When he died (early 1970's) my mom and her sisters took over the running of it.
It seemed a pretty fraught time, banks not lending money and strikes.
Inflation and unemployment.
I used to say, why not just tell the workers the truth of it, give them the figures, show them that there is no profit to pay for wage rises. I was a science student you see, but more than that, I couldn't see why she was taking a parental attitude to the troubles there. Information, it seemed to me was the only sensible way to prove what was actually happening to the company's finances.
I think now I understand that my mom must have felt that the employees owed her loyalty or respect. I hadn't understood before that small factories and businesses were meant to be a kind of large family, with the owner as a father figure (regardless of it being a woman or man) and that the workers were expected to be at the very least polite and at most, downright grateful.
I'd gone to a comprehensive school which tried its best to really be a meritocracy, we were streamed according to our ability to pass tests. It seemed fair to me. I didn't see much use in tradition. It felt as if the past was a bad place we were all trying to escaping from...
In the end my mom just gave up and set about getting the best price possible for the factory. I know that she hadn't wanted to sell the factory but there had been a sense of pay-back, of the employees getting what they deserved for going on strike...I assume new bosses, meant job losses.
Following the trail of devastation via Google- from the original land that once had an old wattle and daub house, a garden and orchard (I think it used to be a farm) with a factory making specialised goods, to a cost cutting supermarket and a token business - nothing now remains of the factory and its offices. Land sold for houses.
A bit further on, down Long Lane, at the corner of Greenhill road, there used to be a small business- not sure what they did- I see that's gone too.
Land sold for houses.
The ideology that comes up with ideas such as there being a lot of 'fat' to be cut from businesses to make them leaner, fitter and more productive had followed on from the 1970's myth that the workers were revolutionaries, intent on anarchy.
Neither view is useful, the fat is made of wages- 'downsizing' is a euphemism for sacking people; means reduce wages, save money.
Convert people to strikers, easier to blame them rather than to see that possibly the revolutionaries were just people objecting to losing yet another industry.
Expanding this process further and I hear the language of financial technocrats demanding that Greece undergoes radical financial surgery.
Metaphors of disease of contagion and amputation.
Significantly, the German word for debt, Schulden, is the plural of Schuld, meaning guilt or fault.
And so it is I get to Hayek.
Hayek seemed to believe in the 'market' as an entity that would regulate itself just so long as there is free, open information.
Information is the life-force of the market.
He had taken Adam Smith's idea of the Invisible Hand and used language from science to portray the economy as a cybernetic system, the ghostly Hand becomes a set of algorithms. This little snippet of his ideas makes it seem that Hayek's theories are responsible for deregulation of banks and the privatisation of schools, hospitals, etc.
1975 The Institute of Economic Affairs arranged a meeting between Hayek and Thatcher in London. And thereafter in Mrs Thatcher's Britain the real heroes were supposed to be the "privateers" who were going to open up the system to allow the market to work efficiently.
If you say that sentence back to yourself slowly- the privateers are going to open up the system to allow the market to work efficiently- you can see that it is blatantly mad, not least because it is pretty obvious that privatisation is not opening up information, it is buying things to make a profit and that there is always going to be a point where the freedom to take and sell anything starts to look a lot like theft.
Hayek's word for economy is catallaxy:
"the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market".The key to making this system work, Hayek said, was to allow information to flow freely around society. Governments should control the flow of information. Information is millions of rational consumers sending abstract signals to each other.
By managing the signals, governments could create "a competitive order".
It sounds plausible, but in reality I suspect that it is impossible to do. Hayek acknowledged that it was impossible to know enough enough to be absolutely correct, and his solution was simply to say that 'efficient exchange and use of resources can be maintained only through the price mechanism in free markets'.
It sounds like religion to me, not science.
An updated incarnation of 'The myth of the machine'.
