So, apparently Blue Labour is not, despite my efforts, dead (pdf). The question is whether that means it's alive. Since its critique of the allegedly left-liberal mainstream in the Labour Party seems to consist of a rather poorly warmed-over version of the communitarianism that had finally collapsed under the problem of not actually having read the people it was trying to criticize some time in the mid-nineties, I think not. They're even invoking Alisdair MacIntyre now, who may be a very good moral philosopher but whose discussion towards the end of After Virtue of how what he says relates to contemporary political theory is rather marred by the fact he is quite obviously uninterested in how any of the actual details of what it says might interfere with his moral grandstanding in favour of whatever it is he thinks he can coherently get out marrying the traditions of Thomist Catholicism with those of Red Clydeside.
Let's just remind ourselves briefly what was wrong with communitarianism the last time round so as to be able to deal with its shambling zombie cousin. Communitarians say that communities, traditions and relationships give our lives purpose and meaning, enable us to act together to achieve common goods and the like. So far, so motherhood and apple pie. The worrying move is when they start describe liberals as unable to understand the unavoidably social nature of our lives because of the way their stance depends on abstract values which cannot but fail to capture the distinctive character of the groups we actually live our lives out in. What's worrying about this is that the abstract values they have in mind are things like whether you are able to leave these groups, whether you have an equal share of power within them, and whether they treat you with basic human dignity.
None of these are abstract values. It's pretty concretely awful when you are trapped within a group which systematically deprives you of a right to a say in what it does and predictably denies you a fair share of what it cooperatively produces. Concretely awful in the way that the lives of people who weren't straight white men were in the period that Maurice Glasman evokes as exemplifying the ideal he wants to return to - along of course with the lives of many straight white men who had limited access to healthcare and education and depended on often dangerous work in order to be able to live. Jon Wilson even goes so far as to slag off Tom Paine's demand for equal rights as demonstrating the pitiful way he'd become alienated from the communities he should have been making his home in. Why not call him a rootless cosmopolitan and be done with it? Glasman after all has already said that EDL supporters are "falsely stereotyped as racist, sexist, nationalist", so slurring other members of your political community as insufficiently enculturated into its exclusive and oppressive norms of conduct is surely only a small step away.
What Blue Labour and other communitarians fail to understand is that what liberals are interested in is ensuring that communities and traditions treat their members decently and that relationships are not abusive or exploitative. This is why we care about rights to exit, for example, since the right to leave means that people do not have to be trapped in relationships they hate. Either Blue Labour don't care about people being trapped in abusive, exploitative and oppressive relationships, communities and traditions, or it is entirely unclear what their complaint about liberalism is, since, other than saying things in favour of class, gender and racial hierarchies, that complaint seems to be more or less entirely constituted by some hand-waving in the general direction of some obscure complaints about abstraction. It is notable, for example, that Jon Wilson's discussion of the value of groups before slagging off Tom Paine says nothing about the importance of rights of exit or other rights to control the terms on which you interact with others.
Given that, more or less everyone I am aware of has been far too conciliatory to an intellectual movement whose sole distinctive contribution seems to be the valorization of various kinds of racism, sexism and ideologies of self-help entirely inadequate for ensuring that people can live their lives out without being at the mercy of others and impersonal forces beyond their control. Rather than trying to carefully explain why we disagree with their oh-so-careful, thoughtful analysis, as Stuart White does here for example, the appropriate stance is, I'd presumably rather predictably argue, one of outright and uncompromising hostility - which is of course only a difference of strategy with Stuart. When they start talking about working class traditions of self-help, our response should be, so you want to abolish the NHS? When they start talking about the importance of community, we should say, communities like the ones where marital rape was legal whereas sex between consenting adults of the same gender wasn't? This is zombie communitarianism, and rather than treating it like a respectable intellectual interlocutor with whom we can have a reasonable conversation, we have to just go straight and hard at the head before it cracks open ours and begins feasting on brains.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
more or less everyone I am aware of has been far too conciliatory
I've just been ignoring it and hoping it goes away - which is more or less how I feel about neo-Blairism, the Coalition and more than one development at my place of work.
As a criminologist, what communitarianism means to me is basically Broken Windows - "don't you just hate tramps, beggars, prostitutes, drunks and young people hanging around for no reason, and wouldn't you feel safer if the police could send them all on their way?" (Quote: how can a neighborhood be "safer" when the crime rate has not gone down - in fact, may have gone up? Finding the answer requires first that we understand what most often frightens people in public places.) To the extent that it's got any substance at all... actually I don't think it has got any substance at all, not in the way it's been used in political discourse in the last 20 years. The closest thing to substance was probably Blair's embrace of Macmurray (pdf) - who was quite overtly and specifically writing about face-to-face communities, and not about society as a whole.
