h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm debating whether or not our the uk doctors' strike will spark of a out break of striking and discomfort among the middle classes leading to a bourgeois revolution.

"What do we want?"
"A latte and a croissant!"
"When do we want them?"
"About four-ish?"

Z,

do people know that doctors contributions are higher than other civil servants?

is the long formation career and the work performed by doctors acknowledged?

is the media presenting doctors as those privileged and uncaring ones?

if instead of supporting each other and protest for the unfair cuts, worker choose to critizise doctors, or teachers or transporter, or whoever protest, we won´t have any kind of revolution.

divide and rule.

Manipulate and people will feel scared and willing to swallow anything for the sake of Saint Austerity.

Taxing the wealthiest to get more income? Appling the Tobin tax?... Heresy!!!

Well --

The Age of Revolution 1776-1848 was the age of Rise of the Middle Classes- those who based their position in life on their personal ownership of Capital- either intellectual or material. And -one way or another- they by-and-large managed to come to dominate current affairs and politics, turning both into some kind of feuding "clan warfare" between groups that had "dyed in the wool" and ireconcilable differences.

One of the features of most of "Middle Class" culture since 1776 has been the very strong compulsion to copy the monarchies that the Middle Classes either replaced or turned into mere figureheads. The "Versailles effect" encouraged them to flee away from the great cities, the traditional "happening places" and sources of dynamic change (too dynamic for comforts sake)..Wordworth could write of the French Revolution "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven": but we associate him very much with wandering around "lonely as a cloud" (probably a drug induced cloud?) in romantic escapism which is what Capitalism has exploited very effectively. "It could be you!"


This Versailles effect became a great exodus from the cities as living traditional spaces where all of humanity as in Plato's Republic lived in mutual support and "Commonweal": and this has left us with the anti-city tradition of Western Civilization, as exemplified especially in the Prohibition Era in the USA.

But the City and especially the "ghetto" became a "godforsaken place" because all of those who could, even if they were forced to commute daily into the City, abandonned the idea of the City as the height of Human Achievement and the best and strongest asset that humankind has "strong-point". We have achieved a segregated "aparthied" situation in many cities are really the actually acommodate only the rich and the poor, with all the dangerous, explosive and destructive dynamism that is produced quite naturally when extremes of positive and negative are generated in close proximity. (Van Der Graf generator).

Cass

I don't think so- doctors are in a fairly unique position in that they have a certain amount of job security. Many in the public sector are struggling with huge job losses and pay cuts/freezes and don't have skills that make a foreign relocation possible. Most of the public sector are being cowed by the rising unemployment figures. The same way the Conservatives controlled manufacturing industries in the 1980s.

The specific issue of the Medical Profession raises interesting emotional issues and the NHS is just about as close as we get these days to "A Holy Cow"... except that the implied state of bovine helplessness is reversed with people increasingly brought up to feel a sense of entitlement to excellent treatment, to being "taken care of"- irrespective of whether they have actually taken care of themselves, of the life and health that with which they were endowed.

This must be one of many frustrations impacting on careers in Medicine. Or perhaps that is just cross-over thinking from the frustrations of the teaching profession.

Over a teaching career of over 37 years it was very noticeable that a large number of pupils from 11+ onwards were only too happy to just underperform and leave the hard work to others, especially in the subjects like science and mathematics that really require ongoing commitment throughout secondary school in order to build up to the kind of academic level required to study any of the medical sciences- Human, Veterinary and Dental. There was little point in pointing out the injustice of expecting other people to work hard to achieve skill and educational levels that you would later depend upon in others for the rest of your life.

By ten years ago, however, entry into Veterinary Medicine was harder than the other two and perhaps this was significant. Animals I suspect are much more rewarding patients than some people.In fact it is more than ten years ago that our daughter, taking a post-graduate "gap year" to reflect on what to do as a career, went to the local Labour Exchange and was offered some work as a medical receptionist at a local GP's practice. The GP phoned to say that she was vastly over-qualified and I explained that she just thought that she should earn some money while sorting out her future. She left for work on Friday morning, and was home by Friday lunch-time having decided that she was just not prepared to deal with such nasty, hostile, impolite "clients".

