Material Considerations

“I’d like to introduce the first application

On the agenda tonight

It’s an application for a proposal

Providing a formal indication

Of my designs on your affection.

The material considerations are crucial,

The usual ones for an application of this kind:

The aesthetic dimension, compatibility in its sexual context

The principle of emotional development

And, of course, your assessment of future romantic amenity.

The recommendation before you is one of approval.

The statement of devotion is sound in planning terms

Though the surface adoration management is poor.

Nonetheless, most weight must be placed

On the presumption in favour of sustainable entanglement."

Alas, in love all considerations are material,

And the heart is no Town and Country Planning Act.

Besides, your desire is in a Conservation Zone

And, since your committee’s rejection,

I have no appeal. There is no pining inspector.

On the Fear and the Pleasure of Solitude

Samuel Johnson, notoriously, hated being alone. Solitude to him not only invariably provoked his bouts of depression, but he saw it as something fundamentally corrupting and suspicious. He described the “solitary mortal” as “certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad”. Solitude to him was “dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue”. In his imagination, one supposes, seclusion was a hothouse producing the febrile, disordered fantasies of cranky, treasonous Whigs and republicans. It was both personally disarming and politically troublesome. As such, he was famously open to entertaining any guest, no matter how slight the acquaintance, until any time of the night. He would often beg the last guest to stay so as to stave off the dreary purdah of his own company, company that the fashionable classes so craved for, for as long as possible.

I think that Johnson’s hearty disdain for isolation reflects a powerful current in the English character. One detects in Johnson’s eighteenth century attitude twinges of the characteristic distrust of such detachment found in the bracing attitudes of pioneering, tyrannical nineteenth century public school headmasters such as Edward Tring of Uppingham, say, or Edward Lyttleton of Eton. To them, a penchant for one’s own company was inherently subversive, a symptom, along with excessive reading and masturbation, of a lurking anti-social tendency that had to be stamped out in the course of the moral formation of the upstanding denizens of Britain and the Empire. Enforced games-playing, the House system, constant supervision and cold showers were enlisted as conscripts in the war against furtiveness, seclusion and sensitivity.

This is far from being the case only amongst the upper classes. Natural suspicion falls in British life upon anyone who displays a proclivity towards solitude, beginning early in life. There is no more damning analysis of a child or adolescent’s character than “he spends an awful lot of time alone up in his room”. Children of all classes who show a fundamental indifference to the company of others are perceived as worrisome, and are usually, in a similar way as the domineering Headmaster of Harrow or Wellington might force recalcitrant students into unwanted games of rugby, dragooned into some communal activity that they are not the slightest bit interested in.

This is usually done with the best of intentions, by the most loving of parents. Excessive isolation is seen to be either a cause or a symptom, or possibly both, of unhappiness and unhealthiness, and therefore in need of remedy. Even my parents made attempts (admittedly fairly desultory and half-hearted ones) to lure me from my self-imposed infant exile from humanity, at one point trying to persuade me of the virtues of joining the Cubs or Scouts. I had no intention whatsoever of engaging with such an organisation, and I’m not even sure if I ever got as far as being forced to attend one meeting. My parents not being the most compulsively social people themselves, and certainly not wanting to force me into anything that would make me unhappy, gave up, mercifully with very little resistance.

I think that this obsession with society (in the literal sense of being in the company of others), with ‘mixing’, is rooted in a fundamental idea that happiness is only achievable through other people. Emotional investments and bonds in other people are the only root to happiness. Because, ultimately, what is the alternative? Some kind of solitary debauchment? Or even worse, knowledge and facts and ideas?

Therein lies the British obsession with the dangers of solitude; the association with, in its broadest sense, subversion. It links into our much-vaunted distrust of intellectuals, who, squirrelled away, scratching into midnight with their treasonous quills, disturb solid moral and political common sense with their over-analysis and perhaps even unpatriotic ways. The solitary, it is always feared, is prone to dis-ease, perhaps with himself but also with the status quo in general. The projections of this dis-ease onto society manifest themselves in some kind of radicalism, either nihilistic or (in an irony noted by the splendidly grumpy Bernard Shaw’s self-description as the ‘antisocial socialist’) socialistic, and the projections onto the individual manifest themselves in morally questionable debauchment, the luxury, superstition and madness of which Dr Johnson was so apprehensive.

However, there is another aspect to this, which links more directly into the obsession with finding fulfilment or happiness primarily or solely through other people. There is a pervasive suspicion that unless one’s primary source of satisfaction is some relationship with another person or other people, particularly but not exclusively a monogamous sexual relationship, one is not a normal human being. Sneaking terror of loneliness projects itself onto the fearful and neurotically hateful attitude towards anyone who lives out the profoundly feared destiny of solitude, a hate which is as much actual or potential self-hatred as anything. This crystallises itself in that extremely common stock-character of British life, real and fictional – the man who lives alone, or perhaps with his mother, his lack of other relationships indicative of or a cover for some seedy and mysterious habit, such as serial killing, wearing mackintoshes into adult cinemas, or listening to Gardeners’ Question Time.

