*DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW - THE ENTREPRENEURIAL STATE* by Marianna Mazzucato

On this blog, you may have noticed that I frequently like to rag on Thatcher and Reagan, and discuss how they put into motion the mechanisms that would destroy the high standard of living and threshold for optimistic advancements in science and technology in the West that we had all come to expect after the Second World War,

There are two quotes that are rather famously attributed to Mrs Thatcher and Mr Reagan that best summarise their view of the role of the state in the life of the average person:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

Margaret Thatcher

There is no scarier phrase in the English language than, "I'm from the government, I'm here to help".

Ronald Reagan

Many have taken this to mean that neo-liberalism is against the state in all forms, a sort of 'anarcho-capitalist' sort of thing, without realising that anarcho-capitalist is an oxymoron since capitalism is inherently prone to hierarchy and therefore putting the two together is a gross misunderstanding of both capitalism and anarchism, in a sort of miss understanding of basic history and the humanities that only someone who thinks AI and computers can fix all of man's problems would come up with. Of course, as Slobodian pointed out in last week's book, and as has been hinted at several times in my Marx and the Death of the Author series, this is a misunderstanding of the neo-liberal view of state. No, the neo-liberal believes the state exists solely to protect the interests of capital. We saw this with Thatcher and Reagan as well, as both were prone to use their respective militaries to protect the claims of British and American corporations at home and abroad, as well as using the violence of state and international Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) to smash the power of organised labour at home, planting the seeds of modern militarised police to break up strikes and protests against this dramatic shift against the previous Keynesian understanding of the importance of employment at all costs. When you're walking through central London and see unmarked police vans and/or police vans with metal bars on the front to 'riot proof' them, thank your local Tory and/or Blairite, and Americans, well, Americans you know what your police are like.

One of the roles of the state that got sacrificed was the ability of the state to advance research and development. That's where today's book comes into play. Of course, the military's ability to advance R&D has not diminished, but we can circle around to that later. Children of the 1990s, myself included, grew up hearing many stories about how the internet was going to change the world. I, for one, still have vivid memories of a Blue Peter segment in which the hosts discussed the remarkable speed at which both electronic-mail messages (this hip new thing called email, you see) and games could be played on this wonder device. Of course, these new wonder computers were brought to us by private corporations, I'm old enough to remember when that included companies like Acorn, Sinclair, and Commodore, but more Apple, HP, Dell, Compaq, IBM, etc, etc. Most of my childhood was dominated by the Wintel (computers running the Windows Operating System on Intel x86 processor architecture) monopoly and Apple's then increasingly pathetic attempts to challenge it after Commodore, Atari, and Sinclair died, and Acorn abandoned (temporarily) the consumer market. I guess Olivetti and Amstrad are also in there somewhere. The late 1980s and early 1990s was a crazy time in computing). But, the key word for all these players was private, private, private. Even when the European Commission and the US Department of Justice completely dropped the ball on breaking up the Microsoft Monopoly during their respective anti-trust cases between 1999 - 2002, the arguments being seriously considered by English language media were 'yes, obviously Microsoft brought us the personal computer, but at what cost to our free market'?

One of the things I came across whilst I was doing my PhD was my growing frustration with just how utterly useless tech journalists are, since the way the entire industry is structured makes them all unbelievably sycophantic to the companies they're meant to critically report on because if they're critical they 'lose access' and so instead we get utterly useless websites like Windows Central that only become critical of Microsoft when the marketing fails and not in during Microsoft's ruthless destruction of the entire industry as we know it, because they really took that 'I'm a PC, you're a Macintosh' marketing gimmick to heart and now that's a core part of their identity. (If you want good tech reporting, might I recommend 404 Media or The Register, since they're not just idle cheerleaders for their team). This desire to be sycophantic is not unique to tech journalists. It extends to such publications of note as The Times, its American counter-part the New York Times, and yes, The Guardian, all of which are owned by the billionaire class, and so generally aim to please the billionaire class, which means uncritically cheerleading neo-liberal orthodoxy, or occasionally taking well established scientific fact (the climate is changing, and NOT for the better) and presenting it as a debate, because we're just asking questions you see, and not frogs sitting in an increasingly boiling pot who might have to take action quickly before we all die of a remarkably preventable thing that only have one large industry between us and cosmic oblivion.

