Left futures

New Labour and the theory of globalisation

Michael Rustin

Michael Rustin analyses the weaknesses in the sociology of Tony Giddens, and hence in the social theory that underpins New Labour. His argument is that they have denied/ignored capitalism as a system, instead substituting a loose notion of globalisation. This makes it difficult for them to understand what is going on in the world....

'Are we all neo-liberals now?'

Grahame Thompson

How far can anybody now fully 'escape' the neo-liberal embrace? Has it become such an integral part of the fabric of our lives that it is impossible to remain 'outside' of it? Is the left itself now so embedded in it that it too must reassess its attitude towards neo-liberalism? ...

Techno-politics? The relevance of information technology - its metaphors and its practical potential for rethinking politics

Hilary Wainwright

This is by way of a report back. Over the past two years or so, I've been working, on and off, with an international network of new friends on an inquiry into `rethinking political organisation in an era of movements and networks'. We met mainly through the European and World Social Forums and Transnational Institute related research in Italy and Brazil. A distinctive focus has been the many influences at many different levels of transformative politics, practical and conceptual, of developments in information technology. ......

The Rise and Rise of Finance

Andrew Glyn

By facilitating economic expansion, the financial system has traditionally played a part in raising living standards. For these functions the banks have always taken their cut. However this has increased dramatically in recent decades. US financial companies earned 10-15% of total US corporate profits in the 1950s and 1960s, but now account for 30 - 40% of the total. If profits from the financial activities of industrial and commercial companies are included, finance in this broader sense could soon account for a majority of US corporate profits. ......

What does free market collectivism mean for the Left?

William Davies

What model of capitalism has emerged out of the ashes of the 1970s? While 'neo-liberalism' is the rhetorical answer, it is clear that something more subtle took hold over the 1990s. New types of collectivities were being pursued, resting on new types of market logic. Two in particular are worth thinking about: the neo-classical paradigm of 'market failure' and the Schumpeterian emphasis on innovation and 'competitiveness'. It may be easier for the Left to continue pitting itself against the Gordon Gecko ideology of individual greed, but responding to the market's own preferred collectivisms is the more complicated challenge. ......

The future of the left

Neal Lawson

After 18 years of Thatcher and ten years of Blair the left hasn't exactly covered itself in glory. It is a collective failure based on some fundamental weaknesses and a total lack of strategy. We don't know if we are progressives, social democrats, democratic socialists, socialists or what. But there are some contextual and actual reasons to be cheerful. ......

Socialism for the twenty-first century

Mary Mellor

Socially necessary work has been caught up with the unsustainable activities of the capitalist market. Wants and needs cannot be untangled and people have little choice about engaging in unnecessary employment. Socialists must argue for a socially responsive economy that would be able to provision people adequately and provide a good quality of life with minimal damage to the environment or intrusion on the needs of other species......

Tales of the City: The future in words, ideas and music

Gerry Hassan

Glasgow 2020 project was unique inviting the citizens of Glasgow to imagine different futures for the city. The creative responses it elicited show that people increasingly question the current orthodoxies on offer in policy, politics and society, and that the old-fashioned answers and critiques put forward by the left are also part of the same problem.....

Life on Mars or back to the Edwardians? The politics of inequality

Ruth Lister

Much of the mainstream political debate about inequality is profoundly depressing -Hazel Blears, for example, believes that concerns about increasing divisions of wealth stem from a politics of envy. Nevertheless, the fact that some debate is now happening gives cause for some optimism. How can the left now capitalise on this to win the argument for greater equality and for a range of policies to achieve it?....

The flat child society

Priscilla Alderson

People's flat-earth ideas about children inform most aspects of adult policy towards them. What would be the implications of thinking about children more intelligently?....

Ethical Life and the Left

Jonathan Rutherford

The defeat of the 1970s wasn't just political, it was the death of a social imaginary. This means that our current explanatory frameworks do not fully comprehend the changing world we live in. One place to start rethinking is trying to articulate the relational impulse of ethical life to new kinds of politics....

A response to Feelbad Britain

Sally Davison

Feelbad is good on political economy but weak on cultural politics. This is connected to the problems of its ideas for 'what is to be done'. ...

The Personal is Political Revisited

Sue Gerhardt

Personal misery is political. It turns people against each other, as we see, for example in the Unicef report on childhood that found that a high percentage of British schoolchildren don't believe their peers are either kind or helpful. We should aim for more equality of happiness, and seek to prevent children's life chances being blighted by the parents they happen to have. ...

From neo-liberalism to neo-republicanism

Daniel Leighton

'No citizen should be rich enough to buy another, and none so poor that he has to sell himself' Jean Jacques Rousseau
Despite being in power for a decade New Labour has failed to develop a coherent political philosophy of public life and the common good. In the absence of a coherent public philosophy the activity of the state has been driven by two imperatives that have trumped all others: efficiency and security. Daniel Leighton sketches out some key republican themes that could provide a theory of the common good and re-imagine the public domain. ...

