Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity with the Royal Mail workers.)  This Private Eye squib mentions the workers only in passing and the Directives not at all, but it draws attention to an important mediating stage in the restructuring: the banker-run Shareholder Executive, created in 2002 to subject the UK's remaining state-owned companies to the ultra-short-term criteria of 'shareholder value'

Shareholder Executive
BIG CHEQUES IN THE POST

Where did the ruthlessly commercial approach to Britain's post offices, and with it the massive closure programme, come from?

It’s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ‘a breathing space from the State’ in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ‘me time’, the production of ‘universal access’, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons

Public Domain

In a bust economy can Keynesian demand management save us from the latest cycle of Schumpeterian creative destruction? In this issue’s ‘Cyberhype’, CCRU assesses the contenders’ credentials

‘Industrial mutation – if I may use the biological term – incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.’ – Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

Following the cyclical exhaustion of the first cyberspace boom, artificial winter set in throughout the capitalist world. Investors’ ‘animal spirits’ retreat and the shadows of the Yin World stir. As the economy slithers in the abyss the dusty grimoires of modernity’s arch-magician J.M. Keynes are once again being perused for policy conjurations to exorcise the darkside of the wave.