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A few thoughts about #competition.
1. Competition could be seen as the defining value of our times. It is the touchstone of conservative/radical right politics. Even formerly left parties now treat it as a holy virtue. But ...
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1. Competition could be seen as the defining value of our times. It is the touchstone of conservative/radical right politics. Even formerly left parties now treat it as a holy virtue. But ...
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2. ... when you look at what conservatives do, rather than what they say, you discover that competition is strictly bounded. Competition is good – as long as *we* win.
3. If they really believed in competition, they would immediately abolish both private education and inheritance. Everyone would start from the same position, and the people who are most adept at particular tasks would win.
4. Far from it. They ensure their children begin the race after an expensive education, with economic security and, often, with a $0,000s in seed money to start their first business. In other words, the 100m race commences only when their offspring are 10m from the finish line.
5. Even then, the game is rigged. Look at the sourcing of vital health equipment and services in the UK. Contracts were neither advertised nor subject to competitive tender. Instead, a VIP channel was set up for chums. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/18/ppe-suppliers-with-political-ties-given-high-priority-status-report-reveals
6. Specialist companies with a long track record of delivery were passed over in favour of companies with no record, no experience, and, in some cases, no prior activity of any kind, owned by court favourites. The money was kept within the gilded circle.
7. The sums the government has given to these companies – sometimes for contracts that have either not been fulfilled at all or have delivered substandard equipment or services – are sufficient to set up the families of the “winners” for generations.
8. It's happened before. Some of the families given vast and corrupt military procurement contracts by George I (1714-1727) remain stupendously wealthy today.
9. In fact, so averse to competition is established wealth and power that many families have sustained their social position since the 12th century. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-014-9219-y
10. Any attempt to bring down the barriers to competition (through taxes sufficient to break the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation) is dismissed as “communism”. But without such resetting, competition, which is supposed to sit at the heart of capitalism, is a fraud.
11. The hereditary “winners” must then produce spurious arguments to reconcile their inherited wealth and power with their professed belief in competition. As Sir Humphrey Wakefield does: https://www.thenational.scot/news/18483684.clip-dominic-cummingss-father-in-law-discussing-genes-goes-viral/
12. It’s one of the unfunny ironies of our age that, amid all the grand talk of competition, anti-trust laws have been ripped down, enabling a massive increase in mergers and acquisitions and the consolidation of corporate and financial power.
13. And guess what? They've been ripped down by the very people who claim to prize competition above all other values. The result is a suite of anti-competitive practices, enabling powerful conglomerates to strangle smaller enterprises.
14. Even as they rig the game to ensure they always win, the economic elites insist that people at the bottom of the ladder are subject to ever greater competitive pressure. This is why the Hunger Games is a good satire of our times.
15. Of course, competition is a terrible value to fetishise in the first place. By definition, only one or a few people can win. The great majority will lose.
16. Yet those who lose keep voting for those who rig the game. Why? Perhaps because of our fatal tendency to see ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. One day it could be me! It’s the triumph of hope over experience.
17. This improbable dream is reinforced by celebrity culture, influencers, advertisers and thousands of aspirational programmes and articles. The media and marketing, even when they don't take an overtly political position, are powerful political forces.
18. It would be better to choose a universal value that delivers universal benefits. Such as #cooperation. Our belief in the virtue of competition and our frantic efforts to win harm the lives of most, and wreck the living world on which we all depend. Nobody wins the human race.
