Too big to be saved

I have referred several times in this blog to Paul Kingsnorth – who has a very pertinent article on the global crisis in today’s Guardian

In times like these, people look elsewhere for answers. A time of crisis is also a time of opening-up, when thinking that was consigned to the fringes moves to centre stage. When things fall apart, the appetite for new ways of seeing is palpable, and there are always plenty of people willing to feed it by coming forward with their pet big ideas.
But here's a thought: what if big ideas are part of the problem? What if, in fact, the problem is bigness itself?

The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself.

Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event.

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr's message is a direct challenge to them. "Wherever something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big."

Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what at the time was a radical case: that small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers or superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age – a time of high confidence in the progressive, gigantist, technology-fuelled destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness of creating a world government as the next step towards uniting humanity. Kohr was seriously at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented, dryly, that his critics "dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet".

Kohr's claim was that society's problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called "the human scale": a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because "the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself".

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world's problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative.

On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.
To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr's vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

Two years ago, I reread the book and picked out several quotations– of which this was one –

the chief blessing of a small-state system is ...its gift of a freedom which hardly ever registers if it is pronounced.....freedom from issues....ninety percent of our intellectual miseries are due to the fact that almost everything in our life has become an ism, an issue... our life’s efforts seem to be committed exclusively to the task of discovering where we stand in some battle raging about some abstract issue...

The blessing of a small state returns us from the misty sombreness of an existence in which we are nothing but ghostly shadows of meaningless issues to the reality which we can only find in our neighbours and neighbourhoods

Kingsnorth continues that

We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where "instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence". Kohr's "crisis of bigness" is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.

This shouldn't surprise us. It didn't surprise Kohr, who, unlike some of his utopian critics, never confused a desire for radical change with the likelihood of it actually happening. Instead, his downbeat but refreshingly honest conclusion was that, like a dying star, the gigantist global system would in the end fall in on itself, and the whole cycle of growth would begin all over again. But before it did so, "between the intellectual ice ages of great-power domination", the world would become "little and free once more"

The discussion thread to Kingsworth's article is also worth reading.

Do Social Democrats Think Any More?

I didn’t actually send a nomination to Social Europe for "the thinker who most influenced the European social democratic agenda last year” – simply because it’s so obvious that thought has no real place in the construction of social democratic party agendas and activities these days. It’s all a question of focus groups, sound-bites and clandestine negotiations with media and financial interests. I was tempted therefore to suggest the name of Peter Mandelson who first concocted this diabolic formula. But an additional reason is that I didn’t want to add to the anglo bias of the Social Europe website. There must be many interesting German, French, Dutch and Scandinavian "writers” who have some useful thoughts to offer reform parties. Sadly, however, I have not been able to find my way to their blogs and papers – until now! Rene Cuperus is a Dutchman who has written well and provocatively about the causes of social democratic decline – and it was through following links to him that I came across two websites which are actually devoted to the revitalisation of social democratic thinking at a European indeed global level. The first is Policy Network which, at first glance, seems too focussed on political leaders for my taste. But their publications are worthwhile – particularly a recent one Priorities for a new political economy - Memos to the left which has introductory essays by Will Hutton and Colin Crouch amongst others and then 19 short essays by European (British, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Spanish) and North and Latin American writers. Interesting that Germans don’t really figure in such books – they are not anguishing the way the rest of us do. They just get on with sustaining a system which is, broadly, working?
Another title which looks interesting is Social Progress in the 21st Century – social invetsment, labour market reform and inter-generational inequality which was also funded by the second useful website I came across - the European progressive political foundation (FEPS). Set up in 2008 and close to the Party of European Socialists (PES), FEPS explores new ways of thinking on the social democratic, socialist and labour scene in Europe. Its publications look interesting and I hope to report on one in particular which I have downloaded – a tribute to Tony Judt and the challenge he posed us in his penultimate book "Ill Fares the Land".

I have just found (and added to the links on the right-side) a great blog devoted to superb, off-beat examples of Romanian architecture. It’s bilingual and called A patriot’s Guide to Romania.

