Friday Briefs...

At this General Election Michael Caine seems to be 'doing a Sean Connery' and giving his two-penny's worth to the British electorate. The Tory Press are giving the impression that the proposed two months in a residential centre for 16 year olds is the same as the proverbial 'National Service' which is trotted out, along with hanging, as the perennial solution to the country's problems by the saloon bar bores and third-rate Richard Littlejohn impressionists who populate tabloid letter pages and radio phone-ins. People who say 'bring back National Service' tend to forget that in the 1950s there were proper jobs and lots of them for those who had served two years in the army to go into. Now we would only have people highly trained in firearms to join criminal gangs or other sections of the lumpenproletariat.

The other Conservative cunning plan at the moment is to reverse Labour's pledge to increase National Insurance Contributions and to cut public sector 'waste'. With a lot of Big Business backing the Conservatives on NIC New Labour is at sixes and sevens. Its reaction to Big Business deserting it for the Conservatives is like watching a Gangster's Moll watching Her Mister Big going back to his Wife.

However, when it comes to cutting public sector 'waste' the Conservatives seem to be making it up as they go along. A good overview can be found here and a less reverential one here. For those of you wondering what on Earth Big Business has got to moan about, this may be of interest.

Do not expect Gordon or Dave put themselves up for hard questioning in the media during the campaign, let alone go all Stuart Mclennan on us. On the subject of the Media, the Open Rights Group and the Pirate Party give their views on the passing of the Digital Economy Bill, although the ORG does provide a tad more pithy summary:

However, as the Pirate Party say, it is only a battle lost, not the war. The General Election is the same. It is not the end of British politics, thankfully, although it may feel like it more than once in the coming weeks...

Socialists For Small Government?

From Chris Dillow's Stumbling and Mumbling blog:

Shrink the state: a leftist aim, April 17th 2009

David Semple thinks the left should join American tea parties, which protest against high taxes. I think I agree. The desire to shrink the state should be a leftist aim. I say so for four reasons.

1. Big government cannot be redistributive government. If the state is raising 40% of GDP in taxes, it must tax the worst off, simply because the rich, even in the UK and US, aren’t that rich or plentiful.

This pdf gives us the numbers. Table 2 shows that the tax system - leaving aside benefits - actually adds to inequality. This is because direct taxes cut the Gini coefficient by 4 percentage points, but indirect taxes add 5 points to it. And table 21 shows that the poorest fifth of households with children pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than the richest 10%: 37.2% against 33%.

2. A big state hurts the worst off. Right-wing nut jobs might pose as victims of “ZaNuLabour.” But whether we look at Purnell’s welfare plans, repressive anti-immigration laws or the policing of protests, it is ordinary people who are the real victims of an overly powerful state: newspaper sellers, poor foreigners, the unemployed and ill. The left should be on their side.

3. When the state has lots of power, there’ll be a big fight to control it. And it’s the rich and powerful that win such fights. Why do you think banks get big bail-outs whilst ordinary workers are flung onto the dole with little compensation?

4. Belief in big government rests upon the notion that there’s an elite of leaders which has the wisdom and know-how to manage our affairs from the top-down; this is why New Labour found common cause with corporate bosses - both share the same ideology. But it is an utterly anti-egalitarian notion. It is also utterly wrong.

Radicalism & Conservatism: Thinking Aloud

Anyone got a better political compass?!

I'll begin with a Parish Notice: the Greens came third in the Kentish Town bye-election. The Lib Dems won, despite their erstwhile councillor disappearing to Arizona. I was invited to a Green post-election drink/meal tonight, but I'm trying to get 100% over my chill and it has been chucking buckets here since lunchtime, so I'm giving it a miss.

I've been going through notes I've had in folders and files over the years this evening, and along with some stuff which has been going through my mind while I've been going 'woe is me' with my chill, I thought I'd might as well share them with a wider audience.

'Radicalism' and 'Conservatism' are words that are used in politics to pretty much describe anything. Not as bad as, say, using 'Socialism' or 'Fascism' as political swear words, but not far off. However, 'radicals' can be described as people who want to change things politically, while 'conservatives' want to conserve things. I call myself an 'English Radical', but not an 'English radical', as 'English Radicalism' is recognised as a phrase encompassing a number of ideas and historical figures/movements ie the idea of a post-1066 'Norman Yoke'; the Levellers; Tom Paine; the Chartists; William Morris; GDH Cole. An 'English radical', on the other hand, is just an English person who happens to be 'radical'.

However, most people would associate political 'Radicalism' with 'the Left' (don't get me started...) and/or Socialism, while Conservatism is associated with 'the Right' and/or Capitalism. However, is that the right way to look at politics? I am reminded of a John Le Carre quote I posted up a few months back:

"The mere fact that communism didn't work doesn't mean that capitalism does. In many parts of the globe it's a wrecking, terrible force, displacing people, ruining lifestyles, traditions, ecologies and stable systems with the same ruthlessness as communism." (Times Higher Educational Supplement, 20/6/97, p.11.)

If Conservatism = Capitalism, surely it should not be 'The World Turned Upside Down' (to use a good phrase from the English Civil Wars) in the same way Communism promised to? Then I think of the Communist Manifesto: the capitalism and capitalists Charlie and Fred describe are hardly 'forces of conservatism' (to use a Blairism- Tony not Lionel):

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising 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 conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." (David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, 1988, p.224.)

From a different perspective then, Capitalism (or the corporate, globalising version) can be considered to be dangerously 'radical', not 'conservative'. At the same time, I think a lot of 'Left/Socialist' political activity can be seen as 'conservative'. That is, it is activity that(usually rightly) tries to conserve jobs, health and social services, educational institutions, the environment etc from rapacious corporations and financial institutions.

