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Jeremy Gilbert
© Jeremy Gilbert 2007
Watching the historic TV debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royale, I could feel my heart sinking, as a vague feeling of déja-vu crept over me. Something about Ségo's forced smiles, contrived gravitas and calculatedly moral outrage had come to seem increasingly familiar over the course of the campaign, and not comfortingly so, but it wasn't until the evening of the debate that I realized why. As strange as it may sound, something about Ségo's bearing and situation reminded me inexorably of the later years of Neil Kinnock's leadership of the Labour Party.
Views of Kinnock and his fate are mixed, and no doubt my own rather sympathetic assessment is coloured by a certain nostalgia and naiveté: this was the last leader of a major party that I actively wanted to see in No 10, but that was probably only because I wasn't old enough to know any better, having been 7 years old when Thatcher came to power. Nonetheless, for what it's worth, here is my off-the-cuff analysis of the tragedy of Neil Kinnock.
Kinnock was an intelligent and committed man whose heart and most of his head were firmly on the left. He was also a great unifier within the labour movement and a powerful orator with a real feel for the sentiments, traditions and experiences which the various strands of the movement shared. As such he was able to draw together most of them into a relatively coherent coalition, excluding only those elements so buried in their own sectarian, hard-left parallel universe that they could no longer speak a language intelligible to anyone else in the country. Unfortunately, it was precisely this native fluency in the various vernaculars of the labour movement which made him unelectable by the swing voters of Southern England. As keenly as Kinnock learned to speak the language of moderation, he always spoke it with a socialist accent, and everyone could hear it. This was precisely why the party trusted him - even while he dismantled its commitments to socialism, unilateralism and neutrality and expelled its most militant elements - but it was also precisely why the Tory press and the voters of the southern suburbs were never going to.
When Kinnock addressed the Labour conference he could be electrifying, and it was he more than anyone who put an end to the days of conference as a site of internecine blood-letting. When he addressed the country, however, his grinning banality was embarrassing, and everybody knew he it. He knew it. This was a great example of the context-specificity of charisma. Kinnock was the man the movement needed to pull it together after the crisis of the early 1980s, but nobody could have done that and sold a reformed Labour party to Middle England. To do that job required somebody who was pretty much the diametric opposite of Kinnock, someone who treated the Labour Party, its traditions and institutions, as a means to an end, but who really did believe, in his heart of hearts, in the inexorable power and inherent value of capitalism, liberalism, and aspirational individualism. That person, of course, was Tony Blair.
Royale's campaign was reminiscent of Kinnock's not because their situations and personalities are particularly comparable, but because she, like, Kinnock, has been forced to substitute an attempted likeability for saying what she really thinks. As with Kinnock vs. Thatcher, we have a socialist with deep roots in the movement coming up against a nasty but charismatic conservative combining right-wing populist sentiments with a neoliberal economic programme, knowing that they cannot offer a properly socialist analysis of the problems their country faces, and being forced to fall back on soft-focus niceness as the basis for their pitch to the electorate. The reasons why Ségolène could not make a properly socialist pitch to the French electorate are no doubt different to the reasons why Kinnock could not do the same in the UK. Kinnock faced an implacably right-wing press and, more to the point, had taken over a party that had seen its vote collapse while trying to take a radical socialist message to the people. Neither of these situations obtains in quite the same way in contemporary France. In another way, of course, the situations are very similar: the immediate historic challenge facing both Kinnock in the second half of the 1980s and the PS in the French presidential election was the emergence of a centrist bloc which had taken a considerable chunk of support away from the left. However, I want to think more now about the specificities of the current situation. What was it that Royale, like social democrats across Europe, simply cannot say today that forces them to grin like idiots and exude banality in the face of the Sarkozys and the Berlusconis?
It is simply this: that social democracy is no longer viable as a 'nice' alternative to the rigours of free-market capitalism. Policies which a majority of European voters support, and have done consistently, and almost everywhere, for decades, are not moderate as they once were. High-quality public-service provision combined with generous pensions and high level of worker-protection: in the 1970s these were policies that governments could pursue with some hope of success without engaging in much direct confrontation with the planet's more powerful institutions. This is just not the case any more. The power of the Washington consensus, the absence of a countervailing force in Eastern Europe and the competition from cheap Chinese labour now produce a situation in which these once-moderate demands can only be implemented in direct confrontation with Capital and its major institutions.
