The objectives of the 2007 Winter School are to identify and to understand the main tendencies currently dominating in industries world-wide and to relate these to their social environments. Thie two seperate weeks of the Winter School are designed to promote the discerning, discretionary and anticipatory powers of leaders and potential leaders of industries as they work within this emerging environment.

By its nature the programme of the School is flexible and its outcome is left open. On a similar ‘voyage of discovery’ the first EIIL Winter School concluded that only by transforming Europe into much more of ‘an understanding society’, than a ‘ knowledge society’ could Europe survive industrially and socially in an era of Asian industrial predominance, such as was expected to be realised around 2020, when Asia should regain at least the position that it last held in 1750, when it accounted for 73 percent of the world’s industrial production.

The 2007 School will build on this conclusion, and will take participants through ‘the watershed year’ of 2006 in which, under the ‘air cover’ of the powers of persuasion of the new or upgraded Arabic, Chinese, French and Russian television channels broadcasting in the English, French, German and Spanish languages, most of the Belgium, British, Dutch, French and Luxembourg steel industries were acquired by nominally ‘Third World’ business interests, while substantial parts of the German and US steel industries were acquired by Russian interests. 

Using several additional examples the Winter School will demonstrate the change in attitude that also became evident during 2006 towards direct inward investment, whereby the value of the knowledge content of the investment increasingly comes to take precedence over its financial content, and the immense changes which are simultaneously developing in the financial markets and which are having a major impact on industrial development, or rather lack of development, most obviously in the UK and the USA, but also to some extent as well in ‘Continental Europe’.

The first week will consider ‘The Big Picture’ and will describe, illustrate and analyse the the acceleration of this Hidden Pendulum towards Asian Industrial supremacy. The second week of the school will illustrate the characteristic strengths still evident in European industry and through one major, and several other illustrative case studies will explore where and how European industry is to respond to the Asian challenge.     

2006 is seen to have been ‘the watershed year’ where Europe is threatened to loosing itself by ignoring the power shift of Idustry to Asia. This new development of ‘Third World’ business interests has been reinforced by the acompanying development in the ‘technologies of persuation’ in terms of ‘providing air cover’ for the industrial initiative. Examples of aquisitions of the steel industry & has been ‘cherry-picking’ Europes outstanding executive talent. These examples will be related to the change in attitude that also became evident during 2006 towards direct inward investment, whereby the value of the knowledge content of the investment increasingly comes to take precedence over its financial content in several countries that are otherwise as different as China and Venezuela.

A special place will be given in this 2007 School to a subject that has previously been avoided, namely the immense changes that are continuing in the financial markets and which are having a major impact on industrial development, or rather lack of development, most obviously in the UK and the USA, but also to some extent as well in ‘Continental Europe’.

The condition of the Asian challenge has developed from out of an analysis of the symbiosis obtaining between an ongoing mutation from a ‘modern’ into a ‘post-modern’ condition of a society (that is, from a society of ‘knowers’ into a society of ‘consumers of knowledge’) The last day of this week will be spent examining the concept of the Knowledge Society.

Workshop 1: The Hidden Pendulum – The Changing Balance of World Economic Power

19th – 20th  February 2007

The Winter school will use the metaphor of a pendulum to describe this swing in fortunes and to characterise the massive change that occurred in these fortunes over 150 years, after some millennia in which a relative stability had been maintained, and thence the even more dramatic and much more rapid change that is occurring in the opposite direction today.

That the pendulum has started to move back is still almost completely misunderstood today in the West. This seminar will discuss this state of denial in the world of Western politics such as is strongly supported by the Western media, so that if we are to understand anything at all of the dynamics of this hidden pendulum as it now swings back to its 1750 state of industrial dominance of Asian and related ‘Third World’ societies we must also consider this occulting influence of the Western political and media forces.  

Almost everyone is aware of something called ‘Asian competition’, however, this seminar will explain the essential nature of the new kind of competitive advantage enjoyed by these Asian societies, explaining its sociotechnical foundations and so basing itself upon a proper understanding of the new relations that are arising between people and equipment within post-modern conditions.

Tracing the transformation/mutation of present-day societies that are based upon promoting ever larger numbers of ‘knowers’ (as so-called ‘knowledge societies’) into those that are promoting ever larger numbers of ‘consumers of knowledge’, as experts in the acquisition, employment and disposal of wide ranges of knowledges (as ‘understanding societies’), this seminar will then briefly explore the necessary development of new ways of organising working arrangements, enabling the development of self-structuring and so self-managing groups that are far more flexible and adaptable than are existing tightly-coupled and over-managed structures. 

The seminar will therefore identify and characterise a specific combination and interaction of processes that are driving the acceleration of The Hidden Pendulum in order to better understand these both in themselves and in their interactions, the various, essentially qualitative, factors that have come into synergy as they drive this transformation in the so-called ‘balance of economic power’.

