The fifth tradition (part 3 of 6): ‘Bevanite Ellie’ and what our Keynesian past tells us about a socialist future
1 And so to part 3
This is the third part of my slow burning six part series on the future for the Left and the Labour party.
In part 1 I set out the case for the Left to remain with the Labour party as the most effective route to socialism. In part 2, I broadened the enquiry, and sought to answer the question: ‘what is the current state of capitalism in Britain, and what are the opportunities and threats for the Left?’
In parts 4 and 5, I’ll be bringing the focus back onto what the Labour party and its members should do in the short to medium term to make the party into the socialist force most of us want it to be, and what challenges we will need to face. In part 6 I’ll sum up the idea of the need to develop, conscioulsly, a ‘fifth tradition’ which builds, with interrelated intellectual and practical coherence on the best of the traditions of the Labour party and the Left in Britain.
In this part, the enquiry retains its part 2 focus on the wider political environment, but moves attention away from the enemy of capitalism and towards our own resources. Mightily observant readers will spot that this is a change of plan, as in part 2 I said this part would be more specifically about the Labour left should learn from its mistakes in the 1980s. This assessment will be built into chapter 4, as I felt the need to spend more time assessing the political ennvironment in historical context befre moving onto the nitty gritty of what we do next. It’s my six part series and I’ll do exactly what I want with it.
If you’re all sitting comfortably children, then I’ll begin.
2 The present
Now, I may be a bit slower than your average blogger, so I’ve only just worked something out for myself, with the illuminatory assistance of The Stilettoed Socialist, or Bevanite Ellie as she is known in Twitterland.
For months now, I’ve been wondering why the Conservatives have not made that much of the rising unemployment figures to paint a picture of the Labour government as economically incompetent.
Sure, there’s been the odd blogpost about how the unemployment figurerose first to 2 and then to the 3 million mark, and there was a poster knocking around looking to reprise the ‘Labour’s not working’ theme of the 1979 election. As and when the figure does move past 3 million there will be, I am sure, and notwithstanding the issues around the different ways unemployment is counted, that the Conservatives will make hay.
Even so, it doesn’t seem to be a consistent line of attack from the Conservatives, and this has intrigued me. One obvious explanation has sprung to mind. This is that the Conservatives may be afraid that mention of the three million figure may draw negative associations with the Thatcher government’s record, from some of which the current Conservative leadership has been keen to distance itself as it seeks to portray a more ‘compassionate’ image.
But then Ellie tweeted, and I understood. The Tories have a ‘default position’, she said, and it’s called the ‘national debt’.
A fear of association to Thatcherism may be a tactical reason for the Conservatives steering clear of the subject of unemployment, but the deeper, structural explanation is that the Conservative party, as arch political representatives of capitalism, no longer need to give it any attention at all.
The same is true of New Labour, not quite as arch but still pretty arch political representatives of capitalism. Its recession response has tended to ignore growing unemployment, apart from the odd expression of regret forced upon it when when a major employer has laid workers off, and instead to focus on the effects of the recession on its mantra-grouping, its ‘hard working families‘.
Labour’s rhetorical focus is somewhat less on people who haven’t got work and why they haven’t, but on recession issues which are related but secondary to not having work – personal debt, housing loss, inability to get on the housing ladder etc., the expense involved in going to university in the context of uncertain economic times, the effect on pensioners. For just one example, take a look at David Miliband’s constituency website and his ‘Real Help for Hard Working Families in South Shields’ article. Here, growing unemployment is reconfigured as ‘tough times’, and ‘people looking for jobs’ are just one of the named priority groups amongst ‘senior citizens’, ‘families’ and, notably ‘homeowners’.
This in itself is not especially reprehensible. The effects of unemployment are indeed felt as secondary repercussions of lack of money rather than the fact that there’s no job to go to in the morning. What the rhetoric does suggest, though, is that unemployment is, of itself, no longer seen as the single biggest social issue, in the way that it was in the late 1970s, and in the way that allowed the Thatcher campaign picture of the dole queue to be quite so powerful.
While the change of rhetorical focus is subtle enough in the Labour literature, Ellie is right to point to the Conservatives’ particular ‘default position’ of addressing national debt before all else. For the approaching election, the Conservatives will focus principally on the need to reduce debt as a percentage of GDP quickly, and blame Labour for having let it get so high, even though rational economists keep on warning that such a move may lead direct to double dip recession. For the Conservatives, a focus on national debt as electoral strategy, to the exclusion of all consideration about the impact, whether primary or secondary, of protracted unemployment, make perfect sense.
