Alex Law | ukwatch.net

Resisting New Labour’s ‘hard labour’

Ellie Keen — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:48:15 +0000

Few readers of Variant will be unaware of New Labour’s welfare ‘reform’ and public sector ‘modernisation’ agendas. Since 1997 the restructuring of welfare and public services has been a central component of the government’s political project. Welfare reform was viewed by Blair and is presently by Brown as contributing to a neoliberal vision of the UK as a modern, lean, flexible and competitive economy. Much has been written about the many and varied forms that privatisation has taken, of the contracting-out of public services, of Public Private Partnerships/Public Finance Initiatives (PFI/PPP), and of the increasing encroachment and indeed take-over by the private sector in the delivery of many key ‘heartland’ public and social services. In contrast, there has been much less concern with how these reforms are impacting on the workers involved in delivering services. Our concern here is to draw attention to some of the many ways in which welfare workers are being adversely affected by the restructuring of the welfare state and, more importantly, how they are resisting New Labour in new and significant ways.

Welfare Workers on the Frontline

Our focus is on workers in what we call the ‘welfare industry’ – that is, workers who are involved in diverse ways in both the production and delivery of social and welfare policy and practice. In short, ‘welfare industry’ is not just an umbrella label for those six million or so workers employed in what’s left of the welfare state in the UK – such as NHS workers, teachers, university workers, social workers and care workers – but it also includes important sections of the civil service, in areas of criminal justice and public administration. Beyond a narrow focus on the traditional institutions of the welfare state, the notion of a ‘welfare industry’ also encompasses non-state sectors, chiefly the voluntary sector and private provision. Speaking of a welfare industry also helps to focus attention on the specific way that welfare functions are being further industrialised and degraded using technological systems, such as call centres, and centralised managerial commands and targets to restructure the welfare labour process. This has involved the flexible intensification of worker effort during working time. Work time has also been elongated in a variety of ways with the loss of ‘porous time’ and breathing space in both worker-worker and worker-user social interactions. Additional duties have been imposed on welfare workers, especially administrative burdens, creating tensions with their core duty for the care and well-being of welfare users. That this is having morbid consequences is amply testified by the scores of deaths¹ in British hospitals as a result of the managerialist obsession with cost-cutting and targets.

Many workers in the welfare industry deliver services to some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society. However, what is also significant is that such workers, themselves often low waged, are central to the delivery and maintenance of public services, in the process supporting other disadvantaged groups, including those who struggle to survive on what the state provides through benefits. Public sector workers, and in particular those involved in the welfare sectors, are not simply delivering services, administering benefits and managing poor people. They are also tasked with the delivery and implementation of government social policy initiatives, such as workfare/work activation programmes which force those in poverty into low paid employment and vulnerable forms of work. ‘Work’, understood as paid employment, underpins New Labour’s vision. Public services are central to achieving the goals that this vision generates. Public servants are therefore critical to delivering not only services but also central to implementing New Labour’s political and ideological objectives.

Work, Work, Work! - The World of New Labour

‘Work’ lies at the heart of the entire New Labour project. With Gordon Brown’s new found ‘Protestant ethic’ being rather self-consciously aligned to the ‘spirit of neoliberal capitalism’, work is seen as the most morally elevating means through which poverty can be alleviated. Work represents the ‘best’ form of welfare! Work is central to ‘social inclusion’. Work is salvational; its morally uplifting properties enables the ‘socially excluded’ to be transformed into model citizens, exercising the opportunity to make choices and consume as part of ‘respectable’ or ‘mainstream’ society. However, at the very time when New Labour has sought to valorise work as a central dimension of daily life and personal existence, what is going on in the workplace, the site where society’s ills are going to be cured, has, with a few honourable exceptions, been neglected across large swathes of academic, media and political discourse. This, despite the fact that much welfare work is carried out in full view of the public.

In the meantime, waged work has not stopped being an exploitative social relation. For many groups of workers in the welfare industry things have, if anything, deteriorated in the last decade. But this also throws up its own contradictions as it rubs up against certain limits to how far services can be degraded, not least the permanent tension between the depreciating nature of the welfare labour process and the end product of enhancing the capacities of welfare users.

Public sector workers and the services they help to provide have undergone profound changes in recent decades. To name only some of the more obvious forms that this has taken: Privatisation, Marketisation, Contracting-out, Outsourcing, Profit centres, Competitive tendering, PPP/PFI, ‘Best value’, Managerialism, Targets, League tables, Performance indicators, Audits.

The consequences of these ‘reforms’ for welfare workers has been far-reaching. Workers now fear that the loss of a contract will lead to redundancies or a wage cut or both. Private companies attack collective bargaining and place constraints on effective trade union organisation. Against employer and government hostility to collective organisation is their preference for exercising ‘control at a distance’ to advance the project for the individualisation and atomisation of the workforce. This works through pseudo-market mechanisms, performance related pay, increased pressures to ‘self-manage’, a greater emphasis on ‘emotional’ skills wage and qualities, regrading and reclassification, casualisation, increased workplace regulation, and inspection, and flexibility in its various guises. In the process, work intensification and extensification is advanced, in some cases to breaking point. Job devaluation, a declining sense of personal worth and job insecurity leads to increasing levels of workplace stress and related illnesses. Alongside deskilling and the loss of autonomy there is also employer-led demands for reskilling and upskilling, often leading to ‘qualification inflation’ and therefore a loss of market value for credentials, directly contradicting claims that engagement in lifelong learning will equip workers with the human capital so as to make them into highly marketable assets. And then there are the growing numbers of cases of the substitution of labour through the use of new technologies and ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies), from NHS call centres to online educational packages.

New Labour’s social policy agenda demands ‘more and more’ from public sector workers as they struggle to meet the bewildering myriad of targets and strategies that have been deployed since 1997. As Fairbrother and Poynter argue:

“State employees are increasingly entreated to take on tasks that their occupation previously did not require – teachers are engaged in health promotion activities, university lecturers are encouraged to ensure the employability of their graduates and doctors are called upon to advise on healthy life styles rather than specifically treating illnesses….In this sense, the social and moral dimensions of the customer-oriented approach have been deployed to reform the relationships between professionals and their various publics and erode the monopolies of skill and discretion over decision-making and job content that professional staff traditionally exercised.”²

Market modes of delivery along with aggressive and pervasive managerialism are restricting the ‘space’ that many welfare professionals once enjoyed to provide the services and support that service users require, resulting in a significant deskilling of work tasks. Routinisation and work degradation is contributing to what Richard Sennett calls “the spectre of uselessness” that is now gripping increasing numbers of professional workers in the welfare industry.³

Work intensification under New Labour has led to millions of workers facing increasing demands on their work time. Successive and multiple policy measures – ‘initiative-itis’ – has led to already hard pressed workers undertaking additional responsibilities. In some local authority nurseries, for instance, nurses find themselves taking on additional tasks to meet newly implemented nursery curriculum targets, regular inspections and workplace audits. Such examples prove that New Labour has today made satire seem superfluous, since these very same low-paid, over-worked female workers are also expected to play a strategic role in ‘helping’ young unemployed mothers back into the labour force – often in low paid childcare work! The story here is all too often one of more-and-more for less-and-less pay. In other areas of the public sector, for example in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), maintaining service provision against a background of large scale redundancies has been achieved only by fewer-and-fewer workers doing more and more. The DWP has struggled to achieve the same level of service provision with less and less of a workforce.

It is important to recognise, however, the unevenness of reform and modernisation (and worker unrest and resistance) that exists across different sectors, for instance in relation to the use of PPP/PFI or the vastly different levels of contracting out and redundancies. This awareness, however, does not detract from the point that public sector work in the UK is a world that has undergone far reaching change, change that has all too frequently been detrimental to and at the cost of the workers delivering public services. Managerialism and the drive to restructure and intensify work while curtailing wages and worsening conditions is a self-contradictory process that relies on the emotional, intellectual and bodily creativity of the labour that it attempts to dominate through managerialist regimes and controls held at a distance. Degrading the work process also invites resistance at the point of welfare production in ways that cannot be captured by even the most strenuous supervisory regime. Workers may elect to mechanically follow orders to protect themselves from managerial opprobrium. In which case, the affective embodied side of worker interaction with user groups like patients, clients or student, suffers. Measuring output in the form of targets and internal audits gives little indication that worker commitment has been withdrawn and disaffection increased. So long as boxes are ticked and numbers are massaged then managers are protected and the embodied nature of the welfare labour process becomes a matter of mutual indifference.

