Making Democratic Socialism Meaningful

In the third piece in our discussion about the Labour Party and the left, Alex Andrews argues that Labour needs the radical left more than the radical left needs it, and that Labour must avoid letting the Tories setting the agenda.

William Farrell’s assessment of the position of the left within the Labour party makes for sober reading. There is little I wish to comment upon in Farrell’s work that would not be superficial or petty. What I instead wish to do is draw out aspects of his commentary that show what Labour must avoid as well as what it must do. What is missing from Farrell’s assessment, which is perhaps appropriate for the piece, is a strong sense of just how much the situation external to the party is favourable for the Left, but there is insufficient space to discuss this here.

As Mark Fisher has suggested , the fact that the Labour party is in disarray internally especially among the left is an opportunity for the extra-Labour left to at least attempt to shape its direction in the power vacuum. As Mark says, Labour was formed outside the usual structures of parliament and the New Labour turn was the result of pressure outside the party, so there is little doubt that the possibility is there. While relatively politically weak, intellectually the extra-Labour left is saturated with ideas, analysis, philosophical perspectives and willing academics, writers and activists to explain these concepts to politicians. We outside Labour have nothing really to lose in attempt to exercise influence and much to gain – the worst that can happen is to be ignored. Autonomous political movements outside the Labour party will continue whether or not they ultimately agree with the ideas presented. This is not a situation of petition – the Labour party needs the exterior left more than the exterior left needs it. It has no new ideas so desperately needs input. Now, if the mainstream of politics is capable of absorbing an excellent book such as The Spirit Level why would a well briefed Labour politician not be able to bring the ideas of The Shock Doctrine from the more radical left to the Today programme? Naomi Klein’s book would be perfect for creating a more convincing narrative around cuts, and has the added bonus that it is true. This must be the core of Labour’s tactics – staking out distinctive positions that are so far outside the comfort zone of the Conservative party that it must retreat into simple polemic, rendered transparent its own tensions between warm rhetoric and cold policy.

This task of guiding Labour towards something different must be done with a sense of extreme urgency and seriousness. Time is too short for navel gazing. The threat is too immediate for Labour to wallow as it did for much of the Brown era, for the good of millions of people who will be affected with the Tory party running roughshod over the poorest in society and handing the public services to the inefficient, parasitic absurdities of the private sector. Losing the next election is not an option, since imagining a second term Tory government of this internal strength, vision and ideological coherence is chilling. Third parties, while laudable, neither have the organisational structures nor the mainstream pull to shift the Tories from power, something which is necessary for any form of Leftism regardless of stripe. Extra-parliamentary pressure is vital as is protest, but as Farrell recognises, political power is not “about to fall into the streets any time soon”. He must also recognise that this is only with regard with parliamentary power, which does need exercising since every day the Conservatives remain in power threatens any semblance of civilised society.

Farrell is right to find problems with Jon Cruddas’ call for Labour to embrace value orientated politics. This is not because the [Labour movement and party are not, as Cruddas opines, based upon values and ethical orientations, a moral force towards common goods, since they certainly are. Moral condemnation of certain actions of the bankers, corporations and their political pawns would not go amiss, provided that these are attached to a proper condemnation of the system as a whole – the systematic injustices of capitalism are systematic; even if the bankers become a little nicer the system remains exploitative. Yet the problem with moral arguments is that they are too easily produced by the opposition for this to be the core of the future Labour party. Recall that Gordon Brown, George Osbourne, David Cameron and Vince Cable have all condemned the financial crisis in moral terms. Cameron’s revival of one-nation Conservatism, accompanied by the more sophisticated articulation of the ambience vision in Phillip Blond’s Red Tory, with Iain Duncan Smith’s call for compassionate conservatism in the Centre for Social Justice, means that moral language and thematics is stronger in the Tory party as it has ever been and resonates with many left-wing themes. Cameron has taken the party so far in this direction that he can say in a keynote speech that the Conservatives have moved from “From unchecked individualism to national unity and purpose. From big government to the big society” - a remarkable appropriation of the left-wing critique of the 1980s. The space here is crowded and a talk of a return to core values perhaps too tempting toward nostalgia. Simply using moral language is cheap and the voters know this. Staking out a distinctive and correct position, imagining a vision and brazenly naming one’s enemy alongside moral critique is politically costly. Yet this is precisely what Labour must do.

Much the same situation presents itself when we are consider what Labour should do with the cuts-masking Big Society. Many left-wingers, myself included , have noted that many of the themes of the Big Society – localism, mutual-aid, co-operatives, community organising, direct democracy and so forth – are traditional themes of the left re-appropriated with a cynical modulation by the right, joining the dazzling history of such conceptual reconfiguration amongst neoliberals. There has been some commotion around the idea of taking these themes back from the Conservative party to their more natural home on the left – again Cruddas is a point of contact. David Miliband’s ‘Good Society’ idea during his campaign, which appears to have been absorbed by his brother, is one such attempt. Yet, in order to win an election, Labour need to avoid at all costs simply hanging on the coat tails of Conservative policy orientations. The conversion of the Big Society to the Good Society, is a move that is so transparent that is it almost laughable, and Lord Wei is doubtless chuckling right now. The same is true of the training by D. Miliband of hundreds of community organisers – doubtless laudable, but something which is official government policy!

