Have we lost our Collective Intelligence?

Once again a video has inspired a post – this time a conversation with Geoff Mulgan about his latest book “Another World is Possible - How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination” (2022). Geoff Mulgan is a professor of collective intelligence and a Knight of the realm; a former CEO of Nesta and DEMOS think tank; Director of the government’s Strategy Unit and Head of Policy in the Prime Minister’s office. He is also the author of many books, including “Big Mind – how collective intelligence can change our world” (2018) which I’ve just started to read and which argues that -

... the world has made great strides in improving health and has accumulated an extraordinary amount of knowledge about it, yet still has a long way to go in orchestrating that knowledge to best effect.

Similar patterns can be found in many fields, from politics and business to personal life: unprecedented access to data, information, and opinions, but less obvious progress in using this information to guide better decisions. We benefit from a cornucopia of goods unimaginable to past generations, yet still too often spend money we haven’t earned to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. P13

For institutions, the rising importance of conscious collective intelligence is no less challenging, and demands a different view of boundaries and roles. Every organization needs to become more aware of how it observes, analyses, remembers, and creates, and then how it learns from action: correcting errors, sometimes creating new categories when the old ones don’t work, and sometimes developing entirely new ways of thinking.

Every organization has to find the right position between the silence and the noise: the silence of the old hierarchies in which no one dared to challenge or warn, and the noisy cacophony of a world of networks flooded by an infinity of voices. That space in between becomes meaningful only when organizations learn how to select and cluster with the right levels of granularity— simple enough but not simplistic; clear but not crude; focused but not to the extent of myopia. Few of our dominant institutions are adept at thinking in these ways. Businesses have the biggest incentives to act more intelligently, and invest heavily in hardware and software of all kinds. But whole sectors repeatedly make big mistakes, misread their environments, and harvest only a fraction of the know- how that’s available in their employees and customers.

Mulgan had rehearsed some of his arguments in a 2020 paper called The Imaginary Crisis and in this great interview a couple of years ago

One of the reasons I became interested in imagination recently was because perhaps 

there was a missing piece in the theories of change. In the past, one of the things which 

allowed change was people thinking ahead to a better possible society or utopia. And my 

worry is that that kind of imagination has almost disappeared.

Why is that?
People can picture a much worse world, with climate change, ecological catastrophe, robots 

taking over the world, populous demagogues. But very few people can give an articulate account 

of how the world might be better socially. What might our health care look like? Our primary 

schools, our libraries, our parliaments. And part of the reason is that the institutions which 

should be working on this imagination have largely vacated that space - political parties, 

universities, think tanks all for slightly different reasons. This has become part of a pathology 

of our time.

You have a very mixed background, working in government with Tony Blair, founding and 

running big think tanks like Demos and Nesta, teaching at university. What is your personal 

ambition in all of this?
I spent half of my career as an activist, from the grassroots upwards, starting at the age of 

14. I used to organize marches and pickets and I remained involved in community organizing 

and social entrepreneurship trying to find solutions from the bottom up. And I have spent 

the other half of my life working from the top down, with governments around the world, 

the European Commission or UN now. To some extent, nearly all change has to involve some 

alliance of the top down and the bottom up, the powerless and the powerful. I sometimes 

call them the bees and the trees – the people with the ideas and the big institutions with 

power. And, uh, money.

Where do you get your energy and optimism from?
I get some optimism from having seen how often you can transform things completely. 

The great lesson I have learned or relearned, again and again, is that we overestimate how much can change short term. But equally, most people underestimate how much can change over one, two or three decades. There is nothing worse than an unrealistic fatalism because it undermines the energy, the capacity to do the practical changes – which of course won't solve climate change in 2022, but actually over 20, 30 years. We will completely transform our economy and society.
How much of your job is to try to design options for the future?

One of the institutions that you want to challenge and change is the university – for 

THE NEW INSTITUTE you wrote a fascinating paper on what you call “exploratory 

social sciences.” Can you explain your argument?
I mainly focus on social sciences, it is a very different story for engineering and the other 

sciences. But in the social sciences, the fundamental question for an academic is: how much 

of your job is to understand the present and the past, and how much of your job is to try 

to design options for the future? Now in the 19th century, in the early days of social science,

 it was assumed you did both. The London School of Economics for example was very much 

formed as a place for academics to work on designing future health systems, welfare states 

et cetera – not just to write books and analyze what had gone wrong. Over the last 50 or 

60 years, academics have become quite fearful of designing the future. It is almost career 

threatening.

Why is that?
Some of this has to do with the rise of positivism and quantification, the in many ways quite 

welcome rise of attention to data, to empirical analysis, to looking at the facts. In many ways,

 this has been good. It has made for a much more rigorous understanding of the present 

and the past – but it squeezed out creativity and visions for an alternative future.

A scepticism vis-à-vis utopia or world-building?
There certainly was a disappointment with the grand ideological projects of the last century, 

which led a whole wave of intellectuals to move into critique rather than creative construction. 

It's a much safer place to be critiquing all that is wrong with capitalism rather than trying 

to propose alternatives to it. I believe there is a need to recover a bit of that older tradition 

of social science but align it to the best tools we have now, data and models and experiments 

– and learn methods from design and the arts and other fields, which do creativity as a matter 

of course.

