Big Money Rules

I've always been overly fond of irony, even though I also accept Rilke's sage advice in 'Letters To A Young Poet':

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of life. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.
(Viareggio, April 5th, 1903)

I'm neither young nor a poet, and I'd never actually become ashamed of irony until now. The irony that finally proved too much for me is this - that fate of democracy may now depend upon the best efforts of the US intelligence agencies. They may now be the only institutions capable of arresting (for their own far-from-progressive interests of course) the process described in Diane Ravitch's NYRB article Big Money Rules.  It's a grim but a necessary read if you want to know what's really going on in the world.

Social Democracy Uber Alles

The outcry over the revoking of Uber's London licence shows that the service it provides is popular, and it's unquestionably a significant, innovative use of new technology to improve transport. On the other hand the outcry from drivers about lack of benefits and job security show that the application of technology is being used (not uncommonly) both to increase exploitation of the labour force and to flout legal regulation designed to protect labour and customers. The outcry of Black Cab drivers against Uber ignores the fact that people flocked to Uber not merely for convenience (though that is considerable) but because Black Cabs had priced themselves out of the market with the last big price hike.

Put all this together and it's clear that all the parties need to get together and find a workable solution, which is highly unlikely to happen because of the vastly different political atmospheres between UK and USA, and a general lack of adult leadership on both sides. I can imagine a system where Uber's technology is used, within a revised legal framework that brings in Black Cab drivers too. Uber would have to give up predatory pricing and recognise its employership, while Black Cab drivers would have to slacken their monopoly. And pigs would have to mount flying unicorns.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and the rest have built a worldwide, highly effective infrastructure of the sort that socialists (especially Stafford Beer) used to dream about - but unsurprisingly, as private enterprises, they use it to generate mega-profits for their owners and to erode working conditions and pay for their workers. The challenge for social democrats - which few are thinking straight (or even talking) about - is to devise new reforms that will make this infrastructure work better for the public interest, without destroying it or crushing its ability to keep innovating.

Tax avoidance by the big tech companies is certainly a major issue, and getting them to pay anything at all would be a step forward, but punitive taxation is not a solution either. Similarly with ownership, old-style nationalisation is unimaginable, unaffordable and might in any case stifle innovation. As for regulation, we need to grasp in precisely what ways the new connectivity renders many older forms of regulation ineffective, and modify them to the new reality. In fact we need to rethink a whole complex of now-inseparable issues - benefits, universal basic income, employment rights, taxation, public v private provision.

Not convinced? Then remember for a moment all those billions of pounds from the public purse that have been wasted over the last 50 years on failed NHS and other public IT projects. Now try to imagine how technology like Amazon/Google/Facebook's would help the NHS with appointments, record keeping and sharing, even diagnosis...

No parties that I'm aware of on either side of the Atlantic are thinking seriously about these matters in sufficient depth and urgency. In the USA the sheer incompetence of the Democratic Party has put the Republicans in a position not only to erase what remains of New Deal social democracy, but also to salt the earth against any possibility of its regrowth. In the UK social democracy has fallen down the crack that runs down the middle of the Labour Party, between a Right that remains wedded to neoliberalism, and a Left often hobbled by nostalgia (not always conscious) for state socialism. Not until Jeremy Corbyn starts calling himself a social democrat rather than a socialist, can you be sure that the party has remembered the difference.

Collapse of the Left

The devastating setbacks recently suffered by the Left in the UK, USA, Turkey, Hungary and Poland (perhaps soon to be followed by more within the EU) have not yet lead to any satisfactory explanation of what is going wrong. They're still largely discussed in terms of Right v Left, but using partially outdated definitions of what these terms imply.

For the first half of the 20th century, the democratic Left was associated with socialised services, economic regulation, high wages and worker's rights,, while the Right espoused militarism, privatised services, free markets and low wages. The 1960s counterculture crucially changed the beliefs of the so called New Left in the direction of pacifism, minority rights and social libertarianism, and these positions have now merged into the mainstream Left to produce a bewildering range of different combinations and sects.

