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 19th 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.