ANYWAY, the journalists of the late 1990s and the early 2000s were incredibly wrong in their initial framing, and therefore were always going to come to the wrong conclusions. Microsoft did not, in fact, bring the home computer to millions. That would be the UK, US, and to a lesser extent the French governments, and all at the considerable expense of their respective tax payers. Microsoft is just the ones who got rich off of it, instead of, you know, the people of the governments that put in all the leg work.

The Second World War was, most experts agree, something of a big deal. A genuine existential crisis for multiple nation-states, amongst them the British and American ones. Britain, rather famously, found itself at the receiving end of multiple bombing runs in our most important cities, including the capital city of London. More importantly, U-Boats were threatening the island nation's existence by cutting it off from its vast empire. If you remember last week's review of Globalists, you know that cutting the metro-pole off of its Empire is typically bad for the long-term survival of the nation-state at the metro-pole. Given my obvious political bent, I'm sure it shocks exactly no-one that I'm a fan of George Orwell. Confusingly, I'm not a big fan of his fictional work, 1984 and Animal Farm both prove that subtly is, as Gareth Mengele said, for pansies because people will indeed choose to ignore what you mean. Death of the author and that. That concept, it just keeps coming back. No, I'm more of a fan of Orwell's non-fiction essays. Of particular interest here is his 1941 essay, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.

I like Orwell, but not uncritically, for a start he should've said the British Genius, not the English one, since the Unicorn in question represents Scotland's place in the Union since the Stuarts ascended to the thrones of England, Wales, and Ireland in 1604, with King James VI & I. The lion represents England and Wales, and this is okay because a lion that is indigenous to the British Isles is just as fantastical as a unicorn. ANYWAY AGAIN, there is an interesting idea that comes to us from The Lion and the Unicorn, which is the idea of what Orwell calls 'war communism'. You see, there are many reasons I love rereading The Lion and the Unicorn, one of them is it was written in Senate House here at the University of London. I have given lectures on this book in the very building it was written in, which I find very cool. Second, it was written in Senate House, as during the big Second World War, the British government commandeered Senate House from UoL and made it into the centre of the Ministry of Information. This, and the fact that Orwell hated Senate House (I love it, good example of Holden's work, and Art Deco is cool) led to Senate House becoming the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in 1984.

The second reason to read it, it opens with Orwell pretty sure he's going to die at his typewriter in Senate House. It was, after all, the Blitz, and Senate House seemed an obvious target for the Luftwaffe. Fortunately for Orwell, history, and my beloved example of central London art deco, fascists never go for the obvious targets, not when there's war crimes to be committed in the name of 'breaking morale', which has always worked, and that's why I'm writing this in German and not the king's English and the capital of Vietnam is Saigon. Orwell's fatalism comes from his understanding of the situation, Britain's response to the threat of Nazism was chaotic and messy, and this was largely due to the fact that the British government put corporate interests and a desire to 'save the economy' above preparedness for the obvious existential threat emerging on the continent. I know this seems familiar, my dear British readers, but let's press on. Orwell argued that capitalism would prove itself inefficient and incapable of adequately matching or addressing the threat of a centrally organised state like Nazi Germany, which had co-opted its capitalist class to war production. Orwell argued that Britain would have to engage in a sort of 'War Communism' to adequately organise against the fascist state.

Orwell was right, and this is what Britain and the US would both do. It was, after all, the only way for British and American industrial capacity to effectively meet the demands for the rapid expansions of the armed forces both countries were about to do. Orwell had hoped that this 'war communism' would encourage British people to see that socialism could address other existential crises, the ones brought on by the Great Depression, and move Britain to bring socialism not only home, but also to the Empire, and reform the Empire and Commonwealth into an international association of equal and egalitarian socialist states. Orwell would live to see both VE and VJ day, but not long after, becoming seriously ill in 1947, and ultimately dying in 1950, never getting to see Britain emerge from the shadow of the war. Infamously, the CIA and MI-6 would use his work to further smear all socialism, further proving my point above.

