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REASON
TO BELIEVE
MICHAEL
JACOBS
Article publicat a Prospect Magazine
When Max Weber analysed the
way in which the post-Enlightenment processes of rational thought gradually
permeated European consciousness in the 18th and 19th centuries, he
described the world as becoming 'disenchanted.' The religious world view
which the Enlightenment largely destroyed had made the world an enchanted
place, filled with the magic and mystery of gods and God. But cold, hard
rationality killed them off. Even for those who remained religious, Weber
observed, the world ceased to be magical. It was subject to physical laws
which were knowable through science. God did not die, but he no longer
inhabited the everyday world.
In the last 20 years,
something similar has happened to left-of-centre politics in European
societies. Up to the 1980s, politics on the left was enchanted-not by
spirits, but by radical idealism; the belief that the world could be
fundamentally different. But cold, hard political realism has now done for
radical idealism what rationality did for pre-Enlightenment spirituality.
Politics has been disenchanted.
There are many who welcome
this process. But it is equally possible to argue that it has been
profoundly damaging, not just for the causes of progressive politics but for
a wider sense of public engagement with the political process.
It is true that the British
Labour party was always pragmatic in office. But there is something that
Labour has lost, which it used to have-an ideology of social transformation.
Until at least the mid-1980s most members of the Labour party, in common
with its sister parties throughout Europe, believed in a different kind of
social and economic order, with institutions and social relationships
founded on morally superior values. This was socialism, and belief in it
infused the whole of left-of-centre politics.
Socialism was not merely the
end-point towards which those on the left believed themselves to be working.
For large numbers of activists and politicians, it was an animating force in
their lives. People were socialists in the way that others (sometimes the
same people) were Catholics or Jews: it was part of their identity.
'Socialist' did not just describe a set of views you had. It was something
you were.
This was true of the
moderates as much as the revolutionaries. It is easy to forget this now, so
accustomed are we to politicians who aim for nothing more than their
pragmatic policy positions. Prior to the mid-1980s, the most mainstream
Labour politicians talked often and without embarrassment about socialism.
Here is Tony Crosland, Labour's principal revisionist of the 1950s and
1960s, writing about the central socialist value of equality in a 1975
Fabian pamphlet: 'By equality we mean more than a meritocratic society of
equal opportunities... we also mean more than a simple redistribution of
income. We want a wider social equality embracing the distribution of
property, the educational system, social class relationships, power and
privilege in industry.'
The Fabian tradition is often thought of as the moderate end of socialism,
but Fabian pamphlets from the Webbs through to the 1980s were full of
statements such as this. This was how all Labour people thought. There were
deep divisions between those believing in rapid change and those favouring a
more gradual approach. But the transformative ideals of this ideology ran
right through the party.
Today all this has gone. No
one speaks about socialism: the word sounds quaint. But it is more than
semantic. New Labour no longer seeks to transform society, even as an ideal.
Of course Labour wants change; it sees many things wrong in society and
wants to improve them. Two of its goals, if achieved, would be genuinely
far-reaching: the eradication of child poverty and the target of 50 per cent
of young people entering higher education. But Labour politicians no longer
claim that it is possible to change the structures which perpetuate
inequality. We hear no visions of moral improvement, personal liberation, or
the ability of humans to live more fulfilling lives than those offered by
consumer capitalism. Even in its rhetoric-where most of this used to lie-New
Labour's aims have become managerial, about the better administration of
society, rather than about its transformation.
Tony Blair emphasises the
continuity of his values with Labour's past. But the values are vague:
"equal worth, opportunity for all, responsibility, community."
They are not translated into concrete ends, a vision of different kinds of
institutions and relationships in society. Indeed, as Robert Skidelsky has
pointed out in Prospect, Blair's mantra of 'eternal values, modern means’
is not true. Labour values-equality and the favouring of the
public/collective over the private/individual-have been abandoned. The idea
that one might have principles about means, or that different kinds of
social institutions might be ends in themselves, is rejected as dogma. The
third way is not an ideology. It provides neither a guide to policy-making,
nor a vision of the society towards which social democrats aim. New Labour
is left with no more than piecemeal social reform.
Electorally, of course, this
has been very successful. But within the Labour party it has had a
devastating effect. This has gone largely unnoticed by those outside. But
inside the party it is visible and widespread. It is not that the
government's policies are too moderate-party members are used to this. Some
of the policies in fact command widespread support, particularly now that
they come with higher spending and taxation. It is the loss of ideology
which creates the sense of alienation. It is the abandonment of the party's
historic commitments to equality and to radical social change. Talk with any
group of longstanding party members, especially those over 40, and this
sense of alienation will come up, and not only among leftists. If anything
it is the old moderates of the party, the people who would once have been
called right-wingers, who feel most confused. It was they who won the fight
to reclaim the party after the aberrations of the 1980s. Now they find that
the party's rhetoric has carried on marching right past them.