Taken together, both the main parties’ focus reflects an important, and definitive paradigm shift, away from any current possibility of a Keynesian settlement based on ‘full employment’.
That is, however rational the arguments of Krugman et al. that a refreshed Keynesian approach to managing the world economy will keep stand us all in good stead, it just ain’t going to happen.
Now, I know that an article in which the main thesis is that Keynesianism is dead as an ideology is likely to be greeted with hoots of derision from both left and right, and plenty of ‘where have you been for the last 30 years?’, but hear me out there, please.
What I am saying is not simply that we are unlikely to return to Keynesian policies soon because rightwing governments and their economic policies hold sway, and because the sensible arguments of Paul Krugman and his followers currently fall on deaf ears.
What I am saying, rather, is that the key problem addressed by Keynesianism – unemployment – is no longer conceived as a problem for the continuation of capitalisms; and if the key problem simply does not ‘exist’, then the policies put forward by Keynes to solve that problem – monetary adjustment to manage demand and generate ‘full employment’ – are simply no longer relevant to capitalism.
3 The past
In order to understand properly the distinction between these two position – between Keynesian policies being out of favour and Keynesian policy being irrelevant to the sustaining of capital accumulation, we need to look less at Keynesian policies themselves itself, and more at the environment in which they were developed in the 1920s and 1930s.
This is what Massimo De Angelis has to say in ‘Keynesianism, Social Conflict and Political Economy’:
‘Keynesianism is defined in terms of an expansionary strategy of growth. Embedded within a social and institutional framework that enables the different interests in society to remain on a dynamic balance within a regime of capitalist accumulation…..Keynesianism was never just an economic theory, it was also a form of social practice – it needed institutions that allowed the theory to work, and it implied a vision of power relations amongst classes in society.’
In other words, far for being a pro-active economic strategy to bring sustained growth and harmony, Keynesianism was a reaction to the social upheaval of the 30 years leading up to the publication of The General Theory in 1936. As Antoni Negri put it in 1968:
‘The October Revolution had once and for all introduced a political quality of subversion into the material needs and struggles of the working class, a specter that could not be exorcised……….Once the antagonism was recognised, the problem was to make it function in such a way as to prevent one pole of the antagonism breaking free into independent destructive action.’
Of course, in Britain it wasn’t simply the October Revolution that gave capitalism enough of the collywobbles to allow Keynesian thinking to emerge into the light of day; in the early 1930s not only will European revolutionary activity have been well in mind, but the effective actions of the Social Democratic Federation in the 1890s would still have been well in memory, just as the violence during the miners’ strikes and at Wapping are etched on the minds, and not a few skulls, of my generation.
But the key point is clear, the strategy of full employment creation through demand push expansion came about because capitalism and capitalists were scared of what might happen if they didn’t pacify the working class.
To say so is not to do down the brilliance of the technical innovation brought forward by Keynes and his immediate predecessors (Hobson included, whose overinvestment theory may be due a come back at some point). It is simply to set that brilliant innovation in its ‘Kuhnian’ context.
In essence then, capitalists in the 1930s and then postwar bought into an arrangement that let them sleep peacefully in their beds at night; as Michal Kalecki put it at the time (Political Aspects of Full Employment, 1943): ‘Discipline in the factory and political stability are more appreciated than profits by business leaders’, even though ‘Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment in the ‘normal’ capitalist system.
The post-war Keynesian consensus was only ever a temporary stand off, and by the late 1970s capitalism had found a way to accumulate capital beyond its constraints. While the transition towards neoliberalism in the 1970s is often pinned on economic stagnation in the UK and elsewhere, the reality is that it had been planned this way for some time. The Mont Pelerin Society, committed to a return to ‘pure’ capitalism was formed in 1947, even as Keynesian tactics were being consciously adopted, and received massive corporate backing from an early stage.
Neoliberalism was not brought about by the failure of Keynesianism so much as by the tactical use of a combination of economic growth slowdown and the opportunities afforded by 1960s and 1970s social liberalism so easily co-opted to ‘freemarketism’ especially in the period following the Hungarian clampdown and increased awareness of the realities of Stalinism (see David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism for a good brief review of this period).