The changing nature of public sector work is part and parcel of New Labour’s Third Way/Neo-Liberal reconstruction of the idea of the ‘public’ itself, a process that crucially involves blurring the boundaries between public and private forms of provision. This involves a shift towards the privatisation of public goods and services and the greater involvement of the private sector in ‘public’ service provision. Neither should we forget that much welfare work, particularly caring work, is dependent on unpaid forms of labour in the private realms of family, household and community, overwhelmingly carried out by women, many of whom are also providing paid labour in public and welfare services outside the home.

Co-existing with the emphasis on paid work this there is also an attempt to reconstruct the ideal citizen both as a citizen and a consumer.⁴ Here the overarching context is one of consumerism and the extension of ‘choice’. Under Blair and Brown ‘consumer choice’ had something of an occult quality about it - the more fervently it was invoked the less its ideological magic worked! To quote Blair:

“In reality, I believe that people do want choice, in public services as in other services. But anyway, choice isn’t an end in itself. It is one important mechanism to ensure that citizens can indeed secure good schools and health services in their communities. Choice puts the levers in the hands of parents and patients so that they as citizens and consumers can be a driving force for improvement in their public services. We are proposing to put an entirely different dynamic in place to drive our public services; one where the service will be driven not by the government or by the manager but by the user – the patient, the parent, the pupil and the law-abiding citizen.”⁵

The promotion of choice reflects a desire to reconstruct the role of the state, no longer always and everywhere the provider of services – except at times as a last resort – but as an ‘enabler’ and regulator of services provided by other ‘partners’ and ‘stakeholders’. In repeated speeches and announcements the emphasis on choice at the heart of New Labour’s project contained a sometimes implied and sometimes explicit threat of dire consequences for public sector workers. Public sector workers often exist as an ‘absent presence’ in political discourse. It is noticeable, for instance, that Blair’s ‘belief’ about ‘people’ wanting ‘choice’ that other ‘people’, namely welfare workers, are curiously absent at a denotative level while they are clearly present at the connotative level. Implicit in this comment is a stark warning to public sector workers that they have to become more customer focused, and this requires far reaching changes in the working lives of those concerned.

It is well understood that New Labour views public sector workers as an outdated obstacle to modernisation and reform, therefore undermining social policy objectives. At Labour’s Spring Conference in Cardiff in February 2002, Blair drew a distinction between ‘reformers’ and ‘wreckers’, the latter category referred to public sector workers and unions who were resisting ‘modernisation’. Speaking to the British Venture Capital Association in London in 1999, Blair also talked of the bearing “the scars on my back” from trying to reform welfare. This was followed up at the Labour Party Conference in 1999, where Blair made his now infamous “forces of conservatism” speech in which he identified some groups of education and health professionals as holding back the government’s reform programme. And again in 1999 Blair attacked what he saw as a “culture of excuses” among school teachers who were resistant to aspects of his reform agenda. Such views played a significant role in helping to ferment the growing disillusionment with New Labour among public sector workers, fuelling continuing and growing resistance.⁶

Welfare Workers: Resisting New Labour

Increasing numbers of public sector workers are challenging the government’s reforms. In the process they are contesting some of the core ideological assumptions of New Labour. Opposition to New Labour’s policies varies considerably across different areas of the public sector and within hierarchically-organised welfare sites, for instance, between different groups of workers in the NHS. However, since the mid- to late-1990s, there has been continual and recurring episodes of industrial action of various kinds involving social workers, teachers, lecturers (both in further and in higher education), nurses, hospital ancillary staff, nursery nurses, home helps and care workers, and local authority librarians among others. Welfare delivery has become a central point of industrial relations disputes across the devolved UK.

Few would have predicted that New Labour’s reforms would have met with the levels of resistance from across the public and welfare sectors that have been witnessed since 1997:

Selected Industrial Action in the Welfare Industry 1998-2007:

• Library Workers -1998

• Social Workers - 1998, 2004, 2005
• Care Workers - 1998, 1999, 2000, 2007
• Teachers - 1999
• FE College Lecturers - 2001, 2006
• Local Government Workers - 2001, 2006, 2007
• Hospital Ancillary Staff - 2002
• University Lecturers - 2004, 2006
• Civil Servants (PCS) - 2004, 2005,2006, 2007
• Nursery Nurses - 2004
• Housing Association Workers - 2006
• School Ancillary Staff - 2006
• NHS Logistics Workers - 2006
• Local Government Workers - 2006, 2007

Highlighted are some of the key disputes and struggles in the ‘welfare industries’ that have featured since 1997, but this list is by no means exhaustive of all forms or instances of resistance to New Labour’s reforms. What is notable is the ways in which groups of workers, once often viewed as ‘passive’ or unlikely to take action, have found themselves under attack and have organised to fight back and challenge New Labour head on. The case of librarians in Glasgow in 1998 is one example of this, as are strikes among university lecturers and nurses. A particularly important example is the Scotland-wide local authority nursery nurses strike in 2004 which saw around 5,000 mainly female and relatively low paid workers take action to preserve conditions while challenging employer demands for local pay agreements.⁷ In the case of lecturers, nurses, social workers and other ‘professionals’ – that is, those often classed and sometimes dismissed as middle class, white-collar workers – organising to contest welfare restructuring has also become a permanent feature of working life.

As was widely documented at the time, during its first two years in government New Labour remained committed to the tight public sector spending constraints put in place by the previous Conservative administration. That this did not lead to widespread resentment and anger among public sector workers is largely due to the ‘honeymoon’ period that Labour enjoyed during the first few years in office, subsequently helped by the easing of public sector spending restrictions from 1999 and after. The promise that New Labour would deliver, however, was soon followed by a growing disillusionment with the New Labour Government among some groups in the public sector workforce, traditionally among Labour’s core voters. It was to become increasingly evident that although there would be considerable increases in public expenditure, especially for education and the health service, this would not signal an end to privatisation. Instead it would be accompanied by the increasing penetration of the market (and in some cases also by the voluntary or ‘third sector’) into heartland areas of public and welfare services provision, moving well beyond the role accorded to the private sector even by the Tories. Pay would increase for public sector workers, that is for those that were not transferred to private firms through outsourcing. However, the growing pay differentials of the 1980s and 1990s between public and private sector employees was largely unaffected. The public sector has become a central battle ground of New Labour under Blair. It is already shaping up in similar ways to characterise the Brown administration.

New Labour’s celebration of choice and of the consumer-citizen is likely to remain central to the ongoing programme of welfare reforms; not least that such a figure is central to the government’s vision of a ‘modern’ welfare state. The government has sought to legitimate this on the grounds that it will deliver ‘better’ services and more customer orientated services. Such thinking informs much of the rhetoric that accompanies announcements of ‘modernisation’. However, it is clear that under Brown New Labour is seeking to develop this much further, in no small part through its ‘personalisation’ agenda. Personalisation is now informing important areas of government policy making, taking the emphasis on the individual as consumer to a new level. Perhaps not surprisingly this allows for a greater role for private providers and firms in the development of more personalised services. So, on the one hand, decentralisation and personalisation and, on the other, the further centralisation and concentration of impersonal corporate control over welfare production. This is radically at odds with the demand for ‘bottom-up’ involvement as advanced over the past two decades by service user movements.

The Re-emergence of ‘Political’ Trade Unionism?

In many of the disputes that have taken place in recent years the struggle to preserve wages and conditions, and also for better pay and conditions, has at the same time folded into campaigns to protect public services. Public sector workers and trade unions have played a leading role in campaigns against privatisation, against hospital closure, cuts in local services and so on. In organising to defend the integrity of the NHS, for example, or to save hospitals and other amenities up and down the country, workers and other campaigners have sought to make direct links between privatisation and profits from illness and disadvantage, the erosion of services and attacks on workers pay, employment conditions and jobs.

