Two articles by Michael Rustin and Jonathan Rutherford
I Michael Rustin
Michael Rustin contrasts New Labour’s unitary, managerial capitalist programme with the more pluralist, negotiated conflict characteristic of the social democratic era. Arguing that Blair’s ‘Caesarist’ resolution to Britain’s social tensions is unravelling, he puts forward an alternative vision for a renewed social democracy.
In his article ‘New Labour’s double-shuffle’ (Soundings 24, Autumn 2003), Stuart Hall characterised New Labour as a ‘hybrid regime’. The leading position in its repertoire is held by ‘its grim alignment with the broad global interests and values of corporate capital and power - the neo-liberal project’, while ‘another subaltern programme of a more social democratic kind’ runs alongside it. The subordinate programme is needed to maintain support for the dominant project among Labour’s supporters. To explain how this works Hall returned to the Gramscian concepts which also informed his earlier analysis of the crisis of the 1970s and the onset of Thatcherism: ‘New Labour’s long term strategy or "project" is … the "transformism" of social democracy into a particular version of free market liberalism.’ The public sector is ostensibly defended, even slightly expanded, but also incessantly ‘modernised’, that is, transformed into the nearest equivalents that can be found to corporate institutional practice. ‘Spin’ is the device functionally necessary to resolve the contradictions between a programme driven by one set of interests and values but needing to be mediated to popular constituencies which may have quite other concerns. Hall observed that:
*forging a plausible or pragmatic pathway from left to right, carrying a proportion of its old supporters with it on particular points, dividing and confusing the oppositions, and winning a measure of consent for it, may serve to establish neo-liberal society on firmer, less contested foundations. Certainly, the confusion which its double-headed strategy sows in its own ranks obscures the long-term objective and prevents a coherent and organised opposition from emerging. The social democratic route to neo-liberalism may turn out in the end to be what Lenin called ‘the best shell’ for global capitalism.*
Stuart Hall’s analysis of this present situation develops his earlier analysis of the crisis of social order from which Thatcherism emerged as the intended ‘solution’.1 Thatcherism followed a period of acute social tension, culminating in the 1970s, in which negotiated, corporatist methods of resolving competing demands on the economy and society repeatedly broke down. (Two governments were defeated by miners’ strikes; inflation reached unprecedented levels; commentators talked of Britain’s ‘ungovernability’; social and cultural warfare was waged over many fronts - sexual mores, abortion, immigration, the universities, schooling, etc). Thatcher was eventually elected on a programme to restore order in every sense, and in particular to change the balance of social power decisively against the organised working class, and the balance of cultural hegemony against the libertarian currents of the late 1960s. (Tony Blair’s recent attack on the legacy of the 1960s falls into place given this history.) In their eighteen years of office, the Conservative governments succeeded in much of this agenda, beyond their wildest dreams. Collectivism, the ‘mixed economy’, the idea of public service, respect for professionalism - indeed most alternatives or countervailing powers to the market and corporate power - were crushingly defeated. Their greatest success was to undermine the Labour Party’s belief in any viable alternative vision of society, so that much of the time it seems that both of the dominant parties in Britain are Thatcherite, not merely one of them. (Some appearances to the contrary, the Lib Dems may turn out that way too.) Only the retrogressive Conservative moral programme seemed elusive, ‘full marketisation’ unleashing a climate of greed and hedonism rather than a restoration of sobriety and family-values.
Yet in the end, the Conservatives also failed, and were swept from office. The poll tax revolt and ‘Black Wednesday’ demonstrated that they too had lost control of the situation. The poll tax protests showed that a massive latent resistance to injustice still existed, and could be provoked into action by Tory misjudgement and over-confidence. ‘Black Wednesday’ exposed the acute difficulties for the Conservatives in resolving differences between modernising business interests who were in favour of close involvement in the EU, and more local and nationalist elements who opposed this on a ‘Little England’ ticket. In addition, the climate of ‘sleaze’ revealed that the governing party’s apparent purity of ideological mission had disappeared with the fall of its prime leader. What all this revealed was that the ongoing crisis of social order that had framed the analysis of Hall and his colleagues had by no means been permanently resolved. The question was, and is, what new forms was this taking, and what new resolutions of it were possible?
Little Caesars and Big Caesars
‘New Labour’s double shuffle’ updated this analysis, but further dimensions can be added to the argument by returning to another of Stuart Hall’s articles, ‘The Little Caesars of Social Democracy’, written in the early 1980s, and discussing the SDP (also reprinted in Hard Road to Renewal). The term ‘Little Caesars’ derives, like ‘transformism’, from Gramsci.2 As Hall summarised, Caesarism is a type of compromise political solution, generated from above, in conditions where the fundamental forces in conflict so nearly balance one another that neither seems able to defeat the other, or rule and establish a durable hegemony. He suggested that the Social Democrats might play the role of ‘little Caesars’ in the early 1980s. (Hall was writing at a time when the success of the Thatcher programme was by no means guaranteed, and other responses to the political circumstances seemed feasible.)