So I think it is quite respectable to be both a political 'radical' and a political 'conservative'. Better than being a corporate frontperson, that's for sure! A lot of the current unease about the crisis in the global financial system stems from the wish of individuals to see their savings/job/home protected and/or conserved from the rapaciousness of institutions that wish to turn all that is solid for individuals into air.

Looking through my files I found notes I made probably about ten years back from a book I got from the local library by Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook called The Revolt Against Change: Towards a Conserving Radicalism (1993: Vintage). Here's what I wrote down:

"...the reason why parties advocating radical change were so unsuccessful was because they were striking against the resistance of people who had changed. who had been compelled to change, too much."(p.3)

"...the only radical politics left to us should be based upon resistance, recuperation and remembering."(p.4)

"To talk about the people's refusal to change has a curious resonance at the end of a period of two hundred years which have seen nothing but incessant, remorseless change. If there is one thing which is obvious to anybody it is that the last two centuries have been a period of unprecedented change."(p.11)

"The conservatism of the people has been stolen by a social and economic system which can never deliver to them the security which is at the heart of their conservative impulse."
...true radicalism does not consist in tearing up society by its roots..., but on the contrary, returns to those roots in order to nourish their survival and sturdy growth." (p.56)

"...a true conservatism (preserving what is of value) is seen to be in opposition to its false namesake (maintaining industrial society); just as a true radicalism (fundamental change) stands against its counterfeit (endless uprootings by the industrial system)." (p.64)

"To be radical now is to resist the ever more invasive intrusions of a world system that can afford to leave nothing alone, but that must open up new pathways to profit deep in the still unexploited fastnesses of the heart, the secret depths of the psyche, even when it goes about its global privatisations...To be radical now is to say we want to be left alone to determine our lives, to say that our needs are more important than the system's necessities."

"The radicals and true conservatives both know that there are things that are beyond price, and that this precious inheritance sustains us all. A conservatism that has thrown in its lot with universal market forces has lost its roots; and a radicalism that accepts the gratuitious tearing up of all that is rooted in human experience could have no idea where it is going."(pp.95-6).

"In the existing order, the apparent oppostion of conservatism and radicalism conceals their common subordination. Both tend solely to a conserving of profit; and the means whereby this is attained is through continuous change and upheaval." (p.96)

"It should be a characteristic of the new radicalism that the people should determine their own role and function in bringing about social change and safeguarding human activities."(p.97)

While typing these extracts out, it did occur to me that while people are often 'out-radicalised' politically and culturally (ie "I'm more of a socialist/Leninist/Eurosceptic/punk/Muslim than you/thou")people are rarely 'out-conserved'. I might try it out at some point:

"We get our freedoms from Magna Carta."
"No, we get them from the Anglo-Saxons, Norman-lover."

"It's traditional to smoke in pubs."
"Only in the last four hundred years. By the way, did you know cancer cures smoking?"

"This is a Christian country."
"Tell the Druids that."

But I digress...

I probably would not have put this post up without this recent one by Chris Dillow:

October 08, 2008: conservatives for revolution

James Delingpole says of Ian Hislop:

I think he’s a bit like Jeremy Paxman — another of those handsomely remunerated, public-school-educated presenters who believes in most of the things a Tory ought to believe in (the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, riding to hounds, warm beer, Brief Encounter, probably).

But I too believe in these things - especially as Britain‘s Most Evil Man doesn‘t.

Indeed, I suspect a reverence for English traditions is more common on the Left than amongst the Conservative Party. Neil Clark’s tastes border on the reactionary; Francis Sedgemore is a Morrisman; you’ll struggle to find a Conservative voter at a meeting of CAMRA or at a Martin Carthy gig. [I did leave a comment to this post to say that CAMRA's public face, Roger Protz, used to be 'Socialist Worker' editor in the early 1970s.] And when Shuggy writes that “our culture seems incapable of expressing disapproval of something unless it can be shown that someone's rights have been violated” he is expressing a conservative view.

Many leftists, then, have Tory sentiments. And many Conservatives do not; David Cameron's Desert Island Discs are not those of a conservative.

Which raises the point - that the conservative temperament and the Conservative party are two completely different things - indeed, two opposed things.

One reason for this is that the pursuit of profit - which Conservatives support - destroys the traditions loved by conservatives. As Marx and Engels said:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.

Another reason is that the conservative temperament is sceptical of individuals’ new ideas, and of anyone‘s claim to know better. As Oakeshott put it: “it is beyond human experience to suppose that those who rule are endowed with a superior wisdom.” The conservative prefers the tried and trusted to the new; he prefers to back the field than any particular horse.

But bosses reject all this. Their claim to power - in business or in government - is a claim to an especial expertise. And the Conservative party, at least in my lifetime, has been the party of bosses.

The conservative temperament gave us mutual building societies, with their local roots and long traditions. The Conservative party gave us the demutualized societies, which blew up spectacularly.

The conservative disposition, then, to use Oakeshott’s phrase, is opposed to Conservative politics. Bryan is right: socialism is “certainly not in conflict with true conservatism.”

I’d go further. One reason why I have revolutionary sympathies is precisely that I have a conservative disposition.