This fear and hatred has heightened in recent years, and not surprisingly. Increasingly, the traditional institutions through which social interaction and stable relationships were initiated and sustained, and loneliness warded off, have been chipped away. The decline of religious observance and Church-going, the break-down of established conventions of marriage and courtship, the decline of the nuclear family, the increased tendency to live alone, and even the decreased vitality of collective institutions of working-class life such as working men’s clubs, pubs, football clubs and trade unions, have given more substance to this terror of solitude. Because the initiation of social interaction and other relationships are less regulated by well-known conventions, the pathways into social bonding and marriage less obvious and negotiated with less certainty and more anxiety, the kernel of our fears has been shown to be more solid than we would like.

Much as this may be seen as a controversial statement, these changes have probably affected men more than, or at least differently from, women. In practice men, most notably heterosexual men, are still usually expected to initiate romantic relationships. You may quibble around this, but any honest assessment of the situation has to conclude that it’s basically true. Therefore, the fact that courtship and marriage are far more marked by uncertainty and less regulated by fixed conventions and rules than they were has had the effect of hitting men harder than women, since this morass of uncertainty is more often negotiated in a proactive way by men. Women have, in general, probably adapted far better, and indeed benefited far more, from the decline of the traditional nuclear family. The collective social institutions of life, particularly working class life, that have been most obviously eroded have been the ones that were male-dominated. I am not suggesting that women do not still suffer from a great deal of injustice and discrimination in other areas, and some of the developments I have outlined are not bad things. However it still seems to me to be the case that the problem of solitude and fear of isolation, as it has intensified in recent decades, has probably disproportionately affected men. It is significant that the stereotypical figure of the weird loner in fiction and reality is most often male in modern culture. The most famous and well-observed fictional representations of these neuroses since the 1960s are of male characters. Mark Corrigan in ‘Peep Show’, David Brent in ‘The Office’, even Rigsby in ‘Rising Damp’, all personify it. The stereotype of the crazy cat-loving spinster still exists, but it is nowhere near as prominent in the modern imagination as the male equivalent.

What is needed to moderate and correct this picture, however, is a sane attempt to appreciate the many pleasures of solitude. I am sure that this is partly a temperamental preference, based on personality as much as any universally applicable argument, but I am unable to function without long periods of isolation, and I’m sure that the benefits of solitude are capable of wider appreciation.

The joys of being away from other people are many. You do not have to regulate your life according to the whims of someone else, whose preferences are never likely to accord with your own. Compromise is much less necessary. You can get on with serious and uninterrupted reading and study. Most of all, you don’t have to constantly fret about others’ perceptions of you. You can be uninhibitedly yourself. If you want to talk to yourself in order to better think something through, or if you want to drink tea out of a pint glass, or eat raw jelly cubes out of the packet, you can do so without having to explain yourself. This may be a recipe for some degree of eccentricity, but by heavens to murgatroid, it sure is liberating.

Furthermore, you don’t have to feign interest in the tedious things that other people have been doing with their day. You can free yourself from the annoyance that is other people. Almost all people annoy me. Even people I like very much or even love often annoy and infuriate me. Most people do so without any compensation. They witter on with their unintelligent, overly sentimental, priggish, petty or ill-considered opinions, feelings or other outpourings, and frankly I could do without it. As my favourite philosopher Schopenhauer put it:

The wise man will, above all, strive after freedom from pain and annoyance, quiet and leisure, consequently a tranquil, modest life, with as few encounters as may be; and so, after a little experience of his so-called fellowmen, he will elect to live in retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude. For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people,—the less, indeed, other people can be to him.

Schopenhauer may have put it in perhaps excessively strong terms. Despite my argument, I would not claim that I do not get pleasure out of the company of others. On the contrary, excessive solitude can start, as Dr Johnson held, to drag on one’s spirit. So long as people are my kind of people – cynical, with a dry or inappropriate sense of humour, usually but not necessarily politically motivated, resistant to false emotion, unsentimental and so on – I derive can great rewards from them. As such, I wouldn’t quite go to the extreme of Sartre, for whom hell was other people.

However, I can honestly say that when I finally get some time to myself, even after a prolonged period of interaction with people who entertain me, being left alone again gives me a pleasure of relief and contentment that little else can provide. The cool and unhurried thrill of silence, of being able to think and reflect and not be judged or weighed up, is wonderful. Solitude gives one time to reflect, to give one’s own emotions – whether they be happiness or sadness, frustration or industry, desire or contentment - a space to breathe.

Anyone who knows me who has read this far probably thinks that this piece is an extended bit of self-justification for my notorious and spectacular failure with women. My extensive acquaintance with the joys of solitude is partially attributable, no doubt, to just this. However, I nonetheless do take a genuine pleasure in being alone, and I do not mean to suggest that there aren’t pleasures to be had from relationships with other people, whether sexual or otherwise, pleasures that are conducive to the good life. My point is that they are not the only important pleasures, nor even ones without which happiness is impossible.