Blair can usefully be seen as a similar - perhaps larger - Caesarist figure, emerging at the time when the Thatcherite solution to Britain’s crisis was collapsing, and as both the dominant order and mass public opinion sought a new resolution. His role has been to condense and resolve in his own person the contradictions between opposing social forces. Continuing the stalled mission of the earlier ‘Little Caesars’, New Labour has adopted the programme of the SDP more or less wholesale - especially its antipathy to the ‘old left’. Thus though the SDP failed to defeat the Labour Party, it can be seen as having ideologically captured its leadership. It should be remembered here that Blair was ‘chosen’ not only by the Labour Party, but also, in effect, by representatives of the dominant capitalist order. The 1997 General Election was an event whose outcome was certain from the start, with even News International giving New Labour their support. (Blair went to Australia to negotiate this with Rupert Murdoch.) Thus Blair was apparently able to represent an extremely wide range of interests, not least because the Labour Party, made desperate by so many years of defeat, opted to disregard the fact that Blair and his circle had convictions quite different from its own (and that he pointed this out at every opportunity). At least he was not a mere opportunist, it thought. The ‘trust’ he embodied at that time was marketable.
Although New Labour’s broad coalition of support has now been fractured by the Iraq War, its programme continues to arouse little real antagonism or anxiety in corporate circles. Most of its agendas remain favourable to the interests of business. It remains reluctant to attack (growing) inequalities through the tax system; it fights ‘regulation’ of the labour market at a European level; and it seeks to create further opportunities for the operation of private capital within the sectors of health, education, social care, transport and telecommunications - all of which have an increasingly important role in post-industrial economies. The ‘modernisation’ of the public services of education and health, with overriding value being given to ‘consumer choice’, aims to erode the boundaries between private and public provision. The ‘freeing’ of hospitals and schools to operate as independent corporations within quasi-markets prepares the ground for their fuller privatisation, when and if public opinion can be persuaded to accept this.
New Labour continues to address the moral agendas promoted by Thatcherism, but with clearer utilitarian purpose. Whereas Conservatives seemed primarily to be attacking social guarantees and benefits, New Labour has selectively enhanced them, but on the basis that they become conditional on conformity to the work ethic, on the acquiring of skills saleable in the labour market, and on the inculcation of parenting capacities. What was earlier a mainly ideological incantation of self-sufficiency (Tebbitt’s ‘on yer bike’) and family values, has become a ‘modernised’ welfare programme under New Labour. The hard line taken by the New Labour government on crime, asylum-seekers and immigration, as well as safeguarding it from attack from the right, imparts a persecutory moral tone to its programme, insisting that citizenship comes only on condition of increasing conformity. New Labour’s ambivalent attitude towards single mothers has precedents, as so often, in the United States, where hostility towards ‘welfare queens’ has a racial aspect.
Thus it is useful to see Blair as embodying a resolution of social tension through a particular settlement, one that differs from earlier Labour programmes, and from Thatcherism. What sense can now be made of the idea that there remain latent conflicts of goals between New Labour and its main constituencies? What are New Labour’s goals, and how do they differ from what Labour has previously been committed to?
New Labour and social democracy compared
Plainly one cannot claim that the differences are between an ‘Old Labour’ commitment to socialism and a New Labour commitment to capitalism. The Labour Party has always accepted the necessity - even the desirability - of ‘living with capitalism’, despite elements in its programme, such as the 1918 constitution’s Clause 4, of socialist rhetoric and aspiration. But its earlier conception of living with and gradually changing capitalism, via what Galbraith called a system of ‘countervailing powers,’ upheld a model of pluralist coexistence between different social systems, against the monolithic idea of a consumer society. By and large, a dynamic market sector was intended to generate economic growth, publicly owned utilities would provide an infrastructure for all, and the social welfare system would redress the inequalities of the market and ensure redistribution of resources to balance the vulnerabilities of the life-cycle. This is still the model which prevails in much of continental Europe.
The acceptance of differences of interests and values, and the need for these to be debated and negotiated, were fundamental to Labour’s social democratic past. The Labour Party itself was indeed
one such institution for negotiation, allowing different segments of the Labour coalition - right-wing and left-wing unions, constituency memberships, the fractions of opinion represented in it - to contend for influence.
In this view of the world it was expected that institutions such as those of local government, the universities, public sector broadcasting, the public sector professions, and the judiciary, would be independent enough to represent and mediate differences of interest and value in society. Pluralism - an ongoing state of institutionalised class conflict, with truces recurrently negotiated on a shifting frontier - was the taken-for-granted condition. In the period of post-war consensus, the Conservative Party came to accept this state of affairs too.
By contrast, New Labour has a unitary philosophy (as did Thatcherism). There are no longer held to be any significant social conflicts left to resolve, ‘class divisions’ being now held to have disappeared, or to be residues of the past. Blair has never hidden his view that the ‘conservatism’ he opposes is as much in the labour movement as anywhere else. The ‘end of history’ (formerly ‘the end of ideology’) has at last arrived. The significance of ‘individualisation’, promoted as an index of modernity by Anthony Giddens, has to be understood in relation to its opposite, social identifications with others who share attributes or values in common. The ‘individual choice’ which New Labour wants to bring to public services adopts the model of individual, self-oriented consumption as the model for everything.