For one thing, in replacing hierarchy with co-ops is one way (the only way?) to assert the wisdom of crowds and the tacit knowledge embodied by professional and craft traditions over the spurious rationalism of managerialist ideology.
And for another, institutions - in the long-run - shape character. And the conservative temperament sees much to bemoan in the modern character: the saccharine displays of public emotion; the supine expectation of “leadership” from those above us; the inability to stand on one’s own two feet and face the responsibility of one’s own actions; the demise of virtue and rise of priggish rule-following; the pursuit of external rather than internal goods ; and the demand that we “respect” others’ sensibilities regardless of their imbecility.

If such widespread failings of character are to be reversed, we might need radical institutional change.

In this sense, revolution and conservatism are compatible.

The reference to public schools at the start reminds me of the description of old Etonian George Orwell as being conservative in everything except politics. I've been struck by the similarities in his personal tastes with those of a proper cultural and political conservative, J.R.R. Tolkien. George:

"Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening. I like English cookery and English beer, French red wines, Spanish white wines, Indian tea, strong tobacco, coal fires, candlelight and comfortable chairs. I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and 'modern' furniture." (Gordon Bowker, George Orwell, Abacus, 2004, p.263).

John:

"I like gardens, trees and unmechanised farmlands. I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking...I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour...;I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much." Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien , Harper Collins, 1995, pp.288-9.

(BTW For a few years I have somewhere in my mind a plan to write a 'compare/contrast' piece on Orwell and Tolkien, but I have a feeling it might never be started. Apart from their major differences on Catholicism and politics, I think they would have got on, especially with their respective interests in the nature of power and language, as well as their love of English nature. Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, read English at Oxford, and one of her teachers was Tolkien (Bowker, op cit, p.167.)

Now this post has ended up at Tolkien, another set of notes I've found this evening are on Meredith Veldman's 1994 book (Cambridge University Press) Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945-1980 which I first came aware of via Patrick Wright's review in the Guardian on St.George's Day aka Shakespeare's Birthday/Death called 'How the Hobbits saved the world'. I eventually got around to reading it (and making notes) a few years later. The inspiration for Veldman's book was when she was reading both The Lord of the Rings and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class while working as an academic in Chicago and finding them extremely similar in tone. In her book Veldman traces the roots of romantic revolt in the British Isles against industrialism from the late Eighteenth Century through to the anti-nuclear protests of the post-1945 period. Some of these "romantic protests" have extremely dodgy politics (the Soil Association, worthwhile organisation that it is now, was part-founded by people with pro-Fascist/Nazi ties (Veldman, p.202) but there were also very democratic ones, in both political and economic terms (ie G.D.H. Cole and 'Guild Socialism'; G.K. Chesterton and 'Distributism'). I intend to discuss them, and other themes from Veldman's book, sooner rather than later.

I think I've strayed a bit in this post away from discussing radicalism and conservatism. That's thinking aloud, I guess. I hate writing conclusions, but I would say that I think there is room for democratic 'radicals' that don't hold onto Big Business or Big Government (including those who think quoting Lenin makes Big Government better for ordinary people) and democratic 'conservatives' who don't cheerlead for the Corporations (and aren't obsessed with Race and/or Religion) to get together, discuss things and work together. Perhaps I haven't persuaded people so, but I hope that you've found this post interesting, one way or another!

Another Kevin Carson book review

In fact two reviews, of books by Sean Gabb and Chris Dillow. Both are scorching critiques, from heterodox "Right" and "Left" positions, of New Labour.

Two Book Reviews: New Labour and Managerialism in British Politics, Monday, November 05, 2007

Sean Gabb. Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back (London: The Hampden Press, 2007). 105 pp.

Chris Dillow. The End of Politics: New Labour and the folly of managerialism (Hampshire, UK: Harriman House, 2007).

These two books, seemingly from divergent ideological perspectives, are both critiques of managerialism in British politics--and perhaps not so divergent after all.

Sean Gabb, successor to the late Chris Tame as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, is very much a man of the Right: a composite of Burkean and Little Englander, roughly equivalent to the Old Right or paleolibertarians on this side of the Atlantic. In his critique of managerialism and the corporate state, however, he has much to say about globalization and corporate rule, among many other things, that left-libertarians will find of benefit.

Chris Dillow, a heterodox economist who owns Stumbling and Mumbling blog, attacks managerialism from a position decidedly on the Left. But it's a Left that's friendly to markets, decentralism, and self-management, and hostile to the New Class version of bureaucratic socialism that dominated Britain from the Webbs to Harold Wilson.


* * *


1. The chief villain in Gabb's book is the managerial New Class and the rentier capitalists whose main source of profit is their association with the corporate state:

It is clear that our ruling class--or that loose coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, educators, and media and business people who derive wealth and power and status from an enlarged and active state--wants an end of liberal democracy. [p. 6]

Elected politicians never have the running of a country all to themselves. While undoubtedly important, they must in all cases govern with the advice and consent of a wider community of the powerful. There are the civil servants. There are the public sector educators. There are the semi-autonomous agencies funded by the tax payers. There are journalists and other communicators. There are certain formally private media and entertainment and legal and professional and business interests that also obtain power, status and income from the policies of government. Together, these form a web of individuals and institutions that is sometimes called the Establishment, though I prefer... to call it the ruling class. [p. 8]

Gabb's ruling class, like the mass base of Orwell's Ingsoc party, was "brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government."

The new Britain he finds so objectionable was essentially described by Anthony Burgess some forty years before. Indeed I find the absence of any reference to Burgess somewhat remarkable. Tony Blair's Britain, with its near-total supercession of common law protections by administrative courts, and with the social pathologies symbolized by the ubiquity of yobs, happy-slappers and ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders), under the watchful eye of the public surveillance camera, could have leapt from the pages of A Clockwork Orange or 1985. Burgess's Britain, terrorized by hoodlums like Alex and his droogs, in which "everyone not a child or with child must work," and where the Minister of the Interior sought to empty the prisons of common prisons because they'd "soon be needing them for the politicals"--is it really such a stretch of the imagination, these days?