The doctor-patient relationship has probably suffered from many reasons, among them because, in my teaching experience it seems that both maths and the sciences at school level are disproportionately taken up seriously by pupils and students from an Asian (Chinese- Indian subcontinental) background. There are various cultural factors involved in this, not least the social prestige and its practical implications.

My GP neighbour (to whom this applies to some extent) remarked recently that the back-pages of appropriate magazines are full of Asian brides basically being put out as "debutantes" used to be complete with Medical Degrees which count a great deal: and it does seem that Medical College interview boards are probably aware of the intense pressure placed on Asian girls to take up medicine.

In one case that I knew of personally a student who had ambitions to do journalism was forced to do science A levels and to try to medicine. The case finally made headlines when there was a attempt to kidnap her to Pakistan while other family members kidnapped her African boyfriend and held him prisoner chained to a bed.

More recently the failure of the UK to meet the UK Demand for Medical expertise has resulted in other influxes of Medical staff: and it seems rather typical of the times that (much as in our "national" sports teams) people often feel more entitled to get angry and upset about having to rely on "imports" than about our signal failure to produce an adequate UK Supply of people who are "up to it" .

Cass

Today is 14 July, French people are celebrating that revolution that brought a new order
where enlightenment values replaced tyranny, priviledges...

However, several centuries later we are again in the same situation:
a priviledged elite who doesn´t pay taxes and is wasting the money of the "Third Estate" on luxuries, wars....

So, why aren´t we taking our Bastilles?

The Enlightenment values are being demolished, what used to be basic human rights are now a good for trade.

Workers work more, earn less.
Politicians , of whom there are too many, have become a priviledged class which doesn´t solve any problem ,
on contrary, they increase them or create new ones...

So, what happens?

Why could it happened then and not now?

yet?

Maria

The fact is that the Age of Revolution, while tapping in to mass discontent, was shaped and managed by the "Middle Class" in so far as it avoided chaos.

The Middle Class wanted to show what they could do if they "ruled the world" for they were the real beneficiaries of an emerging culture that emphasised ownership- ownership of Capital and ownership of Knowledge.

After the Age of Revolution post-1858 increasingly the masses in electoral systems voted for the owners of Capital and Knowledge to rule over them, even in Nazi Germany where the Middle Class had become totally disilluioned with politics, and rich Industrialists funded Hitler, for even knowledge seemed to have descended into chaos and offered no clear road ahead for a "Thousand Year Reich".

The Revolutionary Age (1789-1848) had revolutionary potential for the exploitation of Capital, knowledge and power, as long as this Middle Class were given the reigns of power so that they could pursue "The Wealth of Nations". And they produced a situation in which the wealth that they created was enough to enrich themselves and also to pay for political systems that in fact reversed the pre-1789 situation so that the masses personally got more material benefits out of the economic systems than they actually produced..

This was especially the case since the Second World War when "The West" generally embraced the Marshall Plan type of principle that argued that money should be pumped into areas of poverty and need, with very high taxes being paid by the rich and affluent all as part of the war against the political extremism of Nazism/Fascism and Communism.

What happened with the fall of Communism was a revolt of both the taxpayers in "The West" and the workers in "The East", who had borne the burden for decades.

But Capitalism got "the spoils of victory" in a new global revolution based on the huge investment potential in new territories. The resulting great profits to be earned meant that Western Financial systems had massive inflows of wealth that fed the massive borrowing of societies in which individuals and politicians bought into the idea that everyone could be middle class and ultimately "make it". These were classic boom time conditions. And booms usually go bust.

So your French Revolution model of tax-paying Third Estate and privileged non-tax paying estates does not really apply. The situation in Spain may be different from that in the UK, but here the lowest earning 30% of the population get out the State about three times the value of what they pay into the State in taxes, while the situation is reversed for the top-earners. So in this sense it is the high earners who are entitled to feel exploited and failed by the system.

Apologies for yet another long answer.

Cass

The situation in Spain is getting worse because the meassures this government is taking or/and is being forced to take are absolutely wrong and unfair.

Ordinary people have to pay the money that this goverment is borrowing from Europeans banks at a disorbitated rate. The ECB could buy the debt, lower than other´s countries like Germany or Britain, but they don´t do it because they, the ECB is a lobby of the German banking, which is "making it" with this situation. It´s the Finantial Times, among others, which says that, not just me. There´s a flight of capital from the peripheria to the center of Europe.