Workshop 2: Quantifyng the Dynamics of the Pendulum

21st February 2007

A few ‘old-fashioned’ economic indicators provide some first idea of the present position: steel production in Europe is some 16.5 percent and the USA, Canada and Mexico some 11.9 percent of an expected 2006 world production of some 1,200 million tons, while Asia, including Iran, has some 53 percent. China alone already accounts for at least 36 percent and so more than regaining its 1750 position by this particular measure. By this same measure, Europe is back to an era before 1750 and the USA is back to its position of 1870.  

China’s own steel production rose by 18.6 percent during the first eight months of 2006 alone. Similarly India increased its steel production by 15.3 percent over the same period. Even taking a more ‘modern’ measure, the consumption of aluminium, the basic picture remains much the same. China’s consumption exceeds by a large margin that of the EU and the USA together and is also approaching the per-capita consumptions of these ‘Western’ nations rapidly.

With about 40 percent of the world total China’s consumption of cement is one measaure which links these others together. With a construction industry driven by a historically unprecedented production of new housing and infrastructure, and with China commissioning a major new electricity generating station every week, so that it is already installing every year the equivalent of the whole existing electricity generation capacity of the UK. 

This one-day seminar will discuss these developments as indicative of the fact that China’s growth is not so much driven by exports of manufactures – these serve primarily for earning foreign currency to pay for imports of raw materials and specialised equipment – but much more by internal investment of a kind that will raise the quality of life and thus the industrial competitiveness of its populations to a much higher level than in most other places, so that it may be expected that by 2020 China will have attained to something that we in Continental Europe can associate with a reasonable ‘quality of life’ – in so far as this can ever be represented in such gross quantitative terms.

The seminar will look at this from different perspectives in order as to acquire a more complete picture of the vital phenomenon – and thereby to gain some better understanding that there is much more to the development of China that is hidden from the public gaze.

Workshop 3: The Self-Immolation of the ‘Western World‘
22nd-23rd February 2007

The manner in which the European Peoples, represented by the six major colonising powers, who extended their own territories over most of the American and Australasian continents by conquest and frequent resort to genocide, and not so long ago had colonised the whole world with the exception of Iran, North East Asia and Thailand, is well known historically. However, and especially in more recent times, the shear enormities of the associated atrocities and depravities have been lost to the public view, obfuscated, covered over and thus occulted in most of the ‘Western’ history books, and have even in some cases been denied completely by these means.

Today we say that “History is made in Hollywood” in the Western world, whereby, among so much else, the incredible illusion is created, at least in the minds of the peoples of the USA but in some other places too, that the USA is a ‘superpower’ with some kind of evangelical ‘saving mission’, and indeed that this is ‘the World’s only superpower’.

As several prominent historians have observed, that the USA spends more on its armed forces than almost all the rest of the world put together is one of the natural responses of a nation that senses, even though only subconsciously, that it is in a state of terminal economic decline. 

This seminar will discuss that ‘The West’ is not really threatened very much at all by the reassertion of Asia industrial predominance, but it is threatened far more by its own destructive and self-destructive impulses. We will explain the origins of these impulses so that participants are better equipped to accommodate them and in some cases even perhaps oppose them.

We will discuss an analysis of the deep spiritual and depth-psychological forces within the European peoples that led them to abuse, at first the peoples of the rest of the world and then their own selves to such extreme degrees, and thence of the sociotechnical means that they were the first to mobilise in order to achieve and maintain their domination for so long a time – and then subsequently employed to decimate one another.  

The seminar will discuss the concepts of nihilism and nothingness as essential to the understanding of one of the primary forces that are driving the pendulum of global industrial-economic transformation, and their manifestations through the technologies of persuasion.

The second day of the seminar will discuss two phenomena that exemplify the self immolation of ‘The West’ at the present time and to the highest degree. The first has to do with the extraordinary lack of fixed capital investment, such as in new equipment, in The West, even as profits in the USA and the UK at least are at the highest levels for decades as proportions of gross domestic product. Moreover this is happening in an almost unprecedented environment of exceptionally cheap credit, and where the price of insuring credit is at rock bottom. Business investment, which takes time, and is hard, is increasingly squeezed, whereas company buy-back programmes, even funded by increased borrowing, offers instant gratification via the share price and the bringing forward for management of stock option bonuses.

The second example is concerned with the rise and rise of what used to be called ‘venture capital’, now renamed as ‘private equity’ over the last few years. We will examine how private equity groups manage to provide a convenient way for companies to divest their non-core or underperforming units to such buy-out funds with little trouble and no public embarrassment, but no better example of the adage of the EIIL, that “the quickest way to make money is to destroy value”. We will discuss the more global consequences of this, and it’s the many other such ‘financial innovations’, when taken together, are however far more worrying and have been set out with increasing regularity during 2006 in the financial media. We will examine the ‘pyramid of debt’ thus created and discuss the possible consequences of ‘common mode failure’ of this highly coupled and inherently interdependent and unstable construct.

Finally we will outline the traditional values and characteristics of continental European industry and outline how these might be the basis on which to build resistance to this self-immolation trend.