Demand #10: For autonomous self-regulation and emancipatory values in the professions
Guest demand by an anonymous campaigner and former academic
Many fields of social life and cultural production are torn between autonomous values generated within the field itself, and heteronomous values extending from the market, state, or wider social field. In the neoliberal era, the autonomy of professions and fields of life has been massively corroded, firstly through privatisation or marketisation, and corresponding imposition of market values, and then through state regulation of the resulting markets, imposing alien functions (such as immigration control, crime detection, counter-terrorism) on institutions across a range of fields.
Professions and autonomous fields have always played central functions for capital, and their autonomous values are not always progressive. However, the gleichschaltung or top-down integration of these institutions – and the resulting loss of autonomous values – has had a disastrous effect in intensifying state and corporate power, undermining the welfare of the poor, and closing down spaces for dissent. Examples of fields affected by these changes are public institutions such as universities, schools, colleges, the medical and nursing professions, social work, the benefits system, and local councils, as well as private professions such as pubs and clubs, banking, the media, the Internet, telecoms, and the legal profession. In public services, it has led to the loss of the public service ethos, as well as worsened conditions for workers and service users. In private institutions, it has corroded the relationship between professionals and service users, imposing state requirements which turn these institutions into extensions of state policy.
The new legal underpinning of the Prevent strategy – requiring that a wide range of autonomous organisations such as universities and councils take action against ‘extremism’ or political dissent – is only the latest and clearest instance of the imposition of heteronomous values. Other examples include the Hich Affair at Nottingham University, the jailing of the Cambridge Two, the abuse of licensing conditions to impose surveillance and exclude controversial performers (e.g. the effective lockout of So Solid Crew), the blackmail of organisers of festivals such as Glastonbury and the Big Green Gathering, the campaign by Bristol police to encourage childcare providers to fire anarchists, and various measures requiring (for instance) doctors to breach confidentiality and report gunshot injuries, psychiatrists to report patients expressing controversial views, schools to promote 'British values’ and compete in Ofsted league tables on pain of closure, banks to close accounts on the whim of government agents (leading to the attacks on WikiLeaks and Cage), NGOs to avoid doing work which might benefit 'terrorists’ (to the point where many avoid working in Syria, Somalia or Palestine), and the criminalisation of lawyers (e.g. Lynne Stewart, Aamer Anwar) who criticise or subvert government measures. The general pattern echoes historical forms of totalitarianism in which all aspects of social life are turned into securitised, ideologically homogeneous enforcers of government policy (though today this is achieved by marketisation plus regulation, rather than direct state control).
The resultant state-controlled climate impedes the possibility of radicalism, independent thought, or effectiveness in the professions. To counter such tendencies, there is a need for professions to radically refuse all cooperation with the state control agenda – for journalists to refuse to hand over sources or evidence, and doctors to maintain strict confidentiality, for example. We need to build a coalition in opposition to the corrosion of autonomy which will mobilise if those taking a stand are criminalised. In order to ensure the primacy of autonomous values, professions should be self-regulated, and the government and courts should be kept at arm’s length. In order to ensure the primacy of their values over market values, professions should not be subject to market competition. Restoring at least the level of autonomy professions had prior to Thatcherism would increase the reliability of services to the public, and the spaces for dissent.
However, professional values are themselves sometimes reactionary. Some professions should not exist at all, and others would be drastically reformed in a liberated world (e.g. compulsory schooling, psychiatry, and banking are all questionable in their very foundations). In the present, the boundary between state/market control and professional autonomy is an important one. Yet it is also important to have an alternative vision of autonomous values. It is important to create, and provide internal mechanisms to encourage, emancipatory, patient/client/student-centred values inside each profession. For example, in journalism, market values lead to moral panics, sensationalism, and authoritarian populism. Autonomous values would focus on exposing the social causes of social problems, and speaking truth to power. This requires that journalists be insulated both from government regulation and market pressure. Similarly in schooling, autonomy is useless if it simply leads to uncontrolled despotism by authoritarian teachers. There are thus three necessary tasks for the professions: fighting off government regulation, fighting off market mechanisms and pressures, and establishing emancipatory values within the profession itself.
16th March 2015