The Welfare Reform Bill Passes into Law

John Rogers

The Welfare Reform Bill has received Royal Assent and is now The Welfare Reform Act 2007. John Rogers asks: 'where was the opposition to this draconian act?' Disabled people and others have been failed by the left and progressives ...

Ken Livingstone on London, globalisation and inequality

This is an edited extract of Doreen Massey's interview with Ken Livingstone which will appear in Soundings 36. Ken Livingstone will be giving an opening address at the Compass conference Shaping Our World on Saturday 9 June. ...

A New Political Economy

Andrea Westall

It's time for the left to create a political economy, or indeed a politics, that is able to deliver on a clear vision of society and the good life, harnessed to meet people's and society's needs and within environmental constraints. ...

A New Progressivism?

Gregor McLennan

Erik Olin Wright nicely states that alternatives to contemporary capitalist society can be elaborated and evaluated in terms of three things: desirability, viability, and achievability. I want to focus here on the first criterion, which Wright plays down in his understandable emphasis on viability. Institutional arrangements and the articulation of first principles are in fact intimately intertwined. The Left currently has no viable institutional programme partly because it is no longer obvious that we agree about what is desirable. Is the Left simply an ageing, redundant name for the plurality of oppositional currents, or does it still carry the promise of their positive summation?...

Blair's legacy to education - privatisation, privatisation, privatisation

Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen

Blair's agenda of creeping privatisation across the whole of the education system is systematic. Much of the extra funding that has gone into schools has gone into the pockets of private companies and consultancies. This needs to be tackled by an alliance of people from all sectors of education. ...

The Spiritual Dimension

Wendy Wheeler

In a post-democratic world, in which mega-corporations - wealthier than many countries - increasingly take over, or dramatically influence, the activities of states, all value is reduced to the values of the global market. In this context, in which neo-liberal capitalism takes on the features of a cult of death, it is necessary to reassert the values of life. The religion of capitalism must be challenged by a better global religion - i.e. by humanly experienced values of the human and more than human world, which also have a deeper and more satisfying experiential and spiritual dimension ...

Financialization and capitalism's resourceful remaking

Adam Leaver

Financialization is central to an understanding of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. It is not an epochal shift from before to after but an ongoing process of remaking capitalism around financial priorities. The possibility of new instabilities remains real even if apocalyptic fears have not yet been confirmed. The challenge for developing a new political economy is to understand how financialization speeds up the inherent mobility and resourcefulness of capitalism. ...

The Next Left

Mark Perryman

There is a pressing need to engage with new political formations which might challenge the Brown inheritance argues Mark Perryman ...

Leftism must be eradicated!

Andy Pearmain

The only things keeping Labour going are the political life-support systems of union funding; the spare cash of the more grateful of the new super-rich; the metropolitan political-media class, whose vested interest in Labour is that it gives them something to chatter and scribble about; and the time and attention of hard-core party members with nothing better to do with their lives. So, if Labourism is (hopefully) dying, what of its polar opposite on the rather bedraggled spectrum of British left wing politics, the curious phenomenon of leftism? ...

Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias

Erik Olin Wright

To be a radical critic of existing institutions and social structures is to identify harms that are generated by existing arrangements, to formulate alternatives which mitigate those harms, and to propose transformative strategies for realizing those alternatives. There was a time when many intellectuals on the Left were quite confident in their understanding of each of these. Today there is much less certainty among people who still identify strongly with Left values of radical egalitarianism and deep democracy.....

New Kinds of Socialism for New Global Modernities A Political Economy Approach

Pat Devine

The left needs to address the central dilemma posed by Michael Kenny in his review of the Compass Programme for Renewal (Soundings 35, Spring 2007, p101): "if not state planning, nor the market, then what can be the agent and embodiment of progressive economic governance and public management?". A possible answer to this dilemma is the concept of social ownership...

London inside-out

Doreen Massey

Doreen Massey argues that we need to be more aware of the role of London in producing corporate globalisation...

Neo-liberalism and the end of social democracy

Jeremy Gilbert

The fundamental dilemma of European social democracy is that it has no stomach for a direct confrontation with the forces which promote neo-liberalism. The European left needs to stop talking as if it was still the case that policies like fully-socialised health-care, decently-funded universities and civilized provision for the aged are still reasonable, moderate objectives, implementable by decent clever people of good intent from Whitehall and Westminster. Let's at least admit that if we want those things now, we will have to fight for them in a way that many did not think we had to 30 years ago...

The politics of public participation

Nick Mahony

This Soundings project has been instigated at a moment when discussions of how to realise and increase public participation form the moral high ground of political discourse across the partisan divides. The politics of public participation is about more than 'deliberative democracy', 'citizens juries' or a 'new localism'. Relating it to wider social, economic, cultural and organisational contexts makes it more complicated, but this doesn't make it any less important. Indeed, it has never been more vital to participate in these forms of politics...

Who still reads Gramsci?

Geoff Andrews

Gramsci's influence might have waned in recent years, but the extraordinarily diverse ways in which his thought has lived in different contexts, and has expanded the whole concept of 'the political', suggest that his ideas and insights remain vital for any rebuilding of British left culture....