Power - and saws

First thing morning, my druzhbar (power saw) was serviced by a young neighbour, Rasvan - and immediately powered through the thick tree branches at the front. Then the heavy work of carting them up to the house! By then it was midday - and the wind was really up; with the sun making it very acceptable - particularly on the terrace at the back with a wine after preparing another bean soup with the great new pressure cooker.

Hopefully tomorrow I can finish the sawing and storing of the wood. Three branches have given enough for a couple of weeks sustained heating!

The internet is impossibly slow now and will probably make further blogging impossible until I get back to Sofia - at the end of the week. I do realise that the title I gave to today's post - Come back Corporatism -does beg a lot of questions! Talk of the "new political class" points to the great "cosiness" (collusion) between political, corporate and media elites. But the corporatism of northern european system is a negotiated system composed of powerful groups which balance one another!

Come back Corporatism - all is forgiven!

The events of the past few years have made millions of people angry with their political leaders and disillusioned with the political and economic systems in which they operate.

But for anything to happen, there have to be feasible and legitimate options capable of gaining the support of a significant number of people.

That’s quite a challenging set of preconditions – feasibility, legitimacy and support! A paper on my website tries to track the various analyses and reforms which have been offered in the past decade or so (excluding technical tinkering).

But nothing will happen without catalysts for that change – individuals who have an understanding of the social process of the transformation process and the skills and credibility to ease change into place. Noone buys blueprints (let alone manifestos) any more. And politicians in many countries have lost credibility. Process is all. So where are the catalysts who have that understanding and skill sets; and who cannot be fitted into the conventional political labels?

It was by accident that I pulled a book from my library yesterday which has been lying unread since I bought it years ago. It was Paul Hirst’s From Statism to Pluralism produced in 1997 from various papers he had written in the previous 5 years and arguing the case for “associational democracy” in both the public and private sectors. It has a powerful beginning –

The brutalities of actually existing socialism have fatally crippled the power of socialist ideas of any kind to motivate and inspire. The collapse of communism and the decline of wars between the major industrial states have removed the major justifications of social democracy for established elites – that it could prevent the worse evil of communism and that it could harness organized labour in the national war effort.

Those elites have not just turned against social democracy, but they almost seem to have convinced significant sections of the population that a regulated economy and comprehensive social welfare are either unattainable or undesirable

.He then goes on to argue that –
• more “associational” forms of democracy and wider decision-making would help re-balance the centralisation of the state and the dominance of big business. In this view ‘association’ means groups of people who have similar concerns, views, and aims.
• Associationalism (it has many similarities with mutualism) is the most neglected of the great 19th century doctrines of social organisation. It lost out to collectivism and individualism. But conditions have now changed dramatically and make it an appropriate principle of reform and renewal of Western societies.
• widely distributed methods of decision-making, (both within and between organisations and groups throughout society and the economy) would better enable effective, informed and appropriate action. It might reduce the need for complex top-down regulation, better distribute wealth and security, and offer a potential solution to mistrust and social disintegration within communities.

Sadly Hirst died in 2003 but I discovered yesterday that other people in Britain have recently been going back to his papers and books. Indeed a booklet was produced earlier this year on the discussions.

Clearly the renewed interest stems from the UK Prime Minister’s interest in what he calls the “Big Society” – of public services being managed by its workers (part of the mutualist approach) or by community and voluntary organizations (social enterprise). Although Cameron was talking about this before the global crisis, the concept is a bit suspect these days with such large cuts in public expenditure.

However, social enterprise has a long and honourable tradition and was one I was proud to work for in the 1980s. A recent article set out how the Hirst agenda and social enterprise fit However the elephant in the room is the Big Corporation – and here the limits of (if not the motives for) the Cameron agenda are perhaps most exposed.

And Hirst too does not say much about the economic side of things which Will Hutton was so eloquent about at the same time (stakeholder society) – beyond a few comments about the “industrial districts of Italy”.

