Quoted by IT:

Even on the streets of the City, sympathy was in short supply. Gary Williams, who works for a software company, blamed “a massive bonus culture in a deregulated industry”.

“They aren’t working for the common good,” he said. “They’re working purely for their own ends.”

In what way is this not also true of someone who works for a software company? One answer might be that productive participation in the economy, even as part of a profit-making enterprise, nevertheless adds something to the common good – even if the profits made are subtracted, qua profit, from the commons. Most businesses have customers, people they do something for. What would then distinguish the reviled traders would be their total lack of concern for, or contribution to, the common good: their purely parasitic relationship to the commons. The complaint would be that they take something out of it – massive bonuses – but put nothing back. Worse, “their own ends” are inimical to the common good, and are pursued to its detriment: the manner of their pursuit of personal enrichment is such that it makes things worse for everybody else.

It seems only a short time ago that the finance sector’s pursuit of enrichment was promoted as essential to the common good: the City was what was keeping the rest of the economy afloat. If the huge bonuses earned by a tiny minority were seldom defended as just rewards, it was nevertheless argued that such astonishing inflation of individuals’ private wealth was a necessary evil if “talent” were not to seek its reward elsewhere. It was bitter and sharp with stalks, but we were encouraged to swallow it – to be “cool” about members of this tiny minority having millions of pounds to spend on whatever they liked, driving up property prices and creating a subculture of extreme wealth from which everyone else was excluded. If we could be cool about the private wealth of lottery winners and star footballers, then why not the city boys too?

Now it is apparent that the global economy has been massively undermined by the activities of that same “talent”, nobody is inclined to feel cool about it any more. The harm that was being done to us all along by the very fact of such inequality, such flagrant accumulation and expenditure, is more and more widely recognised as the collective insult it always was.

“The common good” is a fluid notion, which comes most clearly into definition when it is seen to be damaged or threatened. To work for the common good need not be to sacrifice oneself for it, but simply to participate in its construction. What works against the common good is the construction of goods that cannot be shared, that are “what is good” for a privileged group only. We were told that what was good for the city was good for us all; indeed, at times, that only what was good for the city was good for us. It is remarkable that this falsehood was ever believed; what would be even more remarkable would be if anyone were prepared to believe it from now on.

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