Thus, all institutions are to serve the same value-system, rather than represent and mediate differences between them. The reduction of autonomy for so many public sector institutions - universities, schools (centralised via the national curriculum, key stage assessments, inspection and audit, at the same time as they are ostensibly ‘set free’ from local authority control), local government, the judiciary - expresses and imposes this new unitary ideology that holds itself to be without ideology.3 Managerialism in the public sector aims to impose what was known under Thatcher as ‘the enterprise culture’ on all public sector institutions, ensuring that their ethos becomes little different from those of private corporations. Whereas the welfare system was once thought to be the embodiment of a value-system complementary to capitalism - that of care and mutual responsibility - it is being turned into a means of inculcating mentalities deemed necessary to a market economy. The system of audit and inspection which has burgeoned throughout the public sector is another device for imposing conformity to agendas set by central government.4 Devolution of responsibility to discrete agencies, quangos and inspectorates may seem to imply that government is adopting a hands-off approach, but this is largely deception, obscuring where real power lies, and forcing subordinate actors to commit ‘voluntarily’ to prescribed norms as a condition for their continued survival: there is nothing so controlling as uncertain, short-term funding.
We can summarise the differences between the managed capitalism of New Labour, and the earlier programme of pluralist social democracy, in tabular form.
| New Labour | Social Democracy |
| Ideology | |
| Managerial capitalism Unitary ideology End of history and ideology ‘Transformism’ - oppositional forces become incorporated into ruling elites Business ethic throughout c |
Pluralism of private and public spheres Structured arguments of principle Ideological differences to be debated Negotiated class conflict and truce Welfare ethic and public service as countervailing values |
| Social Institutions | |
|
Individual consumer choice All public institutions compliant to |
Entitlement to sufficiency and rising standards Relative autonomy of public institutions Delegation to professional self-regulation Co-determination with unions Weak unitary measures, no public rankings Public sector valued Reality of class differences accepted Gradient of inequality matters Education having various ends |
| Government and Party | |
| Prime Ministerial government Party leader leads and consults Party Conference advisory |
Cabinet government Party leadership mandated by Party Party conference sets policies |
| International | |
| New liberal imperial mission Pro-military |
Pride in decolonisation and lawful international order Pacifistic |
But in spite of these changes, New Labour’s reforming, modernising programme has still had to take account of continuing differences and resistances in society. Many have been inclined to underestimate the extent of these, since the defeat of the Labour Party by Thatcherism was so catastrophic. But the fact that New Labour felt obliged to partially radicalise itself at the start of its second term indicates that it was also under pressure to respond to countervailing pressure from below. Thus the commitment to increase expenditure on health and education to European levels, made in 2001 as its main promise for its second term of office is significant; as are the promises to abolish child poverty and end unemployment, even though New Labour’s poverty programme has been paid for largely by ‘stealth taxes’ which have avoided open arguments about equality, and have done little to enhance it. 5
It looks as if a fault line runs invisibly through the New Labour project, across which the pressures to respond to more egalitarian and collectivist demands are negotiated. This difference within government seems to have been buried in the party walls dividing numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. We should think perhaps of the secret treaty of the Granita restaurant of 1997 as containing the terms of this unequal compromise between the dominant and subaltern elements of New Labour’s programme.
There have been other sources of resistance to New Labour’s unitary model of governance. Some inspectorates (e.g. successive Chief Inspectors of Prisons) have spoken up in criticism of government penal policy. Judges have objected to the appropriation by politicians of their due powers. The BBC found itself in a massive struggle with the government when, during the Iraq crisis, it sought to hold to its charter commitment to serve as an impartial mediator of disagreements.
As Hall argued, it is this attempted transformation of a formerly pluralist polity and society into one that aims to become a unitary one that gives rise to the conflicts that New Labour tries to manage and control through ‘spin’, and through its refusal to enter into open debate about values and ideology at all, within or outside the Labour Party.
What are the ‘Caesarist’ elements in this settlement? Blair certainly maintains a clear distance between himself and the party that he purports to lead, losing few opportunities to indicate his distance from its earlier world view. He tries to escape, through his celebrity persona, any particular social affiliation, occupying a location apparently above class - which it seems easier to bring off in Britain from an upper middle class starting-point. The marketing of Blair in terms of individual charisma and trustworthiness is also consistent with the goal of redefining Britain in individualised terms, in which social memberships are to count for less and less. If one wants citizens to define themselves above all as sovereign individuals, what better than a neo-presidential system which essentially invites them to choose an individual leader? As in the United States, on whose politics this project is closely modelled, the population need to believe in the idea of opportunities for all, even if in reality equality of opportunity has not increased.