That borrowed money , instead of going to ordinary citizens or small business in order to stimulate employment and growth, it goes directly to banks.

Banks that during the housing development took money from German, French, Belgian... banks, they now want their money back and with huge interests , determined basicly by what the ECB does, and you know to whom that entity is serving.

If there really existed a normal capitalist market, those who lent money to the GIPSI countries should have assumed their fault, because they helped to establish and maintain the house bubble in all Europe.

But nobody is assuming the consequences of their bets, and now WE, the ordinary people, the peasants if you want, are paying the bill of all that gambling.

The austerity meassures that obviously don´t work, come from minds like that of Mario Draghi, who many times has declared his adversion towards the welfare state, he is one of the many who belong to the neoliberal universe of ideas which are ruling Europe and the whole world. They are living la vida loca, not only they don´t have to pay for their excesses, they are going to recover the money and even increse it, and as a bonus, the welfare state is being dismantled in favour of privatisation. Besides, working conditions are resembling those of China.
Peugot has just closed a factory in France, in Spain will be open, the reason? workers have accepted the unfair conditions.

The problem I see with this situation of swallow and shut, is that people think that we live in a democracy and that eventually someone else will come and solve things.
Things are simply getting worse and worse, and I don´t see any other solution than a people movilization worldwide.

That 99% against that 1%. It´s the same struggle of always, the opressed and the opressor, but with a more complex scenario: mass media brainwashing, exarcebated individualism, fear...

Maria

I do not know what the situation is in Spain re private debt, but in the UK household debt averages about £40,000, so it has not only been governments borrowing on "Great Expectations"- without any realistic prospect of those expectations being fullfilled.

Parliamentary democracy [and the EU] became a system of mass bribery more extensive than the localised bribery of the English parliamentary system in the eighteenth century, when at least electors got paid in many cases before they voted. Now politicians have been able to wed the electorate to what Thomas Carlyle called "The Cash Nexus", asking to be installed in positions of power with access to the awesome and terrible means available to the State.

In addition to "promises promises" to those who they hope will provide them with a majority, they also create a presumption that they will use the powers of the State against "them"- whoever are the small group who are made into popular scapegoats.

The trouble with this model is that it is very easy for a majority that is rather incapable can pick on and make enemies of those who are more capable. A classic case would be the persecution of the Jews in Germany or of the Asian professional and business community in Uganda. Modern culture tends to blame people who do things much more than those who do little or nothing.

Cass

Maria

Your comment about Berlin reminds me of what I sensed on my only visit there back in the late-nineties when it had become the capital of a united Germany once more, and it was immediately obvious that "global capitalism" was adjusting to the revival of the roots of "Lebensraum".

The monstrous history of Europe and the world from the 1860's was very much bound up with the way that science and technology made it possible to unlock the potential of continents as never before. And by 1914 the real centres of revolutionary change were the continental powers- the USA, Germany and Russia.

J.M. Keynes argued that the Versailles Settlement would prove disastrous since it deliberately tried to destroy the economic system built up around Germany: and Keynesian planning for the next post-war situation consciously tried to build upon the kind of joined up Europe that the Germans had created- hence the EU and the dream of a federal Europe, not unlike the dream of a federal USSR.

This emphasis on reviving the West German economy was not least because the rapid increase in the power and influence of Russia/USSR made Germany a really happening place,the "Front Line" of Capitalism v Communism.

Most of these developments had served to the detriment of the Mediterranean, which had once been "The Sea at the Centre of the Earth" producing the great eras of Mediterraean based powers Egypt, Greece, Rome, Islam, and Spain. Like my "home town" of Oxford these places tended to become great places for opting out and appreciating the treasures of our human heritage, by definition places where the heart and soul is not that of the scientific and technological age- certainly to visitors and tourists, or even emigrants.

English people who go to settle in rural France are looking for a "lost world" from Britain's past.

Cass

>> English people who go to settle in rural France
are looking for a "lost world" from Britain's past. <<


Thank you for articulating a suspicion I had.
Yes, the pastoral dream. Gentry in a garden
of ancient agricultural plenty, rolling green hills,
flowing red wine, all at a bicycle pace with
loaves of long warm bread thrusting skyward
to'rd puffy white angelic non-industrial clouds
on a French blue sky. It's idyllic, Freudian
and likely cost-effective.

