More Mutualist Notes

The Banking Bailout's Intellectual Guru Is Revealed (Seen Here Demonstrating His Theories in Practice)!

I'm currently reading Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, which I think has the reputation of being 'The Das Kapital of Modern Evolutionary Anarchism'. I've still to finish Mr. C's magnum opus, as there is a lot to take in...and my brain has largely forgotten how to absorb serious economic theory (as opposed to slogans) in one go. In fact I've left the opening part, the most theoretical section, largely alone, and sort of made my way through the historical and 'what is to be done now?' sections.

However, after those caveats, I'm glad I'm reading it, as I think embracing Mutualism is the way forward. As the state in Britain, the US and elsewhere is getting increasingly exposed as just means to prop up Big Business financially, I think there is a space now for an anti-corporate, non-statist alternative to Actual Existing Capitalism to make its voice heard and challenge the status quo. Mutualism seems to be a good a starting point as any for trying to achieve this.

To be frank, there has not been a lot of calls from the British Left for a Mutualist approach to the current crisis. Indeed, with the British state nationalising (totally or in part) much of the banking/financial sector here, there appears to be wind (sailing, not scatalogical, metaphor intended!) behind those on the British Left whose answer to every economic or business problem appears to be a call to nationalise the sector or company in trouble. There is nearly invariably accompanied by a simultaneous call for 'workers control' of aforesaid firm or sector. Thus far in the current crisis, the British state has not heeded those calls, and without some sort of employee or consumer representation, the moves by the state to intervene in the financial system can be seen as merely state capitalism, as the Independent Working Class Association has pointed out.




Intellectual Guru demonstrates 'Plan B'...

Furthermore, I think the Left (here and elsewhere) has to think beyond putting forward nationalisation as the answer to all problems. There are some sectors ie the utilities, the railways, the Post Office, the NHS where I cannot see how corporations can do a better job than the state. That is, Actual Existing Corporations, as opposed to those pie-in-the-sky enterprises Politicians, Think Tanks and Journalists seem to think run erstwhile public services. However, even in the public sector, there needs to be more than just state ownership, run (often at arm's length) from Whitehall. Tony Benn wrote back in 1980 that 'We have had enough experience now to know that nationalisation plus Lord Robens does not add up to socialism' (Arguments for Socialism, quoted in Geoffrey Foote [1986, Croom Helm]The Labour Party's Political Thought, p.330). Hence it should be pretty obvious that a state-owned bank headed by some failed ex-financier who sends Christmas cards to Gordon Brown and Tony Blair is NOT socialism either. There needs to be some sort of representation of employees and consumers in the running of public enterprises. This is not just 'a good thing' for socialists to support. It is essential that state-owned enterprises have some democratic input from those who work in them, and use their products, otherwise further down the line the claim that 'we are returning to the 1970s' or 'modelling the economy on the old Eastern Bloc model' will come to the fore and derail any moves towards a post-corporate society. Writing in the early 1980s (In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Verso Press, 1983, p.49), Perry Anderson wrote about the need for a quite detailed exposition of what a socialist society would look like, as:

'...it is quite clear that without serious exploration and mapping of it, any political advance beyond a parliamentary capitalism will continue to be blocked. No working-class or popular bloc in a Westernsociety will ever make a leap in the dark, at this point in history, let alone into the grey on grey of an Eastern society of the type that exists today. A socialism that remains incognito will never be embraced by it.'

Over a quarter of a century on, the need for a non-statist vision of a socialist society is even more pressing, and I think Mutualism can play a large part in creating such a vision.

While contemplating writing this post, I came across the following article. At the very least, it shows that Mutualism does occur in real life, and does suggest that it is a way for the Left to move forward:

Citizenship in action
Swiss firefighters are a living rebuke to right and left: society does exist, but is best left alone
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Guardian, Thursday 22 January 2009

A week before Christmas my son and I were skiing in the Swiss resort of Mürren and staying at the Eiger Guest House run by Alan and Véronique Ramsay-Flück, a Scottish-Swiss couple. At breakfast one day Alan was nowhere to be seen. It transpired that he's now a Swiss citizen and a member of the village fire brigade, who had been called out at 4am to deal with a fire raging in a barn a few miles away. A dramatic picture in the next day's local paper showed the barn had burned out but that they saved the farmhouse next to it.

