Taking Soundings Leeds

John Bllomfield European Crisis and the Silence of Social Democracy

2012-02-01T18:49:00.002Z

This is John Bloomfield's talk given to the Leeds Taking Soundings January 26th 2012 on 'The European Crisis and the Silence of Social Democracy'.

For the last eighteen months Europe has been the epi-centre of economic attention. The world’s largest single market has proved unable to tackle an initial little local difficulty in Greece, one of its smallest economies. The institutions of the EU and its senior politicians have dithered as the crisis has snowballed. As the people of Greece have resisted and protests have spread to Spain and elsewhere, the political response has always been slow, confused and mired in monetarist orthodoxy. Within all the drama one voice has been noticeably absent: that of the mainstream European Left. Social democracy has been silent. Tonight I try to answer the question, why? And then to suggest what can be done about it and why it is important.

Why?

In the UK, Labour’s leadership came to terms with membership of the EEC after the 1975 referendum. But it was only when, in 1988, the French Christian-socialist president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, persuaded the TUC of the potential of a European ‘social dialogue’ – against a backdrop of the Thatcherite offensive against the labour movement in the UK – that the party’s trade union base came around.

However, this pro-European trend weakened enormously during the Blair–Brown era. Blair’s ‘third way’ was neither a variant of orthodox social democracy nor a new right-wing version of it – it was a complete break. That is why solidly right-wing social democrats like the former deputy Labour leader Roy Hattersley and leading French figures such as Pascal Lamy were so opposed to it. In his autobiography, the late Robin Cook reports on an exchange at a meeting of the Party of European Socialists in October 2002 between Lamy, formerly French finance minister and currently head of the World Trade Organization, and Peter Mandelson, the architect of New Labour and then European commissioner for trade. Lamy was explaining the key dilemma that he saw facing social democracy. ‘Historically, the success of social democracy in the past century was to promote a compromise between labour and capital, between the state and the market and between commercial competition and social solidarity. Globalisation has unhinged the balance by taking away all the domestic levers by which we maintained the compromise,’ he said. Mandelson responded: ‘Globalisation offers all the best the world can offer. We must not sound as if we believe there is a tension between labour and capital, or competition and solidarity.’ To which Lamy in turn replied: ‘Yes, but that is what I believe.’[i]
There in a nutshell is the gap between social democracy and ‘New’ Labour’s Panglossian alternative. It explains ‘New’ Labour’s opposition to intervention in any form.

The Blairites had considerable success in promoting this thinking within other social democratic European parties. At the end of the 1990s thirteen of the then fifteen members of the EU had governments of the Left. Many of these bought wholesale into the Clinton Third Way. They were deceived by the easy, early fruits of globalisation arising from the computer revolution and the sudden opening of the ex-socialist economies of China, Russia and Eastern Europe to world markets.

Some, such as the Spanish and Portuguese socialists, the Italian Left as well as the German SPD, also accepted the neo-classical orthodoxies of the Maastricht Treaty and the European Central Bank (ECB) as they embarked on the single currency project. The treaty of 1992 entrenched neo-liberalism. Framing the completed market in capital, labour, goods and services, monetary union was established on the German model, with an independent bank committed only to low inflation – not, as with the US Federal Reserve, a responsibility for high employment. Euro members were (theoretically, as it turned out) to be restricted to budget deficits of 3 per cent of GDP and debt–GDP ratios of 60 per cent. Yet the EU’s budgets – known in the jargon as their ‘own resources’ - were to remain negligible, thus providing no significant fiscal capacity to deal with the risk of asymmetric shocks to individual economies. It was, quite simply, pre-Keynesian.

Most of the Left, traumatised by the defeats of 1980s and the impact of the ICT revolution, offered no critique. An already weak grasp of economics, spread wider; the vast majority of the Left did not understand what was going on with the creation of the Single European Market; the financialisation of capital following on from the Big Bang and credit default swaps;, with booming house prices and asset bubbles. Generally speaking, each national Left focused on a range of other issues, ignoring the overall big economic picture. They fell for the post-modernist myth that ‘grand’ narratives belonged to the past. Well, as we now see, there is a big story here – and the Left missed it.

The financial crisis of 2008 blew this ‘third way’ apart. It revealed the limitations of this approach.
Firstly, this model of financial, de-regulated globalisation was unstable – I use a gentle, polite word. It did not end ‘boom and bust.’ In fact, it needed the massive intervention of the state, “big government” – to save it from the disasters of its own making.
Secondly, it promoted ever larger inequalities. This was something that again most of the Left across Europe ignored, above all New Labour. Working class and middle incomes in the USA have not risen over the past 40 years. In the UK they have been increasingly squeezed with living standards being maintained by the increased participation of women in the labour market and home-owners using the equity of their homes. As Jeffrey Sachs, former monetary hawk; architect of post-Soviet economic reforms; and adviser to George Osborne prior to 2010 general election.
acknowledged in a Newsnight interview last summer.
“Globalisation has meant a massive rise in income inequalities. The rich have walked off with the prize. We need to get more serious about the crisis facing our society. The rich have become fantastically rich and need to be taxed more.” When did you last here a top-flight Centre-Left political leader say something similar?

Thirdly, the world did not follow the neo-conservative dream of American hegemony but instead was becoming increasingly multi-polar. Indeed, I would argue that the invasion of Iraq designed to confirm and exalt American power in fact revealed its limitation and accelerated its decline. And the economic crisis has confirmed and accelerated these trends. The G7 has become the G20 and the North Atlantic domination of the world economy has gone forever.

Fourthly, to exert any control on this turbo-capitalism, it has become increasingly clear that you have to be big. The EU’s Single Market which with enlargement from Central and Eastern Europe had grown to 500 million people has the potential to be a player in this globalised economy, in a way that European countries acting on their own cannot. Labour just does not get this: – the Conservatives even more so. Listen to them, it is as if all the major issues faced by UK citizens can be addressed entirely in a domestic context. It is not true to say that globalisation has entirely removed the role of the ‘nation state’. The well-run Nordic universal welfare states, which supposedly imposed far too costly a tax ‘burden’ to survive in an era of globalisation, have come out of the crisis in very good fiscal order – quite unlike those Anglo-American states whose poor ‘fiscal effort’ has left their exchequers sinking in red ink after the property busts.
Yet globalisation, and now the many-faceted global crisis which has issued from it, has meant that the agenda of twenty-first-century progressive politics in developed countries cannot be dealt with by medium-sized countries acting on their own. Both transnational corporations and global financial markets have become more powerful than individual states. The macro-economic levers national governments previously applied – fiscal and monetary policy – have become less effective,[ii] as was all too evident when François Mitterand essayed a go-it-alone reflation in France in the early 1980s.

To recover, social democrats need to remember that their role is to manage and regulate the market, not to glorify it. Labour and its ‘third way’ European followers got the economics of modern capitalism wrong. Yet in the discussion that has followed the 2010 election defeat, leading Blairites are blithely ignoring this gaping hole at the heart of their project.[iii]

Similarly, the European political and financial establishment has shown a complete inability to address the crisis. Instead it has blithely continued with its previous monetarist orthodoxies. As the asymmetric impact struck Greece, Ireland and Portugal in turn, European leaders, far from agreeing the required transformations for the eurozone as a whole, pursued a series of ad hoc bail-outs, which failed to punish the bankers who had created the crisis, socialised their risks to the taxpayer and enforced a deflationary dynamic which could only make the austerity policies self-defeating.

The severe dangers of the orthodoxy of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the German political leadership are becoming increasingly apparent. The bail-out conditions imposed on Greek, Irish and Portuguese citizens show how brutal these measures are, as do the austerity measures demanded of the Spanish and Italian governments. But to date the main alternatives presented have been nationalistic ones, notably withdrawal from the euro. Yet there is a powerful case for a progressive alternative, which is now beginning to surface.[iv] This requires an active macro-economic policy that breaks from the orthodoxy and the mantra of ‘structural reform’.

European social democracy has not yet grasped these realities, which mean that markets must be controlled and their regulation can only be done at a European level. Throughout the 20th century social democrats across Europe had won concessions at national level for workers and citizens. It was here that they forced compromises on business and secured social gains on pensions, wages, health and welfare provisions. It was a settlement that mainstream Christian Democracy accepted after World War Two. Globalisation has broken that hinge economically, while Thatcherism and neo-liberalism more generally have led the political assault. Currently, across Europe, they have turned a crisis caused by reckless financial globalisation into a crisis of government revenues and demanded a policy of austerity. The European Left has stood open-mouthed and paralysed in response.

What are the options?

1. The first which has been basically followed by the Spanish, Portuguese and Greek Left in government is to accept the neo-liberal story and pursue an austerity course. The consequences are dramatic: social democratic governments confront both the weakest sections of the population and their own supporters with predictable electoral consequences. Here and elsewhere the acquiescence of the Left to monetarist orthodoxy opens up political space for the xenophobic right.

2. The second option is to argue that the game is up for Europe and to accept in the words of Guardian commentator Martin Kettle that “the nationalist right and the global bond markets have won. The internationalist social and Christian democrats have lost.” (Guardian 23 June 2011). That defeatism is pervasive in Labour’s ranks – Blue Labour as well as New Labour.
New Labour and now In the Black Labour basically reverts to the first option. They want an orthodox, monetarist policy, a pale blue version of Osborne and Cameron. Blue Labour dangerously flirts with the nationalist option, a socially conservative, inward-looking Left focussed on England. Left-wing MP Jon Cruddas talks of “a conservative socialism”, “an English socialism that believes in family life.” It is completely unspecified but on reading these articles you get the strong sense that Melanie Philipps will know what he means! Soundings editor Jonathan Rutherford puts it like this. “Labour’s historic task is to organise to conserve the good in society…to defend it when it is threatened by the market and the state and to nurture it back into existence….Labour’s future will be conservative because the decade ahead requires a reparative politics of the local…” [1]
I’ll just say briefly, appealing to the most reactionary and backward elements in the population is no place for the Left. Neither is believing that in today’s world you can insulate ‘the local’ from the wider economy. And that is before Maurice Glasman incendiary remarks on immigration. Let’s be clear:you can’t have a UKIP of the Left.

An Alternative of Green growth and employment

3. Neither option makes sense for social democracy. Instead it should do what it has traditionally attempted: adapt to new terrain and come up with realistic programmes for social advance. On both the economy and the environment that means thinking and organising at the European level. The core story is fairly clear.
Firstly, the Left should state clearly that the priority for Europe is economic growth, more particularly green growth, not austerity. (Even the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s is now arguing for this, as when it downgraded France, Austria and 7 other EU countries on Friday 13th January) That means rejecting the orthodoxies of Maastricht, the ECB and the Bundesbank. Instead there should be an immediate cut in ECB interest rates and active intervention to weaken the euro against other currencies.

Interestingly, over the last few months, both developments have begun to happen. The new head of the ECB Mario Draghi has twice reduced ECB interest rates by a quarter of a per cent; while the on-going policy weakness of the Euro has led to its weakening in the exchange markets. The ‘strong’ euro policy of the ECB penalises all the weaker economies of southern Europe making their exports much more expensive and meeting the conditions of EU and IMF loans all the harder. Up till now, the European Central Bank was the only central bank in the world that refused to limit the appreciation of its currency. Purchasing power parities mean that one euro should trade at around 1.18 to the dollar and 4.67 to the yuan. In summer 2011, it traded at over 1.45 to the dollar and 9.20 to the yuan. The euro has weakened significantly since then. A move to all –round competitive devaluations would be dangerous for the world economy but some rebalancing between the major economies is in order. More important is to boost aggregate domestic demand.

Secondly, it should support a range of measures which Europeanise the debt problem. Former Prime Ministers Amato and Verhofstadt have proposed a transfer of Maastricht-compliant debt of up to 60 per cent of national gross domestic product to a Union debit account that is not traded. Its interest rates thereby would be decided on a low and long-term basis by Eurozone finance ministers rather than rating agencies. This would strengthen governments and curb the speculators.

Thirdly, the ECB should issue Eurobonds, drawing on the basic economic strength of the European currency. This would attract funds from the central banks of the emerging economies and sovereign wealth funds and should be used for an extensive programme of green investments.

Fourthly, the Left should strongly back the Commission’s proposal for a financial transactions -’Tobin’-tax both to rein in financial speculation and to raise significant revenues for new European-wide initiatives. The European Commission estimates that this would raise €55 billion per year – roughly half the EU’s annual budget. This could be allocated to a range of green growth programmes across the EU and beyond, for example major solar energy investment programmes across North Africa.

None of this is rocket science. Neither does it require any change to EU treaties. This is absolutely the last thing that anyone should contemplate now. Remember the last Treaty changes. Eight years of contemplation and the main result was the creation of a new leader for Europe, the President of the Council of Ministers. How many here can name him? What difference has he made?
What is urgently required is a coherent challenge to the monetarist mantras of the German financial establishment and the ECB. So far it has been left to economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Stuart Holland to suggest alternatives. If social democracy wants to offer Europe-wide solutions, it urgently needs to get its act together. Francois Hollande is well positioned to challenge Sarkozy in France. The SPD-Green alliance is regularly winning regional elections in Germany. Ed Miliband has signalled his break from Blair and predatory capitalism. When are they going to meet up and thrash out a common programme to meet Europe’s crisis?

These measures will however require a dramatic political and cultural change, within but also way beyond the forces of the left. It means that the German, Italian and Spanish left will have to break from the orthodoxies that they have accepted in the past – just as Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have to make much clearer where today’s Labour differs from ‘New’ Labour, especially on the banks. A common European economic perspective on the steps required should be a priority. But alone this will not be enough. It will require deft political footwork across the normal political divides to get this shift. But without it the European economy will continue to drift and there will be increasing nationalist resentment at the imposition of austerity by EU institutions, which can only spell danger for progressives across Europe.

Don’t kid yourself that the UK will somehow be immune from the fall-out or that the disastrous economic consequences won’t have profound knock-on social effects. The rise of fascist parties in Holland, Austria and Hungary and of xenophobic and racist parties in Italy, Denmark, and above all France should serve as a warning as to what is at stake. Nasty nationalism is on the rise across Europe. We got a flavour of it with the populist response to Cameron’s so-called use of the veto at the last EU summit. Furthermore, we now see the stirrings of a new German nationalism. Volker Ruhe, the number two in the CDU arousing German nationalism at his party congress was a warning. For decades the mantra has been that we want to develop a European Germany as the alternative to a German Europe. Ruhe’s rabble-rousing speech was a signal that this could easily change. If everywhere plays to their own narrowly-conceived national interest and plays the national card, then Germany will too. As the country is now re-united, and is Europe’s most populated and economically strongest power, they will win.

The Left needs to remind itself of the lessons of the 1930s. We need to offer an alternative to austerity and unemployment and unite all progressives around those limited goals or else we shall lose out badly to the hard Right and the far Right. There are broad alliances to be won on these questions. But we need to present clear and straightforward policy alternatives. And, we need to recognise that if we want to control and regulate the forces that are shaping our economic future, then we have to operate at a European scale. Socialism in one country is long gone; Keynesianism in one country died with the Mitterand government in the early 1980s. A growth strategy across Europe is the only progressive game in town. And it is about time progressives from across the broadest spectrum began to argue for it.

Jon Bloomfield is co-author with Robin Wilson of ‘Building The Good Society: A New Form of Progressive Politics. (Compass)
http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/item.asp?d=5767

[1] Ibid. Rutherford pp.58 and 63.
[i] Quoted in Robin Cook, Point of Departure: Diaries from the Front Bench (London: Pocket Books, 2004), 226
[ii] Panić, 162
[iii] See David Miliband, ‘Why is the European left losing elections?, speech at the London School of Economics, 8 March 2011 (www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2011/20110308t1830vOT.aspx)
[iv] Paul Krugman, ‘Can Europe be saved?’, New York Times, 12 January 2011 (www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16Europe-t.html?_r=1); ‘Zone euro: le remède va-t-il tuer le malade?’, Le Monde Dossier Economie, 5 April 2011 (http://lemonde-emploi.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/04/05/zone-euro-le-remede-va-t-il-tuer-le-malade-dans-%C2%AB-le-monde-economie-%C2%BB/); John Grahl, ‘Crisis in the eurozone’, Soundings 47 (spring 2011), 143–58

Meetings on Jan 26th and Feb 22nd

2012-01-16T14:05:00.001Z

6.00 pm on Thursday, 26 January, 2012
The Eurozone Crisis and the Silence of Social Democracy
Speaker: Jon Bloomfield
Jon is Honorary Research Fellow on European Studies, Birmingham University,
and co-author of Building the Good Society (info on his latest book at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/item.asp?d=5767 )
Venue: Room 101 Broadcasting Place, Humanities Building,
Woodhouse Lane, Leeds Metropolitan University, LS2 3ED

At 6.00 pm on Wednesday 22 February
The Crisis: Alternative Economics
Speaker: Tim Jenkins
Tim is the manager of the Great Transformations Initiatives for the New Economics Foundation
and former policy director Friends of the Earth
Venue: Room 101 Broadcasting Place, Humanities Building,
Woodhouse Lane, Leeds Metropolitan University, LS2 3ED

Barry Winter talks to Ed Carlisle about Leeds Summat

2012-01-12T15:19:00.003Z

Summat’s going on in Leeds Jan 11th, 2012 By Barry Winter

Ed Carlisle is a project manager with Leeds-based charity Together for Peace and one of the organisers of the Leeds Summat Gathering which took place in November last year – strapline ‘Get Connected, Be Inspired, Join in Action for Change’. BARRY WINTER interviewed him for the ILP and Leeds Taking Soundings.

Barry: The Leeds Summat Gathering on 26th November attracted over 1,300 participants and included a myriad of activities. I thought it was a great success and would like to congratulate you. What were the highlights for you as the one of the key organisers?

Ed: I think the process of organising what was a fairly complex and challenging event was, in many ways, full of highlights.
We set out to make the gathering as participatory and contributory as possible, to involve diverse people in its development and delivery. That meant our core partners and others co-delivering it with us. Seeing how those efforts and resources flowed together was really positive. It meant the event really did embody, with some integrity, what we were seeking.
Within that, we also managed to organise it on a reasonably low budget primarily by blagging and borrowing equipment and resources. We delivered the first Summat for £12,000 or £13,000, and this one we did for £7,500. So we really were learning from our earlier experience which itself is positive. At no point did I feel that we were pushing against closed doors.
Two things about the event itself. First, it met our expectations in terms of our overarching themes, and probably met our best expectations. We wanted it to be a day that was serious and meaty but also fun and socially warm.
Secondly, we aimed to attract up to 1,300 people which we managed. What was interesting in looking through the list of the 800 or so people who pre-registered online, as well as the 500 who came on the day, was that I knew fewer than 10 per cent of them. It was not only the ‘paid-up activists’ who came, who we already know, people I see every week. It was not just my mates who rocked up. It drew in a whole bunch of new people and it’s partly a mystery just who they all were. So it will be interesting to use the feedback to find out more about them.
From the written evaluations and from people telling us about their experiences, people met and encountered other people. They also felt energised. These are summed up in two of the strap lines for the Gathering: ‘Get Connected’ and ‘Be Inspired’.
The third strap line is the interesting one: ‘Join in Action for Change’. We are going to try tracking and evaluating whether this is taking place. Will what was a fun and successful event lead to enduring change? It’s too early to say.

BW: What were the original ideas behind the Summat initiative? How did it come about and in what ways have these ideas developed?

EC: The story of the Summat goes back to the formation of Together For Peace (T4P) in 2003. T4P was created to arrange a 10-day festival of events across Leeds. Initially it was to encourage people to engage in peace and justice issues but this broadened out to looking at the big issues of our time. And it was very much about using creative means also used in later Summats – film, theatre, food, music and drama.
Because T4P has always been a low budget affair, we did not have the capacity to deliver the festival ourselves. So we sought collaboration with about 30 organisations. People enjoyed the festival, although some of it was a bit shambolic behind the schemes. We also held festivals in 2005 and 2007.
The reason we stopped was that people told us, very legitimately, that, while they liked what we were doing, they did not have the time to attend every day. Instead they looked for parts of the programme that already interested them. This meant we weren’t really enabling a general fusion of different people and ideas.
Some fusions did follow: for example, individual refugees began to volunteer for Oxfam which itself began working with the Catholic diocese. The most meaty and meaningful actions were being undertaken through such collaborations and we wanted to find ways to develop this further.
At the same time, from 2006 onwards, we were particularly inspired by the work of north American writer, John Paul Lederach. He has written some great books, including The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Social Peace. In it he calls for “web weaving”, enabling diverse people to connect and collaborate in their social spaces, be it a community, a city or a nation. This means making those spaces more resilient, more able to deal creatively with difficult things.
So we stopped doing festivals and condensed them into one-day events. These could then be more about enabling people to connect and collaborate and about integration and action.

BW: Is if fair to say that Together for Peace and the events you organised come from faith-based initiatives, and I don’t mean that pejoratively?

EC: Yes and no. The three original founders of T4P, who were amazing activists, were Christians. But as they handed over the organising, it became increasingly apparent that it was not appropriate to make it overly faith-based because it does not resonate with lots of people. We feel slightly misconstrued as an organisation in this respect but it happens less and less.
That does not mean that we don’t do such work. One member of the team who is Christian has been active for many years in facilitating a Jewish-Muslim dialogue and this is now gathering momentum.

BW: What is it that you are hoping people take with them when they leave, given that the day’s activities begin with breakfast at 9am and continue into the evening with social events?

EC: Our strap line ‘Get Connected, Be Inspired & Join in Action for Change’ encapsulates it. We hope people will take away with them a sense of the need for a better connected yet diverse Leeds, a better connected Yorkshire and a better connected north of England. This amounts to having a healthier place where ideas can flow between different interest groups, across different generations, ethnicities and movements.
For the more engaged activists, we wanted them to feel re-energised by participating, because many go through phases of being tired and fed up, feeling that nobody else seems to be bothering. To be in a space with a whole bunch of other people getting involved really helps.
And finally, while there is nothing wrong with talking shops, projects like Summat do need to hold a mirror up to ourselves. Are we just putting on interesting events or can our activities lead to different forms of action? Sometimes these might be short term, like joining an organisation such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace. But others will hopefully encourage medium or long term change engendered by a stronger community spirit.
As someone else put it, we hope to try to raise the temperature around issues of social change, perhaps even by half a degree, so that progressive social movements become possible.

BW: When you talk about seeking change, what is the change you envisage?

EC: As Lederach argues, you can’t force change, you can only develop the potential for change.
There is very much a resonance, or oneness, between personal change and macro-change or structural change. We want to enable people to make micro changes in their lives all the way to engaging in more significant activities and issues.
If they begin to wrestle with the idea that environmental, social, political and economic issues are inter-connected then that’s progress. We want people to almost intuitively start to grasp that sense of what a huge job is needed; to begin to be able to re-imagine our world. It’s fairly big stuff.

BW: When I hear you speak, I hear echoes of what I would call ethical socialism, and what you do at one level helps to prefigure how you achieve your wider ambitions.

EC: But how would you respond to the kind of criticism that says all this touchy-feely stuff is fine but what about fighting the system, opposing the cuts, tackling the hard issues, and not just sitting round feeling good about ourselves?
That question has to be asked. It’s far too easy for us to construct cosy spaces for ourselves, which we all do to a certain extent.
First, the Summat creates space for groups who want to tackle the big issues. We provide platforms for people to run their own workshops or stalls. This gives them the opportunity to engage with a whole bunch of new people. While Summat is designed to be mainstream and to have a broad appeal, we also want to create space for those wider ideas to be heard.
However, that cannot be the whole response. If that’s all we focus on we are hugely disempowering ourselves. We would be accepting the terms of the struggle defined by pre-established centres of power, by the economic and political system as it is.
Valerie Fournier, who talks a lot about social movements, argues that really crucial steps for developing social change are cultivating outrage. We need to be shining a torch on the centres of power and injustice but this has to be accompanied by creative alternatives.
That’s why the BBC reporter, Justin Rowlett, gave a deliberately provocative talk on the green movement, which he says should be a success but is failing. This, he says, is partly because it is too concerned with being negative (“anti-nuclear, anti-GM, anti-capitalist”) instead of offering creative alternatives. Cultural creativity has to be at the heart of social movements.

BW: What plans do you have for the future?

EC: Over the next few months, I want to research the participants’ responses to the Summat. In particular, it will be interesting to see whether we have encouraged any changes, whether individually or organisationally. If not, it will be useful to consider what the barriers to change are.
In this respect, we were particularly heartened by the comments of two of our leading participants, Maurice Glasman and Peter Tatchell, who were both very positive about the day.
We also have to weigh things up, look at whether the outcomes justify the all-consuming effort of putting on such an event. It will probably take us another six months to decide when and whether to hold it again.
If we go for it, then it will probably be during the summer so more of it can be outdoors. I’m intrigued by the idea of a 36-hour Summat, possibly over a summer bank holiday. We tried a little tester in May with a couple of hundred people, and it was good little event. We are also keen to have even stronger partnerships so we can take our messages to wider audiences.
–
More information from the Summat website: www.summat.orgYou can also download the programme: www.t4p.org.uk/summat2011brochure
More about Together for Peace here.
Information about Paul Lederach’s book, The Moral Imagination, is here.

Max Farrar in the news: remember the flames of police racism (1975)

2012-01-11T16:56:00.002Z

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/111565

Remember, remember the flames of police racism
Friday 04 November 2011
by Ann Czernik

Professor Max Farrar says that he rarely speaks of the bonfire night riot in 1975.
But it was then he narrowly missed a lengthy jail term when he was tried and acquitted for incitement to riot, affray and assaulting a police officer while the Leeds Chapeltown district descended into disorder.
"They said I led a mob of black youth into an attack on the police," he says. "It was 100 per cent fabrication."
The situation with the Leeds police reflected what was going on nationally, Farrar claims, where anyone perceived as a threat was attacked.
A white, middle-class college lecturer who worked with Chapeltown News, which continually criticised poilice racism and unjust behaviour, he was "a thorn in their flesh and they found this opportunity to teach me a lesson."
Farrar was taking a photo of the bonfire night celebrations when "a kid beside me suddenly stoned this passing car. I had no idea what he was doing. He said: 'It's a copper.' I remember thinking: 'I understand why you're stoning the car'."
Police piled into Chapeltown to make arrests and as a policeman ran past he bashed Farrar in the face.
"Being a completely naive middle-class uppity fool, I went to the next policeman and said: 'I want to make a complaint. I've been assaulted by an officer.' He grabbed me round the neck, banged my head against his panda car doors and took me up to the police station and arrested me for threatening behaviour. Some time later, when they realised who I was - part of the Chapeltown News Group - they said to themselves: 'We'll show this guy who's boss.'"
The prosecution "case" was to read Chapeltown News to Farrar, including everything it said which was "pretty radical and hostile towards the police" and Farrar had to say what he thought about each of these statements.
He stood by the paper's political line on race, class and police oppression. When the jury was asked why he'd been acquitted, the response was: "We thought you were the kind of person who could incite a riot but we didn't believe you did on this occasion."
Chapeltown News reported the experiences of the migrant working-class black communities that had settled in Chapetown, a run-down area of Leeds during the 1960s and 1970s. The paper was produced by a group of academics who wanted to challenge and engage with racism.
Farrar moved into Chapeltown in 1970. "I thought it was very exotic," he explains. "I thought that sociologists were supposed to identify with outsiders."
But he was told he was "just another missionary" and should "fuck off" as soon as possible. "I don't think people realise how deep this enmity or division goes," he says.
Farrar says during the 1970s the "orthodox" left thought that what he and others were doing in Chapeltown was "kind of barmy." But real black politics was not so much black youth being arrested, although that was part of it. It was a response to "the endemic racism in everyday life and every institution."
Farrar remembers when black parents in Chapeltown took their children out on strike because the education their kids was receiving was so inferior. They'd been arguing with the authorities for more than six months about how poor it was. They refused to listen and the parents set up a supplementary school with their own self-organised, self-educative work.
Within a week the authority had agreed to a new head and new programme of work, "so black direct action had more effect on the Leeds education system than anything on the left had ever done," Farrar asserts.
He emphasises the role that representation has in reducing violent urban protest. "Democratic participation for me is the key. It's the fundamental for creating a better, socially just society," he says.
He cites the politically astute and experienced trade unionist George Mudie as the turning point for representation. His union background meant he was genuinely committed to the view that there needs to be a consultation in which the aggrieved get their voices heard.
"I think he began to realise that there was a long history of political organising but the riots were a symptom of the failure of those legitimate modes of protest to be properly listened to," Farrar says.
Mudie set up the Harehill and Chapeltown Liaison Committee and dragged all the relevant council officers to monthly meetings where they would line up in front of anyone who wanted to say their piece.
These were "interesting experiments in democratic responsibility," Farrer says, because it was the first time they had been forced to come, the meetings were minuted and there was a "certain level of accountability."
But Farrar is at pains to point out that social inequality, which affects young people and particularly black youth disproportionately, is still a burning issue today. Unemployment among black 16 to 24-year-olds is 50 per cent, more than double the rate of their white counterparts. Poverty and poor housing is the default condition of black communities.
He considers that it takes years for violent urban protest to gain momentum and says that research into the cause of the riots support this assertion.
In a recent, moving newspaper interview following this year's nationwide riots, an unknown black youth says: "Why were people confronting the police if it was all about thievery? It wasn't all about thievery but there was thievery going on. It was about giving the police a taste of their own medicine."
Today young black men "have no communities, we don't have many businesses, we got nothing in this country. It's not that we're not part of society. It's that we're not part of the same culture that most people are living."
Black people are "big business" in Britain and "we need to build something for ourselves so that we don't need to keep our hands out swinging. We've been working in the UK for a long time driving the buses and stuff like that. We should have something by now."
Why is that so difficult to understand?

For further information about Professor Farrar, visit: www.maxfarrar.org.uk

Leeds Taking Soundings meting

2011-10-11T09:34:00.001+01:00

The next meeting is on Wednesday October 26th at 6PM. The speaker is Jeremy Gilbert from the University of East London on the topic of 'Reclaiming Modernity: Why the Future isn't Conservative'. The location is Broadcasting Place A101.

Barry Winter on Tony Judt

2011-10-11T09:26:00.001+01:00

Barry Winter recently did an excellent talk to the Leeds Taking Soundings group on the subject of Tony Judt and his book Ill Fares the Land. Barry has written up the talk and it available here on the ILP wweb-site.

Leeds Young Authors at Soundings, June 22nd

2011-06-16T10:03:00.001+01:00

The next Leeds Taking Soundings event is about Leeds Young Authors. You will see a film and meet the film directors, some of the young poets, and the people who organise the project. It's on Wednesday 22nd June at 6pm in Old Broadcasting House, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds.

Leeds Young Authors are in desperate need of funds if they are to compete in a forthcoming poetry competition in the USA. They get no public subsidy. if you can spare a few pounds, this is the way to make your donation.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects?agent_desc=project&filter_text=Leeds+Young+Authors&commit=SEARCH

If you need to be convinced of what a good cause this is to support, read on . . .

The film about Leeds Young Authors, 'We are Poets' (described by Benjamin Zephaniah as poetry itself) won a prize at the prestigious Sheffield Documentary Film Festival last week.
Director(s):Alex Ramseyer-Bache, Daniel Lucchesi - Producer(s):Alex Ramseyer-Bache Co - Producer Khadijah Ibrahiim
Running time: 80 min

It might be the age of Facebook and Twitter, but a group of Leeds teenagers have chosen to define themselves through one of the most ancient forms of culture out there: the spoken word. But these aren’t any old poems but anguished, witty full-throated diatribes, voicing the concerns of a generation of British born teenagers. Brave New Voices, the most prestigious poetry slam competition in America, has chosen Leeds Young Authors to represent the UK at their upcoming competition in Washington DC (2009). Sheffield-based filmmakers Alex Ramseyer-Bache and Daniel Lucchesi, graduates of Leeds Met's Film School, follow the group as they prepare for a transformational journey of a lifetime. With a mix of cinematically crafted lyrical sequences with raw, intimate actuality documentary, 'We Are Poets' challenges our understanding of youth by giving them the stage, allowing them the chance to speak for themselves. Anyone tempted to dismiss today’s teenagers as politically apathetic layabouts better pay heed: here is electrifying evidence to the contrary.
More on Leeds Young Authors, founded by Khadija Ibrahim, here:
http://www.leedsyoungauthors.org.uk/about.html

Leeds Salon on Valuing the Arts

2011-06-16T09:55:00.001+01:00

Forthcoming Leeds Salon debate, now part of the Emerge Leeds Festival 2011:

Valuing the Arts in an Age of Austerity

Wednesday 22 June 2011
The Millennium Room, The Carriageworks, Millennium Square, Leeds,
5:45pm (for a 6pm start) to 7:45pm.
£5 waged/£3 unwaged on the door.

With the current economic crisis and widespread cuts in public spending budgets, things are even more financially precarious for the arts than usual; and many in the arts have been forced to reappraise how they argue the case for funding.

The Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) is investigating techniques to assess the economic value of the arts, what it terms non-market goods, in terms of what people feel they would be willing to pay for things if they were not free.

And the February 2011 Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) pamphlet entitled Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society: Remaking the case for the arts states: "The Commission on 2020 Public Services at the RSA has called for more public investment to be evaluated in terms of a ‘social productivity test’: whether it builds individual and community engagement, resilience and reciprocity."

The pamphlet sets out to define a bold response to the challenge presented by the cuts in funding, but is there something wanting in the solutions offered?

This discussion aims to challenge the participation approach of chasing audiences, in favour of more compelling reasons why the arts should receive public funding, and ask some difficult questions such as: just how should we value the arts? Are the arts a luxury or a necessity? Do they have intrinsic value or are they best assessed in terms of outcome and impact? Does what the public think they want or like matter or should we fund the arts regardless? Do the arts even need or deserve public funding at all?

Speakers

Angus Kennedy is head of external relations for the Institute of Ideas, working principally to programme the annual Battle of Ideas festival in London and its international satellite events. He chairs the Institute’s Economy Forum and helps organise its discussions. He writes for spiked and Culture Wars, among other publications, with particular interests in the Holocaust, classics, culture and the arts, economics and moral philosophy.

Moira Innes, Director Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre. Moira has a post-graduate qualification in sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art and has since worked continually in the art sector. As a founding Director for Situation Leeds, she co-organised festivals of art in public realm in 2005 & 2007 and is currently developing a series of interventions that utilise the fabric of the city. She is currently Chair of Leeds Visual Art Forum and works strategically to the profile of the visual arts across Leeds.

Councillor Adam Ogilvie represents Beeston and Holbeck ward in south Leeds where he also lives. Since May 2010, he has been the Executive Board Member for Leisure on Leeds City Council; a portfolio which includes arts, culture and creative industries, museums and galleries, events, parks and countryside, sport and recreation, libraries and cemeteries and crematoria. He is also on the Board of South Leeds Community Radio, Beeston Festival and Holbeck Gala Committees and Chair of Leeds Grand Theatre.

Andy Abbott is an artist, writer, musician and educator. He graduated from the LCAD Foundation course in 2001 and has worked and studied in Leeds since. Currently he is undertaking practice-led research for a PhD in Fine Art at University of Leeds. From 2003 Andy has worked as part of the artist collective Black Dogs and has exhibited nationally and internationally from self-organised public interventions in Leeds, to events at Tate Modern and presentations in Italy and Greece. He also teaches part-time in the Fine Art area of Foundation at LCA.