Although Germany gets a brief passing remark or two, I find it astounding that the “corporatist” model of North Europe does not get proper treatment. Is that because “corporatism” got a bad name in Britain in the 1970s (it was blamed for the poor economic performance) – or because the Brits (and Americans) are so myopic about foreign activities?

 We should not underestimate the power of words and phrases – but I suspect the explanation is more the latter. I find it ironic that the Brits were very interested in the 1960s with what they could learn from France and other European countries about industrial policy - but that they have no such interest when part of the European Union!

Apart from the usual academic books about German politics, I know of only two general books on Germany in the English language – the idiosyncratic Germania by Simon Winder and Peter Watson’s doorstopper of a book German Genius – neither of which says anything about how Germany managed, in the post-war period period, to become such a politically and economically resilient country.

The only serious article I know about the country are the 60 pages in Perry Anderson’s The New Old World. I remember in the 1970s we had a huge book by John Ardagh which took us through all aspects of contemporary Germany. Now the books are shallow (and mocking) travelogues whcih say more about the Brits than the Germans.

However there is a recent academic paper which explores why a “coordinated market economy” was first chosen as the appropriate model for Germany; and why it might still be the most appropriate for Germany but for other EC countries.

Our catastrophic elites

In 1987 a book and a film appeared in America which seemed to signal a questioning of the greed culture which had received the imprint of approval from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The book was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities which ended with the come-uppance of one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the universe”. The film was Wall Street; Money never sleeps - starring Michael Dougals as Gordon Gekko whose signature line was "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
Alas, the reflective mood was momentary – indeed the broader effect seemed to have been to persuade other professions to get into the act. A decade later, a distinguished historian, Harold Perkin, published The Third Revolution - Professional Elites in the Modern World(1996). In previous books Perkin had studied the rise of professional society. In this one he looked at Twentieth Century elites in the USA, England, France, Germany, Russia and Japan - and finds their behaviour equally deficient and morally irresponsible -

What all six countries, except Germany, are found to have in common are greed and corruption, from the wholesale fraud, embezzlement, and bribery practised by Soviet apparatchiks , through the systematic bribery of Japanese politicians by the big corporations, and the apparently general corruption in French local government contracts, to the more 'legitimate' but dubiously ethical machinations of junk bond merchants in the U. S. or take-over conmen in Britain. This is attributed to the professional elites who are 'good servants but bad masters', and when they have power are liable to abuse it, exploit the masses, and line their own pockets. At this point one cannot help concluding that there is nothing new under the sun, that ruling elites or cliques have always been tempted to enrich themselves, and that corruption, even blatant and very large- scale corruption, is not an invention of professional society.

It is a book which should be given to each individual when (s)he makes it into their country's "Who's Who" and becomes part of the "system".
A few years earlier, a powerful but different critique of our elites had been launched by Christopher Lasch - The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites. But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch -

The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life."
The privileged classes, which, according to Lasch's "expansive" definition, now make up roughly a fifth of the population, are heavily invested in the notion of social mobility. The new meritocracy has made professional advancement and the freedom to make money "the overriding goal of social policy." "The reign of specialized expertise," he writes, "is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the 'last, best hope of earth'". Citizenship is grounded not in equal access to economic competition but in shared participation in a common life and a common political dialogue. The aim is not to hold out the promise of escape from the "labouring classes," Lasch contends, but to ground the values and institutions of democracy in the inventiveness, industry, self-reliance, and self-respect of working people.
The decline of democratic discourse has come about largely at the hands of the elites, or "talking classes," as Lasch refers to them. Intelligent debate about common concerns has been almost entirely supplanted by ideological quarrels, sour dogma, and name-calling. The growing insularity of what passes for public discourse today has been exacerbated, he says, by the loss of "third places" — beyond the home and workplace — which foster the sort of free-wheeling and spontaneous conversation among citizens on which democracy thrives. Without the civic institutions — ranging from political parties to public parks and informal meeting places — that "promote general conversation across class lines," social classes increasingly "speak to themselves in a dialect of their own, inaccessible to outsiders."