We were suitably impressed, but there was more to it. What had happened that night was something increasingly rare in my own country: citizenship in action, not to say co-operative mutual aid. The fire brigade in Mürren - as in other towns and villages, in some parts of the US, and in social-democratic Denmark - isn't professional but amateur, in the best sense of the word. The firefighters are part-timers, carrying pagers for call-outs. Their only reward is serving their community.

Our nearest equivalent is the wonderful Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which may not think of itself as making a political statement but does. The lifeboat crews are unpaid volunteers. And the whole organisation receives no state support but is entirely funded by public donations. If the behemoth of the modern state is one pattern for society, the RNLI is another.

And so is much of Swiss society. One of the more pleasing things, if one comes from our damp little island and is condemned to talk with an accent that defines caste, is that everyone in Mürren sounds the same. Educated people read books and papers in literary German, but doctor, plumber, postman and teacher all speak the same Schywyzerdütsch, the impenetrable local Swiss-German dialect.

Over the centuries, people with several different languages and religions found a way to live together peaceably in Switzerland. The army consists of every adult man, with his uniform in a cupboard at home; that citizen force was formidable enough to make Hitler think twice about invading. And by way of a decentralised confederal structure, democracy works in a most practical way, with decisions taken at local level.

To praise Swiss localism, or voluntary institutions, is to risk being called rightwing, but that's curious when you look at it. Every kind of "little platoon" is in truth a rebuke to both left and right. Since the 19th century, critics of the ever-growing state called themselves liberal individualists, a misnomer which ignored the obvious truth that most forms of creative human activity are collective. A Cornish lifeboat crew and an Oberland fire brigade refute dogmatic individualism and "vulgar-Thatcherism": there is such a thing as society. The real distinction isn't between individual and collective, but between the voluntary and the coercive.

And yet for that reason those amateur platoons are a rebuke also to the left - or at least to state socialism. In either its Leninist or Fabian forms, socialism assumed unconsciously that people could not or would not deal with their lives by their own initiative and through co-operation unenforced and unregulated by the state. Even the moderate socialism of our own Labour party was all too clearly based on the belief that the lower classes were too backward, feckless and idle to look after themselves and had to be taken care of, whether they liked it or not.

In that respect, the modern welfare state took over from older repressive institutions, and in the process helped eviscerate the finest thing Britain has produced: the voluntary institutions of the self-helping working class. That splendid anarchist writer Colin Ward once made the point by contrasting the very names of the two kinds of organisation in 19th-century England: "On the one side the Workhouse, the Poor Law Infirmary, the National Society for the Education of the Poor in Accordance with the Principles of the Established Church; and on on the other, the Friendly Society, the Sick Club, the Co-operative Society, the Trade Union. One represents the tradition of fraternal and autonomous associations springing up from below, the other that of authoritarian institutions directed from above."

If anything, the RNLI and the Mürren fire brigade are exemplars not of greedy capitalism or some crazed Ayn Rand war-of-all-with-all, but of anarchism, and Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid". And if a "left" has anything to teach in the coming century, it won't be the authoritarian tradition which sees the the state as the answer to all problems, but the spirit of free mutual co-operation that believes that people can help each other - and will actually do so if left alone.

I can imagine someone asking what the Swiss fire brigade has to do with life in Blighty in order to put down the idea of Mutualism taking flight here. Well, there are political traditions here which, at the very least, overlap with Mutualism. I have mentioned before Meredith Veldman's Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Britain: Romantic protest, 1945-1980 (1984, Cambridge University Press) and did promise to come back to it. In this case it is to refer to Veldman's volume to show that there are English political traditions which lend themeselves to being, at least, intellectual fellow travellers of Mutualism.