More importantly, the opportunity to start a second wave of exploitation of the developing world through appropriation of cheap labour in addition to primary resources allowed capitalism in the industrialised world allowed it to set to one side the necessity of retaining passable industrial relations.
But perhaps most significantly, the fear had gone. By the 1980s, Thatcher felt she could use brutal military-style tactics to break strikes with impunity, and she was right. As in the 1930s, the Labour party stood to one side while the paradigm was shifted, and soon enough the Keynesian consensus, at the heart of which is the right to employment and associated social benefits was gone.
4 The future, looking back
Why this brief review of the life and death of Keynesianism?
Well, as set out above, my main contention is that Keynesian policies as we knew them will not be re-introduced just because Keynesian economists have very persuasive arguments.
Already, as the financial gives way to recessionary pain for people who did not cause the crisis and renewed bonuses for those who did, Keynesian arguments are being set to one side, and the self-fulfilling prophecy that economies will become unsustainable unless the credit rating agencies’ demands for fiscal conservatism are heeded and public spending appropriately slashed.
Already, despite perfectly sensible arguments from people like Chris Dillow that the notion of the ‘Evil Poor’ is simply illogical, people on the far right of the Labour party are happy to peddle the notion that it is the poor who are the cause of social breakdown and that a lack of employment that actually produces a living wage has nothing to do with it. For those rightwing demagogues, the rights of labour, including the reserve army of labour, are a thing of the distant past.
On the soft left of the Labour party, the approach is to argue for some kind of ethical socialism, in the basis that if we argue hard enough and long enough, capitalism will be seduced and won over. The argument draws on the history of the labour movement, and people who would like to see an ethical socialism of the type proposed are duly seduced by that selective history, in which Keir Hardie is a dreamer in the Welsh valleys rather than a Scottish miner who endured huge levels of hardship to combat Victorian capitalism.
In my view, Jon Cruddas’ New Statesman article (I can’t bring myself to read his latest speech just yet) is an insult to the memory of Keir Hardie. The focus is solely on his later life, and how he connects to the thinking of Tawney and Cole et al. However, as even Francis Williams (1950) set out in his utterly Fabian-biased but passionate review of the first 50 years of the party, the latter part of Hardie’s life – essentially his Welsh part – was the life of a man exhausted by the struggle of one who worked 14 hours a day from the age of 8, except when he kept from earning any money at all, and who helped forge the Labour party not as some kind of philosophical endeavour, but because he hated the injustices of capitalism.
And in my view, Jon Cruddas and his colleagues appeal for a new kind of socialism ignores the reality of socialist history in Britain – that the advance of Fabian thought was made possible by the strikes organised by the Social Democratic Federation, and that Keynesianism and the post-war temporary class consensus was made possible by the pre-war lack of it.
What I should stress here is that I do not seek to be ‘anti-intellectual’. I pride myself on the fact that I learned to read proper books, and unlike Dave Osler I have no problem with Jon Cruddas reading and quoting from as many thinkers as he feels like. My problem with Jon is simply that he’s read all the right books but come to the wrong conclusions, and that he’s judged the successes of Labour history to be a result of those who wrote about it best, rather than those who struggled for it (though of course there can and should be an overlap here).
Nor do I wish to suggest that Jon has no part in the Left’s future, as long as he is able to take on board what he’s got wrong to date; he is clever, and he is eloquent, and he can be a 21st century version of the 19th century Clarion editor, Robert Blatchford; poetry and passion have always played a great part in the Labour movement, and a capacity to engage and motivate with words is as necessary as it ever was. Jon could be just the man if he knuckles down.
5 The future, looking forward
The future of socialism does not lie in the building of electoral coalitions, however well it’s done. On which argument see these debates between Compass members Tom Miller and Sunny Hundal, and Dave. The Labour party’s tried that. We got New Labour (see part 4 for more detail).
The future of socialism lies in re-establishing a working class identity, an identity which carries primacy over but absolute respect for the other identities which have been forged through admirable struggle over the last 30 years.
That identity can only be forged through its differentiation from, and essential antagonism to, the interests of the other primary identity – that of the ruling class – and our struggle with it for power. This is a difficult task, certainly, because the working class is not as socially homogenous as it was; the notion that it is having your labour exploited than what kind of car you get to drive or whether you live in a council flat or not, or even whether you’ve got work or never had that opportunity.