Background Discussion
Can the arts save the economy? , listen again to this Battle of Ideas 2009 session
Just what are the arts good for? , watch and listen again to this Battle of Ideas 2010 satellite
event
Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society: Remaking the case for the arts, RSA pamphlet,
February 2011
Using art to nudge the public, by Jan Bowman, Culture Wars, 20 May 2011
Melvin Bragg: why the arts have replaced heavy industry, The Telegraph, 12 May 2011
Crisis? The arts have rarely been in better health, Simon Jenkins, London Evening Standard, 23 February 2010
Culture Linked to Improved Health, BBC New, 24 May 2011

To let us know you’re coming please reply to this e-mail. If you’re not on it already, join our mailing list at: http://leedssalon.org.uk/index.php?page=contact, and join our group on Facebook.

This debate is part of the Emerge Leeds Festival 2011 being held at the Carriageworks Theatre from the 19th to 26th June.

This is also a back-to-back event with Manchester Salon. So if you can’t make 22 June join the discussion in Manchester on Tuesday 21 June.

Multiculturalism, Interculturalism, or Muscular Liberalism?

2011-04-03T14:20:00.002+01:00

The next Leeds Taking Soundings meeting is on 'Multiculturalism, Interculturalism, or Muscular Liberalism?' Wednesday, May 18th at 6PM in Old Broadcasting House. Our speakers are Max Farrar (sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Community Engagement at Leeds Metropolitan University) and Franco Bianchini ( Professor of Cultural Policy and Planning at Leeds Metropolitan University) David Cameron has coat-tailed ten years of assaults on multiculturalism with his criticism of 'state multiculturalism'. He proposes a 'muscular liberal' assertion of core British values to which all minorities must sign up. Max Farrar will show that multiculturalism has always been a contested notion. Franco Bianchini will outline an alternative conception - interculturalism - which has the potential to overcome some of the inherent difficulties with multiculturalism.

Salon on Middle East

2011-02-28T17:08:00.000Z

The Middle East Uprising: Why Now? What Next?
Wednesday 16 March

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds, LS2 9EN
6:45pm (for a 7pm start) to 8:30pm.

The events in Egypt have come as a surprise to most, with even President Obama questioning US intelligence agencies’ failure to predict the uprisings in the Arab world. The drive behind the January 25 revolt is a genuinely popular democratic movement, but its outcome is still unclear. Who are the main players determining events – the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, young protesters, workers, the elite? And how should we characterise what Twitter calls #Jan25 in the absence of obvious leadership of the movement?
The uprising seems also to put paid to the idea that democracy is exclusively Western, and not a universal aspiration. Yet the reaction from Western elites has been ambivalent at best: can Egyptians bring about a ‘stable democracy’? Fears about an Islamist takeover are voiced as much by Westerners as by President Mubarak. What do we make of calls from foreign ministries for an ‘orderly transition’, especially in light of Western powers’ history in the region? What does the revolt mean for the balance of power in the region, and for American hegemony?

The Speaker

Karl Sharro is an architect, writer and commentator on the Middle East. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut. Karl has written for a number of international publications, such as Springerin (Austria), Mark Magazine (Holland), Novo (Germany), Glass (UK) and Blueprint (UK), and he contributes regularly to the online publications Culture Wars and Muftah.org. He has spoken on a range of issues such as art, architecture, urbanism and politics. He blogs at Karl reMarks.

Readings

The Egyptian uprising: on the universal aspiration for freedom, by Karl Sharro, 4 February 2011

Why Tunis, Why Cairo?, by Issandr El Amrani, London Review of Books, February 2011

The Egyptian uprising: ‘why now?’ and ‘what next?’, by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked-online, 8 February 2011

Egypt’s Bumbling Brotherhood, by Scott Atran, The New York Times, 2 February 2011

Overdue End of the Old World Order, by Mick Hume, Spiked-Online, 23 February 2011.

This is a free event but a voluntary contribution to cover costs will be asked for on the night. To let us know you’re coming please reply to this e-mail. If you’re not on it already, join our mailing list at: http://leedssalon.org.uk/index.php?page=contact, and join our group on Facebook.

Hugo Radice on Bad News for British Economy

2011-01-31T14:25:00.001Z

BAD NEWS AND MORE BAD NEWS?

Hugo Radice

On the face of it, the fall in UK national output (GDP) reported on Tuesday just adds to the mounting bad news for everyone, not least Chancellor George Osborne. Fears about a ‘double-dip’ recession, which would officially arrive if a further decline takes place in the first quarter of 2011, now look considerably more likely. Not surprisingly, most Red Pepper readers will now be concentrating their energies on the fight against the cuts. But for us as much as for employers and the Tory government, it’s important to keep a close eye on current developments in the economy. So what exactly does all the bad news add up to?

First of all, we live in a world in which the financial markets pretty much dictate the government’s policies, or at least their room for manoeuvre. Now Osborne’s attempt to blame the fall in GDP on the bad weather seemed to cut no ice in the City. But there, the pundits and the speculators mostly concluded that the recovery had now stalled, and that the Bank of England would therefore delay the long-expected increase in its official lending rate of 0.5%.

Looking back on the growth recorded for July-September 2010, it now seemed all too clear that the sudden boost to construction activity in that period owed more to a rush to complete current contracts before the spending cuts hit local authorities and government departments alike; so the sharp fall in the last quarter was as much a case of back to normal, as the result of the big freeze.

In any case, last week’s unemployment figures made grim reading, back above 2½ million, with a particularly big rise in youth unemployment - and this well before the public sector cuts start hitting home in April. What is more, a host of recent attitude surveys, among households as well as businesses, have suggested growing pessimism about our economic prospects and therefore a reluctance to make any big spending commitments. Add in the unexpected attack on the coalition’s lack of a growth strategy from the outgoing CBI chief Richard Lambert, and Osborne surely couldn’t maintain for much longer that shiny smile and confident air.

But although there obviously is a Plan B somewhere on his desk – to slow down the spending cuts and encourage the Bank of England to pump more cash into the banking system – the Chancellor is terrified that a change of direction would be seen by his masters (that’s the financial markets, remember, not us) as a sign of ‘weakness’.

Osborne himself has cited the International Monetary Fund’s latest update to its World Economic Outlook, issued on January 25th, in support of his policies. The IMF, he said, approved of a robust approach to restoring the public finances. Well, yes, but only up to a point. The IMF update didn’t actually discuss the UK as such, and they qualified their approval of spending cuts by putting them in a wider context:

“A host of measures are needed in different countries to reduce vulnerabilities and rebalance growth in order to strengthen and sustain global growth in the years to come. In the advanced economies, the most pressing needs are to alleviate financial stress in the euro area and to push forward with needed repairs and reforms of the financial system as well as with medium-term fiscal consolidation. Such growth-enhancing policies would help address persistently high unemployment, a key challenge for these economies.” (Update, p.7)

Now, the Eurozone governments have, with a lot of delays and haggling, begun to sort out the debt problems afflicting their ‘periphery’ (that is, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain). They have created a Financial Stability Facility which has just successfully issued the first zone-wide Euro bond. The Chinese government in particular is keen on this development, because they want to diversify their own bond purchases away from the USA. But the markets, which as always in an uncertain recovery are particularly prone to rumours, fads and panics, are still worrying away at this issue. Oddly enough, this is good news for Osborne, since problems in the Eurozone make British government bonds more attractive to investors.

However, there are two other global issues which we need to keep an eye on. The first is the one raised by the IMF, namely ‘reforms’ of the financial system. Last week (22 January) the chair of the Independent (sic) Banking Commission, Sir John Vickers, gave a lecture on the progress that the Commission is making on this. Given the often-stated views of the Governor of the Bank of England – and most academic commentators – it was hardly surprising that he highlighted the need to segregate the risky activities of ‘investment’ banking (issuing and trading financial assets of all kinds) from the activities of ‘commercial’ banking (dealing with payments and routine borrowing by households and firms).

The British Bankers’ Association spokesperson, Angela Knight, immediately announced that if new regulations were brought in that were too tough on the banks, they would up sticks and relocate abroad. Short of revolution (not a bad idea?) the way to head off this threat is to make sure that pretty much the same regulations are brought in everywhere, and especially in the USA, UK and the Eurozone. In the more than two years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, progress on this has been painfully slow. In the USA, legislation was finally passed in July 2010 (the Dodd-Frank Act), but implementation is still being delayed, making because the banking lobby made sure that the proposals were incredibly cumbersome and riddled with contradictions. In the Eurozone, progress is also slow, partly because so many banks are massive holders of those dodgy Irish, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish government debt; so any financial squeeze on the banks threatens efforts to calm down the bond markets.

The second big issue is the tensions between China and the USA. Basically, for years there has been a dollar merry-go-round:
· ..... the US runs a big trade deficit with China, paying for the imports in dollars;
· the Chinese government then lends the dollars back to the US – mostly through buying US government bonds;
· the US government uses this money to keep taxes low, leaving households and businesses with more money to spend;
· and they spend it on Chinese imports.....
For years, US pundits have pointed out the irony of the richest and most powerful country in the world becoming financially dependent on what remains one of the poorer countries. But the vast majority of US citizens either don’t pay any attention to international affairs at all, or they just blithely assume that what Uncle Sam wants, he is entitled to get.

However, Chinese President Hu’s state visit to Washington last week brought the issue forcefully to a head. Treasury Secretary Geithner yet again called for an increase in the dollar exchange rate of the renminbi, to try to correct the trade imbalance. But the global context has changed dramatically since 2007. While the USA, as well as other major rich economies, have suffered sharp recessions and then slow jobless recoveries, China and other so-called emerging economies like India, Brazil and Russia took a smaller hit from the financial crisis, and rebounded quickly. Even Africa has in recent years experienced much faster growth than the rich countries.

This is a truly world-shaking shift. Back in the 1970s, the newly-confident post-colonial states of the Third World proposed, in the UN and other fora, a New International Economic Order. The idea was to place their development agenda at the heart of the international economic and financial order, using the leverage of their control over the supply of oil and other raw materials. At first the rich states tried to ignore these demands, so when oil prices were indeed raised sharply, they were plunged into inflation and stagnation. But from 1979, led by the UK and the USA, they took their revenge.

New economic policies of ruthless financial stringency plunged the Third World into a massive debt crisis and the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. Neoliberalism was unleashed across the globe, forcing debtor states to adopt policies that favoured capital (including foreign capital) over labour and private profit over state initiatives. And after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the USSR in 1979-81, this leaner, meaner sort of capitalism became the universal norm.

The great irony is that the success of this strategy – from a capitalist point of view, that is – turned out to create formidable competitors. The Chinese and other new capitalist powers are rapidly increasing their share, not only of world consumer markets, but also of available raw materials. New Chinese, Indian and Brazilian transnationals are displacing the tired old US, Japanese and European firms. China has in recent years outstripped the World Bank as a source of so-called ‘development aid’ to Africa (as always, the ‘aid’ comes straight back to the donor in the form of orders for their goods).

In these circumstances, the power structures of global capitalism have become more and more outdated. The role of the dollar; the permanent seats on the UN security council; the inter-state bureaucracies in Geneva and New York; the voting systems in the IMF; these and countless other practices are being called into question.

For the American people, it is especially hard: that famous ‘city on a hill’ is bankrupt and crumbling, unable to be a beacon for anything except xenophobia and gun law. With the Tea Party Republicans on the rise, threatening everything from bombing Iran to hanging Julian Assange, there are plenty of reasons to be fearful.

Fortunately, help is at hand. For the great irony is that America’s real rulers – the corporate rich – have invested massively in the new capitalism of the East and the South. Knowing full well that the newly-confident ruling classes of those regions fully share their own ideology and objectives, they will ensure that the new American nationalism remains a matter of rhetoric alone. The dollar-go-round will not be abruptly halted.

How does all this impact upon working people in Britain? Well, it makes the outlook a bit better for exports and unemployment. But under the government’s present policies, Mervyn King told us on 25th January what to expect: declining living standards for years to come. As he said, such a long period of decline hasn’t been seen in Britain since the 1920s. As he must surely know, but didn’t say, this strikes at the heart of the political love affair of the so-called middle classes with consumerism and free-market individualism, a key element in the post-1945 political settlement.

What can the left do about it? Well, obviously fight every redundancy and every pay cut. But also, please, this time round, recognise that workers all over the world are in exactly the same situation. We are being urged to accept pay cuts so that we remain ‘competitive’, that is, put workers abroad out of a job instead. And they in turn are being told just the same thing by their own rulers. Time for an old, old slogan: workers of the world unite!

27 January 2011
h.k.radice@leeds.ac.uk

Danny Dorling on Geography of Austerity

2011-01-27T12:55:00.000Z

The School of Geography, University of Leeds presents a School Seminar with… Danny Dorling
Department of Geography, University of Sheffield

The Geography of Austerity: consequences of the coalition government cuts

WEDNESDAY 2 February, 4pm
(followed by refreshments)
Geography Lecture Theatre
Geography East Building
University of Leeds, LS29JT

In this talk Danny will show a few maps of Britain, current social evils, where the highest cuts and planned, but also who still receives the highest incomes and has the most wealth. He'll talk about the choices that were ignored, what the alternatives might have been, and how things might just feel in a few years time if current trends continue. The talk ends with some data suggest all is not well even in what appear the least harmed areas.

For more information on Danny’s work see: http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/

How to find us: http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/about/contact

ALL WELCOME
All seminars will take place on Wednesdays at 4pm in Geography Lecture Theatre (Geography East Building) unless otherwise stated.
To get onto our School of Geography Seminar Series email list email Paul Waley: p.t.waley@leeds.ac.uk

Chris Bem Talk to Taking Soundings

2011-01-25T13:06:00.000Z

HEALTH, THE ECONOMY AND TODAY’S NHS
Talk, Leeds Taking Soundings, 19th January 2011

Outline – themes – the dismantling of a public health service through

COMMODIFICATION OF THE LIFE WORLD
BUREAUCRATISATION OF SYSTEMS OF CONTROL
PROLETARIANISATION OF HEALTH CARE WORKERS

Theories for resistance

REFRAMING PHILOSOPHIES OF BIOLOGY
HEALTHY ECONOMY – HEALTHY SOCIETY
HOMO SOCIALIS – SOCIAL GOVERNANCE – RE-MAKING THE PUBLIC SPHERE

New political openings – opportunities for action and involvement

Utililizing those existing opportunities for participation in governance and health care design that exist both to campaign against the reforms and to subvert the reforms. Membership of local health care organisaions, involvement in health scrutiny panels
Health care institutions as centres for an economy of care and cooperation (in opposition to the economy of profit and exploitation) with social facilities, art, education, well-being, social enterprises e.g. Bromley by Bow Centre, Tower Hamlets, East London
Community media/newspapers/journals (media divorced from consumer advertising) distributed through health care facilities waiting rooms

EXPLORING THE MEANING OF A HEALTHY ECONOMY

The word “economy” is derived from two ancient Greek words, “oikos” meaning “home”, and “nomos” meaning “rule” or “law”. The word, economy, therefore in its original sense concerns “the rules pertaining to household management”. Economics is therefore primarily not about money, but how we seek to live with each other. Whilst proper financial accounting is important to ensure that we live within our means, money is a poor substitute for meaningful work and supportive relationships. Money is a lubricant for human development but it cannot be the motor otherwise it turns people into instruments and human activities into commodities. It subverts economic life into a form of financial slavery and encourages us to seek personal material gain in all human relationships.
The word “health” derives from an old English word “hail” meaning “whole”. In medical care we recognise the importance of a holistic approach. Likewise, a healthy economy needs to respond not only to the physical realities of life but also to the need to foster appropriate personal and communal values and a healthy ecology of living. A healthy economy cannot be measured in dollars, pounds or euros, but can be felt in how it how promotes supportive human relationships which in turn help people to live out their talents and develop as human beings. Many studies have shown that affluent societies, especially those that are egocentric, self-willing and consumerist have lower parameters for health, contentment and social cohesion than middle income, socially cooperative societies.

It is a paradox that the easiest way to increase financial turnover and increase the sum of necessary work is to cause problems that must then be solved – problems such as waste production, crime, environmental degradation, illness-provoking life-styles and violence. Add to these the subtle generation of psychic insecurity and a sustained promotion of material needs, then an economy can be created in which financial turnover is enormous but in which healthy economic relations are distorted. The armaments industry, tobacco, alcohol, the automobile industry each contributes some 4% to the gross national product. Each has their consequences for health and well-being. Economic theory has also to deal with problems generated by a motivation for surplus profit in which it pays financially to deny health and social rights to workers and to ignore the environmental and social consequences of economic activity.

There is a need to move to the third paradigm of health philosophy. Progress in health care began some 300 years ago with the scientific revolution. Some 30-40 years ago, health carers began to become aware of the need for personhood of the patient before them. It is now necessary to fully understand the social aspects of health, aspects that are determined by the economic rules of an societyOrganisations working against the NHS reforms
Keep our NHS public (KONP)
BMA (half hearted)
NHS Consultants Association – (made up of consultants who support the NHS)
Socialist Medical Association – excellent and informative web site
Medact (challenging the barriers to health from poverty, violence and climate change)
The campaign for greener health care

Some reading/background

NHS, economy, governance and health
Allyson M Pollock; “NHS plc”, Verso 2004
Pat Devine: The Political Economy of Twentieth First Century Socialism, Soundings, issue 37, 1997
Anna Coote, Jane Franklin: “Green Well Fair: three economies for social justice” New Economic Foundation, 2009 (pamphlet)
Fair Societies, Healthy Lives, the Marmot Review, 2010
The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone: Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett, Allen Lane, London, 2009
Three Dimensions of Modern Social Governance: Markets, Hierarchies and Kinships, Vladimír Benácek: http://www1.ceses.cuni.cz/benacek/3D-Nov05-short_version.pdf (accessed 3rd October, 2010)
Felix Guattari: “The Three Ecologies”
(Guattari, a Marxist psychoanalyst, “The three ecologies”, an essay published in 1989 and available on the web)
Lewis Hyde: “The Gift”, Vintage Books 1983
Richard Titmus “The Gift Relationship: from human blood to social policy”, 1970, re-issued 1997
Global Health Report 2: an Alternative World Health Report, Zed Books 2008

Philosophy and Biology
Joost van Loon: “Risk and Technological Culture: towards a sociology of virulence”, Routledge 2002
(especially Chapter 4: Assemblages and deviations: biophilosophical reflections on risk)
Noel Castree: “Nature”, Routledge, 2005
(although a book of the philosophy of geography, opens up perspectives on the philosophy of the biology of health)
Iain McGilchrist: “The Mastery and the Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the modern world”, Yale 2009
(author is a psychiatrist, neurophysiologist and one-time lecturer in English at Oxford University who offers a critique of the narrow bounds of technical reason)
William Engdahl: “Seeds of Destruction: the hidden agenda of genetic manipulation”, Global Research, 2007
Steven Rose, Hilary Rose: “Darwin and After”, New Left Review 63, May-June 2010, pp 91-113 (downloadable from New Left Review Website)
(a critique of Darwinian and genetic determinacy with an introduction to epigenetics – emerging theories showing that the dna of the nucleus is not the master molecule but influenced, and changed, by its cellular environment and ecological habitat)

Philosophers worth (in my view) looking at
Jean Baudrillard
Alain Badiou e.g
Jurgen Habermas
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

chrisbem@btinternet.com

Leeds Salon presents What is the Fture of Leeds?

2011-01-25T13:00:00.003Z

Unfortunately this clashes with the next Leeds Taking Soundings meeting with Michael Kenny.

Wednesday 23 February
The Congreve Room
West Yorkshire Playhouse
Quarry Hill, Leeds, LS2 7UP
6:45pm (for a 7pm start) to 8:45pm.

After two decades of growth and change, Leeds is now at something of a crossroads, in search of direction and identity. While other northern cities have had massive investment and public attention as ‘cities of culture’, hosting international athletic events, and the building or renovation of iconic buildings as national cultural venues, Leeds seems to have been left behind. Development and regeneration seemed to have stuttered even before the recession hit.

So where does Leeds go now, and how does it move forward? Does Leeds have anything unique to offer? Is the answer more of what it does already: attracting financial services and promoting itself as Yorkshire’s premier shopping destination? Or could Leeds be the economic hub driving the future success of a huge city-region and attracting new and innovative industries? And what about the arts and culture? Does Leeds have the facilities and resources to attract cultural entrepreneurs, creators and innovators? And how does Leeds keep and promote its own creative talent?

What will, or how will, Leeds define itself as a city in the 21st century? How could it be the great regional capital it aspires to be? And, ultimately, what makes and defines a city?

The Speakers
Irena Bauman founded Bauman Lyons Architects in 1992, and has been involved in developing a wide range of projects. She is a frequent speaker and commentator on the shortcomings of economically driven policies and on the fresh thinking required for urban developments to be based on facilitation of community enterprise and long term viability. She contributes on a regular basis to her column, ‘Dear Irena’, in Building Design that deals with ethical dilemmas in architectural practice.

Neil Owen is founder of Test Space; a multidisciplinary arts organisation based in Leeds. Test Space aims to showcase new and emerging creative talent and encourage talent in Leeds by brokering professional opportunities with business, venues, studios and other arts organisations. Events Test Space run, which include rapid exhibitions, pop-up kitchens, cross-city showdowns and showcase gigs.

Martin Dean heads the Leeds Initiative; the public and private community partnership and Local Strategy Partnership for Leeds. Through the development of appropriate strategies the Leeds Initiative takes forward the priorities identified in ‘Vision for Leeds 2004 to 2020’. This work covers a wide ranging policy agenda including regeneration, economy, skills, local government, environment and transport.

Dr Rachael Unsworth is a lecturer in the School of Geography, University of Leeds, specialising in urban geography with a particular interest in the future of cities. She spends much of her time trying to inject sustainability thinking into policy and practice in Leeds. She was co-editor of 21st century Leeds: geographies of a regional city (2004), a sixteen-chapter book about the contemporary city.

Alan Hudson is Director of Oxford University’s Leadership Programme for China. In the last five years he has been responsible for writing the curriculum for training programmes in UK public policy and public administration which have been delivered to senior Chinese officials at municipal, provincial and national level. He is the author of the chapter ‘The Trouble with Planners’ in the book Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age (2001). He is now researching the impact of Expo 2010 on Shanghai’s urban strategy.

Readings
Cultural Report on Leeds: C minus, could do better … discuss, by Neil Owen, Culture Vulture, 20 July 2010.
Leeds Strategic Plan 2008-11 Executive Summary
What is Leeds …? Talk Today. Shape Tomorrow.
Setting the Vision for Leeds in post-book context, by Dr Rachael Unsworth, March 2009
For the ‘Vision for Leeds 2004 to 2020’, and other related documents visit the Leeds Initiative website.

An entrance fee of £5 (waged) and £3 (unwaged) will be charged on the door to the Congreve Room to cover costs. To let us know you’re coming please reply to this e-mail. If you’re not on it already, join our mailing list at: http://leedssalon.org.uk/index.php?page=contact, and join our group on Facebook.

Special Announcement
Audio Recording of Ray Tallis’ ‘Two Cultures’ introduction available - For those who couldn’t make December’s Salon on The ‘Two Culture’ Debate – Then and Now, Professor Ray Tallis’ introduction is now available to listen to on our website. Click on the above link (‘Flash’ required).

Mike Kenny on the Big Society

2011-01-24T15:32:00.001Z

from Open Democracy

Big Society Dilemmas: a challenge for Tories as well as Labour
Michael Kenny, 11 November 2010

Why is it that the idea of the Big Society worked so well for the Conservatives in opposition (at least until the heat of the General Election campaign), but has proved so difficult to operationalise in government?

Perhaps this is due to the change in economic weather between its conception before the crash and today as Anthony Barnett suggested or because of the varying ways in which the term has been approached across Whitehall and interpreted by different Ministers as observed by Matthew Taylor of the RSA.

But there may also be an explanation which relates to the tradition from which David Cameron emanates. The advantage of the Big Society idea was that it enabled the Conservatives to speak across the partisan political divide to the many progressives who were put off by the dirigisme and tactical obsessions of the Brown regime. And, simultaneously, it nodded towards a long-established conservative commitment to the virtues of civil society. However, the Big Society may well be much more effective in the first of these roles - as a vehicle for conveying progressively minded intentions - than it is for the second.

The terminology of the Big Society does not easily capture the sense of affiliation and belonging that links many people to the places and communities they inhabit, nor the kinds of small-scale civic activism, the disposition to help out families, friends and neighbours, and the fabric of social relationships (what David Halpern calls the ‘hidden wealth of nations’) that undergird communal life. These different facets were evocatively and authentically captured for earlier generations of conservatives by Edmund Burke’s idea of the ‘little platoons’.

Nor is this just a matter of linguistic presentation. Something more fundamental may be at stake. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who came closer than any other single thinker to distilling the DNA of British liberal-conservative thought in the twentieth century, proposed a distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘enterprise’ associations. Civil associations were forms of collective endeavour that revolved around their intrinsic purpose – the co-operative society or allotment association, for instance.

Enterprise ones were established in order to pursue externally directed instrumental goals – the NGO, business association, or political campaign would all be examples. While both kinds of association were bound to co-exist in a free society, Oakeshott argued for the particular importance in Britain of the many spontaneous and localised forms of civil association, regarding these as an important bulwark against the inclination of the social-engineering state to meddle in people’s lives in its pursuit of ‘rational’ goals like social justice or progress. His important critique of the expanding post-war state stemmed from his belief that it was increasingly acting in the spirit of an enterprise association, rather than behaving as an umpire upholding the rules and supplying the social goods that enabled people to sustain their own forms of civic life.
Imperfect as it may be, the distinction he drew between different forms of association still resonates in British culture. It helps explain why people across the voluntary sector have often been ambivalent about Labour’s well-intentioned efforts to involve faith groups or charities in delivering services. Winning a contract to deliver a community service for many groups means giving up the ethos of civil association for the burdens and reduced autonomy that go with being an enterprise-based one. Indeed the very idea of the state harnessing the good works and civic impulses of individuals and communities is in some respects alien territory for conservatives (of both small-c and big-C varieties).

This does not mean that the Big Society is doomed to irrelevance on the political right. But it does suggest that its key propositions need to be fleshed out with greater sensitivity to established patterns of thinking. In policy terms, this implies a clearer connection with the localism that the Coalition also champions. And it requires more signs that government is aware of the challenges associated with the greater involvement of voluntary sector and community organisations in service delivery. These include the issues of how to protect the rights of individuals supplied with services by such organisations, and how to ensure that it is not only the largest, most professional organisations in this sector, that scoop up the bulk of available contracts.

Overall, the real danger for Cameron is not that the Big Society comes to be seen as a front for hacking away at public provision. His worry should be that it turns into one more government-sponsored mantra that meets a wall of indifference because it does not chime with the everyday forms of reasoning through which people make sense of their own, and others’, civic impulses and actions.

And what of the left and the Big Society? Labour may well be tempted to respond to all this by reminding voters of its own record at promoting capacity in the third sector and ensuring the greater involvement of voluntary organisations in service provision. This is the approach many take in OurKingdom's thread on 'The Big Society Challenge'. But, important as this history is, falling back upon it will not be enough.

Labour needs to grasp that it has acquired some highly damaging connotations in the public mind, and these have to be actively and publicly challenged. They include the widespread belief that in government it reached too readily and unthinkingly for the levers of the central state, and was overly bureaucratic and rule-bound in its method of governance. Responses such as ‘we did this better than the Tories’, or calling the Big Society a gimmick, do not begin to address this deeper question of identity and reputation.

Just as the Conservatives found themselves after 1997 saddled in the popular mind with deeply held associations formed after a long period of government that ended in acrimony, so Labour will need to work very hard to show that it truly understands the limits and downsides of the excessive centralism it showed in office.

It should start by gathering together the different strands of its thinking that operate on the territory of the Big Society and work out how these might be turned into a narrative for government, society and communities that works for tomorrow. Mutuals and co-operatives should play an important part in this thinking. But they form only one part of the repertoire that Labour will need in this area.

A serious review of its policies means posing new questions. In what areas does Labour believe it appropriate to devolve more responsibility to individuals, neighbourhoods and communities – in areas such as education, health and law and order? And, what changes are needed to the structures and cultures of central and local government, if the kinds of decentralised and citizen-centred forms of governance which the Big Society promises, are to be achieved?

Michael Kenny on the State of the State

2011-01-20T14:17:00.002Z

Next Leeds Taking Soundings meeting is Professor Michael Kenny speaking about the role of the state in current political issues, especially in Britain in the light of the Conservative-Liberal Democratic government policies.

6PM, February 23rd, Old Broadcasting House, Leeds Metropolitan University, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2.

Leeds Hospital Alert Conference

2011-01-20T14:12:00.003Z

Leeds Hospital alert is a holding an open conference in Leeds on March 19th 2011 at St Chad's Parish Centre on the Otley Road in Headingley. Speakers include John Lister, Amanda Robinson (Leeds Medical Committee) and Chris Bem (Bradford Royal Infirmary).

You need to book: email info@leedshopsitalalert.org.uk

After yesterday's excellent Leeds Taking Soundings meeting with Chris Bem on what is hapening to the NHS we would urge everyone to attend this important conference.

Alan Finlayson on the philosophical significance of UK-Uncut

2010-12-20T14:00:00.003Z

There was another UK-Uncut inspired protest in Leeds last Saturday - the third I've seen - about 30 people, mostly organised by Twitter and Facebook and other social media. There was something warmly human about its spontaneity. Here's a discussion of why these protestsd against the corporate tax-dodgers from OpenDemocracy.

The philosophical significance of UK-Uncut
Alan Finlayson, 17th December 2010

When activists under the banner of UK Uncut protest outside high-street shops on Saturday 18th December they will be doing something of great political importance. But they will also be demonstrating and articulating something of immense philosophical significance.

When activists under the banner of UK Uncut protest outside high-street shops tomorrow they will be doing something of great political importance. But they will also be demonstrating and articulating something of immense philosophical significance. The political mainstream - journalists, commentators and Parliamentarians - is trying to ignore this. Certainly they are confounded by it. For with UK Uncut what that mainstream thought impossible has come to pass: ethics and ideology are once more at the forefront of political contest in Britain.

The demand that corporations cease exploiting the tax loopholes government created for them is ethical in a precise way. It addresses itself to the quality of the actions of Philip Green and others like him. It finds those actions at odds with the principle that ‘we are all in this together’. It then publicly declares those actions unjust. The purity, simplicity and accuracy of all this confounds the political mainstream. Confronted by it they systematically mobilise the argument that since tax avoiders are doing nothing illegal, there is therefore nothing to be said against them. That was the line pursued by Tom Harris MP when he debated with Neal Lawson, Chair of Compass, on The Today Programme after the first Top Shop demonstration. It was repeated by Gavin Esler [10] on Newsnight as part of a challenge put to Daniel Garvin of UK Uncut and again by Sarah Montague [11], on Today, questioning Murray Williams, also of UK Uncut. The frequency with which this line appears suggests it is either an organised ‘talking point’ [12] or simply indicative of a shared outlook - an ideology.

Consider for a moment the real implications of the proposition that no act can justly be criticized unless it is against the law. The implication is that law is a full and total expression of moral values. Only totalitarians think that. Everybody else recognises that, while certainly informed by morality, the function of the law is to provide a framework within which civil society can function and can debate the rights and wrongs of actions. And it would be a cold and brittle society that relied on the law for the expression and support of all values, and that could not tolerate citizens sorting things out between themselves. Just as in sport we recognize that something can be within the rules yet still condemned as unsporting, so too most people recognize that behaviour can be wrong even when it isn’t actually illegal.

More here.

Next meeting: Jan 19th

2010-12-20T13:54:00.001Z

Health Care Governance and the Economy
Chris Bem (Consultant & Surgeon, Bradford Royal Infirmary)

6.00 pm, Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
The Boardroom, Broadcasting Place, Leeds Met University

Soundings 46

2010-12-20T13:52:00.000Z

The winter issue of Soundings is out now: Soundings 46 The Good Society
The Tories are using the Big Society theme as a means by which to move in on ground that was vacated by New Labour in government. We need to reclaim this ground and put forward a renewed vision of a good society.

Contents
Jonathan Rutherford on Labour's good society
Stuart White on the left and reciprocity
Maurice Glasman on Labour as a radical tradition
Stella Creasey, Sally Davison, Ejos Ubiribo and Heather Wakefield on feminism today
Richard Murphy on pensions
Andrea Mammone on Italy's moral crisis
Nora Räthzel, David Uzzell, Dave Elliott on trade unions and the environment
Mark Perryman on the South African World Cup
Dexter Whitfield on public sector transformation
Carl Rowlands on Europe's periphery
Radhika Desai on India and the recession
John Ross on China and Keynesianism

To subscribe to Soundings for just £20 per year (by standing order) go to: http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/standingorder.html
To order a single copy or subscribe by credit card go to http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/products.php?cat=2

A Reply to Harris and Lawson

2010-12-04T13:34:00.003Z

Good to see debate. This is from the Labour Uncut blog.

You don’t build the future by trashing the past
by Will Straw

With Labour still recovering from its second worst defeat in 90 years, now is the time for a thorough reassessment of what the left stands for. The policy review and reforms to party structures that Ed Miliband has announced should be welcomed. Before ink is spilled on the “blank sheet of paper”, time should be taken to debate and consider a range of different perspectives on the future direction of the left.

The five-point plan set out in Neal Lawson and John Harris’ essay in this week’s New Statesman should therefore be welcomed. But by trashing new Labour’s record with little consideration of the many achievements that 13 years in power delivered, Lawson and Harris risk alienating a group of reformers who could, in other circumstances, find common cause with their mission. The Labour party could easily unite around a programme dedicated to defeating inequality, building a new model of capitalism, localising public services, tackling climate change, and creating a more pluralistic politics – as Lawson and Harris suggest. But their approach is not the way to get there.

In their essay, Lawson and Harris write:
“New Labour stayed in office for 13 years because the world economy
was so strong and the Tories were so weak. But even in such benign
circumstances, the poor got poorer and the planet burned … The only
plan they had was to stoke a finance-driven, lightly regulated economy,
and then surreptitiously take the tax skim to fund social programmes”.

What a simplistic view of Labour’s time in office. Few saw the financial crash coming; even fewer set out the remedies in advance of the Lehman’s collapse. Adverse criticism of new Labour around 2003 was primarily concerned with the war in Iraq and the marketisation of public services; not the reregulation of the City. Basel I and II passed without a murmur. Where was the compass paper in 2005 calling for a ban on short selling or a British uptick rule prior to 2007? Twenty-twenty hindsight is a fine thing but those who call now for a new form of capitalism should be more realistic about the collective hubris of the boom years.

More here.

Time for a New Socialism

2010-12-02T18:13:00.003Z

This is a lengthy and important article from Compass. There is a shorter version in the New Statesman.

