55 years in a couple of pages

I always like a bit of intellectual history ….and last week I alighted on a conversation with Roger Scruton around a revamp of a book which this English Conservative philosopher first issued in 1985

We have been told for several decades that the left-right spectrum no longer has any basis in reality although it remains a label very much in evidence 

Now 71, Scruton has been the bête noire of British left intellectuals for more than 30 years, and gives them another beastly mauling in his new book “Fads, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left”. It is a tour de force that, the introduction concedes, is ‘not a word-mincing book’, but rather ‘a provocation’.

In just under 300 pages he Scruton-izes a collection of stars, past and present, of the radical Western intelligentsia – the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson in Britain, JK Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin in the US, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze in Europe. An expanded and updated version of his controversial Thinkers of the New Left (1985), the book ends with a new chapter entitled ‘The kraken wakes’ dealing with the ‘mad incantations’ of Alan Badiou and the left’s marginally newer academic celebrity, the Slovenian Zizek.

A copy of the book was lying in Bucharest’s English bookshop when I popped in there on Sunday -  giving me the chance to read its opening pages which, I have to confess, made a great deal of sense even to an old lefty like me. 

“Why, he asks, use a single term to cover anarchists such as Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Zizek and US liberals like Dworken, Galbraith and Rorty? Two reasons – they call themselves this and they all have an “enduring outlook” – some belonging to the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and others to the post-war thinking according to which the state is or ought to be in charge of society and  empowered to distribute its goods…..”   

This - the dimension of economic ownership (monopoly through oligopoly to cooperatives/shared ownership to private owners) - is indeed one of the axis you need to make sense of world views. But it is not the only one – particularly these days when the social dimension has become so important. Class (rarely talked about now) is only one form of group identity – with race and sexuality being the new entrants. So an additional axis is needed for the strength of social norms - with totalitarianism being at one axis and anarchy at the other. There is a third – for the role of the state, for example, in welfare provision and general regulatory measures – but that’s a bit complicated for this blog.

So I will start with four quadrants which we can use, for example, 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 for 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” started all of 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a few years earlier..

We 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 as a first shot…..

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

 See also the Acorn Guide to Consumers

 You can actually read the entire “Thinkers of the New Left” here

 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.’

For Scruton, the left intellectuals’ apparent attachment to a higher cause only disguises what they really stand for: ‘Nothing.’ He writes that ‘when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice’.

More recently, ‘the windbaggery of Zizek and the nonsemes of Badiou’ exist only ‘to espouse a single and absolute cause’, which ‘admits of no compromise’ and ‘offers redemption to all who espouse it’. The name of that cause? ‘The answer is there on every page of these fatuous writings: Nothing.

So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’

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,’ Rodgers writes, ‘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.’

Yet, as Rodgers points out, 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; 

One recent analyst on the “ideological roots of populism” suggests that there are now 4 tribes – liberal and conservative centrists and left and right anarchists.

For more, read –

Spectrum – from left to right in the world of ideas Perry Anderson 2007

http://s-usih.org/2015/03/age-of-fracture-v-age-of-culture-wars.html

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44132

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n20/corey-robin/achieving-disunity

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-eus-culture-war-against-the-people/15931#.VngkXfl97IU

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Miss-the-Culture-Wars/151435

https://www.claremont.org/featured-article/that-new-time-religion/#.Ve8PdZd0c_g

http://www.claremont.org/download_pdf.php?file_name=1519Voegeli.pdf

ttp://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260742/culture-wars-volume-v-black-book-american-left-david-horowitz

CAN LABOUR WIN?

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.

Reform – and the neglect of context

Today’s highlight was a fascinating story by a Peruvian of how local technocrats – trained at US universities – returned to Peru to peddle solutions to the country which were lapped up from 2000 but are now being rejected by the prevailing power structure - a strange blended mix of left and right.    

Since taking office in July 2021, the so-called “left-wing” government and the ostensibly “right-wing” National Congress have been working together to dismantle the weak scaffolding that held our infant liberal democracy. This regression’s happening against the backdrop of a savage rollback in the state’s capacity. The government has removed career civil servants, reneged on the expectation that key ministries should be withheld from political appointees and acted to undermine the transparency and accountability gains.

This year, the Congress passed two crucial pieces of legislation: removing oversight of higher education standards and giving parents the right to approve all school teaching materials.

