Working For Profit? You’re Having A Laugh!

This was the response of a group of eco-businessmen in St David’s, Wales when interviewed by Paul Mason from BBC’s Newsnight for his report on What’s wrong with Britain.

All five businessmen thought the idea of maximising profit was old hat. They tell Paul that they have learnt their lesson from Nature.

"Nothing in nature maximises," said Andy Middleton, adventure company boss and deep green business guru. "Trees don't ask 'how high can I grow?'"

The buzzword today is optimization not maximization. It allows one to manoeuvre and be more flexible. I presume that - rather like in Nature - if you find yourself in a desert, it’s better to be a dwarf shrub rather than a giant redwood. How different from our Victorian predecessors who sought to tame nature to our needs.

The talk is all about decent margins, low margins, tight overheads and labour intensive rather than machine production. A woman who owned a pottery design business boasted about employing lots of local labour in routine, repetitive jobs that would be better done by machines or cheap labour abroad.

Philip Blond from ResPublica argues for devolving power to the users and re-localising the economy.

All of this smacks of less growth or no growth and low horizons.

‘It’s not capitalism’ says Paul Mason.

True enough. It isn’t capitalism and I ought to be happy about that; after all I’ve argued against capitalism since my University days. But I’m not. The alternative suggested here is even less progressive. At least social progress was driven by the self interest of individual capitalist entrepreneurs. These businessmen are eschewing progress in favour of limiting growth, of allowing nature to determine our boundaries.

Britain’s lifestyle businessmen may feel good about shedding the image of ruthless profiteers but their debts are bankrolled by profit-making countries like India and China and our unprofitable industries are being bought up by those self-same countries.

If British bosses are fighting shy of bigger and better then it’s no surprise that many workers in Britain are being told to make do with less. The vitriol spewed over the BA strikers recently, is an illustration of this trend.

We shouldn’t accept this. We need more than a living wage. It’s only by being dissatisfied with our lot and aspiring for more that human progress evolves at all.