There are a growing number of examples we can use here to illustrate this. The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) run a high profile ‘public services not private profit’ campaign (http://pcs.org.uk) while Unison (www.unison.org.uk) have been at the forefront of contesting PFI/PPP projects. Both have involved non-union members and users groups as well as the wider public. Keep our NHS Public (www.keepournhspublic.com) brings together NHS workers, unions and the users of NHS services. Defend Council Housing (www.dch.org.uk) has also mobilised tenants and public sector unions in defence of state provision of affordable housing to rent. ‘Privatisation’, in all its guises, has worked to re-energise debates around health and other public services over the past decade and this has given rise to a large number or more localised campaigns and organisations that fight to prevent hospital closures or reductions in health and other public services.

There is a further dimension to this. As with the Tories, New Labour has inadvertently repoliticised the whole question of welfare and public sector provision in a multitude of ways. One of the most important aspects of this is that the increasing use of PPP/PFI alongside welfare provision by the market, often involving large multinational firms, has brought the question of ‘profits from illness’ onto centre stage. For-profit forms of provision remain highly unpopular. This has contributed to the re-emergence of political unionism, challenging in the process the ‘division’ that has existed until the early 1990s at least between a trade union concern only with ‘bread and butter’ issues such as pay and conditions and not with more ‘political’ matters. Such a divide – which was often more apparent than real and which tended to characterise the union bureaucracy more than ordinary members on the ward, the office or the classroom – now looks seriously dated in the face of New Labour’s political agenda of the past decade. Trade union leaders have also been driven to question the continuing funding of the Labour Party from members’ contributions. We do not have to look far to see union leaders and union-sponsored campaigns making direct links between pay and conditions; of the importance of good quality services for those in need; for a well funded and free at point of delivery NHS and issues of progressive taxation, pensions; and, in not a few instances, between ‘cut-backs’ and service withdrawals alongside massive expenditure on wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Campaigns for global social justice and for environmental sustainability similarly fold into the opposition to public sector modernisation.

New Labour is being challenged ‘head on’ here: its entire social and economic agenda is under serious dispute and questioning. The challenge here is also to the Third Way project itself and New Labour’s neo-liberal underpinnings. Such campaigns frequently bring together the ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ of welfare in ways that are far removed from claims of an unbridgeable gulf between the demands of each. Among New Labour politicians and not a few policy makers and academics, the idea that public service workers may take action to defend both their jobs as well as services to a wide spectrum of UK society including the most impoverished is something that is all too readily ignored or otherwise obscured from view. It also overlooks the point that public sector workers and their families are also themselves consumers of welfare. In another sense the growing campaigns of resistance to New Labour’s public sector modernisation and welfare reforms also illustrate that far from being ‘passive recipients of welfare’, clients and users can and do take action to both defend and to fight for public service provision.

The Shape of Things to Come?

The significance of the struggles that have taken place across the public and welfare sectors since New Labour came to power in 1997 should not be underestimated – though all too often this is exactly what has happened. Against the general downturn in strike activity and in other forms of ‘industrial action’ during the past twenty or so years, the re-emergence of widespread, large-scale and continuing action in the public sector shows that oft repeated assumptions and claims that workers would no longer struggle or resist in the ‘new’ conditions of the early twenty first century to be very wide of the mark. This is not to be taken that we are implying that there is a return to the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s but simply to counter the general rejection of the capacity of labour to resist that has been a stock in trade for much academic and wider commentary in recent years.

The important point of all of this for us is that contrary to the myriad of assorted ‘end of class’ or ‘death of class’ proclamations of the past few decades⁸, public sector workers in the UK today now comprise some of the key sections of the working class. Our image of the working class is constantly changing as the workforce is replenished as more ethnically diverse, with more recognised women workers, and from recent movements of migrant labour. Welfare workers are just as representative of this shift, indeed more so as it employs women in greater proportions and traditionally recruits from abroad to occupy positions in the welfare state that are difficult to fill from the local labour market. Women, migrants and ethnic minority groups are of course often found at the very bottom of the welfare industry hierarchy.

Finally, and against much of the doom and gloom that pervades the discussion and analysis of neo-liberalism and of New Labour there are different ways of thinking about the developments and events which are unfolding and of the potential opportunities for the future. Against neo-liberalism’s central drive to corrode and erode social and political solidarity, new forms of struggle and resistance have emerged and are emerging – locally, nationally and multinationally. Certainly this is not undertaken in conditions of their own choosing but in active response to welfare restructuring. Welfare workers and their unions are challenging the fundamental neoliberal premises advanced by New Labour using tried-and-tested forms of action as well as new, imaginative participatory strategies with their allies in the wider social and welfare movements.

Alex Law is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Abertay Dundee; Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Staff Tutor, Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University. They are editors of ‘New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance Inside the Welfare Industry’, Policy Press, 2007, available from www.policypress.org.uk

Notes

1. Healthcare Commission (2007) Investigation into outbreaks of Clostridium difficile at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHSTrust, London: Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection: http://www.healthcarecommission.org.uk/_db/_documents/Maidstone_and_Tunbridge_Wells_investigation_report_Oct_2007.pdf

2. Fairbrother, P. and Poynter, G. (2001) ‘State Restructuring: Managerialism, Marketisation and the Implications for Labour’, Competition and Change, 5: 311-333, p. 319

3. Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism, London: Yale University Press.

4. Clarke, J., Newman, J., Smith, N., Vidler, E. and Westmarland, L. (2007) Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services, London: Sage.

5. Blair, T. (2004) ‘Choice, Excellent and Equality’, Speech at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, London, June 23.

6. See Chapter 1, Mooney and Law (2007) New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance inside the Welfare Industry, Bristol: Policy Press.

7. Mooney, G. and McCafferty, T. (2005) “Only looking after the weans’? The Scottish Nursery Nurses Strike, 2004’, Critical Social Policy, 25, 2: 223-239.

8. See Ferguson, I., Lavalette, M. and Mooney, G. (2002) Rethinking Welfare, London: Sage.

Telling the Truth

Alex Doherty — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 11:23:11 +0000

__'Telling the Truth: The 2006 Socialist Register'
Edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys December 2005, ISBN: 1-58367-137-4 __

*A Fairy-Tale Ending*

In a world where appearances can be deceptive and what appears to be blindingly obvious is cynically misrepresented, the idea that the truth can be uncovered as something readily to hand becomes a monstrous lie. These things are not separable: deceptive appearances and conscious manipulation are connected.

Once upon a time a fairy tale was widely entertained that every decent, law-abiding citizen was devoted to 'the truth'. In this distant land, it was believed that such a thing as a liberal 'public sphere' existed, or something approximate to it, where free and democratic dialogue and exchange could take place without fear or favour. Out of this ideal state of affairs a competition of ideas would take place, with the most rational, rigorous and persuasive versions of what constituted truth winning out in the end. Or at least a new compromise might be formulated out of the various claims to a community of truth.

In this communitarian utopia, the public interest would be faithfully serviced by an intellectual caste devoted to a sober diagnosis of the predicaments and problems facing society. On this basis they would make a disinterested prognosis for social improvement. Telling the truth about the powerful and the powerless would in this way be considered a valuable public service on the road to an enlightened civil society.

Not any longer. On waking from this dream, it was found that the ideal community of truth-seekers, if it ever existed anywhere, had been subordinated by a globally dominant state of Un-truth. This is the overwhelming message claimed by the 2006 volume of the Socialist Register, titled 'Telling the Truth'.(1) It is summed up in the opening line of the book: 'A generalized pathology of chronic mendacity seems to be a structural condition of global capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century' (p. vii). It is not just that lies are being told as the occupational hazard of politicians and their media courtesans, but rather that lying and hypocrisy have become an endemic condition of the neo-liberal world order.

George Orwell's prophecy about congenital authoritarianism in his 1984 horror show was wrong only insofar as he got the dates mixed up. His other mistake was, or as was popularly (and wrongly) believed, that he was describing Stalinism in the USSR. Big Brother is not simply the ironic name for a Reality TV show; it is the hegemonic mindset demanded by Empire and Market that Orwell tried to warn of. War is Peace. Hate is Love. Friends of Freedom are Enemies of Freedom, and vice versa. Truth is contingent on the immediate needs of the Now. In this world, even very limited deviations from neo-liberal orthodoxy are hailed as radical developments despite their compatibility with the governing institutions of neo-liberal capitalism.

