The Do Re Mi

I’m occupied at present preparing a review of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital and Ideology’, which turns out to be one of the most important books I’ve read in many decades. Piketty makes perfectly plain that none of our current problems are soluble until we get to grips with a drastic economic restructuring. Call it reform, call it revolution, call it whatever, none of the other issues that keep presenting themselves as a way forward - gender, race, identity, even climate - are tractable until the power of big money is vanquished. Piketty acknowledges that both social democracy and state socialism have now failed, and offers suggestions for economic structures that could lead further.

He also analyses aspects of our current situation that made my blood run cold:

“Let me be clear about the meaning of negative public capital such as we find today in the official national accounts of the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy. Negative capital means that even if all marketable public assets were sold—including all public buildings (such as schools, hospitals, and so on) and all public companies and financial assets (if they exist)—not enough money would be raised to repay all the debt owed to the state’s creditors (whether direct or indirect). Concretely, negative public wealth means that private individuals own, through their financial assets, not only all public assets and buildings, on which they collect interest, but also a right to draw on future tax receipts.  

[...]

In strictly theoretical terms, there is no limit on how negative public wealth can go. Strictly speaking, one could reach a point where private individuals through their financial assets owned the totality of all future tax revenues or even the totality of everyone else’s income, so that everyone would de facto be working for the bond­holders. This happened frequently in ancient times (when slavery was a conse­quence of heavy debt or military tribute; see Chap. 6)"

[Thomas Piketty 'Capital and Ideology', p614]

In the end it’s still ‘The economy, stupid’, or as Woody Guthrie put it rather more nicely, the ‘Do Re Mi’:

Playing The Goat

Steve Bell’s goats cartoon hits home because “herd immunity” was indeed the worst gaffe so far in the coronavirus emergency, a verbal disaster on a par with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” which may have given us the Trump presidency and all that’s followed from that. Herd immunity is a perfectly respectable technical term in epidemiology: “ a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through previous infections or vaccination, thereby providing a measure of protection for individuals who are not immune.“

There are two huge problems with its use in this crisis. First, it contains the word “herd” which is grossly offensive when applied to human beings in a democracy, though perfectly acceptable when used in the abstract about biological systems. It has no place in any political discourse and deploying it was more or less like throwing a hand grenade into a crowded room.

The second problem is not of words but facts. The coronavirus appears to have a lethality around 1-5% of those infected (with much uncertainty until a lot more testing); a vaccine is probably 18 months away, if one can be found that works, so herd immunity will be the de facto result anyway as it is for flu and most other viral diseases. If around 80% of infections are mild or symptomless and the other 20% require hospitalisation, of whom a quarter may be critical, then a strategy based on what could perhaps better be called “community immunity” might have worked (as is being tried in Sweden). It could only ever be morally acceptable if those 20% are guaranteed plentiful and effective hospital treatment, but this was being contemplated by a government which has spent the last decade deliberately reducing the preparedness of the NHS through its policy of austerity.

But in any case it still could never have been politically acceptable in a country like today’s UK in the age of social media, where individualism and dread of such a horrible, invisible threat have largely eroded collective solidarity (already deliberately weakened by successive Conservative governments since Thatcher). Dominic Cummings and Toby Young notwithstanding, most of Johnson’s colleagues realised this – none too quickly – and performed a U-turn whose long-term political consequences are incalculable. Their mass destruction of jobs and small firms might shift us to the social-democratic Left or to the Far Right.

After 2008 the Left utterly failed to make its case for Keynesian reflation and allowed the Tories’ “household budgeting” metaphor to persuade the electorate to vote for austerity. As I write the new Labour leader has yet to be announced, but whoever it is has an even greater challenge before them. Boris Johnson is chameleon enough to take on Keynesian colouring for a while, though it remains to be seen whether he can keep his party with him. But strident Left sloganeering while the virus crisis persists is likely to be counterproductive, and working out a really cast-iron strategy for holding the Tories to account after it ends must be the priority.

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

I've been expecting Boris Johnson to become Prime Minister ever since he was Mayor of London, and was only mildly surprised when Michael Gove's little Brutus-act delayed his progress by a couple of years. I don't possess any supernatural powers of prediction, it just seem blindingly obvious that he's the only politician with sufficient ruthlessness and charisma among the current professionalised political class. What was a bit surprising was just how inadequate they all proved at dealing with his Machiavellian skills during those grim months from October to December last year (when even the speaker of the Commons was trying to egg them on like a rowing cox).

