Jonathan Rutherford | ukwatch.net

Fraternity without equality, and other Conservative ideals

JamieSW — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:09:56 +0000

In June 2005, when we had just begun the collective discussions leading up to the Compass publication The Good Society, an email circulated amongst our group containing a link to a speech by Oliver Letwin, who was then the Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The speech was called ‘Conducting Politics as if Beauty Matters’, and the theme was Environmentalism.1 Drawing on the language of the Romantics, Letwin argued that politicians needed a new vocabulary to talk about the environment. This was an issue that went beyond the merely mechanical. He called for a new political culture in which environmental policy is recognised as being the achievement of beauty. ‘The language of politics needs to reflect the felt experience of the environment as sensations and impressions that are capable of moving us to delight and awe.’ Some would dismiss this kind of ‘love of nature’ as a retreat into aestheticism. But this would be to miss the point. Aesthetic and cultural work is a central task of hegemonic politics. Intellectual knowledge, art, music, image-making, uses of language – these create new forms of consciousness. They can redefine our reality and lead us into new ways of thinking about the world. Letwin’s language, in stark contrast to the Whiggish joylessness of Thatcherism, was an early intimation of a renaissance in Conservative thinking. The Toryism of Burke and Ruskin was making a return.

In November, a month before his election as leader, David Cameron gave a speech to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations on ‘Building a prosocial society’. The speech marked a break with Margaret Thatcher’s Hayek-inspired statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’. We must restore trust in society, he said, and we must recognise that ‘we’re all in this together’. A series of rhetorical questions demonstrated the new Conservative sympathy:

How do you help an eighty-eight year old lady in a cold and lonely flat … who’s barely able to walk to the shops and often too frightened to do so anyway … who needs to navigate the complexity of the benefits system? How do you help a sixteen year old girl who’s never had the love and attention from her parents that she deserved? How do you make her understand that she’s worth something, that she’s special … and that her value to this world should never be measured by the number of boys she has sex with?

People were complex, their emotional problems were built up over the years. The answer to helping them lay in trusting society. Politicians had to trust people: ‘I want my Party to be one that says, loudly and proudly, that there is such a thing as society – it’s just not the same thing as the state.’

For the new pro-social Conservatism, the state still remains the impediment to freedom. Power and responsibility must be transferred back from the state. Not just to the individual alone, but to society as well; in particular to the voluntary associations and community groups who know what problems exist and how best to solve them. For change is not just about solving the physical manifestations of crime or deprivation: ‘In our country today, there’s a sense of spiritual poverty, as well as economic poverty’. There is more to life than money: ‘in an age of social fragmentation, where individuals and communities are often turning inwards to themselves, not outwards to each other, I believe that working together for the common good is the way to create a new and inspiring sense of national identity.’

In September 2006, Cameron’s special adviser Danny Kruger put intellectual substance to the new Conservatism. Writing in that month’s issue of Prospect, he argued that while the contest between the two main parties about the respective values of liberty and equality had not disappeared, it was now being contested on the ground of fraternity. Liberty and equality were political abstractions, but fraternity was concrete and self-generating. Fraternity was not the function of the state or of the individual, but of society – ‘the messy and plural mixture of our personal associations’. Kruger argues that the mistake of the left is to confuse the state with society, and equality with fraternity. The right disagrees with the idea that ‘brothers are equal’. ‘What matters to brothers is not their notional equality but their relationship’. Fraternity is about shared memories and a common home. Society is not the state, and fraternity is not just another word for equality. And the Thatcherites were also wrong, in thinking that fraternity would be taken care of by liberty. Fraternity is about the social. Kruger does not say any more about this, but points out that the influence of one’s wider group, one’s family and neighbourhood, determines one’s propensity for good health. The failure of the Labour government lay in the absence of a language of social life. It had abandoned the fraternity of ethical socialism – mutuals, self-help – in favour of central state control. ‘As the state takes over the institutions of society, individuals feel less confident in them. Egalitarian intrusions into fraternity are made at the expense of liberal attachments to it.’ Starved of liberty, fraternity suffers.

Kruger concludes by asserting that liberty and fraternity are not incompatible. The market relies on the values of trust and reciprocity, the sources of which, Kruger claims, are the family and nation. For Kruger freedom and nationalism – liberty and fraternity – are allies. Liberty needs fraternity – not least because the consequences of Thatcherism have left the Conservatives with the reputation of being society’s ‘wrecking crew’. But embracing social justice does not mean increasing the power of the state. It means extending the social power of voluntary institutions and social enterprises. ‘Trusting people’ is about liberty – ‘individuals should be trusted to make their decisions for their lives’. ‘We’re all in it together’ is about fraternity and the sphere of belonging. The policy strategy of localism, in which people make decisions about their neighbourhood and where communities can create a sense of belonging, captures the relationship of liberty and fraternity. The third element of the trio – equality – is explicitly rejected.

On becoming leader of the party, Cameron announced the setting up of a number of policy groups to review Conservative political strategy. In July 2007, the Social Justice Policy Group under Iain Duncan Smith published its Breakthrough Britain. Ending the costs of social breakdown.2 The report faithfully mirrors Cameron’s pro-social Conservatism. It defines the five key ‘paths to poverty’ – family breakdown, serious personal debt, drug and alcohol addiction, failed education, worklessness and dependency. The solution to these problems is not the welfare state but reinforcing the welfare society. ‘At the heart of the Welfare Society is the army of people who, for love of neighbour and community, shoulder the massive burden of care’ (p6). A welfare society is not the same as a laissez faire approach, which blames poverty on poor individual choices. But nor does it think that eliminating poverty is solely the job of government. ‘Our approach is based on the belief that people must take responsibility for their own choices but that government has a responsibility to help people make the right choices.’ The catch phrase of the welfare society is ‘shared responsibility’, an echo of Tony Blair’s welfare reform rhetoric.

In August the Economic Policy Review under John Redwood delivered its report, Freeing Britain to Compete.3 Its wide-ranging policy recommendations were dominated by its liberal proposals for £14bn of tax cuts. Inheritance tax should be scrapped, and corporation tax, stamp duty on shares and on property, cut. The threshold of the top rate of income tax should be raised. Redwood, it appeared, was keeping the Thatcherite flame alive. Shadow Chancellor George Osborne extinguished it. He affirmed that inheritance tax would be scrapped or reduced by an incoming Conservative Government. However there would be no overall reductions in taxation. Any tax cuts that were identifi ed would be balanced by tax increases elsewhere, such as green levies. A frisson of tension and dissent was exposing the division between Cameron’s new Conservatism and the right wing of the party.

On 13 September, the Quality of Life Policy Group under Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer published its report, Blueprint for a Green Economy.4 The good society it proclaimed must also be a green society. Borrowing from The Good Society, it argued that, despite material progress, the UK seemed to be experiencing a ‘social recession’. ‘Social cohesion is under increasing strain. Levels of trust, in each other and in our institutions, are dwindling. Rates of mental illness, drug abuse, “bingedrinking”, family break-up, and other symptoms of an unhappy society are rising inexorably.’ Unlike Duncan Smith, Goldsmith and Gummer were pushing at the limits of the new Conservatism. The market is central to their vision, but not the market alone. ‘If markets are not to master us then Governments have to intervene to ensure that they keep their place and remain our servants.’ Economic growth ‘is unsustainable without social justice’.

Blueprint exposed the central contradiction in Cameron’s new Conservatism. To create a sustainable economy and to end the social recession would require an active interventionist state, and the regulation of markets. This was a bridge too far. In contrast to the eulogies for Redwood’s report, the right-wing media responded to the Blueprint with contemptuous silence. Dominic Lawson in The Independent damned Goldsmith with faint praise, twisting the knife as he remarked: ‘the fact that he is a faithful frequenter of John Aspinall’s casino is nothing to do with his political views’. Cameron found himself with his feet on two boats as they started to drift apart. The opinion polls showed the public unwilling to trust his new caring style of Conservatism. Camilla Cavendish argued in The Timesonline (13.9.07), however, that the state of the Conservative Party could not be reduced to a simple battle of Goldsmith and Gummer versus Redwood: ‘The last 18 months have seen an outstanding intellectual turnaround in a party that had previously been hobbled by its single-minded obsession with individualism.’ But the turnaround had now stuck in an internecine struggle over the Party’s future and was threatening to unravel. Luckily for them, Labour came to the rescue.