Lasch proposes something else: a recovery of what he calls the “populist tradition,” and a fresh understanding of democracy, not as a set of procedural or institutional arrangements but as an ethos, one that the new elites have been doing their best to undermine.

It has to be said that neither book made much impact – perhaps they were just seen as “moralizing”. Contrast that with the impact made in 1958 by JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Has any recent book, I wonder, made the same impact? Perhaps the Spirit Level – why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) comes closest. I would therefore have to nominate them for the Social Europe award mentioned recently - although I personally think that Danny Dorling's 2010 Injustice - why social inequality persists is a more powerful book since it doesn't just itemise the inequalities but identifies and explodes the various rationalisations which sustain them.

Triumph of the political class

Thunder has been reverbating around the valleys in the last couple of days, knocking out my electricity several times. But that is not the reason for my silence. I have been absorbed by one of the books in the latest Amazon package (which arrived within 2 days of my ordering them) – Peter Oborne’s The Triumph of the Political Class. Some months ago I said that noone seemed to be celebrating the anniversary of Robert Michels’ Political Parties which appeared a hundred years ago and which was one of the seminal books of my university years – suggesting that trade unions and social democratic parties were inevitably destined to betrayal by their leaders through the “iron law of oligarchy”. Havong tasted the perks of power, they don't easily let it go. Oborne’s book appeared in 2007 - but is a worthy successor and offers important perspectives to the various posts I’ve made about the collapse of our democracy -

Lewis Namier (1888-1960) argued in his masterwork "The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III" that talk of great battles of principle between the Whigs and Tories of Hanoverian England was nonsense. Ministers were in politics for the money and to advance the interests of their cliques. MPs who boasted of their independence were forever seeking favours from the public purse. Ideology mattered so little that 'the political life of the period could be fully described without ever using a party denomination'.

You can do the same today, argues Peter Oborne in this thought-provoking polemic. Members of the 21st-century 'political class' are as isolated and self-interested as their Georgian predecessors. The political class is very different from the old establishment. It despises the values of traditional institutions that once acted as restraints on the power of the state - the independence of the judiciary, the neutrality of the Civil Service and the accountability of ministers to the Commons.

If you are young and ambitious and want to join, Oborne sketches out a career path. First, you must set yourself apart from your contemporaries at university by taking an interest in politics. You must join a think-tank or become researcher to an upwardly mobile MP on graduation. Before getting to the top, you will have eaten with, drunk with and slept with people exactly like you, not only in politics but in the media, PR and advertising - trades the old establishment despised, but you admire for their ability to manipulate the masses.
You will talk a language the vast majority of your fellow citizens can't understand and be obsessed with the marketing of politics rather than its content. You will notice that once in power, you can get away with behaviour that would have stunned your predecessors. You can use your position to profit from lecture tours and negotiate discounts, as the wife of PM Tony Blair uniquely did. Politics will be your career. You will have no experience of other trades and be a worse politician for it. Despite the strong language you may use against other political parties, you will develop a stronger loyalty to parliamentarians (regardless of political label) than others and will close ranks if their privileges are under threat.

I have only two quibbles with the book - first that he attributes the decline of parliament to the new political class - but its decline goes back several decades before that. He makes an interesting point, however, about the Whip's power being challenged in the past decade by the power of the Press Secretary (whipping the media into its place). And, although he mentions Mosca's famous book on the political class of a hundred years ago, he fails to place his critique in the wider critical literature. See tomorrow's post for more on this.

