Olympicopoly

In many ways the economic organisation of the Olympics can read read as symbolic of the organisation of late capitalism as an economic system. London has been hollowed out as its wary residents leave town to holiday in the country, or leave their own country altogether. The city that they call home, and whose riches they generate, has become the playground of an international elite. Those attending the games are profligate financially and in carbon terms, jetting around the world for hedonistic pleasure.

There will be spectators, but in global terms all will be rich, since no tickets are available within the price-range of the average global worker. Londoners have lost their city, their roads, their buses, their tube stations - even, as pointed out in an earlier post, their language. Rather than an economic opportunity, white-collar workers have been encouraged to 'get ahead of the games', which without further advice than walking to walk is surely encouragement to skiving on a massive scale. Small-scale entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are excluded from economic opportunities by the mother of all restrictive practices that the Olympic contract itself embodies.

At this stage in the games, the costs are guesses and probably deceptions. The 'round number' for the cost of the games is £9bn. Contributions from sponsors is known but secret: the Guardian has produced its best estimates as to how the suggested £1bn. total breaks down. What is clear is that, although most of the economic value arising from the games will be enclosed and extracted by the corporate sponsors, it is the people of the UK who will pay the majority of the cost. So just as we subsidise the roads that enable Tesco and their ilk to drive their goods from underpaid producers to overfed consumers, so we pay for global marketing opportunities that are then exploited by a narrow range of global corporations.

While such a message could hardly for the basis for a national pageant, the economistic approach to life was wonderfully subverted by the opening festivities. We, the citizens of the world, have utterly lost control of the economic sphere, and yet without our culture and creativity life would be meaningless even for the elites who extract the value of our work and control increasingly more aspects of our lives. This was the hugely powerful message of the opening ceremony, because it is surely the political message of both Danny Boyle and Stephen Daldry. They read our history, as I do, as a history of struggle and the triumph of humanity over economic oppression.

They had skilfully included the aspects of British culture that truly make us proud, particularly our self-deprecating humour and our favourite national institution the NHS. Before the TV transmission began, Boyle had dedicated the performance to the volunteers who made it possible, the people who worked without being paid, who he called 'the best of us'. In a games that seems more obviously controlled by corporate interests than any before, that is the message we must hold on to.
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The Road to Serfdom

When Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944 it was one of several books reacting against the collapse of liberal values in Europe and the continent's descent into fascism. Hayek's argument was that an over-powerful state repressed the individual and that a system of markets, operating freely, and companies in competition with each other would best guarantee individual liberty.The organisation of the Olympic Games is a clear illustration of the way in which it is the private, corporate economy that is turning us into serfs, rather than the overweaning state that Hayek feared.

Those who have bought the expensive tickets to the Olympic venues will be prevented from taking in their own food and drink. The corporate sponsors have bought exclusive rights to advertising, meaning that small businesses will be prevented from using the games to increase their sales. Today we hear that a whole range of words are to be expunged from our vocabulary, since they remain the preserve of corporate marketeers who wish to use them to ensure that the Olympics and all words associated with it, bring profits to only the exclusive companies that have paid for the privilege. We are to be deprived of our freedom of speech. The fuzziness between public and private sectors also erodes our rights as citizens. As a trivial example, how are those with Olympic tickets to know, whether they are being searched by police officers, solidiers, or private security guards? And how are they to know whether they are being searched for weapons or sandwiches?

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation was also published in 1944, and like Hayek, Polanyi was a refugee from fascism who also studied and wrote in London. The current failures of democracy and erosion of individual rights have arisen as a result of policies designed in response to Hayek's vision. Polanyi would agree with Hayek about the dangers of an over-powerful, centralised state, but his target is the market system itself, which turns people into the 'ficitious commodity' of labour and ignores the primal value of the land itself. Hayek's vision of the market as a system of competing firms was always a theoretical fiction, since in reality consolidation leads to domination by corporations, against whom our primary defence must be the government.

The green vision of the economy accepts the need for individual liberty but balanced by our role as citizens and the political power operated on our behalf by democratic institutions. We would also emphasise the importance of scale. Whether public, or private, an institution that operates at national or international level will always be oppressive of the individual merely by virtue of its size, and therefore the power it can wield.

As the Olympic Games loom nearer, for the UK citizen it is hard to see what they offer. Our rights to choose what we buy, where we go, and even what we say have been sold to corporations that are becoming as threatening to individual liberty as the powerful states that inspired Hayek's wrath. Through Hayek and Thatcher our civil and political liberties have been sacrificed on the altar of free-market capitalism.

George Orwell produced a review of The Road to Serfdom on its publication that foresaw the more threatening tyranny of the unconstrained privatised economy:

'in the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of', but he was also able to see that 'a return to "free" competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the state.'*

*Review of the Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek, etc" As I Please, 1943-1945: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, vol. 3, quoted on Wikipedia.
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