You don’t overthrow 40 odd years of the cultural hegemony at one go, and a tactical approach which fights and celebrates small victories will be needed, but winning and building on small victories will be more effective in the long run than appealing to the better nature of capitalism. Capitalism is a force and a system, and, like the weather system, it can’t be appealed to.
In part 4, I’ll look at exactly what those small victories might be, and how the Labour party can go about winning them.
6 The future, looking forward sustainably
Working towards a position where capitalism has to set up another ‘spatio-temporal fix’ to accommodate labour within the ongoing system of capital accumulation may lead to some form of post-Keynesian settlement. The problem is that the Keynesian settlement was based on an economic strategy of expansion fuelled by increased demand.
The 21st century settlement will need to do it different, because continued expansion could destroy the world, which is just about the only thing which overrides the primacy of the interest of the working class. Any settlement that occurs will need to reflect worker demands for the protection and replenishment of natural resources by capital, and towards that end workers do need to work with the green movement, but in a reversal of roles to those held at the moment, where the green movement believes it has the key role, and workers are expected to follow – normally by submitting themselves to some form of ethical plan for the greater good in a way which allows capital to continue to get away with the real abuse of natural resources. I can’t put it better than Patrick Rolfe did in a recent letter The Guardian over the Vestas sit-in, taking to task the ‘blindspot’ of famous holier-than-thou green activists George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth:
‘The ongoing protests at the Vestas wind turbine factories demonstrate one thing – the fight for sustainability can, and must, be a fight pursued by workers and ordinary people against those who seek profit over sustainability. In short, the struggle must be a class struggle. Kingsnorth points out that ‘our’ civilisation is based on the exploitation of natural resources. However, ‘our’ civilisation is also based on the exploitation of people, and unless we fight both of these as one battle, a grim future surely beckons.’
7 The future, concluded
And so, thanks to Bevanite Ellie and her intuitive twittering, there you more or less have it.
Keynes didn’t bring about Keynesianism. Workers’ struggle did. Keynes did the paperwork, and did it very well indeed
Keynesianism is often regarded as something like the ‘middle way’, although Keynes himself accepted that his work was in defence of capitalism in its hour of need rather than in favour of any socialist line of thought. He never had much to say about wages, for example. As Paul Krugman says in his recent well-worth reading essay:
‘Keynes did not, despite what you may have heard, want the government to run the economy. He described his analysis in his 1936 masterwork, ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,’ as ‘moderately conservative in its implications.’ He wanted to fix capitalism, not replace it.’
Last time, the force of the working class was with him in his conservative tinkerings with the system, and the repair job lasted 30 odd years.
This time, to get to a new environmentally sustainable post-Keynesian settlement will require the same.
As the old saying goes, ‘you don’t have to be a Marxist to believe in social justice’. And, likewise, you don’t have to want a full-blown revolutionary to understand that you need to engage in revolutionary struggle to get towards some form of social justice, however, ‘reformist’ and placatory to the ruling class.
At heart, and unlike my Blograde Dave, I’m not sure I do want a full-blown revolution, unless it comes with cocoa and tasteful soft furnishings. But I do know that even he’s going further than me down that road, it makes sense to head his way for a while, till (a little bit like Hardie, if I can make so bold with the comparison) I’m too knackered to do anything but sit in the valleys and philosophize.
Note to self: must read more Jurgen Habermas.
(Links by Dave).
Interesting the dichotomy between profits and sustainability. Sustainability, in reality, should really be defined as yet one further type of profit. It would then be far easier to sell its virtues. Friedman limited the moral definition of shareholder profit to pecuniary gain. He was wildly wrong. Shareholders should take on board the wider responsibilities that living on this planet of finite resources implies, and understand their gains in such terms.
As far as Keynesian thinking is concerned, I’ve recently begun to wonder if what you seem to suggest here isn’t in fact quite true. In ameliorating the worst elements of capitalism, it allowed it to continue more or less untouched. But then I’ve always felt capitalism was a word like love – too broad to mean anything useful, to shallow to productively inform our understanding of the world.
Not everything that capitalism does is bad because not everything we call capitalism is capitalism.