Ways we see the world

I don’t know whether the generations which have grown up with television and the internet experience have experienced the power of seminal texts which many in my generation did. I was driven this past week to think about the key authors who had a profound influence (during my spell at University) on my way of looking at the world. For probably the first time, I saw the common theme in their message – celebration of pluralism and of scepticism at a time when the influence of ideology was still strong. I should also have mentioned the writing of Bernard Crick whose book “In Defence of Politics” (1962) celebrated the practice of politics as a necessary and honourable one and may have been one of the factors leading me a few years later to go into local politics. (We are in need of such a text these days!)
Two difficult recent questions have made me think about “figures of influence” – a question about which contemporary figure (s) I admired (I could come up only with that of Riccardo Petrella); and, today, with an invitation from Social Europe to nominate the (living) “thinkers” (my inverted commas) with the biggest influence on the European left-of-centre agenda in 2010/2011.
When I read the names of those nominated last year, my immediate reaction was that the left thoroughly deserved its present pathetic electoral position if the poll was correct in its judgement. The first three names were Paul Krugman, Juergen Habermas and Slavoj Zizek (who??). Even worse was that Anthony Giddens, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Umberto Eco came next. Then Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Oskar Lafontaine, Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells and (wait for it!)…Ed Miliband! When, 10 years ago, I wrote my own list of inspiring “standard bearers” it did include Lafontaine (and George Monbiot).
But I’m not sure how sensible the poll is – each country is so different – and how does one actually measure the influence which any thinker has had? And what exactly is a “thinker”? Do we not all think? And if by “thinker” we mean an academic such as Etzioni, is there not a certain contradition between being a “thinker” and having an influence on party agendas? Of course, you will say, neo-liberals such as Hayek have had a profound influence on the agendas of all parties in the past couple of decades – but he is dead. Keynes put it so well in 1935

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas

.There are so many voices today that we often require an intermediary (journalists like Will Hutton, Paul Mason and George Monbiot) to act as mediators and popularisers.
In any event, I would prefer to explore which “writers” have the most to offer the social democrats – regardless of the likelihood of their message being bought. In the article I wrote a couple of weeks back for the Romanian journal, I found myself using two quotations from the world of a green Irish economist - Richard Douthwaite – and would therefore certainly nominate him. I will now look around my (extensive) bookshelves and see who else should be nominated. And you, gentle reader? Who would you nominate?
I'm glad to be able to show a Romanian painting for once - by late 19th century painter Theodor Pallady

Sceptic pluralist

The superb weather continues – azure blue sky, blazing sun, light breeze and scattered fluffy clouds. A run down to Bran to stock up and bumped twice people into I knew! I’m obviously becoming a native at last. It will be difficult to tear myself away – but Bulgaria does now beckon with the resumption of workshops there next week
I’m still reflecting on the editorial labelling my published article in Revista 22 got last week (“view from the left”) and, specifically, the “key influences” I referenced in my initial blog response (Crosland and Shonfield). I realised that I had missed some of those whose writings I came across when I was at University and which, effectively, marked me for life – namely Karl Popper, Joseph Schumpeter, Reinhold Niebuhr, JK Galbraith, Robert Michels and Ralf Dahrendorf (in that order). All shared a sceptical and pluralistic outlook on life – and these 2 words are more important to me than “left” which, sadly, embraces all that’s best and worst in politics. I am not trying to establish liberal credentials – particularly since one of the 2 (funded) supplements in that issue of Revista 22 was an eight-page summary of 23 “right-intellectual” streams of thought. Just wondering where I actually stand in relation to all that has been written about social improvement in the past century.
I suppose I was always a bit “elusive” politically. I wrote once that I never felt I really “belonged” anywhere (my upbringing on the class-divide in a Scottish shipbuilding town saw to that). The more I read, the more confused was life and the path to take – both individually and collectively.
For those who want to taste the real Popper, the 800 pages of The Open Society and its Enemies are available here.
And a short and dismissive libertarian review (“sheer social democracy”) can be read here.
But my reflections brought up this gem – of Ralf Dahrendorf in conversation in 1989 in a great history series

Why is it that the older I get, the better the writing seems to become? I finished a few days ago another “travelogue” (there has to be a better name for such sublime writing) - Out of Steppe about the lost peoples of central asia where I spent 5 years of my life. And I have now started another in this genre of well-read young Englishmen immersing themselves in the life of people whose predecessors suffered repression, forced marches and exile – Rebel Land – among Turkey’s Forgotten People. Reading about the suffering of these diverse groups from the Balkans, Caucasus and Turkey certainly makes the grievances of the Scots rather trivial!

Another reminder of what Roosevelt’s programme for artists during the Great Depression produced. Where is its like today?