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Book Review Like ‘dinner with Caligula’

Sugar Daddy Capitalism exposes the grim reality of many who come into contact with neoliberal authoritarianism at work or in their private life, says ANDY HEDGECOCK

Sugar Daddy Capitalism: The Dark Side of the New Economy
by Peter Fleming
(Polity, £15.99)

SUGAR Daddy Capitalism by Peter Fleming is an autopsy on the creed of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and their Chicago School disciples, figures now dismissed by serious economists as relics of the cold war.

But, as Fleming points out, the demise of neoliberal economics in terms of academic credibility has not hampered its corrosive impact on jobs, health, dignity and culture.

He suggests that the economy has been reshaped in the image of the sex industry. It commodifies and exploits us, turning us into pimps and hustlers — a powerful metaphor for capitalism’s arbitrary cruelties, but there are cases in which it is literally true.

These are illustrated by rent-for-sex advertisements and case studies of quasi-sexual coercion by employers, with managers at the Australian branch of marketing corporation Appco imposing a bizarre punishment regime involving anally inserted cigarettes. By reducing life to a series of “deals,” we have created a world in which growing imbalances of power lead to physical and psychological abuse.

The case of Professor Stefan Grimm of Imperial College provides a shocking example of workplace bullying. Grimm committed suicide after a so-called informal review process involved a public dressing-down for failing to meet funding targets.

Fleming believes that arbitrary, cruel and irrational application of authority is making the everyday lives of many workers seem like “dinner with Caligula” and his history of the sugar-daddy economy begins with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). It claimed that individual values were too diverse to be served by public bodies, rejected the idea of the common good and stated that we would be better served by a wafer-thin state.

Fast forward 70 years to Tory policy guru Steve Hilton, a man so besotted with the notion of the market that he promotes deregulation in every area of life and the book uncovers the spurious logic and deceptive language of Hayek and Hilton, exposing their talk of a more human, more personal form of capitalism as entirely bogus.

Forty years of propaganda about “choice,” “freedom” and “individuality” have led to the ruin of a regulated society and its replacement by loose associations based on privately negotiated “deals.” In Hilton’s free-market utopia, Fleming argues, anyone would be able to carry out medical surgery without the “red tape” of examinations systems.

Quality assurance would be guaranteed by poor practitioners being driven out of business by losing their customer base. Sadly, this is unlikely to benefit victims of fatally botched operations.  

The book closes with proposals to eradicate exploitative employment, such as outlawing zero hours contracts, providing a universal basic income and de-privatising the public realm.

Sugar Daddy Capitalism is a short and intense inquiry into the world’s pervasive economic system, its history, its potential to damage lives and ways in which it might be countered.

To tackle this in fewer than 200 pages is an ambitious objective, but Fleming succeeds in providing a compelling and comprehensive challenge to the assumption that there is no alternative to tolerating the iniquities of our deregulated society.  

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