*Homo Economicus*

This is readily apparent in the case of someone like Jospeh Stiglitz, who as Chief Economist at the World Bank in the 1990s and in his subsequent book, Globalization and Its Discontents, recognized market and institutional imperfections and the crucial role played in actual economic processes by social capital, culture and networks. Ben Fine and Elisa Van Waeyenberge in their chapter note that Stiglitz's deviation from orthodoxy is highly limited by his own Keynesian assumptions. It has also had the unfortunate effect of allowing narrow economistic assumptions to determine other discourses about social relations, culture, politics and even ethics. At the same time, as Sanjay G. Reddy reminds us, the World Bank faced severe censure from right-wing commentators for accurately trying to gauge the full extent of acute world poverty. This had the desired effect. Attacks on competing economic methodologies make it difficult for the lay public, that were mobilised in their millions in 2005 to Make Poverty History, from making an informed judgement about which 'truth' to believe.

In one sense there is not really anything new about governments telling lies to their electors. It is just that governments have become more routinely cynical about it. When Empire demands a new figure of hate to replace the Reds, yesterday's tyrannical ally will do. When finite raw materials are coveted, this is done in the name of the universal interest in 'democracy' and the 'rule of law'. When the War on Terror demands it, a hydra-headed enemy is conjured up, which, as A. Sivanandan told a conference in Glasgow, 'cannot tell a settler from an immigrant, an immigrant from an asylum seeker, an asylum seeker from a Muslim, a Muslim from a terrorist'.(2)

In a chapter on The Cynical State, Colin Leys charts the decline of the public service ethos governing professional conduct in the welfarist British state to its destruction, sorry I meant to say 'modernization', through Thatcher, Major and Blair. As the British Civil Service was restructured on more business-friendly lines and the public sector marketised, so more power was arbitrarily centralised in the very person of the Premier. Advice from impartial civil servants, balancing the public interest, has been replaced by think tanks and coteries pushing headline-grabbing policies, allowing PR, pollsters and spin-meisters to continually adapt policies to suit the 'needs of the market'.

In the US, as Doug Henwood argues in 'The Business Community', government and state have become akin to front-offices for the gigantic corporations that dominate so much of the world economy. Here, as in the UK, the image of the ruling class has changed, with paternalistic northeastern WASP elites being supplanted by more thoroughly rightwing oil barons from the West and the South, typified by the 'good ol' boy' antics of George W. Bush. Short-term returns on revenue, tax cuts, and deregulation are frenetically pursued by traditional and nouveau elites at the same time as social programmes are savaged. As Henwood notes: 'the distinction between the American ruling class and its business community - with the ruling class presumably operating on a time scale of decades rather than quarters - has largely collapsed' (p. 73).

While he warns against foreseeing a scary, catastrophic collapse of debt-ridden US capital and state, few seem prepared to squarely face the truth that an austerity programme may be just round the corner, perhaps to be launched by former corporate lawyer and former Wal-Mart director, President Hilary Clinton. Indeed, the attack on social and welfare programmes for marginalised groups is seen by Frances Fox Piven and Barbara Ehrenreich in their chapter on welfare reform in the US as a foil by the ruling elite for a much wider attack on 'expensive' programmes like Medicaid and unemployment insurance. In the process, they seek to unravel further the gains made by the poor through the New Deal settlement and the political obligations of the Great Society ethos. No one but the very rich will benefit from further incursions on welfare, something that is barely disguised by populist appeals of the religious right.

*Debased Punditry*

In the world of neo-liberal disguises and subterfuges corporate PR is pervasive. The idea of the press as the guarantor of an uncorrupted public sphere that holds the powerful to account is looking threadbare. Robert W. McChesney for the US news media and David Miller for the UK media show, in their respective chapters, that the media have become an extension of the military-entertainment complex. All this has been too painfully evident in the propaganda roll-out for the Iraq War and the subsequent occupation. As for news journalists, with few notable exceptions, their blind patriotism knows no bounds. Their slavish dependence on official sources, that is to say, the interests of the powerful, is rarely questioned. McChesney's belief in the possibilities for critical journalism pulls its punches: 'Embedded reporting in combination with full throttle jingoism on US television news made it difficult for journalists to do critical work' (p. 126).

Miller sees UK news journalism in thrall to the rise of the PR industry and resurgent state propaganda. A profound change separates the social democratic media of the post-war period, which Miller dates from 1945 to 1979, from the neo-liberal media of the past quarter century. In the former period, when labour and capital embraced in a corporatist compact there was less need to systematically misrepresent reality. Today, when the gap between the narrow pecuniary self-interest of ruling elites in the go-for-broke miasma of the market and the 'general interest' in secure forms of social reproduction has widened dramatically. Unlike media conspiracy theorists, Miller's contribution has the great merit of situating the giant Un-truth of neo-liberal media in material reality.

Into this web of Un-truth are pulled academics, intellectuals and research departments. They usefully provide 'evidence' in the form of carefully-designed data, buffed-up positively to support government policies. Where they are critical of government or their research findings flies in the face of neo-liberal assumptions, researchers run the risk of being 'cut out of the loop' - that is, the academic-policy network where research funding (and academic careers) is secured. While this has not gone as far in the UK as the situation in the US, it has led, for instance, to a deep-seated de-politicisation of the critical social sciences, which have might been expected to show some fidelity to speaking the truth about the state of British society. For those with insecure prospects, playing the part of the public intellectual in the UK as, for instance, the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had done in France in challenging the vicissitudes of neo-liberal dogma, is particularly unappetizing.

This clears the field for unadulterated pro-Blair punditry. It has also led, for example, to Britain's best known sociologist, Anthony Giddens, recently playing the part of intellectual emissary for the Third Way. Giddens is helping the Libyan dictator Gaddafi, whose son studied at the LSE where Giddens is based, to be rehabilitated back into the orbit of Western acceptability. Meanwhile, in the background, all hell had broken out in the Middle East.(3)

*Ideological Clutter*

It is not just careerism that leads to intellectual quietism in academia. It is also the debilitating political role that postmodernism has played for the past three decades. Once seen as radical and daring, subversive even, John Sanbonmatsu rehearses how the postmodern assault on the very idea of 'truth' evacuated any ground from where the powerful might be challenged. Well, maybe there was a bit more to it than that. After the failure of the radical upturn of the 1960s and 1970s the single Holy and Apostolic defence of The Truth needed to be re-examined. Science and humanism remain embedded within the very class society that gave rise to them.

Does truth entail a direct correspondence with real objects? If so, what if the real objects, say commodities alienated from social labour by capital, are hypocritical liars? During the catastrophe of the Holocaust, Adorno included in his inventory of complicity with growing barbarism naïve beliefs in free access to the truth: 'Since, however, free and honest exchange is itself a lie, to deny it is at the same time to speak for truth: in the face of the lie of the commodity world, even the lie that denounces it becomes a corrective'.(4) Adorno thought that art would provide a refuge for critique. Michael Kustow claims in his chapter that theatre should provide a bulwark for telling the truth. In the immediacy of stage and audience contact, falsity and manipulation are readily exposed. That is perhaps why the truth about the Iraq occupation is more evident in Gregory Burke's play 'Black Watch' than in the pages of the Guardian. But even here the prospects are being narrowed by pseudo-market thinking and the political bad faith that underlies arts funding cutbacks.

Getting at the truth is a messy and far from settled affair, as Terry Eagleton argues in his chapter. If truth is seen as a process, then many of the judgements we are compelled to make need to be considered provisional even though we strongly adhere to them until their falsity can be adequately demonstrated. But what counts as adequacy? Our structure of thinking can protect even the most glaring illusion, for instance that the USSR was a socialist society, from exposure to other truth claims, that the USSR was the antithesis of socialism. The truth is often an unpleasant journey for leftwing radicals. As Eagleton put it: 'Leftists tend to practice a hermeneutic of suspicion: the truth, they believe, is usually uglier and more discreditable than the general consensus imagines. The truth may be precious, but it is not on the whole congenial' (p. 283). In social and political struggles of every kind, both sides seek to conceal their weakness through subterfuge and deception and exaggerate their strengths. In the course of an industrial dispute, for instance, a worker who admitted the whole truth about strike tactics to management would severely endanger the objective efficacy of the action.