The instruments by which the New Class is imposing this "new settlement" on Britain are the replacement of common law due process, civil liberties, and parliamentary government by the unaccountable rule of administrative bodies, and the use of multiculturalism as an ideology to divide, conquer, and reshape society.

Gabb sees the old institutional basis of liberal democracy being eviscerated by the New Class:

...structures of accountability that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries are to be deactivated. Their forms will continue. There will be assemblies at Westminster. But these will not be sovereign assemblies with the formal authority of life and death over us all. That authority will have been passed to various unelected and transnational agencies. And so far as the Westminster assemblies will remain important, our votes will have little effect on what they enact. [p. 6]

I can find much to disagree with in Gabb's view of cultural (or rather multicultural) matters. For example, in principle I would view the shift in orientation of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich that he describes, from a celebration of Empire and naval supremacy to a focus on slavery and "history from the position of the colonised," [p. 10] as a good thing. I consider insititutional racism in police forces, and the casual expression within police circles of racist attitudes toward the subject populations over which they are have been given near-unlimited power to coerce, in a much more alarming light than Gabb apparently does. In a country where the names Cory Maye and Katherine Johnson have recently figured in the news, where every week brings another story of someone murdered in a botched no-knock raid, or of someone being tasered to death for "resisting arrest" (who turned out to have been in a diabetic coma)--I can understand the reasons for rooting out such attitudes among our "protectors and servers" root and branch. I confess little sympathy for a uniformed beast of prey (or "filth," in the apt terminology of some across the Pond) who expressed approval for the murder of black suspects in police custody, and who joked about burying a "Paki bastard" under a railway line,-- regardless of how badly his life was "ruined" by exposure. [pp. 11-12] Although Gabb suggests the public reaction was "excessive" and expressed some doubt as to whether such views would affect their performance of public duties, [p. 12] given the background of police abuses in my own country I tend to think cops with absolute and unaccountable power are quite prone to act on such views, and that the public reaction isn't severe enough.

But the remarkable fact is not our disagreement on cultural matters, but that I concur with so much of his analysis of the effect of "political correctness" and multiculturalism as ruling class ideologies. Like Gabb, I see official multiculturalism in the hands of the New Class and its state agencies as an instrument of division and control, serving a ruling class that prefers a population without the cohesion to resist.

The ruling class seeks "the establishment of absolute and unaccountable power," to be achieved in part by coercion, but even more by the "reshaping of our thoughts." The significance of multiculturalism is not so much its objective content, or the often harmful and wrongheaded content of the older habits of thought it seeks to replace. It is the attitude of uncertainty and deference it seeks to create among the ruled: constant uncertainty and anxiety lest they be using a word ("crippled" or "handicapped" rather than "differently-abled," "black" rather than "African-American," "Indian" rather than "Native American") that has been superceded by the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, and deference to the class of social engineers who decide the currently acceptable terminology. And the terminology is deliberately changed frequently enough to maintain this constant free-floating sense of anxiety and dependence.

As dangerous as virulently racist views may be when held by the lawless thugs whose "gang colors" are police uniforms, the nature of the ideas being stamped out is purely incidental for the social engineers; their real purpose could be served just as well by identifying any widely held belief, no matter its substantive content, as a "thoughtcrime" to be policed by themselves. And the assumption of such state power is even more dangerous when exercised against private citizens--as when plainclothes police agents visited Chinese and Indian restaurants to monitor the patrons for ethnic slurs against the staff. [p. 13] Criminalizing the expression of racist views by private citizens, no matter how abhorrent--it should go without saying for any libertarian--endangers the liberties of everyone else.

The ruling class's motivation in ideologically renovating museums and such is not to replace a worse with a better understanding of an objective truth, but to "weaken their ties with the past, or... to make them into vehicles for contemporary propaganda." [p. 10]

Every autonomous institution, every set of historical associations, every pattern of loyalty that cannot be co-opted and controlled--these must be destroyed or neuralized. [p. 25]

Their agenda, in rooting out and punishing private expressions of racist thought, is to seize on the abhorrence that many understandably feel for such views as a vehicle for putting power into the hands of a class of social engineers.

If borders and customs and other artificial barriers to the free movement of people are a bad thing, then so is the artificial mobility promoted by Empire and by subsidized global capitalism. The result, as described by Gabb, is to render impossible a recurrence of the liberal uprisings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries , "by promoting movements of peolles so that nations in the old sense disappear, and are replaced by patchworks of nationalities more suspicious of each other than of any ruling class." [p. 6]

Stripped of the Left's older preoccupations with economics and class, likewise, multiculturalism can be of immense service to the cartelized private sector in policing its wage-serfs and cubicle-drones. For one thing, the added inefficiency and overhead costs of an internal PC regime, as Gabb observes, are cartelized: that is, they apply equally to all large corporations and are therefore not a matter for competition between firms. [p. 48] For another, the postmodern, multicultural corporate culture described by Thomas Frank in One Market Under God is much closer to the worldview of David Brooks' "Bobos" who predominate in managerial ranks. In the U.S., for the managerialists and professionals who constitute the base of the Democratic Party, stagnant wages, downsizing, and all the other economic aspects of the new global economy are perfectly fine--so long as the people in the boardrooms who do the exploiting "look like America." Forty years ago in The Greening of America, Charles Reich depicted a hippie chic utopia in which the centralized, hierarchical power structures of the state and corporation were largely unaltered--but staffed by people with bell-bottoms and beads. What mattered was not the existence of concentrations of power, but that the people in power "had their heads in the right place, man." That "utopia" is, in essence, now a reality. Most importantly, in an age of increasing worker disgruntlement over stagnant pay and increased workloads, an internal PC regime serves admirably to promote resentment and divisions and reduce solidarity among workers, and provide trumped-up grounds for disciplining troublemakers.