Economics has been in many ways the leading social science of the last decades, and it 

has often pretended to be more than that, more like a hard science. What is your take on that?
Weirdly, economics has taken almost no methods from any other fields, including from business,

 in terms of its own creativity. There is a real intellectual narrow-mindedness, a lack of curiosity, 

lack of hunger at a time when creativity methods are so widely used in everything from 

film and design for products and services. My hope is that we will see university centers of 

exploratory social science, which try to be as good at rigor as they are at imagination. 

We have this paradoxical situation where the people with the deepest knowledge are not 

doing the creativity and vice versa – and hopefully THE NEW INSTITUTE can be part of 

changing that.
We need some really bold, radical thinking in this century

What is the politics in all of this? Traditionally, the left was aligned with the future, 

the right with preserving the status quo. This has shifted, in surprising ways, hasn’t it?
Traditionally, the conservative right was skeptical of any designs for the future because 

by definition what exists has been tried through history. For a time, that changed, left and 

right swapped places. A lot of conservatives became almost more utopian than the left. 

They pictured a future run by markets, supported by technologies, with a slightly crazed 

enthusiasm. In the last 20 years, they have returned back to a much more traditional conservative 

position, with nostalgic pictures of race and community and manufacturing-based economies.

And the left?
The left is still in a rather fearful state – a political fear of being exposed by having 

genuinely novel, genuinely challenging ideas. You are much more likely to make it as a public 

intellectual by reviving old ideas rather than coming up with new ones. Which is pretty disappointing.

 Because we need some really bold, radical thinking in this century if we are going to cope 

with climate change, with AI, with the threats to democracy. And our intellectuals are not 

serving us that well.

You explore a few tools and methods in your paper to get to that point where the 

new can happen: experimentation, complexity thinking, design. How can we unleash 

our societal imagination?
Extension is an example, you can use it for almost any phenomenon – like re-imagining your 

local library or childcare. Then you go through a series of transformations. What would 

happen if you extended one aspect of it radically, the way that we have extended ideas of 

rights to cover everything from animals to transgender. There is also inversion: What happens 

if the farmers become bankers or patients become doctors? Or grafting: You take an idea 

from a very different field and try and apply it to your library or your childcare.

What is the next step?
That is just the starting point. Then the deep knowledge comes in. You have to think about 

building your world, your designs, and see how plausible they are, what might be an evolutionary 

route for them. The challenge is to find a balance between the willingness to leap ahead 

and jump beyond what is realistic now to what might be possible in 20 years. And not to 

fall prey to what I call unrealistic realism.

What does that mean?
It is striking that many academic disciplines are very good at explaining why change won't 

happen. And when it does come, they have no way of explaining why it did happen because 

they hold on to their unrealistic realism. And at the same time avoiding fantasy, illusion, 

ideas which have absolutely no plausible prospect of ever happening. I would like to see in 

universities cross-disciplinary teams becoming good at creating these alternative worlds, 

interrogating them, seeing what their implications are, what their economic base might be, 

the legitimacy of them.

Imagination as practice.
Every society needs some sense of where it might be headed in the future in order to be 

healthy, just as we do as individuals. We need some shared pictures of where we could be 

headed 30, 50, 70 years into the future, pictures which aren't only ecological disasters 

or technological determinist triumphs. That's the missing space in our collective imaginaries 

which we really need to address. Because the downside is that all sorts of other dark forces 

may fill that space instead.

Trouble in small countries

Many people (including myself) see small countries as hopes for civilisation. One of my blogs summarised the powerful arguments of Leopold Kohr more than 60 years ago on this theme. 20 years ago there was talk of Europe of the Regions. The new conventional wisdom, however, is that the global financial crisis has shown the incapacity of small countries like Iceland. A referendum on whether the Scots people wanted complete independence which the (devolved) nationalist government of Scotland was supposed to hold this year has disappeared from the agenda. Belgium, in the meantime, is tearing itself apart - and showing little sign of the solidarity which is supposed to be one of the EU values.
A new pamphlet by centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, The Devolution Distraction, by Tom Miers savages most of the assumptions and emotional supports of the last 10 years of devolved government which Scotland has enjoyed. The Miers thesis is that Scottish devolution has been ‘a spectacular failure’ on the economy and public services, driven by an obsession with constitutional change. This reflects that ‘Scotland has a political problem, not a constitutional one’.
Gerry Hassan (about whose pamphlets I have written recently) has a good blog on this today.