My own fantasy is in the coastal mountains of Spain
looking out over the Med with the distant sound of
Formula One engines and a TR6 in the barn where
I keep several wives of Arabic descent dressed in
the traditional English milk-maid manner. And not
one angry bull in sight.

Can you hear the drums, Fernando?
http://youtu.be/G8bm6XlxuCY

~jwf~

jwf

Re: >> English people who go to settle in rural France
are looking for a "lost world" from Britain's past. <<

My own defence is that I am not "settled" in rural France but use my time in France to actively bridge the gulf between aspects of my "roots" and the reality of the present.

The little town where we now have a house/second home is set amidst countryside which reminds me of my mother's Cotswolds and my grandfather's working life on the land: and Burgundy generally, and more particularly Dijon, reminds me of the Medieval Christendom that shaped my "home town" of Oxford, and much of its surroundings.

The actual experience of rural life [my mother was horrified at the thought of going back to country living when she had no real need to live in a town/city] is a salutary reminder that rural environments are often backwaters where people opt for the quiet life well away from "happening places". The trouble with Maria's "peasants" is that when they become "revolting" they are most often revolting against change.

What happens when an irrestible force meets and immovable object.

As for your wives of Arabic descent, the logic of what I wrote would argue that the Mediterranean needs to overcome the age-old Christian-Muslim divide and its various spin-offs. I have written before about the challenge of the real Islamic Fundamentalism which is to apply the essence of the religion to the positive rather than negative aspects of the present.

We have just had our children with us for various birthdays and spoke again of our hopes to get to know Croatia soon. Our daughter-in-law came here from that "region" more than 20 years ago during the break-up of Yugoslavia. And next year we will be able to drive there as part of the EU.

Cass

jwf

In the context of my recent comments first reflection on seeing that Abba performance was the Nazi-Lebensborn connection of that Abba lead singer, who has ended up a a German aristocrat by marriage. An incredible story. Her mother seems to have saved her from the terrible revenge taken against such children after the war, many of them treated as educationally subnormal and institutionalised.

And re "Brits" moving abroad time was when house price inflation in the UK made it seem worthwhile to "cash in " and move to places where real-estate was comparatively cheap. In the Autumn 2008 crash anyone whose money and income was in pound sterling suddenly found themselves c30% worse off within the Eurozone, and this must have been one of the factors that hit regions where British tourism and second homes were important to the local economy.

Cass

Seems we have too many folk in the UK now, yet another earth shattering indictment as to how ineptly this once great country is now run.
Oh, just to prove it, the powers that be can’t run a p**s up in a brewery, I mean’t the Olympics

do we have an official alcohol sponsor for the Olympics?
if not I think there has been an oversight there
I'm not sure the powers that be could organise their way out of a paper bag to be honest although they seem quite adept at U-turns when ever they feel they might need them

Waits patiently for the powers that be, do a U-turn on a U-turn, a political first which they are more than capable of doing.

But it is the whole concept of "the powers that be" which lies right at the heart of this thread..

The English Constitutional System was based upon the fact that "the power" was in the hands of the people, who contracted with others in order to accomplish specific tasks, in particular the kind of military elite necessary to cope with invasions, extortions etc from without and with those individuals within who refused to leave in "The King's Peace".

This was quite clearly laid out in the contract sworn by Edward the Confessor in the Coronation Oath which all English monarchs have sworn since. The powers of the English Crown subsequently were largely limited to those fields and to granting legitimacy and legal empowerment to "the people" at grass roots level who saw the real-life opportunities and possibilities open to them to improve the Commonweal- for all.

It was the Age of Revolution that promoted this idea that power existed over and above the people and that it could see seized and used by some groups at the expense of others who faced extermination of one kind or another, setting up the right to over-rule, oppress and dominate, resulting in a waste of human potential in favour of mechanisms and systems.

I am just reading about the ideas of Willhelm Reich whose ideas on this matter are very much in accord with this. But also with other writers of "The Lost Generation" like D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.

Cass

Correction not "leave" but "live".

Hmm.. that's one of them Jungian slips, innit.

(Jungian slips are like Freudian slips
except there's no dirty sex involved.)


~jwf~