In October Osborne followed up on Redwood’s proposal and announced that the Conservatives would raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m. Almost immediately the polls began to shift in Cameron’s favour. Then Brown, after allowing weeks of speculation about a November election, lost his nerve. There would be no election. The following week Alistair Darling, in his pre-Budget Report, announced a plan to double the inheritance tax threshold for couples to £600,000. It was a turning point in the fortunes of both parties.

The inadequacy of Labour

Labour’s response to the Conservative policy review was dismissive. ‘We’ve seen their strategy unfold now’, wrote then Culture Secretary James Purnell in Progress. ‘It’s obvious what they are up to. They saw New Labour was popular. They didn’t understand why but they worked out that it was. So they decided to associate themselves with it.’5 Purnell dismissed Cameron for his lack of policies. ‘So, on the environment, Zac Goldsmith told Cameron that the kids liked it. But there’s not a single policy he can actually think of and stick to … There is a black hole in their plans – a £6 billion gap. Their proposals are unfair, unfunded, and unthought through.’ His contempt was echoed by Andy Burnham, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury: ‘The Tories would have to raise green taxes by eye-watering amounts to meet the tax proposals they have been making in other areas.’

But this criticism was oblivious of Labour’s own political crisis. Though Purnell claimed that ‘we have a vision of the good society that the Conservatives cannot match’, this was precisely what the Labour government did not have. Despite its extraordinary electoral successes, its managerialist and technocratic politics had failed to win it deep popular allegiance. Public sector reform, driven by public choice theory and marketisation, had created dysfunctional cultures of centralised control in which trust had evaporated. A principal line of attack should have been the contradiction between the new Conservatism’s social values and its continuing reliance on the market for solutions to the social recession and the ecological crisis. Sir Nicholas Stern had already described climate change as the biggest market failure the world had ever seen. Goldsmith and Gummer owned up to this in their report. Unrestrained, the market, ‘will catch till the last fish is landed, drill till there is no more oil, and pollute till the planet is destroyed’. But Labour could not seize on this contradiction because markets are its own blind faith. It had introduced markets or proxy markets into almost every facet of social life. While Labour remained more committed to the state than the Conservatives, its managerialism and centralising instincts allowed the Tories to portray state intervention – which has to be part of any redistributive politics – as an undesirable intrusion into people’s lives. By the autumn of 2007, the alliance that had brought Labour to power was disintegrating. What had been popular indifference was hardening into open dislike, even hatred. Meanwhile Cameron had regained control in the Conservative Party, and its intellectual renaissance continued.

Jesse Norman, Chairman of the Conservative Cooperative Movement, and a senior research fellow at the think tank Policy Exchange, continued Kruger’s work on fraternity. In From here to Fraternity he argued that ‘after 54 quarters of unbroken economic growth we are in, not an economic recession, but a serious “social recession”. Our society is weakening’.6 Beveridge’s ‘five giants’ of illness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want remained, though they were in abeyance: ‘However we face two new and rather different problems: a problem of security and a problem of trust.’ There was ‘a pervasive sense in Britain today that the social ties between us are weakening’. Like Kruger, Norman points the finger at the state as the main cause of social malaise. ‘The effects of a decade of Labour domestic policy have been to extend and centralise the power of the state, to remove power from individuals and established institutions, and to encourage feelings of deference, dependence and passivity among ordinary people’ (p9).

Norman defines the new Conservative agenda: ‘Compassionate conservatism seeks social renewal through the devolution of power and responsibility to people and local institutions, through greater personal freedom from bureaucracy and regulation, through breaking-up state monopolies to improve public services and through a renewed emphasis on the rights of the citizen and the rule of law’ (p6). The task is to embark on a radical programme designed to address the social recession and restore public trust. The politics of fraternity, with its concern for personal well-being and its recognition of the relational nature of individuals, is the best means for achieving it. Norman differentiates between a ‘social fraternity’ and a ‘personal fraternity’. Adhering to his liberal Conservatism, he favours the latter, which ‘implies limited government and a massive empowerment of nonstate institutions’. His programme, however, is vague. It includes private social entrepreneurship, performing arts to encourage people off the streets, competitive sports, outdoor exercise, programmes of community public service, benefit reform. He also argues for more apprenticeships, and greater flexibility in post-16 learning.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the new Conservatism as Cameron’sopportunistic Clause 4 moment. Rather, it represents a shift away from Thatcherism that retains the critique of the state but acknowledges the value of a stable andintegrated society. Because of New Labour’s politics of centralised control, thiscritique of state control strikes a popular chord. And its ethical language of relationships and social life resonates amongst many who in the past would never have considered voting Conservative. In the aftermath of the disastrous May local elections, the government struggled to re-assert itself. Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, delivered a challenge: ‘In every area we will challenge and scrutinise the Conservative position and expose their determination to protect excellence for the few and oppose our reforms to deliver excellence and opportunity for all.’ In a speech to the Fabian Society on 6 May, James Purnell, by now Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, called for ideological confi dence: ‘The Tories are paying lip service to our policies because they know their old answers are out of tune.’ But both positions are deeply compromised. It is Labour that is failing to deliver greater equality and it is Labour that is increasingly out of tune. Having triangulated rightward on every major social issue, the Government has neither political ideology nor moral authority to exploit the contradiction at the heart of the new Conservatism.

Kruger was right. The Labour government lacks an ethical politics to speak of relationships, or values or even social justice. It is unable to evoke a fraternal culture of care and empathy. Its silence over the super rich has been matched only by its hectoring of Incapacity Benefi t claimants. It has no idea about a more democratic way of governing the country. The joys, pleasures and frustrations of everyday life pass it by. Faced with a crisis, it offers to listen. All it will hear is the echo of its own jargon. Cameron is politically astute to focus on the depletion of trust and social feeling and claim the mantle of progressivism. The new Conservatism is confronting the remnants of New Labour with the bankruptcy of its political culture.

Reclaiming fraternity

It is far from certain that Cameron’s Conservatism will be able to sustain its own contradictions; and its belief that civil society organisations can take on the role of state institutions threatens its credibility. It is time for the left to take on this new Conservatism – a challenge that cannot be separated from the political and philosophical problems facing post-New Labour social democracy. For a start we need to go back to first principles and challenge the right’s attempt to redefine fraternity.

The idea of fraternity goes to the heart of what being human means – what it means to be social. Abraham Maslow defines four needs in life: a feeling of safety, a feeling of belonging, a feeling that we are worth being loved, and the experience of esteem and respect. These needs are social and relational; they cannot be satisfied by an individual in isolation from others. Norman acknowledges the relational nature of the individual. He acknowledges that ‘as adults our behaviour is radically affected by the environment and incentives we face’. However, contrary to Norman, fraternity cannot be ‘personal’. It exists between people. Without others it can only be an unrequited longing for connection.

Kruger agrees that fraternity is about the social, but he narrowly defines it in the biological relationship of brothers. Fraternity extends beyond family. It is not, as he argues, just about shared memories and a common home, nor the imagined community of the nation. It is realised in the reciprocity of friendship. It belongs to women as well as men. Sisterhood too is the experience of self-realisation in a common endeavour. It is the pleasure, even joy, of living with and for others. There is today, particularly in the rich countries of the world, a powerful desire to be true to one’s self. As the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, this ethic of self-fulfi lment is deep within modern consciousness. But it is social not individualistic. It involves the right of everyone to achieve their own unique way of being human. To dispute this right in others is to fail to live within its own terms. The liberty of making decisions about our own lives, and the fraternity of togetherness, require equality to bind them together.