Some kind of standpoint needs to be taken up, one that cuts through readymade platitudes but is also undogmatically alive to changing conditions and self-criticism. If the truth is 'generally rebarbative', as Eagleton would have it, then 'it also involves honesty, courage and a readiness to break ranks' (p. 284). If the 'hermeneutic of suspicion' means that a gap opens up between virtue and truth, a virtuous standpoint may necessitate a break from the absolutist dogmas of truth-seekers. In a society founded on lies about integrity and moral conduct, it may therefore become necessary to appeal to deeper virtues based on justice and solidarity. An obsession with The Truth, Nietzsche argued, represents a kind of madness. It also surrenders the game to those adepts of systematic lying like the tabloid press. 'An appeal to truth', to call on Adorno again, 'is scarcely the prerogative of a society which dragoons it members to own up the better to hunt them down'.(5)

*Infinite indulgence and zero tolerance*

What Loic Wacquant calls the new 'scholarly myths' attempt to create an infinite indulgence towards the market and the security forces, on the one hand, but an unflinching 'zero tolerance' that criminalises recalcitrant sections of society, especially the young, impoverished, black, urban working class. Such 'scholarly myths' depend on the appeal of scientific coherence and a mythical structure. What 'everyone already knows' to be already the case is thus validated by scientistic rhetoric and authority. This includes the US export of supposedly scientific theories of criminality like the celebrated 'broken windows theory' which has been credited with 'cleaning-up' New York's streets. Severe punishment for the slightest indiscretion will, according to this scholarly myth, prevent misdemeanours from escalating, say from vandalism to homicide.

Something like the 'broken windows' paradigm has already made deep inroads into British criminal justice, policing and social work functions. ASBOs anyone? But, as Wacquant concludes, such US-derived scholarly myths are wholly devoid of scientific validity. Instead, they 'function as a planetary launching pad for an intellectual hoax and an exercise in political legerdemain which, by giving a pseudo-academic warrant to sweeping police activism, contribute powerfully to legitimating the shift towards the penal management of social insecurity that is everywhere being generated by the social and economic disengagement of the state' (p. 109).

The neo-liberal submergence of the very conditions where truth might become a possibility is not confined to the US and the UK (the so-called 'anglo-american bloc'). Atilla A. Boron identifies a 'crisis of democracy' in Latin America where the struggles for democracy have been paid for with an enormous cost in human suffering, mass murder and state-sponsored torture. Boron is pessimistic about the possibilities for democratic truth in Latin America. Even the winning of this level of democratic rights is tempered by the incipient authoritarianism of neo-liberal capitalism where the market always attempts to exercise despotic power over wage labour. Here the Market and Democracy are incompatibles:

'Market-driven politics cannot be democratic politics. These policies have caused progressive exhaustion of the democratic regimes established at a very high cost in terms of human suffering and human lives, making them revert to a pure formality deprived of all meaningful content, a periodical simulacrum of the democratic ideal while social life regresses to a quasi-Hobessian war of all against all ...' (p. 55).

*Class and Resistance*

If contributors to this anthology sometimes recall the social democratic welfare state with an over-fondness, at times bordering on a rather nostalgic 'world we have lost' image, it only adds to the seeming catastrophic loss of the conditions where the truth about our current predicament might be voiced. Instead of an accent on proof and veracity, public discourse is degraded into emotivism and sincerity appeals, of the Blair-corporate 'trust me, you guys' variety, a point pithily made by Deborah Cameron some years ago:

'The problem with today's public language, however, is not so much that it represents reality inaccurately or dishonestly, but that it does not set out to be a representation of anything at all. When organisations proclaim they are "pursuing excellence", or when they write scripts for their employees to parrot, they want us not to believe the words, but to applaud the sentiments behind them. Their claims are not primarily "veracity claims" ("what I am telling you is a fact"), but "sincerity claims" ("what I am telling you comes from the heart").'(6)

How is this endemic condition of Un-truth and faux-sincerity to be countered? Socialist Register has a long tradition in its annual anthologies of addressing the urgent issues of the day from a broadly socialist approach. In its early days EP Thompson appealed to 'the people' as a source of resistance to the self-interested power of the rulers.

While acknowledging the importance of Thompson for British radicalism, G.M. Tamas sees this emphasis on 'the people' as an unspecified aggregate of plebeian decency as less than useful for critical forms of resistance. On the way, however, Tamas conflates class with 'caste' and, from the point of view of effecting class-based resistance to Un-truth, ends up in a right old muddle. His problem is that he bends the stick away from the humanism of Socialist Register favourites like Thompson and Raymond Williams to divorce class from how everyday life is actually lived under capitalism. For Tamas a 'way of life' is not about class but about 'caste'. 'Class', in fact, exists only as 'economic reality' but is 'cultural and politically extinct' (p. 255). Class is reduced by Tamas to a dead abstraction that provides no way out of the morass. At least Thompson and Williams, despite their affirmation of 'the people' and plebeian cultures, presented some resources for hope, even if they need to be tempered with self-critical activity. Socialist Register is required reading on its publication every year. This volume continues that tradition as, surely, will next year's anthology. It may even attempt to reconnect the distorted truths of class society with their counter-point in communities of resistance.

Notes:

1. Telling the Truth: Socialist Register 2006, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys

2. Quoted by James Hamilton, 'UK response to terrorism 'has resurrected primitive racism', Sunday Herald, 17 September 2006, p. 27.

3. Anthony Giddens, 'The colonel and the Third Way', New Statesman, 28 August 2006.

4. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, London: Verso, 2005, p. 44.

5. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 30.

6. Deborah Cameron, 'The Tyranny of Nicepeak', New Statesman, 5 November 2001.

How to order:

"Socialist Register":http://socialistregister.com/order

"The Merlin Press Ltd.":http://socialistregister.com/order

Suite 4, 96 Monnow Street,
Monmouth, NP25 3EQ, Wales.
Tel/ Fax +44 1600 775 663

For all enquiries you can email: orders@merlinpress.co.uk

This review originally published in "Variant nr. 27":http://www.variant.org.uk/

Conformist Imagination

jo — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 19:26:12 +0000

Something is wrong with Scotland. Or, rather, Scotlands. According to Demos there are three of these: Traditional Scotland, Modernist Scotland and Hopeful Scotland. Two of these Scotlands, Traditional and Modernist, are simply played out. Only Hopeful Scotland can carry the future aspirations of the nation.

Demoss projections in Scotland 2020 are just the latest entreaties by Approved Thinkers for Scots to get over their outdated hopeless styles and start taking up a style more in keeping with that of a hopeful nation. A whole series of calls have been made recently for Scots to be more positive, happy, playful, optimistic and now hopeful.

Stuart Cosgrove, Channel 4s Director of Nations and Regions and lads lad, caused a furore when he claimed that Scots love failure and writers like James Kelman and film-makers like Peter Mullan are obsessed by the self-loathing of depressing urban realism: They also love the culture of poverty. The rise of the Scottish Socialist Party is a case in point. They dont seem to be able to imagine themselves out of this culture[1]'.

Christopher Harvie, the historian, and the popular writer, Alexander McColl Smith have both criticised the national standing of Irvine Welshs debased fiction. Harvie is specific about the class-basis of this: Welshs market remains captive: the inarticulate 20-somethings, call-centre folk, cyberserfs, unsmug unmarrieds who infest [city centre] fun palaces. Welsh is to this lot what, in his happier days, Jeffrey Archer was to Mondeo Man: the jammy bastard who did well[2]'.

Meanwhile the former head of literature at the Scottish Arts Council, Jenny Brown, bemoans the absence of commercial, upbeat writing the gorgeous sexy novels swamped by dark, Scots miserabilism[3].

The Fearties of Neo-Liberalism

Fatalism and pessimism are supposedly endemic to the national culture. This has been argued with most crusading zeal by Carol Craig, the Carlifornia-style happiness guru. Craig argues that Scots suffer from a collective psychological crisis of confidence that results in a self-disciplining culture which places a check on personal ambition and market success[4]. What is needed to break from this torpor is the power of positive thinking, happiness and a can-do mentality. So successful has Craigs campaign for positive thinking been that £750,000 of public and private funding has been awarded to set a Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing.

