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Jonathan Rutherford
© Jonathan Rutherford 2007
The Left, in both its social democratic and socialist varieties, suffered an overwhelming defeat in the 1970s. When Margaret Thatcher declared that, 'there is no alternative' to liberal market capitalism it was a stark reminder that the counter movements against capitalism that had originated in the nineteenth century had lost a viable politics of social transformation. The Left had come up against a reality it was unable to alter or to fully explain. Finding itself at its historical limit, it either made its settlement with liberal market capitalism, dispersed in hopelessness or retreated into magical thinking. The defeat wasn't simply political, it was cultural and it was epochal. It was the death of a social imaginary and it is irrecoverable.
This is the context in which we find ourselves, caught in a culture of capitalism which has dispersed or assimilated the traditional left language of freedom, equality and solidarity. Any attempt to articulate a new kind of Left must begin here, not in detached systemic analysis but entangled in the demands of performativity, consumption and calculation. There are no clear signposts to follow, no established way stations that will facilitate our task. We are faced with a complexity of differences and an absence of readily identifiable political agents of change. We can call upon sympathetic traditions in politics, philosophy and sociology, but their explanatory frameworks do not fully comprehend the changing world we live in.
With the decline of the labour movement and the Left the social and cultural spaces which once gave rise to mass political struggle have largely been dispersed. There is no predicting the form or location of political agency. To create a new politics of social transformation we need to recognise spheres of experience and private pain that have been excluded from the political realm, and bring them into common voice. This is not about trying to recover the old politics or to do it better. It is about reconfiguring political space, shifting and renewing the traditional sites of political conflict, creating new political agents of change. Structural analyses and an understanding of 'the conjunctural' are important in this process, but political space is given meaning in the pre-political realm of aesthetics and ethics. We might begin with a simple question: 'how shall we live, both in our own lives and together with others?' It is a question which is concerned with one's own self but which also extends globally. It is an existential question but it directly addresses the political terrain of neo-liberalism: the social transformation of individual subjectivity.
Liberal market capitalism and an increasingly marketised state have sought to extend the economic domain into social life and restructure the social relations that constitute individuality. This process of individualisation, evident for much of modernity, has been accelerated by the imposition of entrepreneurial ways of life. Employees, students, schoolchildren, benefit recipients are made responsible for their own social capital investment decisions, risk management and life course. A culture of capitalism driven by the demands of self-enhancement, performativity and the threats of personal failure and redundancy has broken apart traditional social categories such as community, class, family. At the same time it has eroded the trust and reciprocity which underpinned these interdependencies of individuals. Non-market modes of life are squeezed between the intensifying demands for target driven productivity and commercial value, and the fear of being excluded or made useless and invisible.
Out of the traditional social categories and their cultures, new ways of life are taking shape, and with them new anxieties are emerging. These have little representation in mainstream political discourse. Contemporary pre-occupations with cultural difference, identity and belonging, love, sexuality, the body and emotions, intimacy, friendship, the meaning of life and death, are prefigurative forms of culture. Alongside them are the social problems of mental ill health, loneliness, growing numbers of psychologically damaged children, eating disorders, obesity, alcoholism, drug addiction. This malaise constitutes a form of social recession. Its symptoms and its pain are private and concealed within people's homes where they are experienced as a source of shame and personal failing.
As post-materialist anxieties and pre-occupations become more mainstream (for example the current debates over well-being, childhood, mental health) there will be a significant struggle to articulate these structures of feeling into the political realm. The ethical value of self-fulfilment and the desire to lead an 'authentic' life of one's own has entered deep into modern consciousness. This ethic of being true to one's self is relational rather than individualistic. It involves the right of everyone to achieve their own unique way of being human. Neo-liberalism chimed with this new aspiration but it served the interests of capital by extending market relations into the social realm and so depoliticising its relational impulse. Neo-liberal forms of governance proved to be self-defeating as they eroded the human interdependencies that sustain individual social life and well being.
David Cameron understands this in a way that New Labour does not. In his speech on the quality of childhood he said: "The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival.' However he ignores the fact that interdependency requires greater equality. He excludes the idea of a redistributive, social state: 'We believe that there is such a thing as society; it's just not the same thing as the state.' For Cameron social solidarity is about individual responsibility (see www.conservatives.com)
The Left can remake itself by articulating the relational impulse of ethical life and the sense of equality and justice that animates it. The paradox of living a life of one's own is its dependency upon others for the resources to realise one's capacities. This requires trust and reciprocity but it also requires a democratised, social state to ensure the fair distribution of resources. In this it might discover a way of doing its politics differently, create new agents of political change and so reconfigure political space.
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