The Right still likes militarism, free markets, and individualism but has also adopted substantial parts of New Left libertarianism, to further complicate things. Apropos of which, this disturbing and highly unorthodox blog post by Dale Beran may come as a surprise if you're unfamiliar with the seamy end of the Internet: https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb#.kthc5781h

What's happened is that major changes in the economy - financialisation, falling profit rates, neoliberal fiscal policies - have reduced the Left's ability to deliver social democracy, and as a consequence the generation of the 1960s' counterculture, (that is, mine) substituted a new position based on anti-racism, LGBT rights, and much more - what's often called 'identity politics' but could equally be called 'minoritarianism' . Sometimes this switch is justified by reference to Gramsci's concept of hegemony, that is achieving power over culture and society in times when state power is unattainable. (In fact he still saw state-power as the ultimate goal)

An insightful article in the LRB by UCL's professor of Philosophy of Law, George Letsas (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/george-letsas/brexit-and-the-constitution) shows a different way to see what's actually happened. He criticises the usual definition of that 'populism' which lead to Brexit and Trump's victory, namely that it means bowing to 'what the people want' and deploying rhetoric that appeals to their emotions. Instead he attacks this populism in politico-legal terms, as a 'deliberate attempt to bypass the normal channels of representative democracy'. That might sound like the same thing, but it isn't.

Rather than 'populism' this approach is better called 'majoritarianism'. It claims that the sole justification for political action is indeed 'what the people want', but more precisely, what they voted for in the last election or referendum. This conception of democracy is held by as many on the Left as on the Right (of those who adhere to democracy at all that is), but it doesn't correspond to the way UK democracy, or many others, actually work. Democratic political action was until recently always justified by a continual process of collaboration and conflict between the executive, legislature and electorate - the process we call 'checks and balances' - which, however imperfectly, protects at least some of the rights of the minorities within the majority.

This creeping majoritarianism in the wake of Brexit and Trump isn't yet the full-scale authoritarianism or fascism that some on the more excitable Left are claiming, but it is their precondition. It's also clear that the so-called Alt-Right is fully aware of the crucial role such checks-and-balances play in maintaining liberal forms of democracy, and they're rapidly achieving sufficient power to undo them all. And one reason that such majoritarianism is gaining popular support so rapidly is precisely the fact that the Left has more or less given itself over to minoritarianism.

Of course the mass media play an important role in encouraging majoritarianism, but they merely complete a vicious circle with the Left's increasingly extreme and vociferous minoritarianism. The still-mostly-silent majority believes that its interests are being sacrificed to those of a wide range of minorities, in a process that inexorably inflates rather than combats racism, sexism, xenophobia and the rest of the isms.

This almost universal misconception about the nature of representative democracy renders 'more democratic than thou' political arguments moot, as the rancour over Brexit so clearly demonstrates. Letsas doesn't claim that understanding it will solve the problems of the Left, far from it. Particularly among younger people, confusion caused by the New Right's espousal of libertarianism, 'anti-elitism' and anti-PC runs deep, and any policy solutions for the Left aren't at all obvious. Letsas does suggest that in the long-term one way out is a written constitution for the UK, something I've always believed to be less important than electoral reform, but I think he has convinced me.

Trump of Doom?

Thought for the day. The type of economy we call social democracy depended for its success on a willingness of the majority of the population to cooperate as well as compete with one another, giving up a portion of their income in taxes to be spent on various public goods like medicine, education and transport. If the population loses its willingness to make these reasonable sacrifices then it becomes impossible to maintain a social democracy.

The UK population was so willing for at least 30 years following WWII, to a large extent thanks to the experience of necessary cooperation among the generation who fought that war. But over the *last* 30+ years that willingness has been steadily eroded by many factors, including (but by no means confined to): greater individualism stemming from precisely the relative affluence and economic freedom that post-war social democracy conferred; successive economic crises (some related to oil, some to financial recklessness); industrial decline, outsourcing and austerity imposed by politicians in thrall to neoliberal economics; free market propaganda promulgated by politicians in thrall to neoliberal economists; mass migrations; international terrorism.