This move has been promoted by conservative groups, who want to stop the government from allowing educators to teach important topics in schools, like sex education or encouraging informed assessments of the roles that the Shining Path and the Peruvian State played in the violence of the 1980s and 1990s.

 

In May 2022, the National Congress elected new members of the Constitutional Tribunal – Peru’s version of the US Supreme Court. Four of its six members are aligned with supporters of the previous laws. Many other liberal reforms made during the previous 20 years are also at stake:

·       Transport reforms (tackling informal transport providers).

·       How parties can use resources during political campaigns (the basis of several money laundering cases, involving the leaders of most parties).

·       Hard-earned minority rights.

·       Freedom of information and expression.

·       Environmental protection policies.

 

You may well think that a self-styled “left wing” government and a primarily “right wing” congress should be at loggerheads. The reality is more complex and interesting.

“Left” and “right” in Peru, as in much of the world, are now meaningless political labels. Political power provides economic and social opportunities – that’s what matters now in Peruvian politics.

Peruvian parties are mercantilist operations – public prosecutors have even accused some of being criminal organisations, with clear private interests. This shift in priorities has made it easy for them to come to a tacit, multi-party understanding to undo the progressive reforms. It’s a new elite bargain. 

I’ve never worked in South America – but, for some reason, the article struck home. I recognised the issue because, in 1990, I found myself invited by the WHO (Europe) Director of Public Health to help her develop a network of health promotion in the newly-liberated countries of Central Europe. It was a short-term contract of some 6 months but proved to be a launch-pad for my new career as consultant in “capacity (institutional) development” in both central Europe and central Asia. This was a fascinating experience which I’ve written about in Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors? (2007) and “The Long Game – not the logframe” (2011) - presented to NISPAcee Conferences in which I took apart the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats  were making about the prospects of its Technical Assistance programmes  making any sort of dent in what I called (variously) the kleptocracy  or “impervious regimes” of most ex-communist countries.  

Basically my criticism was that project for institutional change failed to understand the local contexts and cultures - and assumed that “good practice blueprints” from elsewhere could be easily replicated – with a bit of training.

One of the reasons I enjoyed my eight years in Central Asia from 1999 was that I had the freedom to take account of the local conditions and to design strategies which the local European Delegations had confidence would actually work. The “conditionalities” which governed the “candidate countries” of aspiring EU members in central Europe patently didn’t apply in Central Asia – and the “counterparts” with whom I worked had the intelligence and ability to be able to insist on “workable” strategies. In Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, this produced results. 

Last year I came across a rare book which helped me understand why – this was Helping People help themselves – from the World Bank to an alternative philosophy of technical assistance by David Ellerman (2006) which I wrote about at the time here - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/06/helping-people-help-themselves.html 

In my next post I hope to develop the theme

THE LOCAL STATE and the new municipalism

I have been trying to interest an academic journal in publishing an article about the development and management of a local political strategy in the mid 1970s – namely Social Strategy for the Eighties (SRC 1982) This was a very rare thing to attempt - the Greater London Council, Liverpool, Sheffield and some London boroughs may have been flaunting their left-wing credentials at the same time but the Strathclyde strategy was rather different - a serious and considered response to the "Born to Fail" report of 1973 which had exposed the scale of multiple deprivation in the West of Scotland and demanded some sort of official recognition. 

The English local authorities had pursued a deliberate strategy of confrontation 

with central government - but Strathclyde Region was at pains to seek (and 

gain) the support of the delegated central government in our country – namely 

the Scottish Office. A draft of the article can be read here 
It’s hardly surprising that the last few years have seen a revival of interest in 

the 1980s experience of local government. The Thatcherite stifling of local 

government had started shortly after her first election victory in 1979 and 

was full in swing – first with budgetary limits and then increasingly savage cuts.

But local government still had some autonomy in those days – whereas they have 

since undergone more than a halving of their income.  
What has been developing in recent years is a new “municipalism” which is 

receiving extensive coverage – some of which I list below

Stuart Hall has one of the best things I have ever read about THE STATE in 

a chapter of The Hard Road to Renewal – Thatcherism and the crisis of the Left ( 1988)

Instead of progressively withering away, the state has become a gigantic, swollen, bureaucratic and directive force, swallowing up almost the whole of civil society, and imposing itself (sometimes with tanks), in the name of the people, on the backs of the people. Who, now, can swallow without a gigantic gulp the so-called temporary, passing nature of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? On the other hand, the very same period, since the end of the Second World War, has witnessed a parallel, gigantic expansion of the state complex within modern capitalism, especially in Western Europe, with the state playing an increasingly interventionist or regulative role in more and more areas of social life. It has become far and away the largest single employer of labour and acquired a dominant presence in every sector of daily existence. What are we to make of that unexpected development, never adequately predicted in the classical Marxist literature?