G.D.H. Cole: Mr. Guild Socialism

There is, for instance, Guild Socialism, which was taken up by leading socialist thinker G.D.H. Cole. He became a supporter of Guild Socialism as it 'offered me a kind of socialism that I could want as well as think right', since it saw people 'as having personalities to be expressed as well as stomachs to be filled.' (p.25)Cole saw Guild Socialism as attempting to realise 'a union of industrial self-government and community control' (p.26). He also believed that 'democracy had to be small, or broken up into small groups, in order to be real' (p.28). Cole and Guild Socialism is also discussed in the Foote book on the Labour Party's political thought. This shows that although Cole believes the nation-state to be supreme in national matters, such as foreign policy and defence, it had no right to interfere in those areas not common to its citizens, such as religion and industry. Cole says 'the State itself should only be regarded as an association- elder brother, if you will, but certainly in so sense father of the rest.' (Foote, op cit, p.115.)



G.K. Chesterton: Mr Distributism

Returning to Meredith Veldman's tome, it is possible to identity 'distributism', as advocated by GK Chesterton, as another intellectual fellow traveller of Mutualism. A caveat must be made here. When I was younger there was two things I associated Chesterton with: (i) 'The Father Brown' detective stories and (ii) a reputation for anti-semitism. From what I've read, I think Chesterton was pretty anti-semitic in outlook for most of his life. However, when the Nazis took charge in Germany, this changed, as his Wikipedia entry suggests:

In 1934, after the Nazi Party took power in Germany he wrote that:

'In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people.'

The Wiener Library (London's archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: "he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on."

Chesterton condemned the Nuremberg Laws, and he died in 1936, as the Hitlerite antisemitic measures were temporarily decreased due to the Berlin Olympics, long before lethal persecution by the Nazis would start.

Sometimes one needs to see the possible consequences of a particular attitude before one rejects that attitude.

Like Cole, Chesterton was a firm believer in political and economic democracy, or distributism, as Chesterton saw it. As Veldman says, Chesterton thought men should be trusted to make their own decisions that concerned their lives and societies, rejecting the idea of there being a 'stupid public'. He thought real democracy depended upon participation, which could only be really secured in a decentralised, locally controlled system in which each citizen could see that their opinions and actions mattered. (Veldman, op cit, pp.33-34) Chesterton believed that 'The best and shortest way of saying it is that instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is a pygmy, we must at least reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is a toy.' In economic sectors where large-scale tehcnology was essential, Chesterton advocated worker shareholding so that machinery belonged to each worker (ibid, p.35).

I realise this post is rapidly advancing into Outer Space, so I'm going move into the home straight. It was from the start more a way of putting various bits and pieces into the blogosphere that any Grand Synthesis...'Studies in Mutualist Political Economy' it is not! I will try and finish Kevin C's magnum opus before the whole economic edifice collapses and I have to finish it by candlelight in a London tube tunnel, and return to Mutualism once again!

A Crisis of Legitimacy?

Just a thought...

To keep this blog ticking over I'll putting up a few a few pieces, loosely connected by a theme, which I've put up on Facebook in the last couple of months and should have really posted here.

Yesterday evening I was thinking of putting a couple of articles up connected to the theme of how the economic downturn (perhaps that's putting it mildly) has challenged, or might challenge the hegemony of the unholy alliance of Big Business, the Political Class & Mainstream Media which has dominated Britain and other Western countries in the last couple of decades. Then I saw this today:

Britain loses faith in economy: Global poll shows UK least likely to trust politicians, banks or markets
Julian Glover, The Guardian, Wednesday 14 January 2009

British economic confidence has been shattered by the financial crisis, according to a unique international poll published today. It shows that people here are now less likely to trust banks, the stockmarket or the government's economic management than people in comparable nations.

The research, carried out by WIN, an international network of pollsters including ICM in Britain, used professional polling techniques to assess public opinion in 17 countries, including the major G8 economies as well as China and India.

On most measures, British people emerged as among the most pessimistic of the 14,555 people questioned around the world.

Remarkably, confidence in the banking system appears lower in Britain - 4.2 out of 10 - than in bankrupt Iceland, which polled 4.6.

While around a third of citizens in developing economies such as India and China say the economic situation in their countries could improve in coming months, more than three-quarters of people in Britain expect it to worsen.

Pessimism here is slightly deeper than in competitors such as France, Spain and Germany, and equal to Japan.