Mil, if I interpret what you are saying right when you say that sustainability should be one further type of profit, you mean that sustainability should pass from an externality to being included in the full price of the provision of goods and services. But surely this is just passing the cost along to consumers? And surely this would increase inequality?
As for the bit about “capitalism” being too broad a word, no idea what you’re talking about. Capitalism, if I had to use the briefest definition I could, is a system of capital accumulation and market exchange based on private property and the free right of any man to enter into a contract. That being so, the externalities produced are directly the fault of capitalism.
Consumers currently pay for everything anyway, as governments pursue them aggressively and assign them the responsibility (both literally as well as through local council taxes) of recycling the rubbish large companies need to market and push their products. When I suggest shareholders should take on board their wider responsibilities, I suggest profit should be defined in terms of more things than just money. A profit *index* perhaps, rather than gross company profit measured in terms of pounds and pence, which included the added value of saving a planet and would allow those companies which spent more on the environment to report back to the stock market on the basis of this wider understanding of what profit means.
I’m suggesting shareholders think about more than money when they decide to invest in a company.
I do, when I decide to put my money in bank. I’m sure lots of other people do at the moment. Simple savers do not have to think only about short-term gain and in terms of how much money this apports them. Why should shareholders be any different?
Externalities are only externalities because we choose to allow factories to pollute our atmosphere. If we imposed a closed-system understanding of the total process, from conception of a product or service to disposal of its end-of-life bits and pieces … well, I suppose as customers we’d be billed for the price. But the market wouldn’t sustain heavy increases, and man and woman’s creativity would soon find a way to reduce the costs of sustainability if we obliged companies to incorporate everything into their processes. In any case, as consumers and end-users, it’ll either be companies or governments which’ll pass on the bill, so – really – there’s no difference here.
As far as capitalism is concerned, certain externalities would exist even under socialism. Or, at least, certain aspects of community life would have to be paid for by those who were not responsible for the needs and wants thus generated. Facilitation of an environment which allows people to work and play means some tabs will always be picked up by those who are not directly responsible. How more socialist can you get than that?
The future of socialism lies in re-establishing a working class identity, an identity which carries primacy over but absolute respect for the other identities which have been forged through admirable struggle over the last 30 years.
I disagree with this, because I don’t think the numbers will be enough. Most people want to see themselves as aspirational middle class, and eventually you won’t have many jobs people traditionally associate with being working class.
Of course your definition of WC will be different, but my point is that if people don’t buy into those categories then you’ll be stuck. And besides, the Labour coalition has always been supported by middle-class lefties who feel they are part of the coalition.
Part of the problem, I feel, is that you’re definining association here strictly by the class people are in.
I don’t think it quite works like that. I think people see themselves as part of the left or right depending on the issues they’re interested in, and then what rhetoric they hear from the political sides. I should explain more but don’t have time today… hope that made sense.
In reply to Sunny, I actually think both the OP and Sunny’s reply miss a few tricks. The most obvious being that even in Compass’ limited analysis, class ‘aspirations’ are clearly a tool of the hegemonic ideology. In this regard, there’s no reason we shouldn’t fight them too, while fighting against other equally harmful ideas which challenge solidarity (which is a useful concept even if one doesn’t agree with the structural notions of class): racism, homophobia etc.
There’s more to say but this was a whistlestop comment.
Sunny
I think you are quite right to point to this as the hub of our disagreement, and I think Dave is quite right with his provisional answer; ‘aspiration’ is a key aspect of the hegemonic control exerted over the ‘working classes’.
Dave is also right to point to the fact, because I have not covered the concept of hegemony to date in this 6 parter, I have missed a trick. In my defence, it has been my intention to draw this out in fourth part, in which I’ll look at our 1980s experience, the last time the Labour party went through a period of leftist coalition building, and during which time it forgot the basics, in exactly the same way Obama and Cruddas euphoria would have us do the same this time around. There were some achievements then, most notably at local levels, but the achievement were paid for with even bigger losses (and I don’t claim that I knew that at the time, as I was taken in by the gains and the rhetoric of ‘post-Marxist’, identity-group left politics. I’d rather we didn’t go down that road again. I will cover this stuff in chapter 4, but i think Dave is right to suggest the basic notion of hegemony needs drawing forward at the very least into this chapter (in any redrafting we do of this extended essay), given its importance to the argument (a matter with which you concur by the very fact that you raise it).