‘For the Conservative party I’m leading’ says Cameron, ‘social justice is a vital issue’.7 But there can be no social justice without the anticipation of equality. Equality is the ethical core of social justice. The Conservatives are wrong to think they can have liberty and fraternity without equality. The new Conservatism sidesteps this dilemma by associating equality with an intrusive central state and the loss of freedom. But fraternity without equality means paternalism – gendered, and defined by the imposition of class rule. Paternalism is a social contract between unequals – a ‘shared responsibility’ between rulers and ruled. There is no anticipation of freedom, rather the ideal is a moral, organic order of unchanging classes in which each knows their place and duty. In contrast, the fraternity of socialism is structured into ways of life, in what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘just institutions’ and what Richard Tawney describes as ‘right relationships which are institutionally based’. Its idiom is the equitable distribution of shares and goods between members of a society. It is the freedom to become one’s own self in relation to others. The challenge is to imagine and build a democratic state and civil society institutions capable of realising this ethic of equality. The new Conservatism, despite its ‘no wealth but life’ language, cannot deliver freedom. Its paternalism is the nostalgic longing for the father to rule once more over his familial order.

1. All speeches referred to can be seen at www.conservatives.com.
2. Iain Duncan Smith, Breakthrough Britain. Ending the costs of social breakdown,
Centre for Social Justice, July 2007.
3. John Redwood and Simon Wolfson, Freeing Britain to Compete, 17 August
2007, www.conservatives.com.
4. John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith, Blueprint for a Green Economy, 13
September 2007, www.conservatives.com.
5. James Purnell, Progress, November 2007, www.progressonline.org.uk.
6. Jesse Norman, From here to fraternity: perspectives on social responsibility, CentreForum, 2007, www.jessenorman.com.
7. David Cameron, ‘Making our country a safe and civilised place for everyone’,
speech to the Centre for Social Justice, 10 July 2006

The unsurprising casualties of capitalism

Ellie Keen — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:01:29 +0000

Fatherhood is back in the political ring. In the right corner, David Cameron’s comments about black fathers revive the Conservative instinct for a scapegoat. In the left corner, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s Working Better initiative has joined with Mumsnet.com and Dad Info to launch ‘Home Front: What do mums and dads need to make life work?’ For the right, paternal responsibility is the bedrock of patriarchal social order. For the left, paternal responsibility is about a new kind of democratic settlement between men and women.

Fatherhood today is measured against the model of the man as family provider, the breadwinner supporting wife and children. This is a modern invention of the middle classes and only became the norm in the 1950s. In the past paternity was never enough to qualify men for fatherhood. Patriarchy was limited to propertied men. Colonialism ensured it was further restricted to white men.

There were plenty of biological fathers who lived without families. This was not about men’s moral failings, but a structural problem. Since the 1950s historic changes in the economy and in gender relations have returned us to this age. Paternity no longer means fatherhood.

In the 1980s, mass unemployment and the closure of manufacturing industries destroyed many men’s role as family breadwinner. Capitalism restructured around a low-wage, flexible labour market. Men’s ‘family wage’ and job for life disappeared and large numbers of women were drawn into the workforce. As men’s incomes stagnated or fell, women took on a double shift of paid work and unpaid domestic labour. Working class survival and middle class lifestyle once managed on a man’s single income now require two incomes, and often multiple part-time jobs. The role of family breadwinner is now unattainable for the majority of fathers in Britain.

For many young working-class people, marriage and setting up a family home has become a distant dream. Low wages and a lack of affordable housing makes it increasingly difficult for many young men to create an independent life of their own. The traditional rites of passage into adulthood – leaving home, entering employment, establishing a family, and taking on legal obligations and rights – have disappeared.

Research by the centre right think tank Civitas suggests that the higher rates of single parenthood and cohabitation in low income areas are not about feckless fathers or an anti-marraige trend but to do with the structural problems of poverty and a low wage economy.

Debates about fatherhood in recent years have all failed to recognise the structural changes within which men and women are forced to make choices and take decisions. Politicians of all parties go along with tabloid explanations of ‘deadbeat dads’. The Right wants to rewind 200 years and reimpose the patriarchal roles of mothers and fathers. Labour, despite the best efforts of feminism, is silent and evasive about both masculinity and fatherhood.

The growing popularity of Cameron’s Conservatives has emboldened them to revive the old right wing ‘responsibility agenda’. Chris Grayling, the Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions has made a number of eloquent speeches on the subject: “We have a growing generation of young men, alienated and drifting without a purpose in life; They are causing trouble; Welfare programmes don’t work and the criminal justice system is too soft; Many have grown up without fathers and many are becoming ‘fathers in name but not in action’; The lack of fathers is a huge problem for all of us.”

Grayling is good at describing the problem, but pointing the finger of blame at individual behaviour does not confront the bigger problem. He has no solutions. Nor, for that matter, does Labour. The fact is that the kind of democratic fatherhood society aspires to is not compatible with our economic and class system which leaves men with either too little or too much work. Only one in five men takes advantage of the new paternity leave provision of two weeks off, paid at £117 a week. Because of financial pressures 40 per cent don’t take up the right. As the EHRC’s NIcola Brewer has argued, “The central issue is that the economic penalty for fatherhood is too high.”

A new politics of class- Interview with Jon Cruddas MP

tim — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:33:24 +0000

What brought you into politics?

I was from a very political family, but not in terms of formal party politics. Ours were informed by Catholic social teaching and by liberation theology. We didn’t have labour movement heroes as such, it was more the likes of Oscar Romero or John F. Kennedy. My family came from Donegal and my dad was a sailor. I was one of five brothers and sisters, and we were the first generation in our family to go to university. Before I went there, I spent some time in Australia and got involved in trade union politics. After getting involved in the labour movement I gravitated towards the Labour Party. I couldn’t vote in 1979, but I was a product of Margaret Thatcher. Youth unemployment, the bomb, the miners’ strike, all were central to my politics. In 1981 I went to Warwick and stayed to do an MA and PhD. I was interested in political economy and the debates around new forms of economic regulation and postfordism. Robin Murray’s work on what constitutes a modern left political economy influenced me. At the time, he was working with Ken Livingstone at the GLC. I was
interested in analyses of the world that were less prescriptive and dogmatic than some of the old left traditions.

Did you keep hold of the liberation theology?

Not really, though scratch beneath the surface and it’s there. My middle brother became a Carmelite.

Were you drawn to the issue of migration through it?

Absolutely. I’m really interested in the issue of migration and demography. It is like going round in a personal full circle. It’s the Irishness of it, the nature of diaspora politics. But when I was younger it was never codified in the Labour Party, despite support for the Labour Party in the family. It was much more fl uid and diverse than that. Much more ideas driven. I was interested in traditions of thought. And now I think we’re faced with a need to just keep traditions of thought alive, despite their unfashionable nature.

After Warwick you started working for the Labour Party. You were quite into the New Labour establishment weren’t you?

Yes. I was drawn to it. I started working for the Labour Party on labour market issues and did a lot of work with the trade union movement. I could see a lot of strengths in what Blair was doing. At his best he was an interesting and seductive political figure. He challenged old assumptions. I saw him at close quarters from the early 1990s when he became Shadow Employment Minister. In 1997 I was in Downing Street for two years and we had some space to deal with issues around individual and collective rights at work, some of which will be enduring. But that is a long way away now. At the time I thought the important thing was to gain power and then it was ‘game on’ in trying to change things. It wasn’t about seeing power as an end in itself. But I began to think that the New Labour project was simply morphing into an exercise in power retention – seen as an end in itself. I really began to fall out with the New Labour project after I became MP for Dagenham. There was a contradiction between the language used by the government and the empirical reality on the ground.

You must have confronted something there that didn’t fit easily with the New Labour rhetoric.

To me Dagenham is the prism through which I see it all. It is the traditional cornerstone of manufacturing industry in London. It is the lowest cost housing market in Greater London and the site for extraordinary demographic change. You see global forces ripping through it at the micro-level, and the wreckage being created. The government cannot offer anything other than a benign take on these forces. What’s worse is that politically it is actually ratcheting up the tensions rather than working out how we can help communities navigate through this dramatic period of change – for example through debates around migration and asylum. But it was the debate around Higher Education funding that really broke it for me.

Why was that?

It went to the core of my own family’s experience. Both my parents left school at fourteen. We are five kids and between us we have fi ve degrees, four MAs and two PhDs. We were the beneficiaries of comprehensive education and free access to higher education. Higher education provided us with the ability to live in a completely different world. Here was a Labour government coming up with a highly utilitarian approach to knowledge. It reduced education to a rational economic exchange – discount for the future, borrow money to get a qualifi cation which will allow you to enter the labour market at a higher rate of return. Education was simply seen as an issue of economic rationality. Questions about what constitutes knowledge and the liberating potential of education were abandoned in favour of a very right-wing conception of human capital.

