Idiocy, entertainment and capitalism

Take a bunch of youngish men and women, divide them into groups, set them a task, and then watch them fuck it up in various implausible and hilarious ways. This is not of course a description of the seminar groups I used to teach (since all my students were brilliant), but of The Apprentice.

I am an ashamed Apprentice viewer. It does not make me proud that I enjoy the sight people who think they are clever being revealed to be the idiots they in fact are. Thankfully the show helps us along by portraying most of the participant as so obnoxious that they fully deserve their public humiliation. Unhelpfully there is also the subsequent discovery that a fired candidate turns out to be personable and clever, indeed a normal human being. Then it is my turn as a viewer to feel obnoxious, as well as an idiot for being duped by the clever editing into thinking that this perfectly likeable person was a contemptible fool. Watching light entertainment can be so complex…

I usually try to justify watching The Apprentice on two grounds. First, the programme’s format, editing and presentation are impressive. The Apprentice is simple and compelling, very funny, and superbly manages to package its narrative and story each week. It is smart, expertly structured entertainment—a model in fact of how one might organize and unfold a story over the course of an hour of television. Moreover, all the regular members of the show play their parts well, notably Alan Sugar who, as all powerful and extremely wealthy idiot-in-chief, entertainingly comes across as cringeworthily stupid, embarrassingly avuncular and mildly psychotic.

Second, The Apprentice gives us more insight into the soulless, ugly nature of modern capitalism than any other mainstream television programme. In this respect it is almost certainly a show in the image of Sugar himself. The footballer Jürgen Klinsmann, commenting on his dealings with Sugar when the latter was chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, considered Sugar to be ‘a man without honour’ who ‘only ever talks about money’. Money and the making of it are not merely the central values promoted by the show, but pretty much the only values. Qualities, such as the creation of a good and useful product or the provision of fine customer service, are regarded only with respect to their contribution to profit: if profit can be increased by reducing the quality of the product or the standard of customer service, then so much the better.

The typical philosophy of an Apprentice candidate

People are objectified as customers and consumers, as sources of profit; candidates are expected to push hard sells, with a focus solely on extracting money. This is why the token ‘nice’ candidates never get very far: it is considered a disastrous weakness politely to desist from the rapacious attempt to prize open the wallets and purses of reluctant, uncomfortable strangers. In effect, The Apprentice cheerfully endorses the irritating methods typical of telemarketers. And it celebrates the idea that money and personal riches are an end, not a means to something else. From Sugar at the top to the performing monkeys with their ludicrous egos at the bottom who try to please him each week, never is there a sign that any of them have given even a moment’s reflection to the role and function of business in its larger context, of how business may sometimes contribute to and sometimes damage wider society. Instead, the goal, often explicitly stated, is simple: personal enrichment.

Defenders of capitalism will protest, of course, that this is precisely how the economic system should work, and they will argue that we all benefit from such values. Their mantra in this regard would be the famous quotation from Adam Smith: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ So when a candidate readily admits to an interest exclusively in his or her own personal profits, the defender of capitalism would say that we should approve, for there are supposedly happy spin-offs for us all from this pursuit of naked self-interest.

Still, we might wonder from watching The Apprentice whether this is quite the outcome of unbridled capitalism. The most typical way of judging tasks is by size of profit: the team that makes the most money wins. That has the virtue of simplicity in fulfilling the show’s guiding philosophy of money-making, but does not obviously have much else going for it. The roadmap to success drawn by The Apprentice is to make cheap rubbish, price it high and sell it hard. Or, as we might more commonly say, to rip off customers.

For example, the task in week one of the current series involved the teams buying fish from wholesalers which they were to turn into lunch products. One approach to this might be to buy decent quality fish, create lunch items of a high standard, and then to price them as reasonably as possible to ensure that a small profit by ensuring that as many people benefit from the good product. Another approach is to buy the lowest quality fish, to turn that into inevitably horrible products, to hoodwink the consumer into thinking that these products are better quality than they in fact are, and to price them at levels that are tantamount to customer exploitation. The first approach would have the potential not only of making a viable business but also of delivering something valuable to consumers; the latter approach is the only one that would succeed on The Apprentice. And so, the creators and producers of the show hope, we are being schooled on the virtues of profit over quality—and, consequently, asked to admire the worst aspects of modern capitalism.

