A New Class War??

I’ve been looking for some time for a book which does justice to our fall from innocence in the 1970s. I start from JK Galbraith’s concept of “countervailing power” which sustained the post-war period in western development. This was the theory that the corporate, union and social power held each other, for a “glorious 30 years”, in a certain balance until 1980 – with results good for everyone.

That balance was destroyed by something we too easily try to explain away by the use of the meaningless phrase “neoliberalism”. I’m familiar with the various efforts a range of social scientists have made to put meat on that particular bone – such as Philip Mirowski, Vivian Schmidt and, more recently, Quinn Slobodian. But, for my money “Licence to be Bad; how economics corrupted us” by Jonathan Aldred (2019) offers the most readable explanation of how we have all succumbed in the past 40 years to a new highly individualistic and greedy virus…..

The question which has been gnawing at me since the start of the new millennium is what can be done to put a new system of countervailing power in place…..????

Until now, few books dared raise or pursue that question, But Michael Lind’s The New Class War – saving democracy from the new managerial elite (2020) offers to do precisely that……

It starts powerfully – 

Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure.

before reminding us that -

In the 19^th and early twentieth centuries, five major schools of thought debated the future of industrial society: liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism (p39) 

……Producerism is the belief that the economy should be structured by the state to maximize the numbers of selfemployed family farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers in society. The moral ideal of this school is the selfsufficient citizen of a republic with a small-producer majority whose economic independence means that they cannot be intimidated or blackmailed by wealthy elites. In the form of Jeffersonian agrarianism, producerism has a rich history in the United States. The rise of mass production in the economy, and the shift from a majority made up of farm owners and farm workers to urban wage earners, rendered the producerist ideal irrelevant in the modern industrialized West. While small-producerism still has appeal to romantics on both the left and the right, it is and will remain anachronistic, and having criticized it elsewhere, I will not discuss it in this book.4

….. A fourth philosophy, opposed to free market liberalism and state socialism alike, envisioned a harmonious society of state-supervised but largely self-governing “corporations,” by which was meant entire economic sectors, not individual firms, rather like medieval guilds.6 This tradition influenced Catholic social thought, as expressed in the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931). For the French sociologist Émile Durkheim and others in the secular French republican solidarist tradition, the organization of labor and business could be an antidote to “anomie,” a phrase Durkheim devised to describe the isolation and disorientation of many individuals in urban industrial societies.7 The same term, “corporatism,” is often used for both democratic and dictatorial versions of this political tradition

….. The view of society as a community of self-organized and self-governing communities, under the supervision of a democratic government, is best described as “pluralism,” the term used by the English pluralists of the early twentieth century, like Neville Figgis, F. W. Maitland, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski, and by their late-twentieth century heirs, including Paul Hirst and David Marquand. 

And then goes on to argue that – 

Only a new democratic pluralism that compels managerial elites to share power with the multiracial, religiously pluralistic working class in the economy, politics, and the culture can end the cycle of oscillation between oppressive technocracy and destructive populism.