The problem, as with value politics, is strategic more than anything else. The Tories are in power and are intending to implement as much of the Big Society programme as is possible. Any attempt to speak in similar ways will run afoul of an easy argument, already rehearsed by Cameron on several occasions, that the Labour party agree with what the Tories are doing, thematically as well as actually, and are simply opposing the measures of backward ideological churlishness. Moreover, this derision of the Big Society concept, and its inability to communicate with the voter, despite its attractiveness to policy wonks (even those like me who bitterly oppose it) as a fascinating work of political philosophy lite, should likely warn Labour that xeroxing the concept and renaming it might not be a good idea. Certainly, just as with value talk, Labour should point out that ideals of mutualism and cooperation are central to the party that is affiliated with the Co-operative Party, but these must be done to swiftly dismiss the concept rather than embracing it. Rather than casting Labour within the Big Society, as the Good Society move appears to, the line must be that the Tories are such unreconstructed Thatcherites that they had to steal from what the left has always said, but that with a cabinet stuffed full of millionaires the Big Society is totally unconvincing and baffling suggestion - pure unsullied Thatcherism is so poisonous that it required a social democratic rebrand. The same goes for the cuts agenda. The Labour line that they would cut hard, but somehow more slowly was ridiculous, they should instead be making the Keynesian arguments that Ed Balls made during his campaign. The problem is allowing the Tories to set the agenda. Labour must set another agenda, but what should it be?

I will suggest two things. It must galvanise a popular dissent against markets and it must centre its campaigning around what might be called the phenomenology of everyday working life, the day to day experiences of most people in this country. Frankly, as far as I can see, it’s this or the wilderness. These are two no go areas for the Conservatives and are even outside the comfort zone of the contemporary Labour party. Yet I believe they are vote winners as well as areas that should be pursued for their own sake.

Attacking market reason, in particular the idea that markets are always and everywhere to the good, is precisely what Labour must do. It is bracing, risky - even a gamble - but I believe it would be effective. The Tories and their backers could never take this line, much as they might dabble in co-operatives. An attack on markets would run a narrative from Thatcher, through the financial crisis (which would require an auto-critique of New Labour) to link up with the cuts (handing the keys of the welfare state to the private sector) and the actually existing market experiments forthcoming in Michael Gove’s free schools and the Browne report education reforms. Finally the narrative would connect with the cuts themselves, which in the Tories’ own insane words are being done largely to placate the bond markets which are held to have quasi-theological importance. This obsession with AAA ratings and pleasing the gods must be called out as being as ridiculous as it is.

It is vital that, as Ed Balls once said of free schools, the ‘free market nightmare’ is named and anger directed toward it. The Conservatives should be painted as the party of markets, and as a party that are living firmly in the past, turning over education, the welfare state, the NHS and universities to the invisible hand only recently found to be rather lacking. Despite the pro-market provisions in Clause IV (the phrase the “rigour of competition” seems charmingly retro post-2008), there is also the clear phrase “ the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone”. It must be argued that common endeavour is superior to markets and that markets and competition are more often than not opposed to a common endeavour as (when the question of being anti-business is doubtless raised) the Credit Crunch demonstrated. No one in the mainstream is making this argument, but almost everyone outside it knows it to be correct. Competition as a natural good must be assailed. Some things in life are too important to be left to the markets must be the line. This way Labour can be painted as the future, just as before the neoliberal counter revolution, the idea of leaving things to markets was the preserve of only 19th century quacks. There is evidence of this direction in Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference. When Miliband says New Labour was “naïve” about markets and that it moved to know “the price of everything and the value of nothing”. We must amplify this message.

This naming of markets must be accompanied by an attempt to speak directly to people’s real experiences and this must be done through the living wage which connects the two issues and embraces the wider theme that the current situation of capitalism is opposed to human flourishing and even (in the case of the environmental crisis) survival. The situation of the poor and even median worker in this country is one of long hours, low pay, often psychological illness and constant precariousness, in both the private and the public sector. Here Miliband is already beginning to talk about this, saying in his speech that “Families can’t do the best job if they are stressed out, working 60 or 70 hours a week, can’t be there when the kids get home from school, doing two or three jobs”. For the Tories, still attached to a neoclassical orthodoxy about minimum wages widely discredited empirically in the early 1990s by David Card and Alan Krueger, raising the minimum wage increases unemployment. The living wage attaches automatically to people’s life and arguing for it, when the Tories return to pro-market reflex already identified, shows their true character – a double move as well as simply being a good policy for people. Miliband speaks of the Labour party protecting people who know there is more to life than the bottom line. It is this sort of statement, though I am sure many Conservatives obviously believe it, that could never be said a Tory politician. Thus it, like an attack on markets, must be the centre of any reconstruction of Labour. Economically, The New Economics Foundation have already produced reports concentrating on economics that places human well-being and not growth or efficiency at its heart. One suggests that shorter (21) hours of work per week, which would certainly be caring about more than the bottom line. Perhaps Miliband could begin making his case for shorter hours here.

The move to attacking markets and a form of popular post-2008 popular anti-capitalism would be bold move for Labour, but it seems as if it is the only space it could properly occupy. Perhaps finally the democratic socialism printed on every party card might be meaningful again.

About this article

Published on 05 December, 2010
By Alex Andrews