It is possible, of course, that The Apprentice is actually an extremely clever critique of modern capitalism. After all, the candidates are generally set up to look ridiculous and to fail, all for the sake of entertainment. Yet while we laugh at their idiocy (and, of course, it is only the idiotic bits which make it to the final edit), in reality we might be at least mildly impressed at what they manage to achieve. Take a bunch of strangers, some of whom loathe one another, and present them cold with a fairly sophisticated project in a field in which most of them have no experience and that has to be completed in 48 hours, and it’s actually a fair achievement that something even vaguely looking like a product/advertising campaign/acceptable sales emerges. ‘Desert Secret’ (one of the shampoo campaigns in episode two) may have been rubbish, but in the circumstances it was the sort of rubbish one might have expected even from a highly competent team of inexperienced strangers in a desperately short period of time.

But on the whole I’m inclined to think that The Apprentice is really a clever celebration of capitalism. For the candidates are also firmly set up to succeed. The ‘fish’ task is a good illustration of this. In a mere two days one of the teams, starting out with limited capital, made a profit of £200. We might marvel at the miracle of capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit: even a bunch of idiots can turn over a quick, tidy profit in hardly any time at all! But consider this ‘profit’ and consider some of the awkward realities of business that are never admitted in the world of The Apprentice. Once the costs of paying for a kitchen and transport, the rental of vending spots and the price of overheads such as electricity and phone bills are factored in, most of that £200 would be wiped out. Then subtract the salaries for nine employees, as well as some money to cover marketing. Normally tax would also have to be paid, but since we’ve now discovered that what appeared to be profit-making fish business would in reality have made a huge loss, then (much like Amazon, Starbucks, etc., although for different reasons) there is no need to bother with tax.

The Apprentice presents an absurd business fantasy. It is a fantasy of a world in which hard work and an entrepreneurial spirit will always succeed, and in which business, as long as it is encouraged, will always make money. At the same time as pouring scorn on the low calibre of the contestants, many viewers are no doubt also impressed by the apparently easy way in which a new business can succeed and quick money is made. At no point does the show invite us to doubt whether it is a fair reflection of the reality of business. The Apprentice feeds the ludicrously unsound idea that private enterprise and profit-making are the supreme economic virtues, that they always work, and that somehow they deliver an unqualified benefit to society as a whole.

In numerous ways, therefore, The Apprentice is a horrible show, embodying some of the most hideous features of modern economic life. Yet I watch it with something like enjoyment—which may go to prove that I am as much of an idiot as the very people I am watching.

Tory neoliberalism

There is a very good chance that by the time the Tories are eventually voted out of office (2020 at the earliest, but more likely 2025 or even later) most existing public institutions will have been largely or fully dismantled, either through cuts or through privatization. The welfare state is rapidly being eroded; privatization of the NHS is likely to be extended; education policy will, by design, result in more schools taken out of local authority control and into the hands of private companies; central funding of higher education and the arts, already decimated by cuts, will almost certainly have been slashed further; the BBC is facing a relentless attack on its role as a publicly funded broadcaster; despite denials from the government, plans have been drawn up to privatize Channel 4. Apart from parliament itself, the royal family and the armed services, we may find that within a decade almost nothing will be left of publicly funded institutions.

The budget deficit is the government’s convenient but dishonest rationale behind this programme. The reality, of course, is that the cuts are driven by an ideological commitment to neoliberal economic principles. It is interesting to consider why the government will not admit this, instead choosing to depict itself as having to make unfortunate but necessary decisions to (as the myth goes) clean up the mess created by the previous Labour government. There are understandable presentational reasons for this: in general, most people are suspicious of ideology but fond of practicality (which helps explain why the Chancellor of the Exchequer preferred to be seen wearing a hard hat rather than reading economic theory for his election campaign photo opportunities); and it is a lot easier to communicate via social media and tabloid newspapers an idea as simple as ‘sorting out a mess’ than complex economic theories.