A central part of Gabb's analytical toolkit is the work of Frankfurt School and neo-Marxist scholars on "ideological hegemony." Although he denies the applicability of their analysis to "liberal democracy," he sees it as well-suited to the ideological project of the new ruling class.

I should say, in passing, that I take issue with Gabb on the relevance of neo-Marxist thought to the old, "liberal" order. He denied the existence of any real "hegemonic discourse" under the old liberal regime, arguing rather that political leaders tended to legitimize their positions in terms of a value system which arose spontaneously from civil society and which they accepted as given. [p. 20] Likewise, he considers the Chomsky/Herman "propaganda model" of the media to have been inapplicable to liberal democracy. [pp. 31-32]

I think he is mistaken on this count. For one thing, the question of whether "liberal democracy" even existed in any meaningful sense is a very real one. The old liberal democracy was dominated by privileged capitalist and landed elites whose economic position resulted, not from the workings of a market, but from the state. And the old "spontaneous" ideological climate reflected, to a large extent, their interests. For another, the New Class and its ideology are nearly as old as corporate capitalism, and its managerialist world-view (eg. scientific management) has been incorporated into the service of the plutocracy since the corporate revolution first required a class of "professional" overseers. The New Class and managerialism, and the protective and nurturing state, have been integral parts of corporate capitalism since its beginning; and if we identify the full flowering of liberal democracy with the electoral reforms of 1833 and 1867 (let alone 1911), then liberal democracy was hardly even fairly begun and the Old Regime fairly ended, before the beginnings of state capitalism. Genuine "liberal democracy" was largely limited to a thin sliver of thought by Ricardian radicals like Hodgskin, assorted Cobdenites, etc., sandwiched in-between the Old Regime and state capitalism, which was quickly relegated to a few radical free market strands (the individualist anarchists, Georgists, Nock and Borsodi, etc.) fighting a rear-guard action within state capitalism.

And in more general terms, hegemonic ideology is coextensive with, and as old as, class society. As an individualist anarchist, I consider class power and economic exploitation the primary functions of the state; and just as there has never been a genuine free market, free from economic exploitation by state-privileged classes, there has never been a society without a hegemonic ideology serving such privileged classes. Hegemonic ideology, I should add, does not require any conscious, conspiratorial design--it is a largely automatic result of a society's normal tendency to reproduce the conditions for its own continued existence.

I also suspect Gabb's treatment of neo-Marxism as the ideology of the new ruling class is overblown. There may be something to his tracing of their political style to the New Left fashions of their formative years; Gabb cites Boyd Tonkin to the effect that while Nulab has abandoned most of the economic content of Marxism and social democracy, their "pattern-building, system-seeking cast of thought" persists. [p. 22] But stripped of their economic and political substance, the signficance of their style itself is tenuous at best (as also with explanations of the neoconservative "style" in terms of their alleged Trotskyite origins).

As an analytical tool for describing the ideological functions of the ruling class, as opposed to the content of their ideology, neo-Marxist concepts may however be quite useful.

And while I disagree with Gabb on the question of whether a hegemonic ideology existed under "liberalism" and the Old Regime, I do agree that it was much more feasible to argue against the hegemonic ideology from an independent base. The average person of the late twentieth century was far more conditioned by his televised matrix reality, than the average member of the working class by the hegemonic ideology of the nineteenth century. The very extent to which Marxism and assorted brands of anarchism spread among the working classes demonstrates as much. Contrast, for example, Thomas Franks' Kansas before WWI, to the same region in recent years. It was surely even more prone to Bible-thumping and Jesus-shouting at the turn of the twentieth century as it is now--and yet it was one of the prime constituencies for the Wobblies and Gene Debs, and home to a vibrant and independent working class press. Today, on the other hand, the populist resentment of the area is channeled by Rove's talking points and AM talk radio against a range of targets carefully selected by the ruling class. The turning point was probably the liquidation of the genuine socialist, working class, and economic populist movements during the reign of terror under St. Woodrow and A. Mitchell Palmer. We may finally be witnessing today, with the rise of the Internet and network culture as an alternative to the gatekeepers of the corporate media, the weak beginnings of a resurgence of something like the pre-WWI independent popular culture.

Gabb's revolutionary agenda deserves a great deal of attention. He rejects any gradualist program of scaling back one institution at a time. Such a strategy, he says, would just result in a pitched battle over each institution, with the anti-state coalition quickly losing its political capital to a war of attrition. The only hope is to gamble everything on electoral success and then to act quickly and decisively, in the brief window of opportunity, to dismantle as much of the ruling class' institutional base as possible, so that it cannot be quickly reconstituted if power once again changes hands. That means completely abolishing institutions like the BBC, and completely dismantling the administrative apparatus and records of the regulatory state ("An hour in front of a shredding machine can ruin the work of 20 years."), and--while leaving the state schools intact--completely abolishing teacher training colleges. [pp. 54-56, 60]

I am skeptical as to the prospects for any such all-at-once seizure of power, as opposed to gradually rolling back the state and supplanting it with alternative organizations (as per both the agorist agenda of building a counter-economy, and the Wobbly strategy of "building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old"). But I agree that, revolutionary or gradualist, the goal of any libertarian movement should be, not to control the state and other centralized institutions, but to dismantle them. I am very much a believer in Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy. Genuine democratic control of centralized, hierarchical institutions is impossible. Our only hope for real democracy is to destroy as much of the infrastructure of the centralized state and corporate economy as possible, and replace them with loose political federations of local direct democracies and with a free market of competing worker cooperatives.

