps we should rethink the remit of our Poet Laureate.

Solon’s Fragments 30, 31

“...Whereas I, before the people had attained to any of the things for the sake of which they had drawn my chariot, brought it to a standstill. A witness I have who will support this claim full well in the tribunal of Time --the mighty mother of the Olympian deities, black Earth, from whose bosom once I drew out the pillars everywhere implanted; and she who was formerly enslaved is now free. Many men I restored to Athens, their native divinely-founded, men who justly or unjustly had been sold abroad, and other who through pressure of need had gone into exile, and who through wanderings far and wide no longer spoke the Attic tongue. Those here at home who were reduced to shameful slavery, and trembled at the caprices of their masters, I made free. These things I wrought by main strength, fashioning that blend of force and justice that is law, and I went through to the close as I had promised.”

From p. 215 of The Work and Life of Solon: With a Translation of His Poems by Kathleen Freeman

Find Out More

‘Solon, the Horoi and the Hektemoroi’ by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix
in Athenian Democratic Origins and Other Essays, edited by David Harvey, Robert Parker and Peter Thonemann, published by Oxford University Press

The Work and Life of Solon: With a Translation of His Poems by Kathleen Freeman
published by The University of Wales Press

‘Solonian Justice’ by Gregory Vlastos
in Studies in Greek Philosophy, edited by Daniel W. Graham
published by Princeton University Press

About the author

Engin F Isin is professor in politics and international studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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As has been widely reported, this year marks the 40^th anniversary of the tumultuous events of 1968, where – if only for a brief moment – it appeared that Western capitalism was about to be toppled by the various riotous and revolutionary efforts of students, political activists and disgruntled workers. Much effort has gone into evaluating the impacts of 1968, not least by the BBC in John Tusa’s recent Year of Revolutions radio programmes.

One area of life which 1968 appears to have had a profound (but largely unacknowledged) influence upon is the realm of work. I recently finished Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's much-praised (and exhaustingly thick) book The New Spirit of Capitalism which takes up this theme and argues that, in the wake of 1968, employers and governments began to carefully manipulate emerging desires for individual freedom, creativity and autonomy raised by the counterculture. Thus, traditionally conservative capitalism began to take on board (rather than reject) radical values, absorbing them into the world of business, in order to provide disaffected populations with opportunities for more meaningful and fulfilling kinds of work. This had the effect of ‘buying off’ the counterculture; so tempering revolutionary impulses while also protecting established corporate and governmental interests.

Thus in the 1970s and 80s, in order to appeal to desires for ‘individual freedom’ work became more personalized, and was placed more under individual control. Indeed, what we refer to as the ‘individualization’of work came to the fore, realised in the increased use of personalized contracts, performances, tests and rewards, the promotion of flexible and portfolio working, the growth of an ethic of self-responsibility in the workplace and the disavowal of collectivization, unionization and the idea of ‘shared’ interests - all of which proved seductive, not just to revolutionary artists and political agitators, but young people more generally inspired by the possibilities of ‘creative freedom’, ‘selfhood’ and ‘autonomy’. The concurrent growth of various kinds of cultural, informational and knowledge based occupations (in public services, in media, design, technology and science) also gave rise to the idea that work could become more ‘creative’, choice-laden and personally ‘expressive’. The old idea that work is intrinsically boring, functional, alienating or oppressive was soundly challenged by the growth of a new discourse that promoted work as the principal route to personal freedom and individual growth. Work became, not the barrier to freedom, but freedom’s provider.

Thus for Boltanski and Chiapello, capitalism hijacked the values of 1968 and inserted them at the heart of economic life – and the social and artistic critiques that flowered in the 1960s have now been incorporated into the management ideology and textbooks of contemporary capitalism. Take for example Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, published in 1967 as a searing indictment of the inauthenticity and alienation induced by capitalism, highly valued at the time as a must-read text for any budding Left revolutionaries, and strongly condemned by the Establishment - yet as Boltanski and Chiapello point out, with its emphasis on free expression, self-directedness and choice there is little in there that would now be out of place in any contemporary corporate training manual or management textbook:

"The problem then is how to organize, without creating a hierarchy; in other words, how to make sure the leader of the game doesn't just become 'The Leader'"
Raoul Vaneigem

"Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders"
Tom Peters – contemporary management guru

I realise I’m being a bit selective. But while we often think of the counterculture as being a glorious failure, it was in some sense a huge success. The demands of the revolutionaries were not ignored – on the contrary they have been absorbed and contained into the heart of the economy, embedded in organizational life, and workers in all kinds of service and knowledge based, creative and artistic, advertising, marketing and media, public service professions have been rewarded with some semblance of the kind of freedom, authenticity and enchantment that the counterculture so vocally demanded. Ironically, then, the revolution has occurred – but inside rather than outside of capitalism. But is work really the new freedom? Maybe for some – doubtless not for many more others.   