Once you became an MP, what was the experience of Dagenham like?

It’s the fastest changing community in Britain. The velocity of change is extraordinary. If you see the changes in the school rolls and the patterns of take up of the right to buy, against the legacy of long-term inequalities in access to health and the large percentage of low skilled work amongst the resident population, it throws up issues that have been completely off the radar of government. The population is growing faster than the state is financing public services. These changes occur in a zero sum game, and this allows people, and in particular the far right, to racialise access to scarce resources.
I’m not an oppositional MP. My psychology is one of pragmatism and incremental attempts to alter the terms of debate. But I couldn’t accept the Government’s failure to recognise what was going on on the ground – the material forces that lie behind community fracture and racial tension.
What is the solution? Is it to talk about ‘British jobs for British workers’, trying to dog whistle to people’s fear? Or is it to find a different take on the problem?

I think that in fully addressing these problems class is the crucial issue. But class has no traction within the Labour Party. The Government, or New Labour, is almost demonising a white working class as violent and degenerate. It’s as if it is unable to have a rational debate about patterns of migration, or inequality, or demographic change. Instead there is this populist, dog-whistling rhetoric – that’s the kind of game that’s going on now in terms of political positioning. I think we can retrieve this situation if we remake a class politics which recognises the heterogeneity of the working class. Why is the issue of class politics so contaminated now? The answer lies back in the intellectual moves made by Blair- particularly the debates around the knowledge economy – which assumed that the working class was withering away.

As Blair transformed Labour into New Labour he legitimised the change by importing an intellectual framework that described old labour as being in empirical decline. The working class was no longer of relevance as a political and economic category. But you can challenge that view by looking at where jobs are being generated, and what is happening in the real economy, as opposed to the new economy. Look at the interlinked issues of the demand for labour, the patterns of migration, the long term inequalities in wages and access to public services and housing. These have a resonance today even more than they had when New Labour was elected ten years ago. Focus on these issues and we’ll be able to get back into the debates around inequality and social immobility, and so fi nd alternative, social democratic remedies.

Your analysis contradicts a lot of what the more high profile sociologists are saying about individualisation, and the cultural changes in class. Can a singular working class still be appealed to?

I’m arguing that we anchor the experiences of different groups in a materialist politics. That is not necessarily reductive. It allows you to contextualise materially the shared experience of different people. The approach we have at the moment is a semiotic game of emphasising difference, be it through symbols of race or of religious difference. It’s unable to understand or navigate its way through the politics of migration and demography. For the last ten years New Labour has used patterns of migration as a twenty-fi rst century incomes policy, holding down the wages in semi-skilled and unskilled work. Now the government is reaping the consequences. And they can’t deal with it by regulating the labour market because they’ve set themselves against this
approach. Instead they have retreated into an identity politics which includes a simplistic idea of a white working class that is illiberal, intolerant and degenerate. Without a materialist politics one is unable to transcend the things that break people apart – one cannot find the shared experiences that bridge cultural, religious and racial differences.

Is it just about identity politics? The ideology associated with the knowledge economy introduces a method or practice of entrepreneurialism – it sets about constructing supposedly self-reliant individuals out of class subjects.

This human capital approach has all the hallmarks of right-wing liberal economics. The only defi ciency that matters is imperfect information and knowledge. The Labour Party has retreated to the foundations of neoclassical political economy. The state is removed as an actor except for providing the means to access human capital. Once this access is perfected inequality is remedied. This is why the HE debate is so critical – it emptied out the politics of class and inequality. What counted was individual rational decision making and discounting for the future rather than materially locating the inability to work or to become socially mobile within a broader pattern of inequalities. This was always the fundamental dividing line between left and right and it has been intellectually collapsed. As education is commodifi ed it becomes a form of capital you can use to consume more commodities. This to me is the intellectual cornerstone of the whole movement that is New Labour. As such Blair was a more profound political figure than people assume.

Does this intellectual project have its source in Peter Mandelson and Charlie Leadbeater at the Department of Trade and Industry in 1997?

That’s exactly it. I remember we were having a fight around what eventually became the Employment Relations Act – two years debate about the labour market, union recognition, new ideas of solidarity through rights the state intervenes on. At the same time Mandelson and Charlie Leadbeater were writing the 1998 White Paper on the knowledge economy – the definitive neoclassical testimony to the New Labour project. It was followed by a second White Paper in 2001, which addressed the creation of a labour force suited to the knowledge economy. I think these will be seen in the future as key texts that shaped the New Labour project. In terms of the history of economic thought it places New Labour on the right of centre intellectually: a neoclassical Labour. Their neoclassical political economy frames all inequalities in terms of individual economic rationality. Those who fail in education and the knowledge economy do so because of their inability to act on their preferences with reference to knowledge, work and leisure. The White Papers intellectually emptied out the whole of the labour and social democratic traditions.

Was Mandelson the key figure in shaping this New Labour politics?

What he was doing with Leadbeater was profoundly important intellectually. They provided the justification for the lack of desire to intervene over and above simply correcting market imperfections. Margaret Thatcher used to talk about unemployment as if it was a trade off between work and leisure. Now it’s the same logic but talked about in terms of economic inactivity. Poverty is viewed as a consequence of an individual choice between work and leisure.

Risk is shifted from the state and business to the individual.

The state has no role other than maintaining infrastructure and facilitating markets. Stuart Hall’s analysis of New Labour’s ‘double-shuffle’ is absolutely right. The veneer, the narrative, the language was brilliantly constructed – the semiotic game of political positioning was brilliant – but underneath was the much more important engine which was working off the deep liberal agenda of the commodification of public services, responding to capital’s global demands and the like.

You present a very different image to the one many people have of a New Labour dominated by a pragmatic ‘let’s see what works’ mentality. There was a deeper intellectual current at work.

I do think there was a deeper philosophical movement in New Labour that was worked through during the long period of opposition. You can trace it through an arc beginning with the 1983 Manifesto, then the defeat in 1987, up to the supply side socialism of 1992, with Brown as the architect. Then there is the radicalism of Blair from 1994 onwards. Throughout this period there is a systematic withdrawal of the state. Post-1983 the negatives are defined as trade unionism, ‘tax and spend’, and the politics of nationalisation. I think there was a grouping of right-wing Labour figures who saw that, generationally, the only way to gain power was to confront these polling negatives. Initially this was done with reference to a body of ideas that were quite brazenly used as justification for short-term political moves in pursuit of electoral purposes.

The intellectual work of New Labour intensifi ed from 1994 on, when a number of intellectuals, for example Giddens and Leadbeater, rose to the challenge and codified the political retreat. The genius of Blair when he became party leader was his ability to tell a story that legitimised all the political retreats since 1979- ‘there is a rupture occurring in terms of industrial organisation caused by new technology and globalisation. Only I can understand it with reference to the knowledge economy’. The intellectual work helped to mobilise and organise the electoral cohorts that mattered in terms of gaining political power. It also wrote off the working class and other groups who had no political traction. It used a sociologythat assumed they had no empirical signifi cance in the future. It was a brilliant political movement to gain and retain political power.

How did it start coming undone?

The world was not like their stylised construction of it. The central contradiction of the knowledge economy thesis and the higher education debate is the belief that there is a massive expansion in the demand for graduates. If there isn’t this demand and you’re equipping people with this utilitarian way to tap into something that doesn’t exist, they end up doing jobs for which they’re overqualifi ed. You’ve got
generational immobility in the jobs market and in housing.

So the higher education system is producing a large number of graduates who have aspirations for a better life which the labour market will deny them? As well they’ll have large debts, they’ll have to pay for their own pensions, mortgages and deal with the financial burden of the ageing baby boom generation. New Labour’s emphasis on the supply side and its liberal economics have created a series of contradictions which are adding up to one big contradiction.

