The Need for Institutional and Structural Transformation

The Need for Institutional and Structural Transformation

We need a new way of doing politics. The old ways have failed, and millions are in revolt against something they call ‘the establishment.’ Do they know what the establishment is and who its key figures are? Those directly in the sights at the moment are ‘the liberal establishment’, convenient scapegoats for a failure that lies elsewhere in the private economy, the transnational corporations, in the banks and in global finance. This power is hidden from view, works behind the political frontline, and asserts itself through a systemic force that is anonymous. ‘You can’t buck the market’ as the saying goes, a blunt assertion of a necessity that is beyond political scrutiny, controversy, intervention and alternation. A convenient way of presenting something that is a social institution, capable of being modified, subject to restraint. There’s the real social power that lies behind economic and institutional failure.

But, yet again, as in decades past, it is the liberal left, the ‘left establishment’, that is staggering from one defeat to another, taking the blame for the system that they thought they could render responsible and manage in the general interest. It’s not their fault, comes the defence. Fine. The problems run deeper than these left-of-centre parties and governments. But they are implicated. They are more than implicated. They are in deep. Because they have canalised progressive forces into the sterile channels of politics and business as usual. And in so doing, they have deradicalised the constituency that exists for radical solutions, diverted it into processes of the prevailing social system, divided it within, turning people against each other, demoralised it by reneging on its promises of all good things. So much so that figures from within the world of business and finance, establishment to the core, can put themselves at the head of a populist reaction and ride it to power, sweeping aside the liberal/left-of-centre political forces whose practices and policies identify them closely with ‘the establishment’ that people are in revolt against. The people have every reason to be in angry and in revolt. Unfortunately, the crisis in the agencies of political representation and action on the left – the fact that the principal agencies of left liberal politics are wedded to a failing system - have left this revolt homeless. And so the people are left rejecting one elite …. only to run into the arms of another. They are rejecting ‘globalism’ for nationalism, exchanging a global neoliberalism for a national neoliberalism.

That hardly constitutes any kind of revolution. It’s a devolution that makes national sovereign states even less in control of their affairs – but puts politics safely under the thumb of the rich and powerful.

So who or what is this ‘liberal establishment’? By this, I refer to the liberal/parliamentary socialist/social democratic parties aiming at office within the capital system – what they used to call ‘the mixed economy’ – endlessly promising a third or a middle way that is capable of managing ‘the economy’ – a neutral term for capitalism and its class relations and divisions – for the greater good. Time and time again we learn the hard way that ‘the economy’ does not simply behave at the bidding of the members of the government. Let me get this point out of the way first, I am not blaming Hillary Clinton. I am engaging in an institutional analysis that avoids personalising structural and systemic forces and constraints. Hillary Clinton is just the latest, hopefully the last, in a long, long line of failed social democratic/liberal politicians. The problem is not a personal issue with respect to this or that leader, the problem is institutional and structural concerning the relation of politics and the public realm to economics. The fact is that social (really, parliamentary) democracy rests on the illusion that the state is determinant in relation to economic life. This illusion has things the wrong way round – the state is determined, its power and resources are secondary and derivative, dependent upon the process of private accumulation. This delusion of political will is inherent in this liberal/social/parliamentary democratic tradition. It rests on the assumption that the highest function the party/government is called upon to perform is economic management, then the implication is that the capital system is legitimate, fundamentally sound and works in the interests of all. Nowadays, in the context of globalisation, such pretensions of economic management have been discarded and replaced with endless promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment.’ Which involves the anti-politics of assertion of economic necessity. Of course, in an economy based on wage labour and whose central dynamic is the accumulation of capital, people want ‘jobs, growth and investment’. It’s like promising food and water to the hungry and the thirsty. But that does not amount to a political vision or value-system. It offers an anti-politics that is entirely conditional on the health and success of the economic system it serves – a class based, exploitative, crisis-prone economic system. Time and again, that system crashes, time and again, those who promised to manage it for the greater good take the blame, time and again, the people bear the social costs.