Membership figures tell a
tale: down by 130,000, nearly one third, in five years. For some, there's a
moment which tips them over the edge-vouchers for asylum seekers, the
promotion of selective schools, the prospect of war with Iraq. For others,
it is a dull sense that there is no longer much point. When Labour wanted to
change society, it was, at heart, a campaign: it needed members. But if it
just wants to manage things better, why bother?
And for every member who
leaves, there are many more who cannot bring themselves to do so, but whose
commitment to the party barely rises above the payment of a membership fee.
Look at the rates of activism: the attendance at meetings, the numbers of
canvassers. The party is not quite in crisis, because for many the bonds of
loyalty remain strong, and there are newer members who are not disillusioned
because they never had illusions in the first place. But there can be little
doubt that something profoundly corrosive has been happening to it.
In fact, the trauma runs
deeper than this. It is not just about the party leadership. The truth is
that most people on the left no longer know what they believe. They still
think that gross inequality is immoral, they dislike competitive
individualism and argue that capitalism generates social evils. What they
don't know is what to replace it with. Once it was socialism. The trauma of
left-wing politics is that the third way is not enough-but it is not clear
what else there could be.
What happened to radical
idealism? What was the political equivalent of Weber's Enlightenment
rationality? The answer, in part, is the fall of the Berlin wall. There had
been signs of ideological collapse from the early 1980s. But it was after
1989 that socialism as an animating spirit began properly to disintegrate.
In many ways this was paradoxical, because the vast majority of people on
the left welcomed the end of communism. They had always felt that the Soviet
system was a burden, an actually-existing version of socialism used to
discredit them. What they hadn't realised was its powerful symbolic effect.
Communism was hateful, but it did prove that capitalism was not inevitable.
Then into this new world
stepped Francis Fukuyama. His 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man
was rubbished by left-wing critics at the time (more rubbished than read).
Socialists above all were at pains to deny that liberal capitalism was the
end-point of history. Yet it was among the left that Fukuyama's thesis
planted itself most deeply. Almost imperceptibly, they felt their
self-confidence draining away. People who were once convinced of their
prescription for change suddenly found their idealism disappearing.
It wasn't only the resurgence
of global capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s which had this effect.
Socialists had lived through previous eras of capitalist triumph before,
secure in the knowledge that they wouldn't last. What happened in the 1990s
was at an intellectual level. As the last dregs of actual alternatives-from
building societies to Vietnam's resistance to American multinationals; from
worker co-ops to the control of international finance capital-were sluiced
out of sight by the onrushing tide of liberal capitalism, the idea that all
this could be turned back came to feel more and more unrealistic. The
insidious thought developed: maybe this is it. Maybe there is nothing more
now than piecemeal social reform.
For the strategists of New
Labour, this new political realism was a liberation. No longer did they have
to pretend to believe in something which they were patently not aiming to
achieve. For most of the rest of the party, it was a traumatic shift.
The debate over Clause IV in
1994-95 revealed this starkly. For the leadership and their younger
followers, Labour's old commitment to 'common ownership of the means of
production, distribution and exchange' was self-evidently absurd. For their
opponents on the left, it was just as obviously fundamental. But for the
huge majority of party members it was neither. The words of Clause IV were
old, but they symbolised the party's commitment to a different kind of
society. Everyone knew that the party was not trying to achieve such a
society in practice. But the words kept the spirit alive. They affirmed the
party's radical idealism. This was why there was such reluctance among the
members to give them up. The New Labourites won, of course, because exposed
to the cold light of day the mystery of socialist ideology could no longer
be supported. But the effect on the party - and on the whole of progressive
politics - was more profound than was realised at the time.
People outside progressive
politics might shrug and say 'so what?' What does it matter if some people
have grown up and realised that they cannot change the world, something
everyone else accepted long ago? Socialism had not been a realistic
political alternative in the west since the 1930s; its final intellectual
demise was belated and is not to be mourned. Many others from within
progressive politics will also say 'good riddance'. There is a strong case
to be made that socialist ideology was a profoundly damaging force for the
decent politics of reform.
There are many things wrong
with today's capitalism, this argument runs, but the alternatives are worse.
Fukuyama was right. Market democracy is the best system of ordering social
and economic institutions, not only producing the most happiness, but also
the most liberty, and possibly the most equality, for the greatest number.
Naturally it is not perfect; but that is why modern social democracy exists.
Capitalist societies need ameliorating, but they do not need replacing by
some other system which social democrats can no longer identify.
This makes politics dull, but
that is how it is. New Labour looks technocratic and uninspiring because
that is what politics is now like-incremental, managerial amelioration. We
should be grateful to live in such uneventful times, not resentful. In any
case real politics is increasingly about negotiating dilemmas between
competing values which are no longer expressed as simple conflicts between
good and bad or elites and masses.
