Labour isn’t radical enough
How the Labour Party can construct a cohesive vision that transcends social democracy, without dooming their electoral hopes.
Given all the hysteria leveled at Corbyn’s Labour during the last election, you’d be forgiven for believing old Jeremy was Trotsky reincarnated, finding permanent revolution pottering about tending to his allotment and making organic jam. If you were expecting grand Five Year Plans and gulag rehabilitation’s, Labour’s modest platform would have certainly turned out a damp squib.
Much to the dismay of tankies the world over, arch-Stalinist and existential-threat-to-the-nation Jeremy Corbyn’s first national plan amounted to a slightly modernised version of social democracy, offering a repudiation to an economic settlement built on privatisation, deregulation, and reduced taxation by aping policies both prevalent & successful in continental Europe. In Germany, a national investment bank linked to regional subsidiaries is instrumental in supporting local manufacturing and providing much needed capital. Portugal recently defied conventional wisdom by rejecting EU mandated austerity, reinstating public sector pay rises and committing to investment, conjuring up growth by reviving business confidence. And from Germany’s Deutsche Bahn to France’s EDF, nationalised utilities operate smoothly throughout much of Western Europe. In fact, as the New Statesman pointed out during the campaign, Labour’s proposals were more Keynesian than Marxist. And considerably so.
This positioning has a strength and a weakness. The strength is that Labour & its outriders can emphasise the prosaicness of it all as a way to combat accusations of disaster. Outside the distorted relative framework of ideology in this country, where neoliberalism occupies the center ground and the mantle of social democracy is claimed by Blairite neo-revisionists, most of their election platform was not very radical at all. Indeed I think the genuine level-headedness of these proposals – how they are entirely common-sensical in regions of the world which weren’t doused head-to-toe in Thatcherite ideology – is a rhetorical weapon too often left in the armoury.
To the degree that it did signal a break from economic orthodoxy, committing to wrestle back power from corporate-friendly tax regimes, public-private partnerships, and self-defeating austerity, it only did so in regards to the distinct form of capitalism that has dominated the anglo-sphere (and imposed itself on the developing world) since the late 1980’s, not to the logic of capitalism itself. Of course this was in itself a sign of catastrophe to much of our fossilized political class and their allies in the media, embarking upon a fear campaign and repeatedly invoking the ghastly spectre of Venezuela.
But discounting such hysteria — the sheer ridiculousness of it all probably bolstering rather than damaging Labours chances — the shrewdness of the manifesto simultaneously allows us to disconnect Corbyns platform from predictions of authoritarian instability, whilst presenting the conservatives and their outriders as custodians of a economic settlement that has long ceased to be beneficial, holding Britain back as other nations invest, trust and educate their people.
This may be incongruent with the corollary of the platforms weakness, however. One issue I had with Labours manifesto was precisely the inverse of this celebration of the tepid: it didn’t go far enough. Here the Times piece by Phillip Collins — ‘Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t come up with one radical idea’ — makes some worthwhile contributions. Putting aside the absurd diminution of the influence of the finance industry, the hyperbolic title, and the drawing of false equivalency between Corbyn’s recent ‘Build it in Britain’ manufacturing speech and Trumpian protectionism, most of Collins’ recommendations I entirely endorse. Not only that, much of the Labour left do, too. And think tanks that are sympathetic to the Corbyn movement are actively drawing up these kinds of policy proposals.
What strikes me as odd, then, is why, when the grassroots, left media, and armchair intellectuals routinely speak of wealth taxes, breaking surveillance capitalism, and alternatives to automatic redundancies, we are seeing such a delay in uptake by the leadership? Perhaps some of it may simply be the time consuming process of policy making – devising, consulting, instituting. But shifting taxes from earned income to unearned wealth and extractive rent shouldn’t be too difficult to tease out, given progressive property taxes and land value taxation are ideas that have been knocking around for a good while, and alterations to capital gains rate could be done in a jiffy. Maybe they’re retaining big policy announcements for when the next election comes around, but even this may amount to a missed opportunity to drum up public understanding and approval toward the alternative economics that would comprise the manifesto. In truth, I don’t know what the answer is, but I have faith that the leadership is responsive enough to the movement, and is tuned in to the recommendations of allied think tanks effectively, to bring these proposals on board, sooner or later.
To give them their due, though, the manifesto was far more radical than they’ve made out. Hidden amongst its pages was the right to own: given workers of a business the right of first refusal to buy out the company in the case of floating or dissolution. Such a mechanism would be fundamental in facilitating a fundamental shift in the politics of ownership in favour of ordinary people, and do well to tackle the confluence of crisis facing capitalism – inequality, climate change, and automation. Of course, this by itself isn’t enough, but it’s emblematic of the issue I’m trying to draw attention to here: that Labours platform was largely centred upon a negation instead an affirmation, secluding the more radical parts of their agenda. The fundamental message was no to austerity, no to poverty, and no to privatisation. And whilst these oppositions entailed some affirmations, they were nothing that the world hasn’t seen before.