Blair often seems to run against, rather than as a representative of his party. Triangulation was the name given by Clinton’s New Democrats to the strategy of positioning a potential government between both of the contending political parties, including his own. This has been New Labour’s strategy too - it was the purpose of the name ‘New Labour’. Since ‘triangulation’ places a political leader above the party struggle (which is the nearest we get to political embodiment of class relations) it can be seen as an institutional form of Caesarism.
In this way it becomes possible for those representing the interests of the modernising centre-right to give at least tacit support for New Labour and its leader, knowing that this does not imply endorsement of his party. Indeed they are allies who can be called upon to defend the modernising leader against ‘retrogressive’ demands by his party. Any opposition to his leadership, for example from the tabloid press, can then be shown to put the Labour government at risk. New Labour has also taken care to occupy any electorally promising ground that the Tories might find to the government’s right. The issues of law and order and refugees are examples of this politics in action. This leaves the Tories having either to claim credit for what the government has already done, or to mark out a distance even further to the right. New Labour seems comfortable with this situation, even though it continually shifts the spectrum of debate rightwards, since it threatens to place the Tories in positions so extreme as to make them unelectable. New Labour can thus stay in office, even if to do so it has had to implement much of its opponents’ programme. The ‘great moving right show’ moves on! The fact that this strategy also pre-empts any move of the government in a leftward direction is a further gain for the modernisers. For one risk for any centre-left government, however moderate it is, is that its success in retaining power and bringing some benefits will wake its supporters up, and raise their aspirations. Such a subterranean movement was responsible for New Labour’s second term programme being more progressive than its first. It would hardly have been politically possible to do nothing for public services for two terms. It must be a problem for New Labour to avoid strengthening incipient forces to its left, by means of its own success. If this were to happen, it would put at risk the support Tony Blair receives from right of centre, since his principal virtue for conservatives is that his leadership excludes the left from the political equation.
The Iraq War has given an additional turbulence to these currents. Blair must have hoped that a successful war and reconstruction of Iraq would shore up his own position as well as the government’s (thanks to the successful economy, that was scarcely at risk), just as the Falklands War immeasurably strengthened Thatcher and prepared the ground for the rightward radicalisation of her regime. Blair has after all led Britain into several military interventions, all of them until now politically beneficial to him.
‘New liberal imperialism’ is certainly a programme of Caesarist hue, and has seemed to some an inspiring one.6 It seems to combine the ‘altruism’ of aid and modernisation for the Third World with the assertion of Britain’s military and imperial traditions. But the Iraqi chapter of this adventure did not work out well. Popular opposition was unexpectedly large. A most unwelcome fault-line opened up between Blair’s pro-European and Atlanticist commitments, which it had been his aim to hold together. Important constituencies - notably Muslims in Britain, and left liberals more generally - have detached themselves from the New Labour coalition, and moved towards the Liberal Democrats and Greens. This is the issue which has caused Blair to lose much of his charismatic appeal.
Where next?
Just like Thatcherism before it, the New Labour project is unravelling, yet no-one seems to have a clear idea of what might take its place. It seems that the ‘subaltern’ side of its compromise, represented inside government by Gordon Brown and John Prescott, and in the Labour Party outside it by figures such as Peter Kilfoyle, Roy Hattersley, and Robin Cook, does not have the confidence or will to reverse the existing balance of power. The position seems to be one in which, as Gramsci said, ‘The old is dead, new is struggling to be born. In this situation a variety of morbid symptoms appears.’
For the traditional left does not have adequate answers for the set of problems to which Blairism has a particular set of solutions. Nor is it notably pluralist. The traditional position of the left has been to seek to construct a contrasting, binary alternative to the world-view of its antagonist, and to base its politics on that. Thus, state versus market, equality versus opportunity, collectivism versus individualism, and the embodiments of these oppositions in each sphere of policy. This position was formerly underpinned by manifest class differences and antagonisms. The socialist world-view could reasonably be held to represent the perspective of the working class and its far-sighted, universalistic, or merely instrumental allies drawn from more favourable class locations. This binary, antagonistic vision of an alternative future no longer has much credibility. Its appeal is now residual, a demand for recognition of what seems to be a social force in decline. It is because it remains tied to this traditional perspective - albeit in its most evolutionary form - that the left of the Labour Party remains largely powerless to affect the fundamental direction of its government.
The left needs to understand that the marginalisation of its old positions need not equate to its defeat, though of course it is this in part. The achievement of material prosperity for most citizens was always one of the main goals of social democracy, and its arrival is not a setback to progress. The erosion of class differences and of deference seems to most citizens to be an enhancement of equality, even if media populism can sometimes give this a philistine and mean-spirited cast. The enhancement of rights that has taken place in the spheres of education, health, and social security (attested by New Labour’s setting of higher standards in the first two areas, and the likely need for it to do something more to assure security in old age before long) are indications that core social democratic demands far from being defeated, have become part of ‘the commonsense of the age’. The ruling capitalist order in Europe defeated ‘socialism’ and preserved itself only by means of incorporating many of these demands as limits within its ongoing form of domination. Although struggles by the right to ‘roll back’ these gains (via ‘modernisation’, ‘flexibilisation’, and ‘reform’) continue to make up the main agenda of democratic politics in the west, they mostly remain stalemated, since electorates do not readily vote for a worsening of their own conditions of life. Thus even ‘New Labour’ has found itself obliged to move fractionally to its left in its second term.