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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On Saturday 5 July the UK will celebrate the establishment of the NHS, arguably one of the greatest British achievements of the post-war years. Politicians, the media, and of course, the health services are celebrating this landmark achievement, reflecting on the history of the NHS and also looking forward to the challenges facing this very British institution.

The NHS was the brain child of Aneurin Bevan and drew upon his experience of the medical aid scheme offered in Tredegar in South Wales by the major employer in the town, the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company. Bevan became minister for healthcare and housing under Clement Attlee’s post-war government and used this opportunity to radically restructure medical care, ensuring that it was free at the point of delivery for all citizens, irrespective of their ability to pay. It has become one of the hallmarks of British identity, summoning up what the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown referred to on January 14, 2006 in his speech to the Fabian Society as 'one of the great British institutions – what 90 per cent of British people think portrays a positive symbol of the real Britain – founded on the core value of fairness that all should have access to health care founded on need not ability to pay.’

Aneurin Bevan.
[image © copyright BBC]

Since the inception of the National Health Service, migrant doctors have been seen as an integral but devalued part of the health workforce. These doctors were necessary for its operation, providing a mobile army of labour in the lower rungs of a pyramidal medical hierarchy, ensuring that UK doctors at the apex did not have to compete too much for pickings from the much diminished private sector. Overseas qualified doctors were provided training in the health service in return for meeting the health service requirements of the population. They were, however, systematically disadvantaged in terms of access to jobs, career mobility, the places where they found employment and the specialties they could occupy. They have come to be called ‘sepoys’ and ‘indentured labour’ pinpointing the situations of trained migrant doctors and the organization employing them. Disproportionately represented in training posts and in non-career grade posts they have, however, been a backbone for the development of this very British institution. Thus, in 2003, only 17 per cent of South-Asian doctors were consultants compared with 42 per cent of white doctors, which provides some evidence that migrant doctors from South-Asia continued into the present century to find their careers limited by the hierarchical nature of the NHS.

But one of the specialties where they have found a home and established a niche is geriatric medicine, a specialty that too was born in 1948. Marjory Warren, often considered the “mother of geriatrics” established the first geriatric unit in the UK, where older patients were admitted, rehabilitated and sent home. This was an innovation in elderly care at that time. Before the establishment of the NHS doctors had provided free medical service to support the charity hospitals but had earned substantial incomes, on the whole, through private practice. After the establishment of the NHS and the amalgamation of most existing hospitals, including the workhouses, into the national provision, doctors’ salaries were paid for out of the national taxation system and there was some resistance to taking over the regular care of elderly frail people. Geriatrics became associated with the wider disdain given to its clientele, older people. As such it became a ‘Cinderella specialty’, a disregarded area of healthcare serving the needs of one of the least regarded groups of patients. However, the work of a few pioneers such as Marjory Warren, slowly changed the nature of healthcare for old people with the development of acute care for older people and its own subspecialisms. It began to offer a career trajectory and eventually became what it is today, the second largest specialty with just under 900 consultants in hospitals. As we enter an ageing society, this development of geriatrics within the NHS is set to continue.

Silhouette of elderly man in wheelchair.
[image © copyright BBC]

In part responding to the dire medical neglect of older people within the NHS hospital system and in part to government and management pressure to improve bed occupancy figures, geriatric medicine grew rapidly, to large extent depending on recruits from overseas for its expansion. But this 'Cinderella specialty' status also gave room for overseas trained doctors who found their own opportunities for career growth to find a home. They too became pioneers in this discipline, shaping the nature of geriatric care today. It came to be a field where South Asians could find jobs so that 22 per cent of all geriatric consultants appointed between 1964 and 2001 were non-white and had trained outside the UK, compared to 14.1 per cent of all consultants in the NHS.

These doctors felt drawn to the UK, rather than the USA, because in South Asia they were already part of a socio-cognitive community for whom markers of participation in the UK labour market were central to notions of career progression. Migration to the UK for the purpose of training, gaining membership of prestigious UK Royal Colleges (MRCP etc) has long been embedded in South Asian doctors’ professional cultures.

For many doctors, their lecturers in medical school had undergone some form of training in the UK and that upgrading and validating skills through training at one of the UK royal colleges was seen as crucial to being recognized as a good doctor. Thus, the doctors’ mobility was already embedded in a network of professional development which valued temporary movement to the UK. Moreover, at least in medicine, the power of empire continued to be forceful as medical practice and qualifications were very much influenced by regulating bodies and by professional organizations, located in the metropolis. Doctors were thus already in some ways part of a professional community where migration to the UK was seen as part of career progression.

As the country is poised to celebrate, and rightly, the establishment of one of the most remarkable institutions of twentieth century UK, it is also worth remembering and commemorating the twists of history that led to the development of geriatrics and the role of overseas qualified doctors therein.

For details of a project exploring the experiences of South Asian geriatricians, visit Overeseas-trained doctors and the development of geriatric medicine.

Take it further

Read more about the birth of the Welfare State

Explore the NHS with Open2

The NHS governance project

About the author

Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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