This post is the text of a talk I gave in January to a panel discussion organised in Finsbury Park by Phil Cohen, under the name 'There Must Be Some Way Out Of Here'. The other speakers were Phil himself, Andrew Calcutt, Valerie Walkerdine, Tim (T.J.) Clark, Lynne Segal and Baroness Ruth Lister: 

Dick Pountain/There Must Be.../ 20th January 2020 08:52:01

I realised the election was lost on the Friday before, when Channel 4 News sent a team to do a vox pop in a northern labour seat. The man they interviewed, who’d only ever voted labour before, called Boris a "lovable buffoon" but said he would nevertheless vote for him. The following week’s defeat was particularly bitter because many people hoped that Labour was about to win a majority comparable to that of 1945 which founded the modern welfare state. Attlee's government came to power thanks to a social solidarity engendered by the collective experience of fighting and provisioning World War Two. British business - or “the capitalist class” if you prefer - was prepared to compromise with organised labour both for their common interest in reconstruction and to avoid the threat of more radical expropriation.

That degree of solidarity clearly can’t be relied upon nowadays, and to understand why, examine what lay behind that man’s description of the "lovable buffoon" who’s now our prime minister. He knew quite well that Boris Johnson isn't going to solve his personal economic problems, but he didn't believe Jeremy Corbyn would solve them either. That’s probably because he thinks no-one can, but he'd rather vote for the one that he thinks is more like himself -- the one who like a drink and a laugh, and who will get Brexit done -- a largely symbolic raising of the drawbridge that he thinks might preserve what he does have from marauding foreigners. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket but he'd rather go there with Boris, and with a giggle rather than a lecture.

The Left devotes a lot of thought to the question of why the working classes, both here and in the USA, choose to vote against their own "economic interests", often using abstractions like ‘false consciousness’, ‘ruling ideology’, ‘consumer capitalism’, ‘neoliberalism’, all of which are merely descriptive. For the UK we can find a more concrete answer in party politics.The 1945 welfare state improved people’s lives over the next half century enormously, in housing, healthcare, education, and employment. It once looked as if this progress would continue smoothly toward some form of pan-European social democracy.

But as we all know this progress was interrupted in 1979 by the election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, which set out to head off such an outcome. Within that government, a group on the Right of the party, who favoured an American-style unregulated economy, set out on a deliberate, tenacious and effective 40-year campaign to undo the solidarity that sustained the welfare state. During Margaret Thatcher’s three periods of office, they devised a policy of selling council houses to their occupants. In the 2nd January edition of the London Review of Books there's an excellent review by Susan Pedersen in which she identifies this policy of selling public housing as a turning point in post-war history.

The policy was part of a three-pronged attack, the other two being malicious neglect of heavy industry to weaken the grip of trade unions, and the fostering of anti-European and anti-immigrant sentiment. But the housing sales were the masterstroke. They gave many Labour voters a stake in the housing market, and this was followed up by restrictions on any further building of council houses, which eventually lead to the housing shortage and ferocious price inflation that’s still with us and is a major factor in the huge increase in inequality and homelessness of the last 40 years. It drove a wedge through the heart of Labour's support, between those who’d bought and those who hadn’t, another split that's still with us. Thatcher famously said she was creating a ‘property-owning democracy’, when in fact she only created half of one. 

The other half, now mostly at the mercy of private landlords lived more precariously, more liable to identify immigrants as competitors for jobs and homes, and less likely to vote Labour. But among the new home owners it reinforced a feeling of autonomy - having your own home to decorate as you like, perhaps a car rather than public transport to go where you like. It’s the attraction of such feelings of autonomy that’s missing from many Left analyses that ask why people vote against their ‘economic interests’ - in the last instance, they value autonomy over cash. Conflict between autonomy and collective good has been around as long as there’s been society, and it always plays better to the Right than to a Left that tends to undervalue autonomy. 

Following Thatcher’s fall, the Labour Party was forced to acquiesce in her counter reformation to get reelected in 1997 under Blair, and ever since the crash of 2007 it's been unable to regain the full confidence of ‘lovable buffoon’ man. Brexit was the Tory Atlanticist's final decisive weapon. Like all the most effective weapons it was two-edged in that it split both the main parties, but the Tory Right correctly guessed that the party’s historic will to power over principle would prevail against Labour’s historic tendency to factionalism and moral probity. And during those horrible three months of 2019 they deftly out-manoeuvered both their own “wet” wing and the Labour Party, to place Boris Johnson in power with a working majority.