The misrecognition of this situation as a general defeat of social democracy, rather than as a phase in its ongoing struggle, contributes considerably to the left’s current difficulties. It allows the entire social system to be represented as if it were a monolith, when in reality it is not; and makes its further ‘modernisation’ in a monolithic direction seem historically inevitable and desirable, when this need not be the case. To look for a total alternative to the system, or to seek to reinvigorate the alternative that once seemed to be there, is to look in the wrong place. Furthermore it leaves those who occupy the governing positions free to define the situation in their own terms, ‘against’ those whose traditionalism they can represent as threatening the social democratic gains that have already been won.
Not only does the always-provisional social settlement that exists still embody many differences of interest and value of a familiar social democratic kind; it also now gives rise to many new differences of value and principle. Ulrich Beck argued in Risk Society (1992) that struggles over material sufficiency and distribution basic to the rise of social democracy were being displaced or complemented by other agendas, including those generated by the new social movements. As material scarcity diminishes (of course we are talking here only about rich industrial countries), a politics based on the alleviation of scarcity is not sufficient to capture the popular imagination. Even the current dominant agenda of ‘consumption’ is no longer about poverty or scarcity, but about aspirations, and people’s desires to live well - even though such desires are cramped and limited by their ‘consumerist’ frame.
Thus there is a vigorous ‘politics of civil society’ which only with the greatest difficulty and awkwardness now finds representation within the formal political process. This is embodied by social movements, NGOs, religious communities, scientists, various professional and trade union groups, the media, even ‘political extremists’, who at many times seem more authentic representatives of public opinion than the professional politicians. Among the issues which this politics encompasses can be listed the following:
These are in addition to the more traditional social democratic agendas of
All of these traditional roles remain fundamental, and they have a strongly material and redistributive dimension. But they no longer constitute, if they ever did, sufficient political goals.
The left needs to define the political process in ways which make explicit
this large range of choices of value, and to argue for structures and processes
which can allow their articulation. It needs to argue against the monolith
of market forces and market ideology, not on behalf of an alternative socialist
monolith, but in favour of the principle of diversity and plurality itself.
Market forces, and capitalist modes of organisation, need to be recognised
and respected as central elements of any plausible social order, but only
as elements, not as its monolithic essence. The principles of democracy
and capitalism, merged together in triumphalist right-wing thinking as if
it were impossible to conceive of one without the other, need to be prised
apart. One point of a democratic form of government is that it should enable
choices to be made about where capitalist forms should and should not be
dominant in a society.
This reorientation of political perspective will require considerable innovation in governmental and political institutions. I have argued previously for the development of ‘audit and inspection’ into means for achieving greater participation, learning, and improvement in public services. A parallel case can be made in regard to the means of legislation, in which something equivalent to representative standing commissions in major policy areas could provide for more open and deliberative debates on major issues, before they give rise to new legislation and institutional innovations. The key problem is to find ways of better representing the diversity of ideas and initiatives of civil society within the political process. From this point of view the proposal in Bruno Latour’s recent Politics of Nature (2004) that entities such as the climate and natural species should be given some form of virtual political representation is worth attention.
The more conventional agendas of constitutional reform, at one time promising to be the most radical element of the New Labour programme, through proving a disappointment in practice, also need to be returned to. The role of the Cabinet, of backbench MPs and their Select Committees, the Second Chamber, the powers assigned to local government, and the internal democracy or lack of it of the Labour Party itself all need drastic attention. It seems unlikely that anything significant will be achieved in any of these areas until New Labour loses its outright Parliamentary majority, and is obliged both to negotiate with other parties about constitutional arrangements, and become more sensitive to public opinion. The present self-regarding and hyper-controlled system of formal political life is now a major enemy of progress in any form.
A broader politics of difference thus requires, as its precondition, a vigorous spirit of negotiated pluralism, in which the present over-mighty New Labour executive finds its powers greatly reduced. It would be good if this could happen through the agency of the Labour Party itself, but since this seems unlikely voters may well have to bring this about by other means.
Notes
1. This was developed in Hall et al, Policing the Crisis (Hutchinson 1978), and in a series of Marxism Today articles which were later published in Hall’s book, A Hard Road to Renewal (Verso 1988).
2. For Gramsci’s writing on Caesarism, see A Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs, Lawrence and Wishart 1988, pp269-274.
3. An interesting exception to this centralising trend was the greater autonomy given to the Bank of England. There was also devolution of powers to the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies, and to city Mayors, but this had various limitations.
4. In an article in Soundings 26 Spring 2004 I suggested how an audit system might have different and more democratic purposes.
5. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)’s ‘State of the Nation’, part of its continuing ‘audit of social justice’, reports that wealth has become less equally distributed in the last ten years, with the share of the wealthiest 10% of national wealth growing from 47% to 54% (though it states there has been progress in the reduction of poverty and in the amount of employment).
