A recent post identified a widespread despondency indeed cynicism about contemporary British politics. Some forty years ago, there was a mood of hope - John Smith had commissioned the “Commission on Social Justice” Will Hutton was just about to publish his seminal text “The State We’re In”. John Major and the Tories may have won the election in 1992 but Black Wednesday a few months later destroyed the Conservatives' credibility – although they limped on before the overwhelming Labour victory of 1997.
Today there is little hope – the Labour party inspires little confidence, is seen as just too responsible not least for its expulsion of most of its left-wing critics. Just compare the party's 2017 Manifesto with its current “Covenant”.
Renewal is a soft-left journal (the link explains the term which publishes thoughtful articles and this one is a review of a recent book with the great title “Futures of Socialism - ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-97”. This excerpt gives a great sense of an intensity of debate which has been lost in recent decades -
His book is a deeply researched history of ideological change on the British left in the late twentieth century. Murphy offers a fascinating guide to the debates about how to modernise socialism that raged across seminar rooms, conference floors, party documents, think tank pamphlets and periodical pages from the 1970s onwards. His findings make a powerful case against the commonplace portrayal of Labour in the late twentieth century as offering nothing more adventurous than a mildly humanised neoliberalism........
During the 1970s and 1980s a very large number of political actors on the left and centre of British politics became convinced that the model of centralised state-driven socialism associated with Labour’s heyday in power in the 1940s was out of step with modern Britain. Political formations as various as the New Left, leading trade unionists, disillusioned Labour revisionists, left-led Labour councils, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Liberal Party and the emergent SDP all agreed that there needed to be greater economic and political empowerment below the level of the UK state. Initially this was often framed in socialist terms as the extension of economic democracy through worker participation in industrial decision-making and trade unionists taking seats on company boards. But these ideas quickly widened (or perhaps moderated) to include passing power on to consumer and community groups, local councils (with Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council as a model) and co-operatives. At a theoretical level, these decentralising tendencies were forged into what Murphy dubs the ‘neo-corporatism’ advocated by David Marquand and Paul Hirst. Marquand and Hirst envisaged a British economy that looked a lot more like the West German social-market model, by combining federal constitutionalism with a more collaborative and long-term industrial culture.
All of this was premised on the assumption that Labour’s traditional political vision was too top-down and statist and thus out of step with a less deferential, more individualist society. This was said to be the vulnerability in Labour’s earlier model of socialism that Thatcherism had exploited, by offering a right-wing vision of individual economic empowerment that widened private property ownership and increased disposable incomes through direct tax cuts (a point that had been presciently made by Stuart Hall even before the Thatcher government was elected in his famous 1979 Marxism Today essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’).
Four quadrants can be used to plot the old and new left and right -
Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)
Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things
New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….
New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.
But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” some 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a decade earlier.. e are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent” (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with
key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum
|
|
LEFT |
CENTRE |
RIGHT |
|
OLD |
Working class |
Family, property |
Tradition, duty |
|
SOFT |
Social democracy |
liberalism |
duty |
|
NEW |
Liberation struggle |
consumerism |
The individual |
|
EMERGENT |
The commons |
identity |
libertarian |
In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’.
‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’
Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -
‘Ideas moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’
The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.
It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.
Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.
With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’
But Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked. What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market as a popular (and populist) vision of the good society.
What all these narratives lack is a class perspective (i.e. they view things from an administrative perspective of governments, politicians and parties, not classes), and they also fail to take into consideration the prevailing economic and social relations between those classes.
ReplyDeleteThere is little point comparing the 1930's or 80's, with the current conditions, which are more like those of the 1890's, or 1960's. In these latter two, mass social-democratic parties were either only just being formed, or else were moribund shells. Yet, the material conditions of rapidly growing economies, and demand for labour, still put workers on the front foot, enabled them to raise wages, shorten working hours, develop their organisations, including those mass workers parties.
The 1930's and 1980's, by contrast began with some radical appearing ideas, but in conditions where economies were stagnating and workers were on the back foot, and so in no position to provide the social weight and muscle to implement them, though, in truth, those radical ideas were not that radical and amounted to merely window-dressing of corporatism.
We are at a similar position to the 1890's, or 1960's, with moribund social-democratic parties, but with economic conditions of labour shortages enabling workers to take matters directly into their own hands - always something politicians detest - by simply utilising their own strength. As in the 1890's, and 1960's that has limits, and a political dimension is required. Clinton led to Trump, Kinnock to Johnson, just as Macron is leading to Le Pen, and Biden again to Trump. Starmer has already become a version of Johnson, and will lead to worse again, unless workers turn their own strength into a transformation of these parties, or create new ones, as happened in the 1890's, when workers split from the old bourgeois parties, as with the creation of Labour out of the Liberals.
But, again, its not the 1920's or 1930's, which made possible fascism at that time. Thee is some time discretion, for now, in which the basic economic conditions and workers strength can prevail and prevent such a development. But, that window lasts maybe only for another ten years.