How do You Solve a Problem like TINA?

For decades leading up to 2011, the year of great occupations, there has been a different kind of occupation. Our collective imagination has been occupied by a lie. We have internalised the mantra of the status quo – “There Is No Alternative” – that is continually repeated, both explicitly and subliminally, by the 1% who directly benefit from the political and economic settlement they claim is the only show in town.

This lie has now reached such epic proportions that it has become easier to imagine the wholesale destruction of the earth’s remaining natural resources than to envisage an alternative means of organising human society. How can this be? How, after a global economic disaster caused by financial capitalism, can tired old TINA still be rolled out without a hint of irony?

The first thing to note is how this has been done. Since Thatcher, neoliberal ideology has conditioned almost every area of our society and of the way that individuals see the world and their lives. All of the main political parties, practically all of the
mainstream media (some vociferous, some tacit), almost all thinktanks and the vast majority of university economics departments are ideologically wedded or owe their existence to neoliberalism and financial interests. This has spawned a mass financialisation of society, in which our public services are infected with a market ethos before eventually being privatised, and our language has been corrupted by meaningless buzzwords and management jargon.

Politicians of all parties have chosen to retreat from intervening in the economy other than to ensure that there is an amenable business environment for financial interests and that public assets be opened up to market forces. And at the centre of this system are the banks, allowed to grow into behemoths with the power to crush nation states, to direct economic policy and to bring the world to its knees. This system has failed. It has failed most human beings on earth, as it always had even before the crisis. But now it has failed even on its own terms. It is not free-market capitalism, it is monopoly capitalism. It was not the ‘Great Moderation’ but an almighty bubble. And it didn’t lead to greater prosperity for all; instead it has now destroyed much of the wealth it had ever created (the vast majority of which was always concentrated in the hands of a small minority.)

But in a sense this doesn’t matter. The only show in town no longer bothers to advertise itself, to say how much everyone will enjoy it; the only argument it is left with is an uncaring shrug and a reductive sneer: “What’s your alternative?” This has been an incredibly effective way to control or eliminate debate, but things are beginning to change.

Odd figures on the right like Peter Oborne and Charles Moore are having neoliberal nightmares and recanting their faith in Friedman’s bible; the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have offered qualified praise for UK Uncut or Occupy; inequality is an issue that is beginning to make its way onto the agenda because, as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson show in The Spirit Level, it affects the whole of society and can’t be solved by wealth trickling down or by some tax credits.

There are choices to be made in political economy, not that you’d know it from most politicians and the media. In taxation, a progressive tax system could include a Robin Hood tax, land and property taxation, the closure of loopholes and tax havens and enforced, transparent reporting.

A Green New Deal could be instituted, with investment in long-term growth, knowledge and infrastructure in universities, high-tech manufacturing, solar and wind technology and public transport. Stronger unions could bring democracy to the workplace, just as they do in Scandinavia and Germany.

The banking system could be genuinely broken up and tightly regulated to eliminate moral hazard; those majority-owned by the tax-payer could be nationalised and made to operate in the public interest, bringing down the high street banking costs of their competitors in the process. Also, the function of creating money must be stripped from private banks who recklessly create money as debt, destabilising the entire economy.

Advertising could be regulated much more tightly to ensure it does not impoverish our – and our children’s – aspirations.

Learning from the long-term success of John Lewis and the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country, co-operatives and other democratic workplace structures could be positively incentivised. A system of environmental and social ‘goods’ as advocated by the New Economics Foundation could be introduced to pricing and the transition they propose towards a steady state and sustainable economy could begin.

Inequality could be tackled head on, across society by the introduction of pay limits in the public and private sectors so that a CEO can earn no more than 10 times as much as his/her lowest paid employee.

These kinds of things are not communism, or romantic well-wising; they happen in well-functioning, developed democracies in which the population don’t live in penury without iPods. And there is no reason that they cannot be implemented here.

TINA is a dishonest argument from an establishment that has never honestly acknowledged what the neoliberal settlement entailed for the 99%; this pernicious ideology has occupied our entire country like an invading army, transferring wealth from poor to rich, silencing dissent and leaving a huge trail of social problems in its wake. TINA’s biggest success has been to create perhaps the largest obstacle to change: our own self-doubt.

The actions of the Occupy movement, UK Uncut and others have shown us how to fight back: reclaim public space, subvert the tired old arguments and make fun of them.  How can we be the unrealistic ones when their economic model leaves us with no planet left to live on?

Michael Richmond is author of the novel Sisyphusa. He tweets under @Sisyphusa