6. ‘The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause’, Blair told the Labour Party Conference on October 2 2001.
Is there a future for social democracy?
II Jonathan Rutherford
Jonathan Rutherford argues that we need a new idea of the individual in society.
Soundings has been associated with a number of strands of the democratic left: the New Left, the ‘soft left’, the new New Left, the Gramscian left and the range of thinking and writing of Cultural Studies. These represent the more libertarian, democratic and cultural elements of the British communist, socialist and social democratic traditions. They function as historical signifiers of position for the cognoscenti in what has become an ever decreasing left political sphere. But beyond this diminishing sphere how do these descriptions resonate in people’s minds? This is not intended as a challenge to get into some doctrinal dispute. Step into the shoes of an outsider and imagine what they make of them. In terms of image and a big idea, our democratic left politics lacks an identity. It has no vibrant message which touches hearts and minds. After foundering on the radical shifts in contemporary living that have disrupted the conventional political categories of class, party and state, it has been further dissipated by neo-liberal hegemony. And despite strenuous efforts to renew a social democratic politics to counter New Labour’s widening and deepening of a neo-liberal world, social democracy also, in its current form, seems to have run its course.
Soundings finds itself situated in the waning of its own particular traditions, unclear if or how it will re-enliven them. More broadly, we seem to be in the midst of a historical period where most social and cultural phenomena are prefixed with a post-this and a post-that, lacking a tangible existence that might provide us with our bearings. One response to this is to retreat back into tradition; another is to adopt a celebratory attitude toward indeterminacy and in-betweenness. Neither faces up to the presence of loss - loss of certainty, loss of future, loss of political belonging and political purchase on the world. We have inherited a rich critical theoretical language but we can sense its limitations. Its social categories and agents of change have disappeared or changed out of all recognition. There is more to society and culture than our theoretical language quite understands. It fails to seize hold of contemporary forms of life and subjectivities and articulate their structures of feeling, and in the process think about the kind of world it wants to make. In spite of this epistemological shortfall we still know what we are against, but a denunciatory politics attracts only in opposition and lacks the basis for a renewal of moral values and philosophical ideas. We can’t build a new world without them.
New Labour has been the proof of this. Despite its fearful, subordinate agenda of social democracy by stealth, it is ending up as a morbid symptom of social democracy’s decline. Beyond the demand for instrumental efficacy it has nothing very much to say for itself. Has the Labour Party become, in Ulrich Beck’s phrase, a ‘Zombie Category’, existing - albeit in a highly attenuated way - in the institutional form of a political party but drained of all human life? The collapse in Labour Party membership reveals an organisation that has lost its conviviality. In contrast to its electoral successes, New Labour has been unable to infuse its own Party with a collective vitality and sense of purpose, let alone help build a new society. But are we, the critics of New Labour but ourselves the inheritors of faltering traditions, in any better condition?
In a recent editorial in Renewal (previewed in The Guardian, 9.8.04), the editors, who describe themselves as one-time ‘critical Blairites’, declare their current disillusionment: New Labour had been ‘unwilling or unable to change the political weather’. They had pinned their hopes on Blair opening up spaces ‘to renew social democracy’, but: ‘We were wrong. The promise of a new politics has receded and it is obvious there is no point waiting for a better Blair’. Instead, they argue, ‘we have to define our own agenda for a realisable radical transformation’. The article ends with the question ‘can we remarshall our forces around a genuine social democratic programme?’ Those of us engaged in the pragmatics and compromises of electoral politics do need to marshall existing political positions and forces for some straightforward ‘realisable’ answers. But the editorial also raises longer term questions, about what social democracy means and which social actors and classes will enact radical transformations. What is a ‘genuine social democracy’? The world today is much more complex and elusive than the one which shaped its singular politics. The plurality and diversity of society is resistant to being defined in a single account; nor does it lend itself to being representable in one ideology, party or belief system. To breathe life back into the political language of social democracy more is required than a simple recovery of its moral values and philosophical ideas, dusting them down for modern consumption. Such a mission will need to develop a politics and culture which transforms them into something which is more compelling and vital than other, competing, truths of reality.
The new elements of such a project already exist in fragments. To give some examples: they can be found in emerging ‘post-autistic’, human centred economics that put human well being and social relations back into economic thinking. And in critiques of the destructive impact of our work-based culture on family and personal life, bringing into question how we live now, and the place of pleasure, play, children in our lives. There are doubts about the human and social costs of acquisitive individualism and the pursuit of ‘success’. The standardisation of cultural life imposed by commerce and consumerism has provoked innovative forms of anti-consumer protest, cultural actions and art. There is widespread concern about food, including issues of public and personal health, the social risks of endemic food poisoning, and the industrialised brutality suffered by animals, as well as calls for the greater accountability of food producing corporations, and criticism of the inequalities of global distribution of resources. A growing self reflection around the body and health is bringing into question the instrumental hierarchical approach to medicine which dominates the NHS, encouraging new forms of care of the mind and body. The changing forms of family life, the expectation of egalitarian personal and social relationships and attitudes towards children, and the liberalising of sexual mores and gender identities, are all signals of longer term changes in people’s personal and domestic lives. The large minority commitment to multiculturalism and a global outlook prefigures a more cosmopolitan culture and society. These are some examples of the elements, often inter-connected around a new sensibility of democratic individualism, that prefigure qualitatively new kinds of subjectivities and social relationships.