I think New Labour’s reforms that were influenced by the knowledge economy thesis are built on sand. The question is how can we create new forms of economic and social solidarity that can deal with the economic problems we face and also address the renewal of democracy and the global issues of environmentalism. The only alternative approach is one grounded in the empirical realities of modern Britain in terms of migration, housing, labour market insecurity. It also demands electoral reform. I always thought electoral reform was a second order issue. Now I think our present electoral system has helped to sustain the neo-liberal project.

Returning to the contradiction. There also exists a large swathe of the population who are totally estranged from the education system.

This is where you get the fear of the far right. The BNP is getting very sophisticated. They’re talking about being more labour than New Labour. They are using ne technologies to mobilise people. Their message is anti-globalisation, anti-Europe, anti-Muslim, and the scapegoating of forms of cultural and racial difference. It is precision bombed onto those cohorts who were disenfranchised from the New Labour project, people for whom it was previously an article of faith that they’d go nowhere else. I’ve spent the last year going round the country and this problem is everywhere. The BNP stood 800 candidates in the local elections in 2006. That’s 500 more candidates than they’ve ever stood before. They averaged 14.8 per cent of the vote. They have their own internal contradictions, like any Trotskyist group, but they’re not going away.

The seeds are there for extremism and violence. My fear is that if they become more effective, especially in areas where the Labour Party is no longer an organising and mobilising force, they’ll be much more significant than the National Front of the late 1970s. Compass is attempting to grapple with these issues but in a very cold climate. We’ve tried to force the government to deal with the issue of agency workers. Migrant workers are being abused by unscrupulous employment agencies. In my constituency there are Lithuanian workers on £15 a day – half the minimum wage- and these stories ricochet through the community. The state should intervene. But this goes against New Labour politics. We’re reaping the consequences of the way we’ve been using migration to enforce our fl exible North American labour market.
Similarly the education strategy around secondary school academies undermines the capacity to provide solidaristic, comprehensive solutions.

These issues were central to your campaign to be elected Deputy Leader. Did you decide yourself that you wanted to stand?

I was asked to by some colleagues in the union movement and the Party. It wasn’t my thing.

But why did they ask you?

I was never interested in the Campaign Group. I’m fairly pragmatic, but I’m increasingly frustrated, so maybe it was that. I’ve got no idea. It was a punt from the left field that arguably wasn’t going to fly.

Well, it did.

It did, despite my anonymity. If we can build some ideas, I now think there is more life left in the Labour Party than I had previously assumed.

There’s something about you being both inside and outside that makes you an attractive proposition in terms of how to go beyond New Labour. You have to be outside enough to see the problems, but inside enough to have a hand in it, to have some leverage. Compass has a similar kind of structure.

I agree. Compass has been effective both inside and outside the party in using this structure. In the Trident debate it was able to quickly create a deep and
wide coalition. All sorts of NGOs and groupings joined. We managed to get one hundred votes against the renewing of Trident. Compass also created a coalition of NGOs and groups around the Company Reform Bill and managed to nudge a few changes through the Parliamentary process. It is also doing work around agency employment relations and a positive immigration policy. If we can introduce the basic tenets of social democracy – this is not by any stretch of the imagination a radical agenda – by putting our arguments into the mix it allows for a more lively and pluralist democracy, both in terms of the House of Commons and, more important, the Labour Party. It creates a contested terrain. Contrast this strategy with the government’s ever more sophisticated exercise in political cross-dressing and thecrafting of the soundbite.

You did incredibly well in the Deputy Leadership contest, you became a public figure and gained quite a lot of political capital – what might you do with it?

I’m not actually that interested in the question. The fundamental issue is what constitutes a non-sectarian, modern, centre-left politics, both inside the Labour Party and outside it. What coalitions do we need to create a durable politics? What is its policy framework? I think a narrative is beginning to take shape out of these questions. Compass is pioneering this process and translating it into political strategies. To be perfectly honest I had wondered whether the Labour Party was retrievable as an organisation. But going round the country during the Deputy Leadership contest allowed me to tap into what people were thinking. There were a lot more people interested in the issues than I thought there’d be. It has got me going and given me enthusiasm.

Parallel to the deputy leadership elections you were also involved in broader antifascist campaigns. The Hope not Hate campaign brought in music, made a film, and linked up with the Daily Mirror.

Yes, parallel yet linked campaigns – that is the future. We made use of the internet. We used databases and were able to communicate quickly and widely to large numbers of people. We used new forms of interactive engagement and tried to link these ways of organising to a more fl uid politics of anti-fascist activity. It worked well. I think you’ll see these organising techniques re-surface in Livingstone’s campaign for Mayor. We’ve created a collective memory – or at least the beginning of one – which we can tailor for other types of campaign.

Can the Labour Party develop these forms of cultural politics?

What we were doing was far better than simply discussing whether or not we’re in the era of the end of the political party. I think that some of the anti-BNP activity can re-build the Labour Party as a vehicle for local mobilisation. A cabinet minister told me that this argument is nonsense because we’re now in the era of the virtual party. The role of the party is to scientifi cally construct messages for a few thousand voters. I’d contest that idea. The crucial question is what will constitute a modern political party. It has to be much more open and contingent to local circumstances. Whether its development is towards formal membership or some other relationship to people is an open question. Personally I like the federal architecture of the party because of its essential pluralism. John Harris and I addressed these issues in our Compass pamphlet, Fit for Purpose. What would Conference look like? What would be the basic units of party organisation? How should we fund political parties? These questions are up for grabs. My approach is not to rule anything out in terms of organisational reform. I think we have to contest the authoritarian model that we have now. What worries me is that, despite what everyone during the Deputy Leadership contest said about rebuilding the party on the ground, very little has been done.

Do you meet with other Compass MPs?

Well it’s more we swarm around different issues. We’re not a faction with its own rule book and membership. We’re much more open-ended and deliberative, focusing on specific campaigns. The Tribune Group has in effect gone and the Campaign Group is in numerical decline. There are now acres of territory between New Labour and the Campaign Group. The question is how we enter into that territory and construct a fairly loose conversation around some of the issues.

But what do you do about power and actually achieving change?

Well you can’t just undo the rules of the game. You have to mobilise and organise around specific policies. There is also an issue about whether we should organise across the different decision-making bodies of the party.

Do you feel more at ease in Dagenham or when you’re out on tour than you do in Westminster?

Yes. I’m not particularly interested in the House of Commons. Actually I was never interested in being an MP. What interests me are the issues.

The reason I ask is that I detect a reluctance about you becoming a ‘personality’. You did incredibly well in the Deputy Leadership contest but you seem to be backing away from the implications. Whatever you think about it, people look to you as someone who might play a central role in reconstituting the left of the Labour Party.

Well that interests me. But it’s my general disposition … I mean I’m uncomfortable being an MP myself. I’m only just getting used to it.

What is it about being an MP that makes you uncomfortable?

I’m not interested in, as a mate described it, getting up there and ‘doing the Placido Domingo’. I don’t like the showmanship of the game. What grips me, perhaps in a naive way, are ideas and creating a radical programme of social and economic emancipatory change. I didn’t find the deputy leadership contest a lot of fun. I did it because it was put to me that one can’t be critical and then, when the opportunity arises to do something about it, run away from the responsibility. We’re told time and time again by successive leadership groups that the only game in town is a deeply cynical and pessimistic view about the human condition and the country. That the only way a non-conservative government can be in power is through the politics we have now. It’s seen as a given and beyond debate. In some ways I once agreed with this, as a strategy for gaining power in 1997. But now this approach is turning in on itself. It has itself become an actor in undermining our capacity for economic and social change, because of its deep conservative and liberal political economy. I’m forced to contest it intellectually, and that means politically as well.

You seem to be at a point now where you have to think about your future role.

I am getting more comfortable with being a politician. The last year has been a steep learning curve. A journalist said to me the other day that someone had told him that he wouldn’t be able to talk to me unless he understood my basic catholicity. I said that I thought that this was a ridiculous way of looking at it. He said no, no, it is the experience of migration – you see politics in a vocational way. That’s possibly true.

You occupy the very difficult ground between class and migrancy.

I find myself re-tracing my family genealogy, going back to Mayo and spending more time in Ireland. It’s very interesting but perhaps not what we should go into in a political discussion.

But it has shaped your political trajectory and your take on the world.