However, it seems that the fear of solitude in modern culture has reached a point where many people, especially but not exclusively young people, feel anxious or nervous unless they are with other people the whole time, or nearly the whole time. They may not even particularly enjoy the company of those other people, but the presence of someone else, anyone else, is thought superior to solitude. This is an absurd attitude. My presumption is the other way around. I have a presumption in favour of solitude, unless I can see some way in which the presence of another will improve things. It will sometimes thus improve things, but presuming that it necessarily will is often foolish and always ill-advised, in my experience. A more balanced attitude, which re-examines the very real pleasures and benefit of isolation, may do everyone a favour. Even people less misanthropic and grumpy than me.

Maurice Glasman: A Defence

Maurice Glasman cuts an unconventional figure. It is difficult to imagine anyone further away from the soulless technocrat banalities and bland certainties of New Labour. With his roll-ups, trumpet and cardigans, he is easy to dismiss as some kind of clown.

Some have gone to the opposite extreme, picking up on a few thoughtless remarks, about the EDL and immigration, in order to portray him as a closet racist. His emphasis on tradition has prompted a backlash from some feminists, fearful that he advocates some return to patriarchal domination, and, more generally, from the sniping metropolitan Left of the party, who see any challenge to their liberal assumptions as necessarily having sinister motives.

I have already written a long piece defending ‘Blue Labour’, and I will not repeat its arguments. However, I want to draw out a few points in response to some of the sniping.

Firstly, what did Glasman actually say about the EDL? He said that the Labour Party needs to face up to its “responsibility for the generation of far-right populism”, and attempt to reconnect with the kind of the person that supports the EDL so “that we can represent a better life for them”. In other words, instead of instantly dismissing white working class people who have become disillusioned with our party and turned to racist alternatives, we should attempt to bring them back within the fold by truly representing their interests via a politics of the Common Good that counters the impression that we became in hock to partial interests antithetical to the well-being of the working classes.

In the case of many EDL supporters, this is probably naive – their thoroughgoing violent racism probably makes any such engagement pointless. However, Glasman’s broader point is entirely valid. New Labour, with its attempt to fund social democracy using the unstable wealth produced by accepting the neoliberal consensus, has to partially take the blame for the alienation of the working classes that it is an inevitable result of the concomitants of that consensus, commodification and concentration of power. It is hardly worth denying that this unease has become particularly toxic within the white working classes in the context of profound social uncertainty, fostered by the inherent cosmopolitanism of a global free market. When that alienation is expressed in chauvinistic ways, though we should oppose it with all our might, we nonetheless cannot wish away its causes. Attempting to understand the forces that drive people to the far-right should be commended, not condemned due to the odd clumsy bit of phrasing. Accusing someone descended from immigrant Jews of this is especially implausible. The worst, I think, Glasman can be accused of is naivety and lack of media sense.

Much of the antipathy towards Glasman comes from his emphasis on tradition, on customary institutions and modes of living, which some perceive as being suspiciously conservative. His eschewment of Liberalism and attack on the value of abstract notions in politics instantly raise the hackles of cultural leftists who have increasingly come to see Labour less as a party designed to promote the interests of working people, and more as the political wing of the feminist and LGBT movements. This is hardly surprising, but Glasman’s approach is neither invalid nor reactionary.

To understand why this is, you have to understand how this links into the argument that politics is about nurturing collective practices and institutions that allow people and existing communities to live as ends in themselves, free from the tyranny of capital, and not about abstractions such as ‘Equality’ or ‘Justice’, in which all human relationships and traditions are seen as troublesome impediments to abstract ends. This does not involve accepting all prejudices inherent in a status quo. It does, however, recognise some realities about human beings, such as the fact that people’s particular relationships with places, institutions and traditions are powerful and often inherently valuable, except where they themselves embody other forms of domination – of class, or sexual orientation, or gender.

This view involves taking working people’s preferences seriously rather trying to rationalise them in the name of utilitarian efficiency, of state or market. Where tradition, where patriotism and faith, gives meaning to people’s existences, where those impulses do not spill over into bigotry, we have to respect them and integrate them within the Labour movement. The metropolitan Guardian-reading middle classes of the Labour Party need to abandon their attempts to impose their prejudices on the working class in the name of expunging the prejudices of the latter.

Another source of discomfort is his criticique of the Attlee Government. To many on the Left, this is sacrilege. However, it is useless to pretend that the legacy of that government was perfect. Nationalisation, in which private management was merely replaced by an equally unresponsive bureaucratic elite was not what pre-war socialists had in mind. Integration in the political nation was never enough. Socialism also requires institutions and practices outside of the state to protect working people against capitalism, such as mutuals, credit unions, co-operatives, worker representation on works councils, worker codetermination at board level, and so on. In other words, real democracy. This is a radically Leftist attempt to move on from the tired debates of whether we support ‘state or market’.

That Glasman’s argument represents a genuine attempt, albeit one rooted in history, to address the dilemma of the Labour Party illustrates an important point. Much as people like to carp, where are the alternative ideas? The Right of the party re-heats Blairite dogma and unthinking acceptance of the status quo and is more stale than year-old bread. The statist Left, Hard and Soft, is utterly bereft of anything new to say. It has no coherent political economy. Glasman and Blue Labour have the guts to formulate something paradoxically both old and new, both historic and fresh, that might actually provide an intellectually coherent basis for Labour Party policy. Go away and read Glasman’s essay ‘Labour as radical tradition’ or Polanyi’s ‘The Great Transformation’. If you don’t like it, then what’s your alternative? It’s easy being the critic; let’s see if Blue Labour’s detractors have a meaningful agenda of their own.