The UK Brexit referendum, US election of Donald Trump, and developments within many EU countries suggest that this willingness has now been lost by somewhere around a crucial 50% of my own "baby boomer" generation, and there's evidence of loss too among younger generations whose expectations have been drastically curtailed. But despite the nationalist rhetoric of "taking back control" from the Brexiteers, it seems more likely that what's actually happening is a withdrawal of people's engagement from the nation-state altogether, back to the individual family as unit of survival.

Perhaps the only way the willingness required for social democracy could ever be restored is in the event of some major catastrophe, on the order of magnitude of a world war, great depression or an abrupt climate deterioration, that forces people to relearn cooperation in order to survive. Recent governments in both Europe and USA have been just barely prudent and competent enough (tempering their neoliberal policies with judiciously-applied shots of Keynes during the emergencies) to avoid such a catastrophe. Such a catastrophe feels quite a lot closer following the inauguration of the impulsive President Trump, but a catastrophe it would remain - and to imagine otherwise would be grotesque.

What I've learned this week.

That insecure, narcissistic, retarded-adolescents who can barely distinguish between reality and computer games, are inventing and controlling technologies on which the future of civilisation may depend (Andrew O'Hagan's "The Satoshi Affair" in the LRB, 30th June). That a majority of working people are being written out of this future, robbed of dignity, security and jobs, and they're so furious that they'll lash out right and left at institutions they blame - like Parliament, the EU, and perhaps in November the USA. And that we lack any politicians who have clue what's going on, the nous or the backbone to handle it. It will take some time to digest these lessons.

To be absolutely honest, I did know all this already but, hell, I don't get too many opportunities to exercise my rhetoric nowadays...

Blimey, it could be Brexit!

It's a year since I wrote a new entry on this blog, and that isn't because I have nothing to say, merely that the world is getting crazier faster than I can focus on it. Now though, faced with an imminent EU referendum, it would be remiss not to say something. Boris, Gove and the other Brexiteers have the scent of victory in their nostrils, a scent wafting from a silent majority who don't share their real thoughts with pollsters. This scent is part xenophobia – the Brexiteers are convincing many people that leaving the EU would reduce immigration, which it won't – but also partly from their simmering rage against liberal media and cultural elites who have for several decades been fiddling while they were robbed of security, dignity, jobs. Unfortunately the Remain campaign relies on precisely those elites for advocates, which simply turns up the heat under the simmering pot.

So what of a "Left Case For Brexit"? There isn't one. Even if you sneakily share some of that majority resentment, accept the fact that victory for Brexit would leave you locked on this small island with neo-Poujadist governments permanently in power. Read Anthony Barnett's long but thoughtful analysis Blimey, it could be Brexit! Then vote Remain on June 23rd. Just do it.

Connection Lost: the crisis of social democracy

I'm not going to claim to have predicted Cameron's success and Labour's defeat in the general election: that would suggest an expertise in psephology that I don't possess, as well as being in poor taste. I will claim though to have expressed a bad feeling about the way things were going for some years before the disaster. For example in reply to a Facebook friend who reposted Paul Krugman's excellent refutation of the case for austerity on April 29th I said this:

"A very good article on economics, as you'd expect from Krugman, but this election is about politics. Austerity is really about punishing 'welfare scroungers' and the immigrants who 'steal our jobs'. The Tories and UKIP are succeeding in selling this story to a large part of the public. Never underestimate the desire to punish. Labour is trapped by this story, as it can't be seen as soft on either scapegoat group. It's not about the real economics at all."

