A Neoradical Approach

Since the financial crash in 2008, there has been a growing and fundamental disconnect between the lives of the governed and the worldview of the governing. A single belief has reigned unchallenged for the last forty years - the belief that markets always do the right thing - and has year after year narrowed the space in which the political sphere can operate and influence. For thirty years the belief held true and unquestionably delivered benefits to society, but in the last decade, the capabilities of technology have revealed the cracks behind the plaster.

For example, take Uber. It uses technology to match a traveller to a driver. In doing so, it takes into account the reputation of the person being moved by the system, the reputation of the person doing the moving, and their respective locations, before brokering an economic exchange between the traveller and the system that cares only what the market will bear at the expense of all else - including the profit of the company itself.

Whereas the market - traditionally - would have compelled these companies to seek third party organisations to provide this logistical capability with a profit margin of their own, the confluence of clever software, investors with deep pockets and a required human component has allowed for a winner-take-all situation to develop where the prize for a fully vertical organisation is the ability to exploit the human components of delivery right up until the point that they are no longer needed.

Similar systems are deployed by dozens of other companies, each doing similar things, in similar ways. From DoorDash to Deliveroo, the labour of humankind merely augments the machine until it is needed no more.

This automation is not in and of itself wrong. It is an inevitable consequence of powerful computational capability, easy capital and a vast pool of un- or underemployed workers.

The ability to achieve massive market valuations at the expense of the millions of unfortunately necessary humans has created a world where the politics that emerged out of the late 1970s - politics that place faith in the qualities of the market above all else - no longer make sense. Instead, as Thomas Piketty pointed out, it looks far more like the nineteenth century, when the return on capital exceeded the increase in productivity and wages. The inequality that naturally followed at that time led to reform through two movements: liberalism and radicalism.

If liberalism was concerned with protecting the rights of the individual, radicalism went further by aiming to ensure equality. And, at a time when many see neoliberalism as the force that has driven societal inequality to a breaking point, perhaps it is time for a neoradical position to emerge that uses the unique capabilities of government to examine and exploit the market so entrenched by that force for elements of universality.

In the case of Uber described previously, and in all similar systems, there is a simple truth that the neoliberal worldview is unable to see: in an efficient market, the logistical heart of such a system should be consumed by many organisations. The fact that it is not shared is the opposite of the forces a market is supposed to unleash.

The valuations of these companies and therefore, these systems do not represent success. They are failures of the market — aberrations, not unicorns.

Just malformed horses.

A neoradical approach recognises the universality of such a platform and would have the government deliver a nationalised capability to link worker and consumer in precisely the same way, positively distorting the irrationally performing market by guaranteeing workers who present their services on the national platform their employment rights, wages, and pensions while effectively subsidising their national insurance contributions through general taxation.

If the human component is required by a service that will discard them at the earliest opportunity, then the society that consumes such a service is morally obliged to ensure that adequate protections are in place for when that occurs. The guarantees and protections that a government can provide are the very things that a corporation has difficulty providing, in no small part due to the fiduciary obligations that CEOs have to their boards and their boards have to their shareholders.

No reputable worker would choose to offer their labour in any other way. Consequently, companies would emerge to compete with those wholly private sector services, only using the national platform, not having to invest in that technology capability themselves, and therefore providing employment to the national pool of protected, reputable workers. Ultimately, this efficiency would enable these new services to win in the marketplace, consumers would benefit, and society would benefit too.

The prevailing view - the neoliberal view - would be that governments cannot deliver services efficiently, but inefficiency exists in equal measure in both the public and private sectors. The success of the marketplace resides only in the fact that it compels small companies to fail fast, not that large companies are unimaginably good at what they do.

Furthermore, these are services that have never been delivered before. It isn’t possible to claim that the private sector would do better - it has not, and it could not, for the fundamental legal & structural reasons already presented.

Government has access to vast pools of capital - significantly more than the private sector can muster - and neoradical approaches could leverage that immense potential to build universal infrastructural capabilities that work in the world of the 21st century, rather than tinkering at the edges of a space defined by the politics of the past.