We know that Orwell's dream of a socialist Commonwealth never came to pass. One of history's greatest missed opportunities, and in no small apart thanks to the CIA/MI-6 shenanigans mentioned above. Britain's post war socialism was uneven at best. For start, it was socialism at home, and maximum capitalism abroad, especially in predominately non-white countries. This would ultimately lead to OPEC, which would lead to the OPEC embargo, which would lead to the energy crisis, which would give Thatcher and Reagan the ammo to undo that socialism at home. In the case of both the UK and US, the previously nationalised war production was privatised, and led to the creation of some of the largest international arms dealers today, British Aerospace Engineering's predecessors, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Rolls Royce, etc all made a lot of money from this re-privatisation, and created the 'military-industrial complex' that ruins and ends millions of lives globally annually to this day.

In the UK, however, we did get some positives. We got the NHS, we got universalised universities (fun whilst those lasted), we got the largest social housing programme in history until the Soviets out did us, we got legitimate social progress. Don't worry, it's all been undermined thanks to Thatcher. The Americans never got universalised universities, or social housing, but the GI bill helped white Americans get a glimpse at what their European and Soviet cousins were enjoying. Until their racism also got their goat and that all came tumbling down under Reagan. (Story here: socialism only works if we actively address racism and other bigotries, so no TERF socialists, please, and no, we can't have 'pleasant debate' about racism because the 'other side' is in fact, just wrong).

That rapid expansion of universities is important for our story, because that's where the state was entrepreneurial. Most medical research and most computing research that would become the basis of our modern lives, that would lead to 'Silicon Valley', NASA advancements, and even most of the war era and post war would be in government funded universities and not private enterprise. Fully electric, transistor-based programmable computers? And most of Turing's work for that matter, was done at the British government funded University of Manchester, most of the early internet, British funded National Physics Laboratory network (NPLNET) and the US government funded Advanced Research Project Administration Network (ARPANET). Free enterprise would not have paid for it, because it was a long-term project with no promise of profitability. Despite these massive tax payer funded programmes providing most of the research and advancements and, yes, infrastructure necessary for these programmes to work and produce the digital revolution, private enterprise came in at the eleventh hour, under Thatcher and Reagan, and privatised the results and collected the profits, before selling the inventions back to the tax payers that paid for their development in the first place, meaning you and your parents and grandparents paid twice, and even thrice, for the device you're reading this on, but a person who had little to nothing to do with the advancements is reaping the rewards on their yacht, whilst its stuck in a Dutch harbour and doing more to destroy local history than a frequently hinted at German-Austrian fellow.

The Entrepreneurial State does a very good job of expanding on the many arguments I have made above and more. As you might have guessed, I have some background with the economics of what I formally call 'information and communication technology', or ICT. You might also know it by its more informal nickname of IT. My knowledge of ICT is why I focused mostly on computers in this review. It's also why I know that Mazzucatto missed some things in the ICT story, including the UK and French government's involvement, in typical American fashion, she played up the role of the US government at the expense of even the great Professor Turing. That said, I know that enough of her argument is true that this book is an excellent introduction to what Guy Standing refers to as the plunder of the commons, that is things that were created by the public, using public funds and public knowledge, and then stolen from the public, often by government sale, and then hidden behind a paywall with no benefit to the public. And it happens more often then not, especially in the neo-liberal era. (NPLNET and the telecoms infrastructure built up by tax payer money becoming British Telecom, and BT charging the British people at monopoly rate for the same services previously obtained through government rates).

Mazzucato does go into other fields that I don't have as much experience in, namely pharmaceuticals. One of the justifications for the high rate they charge for drugs in unregulated markets, like the US, is they claim high R&D, this is a lie, as most of the historic R&D has been done by universities (think the Oxford-Astra Zenaca vaccine that Boris sold to Astra Zenaca for mate's rates). I don't have much background in the pharmaceutical industry, but I have read this report which discusses how patent hoarding has led to a stagnation in efficacy of medical research and pharmaceuticals, as well as a stifling of 'innovation', namely because only the profitable and popular diseases get treatment until a celebrity 'raises awareness' of the other ones, especially in an era when universities and their government funding have been under attack since the late 1980s, meaning corporations have to milk the hell out of the patents they already bought in the fire sales. (Change a colour or a shape of the pill, and that's enough). Also why the last meaningful advancement in technology was the release of the iPhone back in 2007, and now Silicon Valley is resting its laurels on nonsense like AI.

Give Mazzucato a read, and then read Standing. I have so many more of these to write.