I've just been ignoring it and hoping it goes away
I had as well, but it seems to have got some currency amongst political theorists who generally engage in policy debates, and there's only so much you can take. I quite agree that it's basically empty too. Either Glasman thinks the EDL aren't racist or he, oh-so-ironically in light of his dislike of abstractions and demand for a return to the concrete, is saying more or less nothing. Given that I take it he doesn't think the EDL is actually an appropriate political partner, presumably he's saying more or less nothing.
Although I'm quite sceptical about Glasman, I find myself more or less in the conciliatory camp, partly because so many friends of mine are active in Blue Labour circles (Jon Wilson, for example, has been a good friend since undergraduate days), but also because I hadn't realised before reading the e-book the extent to which the Blue Labour project is quite so antagonistic to New Labour ideology. And since I think New Labour is toxic, and toxins have to be flushed out of the system if they aren't to do any more damage, I'm tolerably content if the purgative on offer is coloured Blue.
If you want to take a harder line, that's fine. But the answer to the questions you pose at the end are "No" and "No". I know Glasman likes to talk in enigmatic ways from time to time, for reasons I don't fully understand (since it presumably doesn't serve his interests for people to think he's an obnoxious charlatan), but it's very clear to me that the contributors to the Politics of Paradox volume in general want to defend the NHS (and resist attempts to privatise or part-privatise it, whether they come from New Labour or the Coalition) and aren't remotely nostalgic for a world of legal marital rape or illegal gay sex.
But the answer to the questions you pose at the end are "No" and "No"
Of course I know that no-one wants to get rid of the NHS or return to the sexual consensus of the interwar years. That's exactly the point of accusing Blue Labour of wanting to do it. It points to the way which large portions of their public rhetoric are more or less contentless appeals to tradiiton and community, which in the context of British political history it is reasonable to interpret as endorsing, for example, communities built around traditions of self-help rather than state-funded healthcare and of patriarchy and homophobia - an interpretation a lot of what they say encourages. It asks them to stop making motherhood and apple pie noises, get off the fence and start taking some hard political choices about who gets what and who pays for it, ideally without ending up as rightwing populists they can often sound like. Maybe they do that in the Politics of Paradox, but I think they've already more than used up any goodwill they might have called on to ask me to make that investment of time and energy.
As for the purgative effects, it is entirely possible for something to be purgative without it being particularly helpful. Part of the problem with Blue Labour is that it seems to think New Labour was all that Rawls and his followers might have wanted. By denying access to the resources which left-liberals might bring to attempts to reshape the Labour Party, they're making things considerably worse than they need to be.
As I think I made clear when I first wrote about Glasman in January, it is very difficult to overstate how much I loathe this kind of thing. I think it's philosophically idiotic, politically dangerous, and anything sensible it says can be said much less dangerously and much more sensibly by other people. Others may feel differently.
I'm sympathetic to some of this (and I'm writing another comment as the alternative is marking exam scripts).
I agree that the proof of the pudding will come when we have concrete examples of Blue Labour in action to point to, whereas right now we just have a few articles and an e-book. I think that we should treat Glasman as if he were on probation, and be generally suspicious of the things that he says. And if Miliband does jump to the right on immigration armed with the support of the ideologues of Blue Labour, I'll drop all of my constructive interest in what's going on here and move into unqualified opposition.
But I do think there's a lot more going on here than Zombie Liberals and Communitarians. I think that's because the Blue Labour people, insofar as I understand what's going on (which I'm sure is imperfectly), are interested in two things that left-liberal theorists aren't generally much interested in (though there's no reason why they shouldn't be): the state and the party. They are interested in exploring ways of talking about the state that break with standard neo-liberal / New Labour vocabularies (and they want to do this because they dislike what we might call Blair's Bonapartism as much as they do), and they want the Labour Party to be more than a vote-harvesting machine on behalf of the leadership clique (because they think that that's the death of democratic politics).
Now I think we have to be careful with both of these bits of their agenda, but for different reasons.
The trouble with the "state" bit of the story, is that fostering scepticism about the managerial, centralised, bureaucratic state risks losing sight of what it does well, and what only it can do at all. Here I think the risk is probably worth taking: support for the institutions of the Beveridge welfare state is rock-solid inside the rank and file of the Labour Party, and insofar as they have been threatened, it's been by the New Labour modernisers, and insofar as they continue to be threatened, it will be by the heirs to New Labour, whether inside or outside the Coalition.