Along these last lines, interestingly, Gabb proposes something of an entente with the libertarian left.

...there are many anarchists and syndicalists and libertarian socialists who do not believe in this extended state. And so I will make it clear that when I talk about a free market, I do not mean a legal framework within which giant corporations are able to squeeze their suppliers, shut down their small competitors and socialize their workers into human sheep.

I have already said I would not defend the landed interests. I would very strongly favor an attack on the structures of corporate capitalism

Organisations like Tesco, British Pretroleum and ICI are not free market entities. They are joint stock limited liability cororations. The Company Acts allow them to incorporate so that their directors and shareholders can evade their natural responsibilities in contract and tort. They are, for this reason, privileged in law....

It is not true that big business has in any sense suffered from the public interventions in economic activity of the past hundred years. The truth is that big business has benefited from, and in many cases, promoted every agenda of big government. Employment protection laws, product safety laws, curbs on advertising and promotion, heavy taxes, and all the rest--these have served to insulate big business from their smaller competition, or have cartelized or externalized costs, thereby reducing the need for competition between big business....

The leaders of large corporations are nothing more than the economic wing of the ruling class. They provide taxes and outright bribes that enrich the political wing. They act as part of the ideological state apparatus.... In return for all this, they receive various kinds of protection and subsidy that allow them to make large profits.

They police their workers... Workers find themselves gently conscripted into large organisations that strip them of autonomy and suppress any actual desire for self-direction. Anyone who works for any length of time in one of these big corporations tends to become just another "human resource"--all his important life decisions made for him by others, and insensibly encouraged into political and cultural passivity. [pp. 63-65]

His description of the likely fate of the state-affiliated "private sector" corporate economy, after the revolution, is positively eloquent:

Our first big attack on the present ruling class should destroy most of the really dangerous government bodies, and the formally private bodies that now cluster round them would perish like tapeworms in a dead rat. [p. 61]

The tapeworm is to be killed through the elimination of all subsidies and protections, and above all the elimination of limited liability.

We should promote the emergence of markets in which the majority of players are sole traders and partnerships and worker cooperatives, and in which the number of people employed on contracts of permanent service is an ever-dwindling minority.... [This policy] would replace armies of ruling class serfs with beneficiaries of our counter-revolution. [pp. 65-66]

The welfare state he advises to leave pretty much alone for the near term. In so doing, the revolution would deprive the ruling class of its chief potential ally for an attempted counter-revolution. And, he points out, the main actual cost of the welfare state is the administrative overhead from supporting intrusive and authoritarian welfare bureaucrats in a comfortable lifestyle. As a first reform, he proposes eliminating the entire apparatus of case workers and redirecting the entire welfare budget to a guaranteed annual income. [pp. 57-59] Ultimately, it could be drastically scaled back as increased working class prosperity and a resurgence of voluntary mutual aid arrangements made it unnecessary. [p. 63]

His tax agenda--eliminating the income tax and VAT, and replacing them with a tax on land-value--should be pleasing to the Geolibertarian contingent of the libertarian left. [pp. 62-63]

In the legal realm, Gabb proposes dismantling as much as possible of the administrative state and its prerogative law procedures. In the restored common law, all regulations of vice and private behavior are to be eliminated, while making penalties for real crimes against person and property sufficient to deter. For the latter crimes, however, a maximalist reading of all common law due process guarantees is to be restored:


the right to silence under police questioning, the full right of habeas corpus, the full presumption of innocence, the full right of peremptory challenge of jurors, the rules against similar fact and hearsay evidence, the unanimity rule in jury trials, and all else that has been taken away. [p. 68]


* * *


2. The central focus of Dillow's critique of New Labour is managerialism. By that, he says,

...I mean an ideology which tries to eliminate political debate about the rival merits of competing ideals. In its stead, managerialism relies on a central elite which believes that it, and it alone, has the skill and know-how to devise policies to cope with the inexorable forces of economic change.... In short, New Labour believes it can run a country in the same way that executives run a business. [pp. 11-12]

...Managerialists like to pretend that we face big challenges in a fast-moving environment. They invite us to believe that they alone are equipped to address such challenges (in managerialism, problems are never solved, only addressed). And they like to present policies as necessary responses to external events--just as company bosses present mass redundancies as inevitable measures over which they have little choice. [p. 14]

The irony is that New Labour managerialists, for all their proclaimed technocratic competency, are so ham-handed in their "solutions" to the pressing needs of the changing economy. "Information technologies are transforming our lives," goes the Nulab slogan. "Fair enough," replies Dillow. But he points out that the organizational paradigm of the new economy is the substitution of networks for hierarchy, while the Blairite "solution" is even more hierarchy. [p. 16] An interesting point of comparison is Bill Gates, the fountain of so much superficially libertarian rhetoric about new economies and flattening hierarchies, but whose practical agenda focuses almost entirely on the use of state power to protect corporate hierarchies from the destabilizing effects of the new economy: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Vista Genuine Advantage, the recurring threat of infringement action against Linux distributers. Blair and Gates, faced with a technological and economic revolution against hierarchical institutions, attempt to domesticate the revolution and render it amenable to the control of hierarchical institutions.