British people are also less likely than average to think that their government can manage the situation, despite Gordon Brown's bank interventions and fiscal stimulus.

Asked to rate their trust in the government's management of the financial situation, British people award the government 4.5 out of 10, below the worldwide average of 5.2 and just ahead of Iceland on 4.4.

Only Germany and Japan are gloomier, scoring 4.0 and 3.0 respectively in the poll which was conducted before Christmas and published today.

These results may reflect the severity of the British position as much as any particular distrust of the British government, and the ICM data was collected before some more recent government initiatives were announced. But they do bring into question the prime minister's claim that Britain is particularly well placed to weather the economic storm.

Several of Britain's competitors are more optimistic about their government's capabilities. Americans award 6.3 out of 10 overall, possibly as a result of the changed mood in the weeks following the presidential election.

Asked about their personal financial situation, however, rather than prospects for the country as a whole, British people are more upbeat.

Not surprisingly, pessimism about personal finances is greatest in Iceland, and lowest in fast-growing economies such as India. Britain comes 10th out of 17 countries on personal finance: most people here say their incomes will either decrease (25%) or stay the same (48%) over the next 12 months.

The British are more likely than many to think that this could be a good time to buy a house: 28% say so, against 39% who say it is a bad time, which still leaves Britain towards the top end of the international table, seventh out of 17.

However, trust in financial institutions such as banks in Britain is particularly weak, probably as a consequence of the scale of government intervention in banks required since the collapse of Northern Rock.

Britain ranks 16th out of 17 countries for public trust in its banks, just ahead of Germany and well behind countries such as the Netherlands, Spain and France.

Overall, people around the world tend to have a greater level of faith in their government and even in banks than in the stability of the stockmarket, which on average scored 4.0 out 10 for trust after a terrible performance in 2008.

British people are now particularly cautious, giving the markets a score of 3.2, well below America on 4.3.

Overall, British attitudes to the financial crisis are closest to other old-world economies such as France and Germany, as well as Japan.

Canada, Italy and Spain lead a middle group of more optimistic nations, while developing economies such as India are the most trusting and optimistic.

The research draws upon a mix of face-to-face and online polling, and the variation in results may be affected by this, as well as by different sample sizes.

Long-term differences in national attitudes to subjects such as property ownership, which outlast economic cycles, may also have played a part in today's findings.

But the WIN crisis index, which will now be carried out every three months, does suggest that anxiety in this country is consistently greater in Britain than in its competitors.

• The research was carried out online in Britain by ICM in November, with a sample of 1,050. Worldwide data was collected between November and December 2008 by members of the WIN network. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

We English, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish (not 'Brits', please!) might be more pessimistic than other peoples about the current economic situation, and the ability of our betters to get us out the mess they largely created. However,there is little doubt that people everywhere are wondering whether this is as good as it gets. After years of being told that 'the market' (in fact a corporate bearpit from which Adam Smith and David Ricardo would have looked for exit doors to get out of) should be left alone and throwing taxpayers' money away to prop up those unable to 'stand on their own two feet' was wrong and expensive, the obscene amount of money which have been handed over to large financial institutions and other corporate behemoths in the last couple of years must have caused cognitive dissonance for at least some who acquiesced to the status quo- didn't it?

The ever readable Splintered Sunrise gives his view on the potential crisis of legitimacy from over the Irish Sea (picture as in original post!):



The crisis leaves our leaders without a convenient paradigm
December 4, 2008

Yes, yes, I should be doing more on the economic crisis. If I’ve been reticent, one very good reason is that I’m not an economist and, apart from generalities about the system, I don’t have any easy answers. It’s a little comforting, though, that nobody seems to have any easy answers. The political classes of the world appear to be navigating without a compass, having lost their framework but without acquiring an alternative one. You see this in the way that every government seems to have a completely different recipe for dealing with the crisis. The overwhelming impression is that they’re making it up as they go along.