One of the reasons that
socialist ideology flourished in the past was that it fitted the tribalism
of a class society. Ideologies which came as whole packages of belief
attached themselves easily to fixed, collective identities. But people's
identities today are more fragmented, looser, more malleable; and by and
large this is a welcome form of personal liberation. It is unsurprising then
if belief systems are also not taken on as a whole, if people pick and
choose their political views as they try to create their sense of self.
This is why New Labour
abandoned socialist ideology. The voters didn't believe in it. Moreover, it
created a gap between the party's rhetoric and the realities of its policies
which led to constant conflict between leadership and activists. The
ideology also put off many voters who might otherwise have supported it. By
abandoning the ideological pretence, New Labour has at last buried the lie
at the heart of the old Labour party and has been able to achieve some
historic goals: a minimum wage, devolution, huge investment in the NHS,
among others.
The arguments against
ideology are powerful. In these circumstances, can there be a defence of
radical idealism? I think there can. Indeed, without a renewal of radical
conviction the Labour party, and possibly modern politics as a whole, is in
serious danger of atrophy.
Such conviction cannot be a
return to socialism. There is now no alternative "system" which is
imaginable as a replacement for liberal capitalism. But there does not need
to be. Radical idealism does not require a belief that modern economies and
societies could be run under fundamentally different principles, merely that
the present system could be made to generate fundamentally different
outcomes. For its root is a very simple impulse. It is the feeling that many
people must surely have when looking at the world: that too much in the
present order is morally wrong. A billion people living in absolute poverty,
species and habitats being wiped out, many groups subject to systematic
violence and discrimination, some people consuming vast amounts while others
starve. The impulse is not complex, nor does it carry self-evident
prescriptions. It simply says: the world does not need to be like this.
As such, today's
transformative ideal stands between two opposite but equally debilitating
claims. On the one hand, it escapes the comforting complacency of belief in
wholesale system change, where real-world problems did not need addressing
because all would be different 'under socialism.' On the other, it rejects
the paralysing (and almost always self-serving) assertion that significant
change is impossible because the present order of things is the only one
available. It is not an argument against liberal capitalism per se, but is
an argument against the fatalism of political action that now generally
accompanies it.
This is why it is inevitably
ideological in form. Idealism envisages a better kind of world and makes
this its political goal. It does not seek a simple leap from here to there:
it must engage with the present order and seek a feasible path of change.
But it does allow political vision to extend beyond present constraints. It
permits the politician to say, 'this is all we can do now, but here is what
we are aiming for in the future.'
And this is just the
objection that many have to it. For New Labour strategists, it was the gap
between rhetoric and policy which damaged the party in the past, frightening
voters with radical aims which were not even on the agenda. Why go back to
that?
There are three different
answers. The first, perhaps surprisingly, is pragmatic. It is that without a
clear ideology, political parties are electorally vulnerable. Their support
may grow wide but remains shallow, and may be swept away. Ideology gives a
government roots. In providing voters with a strong sense of a government's
purpose, it gives them something to grip on. Policies are often weak
instruments for attracting public support. They are complex; they must be
designed to satisfy different, even conflicting, interests; they can take a
long time to have visible effect; they sometimes fail. A clearly articulated
philosophy can not only explain the aim of policy to the public, it
reassures them that the government has a purpose and direction when its
policies are not making this evident. This was why Margaret Thatcher placed
so much emphasis on ideology in her speeches. As the slow pace of Labour's
improvements in the public services becomes plainer, a clearer sense of
vision-of what it is trying to do, even if it is not yet doing it-may help
this government similarly.
Paradoxically, this role for
public philosophy in underpinning electoral support may become more
necessary as society becomes more fragmented and less tribal. When people
are no longer voting according to class tradition, they need more reasons to
choose one party over another. Most people's understanding of specific
policies is small, and often people don't know exactly what they think. In
these circumstances, as opinion polling shows, leadership becomes highly
prized. Voters want leaders with a clear sense of purpose and direction.
Values alone do not provide this: they sound too vacuous. What does is a
vision of a better society: a description of how things will work-how people
will be-in the world the politician is striving to create. Ideological
clarity inevitably reduces the breadth of public support. But it makes that
support deeper and more reliable. New Labour has not yet been tested by this
thesis, since it has faced no serious Tory challenge since 1997. But the way
in which the opinion polls swung so rapidly against it during the only
period when it faced concerted opposition-the fuel protests-suggests that it
does apply. The great lack of enthusiasm for the government revealed in
qualitative surveys reinforces the sense that its support is weaker than
poll numbers indicate.
But this argument goes beyond
New Labour. The second case for political ideology is that it can help to
fire interest in politics more generally. The bigger problem of the
managerial form of politics is its failure to capture the public's
attention. There are many reasons for the decline in election turnouts over
the last decade. But one of them may well be that politics isn't interesting
enough. If all that the parties are offering are alternative management
prospectuses, it is perhaps not surprising that public engagement with
politics has fallen.