I’m sure that’s right, but I’m much happier looking at politics in terms of the shape of objective social and economic conditions. It’s why I find Compass really interesting. Things are beginning to happen. The experiences of the last year have been, on the one hand, uncomfortable personally, but on the other hand they’ve helped to shape political discussion. I think there are now opportunities for coalition building and policy debate and a retrieving of certain conceptions of what the human condition is about – going back again to ideas that have been emptied out through the atomisation of politics. We need to have discussions about what constitutes a modern form of solidarity when we talk about migration or labour market insecurity or housing. These issues are opening up because of the contradiction between the language of New Labour and the empirical realities on the ground. Dagenham is the prism through which I see this. It’s on the frontline. Politics is about ideas, but also about power. I still detect a drawing back – let’s discuss it but in the meantime let’s leave the other lot to run the country and the party. We’ve been effective but we haven’t constituted that base camp from which to go further and agree some of the terms of that strategy.

Is that because MPs in Parliament are not talking about it?

Yes.

There needs to be some ideological cohesion amongst the MPs.

I agree with that.

You can get together around issues and make a big impact.

But then it’s, ‘Oh shit let’s run for cover …’

You’ve upset them …

But hold on, we’ve just been through a very successful period. The Compass Programme for Renewal goes with the grain of what is going on empirically. If we can shape it into an organising and mobilising strategy I think we’re joining the dots in a fertile way. We’re in a period of transition.

People, even those who have given up on Labour or who refuse to vote for them because of the Iraq War, are wanting something to inspire them politically.

Until a couple of years ago I was thinking about the Labour Party ‘this is going, this is going, and it’s not coming back.’ But I’m much more optimistic now, and that comes from travelling round the country and fi nding that the basic social democratic disposition of huge swathes of the country is still there. It’s a question of how we tap into it and articulate some of the issues and build a programme of change through coalitions and ideas. I’m really interested in Ken Livingstone. He inverts the whole logic of New Labour in terms of power retention. His objective is to get power in order to alter the terms of debate and to shift the climate toward radical change. But he also acknowledges the complexities of the modern world. He is able to think about what constitutes a modern coalition that is both inside and outside the party. Increasingly I find him a key stopgap around issues of class and migration. He will defend the basic architecture of a modern, pluralist multicultural democracy. That needs doing. We’ve got good links with him. The next big campaign is to support him in the Mayoral elections.

The Culture of Capitalism

tim — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:38:25 +0000

We are living through an age of transition. The new co-exists with the old. We can identify political, economic and cultural elements of this change, but we do not yet have a way of describing the kind of society we are living in. The great explanatory frameworks of political economy and sociology inherited from the industrial modernity of the nineteenth century leave too much unsaid. Theories of the moment tend to skip from one modern phenomenon to another. They are like stones skimming across the surface of water. We lack a story of these times.

In the last three decades Britain, the US and other anglo-saxon economies have been experiencing a new type of capitalism. Class and the social relations of production are being re-organised by new regimes of capital accumulation. These changes raise a number of questions. How are new technologies and the new modes of production and consumption transforming the cultures and social relations of class? In what ways are individuals as social beings changing in these new conditions? How is capitalism utilising labour as a force of production? Contradictions abound across the old and the new, the national and the global. We need an analysis of contemporary capitalism, its culture of unrest and its forms of capital accumulation. There are no clear signposts to follow. But, as Rebecca Solnit says, getting lost is like the beginning of finding your way. Britain’s old model of mass industrial production and capital accumulation began to fail in the 1970s. Growing pressure from labour for increased wages was undermining business profitability. Trade and overseas markets were limited by international competition and the decolonisation process across the third world.

The growth of industrial capital relied upon a high ratio of profits to wages.[1] The outcome was a collapse in the rate of profit and a systemic crisis. Inflation rose to double figures. Economic growth slowed and the balance of payments deficit increased. Out of this crisis arose a new and invigorated global capitalism which originated in Britain and the US. Three factors underpinned its extraordinary revival. The first was the development of new information and communication technologies (ICTs), which began to transform traditional manufacturing and distribution systems.

The utilisation of knowledge and culture as economic resources created new types of ‘post-fordist’ firms, products and markets. The second was the influence on economic policy of neo-liberal ideals, which claimed to maximise individual freedom through the deregulation of markets. Only competitive capitalism, free from the interference of the state, could guarantee the separation of economic power from political power and so ensure liberty. Third, there was the emergence during the 1960s of new values in the counter-cultures of the young middle classes. Under conditions of growing and sustained affluence in the West, the imperatives of economic security gave way to post-materialist values associated with identity, ethics and belonging. These created a powerful trend toward a ‘liberation ethic’ of individual self-expression, anti-establishment sentiment, emotional attunement to the world, and the personal pursuit of pleasure. These cultures, the ideological weapon of neo-liberalism, and the new technologies of information and communication (including the media), were key resources for creating the new regimes of capital accumulation.

The political response to the crisis of capitalism came with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The Conservative government began with no coherent ideology, but neo-liberal ideas soon began to set the agenda for change. A hegemonic project – Thatcherism – took shape. Milton Friedman’s ‘shock therapy’ was applied to the British economy and working class. The welfare state began to be dismantled. Low profit, traditional, manufacturing industry was shut down and de-industrialisation was allowed to accelerate. Mass unemployment was used to drive down labour costs and destroy the influence of the trade unions. Capital controls were abolished. The aim was to eradicate collectivist cultures and optimise the conditions for capital accumulation. A possessive, petty bourgeois individualism spoke a civic language of self-reliance and authoritarian populism. In contrast a hedonistic culture of consumer choice created markets in aesthetics, personal leisure and fashion. Technology first revolutionised the retailing sector and then catalysed change across the economy. As the de-industrialising North disintegrated into poverty, the big cities and Southern England boomed with new service, financial and high tech industries.

The neo-liberal ideology of Thatcherism virulently attacked the progressive social influences of the civic counter-cultures of the 1960s, while at the same time marketising them in consumer culture and in the social relations of the new industries. It transformed the political and economic landscape. However its attempts to reduce public owned resources as a share of GDP foundered on a residual, popular social democracy. In 1997 New Labour achieved power by appealing to this social democratic sensibility while accommodating itself to the neo-liberal ascendancy. To manage this contradiction it abandoned traditional class-based politics for its own brand of aspirational individualism. The ideological driving force was the Department of Trade and Industry under its Minister, Peter Mandelson.

A key figure was Charles Leadbeater, who had developed his idea of a new individualism a decade earlier in the pages of Marxism Today. The failure of the left, he had argued, was its lack of a vision of an individually-based collectivism. However, by the 1990s his ‘socialist individualism’ had metamorphised into the figure of the entrepreneur: ‘confident, inspiring, charismatic … quick to absorb new ideas, restless to discover new opportunities’.[2] Two documents have come to define New Labour’s adoption of this politics of individualisation. The 1998 Competitiveness White Paper, Our Competitive Future – Building the Knowledge Driven Economy, set out a framework for Britain’s industrial policy in which the market and its values were central. National prosperity depended on the ability to create a knowledge driven economy.

Peter Mandelson delivered New Labour’s vision: ‘Knowledge and its profitable exploitation by business is the key to competitiveness’. This was followed by the 2001 White Paper on Enterprise, Skills and Innovation, which addressed the creation of a labour force for the knowledge economy. Individual and business success was dependent upon a culture of innovation and competitiveness. Education and training would create workers who were autonomous entrepreneurs rather than dependent employees.

A new economy developed rapidly, based in the South East, organised around the technological development of the commodity and trading in intangible intellectual assets. It was dominated by the global financial sector, whose share of GDP increased from 6.6 per cent in 1996 to 9.4 per cent in 2006. Its business model became the new paradigm of the capitalist revival and has been incorporated into traditional sectors of the economy. Profit seeking in the traditional way is no longer the sole driver of economic activity. What counts is increasing shareholder value. As Richard Sennett has argued, companies must constantly ‘re-engineer’- introduce new products, create new markets, restructure their organisations and re-brand – to signal to the capital markets their economic dynamism. Profit alone will not guarantee a rising share price. This demand for constant change creates organisational cultures characterised by a state of permanent revolution without a cause.