But perhaps the primary reason for playing down the ideological nature of the policies is that the government knows full well that at best the policies are highly risky, and at worst they simply do not work (or at least do not work in the way many of their most enthusiastic proponents would hope). It is worth acknowledging, even for those of us on the Left who oppose the government’s policies, that neoliberalism makes a serious claim to be the best and most rationale way of organizing society. There is no lack of weight or sophistication to neoliberalism as a set of ideas, and to reduce it simply to an ideology of greed or hatred of the poor is an intellectual dead end. Certainly neoliberals maintain that profit, self-interest, competition and, if you like, greed are key motivating factors behind human action, and they positively encourage inequality not only as the most effective way to ensure that merit is justly rewarded but also as a dynamic that stimulates productivity and economic growth. Whatever one thinks of the neoliberal analysis, there is no doubt that it presents a body of psychological, philosophical, political, social and economic theory that demands serious engagement.

Like many ideologies, however, neoliberalism works better in theory than in practice. At the heart of neoliberal thought is a belief in laissez-faire capitalism, free markets, deregulation and the excision of the “dead hand” of the state. It is supposed that markets, unlike governments or the state, know best; therefore, markets that are fully free (i.e. that are subject to no government intervention through red tape, regulation, or state ownership) will, it is argued, work efficiently and in the interests of everyone. The economic laws of supply and demand, so long as they are left to operate freely, will benefit society as a whole.

As a theory neoliberalism is seductively persuasive—as long as one accepts that there are economic laws as true as scientific laws. But there is little hard evidence that neoliberalism works well in practice. As its name indicates, neoliberalism is a modern reworking of classical economic liberalism. Associated particularly with the politics and ideas of the nineteenth century, above all in Britain, classical liberalism has impressive intellectual credentials stemming from the thought of, among others, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. The history of nineteenth-century Britain is instructive for some of the strengths and weaknesses of economic liberalism. On the one hand, liberal policies (e.g. lack of regulation) helped the phenomenal economic growth set off by industrialization; on the other hand, they also generated some truly dreadful social conditions. In theory, by maximizing profit and increasing wealth, everyone will benefit (or, rather, all those who deserve to—the lazy and the workshy, for example, will deservedly not benefit); but this is not how it turned out in practice. For example, although profits are increased from, for example, the employment of cheap child labour, what resulted was not only suffering children but also depressed adult wages and increased adult unemployment. Such was the moral outrage at the social effects of economic liberalism, that the only remedy was for the state increasingly to intervene in the social and economic sphere, by regulating working conditions and alleviating poverty and its results.

The neoliberal Tory vision of society has clear echoes of liberal nineteenth-century society. David Cameron’s idea of the ‘Big Society’ (which still occasionally sees the light of day in his pronouncements) is in essence a modern take on the nineteenth century: promote laissez-faire capitalism, rein in government and state intervention in social and economic regulation, and encourage philanthropy, charity and human kindness to fill in the gaps. It’s an optimistic vision, but one for which the evidence is hardly encouraging. There were certainly philanthropists in the nineteenth century, but philanthropy and charity on their own had a minimal impact on the alleviation of social problems. In the US, the most neoliberal of all western countries, there is a long tradition of philanthropy, but American society is nevertheless beset by levels of poverty and inequality—and increasing ones at that—that dwarf those of western Europe. When, during the election campaign, the Tories unveiled a policy that would, through statutory paid leave, compel employers to enable workers to undertake voluntary and charitable work, it was perhaps an unspoken acknowledgement that neoliberalism may not work.

Austerity and the ‘shock doctrine’ so beloved of the IMF (and US) have similarly provided little real evidence that they work. As has been well documented (by, for example, Joseph Stiglitz and Naomi Klein), despite repeatedly failing to achieve the desired results, the IMF has for decades nevertheless relentlessly pushed on with its blinkered neoliberal policies, convinced that the rarefied theories of the Chicago School economists trumps the actual evidence before its eyes. In so far as problems were acknowledged, these were usually attributed to the failure of countries to move to a fully free market quickly enough, or to the continuing intervention of governments in economic policy. Even in cases where the IMF policies had some success, it was only a small part of society who benefited—not a surprise to critics of the IMF and neoliberalism, but not the anticipated outcome expected by the IMF and neoliberals themselves.