These elements exist as cultural sensibilities and practices, ‘structures of feeling’, personal ethics and politics, unarticulated anxieties and moral doubtfulness. They have grown up alongside, but have also been incorporated into, countless political campaigns, community actions, civic obligations, and a multitude of informal individual engagements with political, charitable and social issues. Many are embedded in individual consciousness and life experiences, but they are absent from the discourses of mainstream politics and institutions. Their concerns and various forms of micro-politics provide the practical, moral and philosophical resources for a new kind of democratic left. Not tacked on as a series of politically useful after-thoughts and instrumental alliances, but constitutive of a new narrative of the individual and the individual’s relationship to society (the ‘liberty of egalitarianism’). Each micro-politics alone is not sufficient to transform and improve material conditions. There is a need for a collective politics which can give them voice and agency and leverage over the power of the state and capital. How might we begin to articulate this kind of pluralised counter-hegemony?
The appeal of liberalism
A good place to start is with neo-liberalism. Its truth claims have been the nemesis of traditional social democracy. Analyse the victor and one will discover the weaknesses of its vanquished; will see its contradictions and failings, but also the historically enduring elements of its hegemony.
In his essay ‘The Principles of a Liberal Social Order’, Theodore von Hayek provides a working definition of neo-liberalism:
*The central concept of liberalism is that under the enforcement of universal rules of just conduct, protecting a recognisable private domain of individuals, a spontaneous order of human activities of much greater complexity will form itself than could ever be produced by deliberate arrangement, and that in consequence the coercive activities of government should be limited to the enforcement of such rules, whatever other services government may at the same time render by administering those particular resources which have been placed at its disposal for those purposes.1*
Hayek’s ‘spontaneous order’ is a law-governed as opposed to a purpose-governed society, ordered by the ‘regularity of the conduct of its members’ and continuously evolving through a complex network of interaction amongst agents. His utopian account of a radical liberal social order sounds remarkably similar to complexity theory, which is emerging as a significant science. Complexity theory describes the emergent properties of non-linear, open systems, characterised by feedback loops and without a central organising force. The behaviour of agents within these self-reinforcing systems is determined by reaction to what other agents do. John Law and John Urry argue that complexity theories are ‘particularly appropriate to contemporary globalisation’: ‘With its many convergent, overlapping and irreversible interdependencies "globalisation" is remaking "societies" but not in a linear, closed and finalised form. We might see the growth and spreading of complexity as part of, and simultaneously helping to enact, the very processes of global change.’2 With its similarity to the language of complexity, Hayek’s liberalism retains a significant descriptive purchase on post-industrial societies and their plurality of democratic sensibilities, identities and practices. This is the reason for its continuing effectiveness, in spite of the anxieties its regime also engenders.
However, like complexity theory, neo-liberalism fails to take into account the operations of organised capital and the vested interests of the powerful. The world of individual self-determined freedom it promises is not the world it brings into existence. Hayek’s ‘Great Society’ is held together ‘entirely by what are commonly called economic forces’ (p164). The self-generating spontaneous order in his argument is in fact the ‘spontaneous order of the market’ (p172). Markets in capitalism do not tend toward equilibrium, however, nor do they operate under conditions of perfect competition. The resurgence of economic liberalism in the US and UK in the 1970s and 1980s gave ideological form to the political restructuring of capital into historically new modes of extra-national production and consumption. New deregulated markets in labour, finance, trade and services were created. Contrary to Hayek, these markets did not arise spontaneously. They required a huge increase in political control, regulation and intervention. As Karl Polanyi points out: ‘the market has been the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of government which imposed the market organisation on society for non-economic ends.’3 In addition this laisser faire economics lacked an ethical stance of obligation towards others, resulting in the systemic and callous impoverishment and economic unfreedom of millions. Hayek himself explicitly rejects the idea of a public good or common interest: ‘It is meaningless to describe the manner in which the market distributed the good things of this world among particular people as just or unjust’ (p167).
Despite the falsity of the neo-liberal claim to promote individual liberty, however, the left’s call for greater egalitarianism has not secured a broad constituency of support. Its criticisms of the neo-liberal order have lacked political impact. It is not that they are wrong, but they do not get to grips with the discourse of individual autonomy and choice which has infused popular common sense understandings of economic and social life.
Liberalism assigns the individual an agency. Marxism, socialism and social democracy have by and large not done this. They have addressed the agency of history, class, and the state, but not of the individual. The social category of the individual remained intangible in this way of thinking. The individual was understood in terms of alienation, ideology, class relations or the state. Collectivist egalitarianism suppressed individuality. Social democratic traditions levelled it beneath paternalism and moral conformity. In consequence liberalism remained unchallenged on its home turf.