That reply contains the kernel not only of my critique of Labour's recent campaign and policies, but also of my analysis of the crisis of social democracy all over the world. The Tories have managed to sell their rationale for austerity thanks not to a superior grasp of economics, but rather of social psychology: they spotted and capitalised upon a shift of public mindset to which Left ideology has made Labour blind. A standard trope in most recent Left analyses of neoliberalism is that one of its most important effects is the promotion of the economic over the political, the invasion of the social world by market forces and pricing. The conclusion drawn from such an analysis is that the Left needs to assert a more powerful moral position, to mount a Gramscian counterattack which substitutes empathy and social solidarity in place of commerce and competition. This conclusion, that the Left needs to become more moralistic, was a major factor in the recent defeat. A new critique is certainly necessary, and it does indeed need to start from non-economic grounds, but from social psychology rather than morality.

Since World War II, and at an accelerating pace from the 1960s onwards, affluent Western societies shifted from being mostly organised around production (which we've largely outsourced to the East) in favour of services and consumption. This seismic shift created a profound change of mindset, or character if you prefer, among the population. The type of bourgeois individualism preached by Rousseau and analysed by Max Weber placed a high value on work as a source of both identity and virtue, but our post-60s individualism is more hedonistic, even narcissistic. We've lost most of our deference to authority and adopted in its place a prickly sort of confidence that recoils from any kind of political paternalism. Most of us tend to value pleasure and personal autonomy over social solidarity (except towards family), and sentimentality (rebranded as "emotional honesty") over stoicism. And in recent years the advent of social media like Facebook and Twitter have reinforced this shift enormously, especially among the young, bringing us to the cult of the "selfie".

In the UK dwindling faith in organised religion has lead to morality becoming more personal, arbitrary and even contradictory: on the one hand we dislike people being "judgemental" toward us, while on the other we mercilessly refuse forgiveness to transgressors like "love rats" or celebrity paedophiles. The prevalent attitude of "middle England", of the tabloid press, indeed of a narrow majority among most Western populations, it presents many such contradictions which doom to failure any attempt to analyse public opinion in terms of Left versus Right (or, in the USA, Liberal v Conservative). A deep adherence to personal autonomy might lead someone to support gay marriage while opposing immigration, to resent anti-discrimination laws, to support taxes to pay for the NHS but not for foreign aid, and to despise those who depend on welfare. And this unreadability is compounded by a growing generation gap.

The 35 years following the end of WWII saw governments that were in effect social democratic, even when sometimes called plain Democrats (USA), Christian Democrats (Europe) or one-nation Conservatives (UK), who constructed welfare states that guaranteed a high degree of security in employment. By contrast the last 35 years have seen free-market reforms - under both Tories and New Labour - claw back much of the power that organised labour acquired after WWII, resulting in far less secure employment, and with rewards for the lower-paid static or even falling. Over the period we've witnessed the rising power of the mass media and "celebrity culture", accompanied by a divorce of remuneration from productivity among the upper echelons, a phenomenon that Robert Frank and Philip Cook called "The Winner-Take-All Society" and Slavoj Žižek has dubbed the "surplus wage". Top executives, artists, performers, fashion designers and the like behave like self-selecting, invitation-only clubs in which the rewards are orders of magnitude greater than those for normal jobs.

Young folk in their 20s and 30s are faced with debt and uncertainty, only slightly counterbalanced by the small but real possibility of entry - if they're both talented and lucky - into these "creative industries" which might bestow great wealth. Two generations of left-leaning teachers (the ones Michael Gove would have loved to eradicate) have inculcated values of anti-racism and ecological awareness deeply into most of these youngsters, while popular culture adds a topping of sex, drugs and <insert any one of two hundred+ new genres here>. Old folk in their 60s and 70s on the other hand, faced with a similar loss of certainty, security and identity are offered no compensation beyond a free bus pass: they're among those tempted toward UKIP, toward transferring some of their pain onto scapegoats like immigrants and "welfare scroungers". Fundamentally opposed as some of their attitudes are though, these different age cohorts share a profound dislike of ideology, a keen nose for hypocrisy and contempt for politicians, and - as rampant individualists, forced to forge their own character rather than accept those imposed by work and church - an unprecedented sensitivity to tone.