The main assumption behind all this is the assertion that Scotland suffers from an inferiority complex deeply rooted in the national psyche. This is seen as a debilitating, congenital condition afflicting Scotland to the point where the nation constantly under-competes in the world economy. If only our latent pessimism and negativity could be overcome then somehow we might become a great wee country again.

Here can be found echoes of an older argument that Scots are a great disappointment as a nation for failing to live up to their historical mission of achieving full national self-determination. Such claims traditionally came from nationalist intellectuals and politicians frustrated by the lack of political support amongst Scots for the break-up of the UK state.

The moral failing of Scots to develop a fully-fledged national politics and culture reflects their deeply-embedded inferiorism borne out of dependency relations on the metropolitan heartlands of England, where social power really resides.

This has been largely superseded in the past decade by a new rhetoric of social and cultural exclusion as a way to remoralise despondent social groups in Scotland. A kind of Munchhausen effect is routinely invoked where individuals need to pull themselves and their communities out of the mire by their own efforts.

This chimes especially well with neo-liberalisms drive to create cultures and identities around an entrepreneurial selfhood receptive to the force and needs of capital. As Alan Hogarth for CBI Scotland put it: We have to try and get over the cultural problem of still denigrating success and an anti-private sector, anti-profit culture still apparent across Scotland[5]'.

All this has a certain ideological consistency to it. The social source of this in Scotland today is a new power elite whose shared project is to make Scotland a miniaturised version of the global neo-liberal order.

Arguably, this project expresses the revanchism of the new power elite that has increasingly ensnared Scotland since the Parliamentary restoration of a few years ago. For too long the middle class leaders of society culture experts, union bureaucrats, academics, journalists, political hacks, public servants, non-governmental bodies suffered the indignities of being treated as irrelevant under Thatcherism and multinational restructuring[6].

All this time they saw themselves as a new power elite in waiting. Some among them set-up a Constitutional Convention, an undemocratic elite that gathered together to demand democracy on behalf of the rest of the nation.

Having restored a quasi-sovereign Parliament, such elites have glued themselves to the institutions around the New Scotland. Theyd like to forget the recent past and their abject failure to protect Scottish society from the ravages of Thatcherism, which, of course, many have since come to see as unassailable common sense.

Given that the present is not all it was once cracked up to be, something for which the elites can no longer be held responsible, they have become heroic defenders of the future. If only the rest of us would snap out of being depressed about past defeats and an unheroic present.

Hopeful Hopelessness

How does the new power elite revanchism express itself? In place of social solidarity rooted in the inequities and antagonisms of adversarial class relations, any sense of the good community depends today on media lifestyle drives and political exhortations to develop our own social capital. Television and the press are unrelenting in their lifestyle campaigns for us to dress better, eat better, cook better, garden better, shop better, even shit better. On the other hand, a conformist sense of community obligation, trust and networks is demanded of those sections of society worst hit by decades of capital restructuring and state reform by joining choirs, painting clubs or the PTA, what is called social capital[7]'.

Squeezed between two types of middle class conformism emanating from the people who as a matter of social distinction always know better about tasteful consumption and responsible morality the rest suffer their admonitions and are treated as ungrateful supplicants of their beneficence. This may feel like hopelessness most of the time.

But there are also the mad moments of breakout, when subaltern recalcitrance is moved to outright rebellion, for instance to resist the modernising measures of the new power elite in the closure of a local swimming pool in Govanhill[8], the Stock Housing Transfer in Glasgow or phone masts and GM crop trials in North-East Fife[9].

Recalcitrance therefore is posed as a problem to be stamped out. A discernible ideological drive is underway in Scotland to see to it that there is less of this defeatist nonsense. It only gets in the way of those selfless creatures that valiantly try to make a difference.

Class conflict and cultures are polarising, adversarial and unpleasant. They divide nations like Scotland that need to be held together to entice capital to settle here, if only for a moment, by cultural pluralism, a pleasant disposition and harmless historical monuments. Otherwise, ferocious global market competition will jeopardise lifestyle, acquisitions and the social cohesion that are enjoyed by affluent sections of society.
In its social and economic structure Scotland has undergone what for some is a profound transformation in just two decades from industrial basket-case to post-industrial powerhouse. Only popular attitudes have been slow to catch-up. Sociologists point to the fact that Scotland is now a more affluent, comfortable and pleasant place to live, although an impoverished minority are being cut out of the good times[10].

Middle class leaders of society therefore need to become more assertive about the joy of commodities and competition and break from the thrall in which many are supposedly held of proletarian recalcitrance and its legacies, above all, the welfare state and collectivist values.

Remarkable Thinkers

How is ideological revanchism given shape? New power elite revenge for past humiliations and current banalities takes the form of a plague on both the houses of the left and the right. Abjuring both proletarian recalcitrance and reactionary petit bourgeois traditions, the enlightened elites seek to lead society under the illumination of their own pragmatic vision. An ahistorical, self-contented Third Way, unfettered by the ideological detritus of the past, is to be steered between these unspeakable binaries.

At the helm of the great pragmatic leap forward is think-tankery. Since ideology and class interests are too depressingly backward-looking the vacuum in ideas is filled eclectically by commercial thinkers for hire. Such thinkers hover around the margins of the power elite, hustling for the right rate of exchange for the next Big Idea. Operating beyond the managerialism of conventional academe, think tanks parade the illusion that they are independent, free to think radically, outside of the unappetising conventions of peer-reviewed papers and RAEs or party-based research groups.

But, as Walter Benjamin remarked of an earlier faux intelligentsia, they thought that they came to the market to coolly observe but, in reality, they only came to find a buyer. For centre-left think tanks the uncertainty of their own social standing and economic position translates into the ambiguity of their political function.

For instance, after he gave up the security of working as a Financial Times journalist to become a thinker of independent means[11], former Blair guru Charles Leadbeater is all wind and thunder about the social, technical and economic revolution of our age in his idealist paean to the weightless knowledge economy, Living on Thin Air. He makes great play of his own ability to literally live by his wits and find a buyer in the market place. We are all encouraged to emulate such examples of the self-sufficient but networked monad and bring our own carcasses to market willingly.

While the policy-apparatus talks about evidence-based studies and research institutes slowly grind out the findings of longitudinal, representative studies, think tanks need to catch the eye with the newly-minted neologism, the grandiose claim, and the fundamental re-think. Think-tankery demands novel jargon (iconoclastic) to dress up (re-brand) stale ideas (new, radical), outlandish cults (positive thinking), inflated claims (the knowledge economy) or outright banalities (ideas shape society). But always in such a way that no threat might be implied to their existing or potential position in the marketplace for ideas.

And the traffic runs in both directions. So-called action research routinely supplies the buyer with the right tune, one already composed by stringing together over-wrought corporate slogans about flexibility, connectivity, networks, social capital, social inclusion, knowledge, information, and so on.

Think tanks and policy centres revel in a vision of progress, thinking the unthinkable, bringing radical solutions to old problems, finding a future that works[12]'. All of which must be heroically undertaken by intellectuals, thinkers and ideas-orientated people in the sphere of public policy and politics[13]'. In other words, people just like themselves.

And this is no easy matter. It involves risk-taking and courage in a world without the old certainties and easy distinctions of class politics and confrontation[14]'. Commercial thinkers have, not for the first or the last time, done away with all this unpleasant business of class. Good news about the end of class finds an insatiable appetite among elites that always stand above the fray in the general interest.

Demos and Polis

One of the most influential, media-obsessed, anti-class think tanks under New Labour is Demos. They have all the attributes of post-modern think-tankery at its most superficial. As two sober academics put it, Demos show few inhibitions about shunning painstaking, detailed research in favour of cursory surveys of focus-group opinion on life-style issues such as gender and the environment: like the [Blair-endorsed, right-wing] Adam Smith Institute, it threw out ideas almost at random in the hope that they would be rewarded by a newspaper headline or a semi-humorous item in television bulletins[15]'.

Their own self-image, About Demos, says it all: Demos is a greenhouse for new ideas, which cross-fertilise ideas and experience of people changing politics. Key to this is something called Demos knowledge, which seems to concern the way ideas shape society. Well, yes, and...?