Time for a New Socialism argue John Harris and Neal Lawson
Thursday, December 02 2010

To begin, a reminder. Just seven months ago, Labour suffered a defeat of epic proportions. It was the Party's worst performance since 1918, barring the loss it suffered under Michael Foot in 1983. But where is the debate, the soul searching, and the way out of such a cataclysmic setback?

Two events have smothered any conversation. First, Labour went straight into a leadership fight, in which the overriding goal of the candidates, naturally enough, was to win, not fixate on why Party had lost so very badly. Gordon Brown should have stayed on for six months like Michael Howard did, to over see a more wide-ranging debate and allow a far-reaching analysis of Labour's plight, analogous to that which led David Cameron to victory against David Davis. In Labour's case, our guess is that Ed Miliband would still have won under this longer timescale - and probably by a comfortable margin: he, after all, was the candidate who engaged most forcefully and fully with the scale of Labour's defeat and called on the party to ‘move beyond the New Labour comfort zone'.

The second explanation for the absence of intellectual heft is the cuts, and another comfort zone that could seduce the Party into ignoring the deep hole it is in. Austerity, it is presumed, will do our work for us. Maybe it will. But remember: the cuts that will be in the forefront of voters' minds come election day 2015 will be the tax cuts the Coalition has just doled out. Besides, even if a turbulent next two years sees the Coalition loosen their grip on power, will Labour be any better prepared to govern effectively without a thorough understanding of what has gone so wrong, and why?

There is a third reason why Labour appears to be sleep walking away from the car crash that was the 2010 election defeat: the sheer gravity of what happened, and the onerous challenge it entails. We know in our hearts that this was more than a routine defeat; just another turn of the electoral wheel in which someone has to lose. In May 2010 Labour lost more than an election: it lost a way of being.

To understand the profound nature of this numbing loss, we have to go back and admit to ourselves that social democracy has been in retreat for decades.

More here.

Readers meeting

2010-11-18T19:21:00.002Z

Briefing: The Campaigns against the Cuts
Matthew Caygill

Reading: ‘Let’s Take Back the Big Society’ (email b.winter@leedsmet.ac.uk for a copy)
Jon Cruddas MP
Aneurin Bevan Memorial Lecture

7.15 pm Monday, 29 November, 2010
The Boardroom, Broadcasting Place
Leeds Metropolitan University

New date for our December meeting

2010-11-16T13:53:00.000Z

Cutting Public Deficits: Economic Science or Class War?
Speaker: Hugo Radice (Politics & International Studies (POLIS) University of Leeds)
December 9, 2010 (new date)
6 pm, Old Broadcasting Place (former BBC Building)
148 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds

Hugo Radice on the on-going crisis

2010-11-15T18:49:00.002Z

Hugo Radice: Risky and radical cuts policy is at mercy of global events
Yorkshire Post
09 November 2010
MUCH of the debate on the Comprehensive Spending Review has focused on whether the resulting pain will be equitably distributed between rich and poor. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, regarded as the most objective of the think-tanks, quickly announced that the cuts would impact more heavily on the less well-off, taking into account not only taxation and welfare benefits, but also their greater reliance on public services whose availability, cost and quality will surely not be sustained.

While there is considerable support for reducing the deficit, many argue that a greater proportion of the reduction should come from higher taxation, especially of the very rich and the banks, rather than cuts in spending. Although the Government is maintaining Labour's 50 per cent income tax band on incomes over £150,000 a year, the dominant Conservatives are adamantly opposed to further increases in taxation of the rich for fear of damaging incentives.

Evidently, Disraeli's "one nation" is dead and buried: cutting the incomes of the rich would lead them to stop working, while cutting the incomes of the poor would encourage them to start working.The other area of debate concerns the economic causes and consequences of the cuts. The Chancellor continues to maintain that the parlous state in which Labour left the public finances left him with no choice but to cut the deficit quickly and deeply. In placing all the blame on Labour, he glosses over the undeniable fact that the largest part of the deficit arose from the bank bailouts of 2007-9. Yet, internationally, the measures taken by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling were hailed by political leaders and bankers alike. The best that can be said for the Conservatives' own policy prescriptions during the banking crisis is that they were confused, unwilling to endorse the policies of an increasingly unpopular government, but unable to offer a coherent alternative. In addition, Mr Osborne's repeated claims that the bond markets were on the brink of pulling the plug on UK government borrowing prior to the election are not credible, given the ease with which successive issues of government debt have found willing buyers at remarkably low yields.

In any case, there remains a clear risk that public spending cuts will trigger a further economic contraction. Even though the implementation of the cuts is to be spread over four years, the prospect of massive job losses – perhaps 600,000 across the public sector, with consequential further losses in private firms that lose government orders – is enough, it is argued, to damage confidence and reduce the willingness of households to spend, and businesses to invest and to hire new workers. Already at the time of the emergency budget, many commentators pointed out that the new Office for Budget Responsibility was forecasting economic growth much faster than warranted by the historical evidence of earlier recessions.

In view of these criticisms, we can surely surmise that the underlying reason for the cuts lies more in the long-term political objectives of the coalition: reducing the scope and scale of the state, especially through a shift away from universal rights and benefits, and promoting the Big Society. Whether the British public, normally so sceptical of fervent political ideologies, will embrace this radical shift remains to be seen.

There are nevertheless some more hopeful signs for the Government. Despite the fears of renewed recession, the evidence remains mixed. Economic growth continued in the UK in the July-September period, albeit at a slower rate than previously. In Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, a more substantial recovery seems underway, while the Obama administration the USA has embarked on a further monetary expansion which, despite opposition from the resurgent Republican right, has been accepted with equanimity by the bond markets. Above all, the emerging economies, especially China and India, have grown so rapidly that they can now provide significant markets for the rest of the world.

In the bigger picture of global recovery, much depends on how world leaders handle the tensions over trade imbalances. There are fears that the major economies are manipulating their foreign exchange rates in order to capture larger shares of world export markets, and that this could lead to a breakdown of collective policy-making in the G20. But these fears are surely unfounded, not because great wisdom can be attributed to the G20 leaders, but because the world's major businesses depend so much on international trade and finance to sustain their production and profits. They are resolutely opposed to any breakdown in the global political dialogue that would threaten their ability to trade and invest wherever they see opportunities. If the new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives seriously threatened protectionist measures, the business and banking lobbies would soon cut off their flows of political funds. On such apparently distant considerations the success of the government's economic policies now rests.

Hugo Radice is a senior research fellow at the University of Leeds.

Dec 8th Hugo Radice on the cuts

2010-11-04T17:49:00.001Z

Cutting Public Deficits: Economic Science or Class War?
Speaker: Hugo Radice
Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Leeds

December 8, 2010
6 pm, Old Broadcasting Place (former BBC Building)
148 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds

Nov 17th Carlo Ruzza on Racist and Xenophobic Right in Europe

2010-11-04T17:46:00.000Z

LEEDS TAKING SOUNDINGS
A politics and culture discussion forum

The Racist and Xenophobic Right in Europe

How can we explain the recent electoral success of the populist and xenophobic right in countries including Italy, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and Hungary? What are the key ideological and socio-economic factors driving this phenomenon?
Speaker: Carlo Ruzza
Professor of Sociology, University of Leicester
November 17, 2010
6 pm, The Boardroom, Broadcasting Place
Woodhouse Lane, Leeds

Carlo Ruzza is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Leicester.
He is interested in ethno-nationalism and populism, and in ‘uncivil society’ organizations – such as xenophobic groups and networks. In recent years he has worked on the interaction between civil society organizations, parties and the state in policy-relevant functions. Civil society groups – both left and right – provide information to the policy process, a channel for advocacy and support for service delivery. He has explored these functions in a set of contexts, ranging from EU-level politics to right-wing parties and movements. More broadly, he is interested in changes in modes of political participation and in their related theoretical aspects, particularly the process of institutionalisation of social movements and the implications for democracy. He is the co-coordinator of the political sociology section of the European Sociological Association (www.europeanpoliticalsociology.eu ).
Selected Recent Publications
· Ruzza, C. (2010). "Italy: the Political Right and concepts of civil society." Journal of Political Ideologies 15(3): p. 259-271
· Ruzza, C. (2010). Organized Civil Society and Political Representation in the EU Arena. Civil Society and International Governance: The role of non-state actors in the EU, Africa, Asia and Middle East. D. Armstrong, V. Bello, J. Gilson and D. Spini. London, Routledge.
· Ruzza, Carlo (2009) 'Populism and Euro-scepticism: Towards Uncivil Society', Policy and Society, 28(1), pp. 87-98.
· Ruzza, Carlo and Fella, Stefano (2009) Re-Inventing the Italian Right: Territorial Politics, Populism and 'Post-Fascism', Extremism and Democracy (Routledge).
· Ruzza, Carlo and della Sala, Vincent (eds.) (2007) Governance and Civil Society in the European Union: Volume 1, Normative Dimensions; Volume 2, Exploring Policy Issues (Manchester University Press).
· Europe and Civil Society: Movement Coalitions and European Institutions (Manchester University Press). 2007

Abstract
Populism and the Extreme-Right in Contemporary Europe: Causes and Manifestations
How can we explain the recent electoral success of the populist and xenophobic right in countries including Italy, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and Hungary? What are the key ideological and socio-economic factors driving this phenomenon? This presentation will focus on these questions and seek to answer them by examining the relation between xenophobic sentiments in parts of the European population, populism as a reaction for a perceived ineffectiveness of politics and concepts of political representation. With special reference to contemporary Italian politics, but also drawing more general implication for other European political systems, it posits a general crisis of legitimacy of mechanisms of political representation and it conceptualises the emergence and continuing relevance of populist right-wing parties as a consequence of this crisis.

It is posited that a general crisis of representation is rooted in several factors, which centrally include a perceived inadequacy of the ruling political class, worries about its ability to cope with the consequences of economic globalisation, lack of trust in its selection criteria, policy competence and representational effectiveness. A repeated set of corruption scandals that have personally affected many politicians over recent years has cast doubts on the ability of conventional political actors to represent wide sectors of the European population. Failures to prevent key crises have been identified by the wider public in several policy sectors, ranging from immigration policy to redistributive policies of the welfare state. Doubts about the effectiveness of mechanisms that ensure the proper functioning of checks and balances in democratic systems have resulted from intra-elites competition.

As a consequence, various alternatives have been explored by European publics. These include, on the one hand, increased reliance on deliberative structures involving civil society actors in decision making and service delivery structures. However, on the other hand, there is also more reliance on charismatic leaders who interpret a putatively undifferentiated ‘will of the people’ and channel it in the supposedly ailing mechanisms of democracy. Thus, in this presentation, populist politics is explored in relation to mounting anti-political sentiments and the specific features that they have acquired in different electorates. In the discussion and concluding section, the presentation identifies some common traits of recently prominent European populist leaders, and relates their political relevance to specific aspects of the crisis of representation in different

Jon Cruddas on the Big Society

2010-11-04T17:43:00.000Z

Aneurin Bevan Memorial Lecture: Let's take back the big society says Jon Cruddas
Wednesday, October 20 2010

Thank you for inviting me to give the memorial Lecture tonight. My subject is ‘Taking Back the Big Society'. Now I was going to speak about the specifics of the Big Society debate, about its different forms across Whitehall; its tensions and contradictions and about Labour's own record and how we should respond.
I now think, however, that in order to do such work we have to firstly consider some more fundamental first principles.
Because this debate is really about Labour; about what it has become and what it has been in the past and about what it has lost. And how - through the lives of historic Labour figures like Bevan- we can rediscover our own identity; through the rediscovery of a sentiment around Labour.
Why? Well, put simply, we are in crisis.
Arguably we are experiencing the third great crisis of Labour following those of 1931 and 1981; each driven by patterns of economic rupture. How will we get out of this? And where do we start?
I believe we will find the answers to these questions here in England. I admit this is a strange observation when discussing a towering Welsh Labour figure; but bear with me. England is where the fight for Labour's future will be fiercest; where the crisis is most acute.
Now, I have to make an initial admission. I did not grow up in a family schooled in the great Labour contributions of Hardie, Lansbury or Bevan.I had never heard of them till I went to University. Our heroes were the Kennedys - born not of party but of diaspora- and Oscar Romero - born of creed not of political science. We lost the brothers over 40 years ago. And it is now 30 years ago last march since Romero was assassinated by San Salvador death squads.
Whilst I personally was very much attracted to his mixture of catholic social teaching and Marxism - to give a ‘voice to the voiceless' - in fact at home we owed everything to Labour.
Aneurin Bevan told Jennie Lee: ‘it is the Labour party or nothing'. He was speaking for the working class but he was also speaking about himself. And for me too - and many, many millions of us. I still see it the same way, almost as a life sentence; a fundamental part of my and our identity.
But what is the identity of Labour now? The threat facing Labour is bigger than the Coalition. It’s bigger than the millions lost to us at the last election. Or the tens of thousands of members lost.
We have lost the respect of many who put their trust in us. Now I am not here to bury Labour; but there is a pervasive sense of loss around our Party. It is a loss of identity. We do not possess some kind of historical right to exist.
Across Europe social democracy has been reduced to parties of the public sector and the liberal middle class. 30% in Sweden; 23% in Germany; 29% here in the UK. Capitalism has been through a revolution and the old working class has lost its economic function. Its culture is dying; its patterns of family and kinship under siege. Its political parties are fading. Many are turning to the far right cultural movements that are sweeping across Europe. And this is the coming front line.
The new battleground is one of identity, race and religion, of class and culture. Witness Merkel this week; Sarkozy and the Roma.
Labour has to be in this swim; to ensure that right wing populists are not the only ones navigating this terrain. Bevan understood Labour's faults and dangers. He said, ‘We can't undo what we have done. And I am by no means convinced that something cannot yet be made of it.' It is true, there is hope for Labour precisely because we have a powerful tradition; a collective memory built in previous periods of dispossession.
But Bevan also gave a warning. To retreat into purity will bring impotence. Success will require boldness in word and deed. The task at hand is for Labour to rebuild its identity grounded in ordinary, everyday working class culture. If we don't change, the mood will turn to weariness and despair; possibly captured by right wing populism. The people will continue to desert us.
There will be dark times. It is therefore an obligation to rebuild. For that we need audacity. Think of England Today My dominant image of politics in 2010 is not the election, Gordon Brown and Mrs. Duffy, nor Cameron and Clegg in the Downing St garden; nor of Ed and David Miliband. It was in London; just recently. I was walking behind a big African guy coming home from church with his toddler. The little boy was wearing a t-shirt with two simple words on the back. In very big bold type, 'Pastor Jones'. Was all it said; all it needed to say. It was the height of the Mosque in Manhattan controversy and Pastor Jones in Florida was ready to burn the Qur'an. International Burn a Qur'an Day.
In real time his message had reached the centre of cosmopolitan London. Where people felt moved to dress their kids in solidarity with this cultural and religious fight in North America. And go to church so dressed. The man and his child belonged to a London church; on inspection we find links between this church and the English Defence League.
Indeed we find links between the EDL and organisers of the New York protests. Moreover, these shadowy figures are also in touch with key Tea Party people in America, inviting them over and building links across Europe. On 30 October they will be in Amsterdam supporting Geert Wilders.
What is this about?
Sure the BNP has been crushed by electoral defeat. The EDL is a new kind of threat- a cultural movement; unpredictable and violent; a new politics of ‘flash demos' and open wildcat networks. It copies the old Anti Nazi League slogan: ‘Black and white to unite'. It demands democracy not racial purity: ‘While our troops fight for democracy overseas we're losing it here' they shout. Its leaders welcome all races to join in defending England's ‘Christian culture’. It is patriotic, it loves the military.
The EDL is a small, violent street militia but it speaks the language of a much larger, disenfranchised class. A politics born out of dispossession but anchored in English male working class culture; of dress and sport. Camped outside the political centre ground, a large swathe of the electorate. The making of an English Tea Party. A people who believe they have been robbed of their birthright .They want community and belonging.
I would argue that in the last three decades England has suffered a social calamity. Thirteen years of Labour governments had only begun the repair.
Deindustrialisation. The malign elements of globalisation ripping through communities. For many, ways of life ruined. Civic decency and families compromised by crime and drugs. Scores of thousands suffering chronic illness and premature death. The institutions that supported the labour movement a shadow of their former selves.
In his essay, Culture is Ordinary, Raymond Williams described the working class culture he grew up in: neighbourhood and security, mutual obligation and common betterment. Precisely those things often now felt to be under threat. People make a culture to make identity and their home in the world. A Labour working class culture grounded in the ordinary.And another great Welshman Dylan Thomas described this culture of the labour movement as ‘parochial' and yet ‘magical'. But what happens when that is lost? When the things that give you and your family meaning are rendered obsolete? When you are dispossessed of that culture you lose a sense of who you are.
It can be to suffer humiliation. It can become harder to find and keep a sense of honour and dignity. It can create the anger of the defeated. It can destroy family and community. And culture. The old industrial order with its male breadwinner and head of household has gone. Men have lost traditions of skilled work that were a source of pride. What now do fathers pass down to their sons? Many young men have lost the traditional rites of passage into adulthood: getting a decent job, establishing a family, making a homeland there can be the shame of those who are unable to defend themselves.
There are the beaten and defeated, the ‘feckless' poor and the so called benefit scroungers, those who suffer chronic illness, depression, alcoholism, addicts, who have not worked for years, who are living reminders of what happens to those who can't cope, and who don't succeed in this rat race.
This is the fate that our society deals out: not compassion but more often contempt.
At times people will use violence to avoid this shame.; respect garnered in different ways. Here lies an angry politics of dispossession.
Is it to become crystallised - or framed - in Europe and North America - in a new politics of Patriotism, Family and Faith. A ‘civilisational politics' that stretches across the Atlantic. A politics of loss. Loss of a sense of identity and a way of life. A loose coalition pulled together by what they are against: often this is Islam. The enemy is not, to them, just Islam it is also the liberal middle class elite who reside over injustice and who have betrayed England and humiliated its people.
Labour must stop this refracting into an English populism; by building our own optimistic politics. To return to Williams: he said ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing'. We have been here before. In the 1960s, Enoch Powell built an English nationalism that drove a wedge between the liberal elite and the people. Powell sought to make despair convincing. He said, ‘There is a deep and dangerous gulf in the nation'. The liberal intelligentsia is the ‘enemy within', destroying the moral fabric of the English nation with its promotion of multiculturalism. A permissive elite that renders the majority of English people passive and helpless, and abandons England to those who hate her.
Are we witnessing a new cultural struggle in civil society? A growing gulf between the political classes and the people. Could this develop into the real challenge of our time. Played out in the context of massive public expenditure cuts.
It is incumbent on Labour to once again make hope possible. There is much talk in Labour about our Southern Discomfort. But the politics of dispossession point to something bigger: Labour's English Discomfort.
Bevan said be bold. He taught us how to begin the political struggle.Ask the question: ‘Where does power lie in this particular State of Great Britain, and how can it be attained'
So let's return to some fundamentals in terms of England. Because although these issues are contemporary- they are actually not new. They lie deep within Labour's own culture through waves of dispossession.
Let’s briefly return to England's past. In the winter of 1799 Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William settled in Dove Cottage in Grasmere. The industrial revolution was in its most intense period. A period of economic rupture. She decided to keep a diary. She writes about nature, their walks and the garden. But there is more. She describes her encounters with beggars: ‘a poor girl called to beg', a ‘broken' soldier, ‘a pretty little boy' of seven - ‘When I asked him if he got enough to eat, he looked surprised, and said ‘Nay'', an old sailor 57 years at sea.
She asks them about their lives. Where have these sick, destitute and uprooted people come from? Countless pamphlets of the time attempted an answer: wages were too high, wages were too low, paupers were feckless; they had bad diets, they had drug habits; they drank tea that impaired their health.
A strange contemporary feel to the debates if you read them now. The national debate about the causes of pauperism literally led to the idea of society itself. In turn the idea of society laid the foundations for socialism and social democracy.
We are having the same debate today. Big Society, Good Society, we cannot talk about them without talking about class, power and dispossession. Since Wordsworth the English working class was defined in three acts of dispossession.
First. The dispossession of the people from their land and livelihood and from a common way of life. Gerrard Winstanley summed up the history of enclosures in his ‘Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England'. .He told the landowners: ‘The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into creation by your ancestors by the sword’. Enclosing was standardised in the General Enclosure Act of 1801. The industrial revolution turned the common people into shiftless migrants'.
Second. The dispossession of the labouring class from the political life of the country. The enclosures dispossessed the people of their land. The 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act excluded the landless from the franchise. ‘In England', writes Karl Polanyi, ‘it became the unwritten law of the Constitution that the working class must be denied the vote'.
Third. The dispossession of the people from their own labour. The 1834 Poor Law Reform Act established a competitive market in labour. The poor were divided into helpless paupers who were confined to the workhouse and a new category, the unemployed. Free labourers must earn their living by working for a wage. Unemployment meant the hated workhouse or death by starvation. Labour was turned into a commodity and the capitalist system was born.
So began what Polanyi describes as the double movement of capitalism. On the one hand the market destroys old social networks and reduces all human relations to commercial ones. On the other, is the counter tendency to defend human values; the search for community and security.
What is Labour in its deeper meaning? What is then the Labour Sentiment? Historically it is the response of people to their dispossession. It is a timeless fight against such dispossession. It is the defence of their social life and relationships from commodification. It is the politics of a common life, a common law and a common wealth. It is being played out today.
Labour has been at the centre of the historical struggle for democracy. Since Wordsworth; through successive waves of dispossession. This is our tradition; to be reclaimed today.
Turn then to New Labour. For the last three decades Polanyi's double movement has been working in the favour of capital. Trade unions decimated. A massive transfer of wealth and political power to the rich. Like our ancestors in the first decade of the nineteenth century, we are faced with profound questions about capitalism and dispossession. About the role of the market and state and the relationship of the individual to society.
New Labour was at its best a contemporary, popular response to these questions. Tony Blair set out his vision of New Labour in his 1994 inaugural conference speech: ‘This is my socialism...‘A nation for all the people, built by the people, where old divisions are cast out. A new spirit in the nation based on working together, unity, solidarity, partnership. That is the patriotism of the future. Where your child in distress is my child, your parent ill and in pain is my parent, your friend unemployed or homeless is my friend; your neighbour my neighbour. That is the true patriotism of a nation.'
But it did not survive. By 2005 New Labour politics had become a desiccated materialism where people either sink or swim. At the party conference Blair said, ‘there is no mystery about what works: an open, liberal economy, prepared constantly to change to remain competitive. The new world rewards those who are open to it.' A dystopian worldview.
Social solidarity is essential, but its purpose, he said ‘ is not to resist the force of globalisation but to prepare for it, and to garner its vast potential benefits.' In that arc between 1994 and 2005 Labour lost its identity. A communitarian politics built around the good society had been defeated by a utilitarian privileging of personal choice and liberal individualism. A stripped down notion of aspiration dominated.
Philip Gould said in his ‘Unfinished Revolution' that his parents ‘wanted to do what was right, not what was aspirational'. When asked what was Labour's essential message Alan Milburn said it was to help more people ‘earn and own'. In contrast Romero - speaking for our labour ancestors- and indeed speaking for a different Labour sentiment - said ‘aspire to be more not to have more'.
Now the consequence of this drift within Labour- was of course the ‘Big Society. David Cameron seized the opportunity. He reframed New Labour's ethical socialism into his idea of ‘building a pro-social society': ‘There is such a thing as society, but it's just not the same thing as the state'. Iain Duncan Smith and the Centre for Social Justice gave pro-social, anti-state politics a moral underpinning.Cameron called Britain a ‘Broken Society'. In 2008, he wrote ‘ the aim of the Conservative Party is nothing short of building the good society'. Notice the use of both the big and the good society- seen as inter-changeable.
By 2010 he was talking about ‘Our Big Society Agenda’: ‘It’s about the biggest and most dramatic redistribution of power from elites to the man and woman in the street. It's about liberation. ‘He is colonising a language- around fraternity; duty; obligation and yes belonging. It is a profoundly important challenge for Labour as our loss of language reinforces that loss of identity.
His party is unenthusiastic. Sure. His right are disgusted. Sure. The electorate and commentariat don't get it. Yet Cameron persists. His 2010 Conference speech called for a ‘Big Society Spirit': ‘it’s the spirit of activism, dynamism, people taking the initiative, working together to get things done.'
Labour has been slow to respond. We have said
-Big Society is just about dismantling the state. -It's vacuous and shallow.-Cameron's mistaken obsession.
But Labour cannot afford complacency. Labour built new schools and hospitals; a massive social investment. .An historic achievement. No-one seems very grateful. Labour in government pursued efficiency, ‘value for money', and ‘customer satisfaction' but it did not take care of the human relationships and trust that lie at the heart of public services. It used the market and the state as heartless instruments of reform. People felt excluded. They did not feel an ownership of the new grand buildings. With embarrassing speed the Conservatives detached Labour from its own achievements. The market failure of the banks was turned into a crisis of public debt and blamed on Labour.
Cameron's Big Society is a mix of social Tory activism and old fashioned volunteering. It speaks about mutualism but is stuck in market transactions. It believes in fairness but won't tackle the causes of unfairness. It wants power to the people but opposes democratic reform. It is Cameron's version of what Stuart Hall once described as New Labour's ‘double shuffle'; a sophisticated, warm political language that disguises what lies beneath; its neo-liberal wiring. Its warm and generous words obscure- quite functionally - a deeper fundamental assault on the state.
Cameron's goal is to seize the centre ground and remake it around a centre right politics. He has seized Labour's most precious asset: society and its relationships.He has left Labour looking like a technocratic, micromanaging, 'we know what's best for you' party. The coalition with the Liberal Democrats has only increased the potency of this strategy.
Labour has been dangerously slow to respond. Yet buried underneath the last few years there was other work in progress that was in direct contrast to the trajectory of much of this Labour thinking. It urged us to challenge this dominant notion of materialism and acquisition. It talked about fellowship and human relationships; it talked about dispossession and neighbourliness. It talked about England: of Tawney and William Morris; of Orwell. It talks of virtue, love, collaboration and kindness. The task was to build the ‘decent society'; grounded in the ordinary working class culture of the country.
I would urge people to read Hazel Blears 2004 pamphlet; ‘The Politics of Decency'. Second I would urge people to re-read the Compass Pamphlet ‘The Good Society'. The parallels - and the common ground- yet from different wings of the Party - are crystal clear. Hazel and Compass might appear strange bedfellows; but I believe Labour's future is to be built within these two texts.
And now things appear to be moving further. For example, in July, David Miliband reacted. He recognised that Labour lacked a creed - ‘a strong idea of a good society and a life fit for all human beings for all citizens.' In turn, Ed Miliband has pushed it into the centre of Labour politics. In his inaugural leadership speech at the 2010 Party Conference, he called on Labour to ‘inspire people with our vision of the good society'.
Taking back the Big Society from the Conservatives means building Labour's Good Society. It is about rediscovering a sentiment around Labour. Let’s think about the notion Labour's Good Society Let’s return to New Labour: at the beginning it captured the popular mood. It had a vision of the Good Society. The pluralism, the ethical socialism, the stakeholding economy, the idea of a covenant of trust and reciprocity with the people, the powerful emotional language that ignited popular hope.
It made a powerful, vote winning story. I believed in this politics, I still do.But it is no longer enough. Arguably, with the move away from stakeholding, it tended to see globalisation as essentially benign and understate at best the destructive forces of capitalism; its double movement as described by Polanyi. It developed a naive faith in markets and a fatal deference toward the City of London.
We now have to go on a return journey to rediscover our language and identity. So let’s start with a number of central propositions that lie deep within our own history- captured in the life of Aneurin Bevan himself. First, that Labour is a moral force. It emerged out of the harsh puritanism of non-conformist culture. But it broke the status quo and it began to transform the culture that had given it life. It grew out of the Mutual Improvement Societies dedicated to literature, a love of learning and the liberating power of culture. It grew out of a vast popular movement of voluntary collectivism. Bevan's politics were formed in the Tredegar Query Club, the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, the Miners Institute, the Miners Welfare Committee.
It was a movement of civility, liberty and self-education. It was dedicated to social justice, intellectual freedom and the desire for self-realisation. Not the brittle aspiration that became New Labour's signature tune but a deeper human desire to live a good life.
Second, Labour is for the common good. Its ethical intention is aimed at the good life with and for others and the creation of just institutions. Its politics of virtue is rooted in Aristotle and grows out of the shared life of friendship. The common good provides the general conditions through which each has access to their own fulfillment.
Third, Labour is for reciprocity. There is a story always quoted by Karen Armstrong in her studies of comparative religions. She refers to the way Hyam Maccoby quotes the Rabbi Hillel's Golden Rule. Some pagans came to Hillel and said that they would convert if he were able to stand on one leg and recite the whole of the Jewish scriptures in full whilst keeping his balance.. A pretty tough ask. Well, Hillel stood on one leg and simply said the following: ‘Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary.'
The rest is commentary- stripped bare this is the core of all religions- and none- as it also lies as the core of much humanism found around labour; a sense of reciprocity and obligation to others. Reciprocity is the ethical core of Labour. Reciprocity is the give and take that creates the social bonds that hold people together in a common life. And it is not exclusively religious.
Consider this written about Bevan by Jennie Lee in a letter to Michael Foot - the day after he died on the 6th July 1960. She writes thus:
‘Nye was never a hypocrite. No falsity must touch him once he is no longer able to defend his views. He was not a cold blooded rationalist. He was no calculating machine. He was a great humanist whose religion lay in loving his fellow men and trying to serve them.'
The Golden Rule: ‘Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you' reappears. Further Jennie writes:
‘He could kneel reverently in chapel, synagogue, Eastern mosque, Catholic cathedral on occasions when friends called him there for marriage or dedication or burial service. He knelt reverently in respect of a friend or a friend's faith, but never pretended to be other than he was, a humanist. Often in the last few years he talked of ‘the mystery that lies at the heart of things', nothing more definite than that.'
This is vital as we seek to rebuild Labour. In contrast to much secular European social democracy, Labour succeeded in the UK in building a workers movement-built around a common humanity beyond money or power alone- that was not divided between catholic and protestant, or between secularists and believers, but the movement itself provided the common life which reconciled these different elements.
It was genuinely plural, respectful of difference; fraternal; courteous. This open pluralist sentiment has to be rediscovered again in order to make Labour a vibrant contemporary force. Not a haven for a shrill, closed and exclusive, middle class secular metropolitan liberalism.
Fourth, Labour is for liberty and joy. The ethic of reciprocity is the basis of human freedom. We are interdependent and liberty is mutual; the freedom of one requires the freedom of all. There is no liberty for all without solidarity and democracy. There is only one force capable of countering the profit seeking of capitalism and the social damage and insecurities it causes, and that is democracy. Political democracy alone is not sufficient; it has to extend into the economic sphere.
Bevan - as we all know- used the term serenity- it is an elusive term - but is a sense of contentment. It is a notion of self realisation again traced back to Aristotle- the Polis- the City State- politics- is about establishing institutions that allow us to live a virtuous life- the search for wisdom, compassion, the cardinal virtues. Bevan was not a religious man- although close to death he did - as we have see- ponder the ‘mystery that lies at the heart of things'. He found this self realisation in walking, in learning and culture, in the pleasures of life. Where there is joy there is a life lived well
Fifth Labour is for a common wealth Labour's political economy was born out of the experience of dispossession. It seeks:
-To ensure the worker receives a fair reward for their labour.-To build up democracy in order to regulate markets, and use capital for the common good.
-A productive, wealth creating, wealth spreading economy for a common prosperity and not for the enrichment of the few.
-A system of welfare for all funded by all according to their means, that preserves the dignity of the people and that protects them against the inequities of capital and the misfortunes of life.
-A just distribution of assets such that all can live independently according to their want.I will conclude with a couple of points. Tonight I anticipated simply talking about ‘taking back the big society debate' by offering a critique of the Tory agenda. But the more I kicked it around, the more it becomes a case of firstly rehabilitating a sentiment around Labour as part of rebuilding a party and movement. In our history Labour has always responded to dispossession; to economic and social loss.
It must do so again by rediscovering a warmth and generosity; especially in England by learning from our previous generations who have all dealt with the same patterns of loss. As such, Labour's Good Society lies deep in the English struggle for popular democracy. As well as a struggle forged in Celtic Labour traditions and culture through such heroes as Hardie and Bevan. Yet it is a distinctly English crisis that Labour must now respond to - by learning from our own comparative history.
Literally, it’s a journey of self discovery; of rediscovering a virtue politics of compassion, fraternity, duty and obligation. The next few years will be difficult; we are obliged to re-anchor Labour in ordinary, mainstream culture of the country. As we have done before. Not least to counter those sinister forces who seek a politics of division. ‘To make hope possible rather than despair convincing'.
The Conservatives Big Society is founded in its history as the defender of the status quo and the property rights of the rich. They profited from the Satanic Mills.
By reclaiming the Good Society, we can again seek to build that Jerusalem. Thanks very much for having me this evening.

Michael Albert speaking in Leeds

2010-10-26T17:45:00.001+01:00

The School of Geography, University of Leeds  presents a School Seminar with…
Michael Albert
American writer, activist, author of Parecon: Life after capitalism

‘Life beyond crisis-capitalism. Towards a humane and sustainable economy.’

THURSDAY 28th of October, 4pm (followed by refreshments)
Geography Lecture Theatre
Geography East Building
University of Leeds, LS29JT

Michael Albert is an American activist, speaker, and writer. He is co-editor and co-founder of Zcommunications. He also co-founded South End Press and has written numerous books and articles. Along with Robin Hahnel he developed the economic vision called participatory economics
Participatory Economics or "parecon" is a model for a type of democratic economy proposed as an alternative to capitalism and central planning, that includes new institutions aimed to further participation, solidarity, self-management, diversity and equity. A timely intervention when other forms of economic organisation are in crisis.
Michael Albert is on tour in the UK http://www.ppsuk.org.uk/matour/

For more information about Michael Albert and his work see: http://www.zcommunications.org/topics/parecon

Thursday Soundings meeting: Leeds: The Promised Land/

2010-10-19T09:31:00.002+01:00

Leeds: The Promised Land?:
Leeds United and the migrant experience
21 October 2010, 7pm-8.30pmOld Broadcasting House

This meeting will address what sport, and especially Leeds United, means to the different communities that make up the city of Leeds. It will explore if it has fostered a sense of belonging and look at how United's troubled history influenced the speakers. The discussion will also talk about race, place and the meaning of football.

Speakers
Anthony Clavane, Sunday Mirror Chief Sports Reporter and author of The Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United. Caryl Phillips, author of The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Crossing the River (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize), A Distant Shore (winner of the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize), Dancing in the Dark (winner of the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award), and many other works of fiction and non-fiction.

Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and grew up in Leeds. Anthony Clavane was raised in a Jewish family in Leeds in the 1960s and 1970s, both became and remain Leeds United supporters.
The meeting is free. Everyone welcome.

Salon meeting Nov 15th

2010-10-19T09:10:00.000+01:00

Is Unfettered Growth Possible or Desirable?

Monday 15 November 2010 - The Carriageworks, Millennium Square, Leeds
The Millennium Room, 6:30pm (for a 6:45pm start) to 8:15pm.

Economics writer Daniel Ben-Ami and UK Green Party founder-member Clive Lord will discuss the limits and desirability of economic growth.