This is especially disappointing, given Blair's Christian socialist roots and his early affinity for quasi-distributist ideas. The Cooperative Party, in an almost touching exercise in denial, have long persisted in celebrating their ties to Blair and Brown; until recently Blair's visage leered down from the banner of their website.

But despite occasional lip service to "a redistribution of power that offers people real control over the decisions that affect our lives" (Gordon Brown), New Labourites never consider any cooperative challenge to corporate hierarchy.

New Labour likes to claim that it is "pro-business." The significance of this is that one rarely hears that it is "pro-market."

The distinction is important. Markets are tumultuous, unpredictable and uncontrollable processes, which often make fools of the most esteemed expert.... Businesses, however, are hierarchical bureaucracies and their leaders are often more like senior civil servants than buccaneering entrepreneurs.

New Labour's preference for business over markets shows its managerialist bias--because to any managerialist, businesses, with their mission statements and their illusions of control, are much more congenial than the disruptive anarchic forces of the market. [p. 19]

Dillow, in denouncing New Labour managerialism, does not fall into the common pattern of considering its economic agenda a neoliberal departure from the older Fabian socialism.

We might observe, in passing, that almost from their first Fabian and Crolyite beginnings, New Class advocates of a mixed economy in the Anglophone world have been in fact the hired help of the corporate plutocracy.

And as Dillow points out, Blair's agenda was very much in line with the anti-labor authoritarianism of the old Fabian movement. Blair's "work not welfare" was a logical outgrowth of the Beveridge Report's aim "to make and keep men fit for service." [p. 9] C.S. Lewis' depiction of authoritarian social engineering in That Hideous Strength was a fairly plausible extrapolation from the most proto-fascistic tendencies of H.G. Wells and the Webbs (with their forced labor camps and sterilization for the underclass), and from the New Statesman agenda of the late 1940s.

There is one issue on which I probably disagree with Dillow: the necessary tradeoff between efficiency and equality. Dillow takes issue with the New Labour theme that we can have both efficiency and equality. Although that position may well be spurious as it is meant by New Labour, I think it is in fact quite possible to have dramatic gains in both equality and efficiency compared to the present baseline, with no tradeoffs of any kind. The reason is that most of the present inequality in income bears no relation to differences in efficiency, but rather results from privilege and exploitation. If by "equality" one means eliminating incomes that derive from privilege, and by "efficiency" tying income to productivity, the two are necessarily connected.

I suspect the problem with New Labour's idea of reconciling the two lies with their conception of "efficiency": a Schumpeterian/Chandlerian/Galbraithian monstrosity of centralization, false economies of scale, and Weberian rationality. Accordingly, their recipe for "efficiency" assumes the existing corporate institutional structure will be left intact with all its assorted forms of privilege, and then "equality" is achieved by redistributive taxation and welfare to distribute some of the surplus accruing from such "efficiency." The New Labour approach is to leave the hierarchical corporate and state apparatus untouched, and then promote both "equality" and "efficiency" through top-down social engineering: carefully tailoring taxes, benefits, minimum wages, and other incentives to maximize output and achieve the ideal distribution of income.

....governments know how labour supply decisions respond to tax and benefit rates, so they can design a tax and benefit system that encourages people to work. They know how to set the minimum wage at a high enough level to raise incomes, but not so high as to destroy employers' willingness to employ peole. They know enough about what determines companies' capital spending decisions, so they can promote investment by striving for macroeconomic stability. And they know how to improve education, and how education affects earnings, so they can use better schooling to reduce wage inequality and promote economic growth by providing a bigger supply of skilled workers. [p. 21]

But in fact the present corporate system is pretty bad from the standpoint of efficiency. It starts from the assumption of enormous concentrations of wealth in a few hands, the absentee ownership of capital by large-scale investors, and a hired labor force with no property in the means of production it works. Necessarily, therefore, the absentee owners must resort to the expedient of hierarchy and top-down authority to elicit effort from a work force with no rational interest in maximizing its own productivity. Such hierarchies necessarily result in the divorce of effort from reward, and of productive knowledge from authority. Each rung of authority interferes in the efforts of those who know more about what they're doing, receives only information filtered from below based on what they want to hear, and is accountable only to those higher up the chain of command who are even more unaccountable and out of touch with reality.

The obvious solution, the worker cooperative, by uniting knowledge with authority and reward with effort, would slice through the overwhelming majority of the hierarchical corporation's knowledge and agency problems like a Gordian knot. The problem of socially engineering the wages and benefits system so as to "encourage people to work" would disappear; the elimination of privilege and unearned income, and the receipt by labor of its full product, would tie reward directly to effort.

But this solution is ruled out by the system's structural starting assumptions of concentrated wealth and absentee ownership. So the hierarchical corporation is adopted as a sort of Rube Goldberg expedient, the most rational means available given fundamentally irrational ends.

I say above that I probably disagree because Dillow's own agenda, presented at the end of the book, consists of the very sort of program of economic democracy that would be perfectly designed for the coincidence of efficiency and equality. He is an enthusisatic supporter, for example, of worker cooperatives and self-management. He is also very big on the idea of the government introducing cooperative, decentralist and democratic principles into its own enterprises:

The salient fact about New labour is that it has done nothing whatever to equalize status within the organizations it runs. The civil service is as inegalitarian--lethally so--as it was in 1997. And there's been no effort to convert schools and hospitals into more egalitarianly managed structures. The state is far more hierarchical--far more opposed to the concept of equal status--than any investment bank. [p. 215]

Indeed, one of the planks in his agenda is titled "Turn schools and hospitals into cooperatives."

