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Michael Rustin
© Michael Rustin 2007
It is difficult to argue with the description set out by Jonathan Rutherford of the onward march of capitalism over the past decades, and its displacement of more collectivist moralities and forms of organisation. This description is valuable in its comprehensiveness, and in its attention to the penetration of capitalist moralities and sensibilities into many areas of everyday life, a perception distinctive in Rutherford's work. It can hardly be doubted that this has been the dominant tendency of our time, and also that the Blair-Brown government has been more its instrument than its alternative or adversary.
Yet there is a problem in constructing a political narrative around the binary opposition of a triumphant capitalism and a nearly-defeated socialism. How can we ensure that the desirable loyalties and commitments evoked by this historic antagonism are retained, while avoiding the risk that this traditional formulation inhibits accurate perceptions and creative thinking?
The risk is of two kinds. On the one hand, socialists have often found it difficult to be specific or clear about what a socialist future would in practice be like, having to rely on rather abstract or sentimental conceptions in the absence of tangible experience. On the other hand, socialist representations of capitalism can over-simplify in a different way, making capitalism appear to be more one-dimensional and uncomplicated than it actually is. This is especially a risk when capitalism forms of life seem so pervasive and dominant, as they do now. Such a binary frame of thinking can easily become dispiriting, even defeatist, the idea of socialism coming to seem more like a historical relic or residue than a genuine possibility.
It has been an ideological project of both Conservative and New Labour ideologies to redefine the political map in such a way that, as Mrs Thatcher put it, 'there is no alternative' to the moralities and practices of the market. Class has virtually disappeared from politics as a respectable point of reference, despite dominating political debate in Britain and Europe for more than a hundred years. Yet in practice, the settlements and compromises established through class conflict and its moral advocacies remain more solidly entrenched in British, and indeed European societies, than might appear at first sight. 'The welfare state' for example, despite all expectations and lamentations, is very far from being dead. Frontal assault on the principles of a 'free at point of use' health service, and system of schooling, has proved politically impracticable, and the project to 'marketise' these disciplines, and to subject them to capitalist disciplines, has had to be given a more indirect form. This is a continuing process 'hollowing them out' from within, in their mode of finance, production and delivery, and also in encouraging their competitive modes of consumption. This is indeed worrying enough, but nevertheless it remains a fact that recent governments have found it necessary to enhance rather than reduce their commitment to these public services, and to promise their improvement, as a condition of survival. The public sector has not diminished in the share it takes as a proportion of national expenditure in recent years, and shows little sign of doing so.
Individualism, as a governing ethos, is having its problems too. When Thatcher famously declaimed 'There is no such thing as society, only individuals, and families', the reference to family was a significant if reluctant concession. Indeed there is great worry currently about the consequences of the weakening of social solidarities, whether these are expressed in criminality, or in the distresses and maladies of individuals (poor mental health, obesity, addiction to drugs, alcohol, or among children, computer games), about whether society is falling to pieces. It has become a matter of concern whether families are adequately nurturing their children, with the expansion of nursery education as one response to this. Concerns about the dilution of British national identity, through higher rates of migration, legal and illegal, are another aspect of anxiety about the weakening of social ties, and of a sufficient sense of shared membership. Attempts to impose a sense of Englishness by means of exclusion and coercion are one negative response to this situation, but the emergence of a measure of Scottish and Welsh, and even in some cities municipal identification and self-government, is a more positive one.
Government has continued to respond also to demands for a more politically just and democratic society, through measures such as the Freedom of Information Act, and through admittedly unconvincing murmurs about further political devolution. It is not so much that one should have high expectations of what the present government will on its own do about these questions, but rather that one should notice that there is an ongoing argument about whether British society can or should become more democratic and respectful of the rights of its citizens.
In other words, contemporary capitalist society remains a contested system, not a monolithic one. It suits the political right, in which for many purposes one can include New Labour, to pretend and assert that our society is more monolithic than it is. A recent report in The Guardian of a national opinion survey in which 57% of those polled chose to define themselves as 'working class' produced an instant rebuttal by Anthony Giddens, now a regular spokesperson for Blairism from his position in the House of Lords, who claimed that such polls could not be relied upon to provide meaningful information. It is more to the point to say that an entire political project has been constructed on the basis that class divisions have disappeared, and that reminders from the world of their continued existence are wholly unwelcome.