If we are to stretch beyond the confines of social democracy, and indeed attempt to appeal to those not won over by a return to the 1970’s, Corbyns Labour must demonstrate that it is capable of a positive reformulation of our social settlement – not just a resuscitation of it before it was asphyxiated by the doctrine of egoism it attempted to restrain.
But here comes the incoherence. How can we break from this contradiction of, on one side, cautious continental social democracy, and ambitious, radical Corbynomics on the other. The answer to this lies in communication.
Yes, not all policies will have contemporary analogues or historical antecedents. But many of the more ambitious planks do: The development of a co-operative, mutuals and social enterprise sector, say, which is integral to economies as diverse as Italy, Sweden and Costa Rica. Or the municipal socialism pioneered in Cleveland, and which is rejuvenating Preston as I write this. Or the democratisation of data and smart city platforms in Barcelona. Or the participatory democracy which has empowered citizens from Ireland to Porto Allegre, Rejkavaic to (again) Barcelona. And indeed, for those hostile to the social democratic floor upon which this all stands – the supposedly quotidian and trustworthy component of Corbynomics – the infusion of public service with the models of localism, decentralisation, and socialisation that constitute the modern thrust of the platform can dispel rightful apprehensions toward the lumbering bureaucracy of Morrisonion nationalisation. On these terms, exemplars are offered by the municipally run water system of Paris and the community energy generation powering Germany’s decarbonisation.
All across the world, other nations pioneer such fresh forms of social organisation, offering counter evidence to accusations of dangerous utopianism. Still, the role of Labours messaging is to not only drum up support for such policies, but demonstrate a capacity to draw these processes into a single unitary vision; one that is worthy of the sentiment of revolution that drives the Corbyn movement.
What, then, does this messaging entail? To combat the lack of enthusiasm toward a return to traditional social democracy, Labour can craft a future-oriented narrative of empowerment that casts the people as the fundamental drivers and owners of the economic sphere, enabled by a state that sees its primary role as facilitating rather than imposing. Not a return to the enervating bureaucracy of old Labour, but an invigorating democracy present in national utilities, the workplace and the parliamentary realm. Position this common solidarity against an unjust system, with its political custodians, corporate exploiters and most obscene benefactors as the antagonists in this story. Making clear that Labour is not opposed to entrepreneurship, the Party can emphasise the limitations neoliberalism poses to innovation; denying business of much needed investment in infrastructure and skills. And the provision of readily available capital, as well as the wealth-building strategies of the Preston model, can demonstrate the the governments prerogative to revitalise communities and turn Britain into an ‘innovation nation’ once more.
By appropriating the notion of liberty back from its bastardisation by the Thatcherite equation with the ‘free-market’, Labour can demonstrate how autonomy has been denied in the corporate sphere, connecting emancipatory worker-ownership schemes — whether through employee ownership funds, inclusive ownership funds, the right to own, and legal and institutional nourishment of new co-operative enterprises — to the larger crises of agency that has seen its most emotional articulation in the Leave campaigns acclamation to ‘take back control’.
Whilst Phillip Collins piece for the Times was right in his observation that challenges to technological disruption have not been forthcoming in the policy department, both McDonnell and Corbyn have signaled their cognisance of the oncoming crises of automation and abdication of self-determination to the data barons, and indeed have pointed to some ways out (the Shadow Chancellor refers to Barcelona’s experiment in public ownership of data in an article for New Socialist, and Corbyn has expressed awareness of the threat automation posses to employment and indeed the potential it offers for an expansion of free-time). These inclinations, even if they remain just that for the time being, are far more then can be said for any other prominent politician. Here though Labour’s desire to fundamentally shift models of ownership dovetails with capital’s engulfing of labour by expanding workers control of the former, guaranteeing dividends from rising productivity. As such, Labour’s communication department can draw attention to the platforms future-proof quality. Far from being stuck in decades past, it is the Left who has their sights firmly trained on the future, and the Conservatives who are left dwindling in the world before, myopic and unaware.
Finally, by wrapping this narrative in the language of national unity (the aformentioned ‘Build it in Britain’ speech is a good sign here) and collective power, rooting the prospective transformations in peoples lived experiences and communities, Labour can offer a rejuvanation of belonging in a context broken down by atomised individualism and globalised alienation. In short, they can reclaim the ideal of home — that place of security, comfort and ownership — from the fascist, so called ‘alt-right’ that seek to corrupt it by drawing it into a narrative of xenophobia and intolerence.
In doing so, I hope Labour can command a majority of those who feel abandoned by the social settlement of the past few decades that has dimished the living standards and subordinated their agency, and reach beyond the already sympathetic to those who demand more than rose-tinted appeals to Keynesian prudence. But the battle’s not over even when Labour get to government. If we want the platform encased in this messaging to succeed, the the Party cannot be isolated; it must be supported by a mass movement, well organised and committed, ready to defend a Corbyn led administration from the inevitable assault from above. In what R.H. Tawney called ‘the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world’, the route to transformations will certainly not be easy.