His case against hierarchy and for self-management is bolstered by extended arguments toward the end of the book. In Chapter 13, "The Rituals of Reason," he examines at length the fallacies and biases to which management is prone, in overestimating its own competence and underestimating the intractability of problems.

One might raise the question of whether managers are really unique in this respect; are not workers, also, prone to such conceptual biases? The answer, I think, is that (of course) everyone is prone to logical fallacies and conceptual biases. But their tendency to distort thought increases the more a decision-maker is separated from direct knowledge of a problem, and the more concrete practical knowledge is replaced by abstract considerations. The closer a decision-maker is to the subject of his decision, and the more it involves matters of familiar technique or personal experience, the more competent his decisions. A skilled laborer on the shop floor is apt to be the best judge of organizing production, or of handling the organizational problems involved in coordinating the activity of skilled workers like himself in his own work unit. If his work unit is a small factory producing for a local market, made up of people largely known to the work force, and with retail outlets that have maintained relations with the factory for an extended period of time, he and his coworkers are apt to be the best judges of the levels output required by the market and the product innovations likely to be demanded.

Dillow's critique of hierarchy, as a source of irrationality and knowledge distortion, is very Hayekian.

When the first factories were established by Richard Arkwright and James Watt, it made sense for them to control production with an iron hand, because they knew the production processes inside out--they had invented them...

Today management doesn't have this know-how. Products, process and markets are too complex for anyone to know as thoroughly as Arkwright or Watt did....

Instead, knowledge of the production process is scattered across the organisation. If you have a problem, it is often better solved by asking your fellow workers than asking the boss.

However, hierarchies can obstruct co-operation between workers. One reason for this is simply that pyramidal reporting lines often prevent workers from knowing and therefore using the skill of their colleagues. Another reason is that communication requires trust.... Worse still, the benefits of co-operation are often impossible to quantify, and so a management obsessed with budgets and targets does not encourage it. And the knowledge that such gains will flow to managers, rather than themselves, will inhibit workers from co-operating fully. [p. 278]

The hierarchical, authoritarian corporation is especially ill-suited to knowledge work, and other forms of production in which human capital is the most important factor.

It might make sense to give the order "be here by nine o'clock." But it's just gibberish to say, "be creative."

In an authoritarian environment, workers prefer (in the words of Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith) to "suppress their innate capacity to solve problems and wait instead for commands from above." [p. 279]

Dillow observes that excessively large government works contrary to the goal of income equality. The reason is that, when state expenditures eat up a large enough portion of the GDP, it becomes impossible to fund them by taxing the rich alone. A society in which the state consumes 50% or more of GDP will, of necessity, have a high tax burden on the middle class. [p. 69]

He is quite hostile to New Labour's social engineering approach to taxation. Rather than a complex, administration-intensive program of carefully targeted tax credits and cuts, it would make far more sense to institute a citizen's basic income which requires little administrative bureaucracy. [p. 85] In the American context, I have long cursed the lack of an alternative to the mainstream Democratic and Republican approaches to tax cuts. The Republicans, predictably, are wedded to the idea of "across the board" tax cuts that go overwhelmingly to the plutocracy. Democrats, as one might expect of such nanny statish social engineers, prefer carefully targeted tax credits for child rearing, health insurance, higher education, home energy efficiency, etc. The obvious alternative to both, as progressive as it would be libertarian, would be to simply raise the standard exemption to $30,000 or so.

The great size of political units, and the removal of the administration of welfare as a question for local self-government, has nullified the natural tendency toward mutual aid shown by humans in communities small enough for direct personal acquaintance with the disabled or unemployed. As a result, the working class tends to resent the underclass and to be vulnerable to anti-welfare demagogy by right-wing politicians. [p. 219] A decentralized society of small, self-governing population units might well contribute voluntarily to mutual aid arrangements on a scale sufficient to render taxation unnecessary (especially if laborers received a larger portion of their actual product).

In the process of writing his book, Dillow manages to attack many of the platitudes of establishment economists and neoliberal chatterers like Tom Friedman. For example, he points out that the natural tendency of technical change is to reduce the international division of labor. The increasing speed with which technology crosses national borders means that particular nations maintain comparative advantage for shorter and shorter periods. "that tends to limit the international division of labour and, with it, world trade growth." [p. 45] And as I recall someone else suggesting, a great deal of "comparative advantage" is the artificial result of "intellectual property" [sic] laws.

He is merciless in attacking the New Labour love affair with education as the solution to poverty (likewise beloved of social engineers in this country, both liberal and neocon). The real benefit of education, from the perspective of the corporate economy, is its function in signalling a "good attitude": educated workers have "a high marginal utility of income, a propensity for hard work, ...and an ability to identify with managers rather than workers."

If education works by changing our characters, and by straightening the crooked timper of humanity into something useful to bosses, prosperity is achieved by sacrificing liberty and diversity to managerialism. [p. 119]

What's more, as the impolitic Joe Bageant argued, the social engineering panacea of education depends on a fallacy of composition. While individuals can increase their chances of advancement by education, the entire population cannot do so. The Empire requires some 25% or so of the population to fill supervisory, administrative and technical slots. Increasing higher education beyond this share of the total population simply increases the competition for those slots and drives down salaries, while inspiring an authoritarian, dog-eat-dog attitude on the part of the winners toward the losers. It inspires, that is, the same status anxiety that motivated so much of the German lower middle class to support Hitler.