And yet liberalism’s agency lacks genuine self-determination, and its utilitarian economism reduces the individual to a two-dimensional, emotionless subject. Neo-liberalism marginalises the social nature of individual relationships and disengages the human psyche from its economic order. Its political and economic coherence is reliant upon transforming non-market spheres of life into markets or proxy markets, to be governed by calculative and metrological power relations (cost benefit analysis, audit, monitoring, instrumental performance). It promotes a world without social bonds, self-reflection or sympathy, in which private individuals allocate their resources in order to maximise their utility. The story of modern capitalism and western modernity is dominated by this bourgeois calculating individual characterised by the dominance of mind over body, reason over feeling. As a response to this, an oppositional culture emerged around the cult of sensibility and the figure of the rebellious romantic. But utilitarianism and romanticism can be seen as forming two sides of the same ‘individual sans society’ coin. And both continue to reproduce themselves in various contemporary guises - the entrepreneur, the celebrity, the outsider, the artist - as potent examples of how to live. In the meantime the egalitarian, collective, class-based traditions of social democracy, marxism and socialism have been rendered inert, unattractive and historically obsolete.
Remaking the democratic left
To remake the value of a democratic left politics requires a new conception of the individual and a new model of public life and the social realm. The German sociologist Norbert Elias provides a framework for rethinking our relationship to society and to other individuals. He remarks that the historical development of self-consciousness has led to a ‘special satisfaction’ that the individual ‘owes everything he regards as unique and essential to himself, to himself alone, to his "nature", and to no one else’.4 Elias challenges this liberal orthodoxy. Human beings are interdependent. We are social and emotional beings who are fundamentally oriented toward and dependent upon other people throughout our lives. As Elias states: what we call ‘a person’s "individuality" is, first of all, a peculiarity of his or her psychical functions, a structural quality of his or her self-regulation in relation to other persons and things’ (p57). He argues that ‘it is necessary to give up thinking in terms of single, isolated substances and to start thinking in terms of relationships’ (p19). What shapes, binds and gives meaning to an individual’s life is ‘the ineradicable connection between his desires and behaviours and those of other people, of the living, the dead, and even in a certain sense the unborn’ (p43). People can only live harmoniously together if their socially formed needs and goals as individuals can find a high level of fulfillment. Elias argues that societies in complex industrial states ‘have not advanced very far in this direction’ (p147).
*Only when the individual stops taking himself as the starting point of his thought, stops viewing the world like someone who looks from the ‘interior’ of his house on to the street ‘outside’, at the houses ‘opposite’, and is able - by a new Copernican revolution of his thought and feeling - to see himself and his shell as part of the street, to see them in relation to the whole mobile human network, only then will his feeling gradually fade that he is something isolated and self-contained ‘inside’, while the others are something separated from him by an abyss, a ‘landscape’, an ‘environment’, a society’ (p56).*
Elias is not a moral philosopher who is evoking a better way to live. His description of the formation of the individual within a dynamic, historical matrix of relationships echoes the accounts of neuroscience. Human beings are ‘open systems’ permeated by other people and their feelings. In sharp contrast to the liberal individual, the mind and reason are created out of and dependent upon emotional life - ‘feelings come first’.
Elias’s work evades political judgements, he leaves that up to us. What kind of politics might take shape around his model of the individual in society? The words ‘democratic left’ contain the core commitments to an egalitarian, social and relational world which is both local and global. But in order to break up the neo-liberal hegemony, it needs to bring into politics an ideal of expressive, democratic interdependent individualism and to argue for the ‘liberty of egalitarianism’. Stuart White has described a social democratic society as one ‘in which citizens are genuinely free because they are sufficiently equal’.5 A democratic left needs to extend its ideals to institutions, social relations and identities that it has previously excluded. The struggles to incorporate the issues of gender, racial difference and sexuality, and so transform its priorities and practices, have been underway for many years, with varying degrees of success. On the periphery there is an interest in the social position of children and young people. But we also need to include in political representation non-human actors: animals, ecosystems, plant life. The obligation toward others to ensure the upholding of individual rights has to be extended towards the earth which sustains us. A political movement is not created by political discourse alone; its transformative dynamism requires idealism and cultural expression in the allegorical, poetic, aesthetic and ethical. Without these, as New Labour is demonstrating, it is lifeless.
There is no absolute historical discontinuity; we can’t simply start again. We need new and different ways of thinking and doing, but we will only find them on the basis of what we learn from the traditions we inherit. We can give the last word to Von Hayek. Writing with a mission to roll back the juggernaut of collectivism he offers us a lesson for the future. ‘The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and thereby an influence on public opinion’ (p194).
Notes
1. Theodore von Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978, p162.
2. John Law and John Urry, ‘Enacting the social’, Economy and Society Vol33, No3, August 2004, p402.
3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, p250.
4. Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals, Continuum 1991, p56.
5.‘Must Liberty and Equality Conflict’, paper given by Stuart White at the Compass Summer School, 4.9.04.
Subscribe
to Soundings a journal of politics and culture
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |