|
Beatrix Campbell
© Beatrix Campbell 2008
There's a serendipitous symmetry about this debate: Is the future Conservative? For the first time in years an un-word that had disappeared from modern times, like gasmasks and typewriters, is once again on our lips. Capitalism.
Gordon Brown's speech at the Labour party conference was coy: he alluded to what should be called a 'crisis of capitalism' without using the words. He couldn't, of course, because Labourism is implicated in a love that dare not speak its name; its fatalistic ardour for capitalism positions it as part of the problem, not the solution. That does not mean that the future is Conservative, even though it might have looked like that all but a week or so ago.
The crisis of capitalism is as unsettling for Conservative fortunes in the UK as it is in the US. The Conservatives have at least come out: it's capitalism, they said at the party conference in Birmingham. Well, not capitalism as a system, but casino capitalism, coarse, crass, greedy betting-shop capitalism.
As we emerge from these conferences in the midst of a global economic tsunami, we are reminded of the idiosyncrasy of English politics - Dave's resort to the race card and old-fashioned right-offness, and Gordon's misty blether about fairness. And both of them blame the problem of inexcusable mass poverty on the poor. What is so enervating about all this is its irrelevance, its estrangement from my preoccupations, yours, and more importantly the experience of the many millions of people whose societies are framing the future.
The proletarianisation of Asia, the combustion of the Middle East, the rise and fall and rise of Eastern Europe, the ravishing tumult of Latin America, the dying of Africa - all this in the context on a perceived crisis of global capitalism - should change the terms of our national conversation. For only two decades capitalism has been given a free hand to roam the world, and in doing its thing, unrestrained, it has brought the world to the brink.
Conservatism may own the future: it looks as if it does. But it doesn't control it. That does not mean that progressive politics, on a global scale, is currently positioned to seize the time. It is still gravely wounded by socialism's own conjunctural crises - the cruelty and collapse of Bolshevism and state collectivism; social democracy's creation in the image of myopic men's movements masquerading as a labour movement.
Despite their considerable achievements, these 20th century experiments were surprisingly brief and unsustainable. They didn't resolve the structural sexism, the colonialism, the oppressions that infuse modernity's faustian grandeur. Nowhere has the tragedy of class as a social relationship - rather than merely the patois of local, subaltern cultures - been resolved.
And everywhere wars are being waged that sponsor counter-insurgencies that, in turn, release macho mayhem, rape and pillage. The dilemma of our conjuncture is the mighty crisis of capitalism and the disorientation of progressive politics, largely bereft of the means of mass organisation. And yet, and yet … progressives interested in a dynamic, inventive, cooperative, democratic and egalitarian esprit - didn't create this conjuncture, but it is the moment we have been waiting for.
Part of the Comment is free Soundings debate, first appeared 2 October
Subscribe to Soundings a journal of politics and culture
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