Such vacuous phrase-mongering has its roots in the defeats faced by the organised working class in the 1980s. Demos was set up by two former members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Martin Jacques and Geoff Mulgan. During the 1980s they increasingly celebrated Thatcherism, the market and consumer capitalism and traduced the labour movement in the Communist Partys own magazine, Marxism Today.

Such was their enthusiasm for Thatcherism that key right-wingers like Douglas Hurd and Alfred Sherman supported Demos, despite its stated claim to have moved beyond right and left. Interestingly, neither Sherman nor Hurd relinquished their own class politics on subscribing to Demos.

Since then Blair, an incorrigible think-tanker, has become a Demos enthusiast, adopting their lamentable attempt to re-brand antiquated Britain as cool Britannia and preparing the ground for the centrist shibboleths of the Third Way. At least Mulgan found the ultimate buyer for his ideological re-heats when he was recruited as personal adviser to Blair.

A heroic leap into the future

Demoss Scotland 2020 is the merely the latest (2005) exercise in thinking really deeply about the future. Some of the same characters have been punting the future since the late 90s in collections like A Different Future: A Modernisers Guide to Scotland (1999) and Tomorrows Scotland (2002). In these works the accent was on how the new Parliament would shape up as a modernising, that is, centrist institution. While it may still be early days, the results have been disappointing, evidenced by the mass disinterest in the elections to only the second Scottish Parliament.

Scotland 2020 has a bit less to say about politics and the Parliament and a lot more to say about changing the mythical stories that the nation lives by and will adopt in the future. The problem is that the narratives dominant in Scotland are too old-fashionedly collectivist and egalitarian. This has bred a deep-seated pessimism that has degenerated since the Parliamentary restoration into outright fatalism.

Stories are needed that will excite and enthuse Scots to claim their share of the new opportunities being opened-up by neo-liberal capitalism. Key to this is something called futures literacy, another fine piece of think-tankery. Here a linear sequence is envisaged to move from consideration of a set of possibilities, to agreement on a set of more probable scenarios, to a consensus around a preferable future[16]'.

Were it not so fatuous this might be considered ironic coming, as it does, from a think-tank obsessed with the momentary impression, basking in nothing much deeper than media image and elite-influence in the present.

In Scotland, this simply means that people need to start telling each other stories that are more optimistic and hopeful and stop depressing each other with tales of poverty, urban blight, collectivism and the loss of distinctively Scottish values. But maybe this is too charitable given Demoss own account of futures literacy, which I quote in its full evasive and tautological glory:
A futures literate public would embrace the capacity to think and talk about the future, using a new language and grammar of politics. Developing a futures literate culture would be one that recognised that thinking about the future means embracing a world where there is uncertainty and unpredictability, and where there are many futures and many future Scotlands[17]".

Never mind futures literacy. What about some basic logical consistency? On the one hand, it is stated that people relate national policies to their own experience but a few lines later we learn that it is quite common for people to never make the link between their own experience and national policy[18]'.

But hold on. Isnt a future enveloped by neo-liberalism and New Labour as predictable as economic slump follows boom, where poverty and the reserve army of labour is a permanent side-effect of capital accumulation, and where the world system of states guarantee global levels of violence? So long as all this persist, it is certain that there will not be infinitely happy futures to pass through.

The Three Scotlands

Three straw models of Scotland are invented by Demos. First, a traditional Scotland from Old Labour to the Catholic church hankers after the old certainties of conservative values as a way to resist encroachment of the modern world. This is given short shrift. Second, a modernist Scotland of the official government apparatus evinces a top-down market growth machine, optimistically predicated on a technocratic, soulless, linear vision that ultimately lacks hope. Economic growth alone will bring happiness and contentment.

And then, of course, there is the correct Demos-world of a hopeful Scotland based on learned optimism. This has less of the wild optimism than the modernist gung-ho embrace of neo-liberal capitalism. It works with people inside and outside of the growth machine to embrace hope, deep change and complexity to effect systemic transformation[19].

For all their constant chuntering about complexity Demos issue disclaimers that these vague models are necessary simplifications that merely illustrate the key faultlines and tensions in Scotland, its cultures and institutions. Beyond vague allusions to Old Labour and the Catholic Church, none of these faultlines are delineated with any empirical precision. But that is the beauty of shifting the focus away from the intractable problems of politics and economy to vague narratives of hope, happiness and confidence. You can sound radical and still not offend the future buyers of ideas.

What an edifice of cultural transformation to build on such flimsy foundations! It smacks of putting a human face on neo-liberalism. This is the well-known trick of applying culture to issues that really require critical political economy and the mobilisation of dissent. Instead, a fatalistic culture in the form of story-telling and myth-making is made to blame for obdurate levels of inequality and poverty in Scotland. In the process the structures of capitalism conveniently drop out of the equation.

Declass-ed Scotland

That Scottish society has changed fundamentally is becoming something of a mantra where everything is new. A new ethic of living is needed to match the changed reality of a more individualist, plural and complex society. But, the central problem for elites is that despite the upward mobility into professional and managerial classes many Scots identify themselves even more strongly with being working class than they did a quarter of a century ago.

Measuring class is a notoriously flawed business, where the conventional categories often fail to reflect reality. Diverse groups of workers are lumped together as non-manual for instance and then their attributes are read back as somehow less working class than the manual worker ideal.

Much of the change to class structure amounts to a shift to feminised service work instead of male-dominated manufacturing. Yet huge swathes of service work are proletarianised in the double sense of hierarchically-controlled, repetitive operations, typified by fast food joints and call centres, but also by much of the public sector where trade unionism remains entrenched dismissed by Demos as a minority pastime of tenured public sector professionals and the low waged nature of such work.

Demos describe the profound consequences of how the lives of Scots have been transformed thus:
from the social layout and feel of cities, to the way young people think about their aspirations, future prospects and savings patterns, to newspaper supplements and TV programmes on this related domestic revolution, and the number of DIY and garden centres[20].
Like so much else, for each of these assertions it would be relatively straightforward to draw exactly contrary conclusions.

Cities are being cloned by retail and development capital as city-centres are turned into hostile surveillance zones[21]. Young people are being burdened with record levels of personal debt not savings. Lifestyle cultures are merely the latest form of reproduction that capital takes as a self-expanding system. Capitalism is commodifying the deepest recesses of everyday life.

Even Scotlands poorest city, Dundee, gets the Demos boosterism treatment, particularly interesting for me as someone who lives and works there. This is set in the context of the shift from Fordism to mass personalisation but little detailed analysis of the city or its composition is provided. Instead a recipe is handed to Dundee, with its jazz scene (?) and science research centres, based on rhetoric about attracting and nurturing creative talent appropriate to the creative age. To do this requires new forms of social trust and avoiding copying how other cities promote themselves. The most concrete recommendation made was the following insight: The competitive advantage of Dundee could be marshalled around ideas such as the best place in Scotland to bring up a child, or a great place for baby boomers to grow old[22].

Happy Stories?
So new positive stories about the New Progressive Scotland are needed for these newly affluent and always more complex times. This story emphasises health, well-being, status, self-worth and other subjective indicators[23]. Again, Demos are keen to shed the attachment of too many Scots to out-dated social democratic values. Here Scots are cast as too consensual, reticent and fearful of dissent, making genuine dialogue particularly difficult. Yet it is Demos themselves that cant make their mind up if dialogue should be consensual or disputatious.

Story-telling is advocated because it creates self-understanding and a feeling of belonging and security[24]. Recent rhetorical psychology has demonstrated that thinking and self-understanding arise dialogically through argument, debate, dispute and dissent rather than agreement, consent, and conformism[25], Anyway, what happened to the idea that far from being passively conformist Scots tend to be democratically carnaptious[26], always ready for an argument at the drop of a hat? Demos fall into the trap of imputing essential psycho-cultural characteristics to an entire nation. So much for complexity.

Mind Your Language

Perhaps the most insightful part of this collection is the short story section. As with most other non-Demos contributors these do not display the same confidence in Demoss optimism of the intellect. Ken McLeod, the acclaimed writer of anarcho-Trotskyist science fiction, for instance, provides a typically bleak, quasi-Orwellian scenario for Scotland of endless war and environmental catastrophe.

