Nothing to Lose but the Chains on our Minds

How can we engage in collective action when we are living a more and more individualized existence? Jeremy Gilbert’s delightful little book Twenty first century socialism (2020) brought this question home to me when I looked at it over the weekend 

Today most people have very little regular experience of working effectively in groups with other people. They probably don’t know their neighbours. Their co-workers won’t be their co-workers long enough for them to get to know one another.

Even if they do, what they have in common with their co-workers is probably a ‘bullshit job’, which none of them wants to be doing and over which they feel no sense of control. In many sectors they may be working on short-term contracts, so their current co-workers will be their competitors in the labour market once the present contract runs out.

When they have to attend meetings, those meetings are boring, bureaucratic and frustrating, seeming to prove the neoliberal hypothesis that people acting together can achieve nothing.

 

They fill their hours with social media, communicating with people most of whom they will never meet and with whom they will almost never do anything more substantial than share memes. They find pleasure and satisfaction in their private lives, as consumers, on holiday, maybe pursuing solitary hobbies,31 probably just watching television.

Neoliberalism says that people are happier this way – consuming, competing, pursuing their private interests. They are not. They use platform technologies and a vast range of drugs to try to make themselves feel better, to feel some connection with other people and the wider world.

 

But this experience of daily life often makes it feel to them as if actually getting things done with other people is impossible, especially if those things have any objective other than making money.

If socialism in the twenty-first century has a single objective, that objective is to turn people’s desire for connection into real social and cooperative action for the greater good. And, if it has a single obstacle to overcome, then it is the feeling that no such thing is possible – a feeling that the whole machinery of neoliberal culture deliberately inculcates in people.

Gilbert’s little book has certainly encouraged me to look more closely at his previous book Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism (2014) whose title had appealed to me when I first saw it a few years back (not least because I had used the “Common Ground” as the name of a website I set up that very year). The book’s Preface had been promising – not least because it generously offered a summary of each chapter) viz   

It was arguably the ‘New Lefts’ of the 1960s, and the social movements of the 1970s, which posed the first lethal challenges to the highly conformist, homogenising model of collectivity which informed the political and democratic institutions inherited from the mid twentieth century. These had questioned the legacy of liberal individualism, not in the name of any kind of conservative ideal of community, but in the name of a radical democratic politics.

 

The book’s first chapter – “Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy” - argues that existing systems of representative democracy were relatively effective in the era of ‘Fordist’ industrial capitalism, but that they didn’t respond successfully to the pressure exerted by a new set of social demands emerging in the 1960s (from women, young people, black people, etc.), to the growing complexity of ‘post-Fordist’ societies, or to the mobility of capital in an era of financialisation and globalisation. Weakened by these challenges, governmental institutions have largely been captured by the ideology of neoliberalism, which the political class has normally colluded with in preference to acceding to the demands for more radical and participatory forms of democracy which characterised what the Trilateral Commission1 called the ‘democratic surge’ of the 1960s and 1970s (Crozier,  Huntington and Watanuki 1975).

But that generosity was the book's undoing since it was clear that Gilbert was in thrall to the French deconstructionists (viz Laclau, Derrida and Deleuze) whom I can’t stand. So the book was left on the shelf despite my knowing that Gilbert writes well – as this review of his most recent little book testifies

But I have now downloaded it – and will let you know how I get on with it…..

For the moment let me simply share with you some of useful reference which Gilbert’s references put me on to - 

- “A New politics from the left”; Hilary Wainwright (2018);  a short book by one of the friendliest writers (she has a great annotated reading list). Most books like this are strong on the critique and light on how to get to a better world – but the process of change is at the heart of this one. It’s in epub format which requires conversion for reading 

- “Freedom is an endless meeting – democracy in American social movements” (2002) looks at collective action on the American scene. One of 2 pdf files which can be directly accessed

- “The will of the many – how the alterglobalisation movement is changing the face of democracy” (2009)

-  “No shortcuts – organising for power in thenew gilded age” (2016) looks at trade union actions in the US in epub format which requires conversion 

- A useful article on Deepening democracy which may be from 2006 but has a typology which makes it still pertinent.

The “Light” that Failed

Communism was, of course, for that special generation of Western intellectuals from the 1930s-1950s “the God that failed” and there is indeed an entire book with that name, published in 1949, with contributions from Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide, Richard Crossman and Stephen Spender.

The last post may have borne the same title – but the God in this case who has disappointed the region in which I live – at least according to the title of “the long read” in yesterday’s The Guardian - is not Communism but Liberalism.

It was, typically, a long post which took some time to reach its point since I found Krastev and Holmes’ 2018 article Explaining Eastern Europe – imitation and its discontents a much more satisfactory analysis than the Guardian “long read” with which I had started the post.

Let me therefore try to summarise what I found the three most original and important points of that analysis – and remember I have lived in the countries concerned for the entire 30 years period (apart from the first year – and the 7 years I spent in central Asia).

I will then explore briefly the question whether Liberalism has indeed failed the wider region.