I use ‘working classes’ above in quote marks because, in keeping with your own view and with a recent brief comment to and fro at Anthony Painter’s site, I think it is eseential to be clear what we mean; here, I used the term in its ‘ecnoomist’ sense to mean that class of people whose labour is skimmed by capitalism. Like Anthony, I think it’s essential to distinguish this from the singular term ‘the working class’, which i’ll use to describe a smaller-than-before grouping of people who define themselves as such in socio-cultural terms (Anthony tells me this follows Hobshawm, but I plead ignorance.
So far, so good, I think. The terminology is clunky simply because there is a continuing struggle for power over whose meaning wins out. In the end, I don’t care whether the ‘working classes’ in the economist sense take on a different name – the economically subjugated, the dispossessed, whatever. This is a matter of lexicon, and like Dave I can adapt to different ones, and use different ‘registers’. Indeed like all of us. But I’ll stick with the ‘working classes’ here as we both know what we’re talking about.
Now let’s try a straightforward example of what I/we mean by the hegemomic control exerted by capital through its appeal to the working classes that they should aspire to be something other than working class i.e. middle class.
Two familes live in the same street, in the same 2 up 2 down house built by the council in the late 1950s. One family decides, in 2002, to use the provisions of the right to buy legislation, to become a homeowner and buys the house at the reduced rate available, using the then easy credit available to get a mortgage at 2.5 times the sole income earner’s wage. One rationale-as-safety valvel used for this is that the children are then 12 and 10, and in a few years will be out and work and able to contribute to the mortgage repayments should the need arise. In 2004, things are going well so the mortgage is extended to buy a nicer car.
The other family decides to stay in rented accommodation. In 2004, the council decides that the decline in rented stock, meaning reduced rental income to the Housing Revenue Account set alongside the poor state of the stock because of years of underinvestment, stock transfer should take place to a local housing association. Rents remain the same, as per the promise. One year later, that housing association merges with a bigger one, which is not bound by the same contractual obligations on rents, and rents start to rise dramatically.
Come 2009, matters are different. The sole breadwinner in the owner-occupier house has been laid off, the children are victims of the recession and are on the dole. Payments are in arrears, and the house is due to be repossessed. Things are stressful.
The other family is struggling now to make rent payments, as neither of their children can get work either, and mum has a work-related illness and can’t work One of the children has a partner and baby now, but they are having to live with mum and dad because there the council waiting list is at 3,000, largely as a result of the sell off of stock over the last 25 years. Things are stressful.
I could go on, but you’ll get the fairly simple point. One family has a middle class aspiration of home ownership, while the other doesn’t, but both suffer. However, the immediate sources of their stress, and alienation from the politicians who put them in this mess, and they cannot be united in their response – one is a ‘homeowner’ of the type that David Milliband has promised to defend, the other is on the verge of becoming a member of the ‘evil poor’ that Tom Harris has promised to take his moral outrage on.
The appropriate challenge for the left is to help both families see that it’s capitalism and its state apparatus, not each other, that’s screwed up their lives and their mental health. This isn’t easy – I never said it was – but if we don’t do that the Left is not going to go forward beyond the kind of convenient electoral/temporayr coaltion which appeals the very ‘aspirations’ which caused the problems in the first place. It’s an enormous job for the Left, because there’s at least 30 years of very effective hegemomic use of the notion of aspiration, and associated divide and rule tactics, to combat.
If you don’t believe me, at least listen to what Stuart Hall has to say in an early 1980s essay on the Gramsci now being appropriated by Jon Cruddas to defend a political approach that ignores the fundamentals of ‘ecnomomism’, in a way Gramsci never actually did:
‘It is by studing this ‘counter-hegemony at work that one begins to understand what a hegemonic poltical porject might look like. Hence it also Gramsci who has helped me to begin to understand the enormity of the talk of renewal which socialism and the Left mow has before it if it is every to beocme a truly hegemonic project.
I mean by that, capable not simply of winning and holding office, or of putting into effect an outdated programme, but of laying the basis for a new conception of life, a whole new type of democratic socialist civilisation.’
