Become ignorant, unskilled, and poor: this is your task if neoliberalism is to survive.

We’ve had don’t vote. Now I suggest don’t throw away, and don’t buy: just fix

By John Ward: The last two days have been mild and sunny here, and what this tends to do is make normal human beings want to get out among all things natural. Doing so in turn increases one’s self-esteem, and enables us to tackle tricky jobs we’ve been putting off, whether indoors or out.
One of these – small but tedious – involved a wire-based switch on a lamp of which I’m very fond. The lamp has a nice mock-Aztec beaten metal base, and so of course I wasn’t about the throw it out on the basis of a switch that has ceased to switch. It is, always in my experience, simply a contact-plate that his gone out of line.
Now in case you hadn’t noticed, these days all such switches are sealed. They used to have simple screw-holes in them allowing one to fix anything quickly. But that was before the era of Neoliberal Output Targets (NOT). These insist that Thou shalt NOT repair something, for this represents a crime against the shareholder dividend in that no further units are sold. So the screws have disappeared, to be replaced by an incabloc seal.
The excuse is safety, and an excuse it all it is….because even the most dumbed-down of today’s consumers  know how to fix such a thing without electrocuting themselves. But the idea itself is insane: because a tiny metal strip costing 0.001 Yuan has moved a bit, one must throw away a €60 lamp. Imagine driving into a car service bay because the horn wasn’t working, only to be told, “Sorry squire…you need a new car”.
(I should add here that I am not blind to another reality: that the power of the electrician union lobby in Europe wants to ensure that they do the work, not a DIY homeowner).
Anyway, this lunchtime I spent twenty minutes repairing the switch – seventeen of which involved breaking into the incabloc seal without breaking the mechanism. The lamp is now back in its position of the baker’s cupboard in the living room, working perfectly.
Because of this multinational, volume-based replacement purchase model we employ, old skills are dying out. There are no longer independent folks earning a decent living as repair operatives; what we have instead is everything geared to further sales, mountains of badly-made infill around the world, lots of Media Studies graduates talking tripe about digital marketing, and half baked after-sales engineers who couldn’t change a lightbulb.
Hence my recent problems with the tractor mower here. The old engineer (a curious bloke I used to call Mr Toad) know how to fix everything. But then the company was taken over by a multinational that wanted to have computers telling the customers what was wrong. Now Mr Toad has left in frustration….and the after-sales service has gone to pot.
There is nothing – absolutely nothing – socially, culturally, individually, fiscally or economically to be said in favour of neoliberal capitalism. It is just another excuse for very greedy people to get richer, while the rest of us get poorer, receive poorer service, get poorer education, and lose our entitlement to even the poorer health service on offer.
But let us not forget: forty years ago there was equally little to be said in favour of greedy, grasping Trade Union power, behind which was the ever-present fascist desire of the Scargills and McGaheys of this world to tell us how to be happy.
As I often assert (beacuse it’s true) we have wasted more than three decades replacing one bunch of bullying liars with another one. To my mind, there is only one difference between Arthur Scargill, Mick McGahey, or Derek Hatton on the one hand, and Bob Diamond, Rupert Murdoch, or Michael Gove on the other: the label.

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