Since the Industrial Revolution, economic growth has generally been seen as good and desirable. However, over the last forty years, the growth of the economy and the spread of prosperity have increasingly been seen as problematic rather than positive. While some are still willing to defend economic growth, highlighting the gains it has brought to humanity in terms of material wealth, technological progress, increased life expectancy and personal consumption, others see economic growth as encouraging greed, damaging the environment, causing unhappiness and widening social inequalities.

So, does economic growth offer solutions to the problems of the world, or is it one of them? Are their limits to growth, whether natural, social, economic or moral, or are possibilities limitless? Isn’t the pursuit of happiness more important than the acquisition of wealth? And as the world copes with the latest recession, is continuous economic growth even possible?

Whether you’re pro-growth or a growth-sceptic, come and join what promises to be a lively debate.

Speakers

Daniel Ben-Ami is a London-based journalist and author specialising in economics and finance. He is a regular contributor to Spiked-Online, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph and The Sunday Times. He is the author of Cowardly Capitalism: The myth of the global financial casino (2001), which was recommended by the Baker Library of Harvard Business school was awarded the, and his latest book Ferraris For All: In defence of economic progress (2010), described as ‘a rejoinder to the growth sceptics’, which will be available on the night.

Clive Lord was a founder member of PEOPLE, later the Ecology Party and, since 1973, the UK Green Party. Clive is a retired probation officer, and has stood for the Green Party in every General Election since 1974, every local election since 1980, and European elections in 1984, 1989 and 1994. He’s an occasional writer for the Green Party website and is also the author of A Citizen’s Income: A Foundation for a Sustainable World (Jon Carpenter, 2003), which amongst other things, looks at the dynamics driving globalisation and explains why the major players can never recognise when to stop, or know how to.
Readings

Hitting back at growth sceptics, by Andrew Milligan, FundStrategy, 23 August 2010
Growth sceptics selling the economy short, by Daniel Ben-Ami, The Australian, 26 July 2010
Why more is really more, by Sean Collins, Spiked Review of Books, Issue, No.35, June 2010
Growth Isn’t Possible: Why we need a new economic direction, New Economics Foundation, January 2010
Bjorn Lomborg – Hero or Villain? by Clive Lord, Green Party website

John Lanchester on spending cuts

2010-10-03T13:22:00.000+01:00

Spending cuts: The knives are out
In just over two weeks, George Osborne will reveal up to £82bn worth of public spending cuts. Think the Thatcher years were bad? You ain't seen nothing yet, says John Lanchester
John Lanchester The Guardian, Saturday 2 October 2010

If British politics were a musical, that musical would be called Cuts. It would consist of three acts. The theme of Act One was denial. This was the run-up to the election and then the election itself. Alistair Darling's final budget, which set out the goal of halving the deficit by 2014, made it clear that large-scale cuts were coming to the public sector – indeed, cuts of a magnitude this country had never seen. But it gave no detail about what those cuts were going to be, and this blanket denial carried on through the general election, where all three parties seemed to be locked in a tacit agreement not to give any specifics about what they might actually do in office on this, the most important single issue facing the next government. The theme of Act Two was the softening up. Often, in horror films, the single most effective device for building a sense of scariness is the soundtrack: the clanking of chains, the groaning of off-stage ghouls, the unmistakable sound of a cannibal rustic firing up a chainsaw. Act Two was like that, with the coalition making all sorts of dire not-quite-threats about what's going to hit the public sector in the next few years. Public sector workers were invited to wee themselves in fear.

And now, in just over two weeks' time, on 20 October, George Osborne is going to stand up in the House of Commons and announce the results of the comprehensive spending review. That will be Act Three: reality. This is the point at which the cuts stop being a topic of mood music and speculation, and become an economic reality – the dominant economic reality for at least one parliament. There will, I suspect, be a profound shift in mood. I was in Ireland in the summer, talking about the credit crunch at the Galway Festival, and as I spoke I could sense that there was an odd atmosphere in the room. The vibe was different from that in the UK. When it came time for questions, the reason for that became clear: people in Ireland are furious. The mood in that room was dark, and every single question turned on the issue of blame – who to blame, and how much. Ireland is deep into the third act of its own version of Cuts, and the realities have included 20% pay cuts for the entire public sector. The lead story in the newspapers that day concerned the epidemic of recession-related suicides. I don't know if our third act will take us to the same place, but it will certainly take us in the same direction.

Given this, the first and simplest question people ask is whether any of this is necessary. The short answer, from pretty much every economically literate person in the world, is yes. In the years building up to the crash, the government had accumulated a structural deficit, in other words a permanent gap, every year, between the money it was raising in tax and the money it was spending. (A word about the distinction between deficit and debt. The best description of a deficit is the one given by Dickens's character Mr Micawber: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." When your annual income is less than your expenditure, you have an annual deficit. Some commentators on the right have argued that the word deficit should be replaced by the more politically charged word "overspend". In Micawber's example, the deficit is sixpence; in the case of the UK, it is £159.2bn – but the principle is the same. As for the debt, it's nothing more than the sum total of all the deficits accumulated over time.) The structural gap was going to have to be fixed at some point. It was as if the government had gradually and steadily dug a hole that would one day, for sure, need filling. The ideal thing would have been for the government to allow the economy to grow without taking a bigger proportion of it, so the proportion of public spending would gradually, and as it were naturally, shrink. Instead, what happened was the credit crunch, causing a brutal contraction in the economy of 6.9%, the worst and longest decline since the great crash of the 1930s. In other words, having slowly dug itself down to the bottom of a hole, the entire economy then fell into a crevasse.

The upshot of that is that the government's finances did the splits: the tax take collapsed just as welfare spending shot upwards. This meant that instead of a gradual rebalancing, the government is having to institute a difficult process of cutting to restore the public finances. In the shorter term, however, the people who had to be placated were the international debt markets. If a government needs to borrow £150bn to meet this year's bills – which our government does – then it has to look like the kind of government that is going to take the repayment of its debts and the value of its currency super-seriously. If it doesn't, then lenders will be reluctant to lend to it and will express their reluctance in the traditional market manner by charging it more to borrow money. That can easily lead to a kind of death spiral, in which the government is borrowing more and more to pay back money it has expensively borrowed. It is to avoid this spiral that all the parties were talking the language of cuts – so far, it has to be said, successfully, since the government's cost of borrowing has not gone up. (We'll never know if that would have been the same in the event of a Labour victory.)

The necessity for at least some cuts is increased by the fact that the costs of administering the welfare state, especially health and pensions, are set to rise extremely sharply in the decades ahead. We are getting older: the average age of Britons is 39.9, the highest it has ever been, and it is set to rise. When Beveridge brought in the state pension, kicking in for men at the age of 65, the male life expectancy was 64. In other words, the average man died before he could claim any state pension at all. Now his life expectancy at birth is 77.4, and his life expectancy at retirement age is 82.4. That's fantastic, an achievement this country should be very proud of, but when it comes to planning our welfare state, it does wreak havoc with the numbers. This is a question that transcends party politics, and needs addressing.

The new coalition government's way of dealing with this was initially surprising. They basically said, "Aaarggh! You're all going to die!" They announced cuts of 25% in all "unprotected" departments – ie all departments other than health and overseas aid. Unprotected departments were told to prepare cuts all the way up to a "worst-case" level of 40%. What does that mean? Well, as Rowena Crawford of the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out some time ago, "For the ministry of defence, an 18% cut means something on the scale of no longer employing the army." No spending at all on roads, and closing the majority of courts – that's the kind of thing we were being asked to envisage. Cuts at these levels are unprecedented and far, far exceed anything Margaret Thatcher achieved. Labour had already announced £52bn of cuts to come by 2013-14; the new coalition added another £30bn on top. No government has ever achieved anything like that reduction in public spending. To put it in perspective, since 1950 there have been only two periods during which public spending was cut for two years in a row. The coalition is proposing to cut it for six consecutive years. This, it seems to me, beggars belief, and I at first struggled to understand why any government would so publicly set out to do something so plainly impossible. The stated target of shrinking the state below 40% of GDP is yet another point on which the coalition is planning to go far beyond the Thatcher government. Why? Who voted for that?

The explanation, I think, is that the coalition – which, in practice, in this instance, means the Tory party – is attempting to create what political wonks call an "inflection point". They want to make a fundamental change of direction in British politics. There have been two of these in the last decades, the first of them Thatcher's election in 1979 and the second Tony Blair's in 1997. The election of 2010 wasn't an inflection point, not least because it didn't produce a majority government. So the Tories put into effect what was obviously a plan to create their own inflection point through Osborne's emergency budget. The idea, I think, is to change the British political ecology. Public sector workers, in particular, are supposed to be scared into malleability. The idea is that instead of being grumpy that some of them have lost their jobs, everybody who is still in work will instead be grateful, relieved and suitably cowed. It will be a change in direction for the British state, and will give a clear way forward for the Conservative party as it returns to its traditional identity as the party of the smaller state. "If they can't do it now," a Tory friend told me, "when can they do it?" In other words, there will never be a more opportune moment for the party to set out its stall to cut spending. Hence the tearing-off-the-arm eagerness to seize the opportunity.

So the politics of this makes a depressing kind of sense, from a rightwing perspective. What is much less clear is whether the economics of the cutting makes as much sense. Cuts were coming whoever won the election, and the £52bn of Labour cuts would have been agonisingly painful. During the contest to be leader of the Labour party, Ed Balls became the first senior Labour figure to say that he thought the cuts implicit in Labour's plans went too far – and that is certainly a valid point of view. Balls' argument is that the cuts make it harder for the economy to begin growing its way out of recession. The coalition's extra cuts seem to raise that possibility to dangerously high levels. Neutral observers do agree that some cuts are needed, but they increasingly don't agree about the level of them. Bear in mind that at the June meeting in Canada of the G20 – that's the world's 20 biggest economies – a general commitment was made to halve all deficits by 2013, and to "stabilise" debt by 2016. That means that every government in the world is simultaneously trying to tighten their belts. So where is the demand going to come from to restart growth in these big economies? If everyone is cutting up their credit cards, where will growth come from? It's supposed to be a "production-led" recovery, not like the consumer-led boom we've just lived through. Fair enough, as an idea, but production-led recoveries still need someone to buy the stuff you produce. In this vision of a global war on debt and deficit, it's not clear who the prospective buyers are.

Some observers have said that the prospect of a global austerity drive reminds them of the mistakes that turned the great crash of 1929 into the Great Depression of the 1930s. Governments, instead of stimulating their economies with spending designed to create employment – the policies advocated by Keynes – instead tried to belt-tighten their way out of trouble by behaving as if they were households with a cash flow problem. But the analogy between household and whole economies is imperfect, as subsequent events clearly showed. A coordinated global slowdown in government spending might turn out to be exactly the last thing we all need.

Put all this together, and the unfortunate fact is becoming unmissably clear: the consequences of the credit crunch are going to fall far more heavily on the innocent than on the guilty. A lot of people who did nothing wrong and who are entirely blameless in the credit crunch are going to lose their jobs. The current estimate for public sector job losses to come is 600,000, in addition to the 750,000 (mainly) private sector workers who have lost their jobs already. "Tell us what we did wrong" – I heard the wife of a laid-off firefighter asking that question, and not getting an answer. She is not going to be the last person to ask it. Research is already showing that the people disproportionately targeted by the cuts will be the poor, especially poor women. As this fact becomes not an idea but a reality – as we move into Act Three – it seems highly likely that the basic unfairness of this is going to become more and more evident, and more and more rankling. For the bankers, business is more or less back to usual; in fact, for the remaining banks, business is as good as it has ever been. Since the public sees the bankers as being the people responsible for the credit crunch, and since the credit crunch caused the recession that in turn caused the cuts, there is a brutal contrast here: the guilty parties doing better than ever, the innocent taking all the pain. Again: did anyone vote for that? Does anyone think it is the kind of society we want to be?

A strongly negative trend in British life over the last 30 years, and one that unfortunately continued during Labour's tenure in office, was the increasingly sharp division between winners and losers. That tendency is set to become even more marked. We are heading back to the bitterly divided politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, except with our newly sky-rocketed levels of inequality. So 20 October is going to be a hugely important day for Britain. I have in the past predicted anger, as the consequences of the recession for public spending become clear; I think the process of expressing that anger has barely begun. What that will do to the coalition is anybody's guess. As anyone in showbusiness will tell you, many a promising production has collapsed horribly in the third act.

Crisis of Social Democracy

2010-09-28T10:52:00.003+01:00

With the leadership race settled in Ed Miliband's favour there is going to be debate about the future of social democratic politics. A contribution from just before the Labour party conference has been made by political pollster and commentator Peter Kellner at Demos on 'The Crisis of Social Democracy' out-of-the way, which reads to me like a continuation of the revisionist case, but might be labelled Blairite.

An SWP critique is made by Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb, Kellner's Blairite intervention in the Labour leadership race, who certainly does consider it Blairite.

Britain's Broken Economy

2010-09-22T15:57:00.004+01:00

Soundings (along with The Guardian) has produced a free ebook: Britain's broken economy - and how to mend it under the auspices of The New Political Economy Network.

There is no cast-iron law that states that crises of capitalism end in victories for the left - and certainly not in Britain. And yet this is not a Conservative moment - it is clear that the Coalition has no viable plan for rebuilding the economy. The problem is that Labour does not have one either. The task for Labour now is to come up with a vision of a moral economy based on decent jobs, good homes, stable pensions and fair finance. This e-book is the story of how Labour might begin to do this.

Foreword by Larry Elliott
Afterword by Jon Cruddas MP
The following contributed to the e-book: Aditya Chakrabortty, Tom Clark, Ismail Eturk, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Stewart Lansley, Adam Leaver, Toby Lloyd, Mick Moran, Richard Murphy, Howard Reed, Jonathan Rutherford, Duncan Weldon, Karel Williams

Neal Lawson pays tribute to Zygmunt Bauman

2010-09-22T15:36:00.003+01:00

Zygmunt Bauman was the first speaker for Leeds Taking Soundings and his ability to draw and captivate such a large audience gave us the confidence to continue the programme since then. He is someone we always want to invite back to do another talk. Neal Lawson is also on our list of people we want to invite. So here is Neal Lawson talking about Bauman from a conference in Zygmunt Bauman's honour earlier in the month. This taken from Open Democracy, a great focus for political discussion that deserves the support and attention of everyone.

Beyond bureaucracy and market
Neal Lawson, 22 September 2010
The bureaucratic state of the mid-20th century ran its useful course, and the attempt to return to a mythical nineteenth century market state failed us. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman helps us to think our way beyond both

Zygmunt Bauman's impact on me – and I think many others has been profound.

Let me be clear. I am not an academic, a theorist and certainly not a sociologist. I can’t do his prolific output of work – but what I want to do is tell you why it matters to me – why this Octogenarian, polish émigré is today in 2010 relevant to the world we face and the hopes, dreams and fears we have.

I first came across the work of Zygmunt Bauman in the mid 1980s when he wrote series of highly charged essays for the New Statesmen. Then I was a very politically undeveloped undergraduate, with hair, more used to listening to and quoting Benn rather than Bauman – I understood little of what he wrote in those handful of essays but got a sense not just of great significance but excitement at the ideas they contained.

From Benn I ended up with Blair. After 18 years in exile the desire to win overcame desire to do right. I worked for Gordon Brown and for Peter Mandelson in the heart of the New Labour machine. Ends were busy shaping means. In winning becoming everything Labour was losing touch with what it wanted to win for. But something gnawed away. I could shed fully neither Benn nor those echoes of Bauman. Naively I thought New Labour was being pragmatic– that idealism was being tempered by reality rather than just being junked. That the attempt to reconnect with the British electorate was so a new social democratic moment could eventually be forged. I was wrong. Blair said ‘we have won as New Labour, we will govern as New Labour’. In the confidence of greater maturity I would know that we won as not being the hated Conservative government. Much was still possible. But by then it was too late. New had been used to brand the Party as Not Labour.

Shortly after Labours victory in 1998 I wrote an essay, which also happened to appear in the New Statesman, asking the question whether New Labour was really part of the social democratic project. It was billed as New Labour’s first revolt. I have been revolting ever since.
In the late 1990s I restlessly and hesitantly moved further from New Labour as the wild goose chase of the third way became more apparent. Around 2000 two books lifted the scales from my eyes. The first was Noberto Bobbios Left and Right which reacquainted me with the basic but fundamental concept of equality and the second and the one that had the more profound effect on me was Work, Consumerism and the New Poor by Zygmunt.

In reading it I not only felt I understood the world much more clearly, I felt a sense of anger that my party was playing a part, as we will see, in the demonization of the very people it claimed to represent. And from that anger came a sense of determination to do something about it.
Now they say never meet your heroes. I think its good advice. They often don’t match up to unrealistic expectations. But sometimes possibilities are too tantalising to miss out on. I met my hero once. A mutual friend fixed for me to go round and have afternoon tea with Zygmunt. It of course turned out to be afternoon Vodka. I think I just sat and stared as this Yoda like figure dispensed wisdom and gentle guidance.

He struck me then, as he does in every interview I have read before and since, as a man of immense charm, warmth, dignity and above all humanity. He writes generously for a massive range of publications and outlets. He does so because he cares. It feels like he is in a race to both download his prodigal knowledge and insights but also to keep up with events. He still has his finger on the pulse of modern consumer and celebrity culture – sighting the likes of X Factor in his critique of actually existing capitalism.

But this desire to stay in touch, to stay relevant is what gives him his vitality. So he rewrites because he is asked and sought out, because he is popular on campuses around the globe, because he offers a unique take on our world – a take the hovers all the time between those twin pillars of optimism and pessimism, hope and despair.

It is these twin pillars I want to say something about. Let's start with the dark side – the pessimism.

Zygmunt pulls no punches in telling it how it is. He describes a bleak world of wasted lives. The vicious cycle – of less collective belief and influence, leading to greater withdrawal from the social scene. The more we withdraw, the weaker our bonds become. The more we individualise the tighter the knot gets. In his description of the shift from the world defined by producers to a world defined by consumption he reveals a landscape of quicksand, with few friends but tragically even fewer enemies. The rich are not to be hated and pulled down but fated and held a loft for their consumer success.

Bauman uses the consistency of quicksand a lot. For it is one of the best images of the liquid modern world his work heralds. It is the world between the solid offering of modernity in the shape of one job, one community, an all-powerful state and a proud and independent nation. Between that and the vagaries and relativism of a post-modern world. In this liquid modernity things are in constant flux, forming new shapes and then morphing. Nations, economies, states and people are constantly shape-shifters.

In his journey from analysing communism in Poland to analysing consumerism in the West the game does not change – it is about social control and the systematic reproduction of authority and privilege. Socialisation by secret police turns into socialisation by seduction. You can fight the secret police but how on earth do you fight seduction – why would you even want to? As capitalism shifts from the exploitation of the physical virgin territory of empire to the emotional virgin territory of our minds – the space for profit accumulation expands exponentially. When I read Zygmunt I am reminded again and again of the Worchasky brothers film The Matrix, where people are made to believe they live a consumer reality but their bodies are just batteries for a machine.

There are two goals of this world in which we are first and last consumers – the first is our unhappiness – if we are unhappy then we will seek comfort from the only place we can – the market – literally in retail therapy.

And second – the eradication of alternatives. There is only one way to be – the turbo consumer – drilled and disciplined by the urgent desire not to fall off the treadmill – to stay normal in the never ending race to form ever new identities. To belong, to be different, to be unique, to be the same. And when we fail – when we fall short – we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Consequently Bauman talks about a society under siege for three very good reasons. First, because power has been divorced from politics and now resides, as we witness every day, in the realm of business – whether that is financialised capitalism, big oil or the media. Second, because of the crisis of agency and the decline of the salience of the working class, and therefore of the labour movement. And, third, because of the secession of power away from the nation state.
New Labour was born of this moment and this profound sense of pessimism and crisis for the left. Why go on fighting a system that feels not just unbeatable, but can be painted as inevitable and even desirable. If you can't beat them – then join them.

In Tony Giddens New Labour found a theoretical rational to do what it wanted most – to win – through a post-class sociology – made feasible in their eyes through the new weightless economy. In the merry world of middle England we could all be winners – except those who, by their own acts, failed to work hard and play by the rules. The shift to a world beyond left and right, beyond struggle was complete.

But for or all the happy talk of a New Britain – this was the darkest politics possible – for in its version of Thatcherism with a human face it locked into our psyche the notion of TINA – that there is no alternative.

So ironically – Zygmunt was ignored – despite some attempts to introduce his ideas into Downing Street because he offered no short-term nourishment for the New Labour project – his was no happy meal. He was deemed to be too bleak for a project that itself offered little more than the modernisation of neo-liberalism.

How could it be otherwise? New Labour failed to offer any genuine and meaningful sense of alternative because in their embrace of the market as the singular solution to all our ills they lost sight of one critical factor – our humanity. And here we turn to the optimism of Zygmunts work.
New Labour forgot, as I had painfully learnt, that means cannot be separated from ends. So the market could not be used for progressive ends. Economic efficiency is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for social justice. Markets are for profit – not for people. And they forgot or ignored that a project that isn’t founded on the rock of humanity – of an ability to look into the eyes of others and see yourself and know yourself – not as competitors but as co-operators - was doomed to much greater darkness than Zygmunt Bauman could ever conjure up.

Zygmunt offers hope – for two reasons. First because he describes how strong the chains are that keep us in place – and therefore informs us how big and strong our bolt cutters need to be. And second he provides the prospect of much more meaningful freedom than we find as pressurised shoppers on the high street. He identifies freedom based on the sense of autonomy – the ability to shape our lives and our society as we see fit because and only because we do it with others.

Zygmunt forces us think about the notion of utopia – the place that is not yet – but through striving for it – we find our purpose. To be a realist – we must first be visionaries – to be pragmatists we must know what we are being pragmatic about.

He is criticised for not offering much of a route map. Well we can’t do it all. But there are two practical concepts I think that are important which Zygmunt returns to again and again.
The first is the idea of the social state, which we can counterpoise to the failures and limitations of the post-war bureaucratic state and its successor: the market state. The social and democratic state is not just about the provision of welfare but the creation of an accountable and responsive realm in which we can be citizens and not solely consumers.

The second hard policy he espouses is that of a citizens’ income or a basic income. This is a payment made to everyone in society as the means to both establish the resources necessary to live a free life and to enshrine our sense of shared citizenship. It is a truly transformative idea.
In 2005 Zygmunt delivered three lectures in London – the Miliband lectures in the presence of David and Ed. It was not the first time they met, Ralph would bring young David and an even younger Ed round to the house for political discussions in Leeds. Now someone called Miliband will be the next leader of the Labour party. Will either brother will have the wisdom to dig deep to build high and start reading the work of Zygmunt Bauman. If they do they will start to learn to deal with the causes of lives that are anxious, insecure and exhausting – and not just the symptoms. If they don’t then the backward march of Labour will to continue apace.

Our relationship with leaders is fraught with complexity. As Gramsci almost said – the challenge of liquid modernity is to live without illusions without becoming disillusioned.

Like rivers cascading down the side of a mountain, leaders take the path of least resistance. The job at hand is to build the dams of ideas and the aqueducts of a movement to channel them in the direction which will deliver greater equality, substantiality and democracy.

That is what Zygmunt has helped inspire me to do.
I read out this quote to 1,500 activists and thinkers who met in London last June at the Compass annual conference. Compass is an organisation of over 40,000 members and supporters – people from Labour, the Greens, Liberals, from unions and pressure groups concerned about the triple crisis of inequality, sustainability and democracy.
I said this from him:
“Like the phoenix socialism is reborn, from every pile of ashes left day in day out by burnt out dreams and charred hopes. It will keep on being resurrected as long as the dreams are burnt and the hopes charred, as long as human life remains short of the dignity it deserves and the nobility it would be able, given a chance to muster”

The left is in a big hole and has been for some time. The left is those people and their institutions that believe in humanity, that trust the people, that think we were born different but equal, that know the answers to our problems will come from democracy and not markets – people who know that we live just a pale shadow of what we can be.

This is the challenge that Zygmunt sets us. To find our way out of the darkness and into the light.

Someone once said to me that you should never have a job you want to retire from – Zygmunt Bauman seems to have that job. Or rather and better still he has used his working life to build a platform for the serious business of the rest of his life. Since his official retirement his output has been an incredible average of around two books a year, as well as many articles, lectures and interviews.

I feel remarkably ambivalent about our times – both hopeful and realistic. Like monks in the monastery in the dark ages – are we simply but crucially keeping the flames alive – stopping the books for being burnt – waiting for the enlightenment? Or is the triple crisis of inequality, sustainability and democracy the moment for transformative advance? We simply don’t know. We make history – but not in conditions of our own choosing.

We do what we can. Zygmunt has done more than most. We stand on the shoulders of giants – my giant – is Zygmunt Bauman. Long may he write and inspire me and thousands of others. Never may he retire.

Neal Lawson is Chair of Compass and author of All Consuming (Penguin, 2009) a book dedicated to the work of Zygmunt Bauman. This is an edited version of the opening plenary speech given on the 6th of September at Leeds University to mark the opening of the new Bauman Institute.

Nina Power 21st Century Feminism

2010-09-21T14:27:00.000+01:00

Nina Power speaking Sept 22nd
21st Century Feminism
Nina Power
6.00 – 8.00 pm, September 22nd 2010
Old Broadcasting House, 148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds Metropolitan University

Nina Power is the author of One-Dimensional Woman, a key work in the recent flowering of feminist argument. Here’s part of the book’s blurb:“Did the desires of twentieth-century women's liberation achieve their fulfilment in the shopper's paradise of 'naughty' self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn't seem too concerned about this coincidence.This short book is partly an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today's positive, up-beat feminists. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture that, while seemingly far-fetched in the current ideological climate, may provide more serious material for future feminism.”

This discussion will address the possibilities of a new feminism that can transform the entire left.

Soundings 45

2010-09-14T15:37:00.003+01:00

Soundings 45 is now out
Although the cuts are coming, there has been an eerie political calm and sense of inevitability about all that is in store for us (carefully nurtured by the Coalition and their allies in the media). But the storm will break - people are going to start seriously suffering and we need to ensure that there is a political battle against the assault planned by the government. Can Labour lead this battle?

Contributors in this issue chart some of the debates, look at the prospects for Labour revival, discuss the financial crisis and outline the problems in carbon trading - a classic example of the failure of market solutions. We also carry an extended discussion on the importance of Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism; a defence of ethical socialism and the legacy of William Morris; a meditation on the problems faced by the generation that grew up with New Labour; and a thought-provoking article by Vron Ware about the ways in which the lives and deaths of individual soldiers have become ever more central to debates about Britain's wars.

CONTENTS
The political struggle ahead Doreen Massey
Labour in a time of coalition Sally Davison, Stuart Hall, Michael Rustin, Jonathan Rutherford
What comes after New Labour? Gerry Hassan
The SNP and the 'new politics' Richard Thompson
Rebuilding social democracy George Irvin
Greek myths Duncan Weldon
Money manager capitalism and the global financial crisis L. Randall Wray
Carbon trading: how it works and why it fails Oscar Reyes and Tamra Gilbertson
Why I am a socialist Ruth Levitas
Smile till it hurts Laurie Penny
Lives on the line Vron Ware

Take Back Parliament Leeds

2010-09-13T11:28:00.000+01:00

Take Back Parliament Leeds- Official Campaign launch

Tuesday September 28th – 7pm at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, Lower Briggate

Speakers include
Nader Fekri- Calderdale Councillor & JP
Vicky Seddon- Unlock Democracy Sheffield Branch
Chris Lovell- Chair of Leeds Liberal Youth

On the night people will get the chance to discuss their own ideas for taking the campaign forward. In particular I think it would be useful to have small sub groups focused on a particular aspect of campaigning.

Media/ Publicity/ Fundraising
Petitions/ writing to elected representatives
Students/ Youth
Liasion with other organizations- community groups/ unions etc
Group Development- Forming branches in other towns

News from Leeds Salon

2010-09-06T09:54:00.002+01:00

The Myth of Racist Kids
Monday 11 October 2010
Leeds Civic Hall (off Millennium Square)
Committee Rooms 6 & 7
6:45pm (for a 7pm start) to 8:30pm.

Leeds Salon invites film maker and anti-racism campaigner Adrian Hart to discuss his book The Myth of Racist Kids: Anti-racist policy and the regulation of school life (Manifesto Club 2009).

Many of the ‘racist incidents’ reported by schools involve very young children and include cases of name-calling in the playground and arguments between friends. A growing ‘race relations industry’ has moved into the daily life of schools and even nurseries, with the aim of combating prejudice in children as young as three.

In The Myth of Racist Kids Adrian Hart argues that well-meaning policies have led to a growing regulation of children’s peer relationships, and the undermining of teachers’ ability to deal with everyday classroom incidents. The growing myth of racist kids can actually create ethnic tensions, stifling the trend towards increasing openness and intermixing.

Others warn against complacency, arguing that society is still racist and that education is the best means of combating racist and sexist stereotypes. Rather than ignoring or minimising playground incidents, we should be vigilant and stamp racism out while individuals are still young and more likely to change their attitudes. Besides, adults have always taught children how to behave and what language is and isn’t acceptable. Isn’t that an important part of a child’s education?

So are our schools institutionally racist or confidently multicultural? Should playground name-calling be taken seriously and eliminated, or is it an inevitable and potentially formative part of childhood? Do anti-racist policies just benefit the so-called ‘anti-racism industry’ or do they protect ethnic minorities from prejudice? Should schools and teachers use their own judgement in discriminating between silly name-calling and actual racism, or should they follow official policy to the letter and report every incident, regardless of context?

Adrian Hart is an award winning community film-maker and founder of Coyote Films. He is a lecturer to special needs students, an author and an anti-racism campaigner. Adrian Hart's film work includes: 'Safe' (winner LWTs Whose London? 2002), Moving Here' (awarded beacon status 2006) and 'Only Human' (2006 broadcast on Teachers TV in 2009). Adrian is also a member of The Brighton Salon. Visit his website here.

Readings & Reviews
Runnymede Trust Consultation Response, 4 March 2010
Spiked Review of Books, Helene Guldberg, February 2010
Culture Wars, Sean Bell, Culture Wars, 17 November 2009
Daily Telegraph, Martin Beckford, 29 October 2009
Daily Telegraph, Josie Appleton, 29 October 2009

This is a satellite event leading up to the Institute of Ideas’ annual festival of debate, the Battle of Ideas 2010, being held in London on Saturday 30 & Sunday 31 October.

This is a free event, but a voluntary contribution towards costs will be asked for on the night. To let us know you’re coming please reply to this e-mail, or contact us or join our mailing list at: http://leedssalon.org.uk/index.php?page=contact, and join our group on Facebook.

Advertisement
The West Yorkshire Branch of the British Science Association has put together an evening centred around William Astbury’s influence in medical science. Talks will feature Professor Sheena Radford and Bruce Turnbull, and there will be exciting demonstrations and a chance to chat to the presenters and other researchers from Leeds University over wine and cheese.
Thursday 16 September, Thackray Museum, Leeds. For more information and to purchase tickets click here.

Forthcoming events at Leeds Salon
Monday 15 November: Ferraris for All: Is Unfettered Growth Possible or Desirable? – Journalist and economics writer Daniel Ben-Ami and Green Party founder-member Clive Lord will discuss the limits and desirability of economic growth.

Monday 13 December: The ‘Two Cultures’ Debate – In a famous lecture delivered over half a century ago, CP Snow raised concerns about the increasing alienation of humanist intellectuals from science. Professor Ray Tallis will argue that this problem is more complex than Snow thought and addressing it may be even more challenging than he imagined.

Leeds Salon is a public debating forum which promotes lively and open debate around contemporary political, cultural and scientific issues. Visit our new website to find out about events, the organisers and writings from Leeds Salon attendees. Also see Is Leeds a City of Debate…? by Leeds Salon co-founder Paul Thomas on the Leeds-based online magazine Culture Vulture, and join in the online discussion.

Leeds Salon is also joined with the online journal Freedom in a Puritan Age to provide an outlet for writing and continued discussion. FIPA is a project in free enquiry that aims to identify countervailing currents in progressive thought within our culture and provide alternative viewpoints on the main issues of our day. It invites submissions of articles, essays, and reviews. Send your work (or proposal) to editors@freedominapuritanage.co.uk.

Michele Ledda & Paul Thomas
Leeds Salon

Nina Power speaking Sept 22nd

2010-09-02T14:34:00.000+01:00

21st Century Feminism
Nina Power
6.00 – 8.00 pm, September 22nd 2010
Old Broadcasting House, 148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds Metropolitan University
Nina Power is the author of One-Dimensional Woman, a key work in the recent flowering of feminist argument. Here’s part of the book’s blurb:
“Did the desires of twentieth-century women's liberation achieve their fulfilment in the shopper's paradise of 'naughty' self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn't seem too concerned about this coincidence.This short book is partly an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today's positive, up-beat feminists. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture that, while seemingly far-fetched in the current ideological climate, may provide more serious material for future feminism.”

This discussion will address the possibilities of a new feminism that can transform the entire left.

Time to organise resistance is now

2010-08-05T10:50:00.002+01:00

The time to organise resistance is now
We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight
Tony Benn and 73 others
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 August 2010 15.32 BST

It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government's budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services.

The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers' profligacy.
The £11bn welfare cuts, rise in VAT to 20%, and 25% reductions across government departments target the most vulnerable – disabled people, single parents, those on housing benefit, black and other ethnic minority communities, students, migrant workers, LGBT people and pensioners.

Women are expected to bear 75% of the burden. The poorest will be hit six times harder than the richest. Internal Treasury documents estimate 1.3 million job losses in public and private sectors.

We reject this malicious vandalism and resolve to campaign for a radical alternative, with the level of determination shown by trade unionists and social movements in Greece and other European countries.

This government of millionaires says "we're all in it together" and "there is no alternative". But, for the wealthy, corporation tax is being cut, the bank levy is a pittance, and top salaries and bonuses have already been restored to pre-crash levels.

An alternative budget would place the banks under democratic control, and raise revenue by increasing tax for the rich, plugging tax loopholes, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, abolishing the nuclear "deterrent" by cancelling the Trident replacement.

An alternative strategy could use these resources to: support welfare; develop homes, schools, and hospitals; and foster a green approach to public spending – investing in renewable energy and public transport, thereby creating a million jobs.

We commit ourselves to:
• Oppose cuts and privatisation in our workplaces, community and welfare services.
• Fight rising unemployment and support organisations of unemployed people.
• Develop and support an alternative programme for economic and social recovery.
• Oppose all proposals to "solve" the crisis through racism and other forms of scapegoating.
• Liaise closely with similar opposition movements in other countries.
• Organise information, meetings, conferences, marches and demonstrations.
• Support the development of a national co-ordinating coalition of resistance.