The latest exemplar of this has been the big plan mooted by Barroso, at the behest of Brown and Sarko, for a massive EU-wide stimulus package. This lasted as long as it took Boss Merkel to say to Barroso, “No you don’t”, on the not unreasonable grounds that Brown and Sarko could come up with whatever plans they liked, but they needn’t expect the German taxpayer to foot the bill. Meanwhile, the Bush administration seems to be nationalising everything in sight, which will shock some leftist analysts but not those of us who always knew that the neoconservatives were never conservatives in the first place, least of all fiscal conservatives, but really big government liberals. Meanwhile again, the Chinese government has launched an enormous Keynesian stimulus plan, having obvious not got the memo about the death of Keynesianism. We’ll see in practice, I suppose, how this works out.

The cluelessness is evident across the spectrum. While Brown still claims to hove to Friedmanite orthodoxy, his big idea at the moment seems to be to encourage yet more consumer spending, while pump-priming the construction industry. I can’t see this working, for the very good reason that he’s recycling the essential elements of his voodoo economics over the last dozen years. And yet the Tories lack any credibility - a mere six months ago, Osborne was complaining about the onerous amount of regulation in the financial services industry, while Redwood argued that mortgage lenders shouldn’t be regulated at all. And to this day, Rankin’ Dave Cameron seems to believe that cutting interest rates alone will do the business. None of this is very convincing.

On the more prosaic level, we have Éamon Gilmore rowing back from his plan to thoroughly Blairise Irish Labour. Say what you like about the Sticks, they’re good at sniffing the wind.

It’s at times like this that I do enjoy going back to the Austrian economists, whose big beef - that most politicians are economic illiterates - is demonstrably true, and who do have an endearing tendency to say the unsayable. Their view is that the main cause of the crisis is cheap money, which is true, especially when you bear in mind that for the last few years the Fed has been printing dollars on an enormous scale - we don’t know how many, because Bernanke won’t say. These guys reckon the best thing for the economy would be a short, sharp recession, maybe lasting a year or so, where unsound businesses would be allowed to fail and a lot of the bad debt cleared out of the economy. Trouble is, a politician would need balls of steel to go down that road. The sharp and painful dislocations it would bring - especially in terms of unemployment - would look suicidal for anyone hoping to gain re-election.

On the other hand, the Austrians critique government attempts to provide a soft landing on the grounds that it will just prolong the downturn, especially as the underlying causes are not being addressed. There’s something to that, especially if you look at Gordon Brown’s attempt to reflate the housing bubble. I would actually argue the housing market is still grotesquely overvalued and needs to sink a lot further, but Gordon can’t say that. That would fall foul of the Brits’ attachment to the house price cargo cult, in lieu of an economy that makes stuff.

More and more I notice that the Old Right and the unreconstructed left do overlap, at least in terms of diagnosis. It’s when it comes to the cure, of course, that the divergence comes. I still believe that there is a serious role for intervention, and the main task should be to divert the economy away from the parasitic financial services sector and towards rebuilding a productive economy. That’s why the Germans have much stronger fundamentals.

This would be bad enough for the Brits. For an Irish economy that has close to zero industrial base, a massive overreliance on inward investment and a European Commission hellbent on destroying Irish agriculture… it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Not to mention Robbo and Marty on yet another tour of the States, trying to drum up investment for the North. Lord, they do pick their moment.

So what is to be done, to quote Vlad? I realise my own economic worldview is informed by a wide range of sources: Marxism, Keynesianism, Greenery, Libertarianism, Mutualism and Guild Socialism to name a few. I do not have all the answers (who does?) but I hope I sometimes ask and address the right questions and hope to meet and work with people who are prepared to think and just know that the current situation cannot go on and that we can all do better than this.



My concluding piece for this post comes from Larry Elliott, whose work with Dan Atkinson, The Gods that Failed, is a witty and damning critique of those who got us in this hole. This is a recent intellectual call to arms from him:

Wanted: the Keynes for our times. Marxists and greens have critiques of the crisis, but what about the centre-left?
Larry Elliott, The Guardian, Monday 22 December 2008


The financial and economic mayhem of the past 18 months has been a crisis for the right. Nationalising banks that have lent irresponsibly was not part of any laissez-faire script.

The prevailing economic model of the past 30 years has run out of road, just as the post-war social democratic model ran out of road after three (far more successful) decades in the mid-1970s. But it is a non-sequitur to assume, as some on the left do, that the world has changed for ever. This is lazy thinking. Without an intellectual critique of what has gone wrong and what needs to be done to put things right, matters will revert more or less to where they were before the flood.