A Sceptical Patriotism for the Left

To many, the idea of left-wing or progressive patriotism is an oxymoron. One immediately thinks of the ‘my country right or wrong’ bone-headed jingoism represented by flag-waving idiots at Tory Party conference or ‘The Last Night of the Proms’. Worse still are the word’s apparently indelible associations with racist, chauvinistic nationalism in the form of the far-right, which has hijacked symbols of national pride such as the flag so successfully since the Second World War.

However, the monopoly of patriotism by the right is not something that leftists can afford to ignore. One of the most persistent and damaging criticisms of radicals is that they are unpatriotic, unfeeling, cold. Burke’s accusation that radicals, in their frigid internationalism, have “benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual" has stuck. The political passions of patriotism seem to be either harnessed by the right or, usually unsuccessfully, neutralised by the left. This will not do. We on the left must revive an older vision of what it truly means to love one’s country, a notion that separates patriotism from the narrower and damaging concept of nationalism, and that focuses on what is truly important in our approach to our national community. In short, we must go back to Enlightenment notions of the true meaning of patriotism, notions that reconcile a heartfelt love of country with ‘internationalist’ ideas of humanity’s common good.

An excellent source of such an Enlightenment idea of patriotism is a now little-remembered political thinker of the late 18^th century called Richard Price. Richard Price was a dissenting minister who supported the radical causes of his age, such as the fight for freedom of the American colonies, and what seemed to him (at least at first) as the historical struggle for the rights of mankind and for humanity’s dignity and liberty represented by the French Revolution. In 1789 Price preached an acute sermon entitled ‘A Discourse on the Love of our Country’, in which he explores what constitutes a true, enduring and magnanimous version of patriotism. His ideas are as relevant today as they were in those heady days, even if the early promise of 1789 dissipated into a factious and quarrelsome nationalistic fervour.

Price critiques what we might call nationalistic or ‘vulgar’ patriotism, which is constituted by a number of doctrines. Firstly, the idea that patriotism implies believing in the objective superiority of one’s own country. This is childish, he opines; “were this implied”, he points out, “the love of their country would be the duty of only a very small part of mankind”. Secondly, vulgar patriotism implies a “spirit of rivalship and ambition” that drives countries to expand and enslave others, “forming men into combinations and against their common rights and liberties” (my italics). In other words, loving one’s own country does not imply waging a war against the rights of humankind in general, since what we share in terms of a common humanity is more important than what divides us. Thirdly, Price attacks the tendency of vulgar patriotism to imply that any critique of a country’s status quo is unpatriotic; that the loyalty of the patriot is to the country as it actually is, not a vision of what the country morally should and could be. “All our attachments”, he argues, “should be accompanied...with right opinions”. One should endeavour to create a country that one can be rightfully proud of, not glorify whatever welter of prejudice and injustice that happens to already exist.

The implication of this critique is an alternative idea of patriotism, what we might call ‘sceptical’ or ‘progressive’ patriotism; a patriotism that is not afraid to critique the existing social, political and economic structures of its country in the hope that one’s love of country can be most eloquently embodied in improving it; a patriotism that does not subordinate the interests of humanity in general to a narrow and factious belligerence; a patriotism that implies fondness and a genuine passion for what is best for one’s country without lapsing into a blind collective self-worship. It is possible to criticise this idea of patriotism as being toothless in its acceptance of the logic that what is most important is not what divides us as human beings but what unites us – in other words, one may argue that it is a watered down internationalism dressed up as ‘patriotism’. Once again, however, I revert to the arguments of Richard Price, who anticipated this objection back in 1789. “We are so constituted”, he pointed out, “that our affections are more drawn to some among mankind than to others, in proportion to their degrees of nearness to us, and our power of being useful to them”. In other words, although our interests should be subordinate to the interests of humanity in general, there is little that we can really do for such a broad and distant concept. Instead, we must harness the natural human instinct to favour the near-at-hand, what we are used to, what we are fond of out of familiarity, whilst not allowing this instinct to degenerate into a damaging chauvinism.

A good way of thinking about this vision of patriotism is the attitude we take to our families in the context of wider society. We prefer and are fond of our families, because we are used to them, and in practice we need an emotional succour and intimacy that implies exclusivity. However, few of us would seriously maintain that our families are objectively superior to all others – the most intelligent, attractive, worthwhile collection of people in the entire country. Furthermore, loving our families does not preclude us from seeking harmonious relations with people from further afield. We can love our families and have important friends and acquaintances from outside it without being inconsistent; loving our own families does not imply that we must hate everyone else’s. Perhaps most importantly, the love that we have for our family members does not preclude us from making honest criticisms of them, because we want the best for them. If our family has problems, then the truly loving thing is not to recklessly ignore them and pretend that everything is fine, but to address honestly the problems. We love our families, but this does not imply a chauvinistic hatred of everyone else, nor does it imply a general benevolence that is too vague to be meaningful.

