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.