Does this matter? On one
account of modern politics, no. If contemporary capitalism is genuinely the
best sort of society there can be, then as long as it is not managed too
badly, we should neither expect nor want politics to be that important to
the public.
But here we arrive at the real issue. The third argument for political
ideology stems from deeper questions about the role of politics in human
nature. The "managerial" view of politics sees it as instrumental.
Politics is not an end in itself but a means to the good administration of
society. The less politics required to achieve that administration, the
better. But there is another view. It stems from Aristotle's claim that
"man is a political animal." Today that claim is often interpreted
negatively: that human nature is argumentative and power-seeking. But for
Aristotle it was a claim of virtue. Humans are political because they are
sociable. Politics is an expression of our inescapable involvement with the
strangers amongst whom we live.
From this perspective, an
interest and involvement in politics is part of what it means to live a good
life, to be a fully developed human being. This cannot be just any
involvement in politics.
Political activism designed
only to benefit oneself and one's narrow social group carries no particular
ethical value. What gives politics its claim to virtue is its orientation
towards others. It is when we care enough about the wellbeing of other
people to want to make the world a better place-for them and ourselves-that
politics finds its proper moral expression.
We have particular reason to
value that expression today. As western societies have become more
individualistic, people's sense of social connectedness has declined. This
is difficult to measure, but reductions in rates of voluntary activity and
charitable giving appear to indicate a reduction in people's orientation
towards others. Sociologists note the decline in "social capital":
the bonds of trust and collective activity that bind communities together. A
kind of hedonism pervades popular culture. Most young people don't seem
interested in political causes; most of them seem barely interested in the
world. It is hard to escape the sense, however inchoate, that we are more
selfish, more self-oriented, than we were.
This is why radical idealism
is still important. Belief in the possibility that the world could be
different, and the desire to act politically to make it so, is a vital
expression of an outward orientation. We should want more people to feel
their identity and purpose in life bound up with the wellbeing of others. Of
course this can be overdone. A rounded person also needs self-awareness,
self-deprecation, a sense of fun. But it is good to feel inspired to act, to
want to change the world. We need that sense of magic, the enchantment of
belief.
This is why so many people
have felt sympathy for anti-globalisation protestors, even without
necessarily agreeing with their aims. In the summer of 2001, when thousands
of protestors surrounded the G8 summit in Genoa, Tony Blair dismissed them
as a rabble circus. But to the astonishment of the mainstream media, public
opinion was on the side of the protest. The public saw young people who
cared enough about the world to want to do something.
Throughout history it has
been the pressure of a critical mass of people expressing radical idealism
of this kind which has pushed mainstream politics, including that of the
Labour party, towards reform. Without it the lobby for the status quo is too
strong.
It is difficult to look at the world today and not feel that such idealism
is needed. It may be harder to find the great causes in domestic politics
than it once was: the result of the successful idealism of an earlier
generation of welfare state socialists. Enlarging the consumption of the
already comfortable is not a goal to make the political heart beat faster.
Yet it does not take much understanding of British society to feel motivated
by the cause of eradicating poverty or of giving deprived young people the
chance to realise themselves-or even by the desire to improve the quality of
life of those caught on the treadmill of overwork, stress and meaningless
consumption.
And once one's gaze extends
to the world as a whole the causes are plain. It is not surprising that the
real energy in British politics today comes from the environmental and
global justice movements. Here is genuine inspiration to be found: the hope
of profound change to large wrongs. Reading about the present and likely
future suffering highlighted at the sustainable development summit in
Johannesburg, who can say we do not need radical idealism today?
Labour's ministers came back
from the summit claiming to be pleased with the final agreement. In doing
so, they illustrated what is wrong with the present state of social
democracy. It presents a fatalistic resignation about what is achievable
which robs politics of its moral ambition. The idea that "there is no
alternative" has long been a powerful weapon of conservatives. It is
the infection of left-of-centre thought by this idea that has been the most
damaging consequence of the post-1989 order. And it is why politics needs
re-enchanting now. Of course politics is the art of the possible. But only
by pushing at them will we discover where the boundaries of the possible
lie.
In this sense, the
re-enchantment of politics today will be the reverse of the Enlightenment.
Then humanism-the belief in the capacity of human societies to determine
their own destiny-was the agent of disenchantment. Now political humanism is
on the side of the spirits. In the face of both the terrible material
conditions still affecting so much of the world, and of those voices arguing
that they cannot be fundamentally changed, the spirit of moral idealism is
no less than a reassertion of human will. Without it, it is difficult to see
how politics today will inspire a new generation to make a difference.
Michael Jacobs
General Secretary of the Fabian Society
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