- 1. The newer members of the EU feel their inferior status. When, a couple of years ago, a friend used the term “colonial”, I resisted it but I now realise he was right both literally (in a scale of economic takeover which is nothing short of exploitative) and in the extent to which they have had to comply with EU legislation. As a consultant I was very aware of the utter insensitivity of my colleagues with their perceptions of “best practice” – in which the EU systems were as much as fault as the individual arrogances….I don’t think outsiders can begin to understand how much this has hurt proud and well-educated people    

The imitator’s life inescapably produces feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, dependency, lost identity, and involuntary insincerity. Indeed, the futile struggle to create a truly credible copy of an idealized model involves a never-ending torment of self-criticism if not self-contempt.

What makes imitation so irksome is not only the implicit assumption that the mimic is somehow morally and humanly inferior to the model. It also entails the assumption that central and eastern Europe’s copycat nations accept the West’s right to evaluate their success or failure at living up to Western standards.

- 2. Krastev and Holmes, secondly, explore what the expectations were in the beginning, emphasising the importance of the word “Normality” – and how these have changed….

If, in the immediate aftermath of 1989, ‘normality’ was understood largely in political terms (free elections, separation of powers, private property, and the right to travel), during the last decade normality has increasingly come to be interpreted in cultural terms of identity – racial and sexual and of multiculturalism. 

As a result, Central and East Europeans are becoming mistrustful and resentful of norms coming from the West. Ironically, eastern Europe is now starting to view itself as the last bastion of genuine European values.

There’s a parallel (of a sort) with the Brits who feel that they joined in 1973 a “Common Market” or economic union which, as the European Union, has developed into something very different…

- 3. A Very different “Open society”. Perhaps no phrase has changed its meaning within a decade as greatly as this one

In 1989, the open society meant a promise of freedom, above all a freedom to do what had been previously forbidden, namely to travel to the West. 

Today, openness to the world, for large swaths of the central and eastern European electorate, connotes not freedom but danger: immigrant invasion, depopulation (by scale of emigration of their country’s qualified young professionals), and loss of national sovereignty.

We rarely hear the voice of ordinary people in this sort of geo-political analysis but

Aftershock – a journey into Eastern Europe’s Forgotten Dreams 2017) is based on interviews with people the author, young American journalist John Feffer, met in the early 90s and then, 25 years later, went back to interview. The interviews can actually be accessed here   

But let me return to the question of whether it is Liberalism that has failed the central and eastern Europeans…..

It has become quite fashionable to argue against liberalism – I first noticed this some five years ago and the trend has intensified recently with books such as “Why Liberalism Failed

My argument in the 90s was that it was neo-liberalism which was the false god – with bodies like the World Bank pushing for the minimal state

Certainly “conditionality” was always a demeaning relationship for a country to have with bodies such as the EU, the IMF and the World Bank but I have to say I saw it at the time as a not unreasonable process - and was therefore struck with this section of the Krastev and Holmes article -

”Thus the rise of authoritarian chauvinism and xenophobia in Central and Eastern Europe has its roots not in political theory, but in political psychology. It reflects a deep-seated disgust at the post-1989 “imitation imperative,” with all its demeaning and humiliating implications. [End Page 118]

The origins of the region’s current illiberalism are emotional and pre-ideological, rooted in rebellion at the humiliations that must necessarily accompany a project requiring acknowledgment of a foreign culture as superior to one’s own. Illiberalism in a strictly theoretical sense, then, is largely a cover story. It lends a patina of intellectual respectability to a desire, widely shared at a visceral level, to shake off the colonial dependency implicit in the very project of Westernization.

This is indeed a fascinating argument – if not quite an attack on Liberalism in itself. Its focus on psychology actually reminds me of the Romanian tutor, Zevedei Barbu, I had at University in 1963/64 who had written “Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology and patterns of life” (1956) a book whose three parts were entitled “The psychology of Democracy”, “The psychology of Nazism” and “The psychology of communism” respectively. This must have made use of Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950) one of the first of a stream of books produced in the immediate post-war period to try to make sense of the power of the totalitarian model eg Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and JT Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy(1952). They were all required reading on the small Political Sociology class I took under Barbu who had defected in 1948 from the Romanian Legation in London (despite being an avowed communist who spent a couple of years in prison for the cause). He was a great teacher – it was he who introduced me to Weber, Durkheim and Tonnies – let alone Michels and Pareto – all of whose insights still resonate with me.

It’s an interesting reflection on our individualistic and egocentric times which have seen such a huge expansion in psychological book titles that such political psychology seems to have disappeared?

Except they haven’t – but they’ve morphed their focus into studies of left and right voting behaviour if Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” and Lakoff’s “Moral Politics” are anything to go by.
Rather different from studies of the authoritarian personality!
Or, indeed, from the writings of Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch or Richard Sennett about whom I wrote recently

background reading

Eurozine has a useful overview of the region’s political developments

1989 at 30; an interesting 30 page essay which focuses a bit too much on the earlier period

A recent (and rare) global history of the area

A famous English historian living in California offers useful insights on a younger one let loose in central europe
interview with Krastev -

https://www.eurozine.com/the-future-was-next-to-you/