Commentators on the election debacle seem puzzled why the list of Labour manifesto policies - some stolen from the Tories, some sensible and progressive - failed so badly to capture public support. The answer isn't in the policies' content but the tone in which they were delivered. Ed Miliband performed far better than expected on television, and even managed to convey a degree of passion. It was exactly the wrong sort of passion. Agreeing to continue austerity-lite might have been expected to cover both bases, prudence and compassion, but it wasn't believed because it was delivered without the Tories' special spice, punishment. (It's not only "cheats" and "scroungers" that need spanking, but also a little smack bottom for ourselves for running up so much debt during the boom years). Immigration was equally fraught. Every TV interviewer from Jeremy to Krishnan asked rival politicians the question "how many new immigrants is too many?", and of course received no answer because a liberal-minded orthodoxy forbids such a quantitative approach as potentially racist. A sizable proportion of the public think the answer is "not many" but they bitterly resent being accused of racism and so don't express it: instead they allow Nigel Farage to express it for them in his well-rehearsed, cheeky-bar-room-wag manner. This question is pure poison to Labour politicians, from whom it brings out their inner Methodist. The 2015 public hates to be lectured or scolded more profoundly than any before. This mindset - descendant from what David Robins and I called "Cool" in our 2000 book - is not reversible by hectoring or propaganda but is a result of structural changes in the nature of work, and it's wholly at odds with the prevailing voice of the Labour Party.

The same problem affects, or will soon affect, social democratic parties the whole world over as electorates recoil from the collectivist moral tone that's formed the basis of social democratic thinking for a century, which renders them more amenable to libertarian and free-market rhetoric even where that directly threatens their "real" interests. Labour's recent defeat is the culmination of a process that's been more visible than ever since 2008: Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown's prompt action really did save the world's banking system from collapse, but rather than thanks they get blamed for rescuing greedy bankers; the extent of global inequality is widely known and understood, but attacks on the "1%" get brushed off as envy; the crooked bankers, financiers and tax evaders who precipitated the financial crisis and still profit from it today aren't pursued with any great moral outrage, but instead the Tories' wafer-thin excuse that they are the "wealth creators" is swallowed. There's a complete disconnect between economic facts, Labour's analysis of them and the public's perception. It's a Habermasian failure of communication that can't be fixed by quoting Habermas (that only makes it worse). Labour needs more than just a new language: it needs to reorient its whole relationship to civil society and the state if it is to survive, which is by no means guaranteed.

An Armistice 
Social democracy does not mean employing reformist rather than revolutionary means to achieve a state-socialist society. It is not an alternative way of "winning" the class war. Instead social democracy is an armistice in the class struggle, whereby the employed classes agree not to expropriate the employing classes in return for a fair share of the profits, paid not only through wages and salaries but through free or subsidised services like health, education, firefighting, policing and so on, administered by the state and financed by universal progressive taxation. The economy remains resolutely mixed, with publicly-owned utilities operating alongside private firms, and with unions representing the interests of the employed. Social democracy in this sense has been the dominant type of economy throughout most of the Western world for 70 years, even when it doesn't use that name. That least social democratic of nations, the USA, still hasn't repealed every trace of Roosevelt's New Deal, while every UK Conservative government since the war, Thatcher's included, has been forced to live with a large degree of social-democratic compromise. However this compromise is now under attack as never before, and the result may well a complete breach of the armistice.

Since the 1980s many centre-right commentators have been predicting the collapse of social democracy on economic grounds, as a failure of Keynesian economic management, but this is only a small part of the problem. The real problem is a deep structural problem with the second half of its name, "democracy". Social democrats eschew revolutionary violence and authoritarian rule, governing populations who are free to live as they wish, within the constraints of a market somewhat moderated by redistributive welfare measures. Society remains divided into classes, some of who own means of production and others who don't.

