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.