When it comes to the party, I'm a bit more nervous. Part of this is for the reasons articulated by Alan Finlayson in his Open Democracy essay. But part of it (and, I suppose, relatedly) is that I'm worried that the rot has set in too deeply: that you can't use Alinsky-like methods to rejuvenate the Labour Party because it isn't really any kind of mass participatory party any more, because New Labour succeeded in turning it into a bureaucratic shell. (In other words, if we're looking for Zombies, we should look at the Labour Party as it's currently constituted.)
And if I'm right, that the Blue Labour crowd are trying to get a conversation going within the Labour movement about the party and the state, then there's no reason at all for left liberals not to engage (though they may find themselves talking about things that they don't normally talk about, but that's not necessarily a bad thing at all).
I guess I'm more concerned about the critique of the state than you are, Chris - as well as sharing the worries about remaking the Labour Party as some kind of mass community organisation: what happens to all the other community organisations, and to people who aren't members or are marginal in it? The worry about the critique of the state is that it doesn't matter what rank-and-file Labour Party members and supporters think. It didn't matter when the Labour Party was in power, and I see no reason to think it'll matter any more now. They can be solidly in favour of the NHS as created in 1948, but if pundits are going round making expansive noises about the importance of community and how the state undermines that, then what's going to get heard and influence debate is the punditry, and the punditry in the context of attempts to privatize the NHS under the cover of handing back power to communities. It's not that I don't want to talk about the party - which I should say I am not a member of, and am unlikely to become one as long as Kate Hoey is Vauxhall's siting MP - or the state. It's just I don't think these are helpful conversations to be having about them.
The interesting bit, though, isn't about whether "the state" undermines "community". The more intelligent wing of Blue Labour (again, as I understand it) is precisely about getting away from abstractions like that.
The Blue Labour people want to get away from the New Labour world in which the public sector was regarded as a dysfunctional bureaucracy that might prove amenable to management-consultant-driven solutions implemented by the centre using private sector models. So they are looking for new ways of talking about schools and hospitals and local government (and so on) that focus less on large-scale structures and more on questions of who is doing what, how, and with whom. You can cast this kind of thing in the language of "communitarianism" if you want to (though Jon W explicitly prefers talk of "relationships" over talk of "community") in his piece -- but you might equally well stay on the terrain of left-liberalism, with Jerry Cohen, and talk in terms of ethos rather than structure.
None of this is to say that structures don't matter (of course they do). But it is to encourage habits of thought that break with the modus operandi of New Labour in government, which, let's face it, is the only politics the current Labour front bench knows how to do. At the moment. But the hope is that that will change.
Again -- partly to agree with your anxiety, I think, and partly to expand on something I said a moment ago -- I think the problem here may be that the Labour leadership is just incapable of doing things any other way: these are people who succeeded precisely insofar as they enthusiastically adapted to the system of patronage set up by Blair and Brown, and--as Machiavelli remarks in his bit about the cautious and the impetuous prince--politicians find it very, very difficult to change their ways once they've succeeded in one mode. And if that worry is correct, then all of this is hot air, and can only provide a rhetorical finish to New Labour Mark Two. I think that's a real worry. But I'm not sure I see an interesting / plausible alternative on offer right now. Hence conciliation rather than outright hostility.
but you might equally well stay on the terrain of left-liberalism, with Jerry Cohen, and talk in terms of ethos rather than structure
Given that I spent three years of my life trying to explain how horribly wrongheaded Jerry was about the critique of Rawls, this isn't likely to make me any more sympathetic. And the issue about the rhetoric about the state isn't (only) about its effects on Labour party policy. It's (also) about the rhetorical resources it gives those who are drawn into it to oppose Coalition policy. How are you going to oppose dismantling the NHS by handing commissioning powers to GPs when all your rhetoric favours the local and communal and condemns the national and bureaucratic?
Two core Blue Labour themes are (i) the character of the relationships between citizens and public sector workers they deal with and (ii) resistance to commodification and marketisation. I don't follow the ins and outs of the health debate, but I think those two would give you quite a lot to work with.
I'm a Labour voter (and party member as a matter of fact) and - DOES the leadership think this is really what the grass roots and the voters were waiting for??! Pfff!
Very strange. I had quite a long comment - and blogger only published the first two lines of it! I'm going to give up on it and its silly fiddly password system if it keeps on doing these things..
Post a Comment