The pursuit of insecurity is the business model of the new economy. It is this business model that New Labour adopted in its policies on the knowledge economy and in its modernisation plans for the public sector. Public service reform turned the organisational cultures of education, healthcare and welfare into quasi- or proxy markets. Intangible outputs such as relationships of care, the processes of learning and the provision of social security were incentivised and measured by proxies such as cost indicators and league tables, in order to judge their ‘value for money’.

A capitalism of intimacy

The fastest growing economic sector during the 1990s was the cultural industries- advertising, architecture, TV and radio, music, publishing, film and video, design, designer fashion, and computer and video games. Their raw materials are information, sounds, words, symbols, images, ideas, produced in creative, emotional and intellectual labour. By 2001 the Government’s Creative Industries Mapping Document reported that the cultural industries were worth £112.5bn and employed 1.3m people. Now estimated to be worth 8 per cent of the economy, they are indicative of the rise in an experience-oriented consumerism whose ends are aesthetic pleasure and self-fulfilment.

The Future Foundation’s regular survey Changing Lives asked interviewees in 2004: ‘If you had just one wish, which one of these would you choose? To be more highly esteemed; to have less fear; to be able to afford something; to be able to fulfil yourself; to have more friendship.’ The proportion choosing personal fulfilment as their number one wish more than doubled between 1986 and 2004; for those in their 60s it increased from 18 per cent to 56 per cent; for those in their 40s the rise was from 19 per cent to 48 per cent. In another question the survey asked: ‘For each item I read out will you please tell me whether you feel the need for it strongly, moderately, slightly, or not at all. Firstly … To satisfy my need for new experiences.’ Eighty per cent of 16-24 year olds felt they must strongly or moderately satisfy their need for new experiences, up from 56 per cent in 1983. A similar proportional increase was registered in those aged 35 to 54, with the largest increase being amongst 45 to 54 year olds: up from 22 per cent to 42 per cent. This cultural revolution crosses classes. During this period social group AB registered a fairly small increase in those responding positively to this question, from 55 per cent to 60 per cent; but in other social groups the proportion increased by a much greater margin. In the C2 group it rose from 32 per cent to 51 per cent and in the DE group from 35 per cent to 49 per cent.[3]

Individuals increasingly view culture as something to be actively created, rather than passed down from on high and passively consumed. The 2006 Office of National Statistics survey shows that after housing and transport costs, the highest household spending category is recreation and culture. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have facilitated new kinds of community for tens of millions of individuals. The virtual world Second Life, established in 2003, has over 5,500,000 avatars and L$2.6bn (Linden dollars) in virtual circulation. Its real world exchange rate is L$250 to the US dollar.

After social networking and pornography, the internet’s largest collective activity is the creation of family histories. Individuals are redefining a sense of history through their personal genealogies. Technology is creating new kinds of commons and at the same time opening up new opportunities for capital to commodify these cultural practices. The new capitalism is extending commodification into the realms of subjective life. Its forms of production are not confined to output, but use individuals and their relationships in the co-inventing of cultural and symbolic meanings and new ideas. The market creates communities of interests and seeks the intimacy of the consumer in order to embed commercial transactions in personal and daily life.

Promotional culture creates desiring consumers whose personal histories can be mined for their interests, desires and purchases. The economic sphere expands as production conscripts the thinking, imagination and sensibilities of individuals. New kinds of property and property relations are being created by companies using patenting and intellectual property law. Just as early industrial capitalism enclosed the commons of land and labour, so today’s post-industrial capitalism is enclosing the cultural and intellectual commons (both real and virtual), the commons of the human mind and body, and the commons of biological life. Paulo Virno argues that the productive force of post-fordist economic activity is ‘the life of the mind’.[4] Not just cognition, but also intuition and the symbolic world of the unconscious, where communication is non-verbal. In order to utilise this potential, capital is creating communicative forms of labour. These forms do not make tangible products but function as transmitters of care, information, symbolic meaning and learning (in effect, they lubricate the means of production).

Education plays a central role in producing these new kinds of production. The organisational cultures of schools, colleges and universities have been subjected to continuous corporate reform as they are geared to the labour market and economy. Their function is to realise individual productive potential and to facilitate the restructuring of the class relations of production. Because communicative labour has no end product, what counts as a measure of productivity is performance. In school and at work, a culture of capitalism rewards individuals who comply with market shaped criteria to measure, judge and discipline themselves in pursuit of a self-reliant, entrepreneurial form of life.

This culture of capitalism is about producing the subjectivity of the individual as a form of economic potential. Failure, closely linked to class, brings with it the threat of exclusion from its promise of a good life. But success on its treadmill of competitive exams, performance demanding careers, and never-be-still life trajectories, can lead to a sense of inauthenticity and futility. The culture of capitalism is nihilistic. It invades what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls the space of creative living, which is ‘sacred to the individual’. Here, in the name of profit, or utility or function, it requisitions the tools of social life – intellect, learning, relational life, communication.

Class and consumption

The promises of economic success and the pleasures of consumption cast a veil over the inequalities generated by these new modes of capital accumulation. A majority of the UK population is peripheral to wealth creation and its productive forces. One in six leaves school unable to read, write or add up properly. Social mobility has diminished. The fastest growing occupations are not in creative and knowledge work, but in low paid communicative labour: data input, admin, face-to-face services in health, education and care. Half the population share just 6 per cent of UK wealth, owning assets of £600 or less. In stark contrast to this low wage, low skill workforce is the new, high net worth market of very rich individuals. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has identified the top 1 per cent of individuals – 470,000 people – who earn an average annual income of £220,000 and between them own approximately 25 per cent of marketable wealth. Within this group wealth is unevenly distributed, with the top 0.1 per cent earning an average of £780,000.[5]

The traditional working class in the UK, formed out of the industrial revolution, has lost its economic role as the engine of wealth creation. Manufacturing as a share of GDP fell to 13.2 per cent in 2006. With the introduction of new technologies, its workforce continues to decline. Goods are increasingly imported from a periphery of poor, low-wage economies where primitive forms of capital accumulation, backed up by WTO rules and bilateral trade agreements, are creating a global proletariat in conditions of violence and exploitation. The working class, forced to compete with this global proletariat in a flexible labour market, is being caught in a vortex of Victorian-era casualised labour. Migrant labour is used by unscrupulous employers to further deregulate the labour market and drive down wages. The institution of work, once a source of collective cultural identity, has become fragmented, making forms of class solidarity difficult to organise.

Class consciousness is displaced by the fear of redundancy, not simply from employment but from life’s purpose. This threat to the integrity of the self generates anxieties over individual status and loss of recognition as a social being. The culture of capitalism has depoliticised class while heightening the inequalities and social gulf between classes. In the society of consumers, class develops a new lexicon of cultural domination. Individualised status-seeking consumption enacts the old class conflicts and inequalities. Consumption offers the pleasurable pursuit of desire, but it is also a mass symbolic struggle for individual social recognition, which distributes shame and humiliation to those lower down the hierarchy. The pain of failure, of being a loser, of being invisible to those above, cuts a deep wound in the psyche. This kind of stress dramatically increases our vulnerability to disease and premature death. Violence is more common where there is more inequality because people are deprived of the markers of status and so are more vulnerable to the anxieties of being judged by others.

This is the culture of consumption that has driven growth in the UK economy. It has been primed by the hard selling of cheap credit, which makes accessible a never-ending value chain of positional goods. The resulting personal debt has created an indentured consumption that requires never-ending work in a precarious labour market. Total UK debt stands at £1.4 trillion, of which £223bn is unsecured debt. In terms of profitability what counts is not the selling of commodities, but the lending to buy them. The highly lucrative markets in debt have fuelled the City bonuses of the super-rich. In 2007 they totalled £14bn. In effect capital lays claim to future earnings as a means of accumulation.