When the post-war Golden Age ended in the mid-1970s, the right had just such a critique. It was ready because it had spent the past 30 years arguing that demand management would lead to inflation, that the strength of trade unions was eroding profits and that higher taxes to pay for bigger government was starving the private sector of investment. Most of the heavy lifting was done by the free-market thinktanks, which in the title of Richard Cockett's excellent book on the subject, were prepared to "think the unthinkable". These thinktanks were well funded by business and could draw on academics to shape the policies of the Reagan and Thatcher governments.

The contrast with today is striking. There has been no equivalent of a Chicago school for the left to provide the intellectual justification for more interventionist government. There has been scant evidence of the left-of-centre thinktanks tugging New Labour back as it moved steadily over the past 15 years towards the acceptance of market-based solutions to almost every problem. And with the exception of Jon Cruddas, Vince Cable and a handful of other members of the awkward squad, there has been no real interest in alternative thinking at Westminster.

That is why the government is ideologically bereft as it tries to manage the crisis. Labour has control of the banks but wants to give it up as quickly as possible. It wants the banks back on an even keel financially but it also wants them to slash their lending rates so borrowing returns to the levels of last year. The thinking, such as it is, amounts to the hope that with lower interest rates, tax cuts, and a few tweaks to financial supervision the clock can be turned back to July 2007.

This was not Thatcher's approach in 1979. Instead of exhorting the trade unions to behave better next time, she used the Winter of Discontent to impose statutory controls on their activities. Capital's Winter of Discontent has been much longer, much more widespread and much more damaging than the events of the winter of 1978-79, but the response has been far less robust. Indeed, this is shaping up as a missed opportunity of catastrophic proportions.

At this stage, it should be said that the non-mainstream left has been active since the Berlin Wall's collapse heralded the era of market fundamentalism, and both the Marxists and the greens have a critique of what has gone wrong and what needs to be done now. And these critiques deserve to be taken seriously. After all, it is easy to imagine Marx surveying the events of the past 18 months and concluding that the new global economic order created since 1990s was capitalism's last roll of the dice, and that the imbalances, the debt mountains and the eventual freezing up of the banking system were all symptoms of an irreparable system.

Growth fetish
The greens say this is where you get to if you make a fetish of growth. Living beyond our means not only results in higher levels of debt and balance of payments deficits, but is symptomatic of a reckless disregard for the carrying capacity of the planet. Attempting to re-invigorate an economic model built on ever higher levels of consumption is wrong.

So, the Marxists have an explanation and the greens have an explanation. Where, though, is what we might call the traditional left - the democratic socialists, the Keynesians, the non-revolutionary wing of the progressive movement. The answer is that during the 13 years of Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour party, it was pretty docile.

There could be a simple explanation: the arguments traditionally put forward by those who believed in managed capitalism, the mixed economy and regulated markets have been found wanting. By a process of social Darwinism, the ideas promulgated by the free-marketeers at one end of the spectrum, and the Marxists and the greens at the other have survived because they make more intellectual sense.

Alternatively, there may just have been a colossal loss of nerve on the left, which trickled down from a leadership demoralised by four election defeats and which saw embrace of the market as the way to political success. The control-freakery of Labour's high command meant they were not open to ideas from maverick MPs, academics or leftist thinktanks; access to ministers meant thinking not the unthinkable but the boringly predictable.

This has had unfortunate long-term consequences. The ability of mainstream progressives to develop a critique of the neo-liberal world order is illustrated by the development NGOs, which felt less obliged to cosy up to policymakers and, from the mid-1990s onwards, attacked the Washington consensus. All sorts of radical ideas were floated: that free trade might not always be good for vulnerable economies; that there was a role for an activist state in development; that privatising health and education would lead to more sick people and fewer children in school.

The crisis thus presents a golden opportunity and a threat to the left. The financial meltdown has morphed into an economic downturn of brutal severity; on the other hand, the window of opportunity will be brief, much time has been lost and there is not a lot of money around to fund blue-skies thinking. US academia at least has Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman; there is, sadly, no sign of a British Keynes for the 21st century.