Progressives must, therefore, love their country like they love their family – both wholeheartedly and sceptically, whilst being both constructively critical and selfless. We must harness the human passion to be attached to the near and familiar while keeping in mind humanity’s commonality and never failing to challenge a monolithic interpretation of what ‘really’ represents the country’s best interests. The Left as a broad movement must be able to say about itself what Harold Wilson said about the Labour Party in the 1960s - “We are not a flag-waving party. But we are a deeply patriotic party, because we truly represent the British people”.

'Conservative in Feeling and Radical in Politics': In Defence of 'Blue Labour'

The critic Isaac Rosenfeld once remarked that George Orwell was a “radical in politics and a conservative in feeling”, a phrase that I like to steal for myself. However, to describe anyone thus is complete anathema to many of my comrades on the knee-jerk Left. To them, invoking the term ‘conservative’ in any sense is completely verboten. You are, in the lazy world of political labelling, either conservative, i.e. an evil baby-eating monster, or ‘progressive’, which ends up being a kind of watered-down euphemism for (mildly) ‘left-wing’. These terms are seen as being, by definition, polar opposites. Indeed, with the decline of the term ‘liberal’, these two terms are increasingly used to define the central dividing line of politics in the United States, and such a tendency is also discernible in British politics, where Labour politicians too squeamish to use the word ‘socialist’ describe themselves, rather pathetically in my view, as ‘progressives’.

Progress, however, is not central, in my view, to the point of socialist politics. Of course, it is true that historically elements of the Left have attempted to present themselves as the motor of human progress, of technological , scientific and economic advance. Marx claimed that a socialist society would be more efficient than capitalism, since capitalist relations of production fetter the development of productive forces, in stark contrast to the dynamism released by a system in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Many scientists were attracted to Communism in the 1920s and 1930s because they saw state planning and the elimination of the ‘anarchy’ of capitalist production as the rational guarantor of objective human progress. These delusions reached perhaps their final expression in the Soviet Union of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when, in a fit of optimism prompted by the accession of Khrushchev and the apparent economic successes of communism, the Soviet Communist party proclaimed that they would reach ‘communism by 1980’, by which point the Soviet system would finally defeat capitalism by proving how much more efficient, technologically advanced and wealthy it could make human society. The point of Khrushchev’s optimism was not just that Soviet-style socialism was fairer than capitalism, but that it could maximise objective measures of human value, such as wealth or scientific knowledge, more successfully than capitalism.

Of course, this has been shown to be so much verbiage and delusional claptrap. Which kind of social organisation has delivered greatest objective ‘progress’, in the sense of the greatest amount of wealth, technological advance, scientific research, and consumer goods is debatable. The obvious answer is liberal US-style capitalism, but the statist capitalism of many Asian countries or the social-democratic mixed economies of Europe also have a claim to this label. We can, however, say with some certainty that Soviet-style centralised state planning was not, in these narrow terms (and more generally), very successful relative to various models of capitalism.

The point, however, is that the ‘progress’ attendant on capitalist development has not necessarily given rise to more humane, civilised or decent societies. The maximisation of human wealth and utility under capitalism has not been an unalloyed good, for several reasons.

The obvious problem is that the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power that capitalism, particularly Anglo-Saxon neoliberal style capitalism, tends to create has meant that many of the objective benefits of ‘progress’ have not been equally shared out, both in class terms and geographically, and have actually been created via a process of exploitation and economic coercion that is deeply unjust. Capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism, perpetuates social injustice and prioritises the needs and desires of shareholders, corporations and the wealthy over the common good and the social rights of the majority, a process exacerbated by globalisation, which intensifies competition and leads to a race to the bottom in terms of welfare standards, labour rights and wages. This is a simplification of the arguments, and the general leftist critique of neoliberalism in these terms is well-known, and hardly needs elaboration here. However, it is a critique that I broadly support. Devising alternatives is trickier, but it seems likely that the most plausible and pragmatic solutions will be based, to some degree, around old-fashioned social democratic principles such as state regulation, collective provision of social goods, a redistributive welfare state, organised labour movements and progressive taxation, adapted to individual cultures and political realities.

However, as a critique of capitalism this is necessary, but not sufficient. What the Left also requires is an appreciation of the limits of ‘progress’ in terms of the mere maximization of simple utilitarian value. It needs to inoculate itself against the philistine disregard for the intrinsic value of the particular, the traditional, and the ‘given’ that is evident both on the Thatcherite economic right and the bureaucratised and distant Left. The Left, in short, needs to marry its concern for egalitarian and justice with a conservative, even ‘romantic’ appreciation of the needs of ordinary human beings for identity and stability; the perspective that can appreciate the value that humans attribute to institutions, places, and social arrangements in terms that go beyond the mere coldly calculating and instrumental.