Climate crisis hasn’t played a major role in the ‘Thatcherite plot’ until now, but now it’s set to widen the splits in our society that they’ve caused. And we’re not alone in this predicament, as the electorates of almost all Western democracies are splitting in a similar fashion. There’s growing generational split. The younger generations, whose futures are most threatened by climate change, are being politically galvanised by the threat, as well as by an inability to afford housing in the inflated market their parents generation profits from. There’s a growing gap between city dwellers who have decent, even greenish, public transport, and those outside cities won’t be willing to give up driving cars because alternative public transport is inadequate (and because they like driving - that autonomy thing again). Widest of all is the split between those who would close borders to keep out the mass migration of those displaced by war, flood, fire and famine, and those who support freedom of movement.

Under such conditions, promising to restore 1945-style social democracy will no longer win elections: accepting the reality of climate crisis means managing the winding down of fossil fuel usage which will be resisted, and the Right may continue to deny its reality. Australia is likely to be one of the earliest test cases, because when and if Scott Morrison’s government is thrown out over its attitude to the bush fire emergency, whichever successor that does accept the crisis will have to tackle a coal industry that provides a third of the country’s exports. In fact national solutions to the climate crisis aren’t feasible, since a degree of global governance that doesn’t exist is necessary to curb the fossil fuel industry. The UN is the only available institution, but its Millennium Goals, admirable as they are in principle, are unrealisable so long as climate-denying administrations like Trump’s have a power of veto.

Over the next decade preserving any sort of democracy will be a challenge, and we’ll need to invent wholly new rhetoric, institutions and practices to achieve it: the spectrum of Left, Centre and Right is no longer helpful, while electoral reform and green coalitions barely begin to touch the magnitude of the task.

The Dude Derides

To me, a very interesting aspect of Boris Johnson’s assumption of the premiership yesterday was the fact that both the Daily Telegraph and The Independent picked up instantly on the word ‘dude’ in his acceptance speech. Both papers understood this as a reference to The Dude, hairy anti-hero of the Coen Brothers comic film ‘The Big Lebowski’, played by Jeff Bridges. The Dude has become a cult hero: ex-60s radical, sunk into alcoholism of a rather sumptuous kind (White Russian cocktails), reluctantly forced to be a makeshift private detective. Unflappably cool, partly thanks to his vodka intake, his motto is ‘The Dude Abides’.

In invoking this Bridges character Boris is making a clever appeal to a largeish proportion of the voting population who find him amusing, entertaining and unlike the typical politician. His political allegiances may be fluidly variable but this doesn’t deter this particular audience, who despise most other politicians as humourless charlatans. Boris is a humorous charlatan, and that works for many people. In short, Boris was staking a claim to be Cool, with a capital C.

In 2000 I co-authored, with my late friend David Robins, a book called ‘Cool Rules’ (Reaktion Books, Sept 2000). An informal sociological analysis of popular culture, this book was widely misunderstood as promoting the virtues of coolness, which it was not, but nor was it either condemning it. Instead the claim we made in this book is that the phenomenon we christened Cool with a capital C (hoping to avoid such confusion) is a major shift in the social psychology of affluent Western consumer societies, a change in the ‘spirit of the age’ away from Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic to a quite different constellation of character traits – which we analysed as Narcissism, Hedonism and Ironic Detachment.

The book probed the history and the consequences of this change, drawing on a wide range of reference materials, from the Beat Movement, the 1960s Counterculture, Hip Hop culture, literature and movies, the anthropology of African religions to the psychoanalysis of New York neurotics. In a nutshell we recognised Cool as an extreme form of individualism, at odds with most forms of state-based collectivism, libertarian in tendency, attracted to extremes and contemptuous of compromise and moderation. The very antithesis of Social Democracy. The final chapter of the book was about Cool Politics, and I‘ll quote a few paragraphs for the benefit of those multitudes who haven’t read it:

CHAPTER NINE - COOL RULES

In a 1998 article for the New York Review of Books Mark Lilla of the Princeton University Institute of Advanced Studies pondered the two revolutions that have transformed post-war America - the 'cultural' revolution of the 1960's and Reagan's neo-liberal economic revolution of the 1980's - and was very critical of the inadequate political responses from both the right and the left of American politics to their aftermath. He characterises their responses as 'reactionary' in the proper usage of the term: that is, the Right can only react by lambasting the moral laxity bequeathed by the '60s, while the Left reacts by railing helplessly against the triumph of Reaganomics. The facts are, as Lilla puts it, that ‘the Sixties happened, Reagan happened and for the foreseeable future they will together define our political horizon’. According to Lilla, young Americans have no difficulty in reconciling the two in their daily lives, ‘holding down day jobs in the unfettered global economy while spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties’.

These thoughts then prompted Lilla to pose a dramatic question ‘for which neither Tocqueville, nor Marx, nor Weber has prepared us: What principle in the American creed has simultaneously made possible these seemingly contradictory revolutions? How have our notions of equality and individualism been transformed to support a morally lax yet economically successful capitalist society?’ At the risk of some immodesty toward the shades of Tocqueville, Marx and Weber we offer a single word answer to Lilla: Cool.
[...]
Some might argue that Cool is primarily a western phenomenon, and that elsewhere in the world there are other equally powerful forces, for example militant Islam, that will check its progress. Another possibility is that in non-Christian cultures the Cool pose does not offer the same attraction that it does in western societies - there is, for example, no equivalent expression in the Chinese language. Actually we don't believe in any of these counter arguments. Wherever the standard of living rises to a point where television, pop music and the Hollywood movie are available (and that leaves out very few areas of the globe now) then young people will both recognise and cultivate Cool. What Cool now represents is the influence of the free market in personal relationships and sexuality, and whether politicians like it or not, probably a majority of the younger generation throughout the world now aspire to this degree of freedom. What's more, they are unlikely to be gainsaid by mere moralising, and it takes dictatorship or the military triumph of religious fundamentalism to divert them from its pursuit.
[...]
So how bad could it be if Cool did rule the world? Certainly the traditional Left would experience it as absolute defeat - capitalism unleashed and unregulated, free to seek new markets where it will. Cool consumer capitalism has discovered, as Thomas Frank puts it, how to construct ‘cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.’
But the triumph of Cool would be no more comforting to those on the traditional Right since it represents the collapse of all their most cherished values. The USA, as Mark Lilla’s question makes clear, must be our model for what happens when a society embraces the free market both in labour and leisure, while losing interest in party politics: unprecedented prosperity for the many, misery for the few, Wall Street at an all-time high, jails overflowing, and a lack of any truly oppositional (as opposed to knee-jerk reactionary) politics. The maintenance of a healthy democracy requires a perceptible difference between the parties of left and right, and real confrontations over real issues, and in this light the emergence of an apolitical Cool generation is alarming.
[...]
Cool prefers the image of rebellion, as offered by glamorous terrorists, gangsters and wasted rock musicians, to the hard boring slog of real politics, and we would all do well to remember that Adolf Hitler was also a cultural rebel with artistic pretensions, a distinctive haircut, big trousers and kinky boots
[...]
Cool may once have been an expression of rebellion but it is surely not any longer. The real question is whether or not it can sustain the key elements, the rule of law and freedom of conscience, that make western democracy the least bad form of government ever invented. The picture is murky and contradictory: on the one hand Cool values personal freedom above all, it hates racism, it is egalitarian and hedonistic in temperament, on the other hand it is fascinated with violence, drugs and criminality, and mesmerised by the sight of naked power. But this book is not an effort to predict the future, rather to explain the past - to make visible the ambiguous influence of Cool in modern life precisely so that people might start to debate such matters, and more seriously weigh the pros and cons of boredom versus excitement, order versus turmoil, tolerance versus thuggery. In the end we shall, as ever, have to wait and see what happens, for deprived of Marxism’s Historic Inevitability the future’s not ours to see - Que Sera, Sera (Sly Stone’s version of course, not Doris Day’s).