Scholars, politicians and thinktanks have little more than six months to come up with ideas to influence policy before and after the election. They should concentrate on a few areas.

One would be finance, where the argument should be moved on from the need for faux-Keynesian fiscal policy to what Keynes actually stood for: permanent and tough controls on the financial sector so policymakers could pursue goals of social welfare and full employment. That means nationalising the banks, credit controls and action against tax havens - as a bare minimum.

A second would be housing, where the notion that the private sector will build enough homes for almost two million families has been blown out of the water. The government should be buying up land from stricken construction firms and organising a house-building programme of its own.

Finally, there needs to be a vision of the good society, the world the left wants to create. The free-market right has one. The Marxists have one. The greens have one. Unless the social democratic left has one - and can articulate it fully - it is finished.

larry.elliott@guardian.co.uk

Vote for a better blog than this one!

Back for 2009 after a good break from it all. Before I start blogging myself, you may see that there is a competition on the Net for blogs, which finishes on the 13th (Tuesday). You are allowed to vote once every 24 hours in each category from a particular computer and can vote from here.

It is, of course, totally up to you who you vote for. The vast majority I've never heard of, which just goes to show that (i) I'm way off the pace in the blogosphere and/or (ii) no-one in the real world gives a monkeys about the blogosphere. Anyway, there are a few blogs I would ask you to consider voting for:

In the Culture section there is Madam Miaow;

In the Comic Strip section there are two old favourites of mine: Dilbert & Jesus and Mo;

In the UK section there is Neil Clark and Olly Onions, who I think would look better in the Best Humor [sic] section. However, looking at the figures it looks like 'Mad' Mel Phillips could well win, which would forever tarnish our country with the reputation of being sexually repressed, humourless, shrill, self-righteous, mindlessly pro-Israeli windbags;

In the Middle East/Africa section there is Juan Cole's Informed Comment;

In the Fashion section (which is not really my thing but Madam M pointed me in the right direction...) I voted for Slacker Chic (who prefers Monica Bellucci to Victoria Beckham, which is ALWAYS a good sign of taste).

So please vote...one day I hope to be in contention for this, if it's not hit by a vote-fixing scandal...

Break From Blogging

'I thought you had already!' would be a pretty justifiable response. The writing juices aren't flowing at all at the moment. With my birthday, Yuletide and New Year coming up, and everything associated with them taking up much of my free time, I'm taking some free time from it all. I'd rather do that instead of giving you rubbish posts on a regular basis to fill up time and space. Who do you think I am- a newpaper columnist?! (or about 85% of them.)

Not that I'm giving up. I am having a good think (a la Hamlet) about where I'm going with blogging and the three R's I'm good at ie Reading, 'Riting and Researching and where I want to take them. I'm know this blog is extremely integral to what I want to achieve- it just what I want exactly to achieve is what I'm umming and arring about. I think a few weeks away from it all and then getting some ideas on paper (and sticking to them, says The Great Procrastinator) is the way to go.

If I don't hear or see you before then, have a great Yule and same time same place next year!

Apols (again) for the hiatus...

Perhaps I have blogger's block. Perhaps I am just a SlowBlogger (see below). Perhaps I don't want to be made to look a fool by events. In any case, I hope to get a few posts up in the next few days.

Thanks for your patience!

The bloggers who take it one post at a time
Jon Henley, The Guardian, Wednesday November 26 2008

There's SlowSex (apparently; first I'd heard of it), SlowCities, and SlowFood. Now, the New York Times reports, there is also Slow Blogging, which Todd Sieling, a Canadian technology consultant, defined in a manifesto as "a rejection of immediacy ... an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly". This is an idea that appeals to me. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the mot juste. Words, as a rule, are better weighed before use, and too many blog posts - and particularly blog comments - are, well, not.

So I can but agree with Sieling when he proclaims that Slow Blogging is "speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare"; represents "a willingness to remain silent amid the daily outrages and ecstasies that fill nothing more than single moments in time"; marks "the re-establishment of the machine as the agent of human expression, rather than its whip".