Even more difficult to work out is our attitude towards this development. On the one hand, we not only defend the welfare side of the state, we believe it should be massively expanded. And yet, on the other hand, we feel there is something deeply anti-socialist about how this welfare state functions. We know, indeed, that it is experienced by masses of ordinary people, in the very moment that they are benefiting from it, as an intrusive, managerial and bureaucratic force in their lives.

However, if we go too far down that particular road, whom do we discover keeping us company but – of course – the Thatcherites, the new right, the free market ‘hot gospellers’, who seem (whisper it not too loud) to be saying rather similar things about the state. Only they are busy making capital against us on this very point, treating widespread popular dissatisfactions with the modes in which the beneficiary parts of the state function as fuel for an anti-left, ‘roll back the state’ crusade.

And where, to be honest, do we stand on the issue? Are we for ‘rolling back the state’ – including the welfare state? Are we for or against the management of the whole of society by the state? Not for the first time, Thatcherism here catches the left on the hop –hopping from one uncertain position to the next, unsure of our ground. Perhaps it might help if we knew how we got into this dilemma. This is a vast topic in its own right, and I propose to look at only four aspects here.

• First, how did the British left become so wedded to a particular conception of socialism through state management, the essence of what I want to call ‘statism’ or a ‘statist’ conception of socialism?

• Second, I want to sketch some of the reasons why the very expansion of the state, for which so many on the left worked so hard, turned out in practice to be a very contradictory experience.

• Third, I want to confront head on the confusion caused on the left by the ‘libertarianism’ of the right – the way Thatcherism has exploited the experience of welfare statism and turned it to the advantage of the new right.

• Finally, I want to consider some aspects of the changing social and economic relationships today which have influenced spontaneous attitudes on the left – what I call the growth of a left libertarianism. In conclusion, I can only roughly indicate some directions in which our thinking needs to be developed.

The chapter then goes on to track the history of the british understanding of 

the role of the state – with a collectivism coming into view in the the 1920s – 

particularly on the right.

It was precisely in this critical period, between the 1880s and the 1920s, when the parameters of British politics for the following fifty years were set for the first time – that statism took root in British political culture. In those days, what we now call ‘statism’ went under the title of ‘collectivism’. What is crucial for our analysis is the fact that there were many collectivisms. ‘Collectivism’ was a highly contradictory formation, composed of different strands supported in different ways by the right, the centre and the left – if, for convenience, we can use those somewhat anachronistic labels. Collectivism was regarded by many sections on the right, and by some influential sectors of the leading classes, as the answer to Britain’s declining fortunes. The country – the new collectivists believed – required a programme of ‘national regeneration’. This could only be undertaken if the old shibboleths of laissez faire were finally abandoned and the state came to assume a far greater role of organic leadership in society.

They believed a ‘populist’ bloc of support could be won amongst the

dominated classes for such a project, provided the latter were ‘squared’ by

state pensions and other Bismarck-type benefits. This was the programme

of both the ‘social imperialist’ and the ‘national efficiency’ schools, and of

the highly authoritarian populist politics associated with them. And though

they did not carry their programme in detail, they were extremely influential in pioneering the shift in the allegiance of British capital from its former commitment to laissez faire, to its newer link with a certain type of capitalist state interventionism.

Recommended ARTICLES on the new municipalism
Exploring the Potential of the Local State - Sheffield and the local state  

Beveridge and Cochrane (Antipode 2023)
The Uses and Abuses of municipalism by the british left (Minim 2022)
Prefiguring the local state D Cooper 2017
Whatever happened to local government? Symposium on 1993 Cochrane book 

by Ward, Newman et al (2015)

Whether the Local State? Neil Barnett 2013
 
Book

Reclaiming Local Democracy – a progressive future for local government  Ines Newman 

(2014) A very clearly written celebration of the ethical importance of this body which 

contains a useful glossary