If you are at all convinced by our characterisation of Cool as Narcissism+Hedonism+Ironic Detachment then it will be clear that with the ascension of Boris, the world is now largely under the sway of Cool rulers: Johnson, Putin and even Trump fit that template. I don’t ask you to believe that Xi Jinping is also Cool, but do keep an open mind - it was a bit of a shock when we learned that Mao Tse Tung was an enthusiastic orgiast after all. But my main point is please don’t confuse ‘Cool’ with good. When the spirit of an age changes, the words used to express value change with it. All young people, and quite a lot of older ones, now say ‘That’s cool!’ to mean that’s good, but that isn’t at all what we meant by Cool. Confusion arises because culture and its value system are the sea in which a people all swim and in which they can’t normally see the water: we were trying to get our snouts above the water to examine it from the outside.

So when I call Boris Cool that isn’t any sort of praise, but rather a dire warning. It makes him impervious to most of the arguments used by the Left, and perhaps even fatally attractive to young voters. Boris’s Dude-like insouciance is the perfect camouflage for the vile opinions and policies of the hard right-wingers he’s appointed to his cabinet. We know what Priti Patel thinks about the work-shyness of British workers, but Boris is a bit of a slacker himself you know, like The Dude. No-one in their right mind wants to work nowadays, rock stars and footballers are our role models, Boris is no prude, likes a larf. It’s really hard to picture Jeremy Corbyn besting Boris at PMQs.

The Legacy Of 1968

In my last blog post I mentioned that I was preparing to present at a conference organised by the University of East London called ‘The Legacy of 1968’ (which went ahead with great success). When preparing my contribution I looked around for material and recalled that with my late co-author David Robins I'd once written an article for the journal New Formations (Issue 39, Winter 1999-2000), which compressed the arguments of our about-to-be published book Cool Rules, into eight pages. That book, full title 'Cool Rules: Anatomy of An Attitude' was entirely devoted to analysing the attitudes of the 1968 counterculture.

I dug out that article and was pleasantly surprised by how well it still stands up. In fact there’s nothing in it that I would want to retract 19 years later, though there is one huge thing that I would wish to insert were I writing it now. That is the unexpected economic crash of 2007-8 and its profound effects throughout the world. Our argument in Cool Rules was that the attitude of Cool was becoming dominant in affluent Western societies, to a point where it was displacing that Protestant Work Ethic, which Max Weber had identified as the psychic motor of capitalism. What we didn’t tackle was the way in which Cool was perceived by those sections of the population who didn’t share this attitude, which was precisely what 2008 made very visible indeed.

The crash of 2008 resurrected class consciousness in a reaction that quickly dispelled the illusory fog of classlessness surrounding Cool culture (remember Blair and Cool Britannia?) Silicon Valley, the media industries, fashion, music, TV, film, the liberal professions, and most of all affluent youth, were the beneficiaries of this new, looser, more fun Cool Capitalism. The socially conservative, the religious, and the most precarious sectors of the working class were the losers by it – ‘left behind’ by globalisation, outsourcing, the gig economy, their family values threatened by sex, drugs and rock & roll. They made their displeasure unmistakably felt in the UK’s Brexit referendum and the election of President Trump in the USA.

You can think of those two electoral upsets as experimental evidence for the balance between cool and uncool in Western societies: in the UK the answer is 52: 48, in the US it's slightly complicated by their Electoral college but still somewhere near 50:50. I’d venture to guess similar ratios prevail in most of Europe, and perhaps further. A seemingly unbridgeable social-psychological rift runs through most of the formerly liberal democracies which threatens them with ugly transformation.

If you haven’t read Cool Rules but would like some idea of what we were talking about, I’m attaching our New Formations précis here:   Download PDF of Cool Rules

      

The Three Tribes of Austerity

If the 50 years following 1918 witnessed the slow and erratic ascendance of social democracy (punctuated and accelerated by WWII) then the 50 years since have witnessed its equally slow and erratic dismantling. It was eventually Keynes ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ rather than Kapital which provided the theoretical understanding of that ascendancy, and in my opinion James K Galbraith’s ‘The Predator State’ is the nearest we have yet to an analysis of its demise.

In his recent article ‘The Three Tribes of Austerity' (on the Project Syndicate website) Yanis Varoufakis has suggested an enhancement of Galbraith’s thesis, one that renders the picture with somewhat higher resolution, by sorting the predators into three different species. Varoufakis of course had enlisted the advice of Galbraith during his doomed spell of trying to defend the Greek economy from EU predation, and a whiff of doom is still detectable in his article.

Can Social Democracy be revived?