Like SlowFood, born in Italy of the conviction that fast food was as bad for local tradition as it was for your health, Slow Blogging is a response to the notion that fast blogging can be bad for both author and audience. For the time being, Slow Bloggers write mainly about subjects such as life in the countryside, philosophy and 19th-century literature (and, naturally, about the phenomenon of Slow Blogging). Amid what David D Perlmutter, author of Blogwars, calls the "many, loud and raucous voices" out there, on a myriad blogs, on MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and all the rest, they tend to be "coherent and responsible, intelligent and precise".

So let's hear it for all those who take the time to think, study and reflect before they post; who do not feel the need to slap the first thing that comes out of their head straight onto the web. People who refuse to update five times a day, or even once a week. People who value quality over quantity. People, in short, like Sieling - who is not in fact blogging at all any more, because no one was reading him. But that's the interweb for you.

Scrambling around the Memory Hole

John Hurt as Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth in the film of '1984'.

Well, not exactly bits and pieces no-one knows about, but some interesting quotes I've come across over time that in the last few days I've got around to collating. Drop them into essays and conversations as and when you see fit!

"Anyone who talks of the literature of political science risks being suspected of irony. Few political scientists write books that give their readers pleasure....fewer yet have written anything that is likely to endure....Since the second world war the academic study of politics has been dominated by an effort to replicate the methods and success of the natural sciences, The chief result has been a new genre of unreadable books." John Gray 'How to dish the Whigs' New Statesman, 27/6/97, p.45.

"Law and governments may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor and preserve themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise soon be destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence." Adam Smith, quoted in Class War (1992) Unfinished Business (Stirling: AK Press), p.42.

"...the fancied or real insecurity of capital, when not under the immediate control of its owner, together with the natural disinclination which every man has to quit the country of his birth and connection, and intrust himself with all his habits fixed, to a stange government and new laws, checks the emigration of capital. These feelings, which I would be sorry to see weakened, induce most men of property to be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations." David Ricardo, quoted in Michael Woodin and Caroline Lucas (2004) Green Alternatives to Globalisation: A Manifesto (Pluto Press), p.8.

"I sympathise, therefore, with those who would minimise rather than with those who would maximise economic entanglements between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel- these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be home-spun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national." John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson (1998) The Age of Insecurity (Verso), p.229.

"As far as Trotskyism is concerned, in part it involved a recognition of very ugly things that were happening in the Soviet Union. But it never, by definition, involved any real critical analysis of those developments. After all, who was Trotsky? Trotsky was Lenin's associate. Whatever he may have said during periods when he didn't have power, either prior to the revolution or after he was kicked out, when it was easy to be a libertarian critic, it was when he did have power that the real Trotsky emerged. That Trotsky was the one who labored to destroy and undermine the popular organizations of workers in the Soviet Union, the factory councils and soviets, who wanted to subordinate the working class to the will of the maximum leader and to institute a program of militarization of labor in the totalitarian society that he and Lenin were constructing. That was the real Trotsky- not only the Trotsky who sent his troops to Kronstadt and wiped out Makhno's peasant forces once they were no longer needed to fend off the Whites, but the Trotsky who, from the very first moment of access to power, moved to undermine popular organizations and to institute highly coercive structures in which he and his associates would have absolute authority, with absolute submission of the working population to these leaders. That was the essential doctrine of Trotskyism in power, whatever he may have said before or after." Noam Chomsky in James Peck, ed., (1988) The Chomsky Reader (Serpent's Tail), pp.40-41.

"The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours." George Orwell, (2000 [1938])Homage to Catalonia, (Penguin), p.209.

"I think we overestimate the value of American money and American aid to other nations. No people can make over another people. Every nation must solve its own problems; and whatever we do can only be of slight assistance....A nation that comes to rely on gifts and loans from others is too likely to postpone, the essential, tough measures necessary for its own salvation...it is almost a subsidy to the business of investment bankers, and will also undoubtedly increase the business to be done by the larger banks." Republican Senator Robert Taft, in attacking the creation of the World Bank in 1945. Quoted in David C. Korten (1999) When Corporations Rule the World (Earthscan), pp.167-68.

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!