In order to understand what I mean, it is perhaps best to consider the basic nature of capitalism. Capitalism is, as Marx rightly pointed out, a ruthlessly unsentimental, even revolutionary force. The forces of competition and the unregulated market are no respecters of persons, traditions or institutions. The following quotation from Marx sums this up perfectly:

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

Under an unregulated capitalist system, objective calculations of such phenomena as profitability, market price, the costs of production and so on are the ultimate determinants of social organisation and social change. Furthermore, as Polanyi was to point out in his work The Great Transformation, places, environments and people are commodified. Human beings are effectively bought and sold on the labour market. Natural resources become raw materials to be traded on the market place. Institutions will only survive so long as they adapt to the rules of the market with its competitive pressures on price and quality.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the overall effect of this is deeply destabilising, and not in any way ‘conservative’. This is what makes many modern Conservatives such bafflingly contradictory figures. Tory MPs from the shires droning on about how the villages in their constituencies have lost their corner shops, or their local pubs or whatever is wearyingly familiar. Strangely, however, the same Tory MP is likely to support Thatcherite economic policies that deregulate markets, unleash competitive pressures, and ultimately allow massive capitalist corporations, who enjoy economies of scale and massive economic power, to destroy small businesses and enterprises. Like, for example, corner shops or local pubs.

Likewise, we can see the destabilising and dehumanising implications of neoliberal capitalism in terms of its effects on human beings. The assumption that human beings are commodities whose labour power can be traded in a market is ultimately based upon a false view of human nature. Humans have their own dynamic that is incompatible with being treated as a mere commodity. Adjustments in the labour market are not mere movements in the demand, supply and therefore the price of an object. They affect the job security, living standards, reasonable human expectations, local connections, mental health, pride, and self-respect of real, flesh-and-bone human beings. Likewise, treating land and the environment as a commodity ignores the impact that the dynamics of the creative destruction of markets has upon the landscapes that we enjoy and ecosystem that we rely on, both of which have an inherent value not easily reduced to the cost-benefit analyses of the bean-counters of late capitalism. As Polanyi argued, land, labour and money are not really commodities. Capitalism depends upon the fiction that they are in order to function, but it will always remain just that: a fiction, which contends against the reality of the inherent nature and particular values of human beings and Mother Nature ultimately in vain.

The root cause of the problem is that the market is incapable of appreciating the particular value embodied in human life, in social institutions and in the environment. By ‘particular value’ I mean inherent value that is difficult or impossible to translate into universal or general terms or a ‘common currency’. I mean the value that inheres in existing institutions or practices for particular people, things that are given, that provoke emotional ties and are not necessarily explicable in utilitarian terms. It arises from the simple fact that most or many human beings have a desire to, in the words of G.A. Cohen “conserve the valuable at the expense of maximizing value” because of their need for stability and identity.

For example, consider an elderly man whose house lies on the route of a new proposed motorway. He has lived in this house for 50 years. His children were born and grew up in it. He lived in it with his wife for many happy years. He is used to it, and likes it just the way it is. It evokes a whole series of memories for him, an intricate network of the associations of a lifetime. The motorway developer, desperate to demolish the house, offers the old man a huge payout to quietly move and let the bulldozers move in. The old man could buy a far bigger, far more expensive and, objectively speaking, far nicer house with the massive sum of money offered. However, he doesn’t want to, because, for all the advantages of having a bigger living room and a built-in dishwasher, it just isn’t the same. The house is a part of his identity, and no amount of money can destroy the personal bond and attachment he has to that house.

Is such a man irrational? I would say not. The idea that he is irrational springs from the mistaken idea that all human value can be reduced to some universal calculus, separate from the individuality and particularity inherent in human nature. As G.A. Cohen puts it, “it is an error to think that being rational about value requires the sort of abstract accounting of it that denies the value of particular things as such”. We can all find traces of the old man's conservative outlook in our own perspective. My own emotional attachments and particularities - to the Labour Party, to old school friends, to the house I used to live in Chelmsford, to my old school, to the films of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, to many of my old books, to Scunthorpe United, to the Railway Tavern (a pub in Chelmsford) and to my old teddy bear - many of them are scarcely comprehensible in any utilitarian or calculating terms, but still incalculably valuable to me.

However, as Cohen also points out, the problem is not just the economic forces of the market, which, in their attempt to reduce all human value to the universal, objective measures of profit and loss ignore the particularities and eccentricities of human value that make life bearable. The pragmatic dictates of state planning are equally problematic. If someone argues that a row of trees, to take a completely arbitrary example, ought to be conserved because of the particular and historic value that they have for local residents, then this argument is likely to cut little ice for council planners next to considerations of function or pleasing the majority. As Cohen puts it, planners will “usually... prefer a general consideration, something that the thing does well, or even the general consideration that a majority want it kept there – which is not, of course, the reason for keeping it there that the members of that majority themselves have.”

Now, the idea of prioritising the conservation of institutions, relationships, objects, environments or practices that have built up personal, customary or emotional values for human beings over ‘progressive’ or ‘objective’ measurements of utility is obviously open to question.

It can be pointed out that many such institutions and relationships may embody injustice or exploitation. Conservatives have used such a defence in order to justify continuing the worst kinds of cruel or unjust social phenomena. For example, Edmund Burke tried to defend the worst abuses of feudalism and the French ancien regime in a similar way, contrasting the supposedly intrinsically valuable trappings of the “age of chivalry” with “that of sophisters, economists, and calculators”. Just because the impersonal relations of the market might have their drawbacks, surely it is better than the partial, arbitrary and deeply hierarchical system that proceeded it?