The extension of the commodity form into non-market areas of life has privatised the public realm and opened up intimate, personal life to the market. It has eroded civility, and the boundary between social relations and economic utility. It threatens the social bonds of care, association and community. Isolation and alienation contribute to a social recession: a near epidemic of stress, eating disorders, alcoholism, mental illness, men’s violence against women. The culture of capitalism, with its boundless choices and omniscient dreams of celebrity fame, disassembles human wanting and need. What is claimed to be freedom veers toward a tyranny of objectless desire, an opaque and unbounded world that leads to all kinds of compulsive and addictive behaviours. Personal boundaries are more easily pierced by nameless fears. Young women, subjected to an unremitting commercial sexual gaze, are incited into anxious states of self-dislike and body-management. What is inside and what is outside is no longer clear. It has become commonplace to feel one lives, so to speak, as a stranger outside the community.

Cultural difference is the prism through which large sections of the white population experience and react to their insecurity. Migrants whose cheap labour is exploited to bring down wage levels are viewed as competition for housing and under-resourced public services. They become the portents of social disaster and cultural loss. Political antagonisms and culture wars around race, gender and religion attempt to construct boundaries of identity which will define a sense of belonging and entitlement. At stake in the transition from an investment in an imagined mono-culture to a capacity to live with multi-culture is the struggle for individual and cultural recognition. As Sue Gerhardt argues, ‘we are dependent on what others see, and how much of our “being” they recognise’. Class inequality creates a paucity of recognition, and cultural difference becomes a focus for people’s fear, paranoia and hatred.

The uncertainty, the constant change and the decline in a sense of belonging herald the spectre of the cultural destruction of the traditional working class. Life continues but the cultural symbols that gave it meaning have been destroyed. Those who flourished in the old class culture find themselves ill equipped to deal with the new. For them the future becomes difficult to imagine. The question of hope is bound to the question of how to live. To lose a way of life is to lose a sense of hopefulness.

A new politics

We live in a time not of capitalism without class, but of capitalism destroying and creating class cultures and social relations around its new modes of production. Technologies continue to transform industries. Large sections of the population live and work as if they are a reserve army of labour: economically inactive, or working in casualised and temporary jobs, or threatened with the loss of their job. Class inequalities in health and education are becoming entrenched. The process of individualisation, evident for much of modernity, has been accelerated by the market and the imposition of entrepreneurial ways of life. Employees, students, schoolchildren, welfare benefit recipients are made responsible for their own social capital investment decisions, risk management and life course.

With the decline in welfare provision, work, however insecure and poorly paid, is deified by the government as the panacea of all social and individual ills. The culture of capitalism demands competitive self-enhancement and performativity, and with these come the threats of a precarious life, personal failure and existential redundancy. This culture of nihilism erodes the trust and reciprocity which underpinned the interdependencies of individuals. Non-market modes of life are squeezed between the intensifying demands for target driven productivity and commercial value, and the fear of being excluded or made useless and invisible.

After three decades, there is no end in sight to this period of transition. Despite the vigour of capitalist growth, the structural problems of the 1970s associated with the falling rate of profit have not been resolved. Rising oil prices associated with peak oil and growing international competition from China and India threaten the longer term hegemony of Western capital. The collapse of the US sub-prime market has revealed the inherent dangers of under-regulated financialised capitalism. An argument can now be made that the era of possessive individualism is on the ebb.

Popular response amongst the middle classes to the experience of individualisation is changing. The benefits of economic growth and the pleasures of consumerism are increasingly marred by anxieties over debt and now the prospect of falling house prices. The growing levels of mental illness are not confined to people living in poverty. Middle-class children are at risk of self-harm, eating disorders, depression and burn-out. The fear of impoverishment in old age, and the burdens of caring for aged relatives, extend across the population. Compounding these is the threat of global warming. For the great majority of people, there are no individual, market solutions to these problems.

New forms of political activity have grown up outside the institutions and structures of the old order. They have created a multitude of skirmishes that defy the old political categories. An extraordinary array of social movements, single issue campaigns and community actions reflect a growing level of political activity that is often global in its dimension. These social and cultural politics are also manifest in individual and group pre-occupations with race, identity and belonging. There is a ‘bio-politics’ of the body, emotions, sexuality, nature. ‘Life’, argues Virno, ‘lies at the centre of politics when the prize to be won is immaterial labour power.’ Democratic personal relationships, an ethics of authenticity, and ecological concern inform alternative ways of living that seek to counter the invasive force of the market and commodification. These micro-politics are without common voice or organisation, but they articulate the contradictions and conflicts of the emerging social and class relations of contemporary capitalism.

The change from a society of producers to a society of consumers requires a new kind of politics. The old politics and language of collectivism has lost its applicability. Central to any new politics of the left will be the revival of forms of political struggle around class and inequality. It will need to develop an idea of the common – a livable balance between togetherness and individual autonomy. Individuals are not the discrete and closed personalities of capitalist markets. We bring into the world our own propensities, but our minds and individuality are properties of the cultures, values, conscious and unconscious communications we grow up within. They form the fabric of our social bonds and relations. The culture of capitalism does violence to this fabric because it destroys the relational nature of individuality. A new politics will be socialist because it will recognise the interdependence of individuals. Tend to the social and the individual will flourish.

Notes

1. Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe, British Capitalism: Workers and the Profits Squeeze, Penguin 1972, p15.

2. Charles Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air, Penguin 2000, p243.

3. See Will Hutton, Aine O’Keefe, Phillipe Schneider, Robert Andari, Staying ahead: the economic performance of the UK’s creative industries, The WorkFoundation 2007, chapter 3.

4. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, Semiotexte, p84 www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm.

5. Mike Brewer, Luke Sibieta, Liam Wren-Lewis, Racing Away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes, Institute of Fiscal Studies 2007.

Left Behind, and Unhappier

Ellie Keen — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:20:57 +0000

Britain is in a social recession. Three decades of market-driven capitalism have damaged the social fabric of this country. While Labour evades the problem, Cameron’s rebranded Conservatives are making it a central plank of their politics. They’re staking out ground that once belonged to the left, taking the ideological offensive that will cost this government the next election.

The symptoms and pain of the social recession are often concealed inside our homes. We experience them as our own shameful and personal failings. One in six adults suffer from anxiety or a depressive condition. A quarter of men and a third of women suffer sleep problems. The charity, Mind describes stress in the workplace at almost “epidemic proportions”. Mental ill health accounts for a third of all working days lost. To make the problem worse, over 1.1 million people in Britain are dependent upon alcohol. The social recession has contributed to an alcohol culture of broken relationships, domestic violence against women, chronic illness, and street brawling.

Children have been particularly affected. The 2004 Nuffield study identified a sharp decline in adolescent mental health. In 2006, Unicef published a report that painted a bleak picture of British childhood. Its summary of six dimensions of child well-being places the UK at the bottom of the league. Since then the Children’s Society‘s Good Childhood Inquiry and Cambridge University’s review of Primary School education have confirmed many of the stresses in children’s lives.

Both Labour and Conservatives claim that our class-based society is giving way to a more individualistic, meritocratic culture. But, though there have clearly been changes, class remains a central part of our society. One in six leaves school unable to read, write or add up properly. One in four 16-17 year olds are not in education, employment or training. There is less social mobility. Health inequalities are entrenched. Success in education, and life chances in general, remain dependent on family background.

We have become a society of a small number of winners and many losers. Half the population share just 6 per cent of wealth, earning the median annual income of around £18,876 or less. In contrast the top 1 per cent – 470,000 people – earn an average annual income of £220,000 and between them own approximately 25% of marketable wealth.

The shame of failing in education, of being a loser in the race to success, of being invisible to those above, cuts a deep psychological wound. This kind of ongoing humiliation creates chronic anxiety which dramatically increases the risk of disease and premature death. Inequality not only damages the life chances of people living in poverty, it adversely effects the quality of life of everyone.

Alongside affluence, market-driven capitalism has created uncertainty and a decline in a sense of belonging. Cultural difference is the prism through which large sections of the population experience and react to their insecurity. Political conflict around race and religion attempt to construct boundaries of identity which will define a sense of belonging and entitlement. Cultural difference becomes a focus for people’s resentment, fear and hatred.

The liberal economic policies of successive British governments have not only failed to end the social recession, they have contributed to it. A politics up to the task must recognise that alongside greater equality and fairness, individuals have four basic needs: for safety, a sense of belonging, a feeling that we are worth being loved, and the experience of esteem and respect. It’s a politics still to be made.