While preparing to participate in a conference on the Legacy of 1968, it occurred to me that this year sees another equally momentous anniversary, the end of World War One in November 1918. My deeply-suppressed numerological instinct took over for a second, and made me notice that 1968 is the exact mid-point of the century 1918-2018. Is there any significance in that? What was happening during that century? It then struck me quite forcibly that one thing that was happening during that century was Social Democracy. It arrived slowly, tragically, haltingly to dominate the Western World out of the chaotic aftermath of WWI, which had completely overthrown the 19th century liberal order. It wasn’t always called by that name: it appeared, still does, as Christian Democracy, as the US New Deal, as the Welfare State and even as ‘wet’ Conservatism in Britain. 

One can plausibly argue that 1968 marked the peak of Western social democracy and the birth of its libertarian nemesis: that year saw the start of its decline, first to be overtaken by neoliberalism and after that by – what? I’ve argued some of this before, when in 2000, along with David Robins we wrote Cool Rules, a book that was mistaken by most critics as a manual for being cool but was in fact all about the incompatibility of counter-culture values with the social-democratic consensus.

These thoughts prompted me to whip up the following, highly provisional and incomplete, timeline:

1918-2018: The Century Of Social Democracy 1918 WW1 ends Labour movements of Europe agitate for social democracy Weimar Republic in Germany 1921-28 NEP in Soviet Union 1925 Fascism in Italy 1929 Great Depression 1933 Hitler elected         US New Deal 1939-45 WW2          UK/US/Soviet alliance defeats Nazism/Fascism 1945 UK Labour Government         NHS/Welfare State …………………………………. The "Trente Glorieuses" of social-democratic economic boom 1947 Cold War between US/NATO and Soviet Union begins US Republican Right begins plotting downfall of New Deal under banner of anti-communism 1968 The May Events in Paris Prague Spring US assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy UK Anti-Vietnam demos Intel Corporation founded …………………………………. 1975 OPEC Oil Shocks        Neoliberal backlash proper begins     During the 30 postwar years capitalists tolerated universal prosperity - Keynesian Social Democracy - because it was profitable. It becomes no longer sufficiently profitable. A neoliberal counter revolution hands over power to finance capital. Asset stripping of welfare states begins. 1986 “Big Bang”: Rent-seeking and privatisation displace manufacturing to the Far East. 1991 Collapse of Soviet Union Fear of the Soviet threat had been a key factor in capitalism's acceptance of Social Democracy 2007-8  Runaway financialisation results in the sub-prime crash and "The Great Recession" Government bank bailouts from public funds effectively bankrupt remaining welfare states. Austerity policies to reduce deficits depress earnings and feed into populist anti-government revolt 2016 Brexit referendum and Trump presidency 2017 Turkey "coup" enables anti-democratic, anti-secular shift IT technology causes intense competition     Rate of manufacturing profit continues to fall     Automation and outsourcing contribute to unemployment and zero-hours work 2018 Democracy becomes an obstacle to oligarchical capitalism      Universal Basic income touted as a solution for the underemployed      1% own 70% of wealth Middle East and Latin American wars create mass emigration crises Those feed anti-immigration populist movements throughout Europe, US and elsewhere. This time there is no UK/US/USSR alliance to combat any worldwide authoritarian oligarchy.

I repeat, overtaken by neoliberalism and after that by – what? Various oligarchical economic orders that are growing in China, Russia, Turkey, the Middle East and elsewhere are unlikely to prevail in the UK, the EU or the USA, despite the best efforts of Trump, Boris and assorted europhobic parties, but any progressive alternatives to them are very hard to discern. In particular the UK Labour Party and US Democratic Party are both in a totally unfit state to halt the right-wing tide.

The Labour Party is split. The Corbyn Left remains in thrall to ideas of state socialism and anti-colonialism that the older leadership absorbed during their 1968 student days: they appear incapable of fully renouncing romantic revolutionary rhetoric and declaring themselves ‘radical social democrats’, preferring the weasel-formulation of ‘democratic socialists’. The Blairite Right remain unable to distinguish between neoliberalism and social democracy, call themselves social democrats and hence inflame the Left’s rejection of the name.

In between these positions there are those, rather few and not in positions of power, who cogently argue that a return to social democracy is no longer feasible, partly for economic reasons (global transformation of industries and work by the US giant internet corporations is eroding the tax base), but also for sociological reasons (growing individualism of the electorate, growth of identity politics). I’m tempted by such arguments myself, but still resist them because to accept means either learning to live under oligarchy, or a faith that I can no longer sustain in some kind of non-state, libertarian form of sharing economy. All history suggests it would be far too fragile to survive the current world.