Classes aren't biological entities and your class is not encoded in your DNA, though it most definitely is greatly affected by your birth, that is by your parents' position in the hierarchy of ownership. Since class isn't biological it must therefore continually renew itself (humans have a finite lifespan) by sifting and sorting, recruiting and rejecting new members into each class, and two of the most potent class-forming forces in modern Western democracies are housing and education. The deeper crisis of social democracy isn't so much the funding of welfare through taxation (important though that is), but more to do with a movement among the middle classes to segregate themselves from the working classes, both geographically and educationally, thanks to their superior exploitation of their economic freedom. Ideologues of the Right understand these forces as well as, maybe better than, those of the Left, and Conservative governments ever since Thatcher have been devising policies to accentuate this defection and division - with an effect that far exceeds their hopes since they're pushing at an open door. The middle classes are tremendously effective and self-organising in their desire to defend higher remuneration and superior social status through housing and school choice. Those countermeasures that social democrats once employed during their successful era, provision of social housing and excellent state education, have ceased to be effective.

Social democracy has been eroded by an interlocking set of sociological vicious-circles. Its very success in expanding the consumer economy after WWII lead to an affluence that increased the confidence of the middle classes, while the high wages achieved by the working classes prompted manufacturers to outsource production to the orient. Politicisation of education combined with a collapse of deference lead to a decline in the quality of state education, drove more and more of the middle classes back to private schooling, and produced a barely-employable underclass of undereducated youth. Loss of deference toward the professions, coupled with a deskilling of many arts through new technologies, lead to growth of a "creative class" and stimulated the aspiration to enter this class, to escape from wage labour into creative, non-manufacturing jobs and bohemian lifestyles: Žižek's "surplus wage" and the zero-hours contract are two sides of the same debased coin.

This being the case, why not just let social democracy die, mutter RIP, and wipe away a small tear? One good reason is that it's indispensable for the survival of the human species. The alternative of state socialism was tested to total destruction by history (and let's waste no more time on all that sectarian bullshit about "actually existing socialism" versus "deformed state capitalism" and the rest). The alternative of totally free markets is about to be tested to destruction right now, but this time the destruction will affect most lifeforms on the planet through increasing ecological catastrophes, through mass migrations, through financial meltdown and universal impoverishment. Social democracy on a world scale is the only imaginable way that the necessary regulation can be applied to steer capitalism back toward sustainable progress, and reverse the defection of a tiny super-rich minority at everyone else's expense. Social democracy really is just an armistice, and the result of breaking it won't be some kind of benign anarchistic cooperation but rather an epidemic of terrible new forms of authoritarianism and mayhem.

If there's any role left for social-democratic parties in this changed world, it can only be as honest referees of the armistice. They can no longer be partisan advocates for either the middle or working classes. A social democratic party needs to re-educate the electorate about the necessity for a mixed, regulated economy, which might not be impossible in the UK given the British public's continued adherence to the NHS. It mustn't be afraid to call itself social democratic and to explain what that label means. It needn't suck up to "business" and finance capital in the lubricious way that New Labour did, but nor must it pander to the public sector and unions uncritically: it must remain a referee. It needs to seek cooperation with other international parties and institutions to pursue tax evading corporations vigorously and plug the revenue leaks that threaten to sink the ship of state. It needs to enforce equitable rules about employment rights, work-place safety and welfare matters, but its job is not to promote the public's aspirations, which are their own business, nor to judge their moral failures (except those that breach the law). In short it needs to step back out of people's personal lives and concentrate on the context and infrastructure that supports those lives. Abandoning PC rhetoric will be as a hard as giving up smoking, but it has to be done.

Starting a new social democratic party from scratch isn't a sensible option and the only party in the UK whose history suggests that it could become such a party again is the Labour Party: the LibDems have imploded, while the SNP can't help but be suspected of trying on a social-democratic mask over its nationalism. Whether or not a potential Labour leader exists with the will, charisma and political nous to reforge its broken halves into such a party is something we won't know for at least five years, perhaps a lot longer.