Another novelist, Ruaridh Nicoll, tells a more familiar story about a disability benefit inspector. Nicoll also reported his experience of the actual seminars; Demoss accent on hopeful stories gave a slightly rose-tinted view of the proceedings[27].

Anne Donovans short story shows a time when urban Scots is flattened out of existence by Standard English through cultural indifference, highly unlikely but a useful contrast to Demos bland-speak. She points to the wider issue of spoken Scots as a marker of class that, as Tom Leonard among others have shown, is a recalcitrant form of speech which became by default a touchstone of national authenticity under Thatcherism, much to the chagrin of the indistinct vowels of middle class Scotland[28].

Demoss own use of degraded think-tank jargon and corporate-speak might be taken as a case in point here. Such clichéd language litters the Demos contributions: talk about personalisation, futures literacy, the creative clusters and so on.

It must be catching. Even non-Demos contributions fall into unthinking Demos-speak, as in the discussion about tourism and history, which reduces notions of self-actualistion and authenticity to simply providing holidays based on the hobbies and interests of visitors, apparently unaware of the tortured careers of such concepts in the Modernist revolt against commodification and alienation.

Entrenched Prospects

And indeed other well-kent contributors brought some sense of perspective to what was being argued, in many ways at odds with the whole thrust of the Demos project. But even here there is a predictable tendency to accept that things have indeed been transformed and that, generally, the future is bright and moving in the right direction.

Tom Devine teaches confidence-guru Carol Craig a history lesson about the elite top-down nature of what Neil Davidson calls Scotlands bourgeois revolution[29]. However, Devine suffers from the fallacy that afflicts some historians of reading contemporary trends in terms of discontinuities at the expense of structural continuities.

In response, Craig states that her missionary work to create an egoistic idea of selfhood is nearly done: Part of my mission for Scotland is to contribute to the creation of a cultural environment in which people feel they can be themselves[30]. But she is compelled by Devine to accept that Scotland has not been characterised by cultural or social stagnation as her crisis of confidence thesis predicts. So the wrong, passive and craven attitudes and personality traits are impressionistically imputed by Craig to people who have undergone the deep shifts to socio-economic life wrought by the end of national autarchy and the rise of neo-liberalism.

Christopher Harvie desperately casts around for signs of hopefulness in Scotlands situation within the world crisis on account of rising oil prices and how Trident nuclear submarines might be used to bargain for Scottish independence. Tom Nairn simply ignores the disinterest in large case Nationalism in Scotland to optimistically stress the prospects for constitutional independence against the neo-liberal enthusiast George Kerevans support for the British state and global capital.

Utopian Pessimism

It is not at all clear exactly how fatalism comes to be diagnosed nor how the happy prognosis of a positive future is to be conjured up. Hope has been displaced by cynicism and critique[31]. There is some confusion here between cynicism and critique; the former is practised by the power elite as they conduct a campaign of self-interested revanchism, while the latter depends on taking up a critical standpoint in a class-divided society like Scotland.

It might, in fact, be considered the height of cynicism to propose de-classed liberal slogans about hope in the teeth of entrenched class-based material inequalities. All this points to the elite manipulation of masses, the people who need to be hopeful, for pre-determined ends.

Anyway, why is negativity seen as ignoring the complexity and diversity of any one moment[32]? Couldnt this be equally viewed as a learned pessimism of the intellect, a necessary blasé attitude appropriate to the disappointed promises of actual social conditions? And, why invest unremitting class oppression and exploitation with positivity?

Recently, Bill Duncans Anti-Self Help Guide, The Wee Book of Calvin, provides an suitable riposte to the Scottish Dr Feelgoods. Duncan emphasises the nature of praxis in the work ethic: The work ethic and the inherent sense of unworthiness reject contemplation and stasis, seeking instead self-realization through deed and achievement: doing and being[33].

There is a long tradition of adopting recalcitrant pessimism in order to endorse the utopian future immanent to the present, from the Anabaptists to Benjamin and Bloch in the twentieth century. Bloch discerns such praxis in the fragments of an apparently stubborn reality in theological-dialectical terms as, an anticipatory illumination that could never be realised in an ideology of the status quo but, rather, has been connected to it like an explosive[34].

Recalcitrant pessimism is a condition found among the new proletariat not just in Scotland but elsewhere in the heartlands of capitalism, from France, as recorded in Pierre Bourdieus study of social suffering, to the US in Barbara Ehrenreichs study of the American working poor. The problem is to make self-emancipation a meaningful goal, not to advance a variation on the old conformism, designed by think tanks for power elites.

*Notes*

fn1. Lorna Martin, Outrage as media boss says Scots love failure, The Observer, 13 February 2005.

fn2. Senay Boztas, Post-Trainspotting Welsh accused of peddling pulp pap, Sunday Herald, 23 January 2005.

fn3. Senay Boztas, First it was Scotlands depressing films now our grim books are under fire, Sunday Herald, 27 February 2005.

fn4. Carol Craig, The Scots Crisis of Confidence, Big Thinking, 2003.

fn5. Ian Johnston, Scotland 2004: Why weve never had it so good, The Scotsman, 15 May 2004.

fn6. Alex Law, Welfare nationalism: Social Justice and/or entrepreneurial Scotland?, Gerry Mooney and Gill Scott, Exploring Social Policy in the New Scotland, Polity Press, 2005.

fn7. Alex Law and Gerry Mooney, The missing capital in social capital, Critique (forthcoming).

fn8. Govanhill Baths Trust, A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the briny beach, Variant, 2.21, 2004.

fn9. Alex Law, The Social Geometry of Mobile Telephony, Razon Y Palabra: Primera Revista Electronica en America Latina Especializada en Topicos de Comunicacion, 42, 2004/2005, www.razonypalabra.org.mx/anteriores/n42/alaw.html

fn10. L. Paterson, D. McCrone and F. Bechhofer, Living in Scotland, Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

fn11. Charles Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air: The New Economy, Viking, 1999.

fn12. Such inane clichés can be found, for instance, in the opening pages of Gerry Hassan and Chris Warhurst, A Modernisers Guide to Scotland: A Different Future, Glasgow, 1999.

fn13. Hassan and Warhurst, 1999, p. 9.

fn14. Hassan and Warhurst, 1999, p. 2.

fn15. Andree Denham and Mark Garnett, Influence without responsibility? Think-Tanks in Britain, Parliamentary Affairs, 52.1, pp. 53-4., 1999.

fn16. Demos, 2005, p. 54.

fn17. Demos, 2005, p. 22.

fn18. Demos, 2005, p. 22.

fn19. Demos, 2005, p. 16.

fn20. Demos, 2005, p. 30.

fn21. Alex Law and Gerry Mooney, Urban Landscapes, International Socialism, 106, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=95&issue=106

fn22. Demos, 2005, p. 120.

fn23. Demos, 2005, p. 43.

fn24. Demos, 2005, p. 36.

fn25. See Michael Billig, Susan Condor, David Edwards, Mike Gane, David Middleton, and Alan Radley, Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking, Sage, 1988. Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology, Cambridge University Press, 1987; Michael Billig, Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology, Sage, 1991.

fn26. Late 19th century Scots word meaning irritable or quarrelsome. Concise Scots Dictionary, 1985.

fn27. Ruaridh Nicoll, Retelling the present, The Observer, 20 March 2005.

fn28. Alex Law, Language and the Press in Scotland, in , J.M. Kirk and D.P.O Baoill, eds., Towards Our Goals in Broadcasting, the Press and the Performing Arts, Queens University Press, 2004.

fn29. Neil Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, Pluto Press, 2000.

fn30. Demos, 2005, p. 224.

fn31. Demos, 2005, p. 19.

fn32. Demos, 2005, p..25.

fn33. Bill Duncan, The Wee Book of Calvin: Air-Kissing in the North-East, Penguin, 2004.

fn34. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, MIT Press., 1989, p. 41.

fn35. Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity Press, 1999; Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Waged America, Granta Books, 2002.

This article takes the following book published by Demos as its point of departure: G. Hassan, E. Gibb and L. Howland, eds., 'Scotland 2020: Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation, London'.