We urge those who support this statement to attend the Organising Conference on 27 November 2010 (10am-5pm), at Camden Centre, Town Hall, London, WC1H 9JE.
Signed:
Tony Benn
Caroline Lucas MP
John McDonnell MP
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Mark Serwotka, general secretary PCS
Bob Crow, general secretary RMT
Jeremy Dear, general secretary NUJ
Michelle Stanistreet, deputy general secretary, NUJ
Frank Cooper, president of the National Pensioners Convention
Dot Gibson, general secretary of the National Pensioners Convention
Ken Loach
John Pilger
John Hendy QC
Mark Steel
Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary NUT
Cllr Salma Yaqoob
Lee Jasper, joint co-ordinator of Black Activists Rise Against Cuts (Barac)
Zita Holbourne, joint co-ordinator of Barac campaign and PCS national executive
Ashok Kumar, VP education and welfare, LSE student union
Hilary Wainwright, Red Pepper
Francis Beckett, author
David Weaver, chair, 1990 Trust
Viv Ahmun, director Equanomics UK
Paul Mackney, former general secretary NATFHE/UCU
Clare Solomon, president ULU student union
Lindsey German, convenor, Stop the War Coalition (personal capacity)
Andrew Burgin, archivist
John Rees, Counterfire
Romayne Phoenix, Green party
Joseph Healy, secretary Green Left
Fred Leplat, Islington Unison
Jane Shallice
Neil Faulkner, archaeologist and historian
Alf Filer, Socialist Resistance
Chris Nineham
James Meadway, economist
Cherry Sewell, UCU
Alan Thornett, Socialist Resistance
Peter Hallward, professor of modern European philosophy
Matteo Mandarini, Historical Materialism editorial board
John Nicholson, secretary Convention of the Left
Michael Chessum, UCL union education and campaigns officer
Mark Curtis, writer
Nick Broomfield
Sean Rillo Raczka, chair, Birkbeck College student union, and mature students' representative, NUS national executive
Robyn Minogue, UoArts NUS officer
Prince Johnson, NUS president Institute of Education
Roy Bailey, Fuse Records
Doug Nicholls
Granville Williams
Gary Herman (CPBF national council member, in personal capacity)
Louis Hartnoll, president UoArts student union
Sarah Ruiz, former Respect councillor and community activist in Newham
Michael Gavan
Mary Pearson, National Union of Teachers, vice president Birmingham Trades Union Council
Joe Glenholmes, Unison, life member Birmingham Trades Union Council
Baljeet Ghale, NUT past president
Jane Holgate, chair of Hackney Unite and secretary of Hackney TUC
Marshajane Thompson, Labour Representation Committee NC
Richard Kuper
Chris Baugh, PCS assistant general secretary
Trevor Phillips, campaigner
Stathis Kouvelakis, UCU, King's College London
Carole Regan
Bernard Regan
Roger Kline
Hugh Kerr, former MEP
Nina Power, senior lecturer in philosophy Roehampton University
Norman Jemmison, NATFHE past president, NPC
Kitty Fitzgerald, poet and novelist
Iain Banks, author
Arthur Smith, comedian
David Landau
Anne Orwin, actor

Feminism is not finished

2010-07-27T13:19:00.000+01:00

'Feminism is not finished'

After years of derision, feminism is finding its voice again, from grassroots protests to a flurry of books, websites and even a summer school. But will it lead to real change?
Kira Cochrane The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010

If you want to gauge the energy in the current British feminist movement, you have to speak to the young campaigners. Alex Corwin has defined herself as a feminist since she started reading avidly about women's issues a few years ago, aged 19. It made her "SO ANGRY", she had to become an activist.

Corwin joined a local grassroots group – Sheffield Fems– and since then she has taken part in campaigns that run the gamut: local, international, political, cultural. She could recently be found in a high-street newsagent, armed with Post-it notes to stick on the half-clad women in men's magazines, inscribed with the words "What if she was your daughter?" Once a month she and the group set up a stall in their local shopping centre, campaigning on issues including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and how climate change affects women worldwide. Last year the group helped organise a well-attended conference; in 2008, they ran a campaign to stop a branch of US restaurant chain Hooters (where lightly clothed women serve up the burgers) opening in Sheffield. They're also working on a Feminist Survival Guide, to answer questions including "Do you burn your bra?" and "What can I do about lads' mags?" If she could achieve one lasting change, what would it be? "A total overhaul of the way society sees women," she says.

She is exactly the type of feminist who Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune are celebrating in Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement. The book's title isn't supposed to suggest feminism ever went away – groups as disparate as Justice for Women, The Fawcett Society, Southall Black Sisters and Karma Nirvana have been working for women's rights for decades now. But when Redfern started feminist website The F Word, in 2001, she felt there was a general perception that young women weren't interested, and that the movement was therefore gasping its last. "People in the media kept saying that feminism was dead," says Redfern, "and deriding it year after year". As a young lecturer, Aune noticed the same problem in academia.she met plenty of young feminist students, "but a lot of older academic feminists didn't seem to believe it". The idea of the book, says Redfern, was to "try and present a snapshot of the movement, and bring it into the mainstream". The reader they had in mind, Aune continues, was "someone who's vaguely interested in gender issues, but hasn't had something that really makes the connections for them". Each chapter focuses on a different area of current feminist thought and action, including arguments around violence against women, equality in the home and workplace, and sexism in popular culture.

The book ends with the results of an extensive survey. Redfern and Aune aimed at feminist groups that was started in 2000. Initially they sent it to 50 organisations, but the long, complicated questionnaire was eventually passed around 80 to 100 groups. 1,265 newly committed, newly inspired feminist campaigners responded, and Aune says they could easily have tripled that number if necessary. Three-quarters of the respondents were under 35.

It's just one of many signs that we seem to be entering a new heyday for British feminism. Another is the sudden burst of British feminist publishing, after an extensive drought. Along with Redfern and Aune's book, the past 12 months has seen the publication of Ellie Levenson's The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism, Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman, Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, Sheila Rowbotham's Dreamers of a New Day, and Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Men and Women Today. There are more books in the pipeline – Caitlin Moran, the Times journalist, who won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards is apparently hard at work on a book about the future of feminism, and the young feminist writer, Laurie Penny, has her own take coming out soon. And published next month in the UK, after achieving bestseller status and causing quite a stir in the US, is Half the Sky,: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by husband and wife Pulitzer-prizewinning journalists Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which reports on the plight of women in the developing world.

Walter has been speaking at events around the country, and says the feedback has been phenomenal. Her talk at the Brighton Festival completely sold out, in quite a big venue: "I think there's a real hunger to talk about feminism". The mood is very different, she says, to 10 years ago, when she published The New Feminism, and was met with a bruising response from many female journalists. "People are ready to debate this seriously again."

Kat Banyard agrees. Earlier this year she set up social networking website, UK Feminista, where local grassroots groups can meet, debate and build strong, supportive ties. Banyard, who is in her late 20s, has been running successful annual feminist conferences for the past six years and has also decided to run a UK Feminista summer school, taking place next weekend, where activists will learn how to campaign more effectively. She has been stunned by the response. "In the first 24 hours 100 people registered," she says, "and three days on we had a couple of hundred. I've never seen anything like it. I'm used to spending six to nine months building up that kind of attendance at feminist events."

When I ask what explains this surge of interest, Banyard says that significant triggers arise almost every week. "Over the last few months, we've had the actor Danny Dyer inciting readers [of Zoo magazine] to cut their ex's face, we've had news of padded bras for seven-year-olds, we've had an absence of women on the election campaign trail, the announcement of anonymity for rape defendants. With headline after headline we're seeing a continuing need for feminism. And with each new incident, people are getting involved."

The movement is well-represented across the country. Aune says she was surprised by the huge amount of activity in Scotland, and Banyard points out that new groups include the Belfast Feminist Network, Newcastle Feminist Book Group, Fawcett Essex group, and Cardiff Feminist Network. This last group was set up by Hannah Austin earlier this year – within a week, she says, there were around 300 members.

Suswati Basu, a 22-year-old who is currently studying Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, embodies the movement's drive and excitement. She has been a feminist activist for four years now, in which time she has campaigned against student beauty pageants and been involved with the London Feminist Network's annual Reclaim the Night marches – large-scale protests against male violence, which started in the 1970s, died out in the 1990s, and were successfully revived in 2004. Basu has also taken part in protests with the activist group, Object, which many of the feminists I speak to describe as the most inspiring campaign around. Object has been challenging the sexual objectification of women since forming in 2003, and they scored their two biggest successes last year, securing changes in the laws surrounding lapdancing clubs and prostitution.

The young feminists who are spearheading this new activism clearly have enormous energy, ambition and idealism, and in many cases are doing brilliant work. But the question of where the movement goes next, of what its prime focus should be, remains to be answered.The current burst of feminist publishing is promising, but much of it repackages longstanding arguments. The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism is, as its title suggests, a lighthearted look at the topic; Reclaiming the F Word is a useful book for its expected audience - women discovering feminism for the first time - but doesn't set out to present unexpected new arguments. Dreamers of a New Day is a fascinating look at the women who were fighting for social justice in the late 19th and early 20th century, but its context is historical. Nina Power's book, One Dimensional Woman, lays claim to new ground but, at 20,000 words, is an opening gambit in a bigger battle.

There's a need for new thinking and more publishing then - as well as more focus.If, as Corwin suggests, the aim of today's activists is to completely change society, then questions remain about where to channel their energy. Should the focus be on getting more women into parliament? Getting more women out of prostitution? Does having more women at the top help all the women further down the ladder? Should activists focus on the sex industry, equal pay, violence against women, international issues – and if individuals and groups choose to tackle all of these, how much change can they achieve? If inequality between men and women is structural, a web of discrimination in which the dearth of women in politics intersects with the portrayal of women in pornography, which intersects with the tendency for women to be paid less than men, the depiction of women as obsessed with shoes, the likelihood that female plaintiffs will be disbelieved in rape cases, the attempts to undermine women's abortion rights; if the situation of women in Britain has an impact on women in France, the US, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, then which threads do we pull to make the most impact in bringing the whole web down?

"It feels as though there's so much interest," says Walter, "from so many different areas, that something positive has to happen, but whether it will, it's hard to know. "I'm heartened by the rise in activism," says Walter, "but the questions we'll all be asking ourselves over the next year are: how wide is this new wave? Will it touch people beyond the usual suspects? Will it galvanise energy more widely in the grassroots – bring in other classes, women of other backgrounds? And will it also touch women who have the power and influence to change things? I'm not saying that women aren't asking these questions. So it's not a criticism of what's going on, but it's the challenge. I feel that we're beginning to see more happening, but at the moment it's still quite focused in narrow areas. We need to see it spread".

Banyard is equally aware of the challenges. "At the moment, while feminist organising is growing and really exciting, it's quite disparate and unconnected," she says. UK Feminista is an attempt to address that issue. "For me, what's absolutely crucial," she continues, "is that we translate this excitement, this energy, into real gains for women's rights - because it's not an automatic translation. We need fundamental shifts in our culture, in our laws, in business practices. It's not a simple process. We're very much at the stage now of creating a mass base of people. What's crucial is that we then use that".

What's heartening is that feminism does seem to be reaching beyond the ivory towers of academe to a broad range of women. Redfern points out that there have recently been feminist articles in Elle and Company magazines, while Walter says she was surprised to see pieces debating the importance of feminism in The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph this year. Power says that, even just a year and a half ago, when she wrote One Dimensional Woman "the situation didn't seem remotely as optimistic, but so much has been happening, and there just seems to be a mainstream acceptance that feminism's still around, that it's not finished, it's not uncool, and it's not depressing. It suddenly has a contemporary sheen that makes it exciting, which wasn't really true in the 80s or 90s at all".

Shahida Choudhry, a 40-year-old mother, who lives in Birmingham and has worked in the domestic violence sector throughout her career, says that although a lot of her work "has been driven by feminism, it's only recently that I've started to frame it like that". In the past few years, she has been heavily involved with the Fawcett Society in Birmingham, and is also the founder of the locally based Women's Networking Hub, which brings grassroots women's organisations together with those who need their support. In January she held an event at a library in central Birmingham, "which I pulled together, on my own, in a couple of weeks". She was only expecting a handful of women "twenty at most, but three hundred turned up. It was mind blowing."

Choudry is also involved with the Million Women Rise marches – protests against violence against women – which have been taking place in London around International Women's Day for the past three years and are among the most successful of all the current feminist campaigns. An estimated 8,000 women turned out this year. "It was absolutely amazing," says Choudry, "the feeling of marching through the streets, shoulder to shoulder. It really shows that there are women who want to speak out".

UK Feminista summer school runs from 31 July to 1 August. For details, go to ukfeminista.org.uk

Hugo Radice on the Austerity Budget

2010-07-07T16:57:00.002+01:00

BRITAIN’S AUSTERITY BUDGET: A CLASS ACT
Hugo Radice 7 July 2010
The June budget

Following the inconclusive outcome of the British general election on May 6th, the ‘centrist’ Liberal Democratic Party decided to turn sharply to the right by agreeing to join the Tories in a coalition government. In the run-up to the election, the Tories had argued strongly that Britain faced the prospect of a fiscal crisis unless the government’s deficit was brought down further and faster than the outgoing Labour government intended (see The Bullet no. 345).

The new government quickly cranked up the volume over the deficit, with fresh scare stories about the risk of contagion from the Greek sovereign debt crisis and the subsequent disarray across the Eurozone. Although Labour and the left at once warned of the danger that sharp cuts would risk a new recession, the coalition insisted on pursuing their austerity agenda – and none more so than the Lib Dem ministers, who before the election had sided firmly with Labour on the issue.

The Chancellor George Osborne announced the coalition’s emergency budget to the House of Commons on June 22nd. The key elements were:
Public sector borrowing to fall from £149b in 2010-11 to £37b in 2015-16.
Three-quarters of the reduction will come from spending cuts, and only a quarter from tax rises.
‘Unprotected’ areas of public spending – all bar health and aid – will face 25% cuts.
Government capital spending (investment) to fall by 60%.
VAT raised from 17.5% to 20% from January 2011.

It rapidly became clear what the impact of these cuts would mean:
Forecast job cuts by 2015-6 of 600,000 in the public sector, with 700,000 further in the private sector; to be offset by 2m expected new private sector jobs.
While the richest 10% will lose the biggest share of their income (2%), otherwise the burden will fall most heavily on the poorest, especially due to cuts in welfare.
Postponement of many projects for renewing schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure.

The response
Among politicians, the media and professional economists two camps immediately emerged.

On the one hand, supporters of the budget argue that the government had to announce rapid reductions in the deficit, in order to allay the concerns of the financial markets. By cutting government spending more quickly, they argue, resources of money, goods and labour will be freed up sooner to feed the expected recovery in the private sector. It will also ensure that interest rates remain low, which will stimulate borrowing by businesses. Furthermore, 77% of the projected fall in the deficit will come from spending cuts, and only 23% from tax rises; this is seen as an appropriate balance, since the spending cuts will be focused on waste and red tape, and any shift towards more tax rises would directly hit private sector spending.

The coalition’s critics disagree on all these points. The threat from the bond market has been greatly exaggerated to justify a deliberate attack on the public sector. Far from freeing resources for private sector growth, the cuts will reduce household incomes and spending, making the private sector even less likely to invest and take on new staff. A return to recession could also make the deficit even worse. What is more, the impact of the budget will fall most heavily on the poor, since higher tax allowances will not offset the effect of job losses and benefit cuts.

Key issues include the state of the bond markets; the effects of the cuts; the continued problems of the banking sector; the role of the property market; and the long-term impact on workers’ living standards.

The bond market bogeymen
Despite the continuing jitters in financial markets, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis has abated somewhat. The UK’s own sovereign debt is well outside the danger zone: there has been no difficulty in finding ready buyers for newly-issued debt, and the maturity profile – that is, the average period before the various debt issues must be repaid – remains far better than those of other countries. In addition, the extent of foreign ownership of UK government bonds (around 30%) is much lower than for other large economies (e.g. 50% for the USA). But we have to look in more detail at the global picture.

First, although it may seem paradoxical, quite a few City economists (and the IMF and the OECD) now agree with the budget’s critics, arguing that the impact of simultaneous public sector cuts across Europe and elsewhere threatens to bring the global economic recovery to a halt.[1] This may well account for the worldwide slump in stock markets after the G8/G20 summit at the end of June in Toronto: the assembled leaders gave no indication of having an agreed approach, with the Obama administration apparently arguing that European deficit-cutting was too soon and too deep.

Second, too little attention is given to the global savings glut. Big non-financial businesses are awash with cash, as are the sovereign wealth funds of oil-producer states and the high-growth Asian governments, as well as the global super-rich. In the current conditions of chronic uncertainty about growth and government policies, all these types of investor are looking for safe havens, and after gold, government bonds remain the main ‘safe haven’.

The double-dip risk
The critics also argue that rapid cuts in government spending will directly lead to increases in unemployment through the loss of public sector jobs. This will increase the government deficit as taxes fall and benefit payments rise; it will also hit the recovery in consumer spending, both through lower total household income and through a resulting fall in consumer confidence. Because the private sector will be hit not only by the fall in household spending, but also by the loss of sales to the public sector, they will postpone investment plans and either cut staff numbers, or at best delay hiring or re-hiring.

The coalition argues that quicker and deeper cuts in the government’s borrowing requirement will free up resources for private sector investment, and keep the cost of borrowing low. But recent surveys of business confidence in many countries show that businesses are unwilling to start investing again because of the huge uncertainties they face in terms of demand and costs. In any case, the all-important small & medium enterprises (SMEs), which are supposed to be the backbone of the recovery, are currently paying interest rates of around 10% on bank borrowing, despite the Bank of England holding its own 0.5% rate. As long as commercial banks are under pressure to build up their reserves against future losses, they are unlikely to reduce the rates they charge to the private sector.

However, it is still possible that the double-dip will be avoided. There are two reasons for this. First, despite the very slow pace of recovery, especially in terms of employment and especially in the US, UK and the Eurozone fringes, growth of 4-5% is currently forecast for 2010 in the world economy as a whole. China, India and other ‘emerging’ economies are forecast to account for 70% of demand growth this year, and are now sufficiently large to have a real impact on demand for goods and services from Europe and North America. This may be sufficient to cancel out the depressing effects of public spending cuts, especially since the cuts are going to take some time to implement.

Second, while Keynesian and other critics argue that business confidence is vulnerable to fears of recession, they do not recognise that it is also boosted by any signs of continued recovery. Big businesses, especially transnationals whose production is diversified by country and product, have the cash reserves to respond quickly to market growth wherever it occurs.

The banking sector
The Eurozone sovereign debt crisis has brought to light the continuing fragility of many banks, especially across Europe (including the UK) and the USA. This is mainly because so many banks are holders are large amounts of government debt. The short-term response of bank regulators has been to introduce ‘stress testing’ of banks, which means examining their balance sheets to see the likely impact of events such as large-scale public debt defaults.

The longer-term response is to develop agreed rules for banking regulation across the world. This is taking much longer than originally hoped, for example at the 2008 London G20 meeting. Partly this is because of the resistance of the biggest (and therefore most powerful) banks to stricter regulation of their activities, and partly it’s because of the technical difficulties of reconciling the very different systems of regulation in different countries – even within the Eurozone countries, where the European Central Bank has to deal with 16 different national regulators.

But the real problem concerns much more fundamental issues of what we want banks to do. Most of the political centre and left held the banks responsible for the crisis right from its origins in 2007. Wanting to avoid any recurrence of the crisis, they support renewed segregation of ‘bread and butter’ banking based on deposits from and loans to households and businesses, from the ‘speculative’ activities of investment banking, referring notably to the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act in the US, which was repealed by the Clinton administration in 1999. There is considerable support for this move among international organisations and even bankers, but this is really only an issue for the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economies, and for a small number of European and Japanese banks that have followed the Wall Street / City of London model. Interestingly it is strongly opposed by the government of Canada, whose large but conservative banks avoiding getting involved in the more risky activities that brought down Lehman Brothers or Royal Bank of Scotland.

While these issues are still so far from resolution, banks everywhere face great uncertainty. Many continue to carry a lot of potentially ‘toxic’ lending in their balance sheets. They are urged on the one hand to build up their reserves of capital, but on the other hand to expand their lending to help the recovery, and to pay special levies to governments to provide funds which can be deployed to avoid future crises.

Property and profits
The continued uncertainty about both the global economic recovery, and about the reform of financial sector regulation, are sufficient reason for the volatility of global bond, stock and currency markets. They also explain the tensions between the great powers, old and new, over international coordination of responses to the crisis. In these circumstances, the most likely outcome remains a drift towards ‘business as usual’.

A major part of ‘business as usual’ in the case of Britain (and the US, Ireland and Spain) was the boom in residential property prices in the 15 years after the end of the recession of the early 1990s. By the time the crash came, house prices in Britain were way out of line with household incomes, compared with all historical experience; while the method of financing the boom (by lenders raising money through the sale of short-dated securities) was a major factor in the 2007 credit freeze that initiated the global crisis.

A little-noticed feature of the budget is that it assumes that the recovery of house prices back towards pre-crash levels will continue. This is clear from the assumption that revenues from the stamp duty payable on house transactions will over four years recover to the pre-crash level. Yet it is hard to see how this will happen, unless the economic forces behind the boom are restored. In particular, households will have to revert to debt-fuelled property speculation, and the money markets will have to restore the flow of funds into household mortgages.

A declaration of class war
First of all, with regard to the effects of spending cuts, it is hard to see how the coalition can implement their pledge to maintain ‘front line services’, since their existing commitment to level spending in some areas (particularly health) apparently means that other government departments will have to cut their spending by up to 25% (or – according to the latest leak – anything up to 40%) over the next five years. In addition, much of the supposedly dispensable ‘back room’ work is in fact absolutely necessary for the support of the front line services.

The critics argue also that the tax rises are inequitable, despite the retention of the 50% tax rate for incomes over £150,000; the VAT rise in particular is not progressive, except as a result of the fact that poor households spend a higher share of their income on zero-rated foodstuffs. Given that the impact of spending cuts, especially in benefits, will fall more heavily on poor households, the overall impact of the budget on households will favour the rich at the expense of the poor.

For Keynesian liberals and the centre-left, this makes no sense at all, because the primary need is to expand effective demand for goods and services (and thus expand employment). Poorer households are much more likely to spend their incomes, it is argued, while richer households will be concerned to reduce their debts to manageable levels.

Of course, as I have already argued, businesses will only invest and grow if they anticipate growth in demand for the goods and services they produce. But the Keynesians ignore the other key objective for employers: to reduce costs, and especially labour costs, including not only wages but also the deferred wages that provide our pensions. In the US, the average earnings of individual workers peaked in the 1970s; in Germany there has been no wage growth in the last decade. This places strong pressure on businesses in other countries to cut labour costs in order to remain competitive.

The emergency budget includes not only the prospect of pay freezes in the public sector, but also an assault on pension costs, through raising the retirement age, raising our share of pension contributions, and tying pension levels to contribution levels rather than salaries. The message is clear: regardless of economic growth, lifetime earnings for working people are set to fall in the long term, after several generations in which rising living standards were a central feature of our acceptance of the capitalist order.

Just how important this issue is has been shown by two news items in the days since the budget. First, British Airways management’s proposed deal to settle their dispute with cabin crew includes the introduction of a two-tier workforce, with new recruits on worse pay and conditions. Second, selected Tories and their business supporters have begun to talk of the need to restrict the right to strike even further than the Thatcher legislation - none of which, incidentally, was repealed by New Labour.

We are in for a long, hard struggle – that is the clear message from this budget.

Hugo Radice
h.k.radice@leeds.ac.uk
http://www.polis.leeds.ac.uk/about/staff/radice/

[to appear in The Bullet, http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/]

[1] See Martin Wolf, ‘A demand fall casts doubt on early austerity’, Financial Times 7 July 2010.

Stiglitz on the Budget: Wrong!

2010-06-28T13:04:00.001+01:00

Independent on Sunday, 27th June 2010
Osborne's first Budget? It's wrong, wrong, wrong!
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prizewinner who predicted the global crisis, delivers his verdict on the Chancellor's first Budget and tells Paul Vallely it will take the UK deeper into recession and hit millions – the poorest – badly.

George Osborne will probably not be very bothered that there is a man who thinks he got last week's emergency Budget almost entirely wrong. But he should be. Because that man is a former chief economist at the World Bank who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on why markets do not produce the outcomes which, in theory, they ought to.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, who has been described as the biggest brain in economics, is distinctly unimpressed by George Osborne's strategy. This, he predicts, will make Britain's recovery from recession longer, slower and harder than it needs to be. The rise in VAT could even tip us into a double-dip recession.

Stiglitz, who was once Bill Clinton's senior economic adviser, is now professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School. He was in the UK this week at the University of Manchester, where he chairs the Brooks World Poverty Institute, but he lifted his head from the detail of international development to scrutinise the economic strategy of the Conservative Chancellor whose Liberal Democrat partners recently reversed their judgement that massive public spending cuts now would endanger the economy and joined in the Tory slash-and-burn strategy. They were deeply wrong to do so, he believes.

It would be a mistake to ignore Stiglitz on this. He has a track record of getting his predictions right. He was one of the few economists who predicted the global financial meltdown long before it occurred.

"What happened was very much in accord with what I expected," he tells me when we meet for a coffee outside the Blackwell bookshop in the centre of the university. "The data was pretty clear about that." And the scale of the crash? "That wasn't a surprise," he adds, in a matter-of-fact manner. "The bigger the bubble, the bigger the burst.

"The thing most economists did not fully grasp was the extent to which the banks engaged in murky risk-taking activities. They were taking a risk with our money, their shareholders' money, the bond-holders' money," he says. Banks were demanding up to 40 per cent of the corporate profits, saying their innovative financing was adding value. But "all this talk about innovation was a sham" because it did not relate to any real increase in the economy's productivity, he says.

"There was a prima facie case of something screwy going on [with all the] perverse incentives that would lead them to take excessive risk. But there was no way anyone could know or believe that the banks were [conducting themselves] at that level of stupidity. I predicted that there was going to be a collapse because of the information asymmetry problems that were being created." His Nobel prize was given for exactly that – showing how markets fail because different people in them hold different levels of information.

Yet there is no hint of I-told-you-so about Stiglitz's tone as he asks the waiter for coffee. He orders decaffeinated, but suggests the British economy needs the opposite: a stiff stimulant rather than the "fiscal consolidation" which is George Osborne's economic euphemism for cuts.

Fiscal stimulus is out of fashion now. World leaders embarked on that strategy – injecting money to re-energise the economy – after the banking crash three years ago. It was widely perceived not to have worked because the money governments pumped into the banks was not passed on to ailing businesses or individuals in trouble with their mortgages.

"The problem was that, in the US, the stimulus wasn't big enough," he says. "Too much of it was in tax cuts. And when they gave money to the banks they gave it to the wrong banks and, as a result, credit has not been restored – we can expect a couple of million or more homes to be repossessed this year than last year – and the economy has not been restarted." Instead of producing a consensus that the government should have done more, it has created disillusion that the government can do anything, Stiglitz says.

The result is that, following the attacks by the financial markets on Greece and then Spain, everybody is now in a mood of retrenchment. "It's not just pre-Keynesian, it's Hooverite," he says. By which he means governments are not just refusing to stimulate, they are making cuts, as Herbert Hoover did in the US in 1929 – when he turned the Wall Street Crash into the Great Depression. "Hoover had this idea that, whenever you go into recession, deficits grow, so he decided to go for cuts – which is what the foolish financial markets that got us into this trouble in the first place now want."

It has become the new received wisdom throughout Europe. But it is the classic error made by those who confuse a household's economics with those of a national economy.

"If you have a household that can't pay its debts, you tell it to cut back on spending to free up the cash to pay the debts. But in a national economy, if you cut back on your spending, then economic activity goes down, nobody invests, the amount of tax you take goes down, the amount you pay out in unemployment benefits goes up – and you don't have enough money to pay your debts.

"The old story is still true: you cut expenditures and the economy goes down. We have lots of experiments which show this, thanks to Herbert Hoover and the IMF," he adds. The IMF imposed that mistaken policy in Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Argentina and hosts of other developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s. "So we know what will happen: economies will get weaker, investment will get stymied and it's a downward vicious spiral. How far down we don't know – it could be a Japanese malaise. Japan did an experiment just like this in 1997; just as it was recovering, it raised VAT and went into another recession."

Then why have we not learned from all that? Because politicians like George Osborne are driven by ideology; the national deficit is an excuse to shrink the state because that is what he wanted anyway. Because the financial market only cares about one thing – getting repaid. And because other European governments are panicking because of the market's wild attack on Greece and Spain, and they don't want to be next.

"But cutbacks in Germany, Britain and France will mean all of Europe will suffer. The cuts will all feed back negatively. And if everyone follows this policy, their budget deficits will get worse, so they will have to make more cuts and raise taxes more. It's a vicious downward spiral. We're now looking at a long, hard, slow recovery with the possibility of a double dip if everybody cuts back at the same time. The best scenario is long and hard ... and the worst is much worse. If any one of these countries is forced into default, the banking system is so highly leveraged that it could cause real problems. This is really risky, really scary."

So what should we be doing? "The lesson is not that you cut back spending, but that you redirect it. You cut out the war in Afghanistan. You cut a couple of hundred billion dollars of wasteful military expenditure. You cut out oil subsidies. There's a long list of things we can cut. But you increase spending in other areas, such as research and development, infrastructure, education" – areas where government can get a good return on the investment of public money. "I haven't done the calculation for Britain, but, for the US, all you need is a return on government investment of 5 to 6 per cent and the long-term deficit debt is lowered."

Taxes also need to be restructured. Osborne has increased capital gains tax for high earners from 18 to 28 per cent. "There's absolutely no reason why you couldn't tax speculative gains [from rising house or land prices] by 40 per cent. There's no social return on it and land is going to be there whether people have speculated or not. But you lower the tax on investment in things like R&D."

Stiglitz has one more practical solution to offer. Governments should set up their own banks to restart lending to businesses and save struggling homeowners from repossession. "If the banks aren't lending, let's create a new lending facility to do that job," he says. "In the US, we gave $700bn to the banks; if we had used a fraction of that to create a new bank, we could have financed all the lending that was needed."

Indeed, it could be done for far less. "Take $100bn, lever that at 10 to 1 [by attracting funds from the private sector] and that's a trillion-dollar new lending capacity – more than the real economy needs."

Such a move would help ordinary people more than all Osborne's rhetoric about being tough but fair. Stiglitz is sceptical, too, about the moral underpinning of a Budget which claims that "we are all in this together", but then hits the poorest hardest.

Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has suggested that the Chancellor's Budget will cost the poor 2.5 per cent of their income, while the rich will lose just 1 per cent. "I've not made an independent study on that point, but cuts in public services will have a disproportionate effect on the poor," Stiglitz says. Osborne's Budget "may be well-intentioned, but it takes an enormous amount of work to make sure that a package of public spending cuts of that magnitude doesn't hit the poor disproportionately".

His big fear is that overseas aid, which has been protected in this first round of cuts, will not escape a second. "Developing countries have redirected themselves towards Asia, and China in particular, in recent years, so growth in Africa will be more robust than one might have expected, given the severity of the downturn," he says.

Even so, aid remains vital to poor countries. "If aid is cut back, growth will be badly affected," he says. "China is providing aid, but its aid is all in infrastructure, whereas aid from the US and Europe is mainly in education and health – areas in which ordinary people will suffer most if there are cuts."

Joseph Stiglitz has come full circle. What the world needs now – developing and developed – is not retrenchment but greater economic stimulus. It is not a message many are in the mood to hear. But they didn't listen to him last time, either. And he turned out to be right, and they were wrong – and at what a cost to us all.

Compass Conference 2010: A New Hope

2010-06-22T14:00:00.002+01:00

A galaxy but no stars Jun 21st, 2010
WILLIAM BROWN reports from the Compass annual conference where the Labour left considered the post-election political landscape
(from ILP)

In a conference hall not so far away, the labour left gathered on June 12th for the Compass annual get together. Launching this year’s event, optimistically titled ‘A New Hope’, Compass chair Neal Lawson set off on a slightly curious note declaring ‘we’re not rebel fighters, we’re building a death star’. If that was slightly off-key, much of the rest of the conference followed, exposing a Labour left that is only slowly getting to grips with the new politics of opposition.
Of course, Compass by its nature is a very broad organisation and its conferences are interesting partly because of this, a large (1,000 people), comradely forum for the exchange of quite divergent views. In fact, over time, two ideas seemed to form a core of opinion at the conference: that proportional representation is essential for the future of left politics and that Labour should be a ‘pluralist, not tribalist’ party.

The first of these is a long standing one on the left and has been central to the efforts of those – from Blair and Ashdown leftwards – to fashion a realignment of politics around the centre left. Current government plans for a referendum on the AV system, with Tories campaigning against, leave this aim tantalisingly out of reach for those who see it as essential.

The second pillar – for a Labour politics that is not tribal but pluralist – is becoming a frequent refrain in Compass, among Labour leadership contenders and among the wider commentariat.

Pluralism
But there are very different versions of this call for pluralism. At the level of party politics, one explanation is that it is a reaction to the perceived failure of Labour to fashion an anti-Tory ‘rainbow coalition’ in the wake of the general election. The ‘tribal’ interventions of David Blunkett and John Reid, both of whom came in for considerable stick over the course of the conference, were seen by many to represent an ‘old politics’ that we need to move away from in the new coalition-dominated future.

There were also those present on the Labour left who clearly feel some empathy for the small parties that are seen as more left wing than Labour – such as the Greens’ Caroline Lucas who, despite having defeated a Labour candidate in the general election, was given an enthusiastic reception by this clearly non-tribalist crowd.

However, it was Lucas who presented the least compelling case for pluralism and highlighted the limited vision of this variant of political pluralism. Teaching the assembled grannies to suck eggs, she pronounced on how remaining in the Labour Party meant many people had to make difficult compromises to accommodate the distance between their own beliefs and the Labour’s policy. No shit. Her solution, for a flowering of smaller parties (like her own in fact!), in which members can feel comfortable in their purity leads down a strange path, however. The left knows something about this, having taken the purity strategy to absurd People’s Front of Judea lengths in the past. But it also ignores the question of what then? What happens after this party pluralism has blossomed and PR has delivered a parliamentary mosaic of principled representatives? Presumably there are real issues of principle that necessitated the creation of separate parties in the first place? Don’t they then have to engage in the very same dirty compromises that she was lamenting a few moments earlier?

Some even asked whether you would want to see a majority Labour government again, with the clear implication that if your answer was ‘yes’ then you were obviously still wedded to the ‘old politics’. But what is so inherently progressive about having to make deals with the David Laws of this world? or in giving concessions to Alex Salmond’s narrow, particularistic, nationalist demands?

Rather more convincing and carrying greater potential, is the idea of a pluralist politics that connects the Labour Party and parliamentary politics generally in a more open and constructive way with non-party groups and campaigns. A party that is active on a local level, engaged and engaging, and at the forefront of campaigns around opposition to cuts would indeed help reinvigorate Labour’s internal politics. Such ideas are clearly having some purchase on leadership candidates debates with both Milibands arguing for a revitalised, active campaigning party. Even here there may be dangers however, and the Blairite dream of a dissolution of party memberships into looser networks of supporters, clearly still has some adherents. Internal party democracy still ought to matter, and for that to mean anything then membership has to become again something real.