Nowadays my opinions are formed less by Marx and Debord, and more by James K. Galbraith and the French sociologists Boltanski and Chiapello. Galbraith’s “The Predator State” is still the most radical critique of the asset stripping of welfare states, while Boltanski and Chiapello’s “The New Spirit Of Capitalism” lays bare the means by which the new Silicon Valley style of entrepreneurial capitalism, assisted by neoliberal finance capital, demolished the older ‘Fordist’ style of corporate capitalism – which was of course the soil in which social democracy flourished. It was the full employment and unionisation created as a response to Fordism that made possible the welfare state, and its demise is what has given us the zero-hours gig economy.

So my ‘what?’ question can be rephrased as, is the battle actually over? Has the large, paternalist corporation been utterly trounced by what Richard Barbrook has called The Californian Ideology, the Amazon/Apple/Google/Facebook view of hip libertarian capitalism. Until recently I’d probably have said yes, but what’s changed my mind comes from a most unlikely source, namely one of those very same Californian Ideologists, Steve Blank, adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford, lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and senior fellow at Columbia.

Before entering academia Blank was himself a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, in its earliest days. Around 1978 he helped found Zilog – maker of the first successful personal computer CPU chip the Z80 (on which I first learned to program and wordprocess in Wordstar!) - and later worked with the supercomputer companies MIPS, Convergent Technologies and Ardent. What caught my eye was a recent article he wrote about Elon Musk’s Tesla and the future of the Californian model, which you can read on Medium here.

It’s a compelling argument from the history of the American automobile industry: the giant General Motors was actually started by a brilliant entrepreneur in the Musk mould, called Billy Durant, of whom no-one has even heard nowadays. He was unequipped to weather the transition from innovative start-up to mass production and lost control of his company, which went on to become the epitome of a Fordist corporation, beating Ford at its own game. Things aren’t nearly so different in the current economy as we’ve all been lead to believe.

Over the next few years we’re going to see a war for the electric vehicle market between Tesla and the big, still somewhat paternalistic, European makers BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. We might also see battles between the US, EU (and even possibly Chinese) states and the giant Silicon Valley corporations whose wealth and influence now make them a threat to state power and whose evasion of taxes is a threat to global stability. The outcome there is no foregone conclusion either. To paraphrase what Joe Stalin once asked about the Pope, “how many divisions” do the Silicon Valley corporations have? Well, none, but a Pope is still here while Stalin is long gone, Putin notwithstanding. State power is everywhere threatened by modern populism, and while Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have mostly been ‘liberals’ in the American sense – socially liberal supporters of the Democratic Party – would they stay that way under pressure? They have unprecedented funds to do deals with some suitable demagogue.

We’re at a great fork in history, where unpalatable as it may be, the Left might find itself having to side with older, global corporations as the lesser of evils, against these 'disruptive' new juggernauts with their blithe unconcern for peoples' livelihoods. To get elected Donald Trump promised his voters jobs (plus a lot of less wholesome things), but he can’t ever deliver those jobs because the backers of the Republican Party, which he only appears to control, would never permit it. The chance of the US Democrats returning to power with a mandate to nationalise Google and Amazon is zero (ditto for Labour in the UK). The chance of displacing rentier/finance capital from its grasp on the big corporations is about the same. The chance that some stratum of the top managements of the world’s corporations will wake up to the fact that putting everyone out of work will eventually destroy the market for their products is somewhere above zero, but their next bonus will soon cure that.

So what’s the answer to my original question - can social democracy be revived? The best I can offer is this mega-hypothetical. It could were a party to achieve power that understands what social democracy means - that is, an armistice in the class struggle rather than a victory for either side - and were strong enough to tackle the giant corporations and make them pay fair taxes and create well-paid jobs. Few such parties have ever existed (perhaps Labour in 1945, in Scandinavia and Germany in the 1960s), and none do now. Such parties aren’t created by a few people scribbling a manifesto, they grow out of mass movements that aren’t in evidence anywhere in the West at the moment, though they may be elsewhere. It took the devastation of two World Wars to build such parties last time: it might take something as drastic, like climate change, to achieve it again.

Dick Pountain/Caustic Comments/ 12th August 2018 13:29:49