Neoliberal ideologists (among whom much of the current government can be included) tend to be dogmatic in their approach. And there is nothing wrong with that, provided the evidence supports the dogma. But the evidence invariably points the other way. In a recent essay discussing the life and work of the social scientist Richard Titmuss (a strong believer in the importance of public institutions), Stefan Collini discusses Titmuss’s final book, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (1970), in which Titmuss considered the provision of human blood to meet medical and scientific necessity.* In the US, a neoliberal approach was adopted as the best response: market principles should apply, according to which the demand for blood will be met by supply, and a price mechanism will develop which will satisfy all concerned. In short, leave it to the market. Consequently a commercial trading system developed: for donors there were financial incentives to give blood, and there were profit incentives to encourage companies to trade in and supply blood. In the UK, however, the publicly-funded National Blood Service (part of the NHS) was established, which relied on voluntary donations of blood. A neoliberal would assert that the US model should prove to be the most effective. But as Collini describes, Titmuss’s work demonstrated ‘the greater efficiency of the [UK system] as measured by all the relevant criteria: purity of blood, availability and reliability of supply, cost and administration.’ (As further subsequent confirmation of this, one may note that it was blood sourced largely from the US and infected with Hepatitis C and HIV that was at the centre of the ‘Tainted blood scandal’.)

It is not simply its invariable failure to work in practice and its often calamitous social effects that makes neoliberalism such a disastrous ideology. Just as corrosive is its moral bankruptcy. One of the more interesting moments of the election campaign was when Cameron was confronted by an audience member on Question Time about the fact that he spends all his time talking about the economy but never about morality. The Prime Minister gave a good answer in the context of the debate: he argued that getting people into work and improving their economic security and prospects were above all moral issues, since it was only by doing this that poverty could be reduced. Indeed, his answer probably sums up neoliberal moral theory: assuming laissez-faire capitalism works, then the society that emerges will be morally good. But, as I’ve suggested, laissez-faire capitalism does not work. The dogmatism of neoliberals makes them blind to the bankruptcy of their morality.

The effects of this dogmatism and moral bankruptcy are hugely damaging, for they result in an impoverished moral culture. Even if we accept that public institutions such as the NHS, or the welfare state, or the BBC, could be run more efficiently according to market principles (and according to narrow economic criteria they almost certainly could), this would nevertheless miss an important point about their existence. Throughout Titmuss’s work there was, as Collini explains, ‘a governing preoccupation…: the need for societies to give effective institutional expression to non-economic values in the face of the tiresomely corrosive power of the profit motive.’ It is this ‘institutional expression to non-economic values’ that matters so much—and it is this which will be lost as the Tories dismantle the welfare state and drastically cut back on public funding. The NHS may well be a bloated, inefficient organization, but its importance lies not only in the healthcare it provides but also in the values it represents: the belief that society should look after all its members, the idea that we are collectively responsible for looking after one another, the valuing of care over profit. When a museum or gallery allows free access, this is an important statement about the value of making heritage, art and education available to all. Even if charges did not lead to declining museum attendance (as the evidence indicates they do), by implementing those entrance charges we would nevertheless be replacing a non-economic value with an economic value. Profit and efficiency may be increased by such charging, but at the cost of abandoning the shared moral value that education and heritage should be universally accessible.

When the Tories talk about values, usually specifically ‘British’ values, conspicuously absent are such things as compassion, caring, and sharing. This is hardly surprising: neoliberals tend to be sceptical about these types of virtue, not because they don’t admire them but because they do not fit well with their narrow economic theories. For neoliberals, first and foremost should be a focus on free market principles; in so far as compassion, caring and sharing have a role, these will emerge naturally from the wonderful society that laissez-faire capitalism will create. But it may well be wondered what happens when a government consistently emphasizes economic virtues over moral virtues. If, for example, the message is consistently sent out that economic inefficiency is a more pressing concern than the damage caused by poverty, then society is likely to internalize this message—to value wealth and profit, and to devalue welfare and caring. A cynic might of course argue that such internalization of the profit motive at the expense of welfare is precisely the intention of the Tory neoliberals.

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* London Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 19, 8 October 2015, pp. 29-33.