This argument has some validity, but does not answer the central point, for the simple reason that the ‘conservative’ viewpoint I am defending aims to conserve social relationships and systems that have customary and particular value and as Cohen puts it, “wanting to conserve what has value implies no tenderness towards exploitation and injustice, since they lack value”. Even where unjust things do contain some inherent value, one can maintain a viewpoint that is conservative and simultaneously socialist by prioritising social justice where the conservative and egalitarian points contradict, while bearing in mind that in many cases they will not, and prioritising the conservation of the particular and the customary over the maximisation of utility will actually often tend to coincide with egalitarian aims. For example, protecting small local businesses against the competitive pressures of multinational firms or promoting the co-operative fan ownership of football clubs as an alternative to commercialisation and the depredations of the Abramovichs of this world are cases where the conservative attitude meshes nicely with the egalitarian.

All of this brings me, rather belatedly, onto ‘Blue Labour’, the much talked-about new trend of thinking within the Labour Party championed by Maurice Glasman.

‘Blue Labour’ has attracted a lot of criticism. Some are alarmed about its ‘social conservatism’, others about its economic prescriptions. Let me consider how what I have already said reflects the thinking of ‘Blue Labour’, and answer some of these criticisms of it.

Firstly, the ‘social conservatism’ of Blue Labour closely ties in to the idea of ‘particular value’. Some, faced with the term ‘social conservatism’, have panicked, imagining that this must instantly mean being a homophobe or a racist. What I understand Glasman to understand by it, however, is actually close to Cohen’s ideas about the validity of human beings valuing the customary and the particular in order to give them a sense of security and identity. It is a ‘social conservatism’ that embodies itself in fans of a local football team opposing being taken over by a billionaire investor who will not respect the club’s traditions or ethos. It is a ‘social conservatism’ that manifests itself when people oppose massive, soulless breweries taking over local pubs and turning them into homogenised, bland nonentities that serve a poor selection of badly-kept ale, or closing them down altogether. It is ‘social conservatism’ in the sense of conserving the local, the peculiar and the traditional in the face of the dictates of the market and large corporations. It implies a great deal more economic interventionism than New Labour ever advocated.

It is true that some of the socially conservative attitudes of ordinary people are not so honourable. Some people might think that intrinsic value inheres in being anti-immigrant or homophobic. Glasman and ‘Blue Labour’ are not advocating the validity of such a stance. They are arguing that we should take seriously the desire of ordinary people to have their sense of identity and desire for stability and social security valued over the imperatives of the market, instead of just dismissing these concerns as being ‘backwards’ or primitive, or unrealistic in an age of global neoliberalism. In many cases, this desire overlaps with views that are perfectly understandable and compatible with liberal stances on race or homosexuality. ‘Blue Labour’ advocates stressing these cases, and, as such, focussing on the areas where ordinary working-class people have completely valid concerns about the impact that neoliberal capitalism has on their security, identity and livelihoods. Furthermore, their valid attachments in terms of their local area, their religion or their families, which are natural and understandable, should not be looked down upon by snobby, ‘superior’ liberal-left types, but seen as valuable and compatible with a scepticism about markets and the effects of globalisation that should be central to the Labour Party’s egalitarianism. In some cases unattractive social attitudes may continue to exist, but if the Labour Party focuses on the valid social and economic concerns of working people rather than obsessing about identity politics in a way that is seen by many of them as irrelevant or low priority, then a trade off can be secured – we can win back working class support by taking their concerns about security and identity seriously and endorsing their conservatism when it is just, while in turn they will tolerate the Labour Party’s socially liberal views on many issues.

I know that some have argued that the general attitude of social conservatism, even defined in this sense, is wrong. They argue that it embodies a backward-looking and somewhat myopically nostalgic attachment to things past, when actually the reality is that we could be maximising the value that can be obtained from new institutions, relationships and practices. However, I think this is to completely ignore the reality of how most people, myself included, think and feel. Most people crave continuity, identity and security, and feel a sense of loss when familiar attachments or bonds are destroyed that can never fully be compensated for by the future. No-one can really escape this conservative mentality to some degree. The vast majority of human beings feel a sense of tragic and irreversible loss when, for example, their mother dies that can hardly be compensated for by the thought that you might meet someone else who is as nice tomorrow. Indeed, the family attachment is ‘irrational’ in a sense – looking at it in purely objective and impersonal terms, family bonds are arbitrary and there is no reason why one should have anything in common with one’s father or mother, or value their lives over anyone else’s. Hence Godwin’s famous argument that if you had to choose who to save in a burning house out of your own mother or Fenelon, you should choose the latter, because he has the potential to benefit the whole of society more. However, this attitude is so remote from how most people perceive the world as to make for a wholly unrealistic and emotionally shallow politics. Every ultra-rational utilitarian might deny the value of customary, arbitrary and traditional relationships and attachments in their arguments, but every action and sentiment of their lives belies such an attitude. Even William Godwin loved his mum, and I suspect that if he’d actually had a choice regarding whether to save her life or that of an Archbishop he didn’t know, his decision would not have been entirely consistent with the argument of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