Lastly, Sunny, thanks for engaging with the loads of words scribbled. As you can tel, I think, this rejoinder to your comment has helped me clarify not just the structure of this developing eassy, but I also to raise to your challenge (made to Dave, but my proxy to me) to set things out in a different ‘register’. Paul Richards sets out the need, in his Progress article, to have ‘policies’ we can sell on the doorstep in 30 seconds; while I disagree profoundly with what his ‘policies’ are, and even with his non-doostep person idealisation of what Labour party members actually do on doorsteps, he and you do have a point about the need to use language appropriate to the situation (hence my call for Cruddas to be the new Clarion editor). That doesn’t mean changing the arguments to suit the hegemonic language of the right, because that becomes defeat writ large; it means reclaiming language where we can (e.g. the battle for the term ‘working classes’) and where we lose these battle adopting new forms of expression that can be understood by those we try to reach. But that’s another essay, perhaps.
“The Labour party’s tried that. We got New Labour (see part 4 for more detail).
The future of socialism lies in re-establishing a working class identity, an identity which carries primacy over but absolute respect for the other identities which have been forged through admirable struggle over the last 30 years.”
I can understand why these are tensions hat pull in opposite directions (indeed, that contention forms the core of my politics), what I can’t understand is why they must be mutually exclusive binary opposites. I think winning election victories is absolutely key to sustaining a movement, but that first it’s important to guarantee a platform on which you can build one. One or the other is simply not good enough.
Re. ‘aspiration’ as a tool of hegemonic ideology, I quite agree with you, but I think key to challenging the notion as it is articulated (i.e. in its context as such a tool) is a demonstration of the implicit and deliberate bias with which it is used, best done by comparison ( the question posed therfore whould be what is ‘aspiration’? Is it really about simply individual progress while others languish or are curtailed?).
TUC conference Brown got up and I had to check twice to see if it was Brown speaking or Cameron, this bloke is so far gone he still thinks his idea or Cameron’s idea’s or anyone ideas are going to win him the next election.
Jesus he even started about education education .
Labour going out and will be staying out for a long long time, by the time New labour finally dies I’ll be to bloody old to care.
Tom; on the current basis, yes it is. It’s that simple. And to the extent that socialists begin using the idea of aspiration in the hopes of rebranding it, they find themselves caught within the internal logic of the meaning aspiration must necessarily have under capitalism: individualism.
Good article, and I was particularly struck by the idea that reducing unemployment might just not be a priority any more – very interesting (and troubling). Just wanted to comment on:
“And to the extent that socialists begin using the idea of aspiration in the hopes of rebranding it, they find themselves caught within the internal logic of the meaning aspiration must necessarily have under capitalism: individualism.”
I don’t think socialists should talk about aspiration (which in the public debate is assumed to be bound up with individual advancement), but I’m not sure that the internal logic here is quite as strong as all that.
I was really struck when I was a councillor by the extent to which people’s aspirations were about their community and expressly opposed to aspiration-as-individuals-getting-rich. I blogged about this – Middle England, home-owning, Daily Mail readers absolutely hated buy-to-let landlords because the actions of these landlords harmed aspirations to live in a nice, decent area where people knew each other.
By acting on these concerns with local campaigns, we got lots of new activists involved, we increased support for things like new social housing developments, and we got to a stage where local homeowners gave time and money to help council tenants when they were flooded (and Labour got 60% of the vote). By responding to people’s real aspirations, rather than those which capitalism seeks to impose on people, I think we can start to build these alliances amongst working-class people that Paul is talking about.
Robert
Yes, I would have preferred Gordon Brown to say something different too.
Tom, Dave, Dom
I think the question of what language we use to desribe what we want and how we want to get there – whether to seek to re-appropriate terms which currently mean something else, or whether we accept that often such tersm are irrevocably ‘lost’ and actually damage the socialist cause even when we use them – is a fascinating one something I’ll try to return too. As a general point, though, we shouln’t be scared to develop our own terminology on our own terms.
Enjoyed this post a lot.
On the points about unemployment, there’s statistical data to back-up your claim that it’s now come to pass that higher unemployment just is something the post-1979 settlement accepts:
http://badconscience.com/2009/08/19/is-high-unemployment-a-policy-choice/
skip the text (it’s a bit confused) and just go to the graph showing unemployment rates. Notice that post1979, the lowest levels of unemployment were permanently above the highest levels experienced from 1970-79. That is, post-Thatcher unemployment never went below the worst days of that supposedly terrible decade.
Which says somethnig about how popular perceptions now define and understand “terrible”…