A progressive alliance?
On other issues the conference veered wildly in its reading of the contemporary political scene. Throughout there was a persistent sense of denial about the formation of the ConDem coalition which clearly shocked some speakers quite profoundly. Compass’ political strategy, such as it is, has centred on the formation of ‘the broad progressive coalition’ and one feels that the group still has to come to terms with the fact that this notion has been blown out of the water by the Liberals’ post-election choice. The continued adherence to PR and pluralism does look a bit less convincing in world in which a Lab-Lib coalition is no longer the central element.

Even so, Compass also continue to reject the Blairite notion that the country is essentially conservative with a small c. Their, and much of the left’s, argument against New Labour centred on this claim. Where New Labour used the ‘conservative’ nature of public opinion as a reason to move rightwards, those further to the left argued that this reading of the public’s values was mistaken. A different option that neither takes, is that New Labour was right on its assessment but wrong in not seeking ways – long term, hard and slow – of shifting that opinion. Lawson even commented that over thirteen years in government Labour did nothing to build a progressive movement. The left, one suspects on this evidence, would now rather take the easier option of thinking that the country is with us and build a political strategy on that assessment.

Indeed, several speakers cited the combined vote for Labour and Liberals as evidence of a ‘progressive majority’ in the country. Yet much in Labour and the Liberal manifestos was anything but progressive: both argued for substantial and damaging cuts, neither gave a convincing case for the public sector and against the private, neither presented a convincing critique of the financial sector, both indulged in anti-immigration gutter politics to pander to the ‘bigoted women’ (and men) of the country. Most amazing was New Statesman political editor, Mehdi Hassan, who cited the polling that 1 in 4 LibDems were unhappy with the coalition as evidence of a progressive opportunity, seemingly ignoring that that means 3 in 4 are happy with rampant expenditure cuts, the dismembering the public sector and the creation of a two-tier schools system.

In a warning that ought to give Compass and all on the left pause for thought, John Harris argued that ‘if your argument is also the one you are most comfortable with, it is probably wrong’. Maybe some in Compass fall prey to reading from the political landscape what they are comfortable seeing – a country that is ‘with us’ and a political strategy that seamlessly mobilises a coalition to bring the progressive majority into power through PR.

Coalitions and cuts
Opinions also differed markedly on the prospects for the ConDem coalition and what the appropriate response to the cuts should be. In a seminar on the cuts there was much debate over the appropriate balance between raised taxes and reduced expenditure. Only one speaker made a serious case for limiting cuts, arguing that the widespread austerity policies now being enacted in Europe would trigger a renewed recession. Some contributions from the floor were predictably simple – ‘we say no to cuts!’ – but in the main Polly Toynbee, who chaired the session brilliantly, did not allow simplistic answers, or questions, to go unchallenged.
A more serious omission was of any quid pro quo that the left should ask for in return for reduced public expenditure. If cuts are to be something other than a process of making the poorest pay for the sins of the financial sector, then they must be accompanied by some attempt to challenge the power of financial markets over the longer term. Several speakers cited ‘market reactions’ as a key reason why cuts were necessary, yet none signalled any discomfort with that situation. The irony that the very credit ratings agencies who acted so irresponsibly in the build up to the crisis should now be arbiters of what the government should or shouldn’t do did not seem to register with the speakers. Next to that, all the talk of a ‘Canadian-style’ consultation over the cuts, even democratic politics, comes to nought if markets have the final say.

How soon these questions bite will in part depend on the fate of the governing coalition. Here too, opinions differed. The coalition was, Lawson said, ‘the thing none of us expected’, a claim that betrays a certain lack of foresight if nothing else. Yet both he and John Harris were, rightly in my view, alert to the changed terrain that the coalition may bring into being, an ‘audacious grab’ for the centre-right ground that shared considerable continuities with Blairite policies and which could leave the left looking very isolated. Others, notably Mehdi Hassan of the New Statesman, were more hopeful of a quick end to the coalition, calling it ‘a strategic disaster for the Lib Dems’.

Leadership election
How well Labour responds to the coalition will depend on a revitalisation of the Party’s politics and so far the leadership campaign has not revealed any clear direction either. At a hastily arranged hustings, a packed hall listened to the assorted Eds, Milibands, Burnham and Abbott set out their stalls and answer the predictable questions on PR, cuts and schools. While the greatest cheer during the opening statements came for Diane Abbot, a walking embodiment of tokenism in this election, enthusiasm for her waned as the debate proceeded, possibly reflecting the vacuity of Abbott’s politics. More encouragingly, both Milibands and Andy Burnham emphasised revitalisation of the party and its membership as key aims though as yet none as spelled out a convincing programme of democratic reform of Labour’s internal structure.
Showing some in Compass what might have been, John Cruddas rounded off proceedings with a forceful and at times powerful speech. His attack on the ‘sour, shrill, hopeless politics’ of attacking the poor and immigrants was a direct and timely counter to those arguing that Labour lost the election by not being tougher on immigration. Cruddas’ alternatives, of a thorough ‘1987-like’ policy review, a revitalisation of Labour’s values and culture and a politics based on progressive English nationalism, are clearly based on his energetic campaign against the BNP and his view that Labour has fallen into a ‘moral and intellectual coma’. Whatever the shortcomings of his politics, Cruddas showed a passion and vision that is lacking from much of the race so far and his absence from the contest clearly disappointed some in Compass.
However, Lawson’s recognition that ‘the time perhaps is just not right’ for his kind of politics was an appropriate acknowledgement of where Labour and the left currently is. Looking rather more like a rebel band that has just taken a thrashing at the hands of imperial stormtroopers, the Compass conference was nevertheless an energetic and welcome moment to reflect on the options facing the left.

‘A New Hope is Forged’, a report of the Compass conference on its own website, is here.
For news of the Labour leadership campaign and information about the candidates, go here.

2010-06-18T16:53:00.002+01:00

Erik Olin Wright is a grand old figure in radical sociology - anyone studying class in then 1970 or 1980s should be familiar with 'Class, Crisis and the State' and there's been a host of work on what class means since then. For several years one of his projects has been around 'Real Utopias' and his latest book is called Envisioning Real Utopias.

The excellent blog project New Left Project (please visit frequently) carries an interview with Wright

Edward Lucas: Why do you think there is a need for visions of social arrangement very different from those that we have now? Why is there a specific need for ‘real utopian’ visions?

EOW: There are really two somewhat questions here: why do we need to look for fundamental alternatives to existing social institutions, and why should these alternatives be framed as “real utopian” visions.

First, the issue of the search for alternatives: We live in a world characterized by deeply troubling, if familiar, contrasts: poverty in the midst of plenty; enhanced opportunities for some people to live creative, flourishing lives alongside social exclusion and thwarted human potential; new technologies to cure disease, enhance health and prolong life along with untreated, devastating illness. There are, of course, many possible explanations for these facts. Some people believe that poverty in the midst of plenty constitutes simply a sad fact of life: “the poor will always be with us.” Defenders of capitalism argue that this is a temporary state of affairs which further economic development will eradicate: capitalism, if given enough time, especially if it is unfettered from the harmful effects of state regulations, will eradicate poverty. Many social conservatives insist that suffering and unfulfilling lives are simply the fault of the individuals whose lives go badly: contemporary capitalism generates an abundance of opportunities, but some people squander their lives because they are too lazy or irresponsible or impulsive to take advantage of them. If you accept any of these diagnoses, then there would not be much point in elaborating visions of social arrangements very different from those we have now. But if you believe, as I do, that there is very strong social scientific evidence that these morally salient forms of inequality and deprivation are mainly consequences of fundamental properties of the socioeconomic system, then it is imperative to understand alternatives to the existing world which would mitigate these harms.

But why should the search for alternatives be cast as envisioning “real utopias”? The idea of this apparent oxymoron is to combine a commitment to our deepest emancipatory values and aspirations with a serious attention to the problem of how institutions really work. The “real” in the couplet forces us to continually worry about the problem of unintended consequences and hazards of social engineering; the “utopia” keeps the moral purposes of social transformation and social justice at the forefront. In the absence of a theory of fundamental alternatives, struggles against the harms of existing institutions will generally be limited to those changes which are immediately accessible – reforms of institutions which might in fact be desirable in and of themselves, but which don’t necessarily constitute steps towards the longer term goal of human emancipation. A theory of fundamental alternatives enables us to ask two questions of any proposed transformation of existing institutions – first, does this improve the lives of people now, and second, does it move us in the right direction along a trajectory towards a more profoundly humane and just society.

EL: You present the ideas and aims discussed in your book as socialist. However, your conception of socialism is novel, focusing on ‘social power’, rather than the abolition of private ownership of the means of production. Why do you think socialism needs to be re-conceived in this way? Is it really necessary to call the conception of emancipatory change that emerges ‘socialist’?

EOW: There is, of course, always a variety of words that can be used to identify any underlying concept. While I do think it is appropriate to deploy the word “socialism” for the theoretical and political purposes of my analysis, this isn’t “necessary” in the strong sense of being logically entailed by the arguments themselves. Indeed, some people have argued with me that the word “socialism” has become so contaminated by its association with heavy-handed state control – or even worse, in the United States ideological context, authoritarian statism – that I should abandon the word altogether. Words do have histories, and sometimes that history can destroy the usefulness of otherwise attractive terms.

In spite of this, I feel that the word socialist can be effectively retrieved for a progressive, democratic egalitarian political agenda. There are two issues in play here. First, while in the United States and perhaps some parts of Europe, the word “socialist” has lost traction in popular social movements, in much of the world it remains the broad umbrella term for anti-capitalism in the interests of ordinary people. I hope the audience for Envisioning Real Utopias is left intellectuals throughout the world, not just in the richest countries, and in this broader context socialism remains a positive symbolic anchor. Above all it signals not simply a complaint about specific features of existing institutions, but a criticism of capitalism as such. Second, the conceptualization of a “social” socialism is fully congruent with the normative ideals that have animated many socialists throughout the history of socialism. The real bottom line for most socialists is not really the abolition of private property in the means of production as such. That was always instrumental to deeper moral commitments. The real normative commitments were for a radically democratic and egalitarian social order. I could, therefore, call the political project underlying my project on real utopias, democratic egalitarianism (or perhaps, to give it more edge: radical democratic egalitarianism), and sometimes in fact I do use this expression as a way of identifying the normative foundations and conception of social justice. But because I argue throughout the book that realizing these values requires opposing and transforming capitalism, “socialism” remains the best term available for signaling this transformative agenda.Perhaps it would be useful at this point to briefly pause from directly answering the questions and explain a little what I mean by “democratic egalitarianism” and how this is connected to the idea of socialism as social empowerment.

First, equality: Equality is a complicated problem, and there isn’t really a strong consensus among socialists as to precisely what this value means. A great deal of very productive and interesting philosophical debate has occurred over the past quarter century or so on this issue. Here is how I define the egalitarian ideal in the book: In a socially just society, all people would have broadly equal access to the necessary material and social means to live flourishing lives. This conception is a variety of the “equality of opportunity” conceptions of equality. I prefer “equal access” to “equal opportunity” because the equal opportunity terminology is so strongly associated with what is sometimes called “starting gate” equality, whereas equal access emphasizes more the life-long problem of having access to the conditions to live a flourishing life.
Second, democracy: The core value underlying democracy is that people should, to the greatest extent possible, be able to control the conditions and decisions which affect their lives, both as separate persons and as members of broader communities. We can call this the value of self-determination. When we apply the value of self-determination to the choices and actions of individuals that affect their lives as separate persons we usually call this “liberty” or “freedom”. When we apply the value of self-determination to those contexts in which our lives are bound together through interconnection and interdependency, we call this “Democracy”. Democracy and individual freedom are therefore rooted in the same value: people should be able to control the conditions and decisions which affect their lives to the greatest extent possible. (Apparent conflicts between democracy and liberty occur not because of an underlying conflict in fundamental values, but because of the inherently difficult practical problem of creating institutions to realize this value.) In a fully realized democracy all people have broadly equal access to the necessary means to participate meaningfully in the exercise of political power over those collective decisions which affect their lives as members of a broader community.

This definition has two critical elements:
• The first is an egalitarian principle – all people have equal access to participate in the exercise of political power. A shallow democracy is one in which people have very unequal access to the means of effective participation; a deep democracy is one which approaches equal access.
• The second element concerns scope of decisions that is subsumed under the idea of democracy: a narrow democracy is one in which only a limited range of decisions are subjected to democratic decisionmaking; a broad democracy is one which democratic decisionmaking extends to all matters of collective interest. As I have specified it here, democracy should cover all decisions which affect the lives of people as members of a community. The word “community” here refers to all social contexts of social interaction and interdependence. A family is a community, a factory is a community, a city is a community, and so is a nation. Increasingly, I think, we should think of the world as a community. We can meaningfully talk about democratizing the family just as we can talk about democratizing a factory or the state. What democracy entails, then, is that all of the decisions which affect people’s lives as members of these different kinds of community should be under the collective control of the members of these communities.

The full realization of this principle would be, of course, an extremely complex matter, both because different people have such different stakes in the outcomes of any given decision within a community and because the interdependence of communities means that there are generally ramifications of the decisions made within one community on people in other communities. In practice, therefore, it is really not possible to fully realize the ideal of self-determination: people will always confront conditions not of their choosing and will be affected by decisions not of their making.

Nevertheless, we can still judge alternative institutional arrangements by how much they facilitate or impede the ideals of democracy as collective self-determination. Capitalism, in these terms, inherently obstructs fullest realization of democracy. By definition, “private” ownership of means of production means that significant domains of decisions that have broad collective effects are simply removed from collective decision-making. While the boundaries between the aspects of property rights that are considered private and the aspects that are subjected to public control is periodically contested, in capitalist society the presumption is that decisions over property are private matters and only in special circumstances can public bodies legitimately encroach on them. The private decisions of owners of capitalist firms often have massive collective consequences both for the workers inside of the firm and for people not directly employed in the firm, and thus the exclusion of such decisions from public deliberation and control reduces democracy. A society in which there are meaningful forms of workers democratic control within firms and external democratic public control over firms is a more democratic society than one which lacks these institutional arrangements.

Of course, there may be good reasons for the exclusion of non-owners from such decisions, either on the grounds of economic efficiency or on the grounds that people have the right to dispose of “their” property as they see fit even if this has large consequences for others. Democracy, after all, is not the only value we have, and it could be the case that in some circumstances other values, such as efficiency, might be sufficiently important to justify a reduction in self-determination. These considerations, however, do not change the fact that capitalist property rights reduce democracy.

EL: The advance of democracy, therefore, requires transcending capitalism. But how? And what does this really mean?

EOW: This is where my conception of socialism as social empowerment enters the analysis. “Social power” is power rooted in the capacity of people for voluntary association in pursuit of collective goals – what sociologists call “collective action”. Social power is contrasted two other more familiar forms of power – state power and economic power. You can think of these three forms of power as different ways of getting people to do things: bribing them, forcing them, or persuading them.

In the ordinary use of these terms, “democracy” is the label we use for the subordination of state power to social power: In a democratic state, considerable power is exercised by the state, but the purposes to which it is used are, supposedly, dictated by “the people”, which in practice means through the various ways in which people become organized associationally to influence the exercise of state power, especially through political parties, social movements, and labor unions. One of the pivotal mechanisms for this translation of social power into effective subordination of state power is elections. This is equivalent to saying state power is subordinated to social power. In an authoritarian state, on the other hand, social power is subordinated to state power. “Socialism”, then, is the word for the subordination of economic power to social power.

All economic systems involve all three forms of power. While we can construct three ideal type “pure” economic systems connected to the three forms of power – capitalism is based on the dominance of economic power, statism on the dominance of state power, and socialism on the dominance of social power – all actual economic systems are hybrids that combine in different configurations all three forms of power. The term “capitalism”, therefore, is a shorthand for “an economic system within which economic power is the dominant form of power and limits the scope and operation of state power and social power.” In this conceptual framework, transcending capitalism in the direction of socialism means increasing the weight of social power within the hybrid configuration along a variety of different “pathways of social empowerment”. The institutional proposals for “real utopias” are all situated within these multiple pathways of social empowerment.

EL: You discuss a range of different real utopian proposals for political and economic transformation. Can you describe what you see as the most important of these?

EOW: I hesitate to anoint any specific proposal as “most important” since the actual importance of a proposal depends on historical context, both in the sense of the political conditions which make different proposals more or less achievable, and in the sense of the existing institutional and social structural conditions which make given proposals more or less viable. So, instead of describing the proposals that I think are the most important, what I will do is briefly describe four or five proposals that I think reflect the diversity of institutional designs for moving along the pathways of social empowerment.
(1) Participatory Budgets. Participatory budgeting is a redesign of municipal government that was first instituted in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre and has since be instituted in one form or another in over 1000 cities worldwide. While the details vary enormously across cases, the basic idea is that ordinary citizens directly decide budgetary priorities for cities in various kinds of participatory assemblies. This constitutes a form of social empowerment because collective resources are allocated to different purposes by decisions made through voluntary association of people in civil society.
(2). Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a profoundly anti-capitalist way of producing and disseminating knowledge. It is based on the principle “to each according to need, from each according to ability.” No one gets paid for editing, no one gets charged for access. It is egalitarian and produced on the basis of horizontal reciprocities rather than hierarchical control. In the year 2000, before Wikipedia was launched, no one – including its founders—would have thought what has come to be was possible.
(3). Solidarity funds. In the province of Quebec unions have developed a specific kind of investment instrument referred to as “solidarity funds”. These funds are generated by contributions mainly from union members and are used for private equity investment in small and medium enterprises. The idea is to invest in firms which are relatively immobile geographically and rooted in the Quebec economy and which, in exchange for these long-term investments, agree to sign on to a charter of labor rights and principles of environmental sustainability. These firms remain capitalist insofar as they are profit-making firms in a capitalist market, but part of their capital comes from unions and a specific form of social power shapes the governance of the firms’ activities. They thus constitute a hybrid form combining capitalism and socialism.
(4) Worker-owned enterprises: cooperatives. From the early decades of the 19th century, worker-owned cooperatives have constituted a form of hybrid organization that combine capitalist and socialist elements. Prodhoun, in his famous conflict with Marx, argued that worker-owned cooperatives constituted both an alternative within capitalism and a strategy for challenging capitalism: because they would provide such a better way of life for workers, once they were well-established workers would leave capitalist employment for membership in productive cooperatives, eventually starving capitalism of labor power. Even if this scenario is not plausible, cooperatives are certainly one pathway of social empowerment, and we know under favorable conditions, cooperatives can be both economically efficient and organizationally stable. Mondragón in Spain is the iconic example: 270 separate worker-owned firms constitute the federation called the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) – basically a Meta-cooperative of cooperatives. The MCC provides a wide range of services for its constituent units, including forms of cross-subsidization, risk reduction, work sharing and other mechanisms which help mute some of the pressures from the ordinary functioning of capitalist markets.
(5). Unconditional Basic Income. The idea of an unconditional basic income (UBI) is quite simple: Every legal resident in a country receives a monthly living stipend sufficient to live above the “poverty line.” Let’s call this the “no frills culturally respectable standard of living.” The grant is unconditional on the performance of any labor or other form of contribution, and it is universal – everyone receives the grant, rich and poor alike. Grants go to individuals, not families. Parents are the custodians of underage children’s grants (which may be at a lower rate than the grants for adults).

Basic income is generally defended on grounds of social justice, either focusing on the ways in which it deals with poverty in particular or on the way it neutralizes certain unjust forms of inequality. In the present context, a universal basic income can also be viewed as a way of infusing funds into forms of economic enterprise within which social empowerment plays a substantial role. The term “social economy” covers many such enterprises. One of the main problems that collective actors face in the social economy is generating a decent standard of living for the providers of social economy services. This is, of course, a chronic problem in the performing arts, but it also affects efforts by communities to organize effective social economy services for various kinds of care-giving activities – child care, elder care, home health care, respite care. It would be much easier for communities to mobilize various sources of funding for these activities if the basic standard of living was already taken care of through a basic income.
The problem of providing an adequate standard of living to members is also a chronic problem for worker cooperatives, especially in the early stages in which a cooperative is being established and members are learning how to function, work out organizational details, and develop productive capacity. A basic income would make it much easier for a cooperative to survive this learning phase and reproduce itself as an on-going economic organization. Because a basic income makes cooperatives more viable, this would also help solve some of the credit market constraints faced by worker-owned firms. One of the reasons banks are hesitant to loan funds to worker cooperatives is skepticism that the first will survive and be able to pay back the loans. Since workers typically do not have significant collateral, risk-aversion by lenders means that worker-coops are typically undercapitalized, which in turn makes it less likely that they will succeed. A basic income changes this equation, since now banks know that the revenue stream generated by the coops’ market activities does not have to provide basic income for the worker-owners. This reduces the risk that the cooperative will fail and thus makes credit more easily available.
Some would feel that in an effort to promote utopian visions that are ‘real’, you undermine hopes for more radical possibilities. In particular, in politics you advocate the continuing existence of the state, which appears to involve intrinsically dominating relationships. In economics, by contrast, all of your proposals involve the continuing existence of the market – an institution in which relationships are based on self-interest. Why do you advocate such apparently objectionable institutions?

I have three responses to this objection. First, if it were the case that a plausible argument could be made that the kinds of real utopian proposals I advance actually impeded the realization of a more radically democratic and egalitarian society, then this would be an important objection. But there really is no credible argument as far as I know that proposals I discuss—basic income, participatory budgets, worker cooperatives, solidarity funds, etc. – make more radical transformations less likely. So, even if one acknowledges that the state and markets are intrinsically objectionable, I don’t see how the probability of their eventual elimination is reduced by the kinds of proposals I advance. Second, under any foreseeable historical conditions the complete dissolution of state power and the complete disappearance of markets are utopian fantasies, not viable destinations. We can aspire to deepening democracy and extending its scope and thus subordinating more fully the state to social power, but this is not the same as the disappearance of the state. And we can struggle for egalitarian conditions of social justice in which the inegalitarian effects of markets are largely neutralized. But this is not the same as creating a comprehensively planned economy with no role for markets. Finally, I am not so sure that the state and the market are intrinsically objectionable; what are objectionable are their effects on power and inequality. The objections would largely disappear if state power is effectively subordinated to social power, and if the space for market relations is delimited by genuinely democratic processes and the inequality effects markets neutralized.

Take Back Parliament

2010-06-18T11:53:00.002+01:00

Take Back Parliament is meeting in Leeds on Wednesday, June 30th, 6.30PM in the Adelphi pub on Bridge Street. Here's their message to supporters.

The purple rallies were just the beginning.
If we are to win a referendum on voting reform and consign the current broken and discredited system to the dustbin, we need to start organising now.
Last Sunday dozens of people met to plan the next stages of our campaign in London, and in Bristol, Birmingham and Brighton. This week, over 2000 of you wrote to Nick Clegg in less than 24 hours demanding a timetable for the referendum.
But this is just the start. Take Back Parliament is now organising in your home town:
http://www.takebackparliament.com/page/event/search_simple
Over the summer I'll be travelling to towns, cities and universities across the country to meet supporters and build a movement for reform. But I need your help.
Click below to find out about any meetings taking place near you - and be part of our movement for change:
http://www.takebackparliament.com/page/event/search_simple
I hope you can join me. Together we'll change this rotten system for good.
Thank you, and best wishes,
Andy MayTake Back ParliamentNational Coordinator
P.S - If you can't see one near you and want to get one started in your area, please email me.

George Monbiot: we talk, they act

2010-06-15T12:41:00.000+01:00

Bogus and Misdirected, yes. But the Party has a lot to teach the left
The radical right has an authenticity the left lacks – it is angry and ready to translate that anger into action. We talk, they act
George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 June 2010

In the Netherlands a movement based on paranoia and the fleecing of the poor looks set to join the government. In the United States one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has ever seen – people gathering in their millions to lobby unwittingly for a smaller share of the nation's wealth – has become the playmaker in Republican primaries. The radical right is seizing its chance. But where is the radical left?

Both the Freedom party in the Netherlands and the Tea Party movement in the US base their political programmes on misinformation and denial. But as political forces they are devastatingly effective. The contrast to the leftwing meetings I've attended over the past two years couldn't be starker. They are cerebral, cogent, realistic – and little of substance has emerged from them.

The rightwing movements thrive on their contradictions, the leftwing movements drown in them. Tea Party members who proclaim their rugged individualism will follow a bucket on a broomstick if it has the right label, and engage in the herd behaviour they claim to deplore. The left, by contrast, talks of collective action but indulges instead in possessive individualism. Instead of coming together to fight common causes, leftwing meetings today consist of dozens of people promoting their own ideas, and proposing that everyone else should adopt them.

It would be wrong to characterise the Tea Party movement as being mostly working class. The polls suggest that its followers have an income and college education rate slightly above the national mean. But it is the only rising political movement in the US which enjoys major working-class support. It voices the resentments of those who sense that they have been shut out of American life. Yet it campaigns for policies that threaten to exclude them further. The Contract from America for which Tea Party members voted demands that the US adopt a single-rate tax system, repeal Obama's healthcare legislation and sustain George Bush's reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax. The beneficiaries of these policies are corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Those who will be hurt by them are angrily converging on state capitals to demand that they are implemented.

The Tea Party protests began after the business journalist Rick Santelli broadcast an attack from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on the government's plan to help impoverished people whose mortgages had fallen into arrears. To cheers from the traders at the exchange, he proposed that they should hold a tea party to dump derivative securities in Lake Michigan in protest at Obama's intention – in Santelli's words – to "subsidise the losers". (I urge you to watch the broadcast: it is the most alarming example of cheap demagoguery you are likely to have seen. It continues to be promoted by Santelli's employer, CNBC.)

The protests that claim to defend the interests of the working class began, in other words, with a call for a bankers' revolt against the undeserving poor. They have been promoted by Fox News – owned by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch – and lavishly funded by other billionaires. Its corporate backers wrap themselves in the complaints of the downtrodden: they are 21st-century Marie-Antoinettes, who dress up as dairymaids and propose that the poor subsist upon a diet of laissez-faire.

Before this movement had a name, its contradictions were explored in Thomas Frank's seminal book, What's the Matter with Kansas? The genius of the new conservatism, Frank argues, is its "systematic erasure of the economic". It blames the troubles of the poor not on economic forces – corporate and class power, wage cuts, tax cuts, outsourcing – but on cultural forces. The backlashers could believe that George Bush was a man of the people by ignoring his family's wealth. They can believe that the media is a liberal conspiracy only by forgetting about the corporations (CNBC, Fox, etc) and the conservative billionaires who run it.

The movement depends on people never making the connection between, for example, "mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore" or "the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust".

The anger of the excluded is aimed instead at gay marriage, abortion, swearing on television and latte-drinking, French-speaking liberals. The working-class American right votes for candidates who rail against cultural degradation, but what it gets when they take power is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' Freedom party performs a similar conjuring trick, persuading working- and middle-class voters that their real enemies are Muslims, while demanding tax cuts, abolition of the minimum wage and reductions in child benefits. It is only because of the general political doziness of the British electorate that such movements – despite the UK Independence party's best efforts – have not yet taken off here. Give them time.

Though most of what they claim is false, one of the accusations levelled by both the Freedom party and the Tea Party rings true: the left is effete. This highlights another contradiction in their philosophy: liberals are weak and spineless; liberals are ruthless and all-powerful. But never mind that – the left on both sides of the Atlantic has proved to be tongue-tied, embarrassed, unable to state simple economic truths, unable to name and confront the powers that oppress the working class. It has left the field wide open to rightwing demagogues.

The great progressive cringe is only part of the problem; we have also abandoned movement-building in favour of Facebook politics. We don't want to pursue a common purpose any more, instead we want our own ideas and identity applauded. Where are the mass mobilisations in this country against the cuts, against the banks, BP, unemployment, the lack of social housing, the endless war in Afghanistan? In the US the radical right is swiftly acquiring ownership of the Republican party. In the UK the left is scarcely attempting a reclamation of the Labour party, even as opportunity knocks.

Bogus and misdirected as the Tea Party movement is, in one respect it has an authenticity that the left lacks: it is angry and it's prepared to translate that anger into action. It is marching, recruiting, unseating, replacing. We talk, they act.

It strikes me that in the US the greater opportunities lie not in confronting the Tea Party movement but in turning it. As its mixed responses to Sarah Palin and Ron Paul show, it remains fluid and volatile. There's an opening here for trade unionists to move in and agree that an elite is indeed depriving working people of their rights, but it is not an intellectual elite or a cultural elite or a liberal elite: it is an economic elite. The radical right has something to teach us on this side of the Atlantic as well: the world is run by those who turn up.

Wallerstein on impossible choices in world depression

2010-06-15T11:44:00.002+01:00

Distinguished scholar Immanuel Wallerstein produces a short commentary on various aspects of political and economic interest, twice a month. Here's the latest one.

Commentary No. 283, June 15, 2010
"Impossible Choices in a World Depression"
As the world's leaders and pundits continue to deny the reality of the world depression - they won't even use the word - the impossible choices that are faced by government after government become more and more obvious every day. Consider what has happened in just the last month.

The United States had its worst unemployment figures in quite a while. Yes, there were some new jobs, but 95% of them were of temporary census workers. Private employers added just 10% of the jobs they were expected to add. Despite this, it has now become politically impossible to get further stimulus money voted by Congress. And the Federal Reserve has ceased to buy Treasury securities and mortgage bonds. These had been the two main strategies to increase jobs. Why? The call for deficit cuts has grown too strong.

The most immediate consequence can be seen at the level of the budgets of the separate state governments. The cost of Medicaid has gone up because of the economic crisis. This cost is borne by the separate states. They have been helped in the past year by increased federal subsidies of state spending on Medicaid. Congress won't renew this. Gov. Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania says this will increase his state's budgetary shortfall by two-thirds, and force it to lay off 20,000 teachers, police officers, and other government workers. Of course, this is in addition to lost medical services for many people.

In Great Britain, the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, says that cutting down on borrowing is "the most urgent issue facing Britain today." The Financial Times sums up his proposals in its headline: "Cameron pitches an age of austerity." Its assessment of this policy: "If the government is to make such steep reductions in spending, it cannot avoid visibly damaging frontline services. The cuts will be more savage than anything contemplated by even the Thatcher government."

Germany's Chancellor Merkel has announced her version of austerity: deep public spending cuts immediately, rising in amount each year for the next four years. She has also announced new taxes on airlines, which the world's airlines immediately announced would seriously hurt their ability to reduce their negative balance-sheets and save them from bankruptcy. Germany's unemployment rates will increase, but its unemployment benefits will be reduced. Other governments in Europe plus the United States have been urging Germany to spend more and export less, in order to restore world demand. Merkel rejected these demands, saying that debt reduction was her priority.

Japan's new Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, warned the country that the debt situation is so bad that Japan could face a situation comparable to that of Greece. To remedy this, he proposed some increased taxation, more regulation of the financial arena, and new kinds of public expenditures.

In the middle of all this super-austerity in the North, a most remarkable thing has occurred, which seems to have escaped almost all notice. As everyone knows, Spain is one of the many European countries now in economic difficulty because of very large debt ratios. On May 30, Fitch Ratings joined other ratings companies in reducing Spanish bond ratings from AAA to AA+. The question is why. Just the day before, the Spanish parliament had voted the country's deepest budget cuts in 30 years.

Budget cuts are presumably what Germany and others have been calling for in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and other countries threatened by too much debt. Spain responded to this pressure. And just because it did, Fitch Ratings downgraded it. Brian Coulton, Fitch's person in charge of ratings for Spain, said in the statement downgrading Spain: "The process of adjustment to a lower level of private sector and external indebtedness will materially reduce the rate of growth of the Spanish economy over the medium-term."

So there it is - damned if you do, and damned if you don't. The financial speculators have created a disastrous fall in the world-economy. The ball was then thrown to the states to solve the problem. The states have less money and more demands on them. What can they do? They can borrow, until those who lend money won't do it, or demand too high a rate of interest. They can tax, and the businesses say that this will cut back their ability to create jobs. They can reduce expenditures. And in addition to the terrible pain this inflicts on everyone, but especially on the more vulnerable, this action also will reduce the possibility of growth, as Mr. Coulton points out for Spain.

Of course, there is one big place to reduce expenditures - the military. Military expenditures do provide jobs but far fewer than if the money were used otherwise. This does not apply only to the biggest spenders like the United States. A virtually uncommented aspect of Greece's debt problems was its heavy expenditure on the military. But are governments ready to reduce significantly military expenditures? It doesn't seem too likely.

So, what can the states do? They are trying one thing today, and another thing tomorrow. Last year, it was stimulus. This year, it's debt reduction. The year after, it will be taxation.

In any case, the overall situation will be worse and worse.

Can China save us? Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's very acute analyst, seems to think so, provided the government "stimulate(s) private growth." In that case, rising wages will be offset by higher productivity. Maybe. But the Chinese government has been resistant to such a policy up to now, not for economic but for political reasons. Its drive to maintain political stability has been paramount up to now. Furthermore, even Roach has one great fear - China-bashing in Washington leading to trade sanctions. Myself, I think that's a high probability, as the U.S. economic situation continues to deteriorate.

The way out of all of this is not some small adjustment here or there - whether of the monetarist or the Keynesian variety.

To emerge from the economic box in which the world finds itself requires a fundamental overhaul of the world-system. This will surely have to come, but how soon?

Danny Dorling on the social segregation in Britain revealed by the election

2010-06-14T15:55:00.001+01:00

Our divided nation
Danny Dorling
New Statesman 14 June 2010

Analysis of voting in the 2010 election shows that Conservative Britain is becoming ever more of a fringe, restricted to very few parts of the country.

Imagine for a minute that you are holding an invisible knife. This is a bit like Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market, but a little more real, efficient and effective. You are holding the knife of geographical equality, and will use it to spread something rather than cut. You are about to take the result of the 2010 general election and change history. You are not going to alter a single adult's vote, but you are going to change where they voted. You will swap them with someone who chose to abstain and, by doing so, will smooth out the Tory vote on 6 May.
An analysis of the election results by constituency shows that the Conservatives won 10,683,528 votes that Thursday, equating to 36.9 per cent of all votes cast and 305 seats (not including the Speaker's constituency or the delayed Thirsk and Malton election). Suppose they had won exactly 36.9 per cent of the vote in each seat; the same number of votes overall, but evenly spread. This is what you need the knife of geographical equality for.

What the knife does, as you scrape it across the land, is pick up Tory voters from places where they are more numerous than usual and deposit them in towns where they are lacking. At the extreme, some 14,772 would have to be moved into Dunfermline and West Fife to ensure the 36.9 per cent quota, but most of these could be found from the 13,815 surplus Tory votes in Richmond, North Yorkshire, the seat with the most "wasted" votes.

What effect would the knife have had on the result? The Liberal Democrats would have won 72 seats instead of 57. Labour's number would have stayed the same overall at 258 and the Conservatives would have won only 293 rather than 305. A Lib-Lab coalition could have commanded 330 seats instead of the measly 315 that was contemplated as a block.
But the crucial figure is not how many seats the Tories might have lost, had their support been evenly spread, but how many of their voters would have had to move seat in order for their vote to count. The answer is 1,751,646. That's 16.4 per cent of their entire vote, a percentage which can be called the "segregation index". The Tory vote has not been more unevenly spread since 1918 (at 19.3 per cent). Even as they become more numerous, Tory voters are growing more geographically isolated.

Swing where you're winning
The isolation of Conservative voters has been growing steadily since 1979, when it was half the current level. After it last reached a peak in 1918, it fell, almost continuously, through to 1959. At the same time, the country became less socially and spatially polarised. Wealth and health inequalities narrowed along with those in voting, which became much less of a geographical matter.

From 1959 through to February 1974, the level of Tory segregation remained stable, never going above 9 per cent. In the 1960s and early 1970s, there were Tories everywhere. One-Nation Conservatives had support up and down the country. Then, in October 1974, the segregation index lurched up to 10.7 per cent. New Conservative voters in the Home Counties swung the party's support heavily southwards, while in the north and west it fell. The Tories may have lost that election, but their support had changed geographically and taken the first step on the road towards ever-rising segregation across Britain.

One-Nation Tories felt the cold wind of change. Margaret Thatcher was appointed leader of the opposition the following year. In 1979, she secured her first victory and then, in every general election that followed, including 2010, Conservative support overall increased slightly more where it was strongest to begin with. The segregation index increased the most in 1997, to 13.9 per cent. These may have been "wasted" votes, but they were also one of the many ways in which the 1997 election was no break from the past.

In May 2010, it was voters in the best-off constituencies who swung most firmly towards David Cameron, even though so many in those places already voted for his party. He failed to secure an overall majority because support was lacklustre in the marginal seats. The last Tory leader who saw the segregation level of his or her vote fall while in office was Ted Heath in the early 1970s. In 2010, support swung away from the Tories where it had already been lowest in 2005.
What does this say for the future? It tells us we are living in remarkable times. The segregation of the Tory voter is greater now than it was in 1922, and it has been that high and rising since 2001. That the Conservatives won the largest minority of seats in a general election, while seeing the greatest increase in support where they needed it the least, shows how little empathy most people in Tory shires now feel for those who live in the cities, or the north, or the countries outside of England.

Kings of the hill
In Sheffield, where I now live, it felt like an apathetic election. Hundreds of volunteers were pushing leaflets through doors, but there seemed to be fewer posters than before, despite that brief spell of Cleggmania infecting his adopted city. A few days before the election, I went back to Oxford East, where I grew up, and was shocked to see so many Labour posters again. Perhaps I should not have been surprised when people in that constituency gave an overall swing to Labour.

I also went to nearby Witney, Cameron's seat, and passed posters for Ukip and the Tories (marking out the field boundaries of wealthy farmers, rather than council estates). I asked people there what they thought would happen to the economy after the election and some told me a flood of cuts was coming, but Witney was (metaphorically) "on a hill" and would be OK, especially if they voted for "Dave".

The people of Oxford East have been surrounded by Conservatives for generations. With hindsight, it is not surprising where voters swung; but these two Oxfordshire seats represent in microcosm what has occurred across the country. Those who have most have voted to try to hold on to as much as they can. Those who have less have not been fooled.

The previous 1918 peak is almost 3 per cent higher than today's figure, so there is a precedent for the country to become even more geographically divided. But 1918 was a very strange election (see box left). In many other ways, we have already become more unequal than we were then - in terms of what matters (health) and what we think matters (wealth).

The early casualties of the cuts are the poorest in Britain, who have already disproportionately lost their jobs and their chances of a better home, or even of a holiday, this year. Fear drove those who have the most to vote in greater concentrations to cling on to what they've got.
We all need a politics we can better trust. In more equitable times, we didn't need the knife of geographical equality to help us understand elections. But then, people who voted for different parties lived nearer to each other.

Danny Dorling is the author of "Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists" (Policy Press, £19.99)

Neal Lawson urges pluralism

2010-06-14T15:35:00.001+01:00

Out of one party, many cultures
Neal Lawson
New Statesman
Published 10 June 2010
If Labour is to survive in the age of new politics, it must transcend its instincts to descend into crude tribal tactics and learn to be more plural.

In the run-up to the 1997 election, during discussions about a possible alliance between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown asked of Tony Blair: "Is he a pluralist?" The answer, we eventually learned, was "No", but the question as it relates to the car crash of a party Blair left behind remains pertinent. Can Labour become a pluralist party? The answer to the question will seal its fate.

The fight for Labour's future is not just between right and left, but critically between pluralists and their opposites, the tribalists. It is a struggle between different ways of conceiving power and doing politics. It is existential. What are the differences between pluralists and tribalists? Why do they matter, and can pluralists win?

Let's start with the dominant strain within Labour's diminished ranks. For the tribalist, power can only be singularly held and, because the winner is deemed to take all, means are readily used to justify ends. It's not how you achieve power that matters, but only whether you have and can hold on to it. Power is captured through the party and then the state, whose functions are then used to dispense social democracy from the top down.

Social democracy is thus defined as what Labour governments do, even if they are seldom social and never democratic. Change is done to people, not with people. The political game is to draw clear dividing lines between yourself and any enemy, internally or externally, who wants to stop you gaining a monopoly of power. Dissent, opposition, rivals and debate itself must be crushed. For the tribalist, if Labour doesn't say it or do it, it isn't progressive. The party has a monopoly of wisdom.

Tribalism comes from a mix of vanguardism, as practised by Leninists and old-style Fabians, and rigid class analysis. History is on the party's side. All it has to do is seize control of the state. After four failed general election attempts at such seizure, it was easy for the New Labour vanguard to take over the party in the mid-1990s. But this time, the historic certainty was the inevitability of free-market globalisation.

Tribal Labour desires predictability, certainty and, above all, control. It is a politics of pagers, whips, targets and iron discipline. Everything is subject to control from the centre: the cabinet or its shadow, the parliamentary party, the National Executive Committee, party conference, parliamentary selections, devolved administrations and even Iraq and the economy. It is a culture that cuts across the left and right of the party. It is a technocratic, managerial, brittle, rationalist machine that, by definition, is profoundly anti-democratic. It desires a monoculture that is partisan, paternalistic and graceless. It is the politics of an uncompromising and relentless search for singular power. If you can command, you control.

Together as one
Pluralists are different. They give primacy not to ends, but to means. For the pluralist the process and the journey are everything. Change for pluralists comes through dialogue, respect, trust, tolerance and interest in others. Pluralists recognise a political terrain of multiple centres of power and celebrate difference as a dialectical force. Through debate and consensus-building we learn. We need to work with others, not destroy them. That doesn't mean fundamental differences don't exist; it does mean that little is black and white. We can co-operate and compete. Pluralists are self-critical, curious and often ambivalent about a world that is increasingly complex and paradoxical. Like the tribalists, pluralists span the left/right internal party divide, but they borrow heavily from Gramsci: politics is about securing hegemony in a war of manoeuvre involving many spaces, not a war of position in deep-cut trenches.
The abiding quest of pluralists is to create spaces in which people can determine their future collectively. These are spaces such as trade unions, mutuals and co-operatives. Pluralism is about letting new things happen on a journey of trial, experiment and failure. Democratic engagement may take longer to reach a conclusion than a central diktat, but results in more effective outcomes, precisely because these are negotiated by people who use and produce services.

While tribalists rely on control of a machine that eventually leaves them marooned and detached, pluralists know that shared answers are more enduring and that, once people have struggled to win advances through pluralistic spaces, they are more likely to fight to keep them. What matters is the ability to participate in the process, to find the resources and structures to search for genuine collective freedom to manage our world.

Obviously, I am exaggerating - no one is entirely tribal or totally pluralist. But it is clear that Labour remains a largely tribal party in an age that is increasingly pluralist. Brownites tend to be among the least pluralist, while some Blairites support proportional representation - the litmus test of pluralist credentials, because it denies power without securing strong and enduring majoritarian support - and open pre-election negotiations.

Gordon Brown had a palpable fear of public conflict. Debate was to be avoided at all costs, hence the remorseless sidelining of all pretenders to his crown. He would not fight Blair and no one would be allowed to fight him. Blair himself appeared more open, but as Ashdown found to his cost, the veneer was thin. Under Blair and Brown, party democracy was hollowed out and links to other progressive forces dried up. At the very most, they believed that five people could change the world.

All tomorrow's parties
Yet politics is changing. In 1951, the two main parties secured 98 per cent of the popular vote; this year it was 65 per cent. With the smaller parties (including the Liberal Democrats) winning more than 80 seats, hung parliaments, even under the current system, will surely become a regular feature of elections. Labour will have to be prepared to form alliances or remain in the wilderness. Today, across Britain, seven different political parties are in office. Facebook, Twitter and satirical sites such as mydavidcameron.com mean that neither a party's central command nor the Sun can win it any more.

Tribalism and the elitism that goes with it have cut Labour off from its core base; witness the former prime minister's clash with Gillian Duffy in Rochdale, the defining moment of the election campaign. Labour has become the lumbering party, the arrogant party. Compare and contrast with the coalition government, which may be on the centre right but is pluralism in action: the merging and potential strengthening of political cultures and traditions. The days of catch-all left-of-centre parties such as Labour and Germany's once-mighty Social Democratic Party (which won only 23 per cent of the vote in the last election) are over. In Sweden and France the left is renewing only on the basis of broader red-green coalitions.

Back in 2001, in a book optimistically entitled The Progressive Century, the Lib Dem adviser Neil Sherlock and I described the potential of a new politics, requiring not Blair's suffocating big tent but a campsite of different parties and movements, sharing common values while retaining their own identity. Labour can - indeed, it must - take a lead role as part of a progressive alliance, but only if it can move away from a belief in its singular and exclusive role. Only then can it help to create an alliance whose sum is greater than its parts. This would not be a rainbow alliance of vested interests but a genuine coalition because of a shared set of values.
In the meantime, the poor get poorer and the planet burns; and the inability of our political system to deal with these crises creates a third - that of democracy itself. A progressive alliance can be built from the growing recognition that we cannot create a more equal, sustainable and democratic world by addressing any one of these issues in isolation.

But can the pluralist win? Can the ambivalent, curious, generous and open-minded succeed against the take-no-prisoners approach of the tribalists? On one level, the omens aren't good. In every crisis that Labour has faced, notably in 1929 and 1979, it has retreated into tribalist orthodoxy. Today the party has once again been pushed back into its heartlands. One MP sent me an email when the post-election talks with the Lib Dems broke down, in which he gleefully said that it was time, comrade, for hobnail boots, not sandals.

For inspiration and guidance, we should return to Gramsci and his understanding of political turning points, or of interregnums, the short space between an old order dying and the emergence of something new. Tribal orders feel insurmountable, but can fall fast because they are so brittle. They can't be scratched, yet under continued pressure they can suddenly snap.

Hello to Berlin
Over the coming months and years, Labour needs a "Berlin Wall" moment that will help transform it into a pluralist party. To make such a fundamental shift happen will require sustained effort to win the larger argument about how we can best transform Britain into a more equal, sustainable and democratic nation. Ironically, it was Lenin who said that "the right words are worth a hundred regiments".

The Holy Grail of pluralism - proportional representation - is again off the agenda, but we cannot allow ourselves to be constrained by electoral systems. We must instead understand that it is culture, ideas and organisation that need to change first. All of these we can shape and build. We have to pre-empt a more pluralist politics by practising it, and show it works by submitting ourselves and our institutions to continual democratic scrutiny.

The leading social-democratic theorist Eduard Bernstein wrote that "democracy is both means and ends. It is the weapon in the struggle for socialism and it is the form in which socialism will be realised." Through pluralism, we can seek to remoralise public institutions as places in which the values of equality, solidarity and citizenship resonate.

Pluralism can't offer certainty - it is always unfinished business - but it is our business. Pluralism is the only way socialists can be. Fundamentally, it is about trusting people to make their own democratic future. Unless we get that right, everything else will go wrong.

Larry Elliott: lunatics back in charge of economy

2010-06-14T13:14:00.002+01:00

The lunatics are back in charge of the economy and they want cuts, cuts, cuts
Franklin D Roosevelt's mistake wasn't boosting the economy with government spending, it was heeding the advice of the deficit hawks when he sought re-election and tipping the US economy back into recession

Larry Elliott, economics editor
The Guardian, Monday 14 June 2010

The Germans are doing it. The Greeks, the Spanish and the Portuguese believe they have no choice but to do it. George Osborne believes it is his patriotic duty to do it. Around the world, cutting budget deficits has become the priority for policymakers fearful that rising debt levels will leave them at the mercy of capricious financial markets.

Mervyn King has applauded the return of fiscal conservatism. So has the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Two months after they urged that budgetary support be maintained until recovery was fully entrenched, finance ministers and central bank governors from the G20 said they welcomed the plans announced by some countries to begin deficit cutting without delay.

Budget deficits are certainly high across the G20 and beyond. But they are high primarily because of the severity of the worst recession since the second world war and because of the action taken collectively by governments to prevent that recession turning into something far, far worse.

As things stand, a second Great Depression has been averted, but growth has ranged from the weak in Europe to the unspectacular in the United States. Banks are not lending. Unemployment is running at near double-digit levels in the US and the eurozone. The determination to cut budget deficits in these circumstances does not show that policymakers of probity and integrity have replaced the irresponsible spendthrifts of 2008 and 2009. It shows that the lunatics are back in charge of the asylum.

As evidence, take David Cameron's warning last week about the need for austerity. The prime minister said: "Nothing illustrates better the total irresponsibility of the last government's approach than the fact that they kept ratcheting up unaffordable government spending even when the economy was shrinking."

This brought the apt riposte from Marshall Auerback of the New Deal 2.0 thinktank. "So we're supposed to ratchet up government spending when the economy is growing? When it can present genuine inflationary dangers? If this is the type of policy incoherence we have in store, then God help the United Kingdom."

There are economically literate members of the government capable of pointing out to the PM that he is talking dangerous nonsense. Vince Cable is one. Chris Huhne is another. Sadly, though, the Liberal Democrats seem unwilling or unable to mount an argument against policies that now threaten to repeat the mistakes of Japan in the 1990s, when every tentative recovery was snuffed out by over-hasty retrenchment.

Let's start with a bit of history. The budget hawks like to cite Geoffrey Howe's draconian 1981 budget as evidence that fiscal tightening is perfectly consistent with economic growth. So it is, providing there is scope for an over-valued pound to depreciate and for excessively high interest rates to be cut. So it is, provided that tumbling oil prices raise the real incomes of consumers and cut costs for businesses. All these things happened in the early 1980s; none of them are likely to occur now. The pound has already fallen by 25%, interest rates are at 0.5% and oil prices show no sign of falling much below $70 (£48) a barrel.

The real historical comparison is not with 1981 but, as the American economist Paul Davidson notes, with the US in 1937. On arriving in the White House in 1933, Franklin D Roosevelt used government spending and tax breaks to boost the economy. The US ran deficits of between 2% and 5% during FDR's first term but, while the economy started to pull out of the deep trough reached in 1932, the national debt rose from $20bn to $33bn .

Coming up for re-election, Roosevelt heeded the advice of the "sound money" economists who delivered the same sort of warnings that we are hearing today: the US was running unaffordable budget deficits that would impose an intolerable burden on future generations. The budget for 1937 was slashed and the US economy promptly went back into recession. Falling tax revenues meant the budget deficit rose to $37bn.

When deficit spending resumed in 1938, the economy started to grow again but did not fully recover until the US entered the second world war. The deficit hawks disappeared into obscurity as the need to win the war trumped all other considerations. By 1945, the US budget deficit stood at more than $250bn or 120% of GDP.

But the beneficial spin-off from the war effort was that the domestic economy was humming. Resources that had stood idle in the 1930s were fully utilised and there was full employment. Strong growth brought both the annual deficits and the size of the national debt down in the 1950s. Far from being burdened with unpayable debt, the baby boomers born in the late 1940s and 1950s were the most blessed generation in history.

That's enough history. Just as in 1937, private demand in most advanced countries is too weak to sustain the recovery. Budget deficits are a reflection of high unemployment and low levels of private investment. They are also a reflection of the big financial surpluses that have been amassed in the private sector. Animal spirits, in Keynes's phrase, are low. Consumers are worried about losing their jobs and are having their incomes squeezed. That makes businesses anxious about investing.

Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research has put some hard numbers on this trend. In the US, the private sector was in deficit by 4% of GDP in 2006 but is now running a surplus of 8% of GDP. In Britain, the corresponding move was from a 1% deficit to a 10% surplus. He estimates that the global private sector surplus is now $3.3 trillion.

These are counter-balanced by public sector deficits that also total $3.3tn. The public sector, in other words, has been compensating for a lack of private demand. This spending was not "irresponsible", although a collective attempt to rein in deficits when the private sector recovery is so anaemic certainly would be.

Dumas notes: "If some countries deflate their economies in an attempt to cut their government deficits, other countries will have a larger deficit – and even the deflating countries will be partially frustrated in their endeavours. Why? Because they will induce a renewed recession that will hammer tax revenue and enforce greater relief spending." The result, he warns, "will almost certainly be renewed European recession, quite possibly a prolonged depression".

So why are they doing it? Is it, for all Nick Clegg's guff about "progressive cuts", that the real agenda is to complete the demolition job on welfare states that was started in the 1980s? Or is simply that the deficit hawks are simply crackers?

Either way, we now have the bizarre spectacle of China, Japan, the eurozone and Britain all set on reducing budget deficits while simultaneously pursuing export-led growth. This is a logical absurdity because somebody, somewhere has to be importing all the exports. If the rest of the world assumes that the US is once again going to become the world's spender of last resort it is seriously mistaken.

Paul Krugman calls this "utter folly posing as wisdom". Sovereign debt problems are confined to those eurozone countries that have no way to deal with their productivity problems other than to deflate savagely. Bond markets are not freaking out about budget deficits in Britain, the US or Germany, but let's see how they react to a return to the mass unemployment, protectionism and political extremism of 1930s.

Stuart White maps the new politics

2010-06-09T18:40:00.000+01:00

OpenDemocracy
Where does the Coalition stand on the new ideological map?
Stuart White, 9 June 2010

About the author
Stuart White is a political theorist with an interest in ideas and their application. His research analyses political ideals such as social justice, equality and liberty and considers the kind of policies and institutions that advance these ideals. He lectures at Oxford University and blogs at Next Left.

Last year I tried in an article at Next Left, later revised for the New Statesman, to map the main new ideological currents in British politics, in particular those influencing debate amongst self-defined ‘progressives’. How far does the map I offered back then – tentatively and provisionally – help us understand the new political terrain we are now on? How, for example, does the Coalition stand in terms of these currents? Labour? Other, non-party groupings?

In the original article, I identified four currents of thought:

(1) Left communitarianism: ‘We need a social vision that acknowledges and celebrates our interdependence. This will emphasise solidarity and mutuality against the atomistic individualism of the right. We need to tackle economic equality and restate the case for ambitious collective action, while also recalling that social democracy begins, not with the state, but in the everyday cooperation of civil society. The market must be kept firmly in its place, which is not in the public sector.’

(2) Left republicanism: ‘The task of progressive politics is radically to disperse power and opportunity and to build a participatory and deliberative form of democratic politics. This requires restructuring the state so that individuals participate more directly in decision-making. It requires the cultivation of a grass-roots social-movement politics. It also requires a new politics of ownership, one that seeks both to widen individual asset ownership and to democratise the control of capital.’

(3) Centre republicanism: ‘The task of progressive politics is radically to disperse power and opportunity. This requires restructuring the state in a much more decentralised direction; individual empowerment in public services; a wider distribution of assets; and a stronger policy of protecting - indeed, expanding - civil liberties and lifestyle freedom. The left should get over its fixation on high taxation of labour income and put more emphasis on taxing unearned wealth and environmental bads.’

(4) Right communitarianism: ‘The urgent task is to fill the moral vacuum created by a combination of neo-liberalism in the economy and lifestyle liberalism in society. This requires that we rebuild a strongly moralistic civil society to meet social needs that neither the free market nor the conventional welfare state can meet. To this end, we must build a new political and economic localism. We must ‘recapitalise the poor’ in order to empower them to crawl out from under the welfare state, and the welfare state itself must be cut back.’

The Coalition

The Coalition government can be seen, I think, as drawing on – without in any way being reducible to - right communitarian and centre republican currents.

Right communitarianism is represented by people such as Iain Duncan Smith and by those, such as Philippa Stroud, whom some are now calling the ‘theo-cons’ at the Department of Work and Pensions. Outside of the government machine, Red Tory Phillip Blond stands ready at Respublica to offer advice.

Centre republicanism, as I termed it, has strong affinities with ‘Orange Book’ liberalism, and it is striking that one of the think-tankers I linked to this current, Richard Reeves, has now become Nick Clegg’s advisor on political strategy. Indeed, the Demos pamphlet, The Liberal Republic, co-authored by Richard Reeves and Phil Collins, has been cited as something civil servants have been required to read to get a handle on the Coalition’s overarching philosophy.

The marrying of right communitarianism and centre republicanism is obviously not without potential for conflict. There are some possible points of agreement. Both can agree on the desirability of concerted action to achieve a wider distribution of assets, for instance. But the Reevesian ‘liberal republic’ celebrates a lifestyle liberalism with which right communitarianism is deeply uncomfortable. Phillip Blond spent a good part of the past year, and his book Red Tory, fulminating against the evils of hedonistic, nihilistic, liberalism – not just a particular form of liberalism, but liberalism as such. In a remarkable episode of high-speed ideological reappraisal, Blond then discovered in a Newsnight interview on the first full day of the new government that Red Toryism is, after all, compatible with ‘liberalism’, finding common ground around the theme of the ‘Big Society’. We shall see.

And while both currents might be there in the Coalition mix, we should emphatically not see the Coalition as simply a marriage of the two currents. For there are other, potentially more powerful elements in the mix. Given their commitments to spreading asset ownership, I cannot see how right communitarianism or centre republicanism could support abolition of the Child Trust Fund (see Nick Pearce in OK). But the Coalition did abolish it, almost immediately, reflecting a particular brand of pragmatism that is tacitly grounded in Thatcherite assumptions about the state and the economy. If one wants to understand the ideology of the Coalition look at George Osborne. Right communitarian? Centre republican? Pragmatic Thatcherite? The question answers itself – a point to which I shall return below.

Labour and the leadership question

What about Labour? The leadership race offers an excellent opportunity for Labour to reflect on its public philosophy. To date, however, none of the candidates has articulated a very clear vision of what a future public philosophy might look like.

By contrast, Jon Cruddas, who is not standing as a candidate for the leader’s job, has written suggestively on this. In my original article, I associated Cruddas with left communitarianism. In his recent article in the New Statesman, co-authored with Jonathan Rutherford, Cruddas can be seen as integrating left communitarian and left republican concerns. There is a new emphasis on liberty and democratic renewal in this article which resonates with left republican concerns. At the same time, Cruddas continues to draw attention to the importance of reciprocity and locality to social democratic politics, reflecting a communitarian – or what he would prefer to call ‘ethical socialist’ - outlook. David Lammy, writing for Fabian Review, is also developing an interesting synthesis of communitarian and republican ideas.

In addition the emphasis that both David and Ed Miliband, leadership candidates, have placed on rebuilding Labour as a community-based, campaigning party, learning from the example of organizations such as London Citizens, represents a promising – and very practical - coming together of communitarian and republican themes.

However, integrating republicanism into Labour’s public philosophy poses considerable challenges which should not be underestimated. For example, just how far is Labour willing to go as a party of democratic renewal?

The nub of the question is this: Does Labour think of political success in terms of the return of another majority Labour government? Or does Labour think in terms of being part of a wider left or centre-left politics and in terms of a future progressive coalition government? Much of the discussion of the party’s future still seems to assume that the goal is the return of a majority Labour government, a way of thinking that is really quite at odds with the reforms, e.g., proportional representation, which are necessary for genuine and fundamental democratic renewal.

The new democratic activism

This brings us to what might be called the new democratic activism: the activism of groups such as Take Back Parliament and Power 2010, coming out of the tradition of Charter 88.

Far more than any political party, it is this new activist movement which represents ‘republicanism’ in contemporary politics. It has connected most closely with the Liberal Democrats of the three main parties. But the new democratic activism emerged independently of the Lib Dems, and it will remain independent – particularly now that the Lib Dems are locked into a government that will, inevitably, disappoint a lot of the hopes of new democratic activists.

Is the new democratic activism left or centre republicanism? (Or some other kind of republicanism?)

One cannot say. For it is a feature of the new democratic activism – and this is an observation, not a criticism - that it treats questions of political and constitutional reform as a self-contained ‘module’, detached from, say, questions of political economy. Take Back Parliament is a campaign for ‘Fair Votes’. It draws on an activist base which wants a state grounded in real popular sovereignty, in which state power is more widely dispersed, transparent and accountable, and respectful of civil liberties. But these commitments are compatible with a wide range of philosophical views on citizenship and the economy. They can fit with a left republican agenda which also wants to make the power of capital accountable. Or they can fit with a right-libertarian politics which simplistically sees ‘the state’ as the problem and seeks to ‘shrink’ the state in the name of liberty. Or they can fit with any number of other positions.

Looking ahead

Looking ahead – and thereby sticking my neck out - I do not expect right communitarianism or centre republicanism to be that important in determining the final character of the Coalition.

The Coalition does not represent the ‘end of Thatcherism’. To be sure, Cameron is a Tory politician in what David Marquand calls the ‘Whig imperialist’ tradition and, as such, he is not a dogmatic or doctrinaire politician in the way that the Thatcherites of the 1980s were. In that sense Thatcherism is indeed dead. But the thing about Whig imperialists is that, precisely because they are so undoctrinaire, so untheoretical and ‘pragmatic’, they adapt to their ideological surroundings, to the prevailing ‘common sense’. And the ‘common sense’ surrounding Cameron and his allies, as of so much of the political elite more widely, is in its essence a Thatcherite one: the state is the problem, markets work, taxes should be lowered, unions should be weak, etc. These assumptions, grasped as a sensibility rather than as a theoretical dogma, will be the major force shaping the government’s character. Thatcherism had to be doctrinaire in the 1980s because it was then an insurgent public philosophy battling to displace the conventional wisdom. Now it is the conventional wisdom. So its continued success is quite compatible with the ascendancy of undoctrinaire, pragmatic politicians.

In short, I expect this to be a government of Thatcherite consolidation: a government that consolidates Britain’s adherence to neo-liberal economics and which tries to use the fiscal crisis as an opportunity to push an anti-state agenda further. This is entirely consistent with modest tempering of free-market excesses in specific areas, e.g., banking – just as New Labour tempered excesses in other areas, e.g., in the distribution of income via generous tax credits, while also preserving key elements of the post-Thatcher settlement. The Liberal Democrats are not in a strong position to resist any of this, not least because their own ‘Orange Book’ liberals share much of the Thatcherite analysis.

Right communitarianism is potentially important in rhetorical terms as providing the government with a distinctively non-Thatcherite, ‘compassionate’ way of talking about problems of poverty - even as the practice of welfare reform is to intensify coercive pressures on the most vulnerable in the labour market. And centre republican discourse can of course be used to argue for new experiments in the public services, such as Michael Gove’s agenda for schools. Admittedly, this requires that one accentuate the more individualistic aspects of republican thought almost to the exclusion of the democratic aspects – but Reeves’s conception of republicanism has always had something of this bias.

On the other hand, a creative coming together of left communitarian and left republican currents might yet offer a way of truly bringing the age of Thatcher to an end.

But while this fusion can probably be made philosophically, it is harder to make it happen politically. It will require a willingness on Labour’s part – of which there is as yet little sign - to accept a new, pluralistic electoral politics, a politics of red/green or red/orange or red/green/orange coalitions. And it will require a supporting context of campaigning activism that engages with social, economic and environmental issues with the same idealism, imagination and generosity of spirit with which the new democratic activists campaign for the reconstitution of the state. Of course, some of that activism is there already. But we need so much more of it.

Belusconi: culture bites politics

2010-06-09T10:44:00.003+01:00

This is from OpenDemocracy, an important and very interesting source of debate and discussion on matters of interest - everyone is recommended to subscribe to them.

Silvio Berlusconi: culture bites politics
Geoff Andrews, 8 June 2010

A successful, intimidating prime minister has moulded Italy’s public life in his own image. A fearful, supine opposition is paralysed by his achievement. But there is one source of hope, says Geoff Andrews.

It has been clear for a long time that Silvio Berlusconi is a leader very far from the classic professional politician of the western liberal-democratic mould. Rather, Italy’s premier is a postmodern populist who employs a highly personalised style of leadership in which television plays a central part. His rule during three periods in office (1994-95, 2001-06, 2008-) has been a celebration of image and power fuelled by a constant appeal to the gut instincts of the people. His wealth is at once the source of his route to power, a measure of his invincibility, and a constant reminder to Italians of his entrepreneurial success and ability to get things done.
In all this, Berlusconi draws a winning symbolic contrast with the older type of political leader - locked in the world of newspaper columns and council-chamber meetings. driven to explain policy by reference to ideology, constrained (however grudgingly) by claims of accountability and transparency. No wonder Italy’s official opposition is afraid of him.

Indeed, Berlusconi’s current period in office (since his victory in the elections of April 2008) has seen fear acquire increasing political importance. The prime minister regularly uses his media influence to remove dissidents from the main public-broadcasting channels; assails his opponents as communists or conspirators; harasses his critics with legal writs; denounces judges (whom he sees as his main adversaries); and even speaks out against the president of the republic.
This aggressive stance has paralysed Italy’s official opposition. Its main representative, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party) - itself relatively new, but led by ex-communists and ex-Christian Democrats shaped by the political failures of an earlier era - has been unable either to confront the source of Silvio Berlusconi’s political power during its brief period in government or to begin to construct a plausible vision of a post-Berlusconi world. Italy’s opposition has yet answer the big questions surrounding Italy’s future in any credible way.

The overall result is that a kind of fatalism now pervades Italian public life. Almost every week brings fresh allegations about Berlusconi’s behaviour (of mafia associations or corruption scandals, for example), which are widely reported in a foreign media fixated on the idea of “Berlusconi in crisis”; yet these continue to have little effect on those that matter - the Italian people. In another notable departure from the norms of everyday European politics, many Italians even perceive the prime minister’s human frailties (as others see them) as virtues of his leadership. An almost incredible aspect of this bizarre political situation is that amid a morass of condemnation and vitriol, Berlusconi - one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in modern Europe - has been able successfully to present himself as a victim.

The artists’ answer
This questions that arise from this situation are obvious: how can it be understood, and - if the leader is so commanding and the opposition so stultified - where will real challenge come from?
Italy’s artists offer answers to both. The filmmaker Erik Gandini has created an extraordinary social document called Videocracy which in effect argues that Silvio Berlusconi has (mainly through the vehicle of television) initiated a cultural revolution that has moulded Italians in his own image. In this perspective Berlusconismo’s drenching celebrity culture has a sinister twist - consolidating the leader’s almost unassailable personal power by creating a public culture in his own image. As a result what the Italian think-tank Vision refers to as the “B-factor” continues to dominate Italy and set the terms of political debate.

Italy’s public broadcaster RAI banned trailers for Gandini’s film being shown, part of a now familiar pattern of threats and censorship in response to artists’ interventions. The same scorn was poured on Sabina Guzzanti’s new film Draquila: L’Italia Che Trema (Draquila: Italy Trembles), which the Italian culture minister Sandro Bondi dismissed as a “propaganda film..that insults the truth and the Italian people”. The film, whose title combines Dracula and L’Aquila (the Abruzzo town devastated by an earthquake in April 2009 which killed almost 300 people and made 60,000 homeless), is a courageous attempt to address the plight of these citizens who feel abandoned by their government. Guzzanti, one of Italy’s leading satirists, has through this work engaged directly with citizens and local movements, such as the “Yes We Camp” group I met when I visited L’Aquila (see “Italy and the G8: voices from L’Aquila”, 10 July 2009). Draquila won a standing ovation at the 2010 Cannes film festival.

An earlier example of an artistic effort to make sense of Italy’s predicament under Berlusconi is Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano, released just before the 2006 election. Moretti had already played a major role in civil-society movements such as the girotondi, which campaigned against Berlusconi’s conflicts of interests in the absence of any leadership from the official opposition. “With these leaders we will never win”, he famously told a crowd in Piazza Navona in Rome in 2002, with the centre-left functionaries behind him – largely the same crowd which leads the Democratic Party today.

More recently, the comic blogger Beppe Grillo - a constant critic of the corrupt nature of Italy’s political class - has moved from marginal dissident to serious political opponent; in the regional elections of March 2010 his Movimento a 5 Stelle (Five-Star Movement) captured half a million votes. His challenge extends beyond Berlusconi to the timid and compromised politicians of the official opposition, among which only Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values) Party offers an exception. Beppe Grillo’s imaginative use of new media has helped him to establish an extraordinary political network.

On their own, these “cultural critics” cannot end Berlusconismo and change Italy. But in two ways they can provide a new opposition and revitalise Italy’s public life. First, they use a language which enables them to reach beyond the restrictions of the orthodox politicians and can help galvanise rather than alienate other dissentingl voices in civil society. Second, they interrogate in a courageous and creative way the darker sides of the Berlusconi phenomenon.
Above all, they understand the nature of Silvio Berlusconi’s power as well as its limits. They do not retreat from difficult questions. They have gone where the official opposition has feared to tread. They provide hope, if not yet a vision, of a different Italy.

Cruddas and Rutherford say No Right Turn

2010-06-03T15:14:00.002+01:00

New Statesman 31 May 2010
See the bigger picture
Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford

Labour lost, not because it was too soft on immigration and welfare, but because it failed to convince working people of its core values.

People have a common desire to search for something good in their lives. Labour in power did not give voice to this hope: we broke our tacit covenant with the people - a covenant about housing, work and security, a sense of neighbourliness and community. We lost their trust and so lost the election; and we lost it badly. Now we need to rediscover our campaigning traditions of democracy and socialism, and build a grass-roots movement for a new covenant between the people and Labour.

Yet Labour appears to be heading elsewhere. Since polling day a new orthodoxy has emerged: it is all about immigration and welfare recipients. Let's prioritise the "indigenous" folk, the argument goes; let's crack down on those hoovering up welfare and take the gloves off when it comes to dealing with new arrivals. This wretched prognosis is all about Labour rediscovering the "working class" and camping out on the governing coalition's right flank. That is a deadly position to adopt.

This is a "working class" long present in Labour history. It is the working class of the Webbs and the late-Victorian social investigators, of William Beveridge and fellow members of the Eugenics Education Society - the degenerate mob at the gate, undermining secular, rationalist progress. The distinction between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor is back.

Political economy
Where in these current debates are issues of political economy? Where is the deep analysis of power and structural inequality? Indeed, where are the hope and generosity, the optimism and warmth, the search for a different world? Why are we retreating into a sour, kiss-up, kick-down politics?

The future of Labour will be shaped by how we judge our incumbency. Let us celebrate our achievements in government, but also face up to what went wrong. In a hostile climate, we rebuilt our public services. We lifted nearly a million pensioners out of poverty. The fall in child poverty rates was the second largest in the OECD after Mexico. Education, health care, childcare have all improved. And Britain is a more tolerant place than it was 13 years ago.

But we cannot avoid looking at the larger picture. The National Equality Panel made it clear in its January report: "the large inequality growth of the 1980s has not been reversed". In 1976, the bottom 50 per cent of the population owned 8 per cent of the nation's wealth. By 2001, the figure had fallen to 5 per cent. Labour presided over some of the highest levels of poverty and inequality in Europe, despite ten years of uninterrupted growth.

The power of financial capital was left unchecked and a banking oligarchy captured the financial regulatory system and the political class. While business productivity failed to grow, the business model of shareholder value ensured that the pay of company directors and of those working in the upper echelons of the financial houses soared. Meanwhile, the housing market became the centrepiece of a casino economy. Instead of investment in homes for future generations, there was asset inflation and speculation. Like an imperial cantonment in a colonised land, the City exerted economic control and gave nothing back. As for Labour, it made its Faustian pact: in return for tax revenues that were a fraction of City profits, it played cheerleader to a new "golden age" of finance.

The crash in the financial markets that followed was a crisis of fixed investment. But it was also a crisis of democracy - a profound political failure, on the part of our government, to manage the economy and to protect the security of British citizens. The banking bailout and quantitative easing stopped the collapse of the financial system, but did nothing to halt the transfer of wealth to the rich. Between the third quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010, national income grew by £27bn. Higher profits have accounted for £24bn of the increase, while wages have risen by £2bn. This is an almost unprecedented growth in profits over wages in absolute terms.

Between 1978 and 2008, more than four million jobs in manufacturing vanished. Deindustrialisation undermined the income base of the working class. The share of the national wealth going to wages peaked at 65 per cent in 1973; by 2008, it had dropped to 53 per cent. Over a 30-year period, there was a huge transfer of wealth and power to a rich elite. To maintain their living standards, low- and middle-earning households increased their borrowing, fuelling the debt crisis in the process.

Labour's response was to prepare workers for the global market. It began to promote an entrepreneurial way of life and the aspiration of "earning and owning". The drive towards a more flexible labour market increased the use of short-term contracts, agency work, subcontracting and the hiring of those who were "self-employed". The model encouraged immigration into Britain, but left the British workforce one of the worst protected in Europe.

The whirlwind of globalisation has destroyed working-class communities. In the most deprived areas, a culture of shame and failure has taken root. Children grow up expecting nothing, and so give nothing in return. People fear that their identity and way of life are under threat; in consequence, they fear the stranger. This fear then spreads outwards to the wider population, like ripples across a pond.

Broken Britain?
Nowhere has the impact of liberal-market modernisation been felt more acutely than in the family. The strains placed on women as they juggle the roles of worker, mother and housekeeper make ordinary family life much more difficult to sustain. Time poverty in working families deprives children of contact with their parents. The intensification of work has led to significant increases in levels of anxiety and sleep problems.

For many young people without decently paid work and housing, it has become impossible to follow the conventional rites of passage into adulthood - leaving home, getting a job, establishing a family and taking on legal obligations and rights.

The consequences of this social marketisation were inevitable. Insecurity and a feeling of dispossession turned into hostility to foreigners. Righteous anger at class injustice soured into ethnic hatred. Self-interested individualism eroded the bonds of community and corrupted the ethics of public life. Chronic deprivation spawned self-destructive behaviour, addiction, mental illness, criminality and "conduct disorder". These are symptoms of incivility, however, not its root causes.

The media responded by scapegoating recipients of welfare, single mothers and immigrants. Images of "chavs" and "feral" children legitimised the criminalisation and incarceration of the young and the poor. Government welfare reforms identified the poor as responsible for their own unemployment and poverty. As it sought to repair the tensions in its electoral coalition using right-wing populism, Labour lost its moral compass. More of the same is not the post-election solution that Labour needs.

“Third Way" politics was based on the mistaken beliefs that Britain's class-bound society was giving way to a meritocracy and that globalisation was essentially benign. Labour has to find a narrative about this period that allows it to move on and build a future.

The good society
A first step would be to rediscover a politics of the common good. What type of society do we wish to create? Labour can draw on two coherent, deeply rooted strands of British political thought here. One is the kind of social democracy that is influenced by ethical socialism, and that grows upwards from the people. The other is the radical liberalism of thinkers such as Leonard T Hobhouse.

This politics is conservative, in that it values the continuity of the social goods which shape people's lives: home, family, relationships, good work, locality and communities of belonging. Yet it also promotes social justice in its commitment to personal freedom and to the deepening and extension of equality and democracy in the economy and society at large. Such a politics would enable Labour to engage with the contradictory elements of conservatism and cosmopolitan modernity in British society, and also with the contradictory desires for freedom and security, for the unpredictable and the familiar, that exist in each of us. However, an ethical politics on its own is not sufficient to realise a new society. It will require far-reaching changes in the organisation, control and ownership of the economy to achieve a just distribution of wealth, power and resources.

New covenant
A new covenant between Labour and the people would have three strands. First, it will be for an ethic of reciprocity: "Do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you." It will begin in the daily life of our neighbourhoods, in the commitments of family life. And it would extend to our working lives and our participation in society as citizens. In return for fulfilling our obligations as neighbours and parents, we will expect the government to create a fair tax system and to ensure a proper level of universal social protection, and guarantee a minimum income entitlement. The market, as well as the government, must provide a living wage for all, secure employment and decent working conditions and pensions. People need homes to live in - therefore a national housebuilding programme, along with reform of the private rented sector and the mortgage market.

Second, the covenant would be for an ethical economy that secures capital and employment in localities, creating the conditions for social growth. We are still in the early stages of the economic crisis, and rebuilding the British economy in the long term will require policy strategies for substantial wealth creation and its equitable distribution through well-paid jobs and regional spread. This will entail our government working with manufacturing industry to identify and nurture potential markets, and also demand "patient" or long-term capital investment. J M Keynes, no socialist, recommended this "somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment" when fixed investment collapses. Meanwhile, reform of corporate governance would bring firms under greater democratic control by stakeholders, and thus make business more accountable.
Third, the covenant would be for liberty. Labour is the product of the long popular struggle for freedom and democracy. And its role has been to defend society against the power of the state and the market. Each person has the right to be human in his or her own way. Each has obligations to family, work and society. These rights and obligations can best be achieved by deepening and extending the democratic covenant. Britain needs a constitution based on a democratic state and the devolution of power. We need to bring elites and corporate power to account and our democratic cultures need strengthening by improving the opportunities for active participation and deliberative decision-making by the people. We need a new culture of freedom of information, and more plural ownership of the media.

A new Labour covenant would be the beginning of a new ethical relationship among individuals, and between individuals and society. This ethics will be the basis for an agreement between society and a new kind of democratic "developmental state", as well as a productive, wealth-creating economy. It will not thrive on soundbites, public announcements, passive listening, or the broadcasting of information. Rather, it will be made in campaigning, in the active process of building leadership through dialogue.

The task for Labour, as Raymond Williams once put it, is to "make hope possible rather than despair convincing". Listen to much of the post-election soul-searching and you detect an emptiness within Labour; the replacement of hope by calculation and a base pandering to its worst instincts. The anecdotes told by canvassing MPs about immigrants and scroungers are allegories of a deeper uncertainty about what the Labour Party stands for.

Richard Rorty once wrote that "the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete and powerless". This is an experience that many former Labour voters describe. To use dry terms such as "disconnection" to comprehend it is to underestimate the seriousness of what they feel: grievous pain and loss. The optimism of progressive politics seems to have been leeched from a party that once, at its best, was a byword for it. That is why we need a new covenant with the electorate.

Jon Cruddas is MP for DagenhamJonathan Rutherford is professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University

Interview with David Harvey

2010-06-03T11:46:00.002+01:00

This is taken from Weekly Worker (June 3rd 2010)
Rethinking revolution
David Harvey, Marxist academic and author of the newly published The enigma of capital, spoke to Mark Fischer

Many commentators, from both Marxist and non-Marxist standpoints, predicted the current capitalist crisis. But have there been any features that surprised you?

Something that has surprised me about the way this crisis presents itself is the extremely parochial way that people are looking at it. It is viewed as if it is only happening in their own backyard - and even then only in parts of their backyard.

In the United States some are saying the crisis is over, because the stock market has revived. Implicit in that is a class bias in the definition of a crisis. It means capital is doing all right. But what, for example, about unemployment and underemployment - a disaster affecting close to a fifth of the American population?

So where does this idea about the end of the crisis come from? It’s surprising it has any currency at all. It is as if people truly believe the financial press when it equates a rise in the stock market with the end of crisis. In truth, the crisis is actually broadening and deepening. So what surprises me is how clear and unambiguous the nature of this crisis is and - paradoxically - the inability of people to grasp what is happening and why, even when it is staring them in the face.

You tend to see the wellsprings of crises in multiple contradictions, in a variety of limits to the functioning of capital itself as an alienated social form. Do you think that has been borne out by the form the current crisis has taken?

The way my analysis works is that, in the same way that capital shifts the crisis around geographically, so the crisis moves from one manifestation to another. At one stage of its development, the crisis can look like a profit squeeze, because capital is weak relative to labour.

Now nobody sane would attribute the current crisis to the idea that labour has too much power. I have not heard greedy unions blamed this time around, as opposed to in the 70s. At that time, you could say the crisis really was in the labour market and in shop-floor discipline.

Since then we have had the mass disciplining of the working classes by offshoring and by technological change. If that ‘peaceful’ process did not work, people like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and general Pinochet were ‘invented’ to do it violently.

You can discipline labour, but that produces a deficit of effective demand. The question then arises, how are you going to sell your product when wages aren’t rising? The answer opted for was - give everyone credit cards. So the debt economy is created, households become more and more in hock. But to manage that process you need financial institutions, which start to manipulate the debt. So we are now presented with an effective demand problem, against the backdrop of a problem of financial power.

The crisis this time therefore has a different manifestation. My argument has always been that you cannot go to one single-bullet theory of crisis. You always have to look at its dynamic development, moving from one manifestation in one sphere to another. At one moment, it can appear like an underconsumption problem (there is discussion about underconsumption at present, which I think is a serious problem). It moves on and presents itself as a profit-squeeze problem. Then it appears as the falling rate of profit (which has a narrow, technical meaning in conventional Marxist theory, although profits can fall for all sorts of reasons, including the lack of effective demand). I see the notion of crisis as being spread throughout the system.

In this context, I am very interested in some of the language Marx used in the Grundrisse, where he talks about limits and barriers. As an incredibly dynamic system, capital cannot abide limits on its development. It converts those limits into barriers, which it transcends and circumvents.

I think the theory of crisis has to be rewritten around this idea of a movable crisis form. I call it a movable famine, as opposed to a movable feast. One minute it is a credit famine, the next a famine in the labour market. It can also be shortages of raw materials, so there can be a limit imposed by nature, which has to be transcended by technological change. We have seen this happen historically many times.

My theory of crisis is very much about this movement - in The enigma of capital I make it much more explicit and, I hope, much easier for a mass audience to understand. It was my intention to bring out some of the central ideas from rather complicated books in a simpler way that helps illuminate what is going on around us and demonstrates the various forms in which crises can occur.

What we can say with certainty is that crisis is endemic to the system. We are going to come out of this crisis in a way that prepares the ground for the next one, unless we get rid of capitalism altogether. Which I think is a project we should all resuscitate - for the near, not distant, future.

The timetable for that depends on what stage you think capitalism is at. Does it still have progressive work to do in developing the productive forces, the world market and a global working class, or is it in decline?

I think it is always a bad idea to talk about the final stages or decline of capitalism. Capital has been a very fluid and very inventive system. It has been a permanently revolutionary force in history. Therefore the revolutionary transformations that are internal to capitalism are still capable of reconfiguring the world in radically different ways. They may not be ways that you and I would welcome, or produce a world we would want to live in.

So can capitalism survive for a protracted historical period? The answer is: yes, it can, but at what price?

For instance, I think growth for growth’s sake is becoming much more of a problem. Capital is about the production of surplus value, which means you must always end up with more value. More value has to be circulating than can easily be absorbed into the system. It is an expansionary force.

Capitalism has been so hegemonic - economically and culturally - that we automatically think that growth is good and unavoidably necessary, irrespective of the social, political and environmental cost. When we have zero growth we have a crisis by definition: everyone panics and prioritises getting it started again. The minimum growth people talk about as desirable is 3%. Historically since 1750 or so, capital has grown at the average rate of around 2.25% per year. What we are looking at then is 3% compound growth. Ask yourself what that means in terms of profitable investment opportunities.

In 1970, given the total volume of goods and services, it meant you had to find new possible investment opportunities for $0.4 trillion each year. Now it would take $1.5 trillion. By 2030, we’re talking about $3 trillion of new investment opportunities. We are locked into a logistical process where it begins to look less and less possible to find profitable outlets for this surplus.

Since the 1970s, capital has been encountering difficulties as a result. It has actually been investing not in making real things that people need, but in asset, property or stock markets. Such markets have a peculiar Ponzi character. Someone starts the ball rolling by investing in the stock market. Share value goes up and up, so people think, ‘This is a good way to make money - I’ll invest too’ and it goes up even further. The same fragile process is true of property markets.

An asset market does not clear in the same way as a market in tangible goods like, say, automobiles; they have a very different character. Yet more and more capital has been invested in such markets, so we have these asset bubbles. When the new economy of the 1990s, based on electronics, crashed, people went into the property markets, while the very rich went into art markets and that sort of thing. The economy is less and less organised to make real things that are useful to people. More and more it is about investing money in schemes which make money, without actually doing anything else.

The point I am making is that we have reached what I call an inflection point in the history of capitalism, where sustaining a 3% compound growth indefinitely is becoming less and less feasible. What that implies is that we are facing an historic choice. We can organise to get rid of capitalism, or capitalism can keep on inventing new, ever more intangible asset markets which peak, bubble and burst. The big one they are talking about these days is carbon trading. You can invest in weather futures. We are living in this world of incredible, notional, fictional investments.

While people are starving or trying to live on two dollars a day, others are making incredible amounts of money trading in such fictional investment markets. Just last year, five hedge fund managers had personal incomes of $3 billion each in just one year. Meanwhile, in Haiti you had a spiral downwards into ever more terrible poverty, even before the earthquake came along. You have to question what kind of world we are living in.

So, yes, capital can last, the capitalist class can preserve itself and even thrive - they are in fact getting extremely rich through this crisis. However, at some point people are going to look at this increasing class polarisation, say enough is enough and do something about it.

Is enough capital being wiped out to avoid a new crash in the near to medium term?

It is very hard say. When I say capital moves crises around, it does not mean we can see where it is going to move to next. I was a little surprised when Greece erupted and suddenly became the big problem. But it signals that to some degree the banking sector and the financial institutions are being stabilised. They have been stabilised by state power bailing them out. So the crisis has been shifted - from the banks to sovereign debt. Now we are seeing that for Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. And I think sovereign debt could be a testing issue for Britain too in the not too distant future.

There will be questioning of the sovereign debt of the United States. One of the really fascinating things about the US is that if you were to add up all the debt there - federal, state, corporate and individual - 40% of that is wrapped up in the mortgage market. This is why the crisis was focused there.

I don’t know where the crisis will move to next, but one of the places I would actually worry about is China. I am not an expert on that country, but everything I hear about it, such as property prices doubling in Shanghai last year, indicates there are problems brewing. They have a property boom going on, just like the one in the United States and here in Britain over the last 10 years.

One of the ways they are averting a crisis is through massive investment in urbanisation. Some of it is solid infrastructures - high-speed rail, new highway systems, public works and so on. The rest of it is property development. China is roaring along at 10% growth and everyone says that China is coming out of the crisis. But actually the way it is doing so looks very dangerous to me. I would not be at all surprised to see a real retrenchment there - particularly if the United States insists on a shift in exchange relations and thus brings disequilibrium into the market. So I would watch very carefully what is going on in east Asia. It is a place where another round of the crisis could begin - in the very place where it seems capitalism is recovering at the moment.

Are you encouraged by the political response of the left to the crisis?

I find the left is very conservative sometimes. There are some real problems with its analytical framework for interpreting this crisis. One of the aims of Enigma is to try and lay out an alternative.

There is a theoretical problem to be addressed and I see some attempt at that, which is encouraging. But there is the question of the popular response and the degree to which we can build upon mass anger. The historical pattern I would look to is 1929 in the United States and the stock market crash. Social movements didn’t really get into motion until 1933. The initial reaction to a crisis is to sit tight and hope it goes away. But by 1933 Roosevelt had to do something. Whether he wanted to or not, he had to act, because he was being pushed by very articulate leftwing forces. It was a powder keg waiting to blow. We are in the early stages of this process.

The legitimacy of the system is being propped up by stories that we are coming out of the woods: because the stock market has recovered, the worst is over. I am saying that it is almost inevitable that when a crisis hits people hang onto what they have. It is only when people become convinced that they cannot hang onto it any more that you start to see a political movement arising. I see it beginning in some places. Its potential is very exciting, but it is up to Marxists to articulate what the excitement and energy should be used to fight for.

This flags up the question of agency. In the contemporary world, does it remain the working class? After all, you talk of ‘social movements’ in the 1930s US, but at the core of that was the Communist Party, which stressed the unique role of that class.

This question of agency has to be rethought. I have never been happy with the general depiction in a lot of Marxist thinking of the working class as the agent - particularly when the working class is limited to the factory worker. For me, you would have to incorporate all the people who make the railroads, the cities, etc. It is not simply about the production of things: it is also about the production of spaces.

I have always thought that the general aura surrounding the proletariat in Marxist thinking is too narrow. I wanted it to be much broader, to be much more inclusive of all the people who are working on everything, everywhere - some of whom are easier to organise than others. To me this is very important as a first step, but the second thing is that it is not simply about being exploited in the workplace.

In the Communist manifesto, Marx and Engels talk of people being exploited in their living space by landlords and retailers. So we have to take into account this ‘second round’ of exploitation, but beyond that there is also the continuation of primitive accumulation - or what I like to call accumulation by dispossession. It is not primitive any more: it is ongoing. It is a very important part of what capital is about: people who lose their pension rights; people who get forced off the land.

Over the last 30 or 40 years there has been a tremendous assault upon the remains of peasant societies and you have had an incredible response, with movements such as the landless peasant movement in Brazil, with its very vibrant, very Leninist kind of organisation.

So what we have to think about is combining these much broader workforces. For instance, what about the workforce employed in banking? Some of the strongest unions right now are, of course, the state service unions. So how do we think about all of that as part of a much broader agency?

Then there is the politics. You have traditional political parties, but a lot of the faith in them has diminished over the years. We may want to try to resuscitate that faith, but we have to face the fact that right now they are not in a position to take a vanguard role and lead us out of the woods. They can be part of a more general uprising or solution, but I do not see them as being at the heart of it.

Then you have the NGOs. I am very sceptical about them. They can create spaces where things can happen, but revolution by NGO? Forget it. They are too much in hock to their donors, most of whom have an agenda of trying to integrate people into capitalism.

Take something like micro-finance, which is one of the big ways in which we are going to supposedly solve the problem of world poverty. But what it really consists of is a huge, exploitative industry, set up by Washington institutions, which is sucking wealth out of the poorest people in the world. The financial institutions are making rates of return of around 30%, 40%, in some cases 100% on micro-finance through bleeding these very, very poor people dry. When you criticise them, they say, ‘Well, it is better than the local moneylender, who charges 1,000%.’

Subprime lending was also a very good example: it was extracting wealth from relatively low-income populations. Even before the crisis hit, the African-American community in the States had lost $30-$40 billion-worth of assets through predatory subprime practices. So I think we have to take accumulation by dispossession into account when we think about ‘agency’. It has created a huge population of very discontented people, who are angry at capitalism not because of their work situation, but because they have lost their assets to capital.

I ask how we can construct an alliance which is really going to go for the jugular. For me agency right now is a question mark - I do not have a clear theory of it. I know it has to be broader and bigger than the traditional notion of the proletarian revolution. That is one of the things we have to really think about and work on.

There are things happening. In the final calculus, if you had a vast survey and asked everybody in the world, ‘Are you happy with the way capitalism is working?’ I think you would find the overwhelming majority would say ‘no’. Then you would say, ‘Let’s do something about it’. It is my fantasy that you could do that. Everyone would say, ‘Yes, what do we do about it?’ Then the question of agency will resolve itself through social movement.

Historically, when you look at actual movements, you will find they are much broader than the traditional notion of the proletariat. I did a lot of work on the Second Empire, Paris and the Paris Commune. I always find it interesting that of the first two pieces of legislation passed in the Commune one was a worker issue - about night-time work in the bakeries - and the other was a living-space issue: a moratorium on rents.

If you look at who participated in the Paris Commune, it was far broader than just the industrial working class. There were a lot of stonemasons, and precisely the people I have been talking about, along with the discontented and alienated middle class - Gustave Courbet, the painter, and so on. If you look at any revolutionary movement, it is generally a mix of individuals who have come together in some way or other. There is a big issue as to whether the movement has to have a pre-existing form of organisation, in the form of a political party, which then seizes the moment and guides.

I think in 1968, for example, the Communist Party in France held back the revolutionary movement, rather than helped it forward. I cannot say the answer is that there has to be the creation of a political party. A political party would need to do the right things, the right way and make the revolution happen. But if you look at the history of political parties, it has not always been the case. I veer between thinking maybe we would be better off going with a more spontaneous theory of revolution, like the sort that Henri Lefebvre talks about. This sort of uprising has worked in many instances, including the Paris Commune, which was not organised by a political party.

I wish I had a neat formula to solve that problem, but I do not. I think at this point in history you have to look at concrete examples. The revolutionary movement in Bolivia has very definite characteristics, very much based on the activism of ethnic groups. It also incorporates certain values that I think someone in Sweden may find a bit repressive and obnoxious. You have got to think about how on earth you are going to enter into alliances of some kind across these configurations - so the Bolivarian movement can unite with, say, Die Linke in Germany, with the Maoists in Nepal and in north-east India. How can you bring all of that together? That is again something that needs a lot of thought and consideration.

A danger of spontaneity is that, although it sounds very democratic, it can lack accountability, which is an essential aspect of democracy. You talk in your book about a defining democratic aspect of future society being social command over surplus. But that implies majority decisions, arrived at through democratic discussion. This is impossible without institutional forms and a culture of democracy today, not simply after the insurrection. To start to make radical incursions on the right of capital to rule us in the here and now, it seems to me we need something more weighty than simply spontaneity. A party, in fact ...

One of the things I have tried to do in the book is talk about processes of transition. I used Marx’s way of talking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism to illustrate what I thought would be needed to go from capitalism to communism.

One of the things that became apparent to me is that Marx actually has a theory of what I would call co-revolution. The way I modelled this, based on what he wrote in Capital, is to say there are seven ‘moments’. There is a technological/organisational moment, where change must happen; there is the relation to nature, which becomes unsustainable and must change; social relations, which have to change; there are production forms and labour processes, which have to change; there is daily life, which has to change; there is mental conceptions of the world, which no longer fit and must change; and institutional arrangements, which have to change.

I got this from a footnote in chapter 15 of Capital, which talks about the way in which capital consolidated its power by coming up with new technological forms. When you look at this account, Marx suggests that no single one of those moments, as I have dubbed them, is actually the main trigger, the most powerful cause. All of them were co-evolving.

Therefore my theory of revolution would say that you have to think of a co-revolutionary movement across all of those moments. How do we change technologies and social relations at the same time and what is the relationship between those transformations? What is humanity’s relationship to nature and how does that co-evolve with other spheres? How do the social processes of production relate?

What I set out to do was to show how revolution is not simply a political movement. One of the incredible things about capitalism is that it has been permanently revolutionary. Just think about those seven elements and how they were constituted in Britain in 1970. What were the technologies back then and how have they changed since? Nobody had cellphones, nobody had laptops - there has been an astonishing change in technology. But look at what that has done in terms of social relations; there are tremendous changes and challenges connected with that. Look at what it has done to our relationship to nature. Then there is the dramatic institutional change - the rise of new institutions like the international banks. The whole configuration of those elements looked completely different in 1970.

Capitalism is constantly changing such elements. If you compare 1930 to 1970, what you will see is a co-revolutionary movement going on inside capitalism all the time. My argument would be that a revolutionary movement has to see the contradictions and tensions between different elements and use them. Sometimes you can have silent revolutions - what Gramsci talked of as passive revolutions - which are just as important, it seems to me, as storming the barricades in spontaneous movement. But those revolutions take a lot of patience and you need special skills. My special skill is trying to alter people’s mental conceptions of the world, but I know perfectly well that that is not going to revolutionise the whole thing.

The revolutionary movement is very important. Marx talked about the transition from feudalism to capitalism - it took a considerable time; battles were won here and lost there. But the question was, who won the war? At the end of the day, the capitalists. By setting up new institutional arrangements the capitalists captured and transformed the state, came up with new technologies, changed social relations and daily life. So I am thinking of a revolution of long duration, needing individuals committed to it, who at the same time see themselves in alliance with others. The people who are concerned about the relation to nature need to be in alliance with those who are concerned about social relations.

The instant of a revolution, of a revolutionary change of government, is just one moment in that process that can succeed or not succeed. In many ways the problem with revolutionary transformations, including the one that was associated with 1917, was that there was no real theory of revolutionary change and how the dynamic of revolutionary movement was going to be kept going, and to me that is the most important thing.

Do you see a rise in interest in Marxism?

When I put Marx’s Capital on the web for my course, I was very surprised: there have been close to a million hits and that is being reproduced all over the place in other forms. So my personal response is that there is much more interest than was the case in the early 1990s, when everyone was declaring Marxism was dead and I was teaching a class of about seven bored students - people who could not find another class to go to.

But now it has come back big time, and quite possibly it will lay the basis for a future generation to start to think about the world differently.

David Harvey The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism Profile Books, 2010, pp256, £14.99

Victoria Brittain speaking in Leeds, June 17th

2010-06-03T09:32:00.001+01:00

Leeds City Council Peacelink Group and the Praxis Centre, Leeds Metropolitan University, present: The 2010 Leeds International Olof Palme MemorialPeace Lecture
Lies, Truth and Whistleblowersin war reporting from my work in Vietnam, Somalia, Angola, Congo, Uganda and Sudan
Victoria Brittain

Victoria Brittain was Associate Foreign Editor for The Guardian, and has also worked for The Times, ITN, Le Monde Diplomatique, Afrique/Asie. She has been a consultant to the UN on issues of the impact of war on women, and has written several books on Africa, two plays about Guantanamo Bay, and is co-author of Moazzam Begg's Guantanamo memoir, Enemy Combatant. She is on the board of the Institute of Race Relations, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Widows Rights International, and the Amiet Trust.

Leeds Civic Hall
Thursday 17th June 2010: 7PM for 7.30

Jeremy Gilbert: Democratise or Die

2010-06-01T15:51:00.001+01:00

OpenDemocracy
Democratise or Die: The status quo is not an option for Labour
Jeremy Gilbert, 31 May 2010

About the author: Jeremy Gilbert is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His publications include Anticapitalism and Culture.

There is one key reason why we now find ourselves in a new political era; one aspect of the election result which few predicted and which has decisively prevented it from being a re-run of 1979 and 1997. That is the surprising robustness of the Labour vote in various key constituencies up and down the country. Had it not been for the unexpected success of the party on the ground in many constituencies, Labour would have been defeated as convincingly as incumbent governments were at those two critical elections.

Despite the failure of the campaign as it was managed and presented from the centre, in those places where Labour has a vigorous local culture of organising, involving members and politicians in an active and participatory dialogue with communities, the Labour vote remained solid or even increased. This was even more true in Wales, Scotland and London, where devolved power has enabled Labour-led administrations to deliver real social democratic reforms for their electorates in recent years.

These facts are striking because they indicate the final failure of the New Labour strategy. Probably the best term ever coined to describe that strategy was Anthony Barnett’s phrase ‘corporate populism’. New Labour was based on the idea that a new kind of popular politics had to imitate the organisational and communications techniques of corporations, while pursuing a political programme which tried to align the interests of voters with those of actual corporations. When reflecting on this history, it’s striking to consider that New Labour’s full embrace of market liberalism came some time after its adoption of this approach as its own basic organisational mode.

Long before it became clear that New Labour wouldn’t break in any serious way with Thatcherite economics, while Blair still tantalised his supporters with references to Christian Socialism, ethical communitarianism, and the ‘stakeholder society’, the organisational form of New Labour prefigured the models and the value that it would later try to impose on the state, the public sector, and the country at large.

The basic organisational idea of New Labour was that the party membership were the problem and not the solution. Between 1994 and 1997 huge numbers of new members were recruited to Labour, enthused by the prospect of electability which Blair seemed to have brought back to the party. At just the same time, however, a programme of ‘reforms’ saw almost all meaningful decision-making about policy or campaigning strategy taken out of the hands of local parties and their memberships, and handed over to largely unaccountable bodies and officials, appointed by the leadership and only weakly accountable to anyone else.

Key decisions which required some degree of democratic legitimation, most notably the re-writing of the Labour constitution to remove any commitment to the socialisation of the means of production, were to be taken through postal ballots which presented members with the opportunity either to endorse the leadership position unequivocally or to reject it outright (a politically suicidal option for the party), without any significant opportunity for modification or discussion. The ideal New Labour member was someone who paid their membership, who got their messages from the leadership via the BBC or The Guardian, and who might deliver a few leaflets at election-time, but who never even wanted to participate in localised discussions or decision-making.

There was a certain logic to this. The prevalent idea in intellectual circles at the time was that the professionalisation of politics was an inexorable process: like it or not, political parties could no longer be vehicles of mass democracy, but had to fulfil their new historic function of producing and servicing successive generations of a specialised political class. This in itself was based on a partially-accurate, but ultimately lop-sided understanding of the many ways in which the world was changing at the time.

The decline of old forms of social solidarity, old industries, old patterns of geographical settlement, class culture and party loyalty all seemed to have resulted in a situation in which every voter would be a floating voter, and the only way to communicate with them effectively would be through the mass media. Only the experts who knew how to play the media game could be trusted both to formulate and to deliver the party’s message.

At the same time, according to New Labour thinking, those strange individuals who did remain nostalgically attached to ideas like democracy and collective actions were precisely the kind of people to whom the swing voters of middle England could never relate; and unfortunately those were exactly the kind of people who still showed up to Labour party branch meetings. Creating a new body of non-participating members, and removing all power from the party’s own democratic structures, was an understandable response, as was the decision to turn to focus-groups and opinion polls as better guides to policy than the will of party activists.
But there were two problems with this strategy. On the one hand, its basic analytical presuppositions already look antiquated. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, which enable millions of citizens to share ideas, to build campaigns and to communicate across great distances, the idea that a handful of professional politicians touring the TV studios of central London can be an adequate substitute for democratic politics looks clunky and forlorn. And while the televisual persona of the leader clearly remains a crucial factor in determining the success of a party today, the failure of Cleggmania to materialise at the ballot box shows that this is clearly not the overriding issue which can determine electoral outcomes. Add to this the failure of the Suns’s endorsement to deliver a clear majority for Cameron, and we have a mountain of evidence that the era of Spin, when a command-and-control communications strategy could always win the day, is now behind us.

But this isn’t just about shifts in the media landscape. What these changes demonstrate is that New Labour only ever understood one part of the story about the decline of old political forms. While they may have been right that the 19th / 20th century model of mass political campaigning was reaching its end, they failed to notice the extent to which the coming era would present new opportunities for community-building and for democratic action, and new problems for any attempt to stifle democracy and debate. The success and growing political importance of the blogosphere and of sites like this one is just one sign of this!

The second major problem with the New Labour model was this: in politics, as we so often forget at our peril, form dictates content. Lenin’s bloodthirsty, secretive revolutionary organisation produced a bloodthirsty, secretive state, despite the nobility of its aspiration to liberate humanity from servitude. New Labour started off promising to rebuild community, but in the end all it could offer in government was more corporate populism, always putting the interests of capital ahead of those of the people it was supposed to represent, and pursuing an unpopular programme of public-sector ‘reforms’ designed to fit all social relationships into the mould of transactions between corporations and their customers.

This programme never had any democratic legitimacy - polls showed time and again that most of the public, and the vast majority of Labour voters, didn’t want to have the same kind of relationship to their schools or their government that they had to Tescos - but New Labour pursued it relentlessly anyway. Only where Labour seemed to stand for something different did it escape electoral meltdown at the general election.

The lessons from this history are clear. The details of the programme on which Labour will fight the next election could not possibly be determined now, when so much remains uncertain about the intervening half-decade. What is certain is that unless it is the product of a radically renewed democratic process, that programme will not have the capacity to inspire the public, to mobilise the membership, and to break the Con-Lib coalition which now threatens to do to Labour what Blair and Ashdown once dreamed of doing to the Tories, shutting it out of government for at least a generation.

As Jon Cruddas, Compass and others have argued, a complete overhaul and reinvention of the Labour Party for the 21st century is the only thing that could achieve this end. In the era of ‘we-think’ and network culture, the collective intelligence of the membership - including the 12,000 who have rushed to join now that the age of New Labour looks likely to have ended - is the greatest possible resource that the otherwise-impoverished party has at its disposal.
New Labour was predicated on the idea that it was the membership that stood between Labour and power, but the election result has turned this assumption on its head. All over the world, from Brazil to Scandinavia, new experiments in participatory governance and radical democratic renewal (see, for example, Hilary Wainwrights’ book Reclaim the State) are finding ways of developing such collective resources in ways which go way beyond the kinds of mild constitutional reforms which the coalition is now contemplating, which themselves threaten to make Labour look like a democratic dinosaur.

If the party is to begin to learn from such experiments and to empower itself for the 21st century, then it will have to begin at home, with the most radical review of its own structures of decision-making and membership participation in its history. The alternative: fossilisation, petrification, extinction.

Article: Social Governance in the NHS

2010-05-31T11:04:00.003+01:00

Here is a link to an article by Chris Bem, friend of Taking Soundings, medical practitioner and writer, about the NHS and 'Social Governance': how the remit of our health service can be expanded for wider social benefit.

Just follow this link:

https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZtJbjXSY9GgZGZuNDk3cHpfMHhmdDRzbWc4&hl=en

Event: The Steady State Economy Conference

2010-05-31T11:00:00.000+01:00

The conference, to be held at Leeds Metropolitan University on Saturday 19th June from 10 AM to 6 PM, will explore the steady state economy as an alternative to economic growth. It offers a rare opportunity to hear a range of key progressive thinkers and participate in detailed workshop discussions to identify innovative policies for improving the economy.

Keynote presentations include:

Peter Victor, Professor in Environmental Studies, York University, Canada, on Managing Without Growth – Slower by Design not Disaster

Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation, on The Great Transition

Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development, University of Surrey (by video), on Prosperity Without Growth – Economics for a Finite Planet

Dan O'Neill, European Director, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, on What is a Steady State Economy and How Do We Achieve It?

In addition, critical issues will be addressed in ten workshops. Workshop speakers include Kate Pickett (co-author of The Spirit Level), Franny Armstrong (Director of The Age of Stupid), Roger Martin (Chair of the Optimum Population Trust), Molly Scott Cato (Economics Speaker for the Green Party), and Stephan Lutter (Researcher at the Sustainable Europe Research Institute), among others.

More information on the speakers, programme, and registration is available on the conference website:
http://steadystate.org/leeds2010/
Please direct any questions to the conference email address:
leeds2010@steadystate.org
Yours sincerely,David Adshead, Lorna Arblaster, Claire Bastin, Nigel Jones - EJfADan O'Neill, Rob Dietz - CASSE