Only in Latin America and the Islamic world is any real challenge posed to neoliberalism, and in both cases this challenge is explicit and explicitly revolutionary in character. Here in Europe, voters keep voting, politicians keep talking, and journalists keep reporting, as if national governments could reinstate the social democratic programme of gradually extending the reach of public provision and engineering for social equality if they really wanted to. Of course they could, but what nobody wants to admit, but those governments know perfectly well, is that to do so would provoke immediate and direct confrontation with Capital which could only be resolved in their favour if they were backed by large, well-organised and militant movements comprising a significant proportion of their electorates. In other words, something like the revolutionary socialism of Hugo Chavez and his supporters would be pretty much the only thing that could actually make resistance to neoliberal forms of modernization viable. But this would require a degree of mobilization which Western European publics have not engaged in since the end of World War Two.
Ségolène surely knows this. She may be a moderate, but in France, neoliberalism is an object of explicit public discourse rather than being the untranscendable common-sense of mainstream political debate that it has become here. Shortly before the election, Royale announced her intention to have José Bové, hero of the French anti-capitalist movement, lead a commission on issues of international food justice. So presumably she is familiar with, and not wholly unsympathetic to, the anti-capitalist analysis promoted by Bové and others in the 'altermondialiste' (alternative-globalization) movement. Yet she cannot say it. She cannot say to the voters 'only something like a revolutionary moblization will have any hope of defending the way of life to which you have become accustomed' because even in France it has been clear for years that this is a message that the French electorate does not want to hear. Instead, many preferred the absurd platitudes of centrist candidate François Bayrou, who promised somehow to hold back the neoliberal tide which now threatens to destroy the French way of life (dependent as it is on labour being valued very highly - highly enough that workers can afford to work for only 35 hours each week and to take 2-hour lunch breaks) without any convincing account as to how he would do it. In the end, it's no wonder that more voters were persuaded by Sarkozy.
So Segolene's banality embodies and encapsulates the fundamental dilemma of European social democracy today. It addresses an electorate that broadly supports its programme, and does not want to see its living standards and social values continually eroded by neoliberalism, but has no stomach for a direct confrontation with the forces which promote that project.
Thus the European left finds itself facing one of the great paradoxes of political psychology. Historically, I think (but I could well be dissuaded from this rather glib view) that progress is achieved outside moments of extreme crisis (such as the collapse of Czarism or the aftermath of the second world war) only when relatively modest goals are backed by a real threat of militancy. The trouble is that the kind of people who are prepared to threaten real militancy are not usually the kind of people willing to limit their demands to the remotely achievable, and vice-versa. The hard left in the UK has traditionally deluded itself that by consistently demanding the impossible it would somehow inspire the working class to see through and beyond the limitations of capitalism and come to full revolutionary consciousness. Instead it has only ever made itself seem insanely irrelevant to the people it was trying to win over. On the other hand, the social democratic tradition in the UK is so constitutionally allergic to anything resembling militancy that it has only ever achieved serious reforms when its project has been broadly in line with the strategic goals of Capital at a given moment.
So what can we do about it now? Well, not much, obviously. But what we can do, we vaguely social(ist?) (Radical?) democratic intellectuals, is at least to stop talking - to ourselves, each other, and others - as if it was still the case the policies like full funded, fully-socialised, health-care, decently-funded universities and civilized provision for the aged were 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.
Incidentally, the fact that I'm using terms like 'Capital' and 'militancy' doesn't mean that I'm proposing a return to revolutionary Marxism. The great challenge for the 21st century, I think, is to find new and effectively militant ways to take on the key institutions of neoliberalism (and Capital is a good a word for them as any), to work for social and economic democratization, while accepting that the language and institutions of class struggle are unlikely ever again to be useful tools for doing that.
That's all.
Jeremy Gilbert teaches Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His two new books - Anti-Capitalism and Culture and Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism are due out in 2008, when he will also take over as co-editor (with Wendy Wheeler) of New Formations. He was a founder organiser of both Signs of the Times and the London Social Forum. He is also part of Lucky Cloud Sound System.
See also Pat Devine's Soundings article 'The 1970s and after: The political economy of inflation and the crisis of social democracy'.
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