A few extremely confused commentators have suggested that Blue Labour is a cover for a kind of re-heated neoliberalism. Billy Bragg wrote a spectacularly ignorant and ill-informed piece accusing Glasman of pursuing an ‘economically liberal agenda’ in the Guardian recently. Bragg has been losing the plot for some time, as his hilariously naive endorsement of the Lib Dems, not to mention his touching, if completely misguided, faith in the power of electoral reform to re-energise the left has shown. Indeed, Maurice Glasman has ably answered Bragg’s risible argument himself. Nonetheless, I think the economic radicalism of Glasman’s arguments needs emphasising. Glasman is seriously arguing against the dominant neoliberal assumptions of the last 30 years. He stands completely against the tendency of capital to reduce human beings to mere chattel to be bought and sold in labour markets, against the tendency to reduce land and resources to mere private investments, the return on which is to be maximised quite heedless of the social cost. He stands for defending and protecting the intrinsic, unmarketised human value of lives lived unharried by the logic and power of capital. His agenda seems to me to be trenchantly against privatisation and in favour of a considerable re-regulation of capital flows.

I think the source of the deeply puzzling attempts to pigeon-hole ‘Blue Labour’ as a cover for an anti-state or neoliberal agenda is the fact that Glasman is sceptical about the role of the post-1945 bureaucratic state in creating the kind of egalitarian society we socialists yearn for. He points to Labour’s pre-1945 traditions of mutualism, reciprocity and solidarity separate from the state, embodied in radically democratic organisations designed to challenge the domination of capital – co-operatives, trade unions, credit unions and so on. He points to these as an antidote to the excessively elitist and managerial style of elements of the social democratic state. I think the point that he is making here is similar to the critique made by Cohen of central or state planning, in the sense that it tends to be quite insensitive to local, customary and ‘particular’ assessments of value, and tends to make people into passive recipients of state aid, rather than citizens ready to collectively muck in to build the New Jerusalem together.

I would make two points here, one supportive and one marked by a note of caution. Firstly, heresy as it is for me to argue this, Glasman is right to a large extent. The 1945 government did many excellent things and was a great reforming government. However, its approach was undoubtedly too top-down, distant and statist. Its nationalisations, for example, didn’t really contribute much towards socialist aims. Private industries were merely transferred to an unresponsive and arrogant bureaucratic elite, as remote from the concerns of its workers and those who used its goods and services as the old private managers. Many noticed little difference between the old privatised industries and the new nationalised state companies. A genuine way to transfer power to working-class people would have been to have made such companies into co-operatives, responsive to the needs and values of the community at large and their workers, rather than run by the state in the interests of a small unaccountable elite. Democratic self-organisation is more vital, accountable and effective in many cases than top-down statism.

However, the state is, this point notwithstanding, still a great force for good. Making capital and economic power accountable to and working in the interests of ordinary working people is not best done via the state alone, but the state clearly still has a huge role to play in regulating private capital, protecting the rights of organised labour, and the collective provision of social goods, such as in the case of the NHS. Indeed, I strongly suspect that Maurice Glasman would agree with me here. He advocates a great deal more state interventionism in many spheres, since it is obvious that action at the level of the nation state (or indeed, beyond) is necessary to combat the dominance of capital in addition to autonomous democratic movements. It is not a case of either the state or civil society, but of both working to challenge the impersonal destabilisation and commodification of the market.

It strikes me that ‘Blue Labour’ sums up many of the impulses I and other Labour activists have had for some time now. We have become increasingly dominated by a bossy liberal elite who think that the working class should just ‘come to terms’ with globalisation and the rapid, destabilising change that it brings (while the Guardianistas enjoy their comfortable existences), who dismiss traditional social bonds and institutions, and the pastimes and passions of ordinary working class and lower-middle class people, as not being sufficiently ‘progressive’ or avant-garde enough for their tastes, and who often give the impression that the identity politics of the cultural left is more valid than the concerns of working people worried about their jobs, wages or housing. Too many people in the Labour Party live such separate lives from the majority of working people that they end up being insufferably patronisingly towards just those people whom we exist to represent. To put it bluntly, we need more people in the Labour Party who feel comfortable watching a football match, or going down the pub, or using the local library.

So, Blue Labour’s mixture of Cohen-esque conservatism in terms of our social, parochial and familial attachments and radicalism in terms of socialist economics strikes me not only as more coherent than the Conservative Right and liberal Left, not only as intellectually correct and emotionally satisfying, but also as a real vote-winner, marrying the most popular bits of the Labour movement’s traditions and carrying us away from the insufferably metropolitan and liberal emphases (both economically and socially) that have lost us so much support in recent years. Blue Labour might help us to remember that the egalitarian aims of the left are not incompatible, and in some ways are curiously consonant, with the human need for a sense of belonging, a sense of attachment to the familiar and the past, an attachment to family and country, and that being a conservative Socialist is, in many ways, the most consistent position of all.