Being Clear about Human Nature

The penultimate post got too caught up in my past and didn’t really convey the connection I was trying to make between the book I wrote in 1977 and the one I’ve been trying to draft for the past decade. I knew there was an important message in the quote from JR Saul’s “Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of reason in the West” which was included when I first set up the blog in 2009 and contained the wonderful sentence

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to 
our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
 
 It’s just that I didn’t understand in 2009 what that message was. It’s become clear 

to me that it was a reminder that I had, between 1968-90, been very clear whose side I was 

on in the perennial ideological battle which divides society. Although I’ve called myself a 

mugwump, I was generally clear that I stood with the activist against the elite. But, in 

becoming a technocratic consultant to state bodies, I implicitly changed sides
I’ve been struggling with that dilemma for the past decade – and my blogposts show the process 

of one scale after another dropped from my eyes. Perhaps none so much as What is to be Done? 

Dispatches to the Next Generation which is a mea culpa to my children about the damage my 

generation has brought to theirs.

So I’m now working on a new version of “The Search for Democracy” which tries to do justice 

to the need to -
- extend democracy to the workplace
- comment more succinctly on the reality of democracy – particularly (but not only) in the new member states of the EU, including those in which I have been living for the past 15 years

In 1975 Samuel Huntington and others published for the Tripartite Commission - a report entitled 

“The Crisis of Democracy” which was a diatribe against the hoi poloi and our aspirations. 

It created the conditions for the neoliberal onslaught which has been inflicted on us for 

the past four decades and to which there has been no real answer. What passes for the 

left seems to have accepted that individualism is here to stay – with Richard Wolff’s  

“Democracy at Work – a cure for Capitalism”, Thomas Pikety’s “Time for Socialism” and 

Jeremy Gilbert’s “Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism ” (2014) 

and “21st century Socialism” being rare exceptions . What seems very clear is that progressives 

need to give much more thought to human nature if we have any chance of convincing the 

electorate of our programmes. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind – a hopeful history would be a 

good start.  
Democracy has very much been in retreat since I wrote that first book in 1977 with the 

Thatcherite attack not only on trade unions but all possible challenges to corporate power. 

And the populism we’ve seen in the last couple of decades has given new energy to that attack. 

The saving grace has been the new discourse about direct democracy and citizen juries 

– at least in western Europe. But central Europe and the Balkans remain disfigured – with oligarchic elites consolidating their power.