There is a systematic distortion and misrepresentation of the facts of social difference and class in the present operation of the British political system. The location of the political classes, of the press and broadcasting, and of virtually all of the centres of power in Britain in London and the south east, has the effect that this richest segment of society is able to represent itself, and indeed believe itself, to be typical of the whole, when it is far from being so. Thus the world view of those possessing income and wealth much higher than the national average comes to be equated in mind with the national experience. 'Opinion formers' convince themselves, and indeed others, that inheritance taxes are an imposition on the 'middle classes', even though in reality they are currently paid by only about 5% of the population.
Here is the paradox then of a society whose 'objective' class divisions and differences (degree of inequality, limited social mobility) remain entrenched, and are even increasing, while its official self-representation is that of a society in which class differences have more-or-less, except for a troublesome underclass, disappeared. While average incomes continue to rise, this seems to be a politically stable condition. Should they start to fall, however, social relations are likely to become once again much more conflictual and unpredictable.
New Labour governments have continually given precedence in their practice to the aspirations and interests of the more privileged and upwardly mobile, while claiming that their main concern was for the worst-off. Thus 'choice' over public services such as health or education is self-evidently going to be to the benefit of those who have the greater resources to commit to such choices (through residential location, or through superior knowledge, time or skill.) 'League tables' provide ready-made guides for such choices. City academy schools, proclaimed as a solution to low achievement, were plainly established for a quite different reason, to give middle class parents an opportunity of escape from the ethos of the comprehensive school, 'bog standard' in Alastair Campbell's notorious term. In the university system, choice and competition have produced a situation in which 'public' school pupils take up an increasing proportion of places at Oxford and Cambridge.
Neo-Weberian sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann in the 1970s and 1980s argued that Marxist (and also 'structural-functionalist') models of society were mistaken in their assumption that societies were normally dominated by a single source of social power (modes of production, in the case of Marxism, value-systems in the functionalist case). Several different power-systems co-existed and competed for dominance in actual societies, they each proposed. This argument for an explanatory pluralism, and related assertions concerning the actual diversity of class positions and interests within capitalist societies, inflicted severe theoretical damage on Marxist theories, even when, through giving serious attention to different kinds and levels of causation, Marxist theorists, influenced by Gramsci and Althusser, sought to acknowledge and internalise this complexity and multi-dimensionality within historical materialist models.
The apparent triumph of capitalism, and the assumption of an 'end of ideology' (except, absurdly, for Islam!) which accompanies it, has however lost sight of the relevance of this earlier pluralist critique of one-dimensional models of society. Just as certain kinds of critical economic materialism could lose sight of the significance of political, religious, familial and cultural orders in determining social outcomes, so the representation of capitalism by its own advocates now removes from sight its own continuing diversity and conflictual nature. It does this in order to bring history, so to speak, to an end, by silencing all those different positions and values (relational, aesthetic, solidaristic, democratic, religious, familial, indeed environmental and ecological - and more broadly, the contrast between gift exchange and market relations) from which capitalist forms of life can be criticised and contested. And indeed are, in everyday life.
But of course, this misrepresentation of society as homogeneous, classless, and without value-differences, when in fact it is not, itself influences the reality, and ideas of what is politically possible. New Labour, and Berlusconi in Italy, understood an important facet of power in modern society when they gave priority to branding, image and spin as technologies of politics. Once a certain definition of the situation has become established as reality, or as 'the commonsense of the age', alternatives to it become difficult even to conceive.
But my argument is that despair on the part of socialists is even so premature, since the struggles in which they have long been engaged continue beneath the surfaces of things, even if they are no longer being formulated and organised through the powerful adversarial class structures of the recent past. Polly Toynbee's recent recommendation in her Guardian column to Gordon Brown's Government that it should make the redress of unfairness and injustice in all spheres of life its primary vision is perhaps the best recent statement of how the inequalities of our society could now be addressed in a way which would have resonance. Nevertheless, how we can move from this widespread latent presence of alternative values and ways of seeing, to their actualisation in thought and practice, is not easy to see.
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