Miers apparently makes the case with five key points: that the Scottish economy has grown much slower than the rest of the UK since devolution, entrepreneurship is low, health and education underperform in comparison with the rest of the UK and are increasingly losing ground, and public spending higher than UK levels per head (2). The first two are long-term historic trends; the last complex; but the latter two have an uncomfortable truth which needs serious debate.
The conventional devolution class response to the failure Miers argues are two fold. The first is ‘to deny failure altogether’ – the politics and mindset of self-denial. The second is to invoke from failure and lack of results that the answer can be found in the argument that ‘Scotland needs more self-determination’.
Miers writes in ‘The Scotsman’ on this: The history of democracy is full of examples of political elites that do not respond to evidence of decline, however obvious. So what is it with our own political class? What makes Scottish politics so deeply conservative, so hostile to the notion of reform, so defensive about the performance of Scottish institutions
Just before the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, I wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet, ‘The New Scotland’ which explored the potential and limits of devolution. Its argument can be summarised in five points:
1. Labour were driven onto the devolution agenda with the intent of a politics of maintenance and conservation; one of the central paradoxes of devolution was that the party which introduced it would have its one party old state politics slowly undermined;
2. Devolution for all its hopes and rhetoric was always fundamentally about a politics of reinforcing the internal status quo in Scottish society: one characterized by inertia, lack of dynamism and absence of policy innovation;
3. The forces for devolution were marked despite their radical language by a profound sense of conservatism; this combination of radical hope and conservative reality concealed the limited prospects for change under devolution;
4. Democracy has been late coming to Scotland and the main forces of progress: the Liberals in the 19th century and Labour in the 20th century have colluded with and used the professional elites and castes which dominate and disfigure Scottish society; Thatcherism disrupted part of this, but devolution was never intended to fundamentally shift this;
5. Scottish civil society – shorn of all its illusion and romance about itself – has been characterised by a lack of diversity, pluralism and ideas. This raises the question where were and are the original, challenging ideas for devolution going to come from? All of the above coalesced in the mainstream version of pre-devolution which stated that the Parliament was going to be the vehicle of Scottish radical opinion and a body born from the flowering of civil society and thus likely to be a bold, imaginative institution giving expression to progressive imagination. Instead, I argued that this very idea – of the Parliament as the creation of civil society (or even worse, ‘civic Scotland’: the well-mannered, middle class chatterers of institutional opinion) – made it inevitable that the Parliament would be the voice of closed, complacent Scotland. And so it has turned out to be.

Where Miers is on less secure ground is when he comes to solutions. Here he ventures onto predictable ground as he outlines in his conclusion, ‘a new approach’ which entails:
1. The constitution: a generational truce; advocating that we need to stop seeing the solution to Scotland’s problems in some inevitable slippery slope to more powers for the Parliament; instead we should implement Calman and then call a halt for a generation or so;
2. Measurement: a new honesty; challenging our ‘state owned national monopolies’ to stop changing and fiddling figures of measurement;
3. Reform: a new radicalism: declaring that ‘all the parties should seek to recast their policy positions from a foundation of recognition of the problems faced and genuine intellectual curiosity’.

Miers outlines in his conclusion:
The combination of economic and social decline, conservative policy making and endless constitutional debate in Scotland cries out for a new approach. Those who first articulate it persuasively will set the agenda for many years to come.
This is broadly correct as a general description, and also in the opportunity it offers to whichever political force can seize the radical agenda. Where he is wrong is that his ‘new approach’ and radicalism is centred on old solutions: of free market ideas, fragmentation, marketisation and deregulation. It is a view of the world which isn’t ‘evidence based’ as it claims – addressing Scottish failures in comparison to England, but ignoring English problems and pitfalls. It is as if the last few years haven’t happened or the fallout from New Labour approaches.

Following on from my ‘New Scotland’ thesis of over a decade ago here are six points for beginning to explore a more far-reaching, radical, new agenda:

1. Labour’s old style hegemony is as predicted slowly eroding – leaving the party rudderless, directionless and without any sense of anchor – beyond maintaining the rump remnants of its patronage state and its oppositional, opportunist detesting of the Nationalists;

2. Labour, SNP and civic Scotland ideas on economic, social, cultural and political change have shown their commitment to the forces of conservatism and inertia; none of these bodies really has any radical notion of how to deliver change in Scottish society, rather than just presiding over the internal status quo;

3. The forces of the new conservatism – which have critiqued the entire first decade of devolution from beginning to end – advocating a ‘reform’ and ‘modernisation’ strategy – need to be scrutinised and challenged;

4. Equally problematic is the typical centre-left and nationalist response to calls for change – invoking a defensive politics of resistance and public sector institutional conservatism;

5. Mapping a path between these two cul-de-sacs involves embracing the politics of self-determination. Not the constitutional version, but at a societal level, shifting power and challenging elites – both in the public and private sector in Scotland;

6. This self-determination should inform and influence a genuine politics of self-government which can be summarised as post-nationalist Scotland – comfortable with the fuzzy ambiguities and fluidities of shared sovereignty in an interdependent age.

‘The Devolution Distraction’ has done us the service of setting out an analysis of some of the key complacencies and failures of the last decade. It would be wrong to dismiss it out of hand, just because some of it is unpalatable and a little uncomfortable to the gatekeepers and influencers of devo Scotland. Yet at the same time, its message for action is part of the groupthink and orthodoxy which has captured governments, corporates and think-tanks across the West, and in particular the UK and US.
The new conservatism has to be taken on and defeated – not by the forces of old conservatism – which it rightly critiques but the emergence of new voices, ideas and thinking in Scotland. And that requires new spaces and institutions which so far Scottish institutional opinion has shown no interest in supporting and nurturing

. The pamphlet in question can be accessed here.

political labelling

I am deeply grateful to Revista 22 for the privilege of being one of their invited contributors to the special issue on 09/11 – particularly when I was clearly going to be out of line with their avowed “market” philosophy. And I do admire the journal for its important role in Romanian society.

I was, however, disappointed to find that they had, without consultation, added a “health warning” to the title of my article – viz “a view from the left”. Four separate issues arise from this -
- First, do the editors not realise that use of such a label for one (only) of the articles is effectively an invitation to their readers to ignore it or treat it with suspicion? What does this say about freedom of expression?
- Second, criticism of the logic and effects of “neo-liberalism” has come from a great variety of quarters – not least the ordo-liberalism which has been the backbone of the post-war German economy.
- Third, it has been recognised for a long time that the left-right labelling makes little sense. Wikipedia has an excellent briefing on this. And I recommend people do their own test on the political compass website - which uses two (not one) dimensions to try to situate people politically.

Finally, there is the issue of whether I deserve the label which has been thrown at me – either from the article or from the range of beliefs I actually hold. The references in my article are impeccably mainstream academia (Colin Crouch; Henry Mintzberg) and a final section clearly signals that I have no truck with statism.

All my political life I have supported community enterprise and been opposed to state ambitions and the “evil” it brings in, for example, the adulterated Romanian form. My business card describes me as an “explorer” – which refers not so much to the nomadic nature of my life in the last 20 years as the open nature for my search for both a satisfactory explanation of how societies and economies work; with what results; and the nature of relevant mechanisms for adjusting what societies judge (through democratic processes) to be unacceptable trends.

I admit to having been attracted in my youth to the British New Left’s analysis of British inequality in the late 1950s - but I was profoundly influenced at University by people such as Karl Popper and his The Open Society and its Enemies, Schumpeter (his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and Ralf Dahrendorf; and, at a more practical level, by Andrew Shonfield and Tony Crosland who were also writing then about the benefits of the “mixed economy”.

More recently I have generally been a fan of the writings of Will Hutton (whose stakeholder analysis of UK society was disdained by Tony Bliar on becoming PM). As an academic I was convinced by the critical analysis of UK and US political scientists in the 1970s which went variously under the terms “Limits of the State” or “problems of implementation” and was the softer end of the “public choice school” of institutional economics.

But, unusually, the anarchistic/libertarian sweep of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire also got to me in the 1970s (which is why I am (unusually) located in the south west quadrant of the political compass). I therefore not only disdained the injunctions of the dominant left and right extremes of British politics of the 1980s but, as an influential Scottish regional politican, used my role to create more open processes of policy-making. Indeed community activitists and opposition politicians were more important partners for me than members of my own party.
I held on to my leading political position on the huge Regional Council simply because I belonged to neither the left or right factions amongst my colleagues but was their natural second choice! The definitions I give in my Sceptic's Glossary reveal the maverick me.

For the past 20 years, however, since I left the UK to work as an adviser on institutional development in central europe and central asia , I have not been involved in politics.
My interest is to find some common ground in all the critiques of the current social and economic malaise – and to develop some consensus about the actions which might be taken.
A paper on my website is an early draft about this.

European perspectives

Brits are famed for their “pragmatism” - which basically means their inability to take the world (or ideas) very seriously. Our easy-going flexibility does, however, mean that we are out of our comfort zone when we face unreasonable people and/or cataclysmic events such as the current financial crisis and the political pygmies who pass for world leaders. Two articles in one of this year’s issues of New Left Review have brought home to me our insularity – first is a wonderful interview – Words from Budapest - with a Transylvanian Romanian - GM Tamas – born in 1948 After a stint as an assistant editor of a literary weekly in his native Transylvania, he got into political difficulties with the authorities of the time and emigrated to Hungary in the late 1970s where he taught at the University of Budapest. Sacked for political reasons again, he became known as a dissident intellectual and published only in the underground or abroad. In the late 1980s he supported and was a founding member of the Liberal Party in Hungary, and was elected to parliament as a liberal member of the Hungarian Parliament in 1989.
He quit professional politics in 1994; became an acadenic again; was sacked (?)... and is now...... a revolutionary socialist (!!). What a life! Someone I would very much like to meet......
The interview covers these very different phases of his incredible life - and his honesty in admitting his blindness to what was going on around him after the collapse of communism-

I was born in 1948, in what Hungarians call Kolozsvár and Romanians, Cluj. The principal city of Transylvania, it had been transferred from Hungary to Romania in 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon, awarded back to Horthy’s Hungary by Hitler in 1940, and was under direct Nazi occupation from early 1944 until the arrival of Soviet forces, when it was incorporated into Romania again. Both my parents were Communists. They had come back from the War broken and bitter. My father, a Hungarian writer, was dispatched from prison to the front, where he was seriously wounded—he walked on crutches, later with a sturdy walking-stick, which I still have—by those whom he considered his comrades: the Red Army. My mother, ironically, escaped being deported to Auschwitz because she was in jail as a seditious Bolshevik. But her mother and her favourite elder brother were killed. My father’s family belonged to the petty nobility, or rather yeomanry, in the mountainous Szekler region of East Transylvania; his father was a tailor in a small town. The movement—they never spoke of the Party—meant mostly suffering and persecution: arrest, prison, beatings.
Later, when my father was thoroughly disenchanted with the system, I asked him why he still called himself a Communist. He showed me a little plastic—well, I suppose, bakelite—cube, with six little photos glued on its sides: the portraits of some of the best friends of his youth, tortured to death by the royal Hungarian and Romanian secret services, or by the Gestapo in that awful year, 1944. ‘Because I cannot explain it to them’, he said. It was the perfect Christian idea: bearing witness, martyrdom as the theological guarantee of truth. They were justified by heroic death, and so was the cause. He could not escape it. Keeping faith in the teeth of adverse political experience, the rotting away of the movement, was the only course. Anything else would have been treason. Duplex veritas also: he never denied that ‘state socialism’ was a failure. His identity and his principles were at loggerheads. Some of his comrades, back from the concentration camps, had been rearrested by the Communist authorities, ‘disappeared’ without a sound. This destroyed him as an intellectual.
In the absence of revolution, he suddenly found himself with time on his hands, so he had the leisure to be a wonderful parent. He showed me historical Transylvania, limping on mountain paths, propped on his stick before some redoubt or castle, or another ruined medieval church. There aren’t many intellectuals today who have working-class friends, but we did. Some of our family were peasants, in the poorest regions of Europe. I was taught, without great success, to do things in the fields and the garden. 

Then two harrowing experiences of communist harassment and dissidence; one highly-charged political phase as a liberal member of parliament and then, in past 20 years.... 

......... I decided to throw out my whole so-called oeuvre, break with my entire life so far, and go to school again. This has of course liberated my passionate repudiation of the state of affairs we wrought, my sympathy and compassion for people impoverished and made illiterate again by the market turn. I was obliged to recognize that our naive liberalism had delivered a nascent democracy into the hands of irresponsible and hate-filled right-wing politicos, and contributed to the re-establishment of a provincial, deferential and resentful social world, harking back to before 1945. The break was naturally quite painful, as it excluded me from the circle of people I was associated with for decades—the dissidents—so that my friends at the moment are mostly generations younger than I am; wonderful people, but without the shared memories so necessary for true friendships. At the same time, young Romanian leftists made it possible for me to have a consoling shadow existence in Transylvania, and to get rid finally of the feeling that poisoned my youth—the sense that ethnic conflict was irremediable. After a thirty-year absence, for the first time in my life when I give talks and sometimes write for journals in Romanian, I am made to feel welcome in my own land: a source of great delight and maybe undeserved justification.

The second article (in the same issue of NLR) is a tour de force from one of Francois Mitterand’s eminence gris - Regis Debray – entitled Decline of the West? - of which this is a typical excerpt -

The West guarantees and shapes the formation of international elites through its universities, business schools, financial institutions, officer-training colleges, commercial organizations, philanthropic foundations and major corporations. No empire has ever ruled by force alone. It needs relays among native ruling circles, and this centrifugal incubator produces a global class of managers who incorporate its language, its references and revulsions, its organizational models (rule of law and ‘good governance’) and economic norms (Washington Consensus). It is this moulding of managerial cadres from an already globalized middle class that transforms domination into hegemony, dependence into acceptance. Beyond the internships for young leaders—3,000 per year, organized by American embassies—this digital brain drain engenders a shared collective unconscious. China’s ‘red princes’ send their boys to be educated in the US, whence they return well-equipped for the pursuit of wealth. In Europe, the young find it not just natural but indispensable to obtain a qualification from one of these ‘centres of excellence’.
There is no far-flung land, minority or sect that does not have its suction pump of more or less well-implanted representatives in the US, with their connections in Congress and in the Administration, whose best-placed elements can, if they wish, return to their country of origin, making it their second home. They are the Afghano-ricans, Albano-ricans, Mexico-ricans, Afro-ricans (the Jean Monnet-style Gallo-rican was merely a prototype). This planetary HR department can pull a Karzai out of its pocket in an instant. A Palestinian from the World Bank, an Italian from Goldman Sachs, a re-cast Libyan or Georgian: the ease with which America is able to install a captain at every helm is the reward for its generous embrace of foreigners, an opening of national identity that the British Empire never risked, but which has earned its successor hundreds of thousands of adoptive children, of every nationality—and the possibility of filling its ambassadorships with people originating from their countries of residence.
China, India, Egypt, even little states like Israel or Armenia, benefit from loyal diasporas as channels of influence. The function of the 30 million Chinese expatriates in Southeast Asia is well known. America, which is no more a land of emigration than are the Nordic countries, does better: it has 42 million immigrants at home, the diasporas from every continent—Hispanics, Asians, Africans. Only the Western states—and the US first and foremost—have so many gangways to distant countries. We might periodize as follows: from 1850–1950, the West sweats the natives, inoculates, opens schools. From 1950–2000, the natives who have survived and learned the language come as immigrants to the West. From 2000–2050, the West educates the most talented and sends them back to top jobs in their country of origin, to propagate the West’s ideas and defend its interests. Win–win?

 Whatever we think of French intellectuals, they can always be relied upon to stick it to the Americans! Please read the whole article – it is a real thought-provoker

I’ve always had a soft spot for the New Left Review which first appeared as I was starting University in 1960 and trying to make sense of the world. On its 50^th anniversary, it received the following glowing tribute from an observer -

When so much of even the so-called "serious" media is given over to celebrity-fuelled ephemera and the recycling of press releases and in-house gossip; and when the academic world is struggling to mitigate the worst effects of careerist modishness; and when national and international politics seem to consist of bowing to the imperatives of "the market" while avoiding public relations gaffes; then we need more than ever a "forum" like NLR. It is up to date without being merely journalistic; it is scholarly but unscarred by citation-compulsion; and it is analytical about the long-term forces at work in politics rather than obsessed by the spume of the latest wavelet of manoeuvring and posturing. Despite its self-description in its guidelines for contributors, the journal is not in any obvious sense "lively". It is downright difficult (but none the worse for that), because what it tries to analyse is complex and its preferred intellectual tools are often conceptually sophisticated. It is difficult where being easy would be no virtue, difficult where aiming to be "accessible" would mean patronising its readers, difficult where ideas need to be chewed rather than simply swallowed. That's what I admire above all about NLR: its intellectual seriousness – its magnificently strenuous attempt to understand, to analyse, to theorise.

I am grateful to Wikipedia for its entry which runs as follows -
New Left Review was launched in January 1960 when the editors of The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review merged their boards. The founders of the new journal hoped that it would provide the motive force for a new round of political organisation in Britain, inspiring the creation of "New Left Clubs" and helping to reinvent socialism as a viable force in British politics.

From 1962, with Perry Anderson as editor, it has had a book-like format with long articles, footnotes, and more than 100 pages per issue.

The NLR — as it came to be known — drew on debates within Western Marxism. It published work by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, El Lissitsky, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser, and interviewed Jean-Paul Sartre, Georg Lukács, and Lucio Colletti.

A distinctive feature of the journal was a series of 'country studies' with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn supplying an account of the peculiar formation of capitalism and the state in Britain. The journal has also specialized in sweeping global surveys. In 1966 the journal published Juliet Mitchell's essay 'Women, the Longest Revolution', a founding text of second wave feminism. Nearly every issue from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s carried an account by a worker of their experience at work.

Texts of the aesthetic avant-garde were published and a series of articles on film by Peter Wollen. The journal covered third world anti-imperial movements. It reflected the concerns of the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s and documented the crises of the Communist regimes in Russia and eastern Europe. Isaac Deutscher, Raymond Williams, Raphael Samuel, and Ralph Miliband published in the journal and their work gave rise to important exchanges.

In the 1970s and 1980s a debate between Ernest Mandel, Alec Nove and Diane Elson focussed on the respective weight of plan, market and worker or community control in socialist economics.

In the 1990s and after the journal published major studies of the growing evidence of global capitalist disorder by Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey, Peter Gowan and Andrew Glyn. Benedict Anderson, Mike Davis, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Ellen Wood, Tariq Ali and Nancy Fraser published some of their most important texts in the review. Notable studies included Robert Brenner on the origins of capitalism, Erik Olin Wright on class, Göran Therborn on the advent of democracy

The implications of the Soviet collapse were extensively covered. Post-modernism, post-Marxism, the fate of feminism and the real configurations of the "New World Order" were plotted and assessed. In every decade since the mid-1970s the journal has wrestled with the historical meaning of nationalism with essays by Tom Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm, Miroslav Hroch, Benedict Anderson, Stuart Hall, Ernest Gellner,Ronald Suny, Régis Debray, Michael Lowy, and Gopal Balakrishnan.

In its new form, NLR has led with controversial editorials on the direction of world politics and major articles on the United States, Japan, Turkey, Europe, Britain, Cuba, Iraq, Mexico, India and Palestine. It has published work by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, David Graeber and Michael Hardt and featured analysis of global imbalances, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the credit crunch, the Egyptian Revolution and Arab Spring, prospects for nuclear disarmament, the scope of anti-corporate activism, the prospect of a "planet of slums," and discussions of world literature and cinema, cultural criticism and the continuing exploits of the avant-garde.

Since 2008, the Review has followed the economic crisis as well as its global political repercussions, with in-depth country studies of Iceland, Ireland, Spain and Greece, an ongoing debate on US-China economic imbalances (and their political consequences), as well as on the crisis's toll on California and the US health-care debate. An essay by Wolfgang Streeck in NLR 71 was called "most powerful description of what has gone wrong in western societies" by the Financial Times's columnist Christopher Caldwell. 

The quintessential Englishman - Tony Benn - RIP

I have been collecting various links on the subject of old age – being very aware of how many of my erstwhile heroes had reached (and surpassed) the critical age of 90 eg Denis Healey, Diane Athill and Helmut Schmidt.

I had confidently expected Tony Benn to join their ranks – but have just learned that he has been struck down at 88  

How to explain this maverick left-wing British politician to my global audience?

·         First that he was quintessentially English in background – his grandfather founding a famous publishing company. This privileged background gave his socialism a slightly artificial tone - despite its undoubted genuineness (his family came from non-conformist stock). He never really "belonged"...... 
Benn became a (Labour) parliamentarian in 1950 (before I came to political maturity a decade or so later) and was a technocratic Minister in the Labour governments of the late 1960s. His famous Diaries, which he started in 1942, give a unique perspective about (if not insight into) our political culture in those days.

·         After the Labour defeat of 1970, reflecting perhaps wider social changes, something changed in him and he became increasingly left-wing and a real thorn in the power system of the Labour Party. He developed (with Stuart Holland) an alternative economic strategy and was the catalyst for the split from the party of the “social democrat” wing led by Roy Jenkins which then doomed the Labour party to 18 wasted years. I famously shared a political platform at the Port Glasgow shipyards with him in 1978 during the highly-charged referendum about a Scottish Parliament.

·         I had been a great admirer until then but felt that he had “lost the plot” as he threw his lot in with the “wild left”. In retrospect, however, the right who took control of the rump of the Labour party were hardly any better!

He was, as The Guardian editorial put it, 

one of the most charismatic, most controversial, most inspirational and most divisive public figures of the second half of the 20th century. He evolved into one of the great political educators, a role to which he was ideally suited by his personal charm, his sense of humour, his passionate interest in new people and new ideas, and his profound commitment to the importance of politics. Long after he stopped being a player at the top table of politics, he fired new generations with an interest in how power works. Unlike many of his contemporaries, there is no doubt that he will always be remembered.

Let his obituary tell the story -

·         When Labour lost the 1979 general election, Benn was well placed to assume the leadership of the left, and began to propose constitutional changes to give greater representation to the views of activists and trade unionists in drafting the manifesto and in selecting MPs. Militant and other Trotskyite groups who had perfected techniques of entryism sponsored the resolutions on party reform. Two very different groups were now following Benn. On the one hand there were revolutionaries of various kinds, many of whom wanted to destroy capitalism and did not mind killing off the Labour party in the process. On the other, Labour's left wing felt disappointed and betrayed by what they saw as the failures of the party's five years in office. The more progress Benn made with his demands for reform, the greater the possibility of a split became. When Callaghan resigned the leadership in 1980, Benn came close to running against Foot, but decided to stay his hand.

·         Despite Foot's passionate appeal to unity, Benn did stand against Denis Healey in the September 1981 election for the deputy leadership. Healey won, under the reformed system that Benn had championed, by less than 0.5%. This margin was accounted for by some of the MPs who would soon be leaving for the Social Democratic party, launched the previous March – though others of this group actually voted for Benn in the hope that he would win.

·         Labour began the long, hard climb back to power. The left of the party split – the Tribune group backing Foot and later Neil Kinnock and Benn setting up his own Campaign group in 1982. He declared the 1983 election a triumph because never before had so many people – 27.6% – voted for a socialist programme. Foot managed to keep Labour in the game, and when Kinnock took over after the election the high tide of Bennism had been reached. It took a decade to roll it back completely, but Benn's realistic challenge for the leadership was over.

In 1987 the first volume of his diaries appeared, covering the period 1963-67. Subsequent volumes then appeared almost annually, covering the whole of his career. At the same time Benn began to present more and more reform bills to the Commons. He did not do things by accident. The switch from trying to capture the party to producing an endless flood of words, in bills, the diaries, collections of essays, videos of speeches, CDs, DVDs, through websites and in semi-authorised biographies formed the great project that filled out his final years.

In response to the flood of his own words the public's perception of him shifted. Much of what he said was highly critical of the Blair governments and the European Union. He appealed to the anti-war movement, the anti-globalisation movement and Ukip supporters in about equal measure. Benn's self-image remained stubbornly self-confident: as he once said: "It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."

 He had half a century in parliament. Then he had an Indian summer as a national radical treasure, the Home Counties' favourite revolutionary. He will be remembered as a great parliamentarian, a great radical and a great diarist. He will be forgotten as a practical politician and a political thinker. In the end his reputation will be significantly greater than the sum of his achievements because of the vast archive he accumulated and the quality of his diaries. He was like Samuel Pepys – someone who described an age without ever having shaped it – and is remembered for his words rather than his deeds and by many for his personal kindness and generosity with time and conversation.

The Guardian editorial put it very well -

Like his Puritan heroes, Tony Benn belongs in the great tradition of English revolutionaries – a passionate radical destined to be loved in popular memory for his defence of democracy and freedom, whose passing leaves the political world a smaller place.

There is a streak of madness in all who stand for office - and there was a time when I felt that the messianic streak in Benn had got out of hand. To understand him properly requires understanding the tradition he came from - ie the radical,Christian non-conformist tradition of the Levellers,the diggers,the Quakers and Methodists,RH Tawney,Kier Hardie and Stafford Cripps. He once said:

''My mother taught me that the Bible was about the Kings who had power and the Prophets who preached rightousness.She taught me to be on the side of the Prophets and I have always tried to do that although it has got me into a lot of trouble''

Nearing the End

It’s just 2 weeks until the Scottish referendum – and I’ve had only a handful of posts about the issue since the series I did 3 months ago – particularly Scotland –keeping an open mind and It’s the economy, stupid 

And that’s despite about a dozen new books on the topic now facing me accusingly on the bookshelves – the most recent being The Scottish Question and Small Nations in a Big World 

It’s almost exactly 40 years since my contribution “What Sort of Over-Government?” was published with a score of others in the famous Red Paper on Scotland which was edited by Gordon Brown destined some 32 years later to become British Prime Minister. Interesting to read all these years later the introduction he wrote to the book which attracted a long review in the New Left Review 

Scotland has been putting on its spectacles with commendable eagerness to read the minute print of a ‘Red Paper’ or socialist symposium on the state of the nation, which has reached the best-seller lists. It is a collection of twenty-eight essays, edited by Edinburgh University’s student rector, Gordon Brown. A dozen of the authors are academics, seven writers or journalists—though many are political activists as well. There are two trade-unionists, two Labour MPS. Six pieces deal with social problems, five with devolution, local government or administration, three with North Sea oil, three others with industry and finance, three with land and the Highlands. Despite the comprehensive investigation of Scotland and Scottish nationalism contained in the book, some topics were bound to get left out. There might have been something on religion and the Churches, considering how near at hand Ulster is. There might have been something on women and the family. Still, their contributions, of very varying length, are all carefully thought out and well documented.

I was fresh then in my position as Secretary of the Labour Cabinet of the newly-created Strathclyde Regional Council which covered half of Scotland and ran a huge empire of teachers, socials workers, police, engineers etc. My piece drew on seven years’ experience as a leading Labour councillor in a shipbuilding town – active in challenging the paternalistic approach which characterised Labour councils in those days. The reference to “over-government” was partly to the fears then of a fourth (Scottish) layer of government being added to appease the upsurge of scottish nationalism but more to  the style of government in those days – and the assumptions it made about the passivity of the citizen.

I famously said that “The debate (about devolution) has been a serious distraction” – from, that is, the poverty and inequities some of us were at least being enabled by the new system of regional government to tackle.

Flash forward 40 years to this recent contribution to the debate about independence

A Yes vote  may get rid of the Tories - but that doesn’t mean you will get rid of Tory ideas, a few of which are front and centre in the SNP’s/Yes campaign’s independence manifesto (or white paper), titled ‘Scotland’s Future’. The positions laid out on corporation tax, the monarchy, and NATO membership would sit more than comfortably in the pages of a Tory manifesto.

More importantly, the idea that abandoning millions of people who’ve stood with us – and us with them – in trade union struggles, political campaigns, progressive movements, etc, for generations – the idea that this can be considered progress is anathema to me. The analogy of the Titanic applies, wherein rather than woman and children, it is Scots to the lifeboats and to hell with everybody else……In 2014 economic sovereignty does not lie with national governments as it once did. Today economic sovereignty lies with global capital under that extreme variant of capitalism known as neoliberalism – or the free market. The notion that separation from a larger state would allow said smaller state to forge a social democratic utopia without challenging said neoliberal nostrums is simply not credible.

A patchwork of smaller states plays into the hands of global capital, as it means more competition for inward investment, which means global corporations are able to negotiate more favourable terms in return for that investment. The inevitable result is a race to the bottom as workers in one state compete for jobs with workers in neighbouring states. In this regard it is surely no accident that Rupert Murdoch is a vocal supporter of Scottish independence. 

Support for Scottish independence among progressives in Scotland is rooted in despair over a status quo of Tory barbarity. This is understandable. For the past three decades working class communities throughout the UK have suffered a relentless assault under both Conservative and Labour administrations. The Labour Party, under the baneful influence and leadership of Tony Blair and his New Labour clique, came to be unrecognizable from the party that created the welfare state, including the NHS, and the party that once held full employment as a guiding principle of its economic and social policy.

The embrace of free market nostrums under New Labour meant that the structural inequality that obtained after 18 years of Tory rule remained more or less intact. The market was now the undisputed master of all it surveyed. The consequence of Labour’s shift to the right has been to give rise to cynicism, disappointment, and lack of faith in politics among large swathes of voters, evinced in ever lower turnouts at elections. Issues such as the lies and subterfuge surrounding Britain going to war in Iraq in 2003, the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2011, followed by the phone hacking scandal – during which the unhealthy relationship between the owners and editors of tabloid newspapers and politicians was revealed – has only deepened this cynical disregard for politics and politicians in Britain, giving rise to anti-politics as the default position of many voters. 

In Scotland – for decades a Labour Party stronghold – devolution has allowed a protest vote to make the electorate’s feelings towards this Labour Party betrayal of its founding principles known at the ballot box. Regardless, the most significant protest has been a non-vote, with turnouts at elections in Scotland following the pattern of the rest of the country in remaining low. For example, there was only a 50 percent turnout at the last Scottish Parliamentary elections in 2011, out of which the Scottish National Party (SNP) emerged with an overall majority, the first time any party has managed to do so since the Scottish Parliament came into existence in 1999. 

The myth that Scotland is more left-leaning than rest of the UKHowever the argument that Scotland is more left-leaning than the rest of the UK is one that seeks to conflate conservatism with England in its entirety, rather than a specific region of the country, which in conjunction with the antiquated first past the post electoral system of Westminster elections has thrown up Tory governments that are unrepresentative of where the majority of England and the rest of the UK sits politically.
Scotland is no more left-leaning than the deindustrialised North East, North West, and Midlands of England. Nor is it any more left leaning than Wales. The working class in Scotland is not any more progressive than its English or Welsh counterpart.

There’s more of the same at this collective blog which I’ve just come across