Well, banking and financial crisis, tipping economies over the cliff, bankrupting economies, on top of the iniquitous distribution of the gains and costs of globalization, and here we are again – a failing capitalism and a political collapse of the left, and another populist revolt that goes to the right, back into the embrace of the elite. Once again, a liberal/social democratic party and government learn that ‘the economy’ is neither a neutral nor benign machine with buttons to press and levers to pull to lead us to the greater good; once again, the hard lesson is delivered that ‘the economy’ does not bend to the political will of politicians and people. All the grand promises, fine words, policies and plans to deliver growth and endless material largess to those prepared to work and save, all the promises of a society of all the talents, all the rhetoric of freeing the creative energies of the people, restoring the nation to its exalted place in – all crumbled and crashed in the face of hard economic realities. It is too easy to view these realities as mere technical problems associated with a particular economy – problems with finance, debt, balance of payments, currency, an outmoded industrial infrastructure, and that old favourite ‘trade union militancy’. Within each nation, these are merely particular manifestations of deeper structural problems, the problems of the dependency of the state and politics upon the accumulative dynamic of the capital system, the systemic imperative to expand the value of capital, and the place of national parliaments within an evolving international division of labour. But this is the great unmentionable, that ‘the economy’ is no merely neutral, objective datum that political managers can direct this way or that according to principle and democratic will and persuasion, but is a social metabolic order based upon systemic imperatives of accumulation and valorisation. Take out those mechanisms, and the system doesn’t work, there is a loss of jobs, growth and investment, the power and resources of the state dwindle, its legitimacy and authority falls into crisis. Hence there is nothing new in this crisis of ‘the liberal establishment’, that crisis is inherent in its own position within the institutional order of the capital system. The liberal/social democrats offer a politics that is based on a false prospectus, offering promises that it cannot guarantee, engaging in a politics that is based on the exigencies of a capital system that has its own imperatives, independent of, and not obedient to, the slogans and rhetoric of political leaders. In resting its politics on claims that it is capable of managing the economy and delivering ‘jobs, growth and investment’, the left of centre parties open themselves up to take a hit for the system. As a result, attention is switched from the contradictory dynamics and inherently crisis-ridden nature of the capital system to the view that economic crisis is simply the result of incompetent politicians - them. This protective fiction leaves the real problems unaddressed and the structures of ‘the economy’ in place. Power is best preserved by being concealed. This constant reference to ‘the economy’ rather than to the capital system turns political problems into technical problems, and exposes those who make the biggest claims with respect to economic management to claims that they are the biggest incompetents who are not to be trusted with office.

The only question to decide is whether they take one for team capital unwittingly or deliberately. It is a consistent theme in the history of what Ralph Miliband calls ‘parliamentary socialism’. It is an attitude that will accompany this politics to its benighted end. Because the lessons still don’t get learned. Not even now. Convinced of the fundamental rightness of their positions, the members of the liberal political class stopped arguing their case, just asserted it as correct, stopped engaging with people, silenced and suppressed disagreeable voices outside of the echo chamber, delegitimised alternate platforms, ban this, ban that, silence folk who don't sing from the same hymn sheet or repeat favoured nostrums like a mantra - folk don't like being dismissed as racists, xenophobes, homophobes - and they don't like the way this establishment has racked up decades of economic and institutional failure, covering the encroachment of the global corporate form. Trump didn't play by the rules, pretty much did it all wrong by offending any number of people - and he nailed the myth that you have to be superslick paying lip service to all the warm words that supposedly win elections. The pundits and the pollsters, yet again, got it all wrong. You CAN win elections by saying what you mean, speaking bluntly. Down with pundits and pollsters, experts by way of nothing! And all the howls of protest from offended liberals cuts no ice either - because the 'liberal establishment' have form, mired in corporate finance and all manner of other stuff. I am sick of the whining, as if certain principles and certain people are entitled to political triumph, the bewilderment as to why the insubordinates don't behave as they ought. Meet the people! The planet can't suffer a four year obsession with what Trump may or may not do. To people protesting, put your banners down - you'd have plenty to say if the other side did it. Go home, join together, organise, network, engage in some constructive social activism and build an alternative. There's enough of you out there to do this, and there are enough movements and projects you can join if you have time on your hands, are willing to back conviction and commitment with effort. Build the new as you contest the old. Many of you already are, I'm know. But I'm not interested in noise, not interested in fights against the police who, yet again, are caught in the middle, taking the blows for the political establishment that has done the bidding of a self-serving, globalist elite, the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many, and utterly disdainful of people. Riots, chaos, shots fired, all becoming the issue, and draining energies away from constructive work. Some real politics please, not gestures and name-calling, and no cringing in corners or whinging from rooftops, still shoving principles down the throats of people. Let's back those principles with effective social practices, participatory structures that involve people, have them involved in a social and a self-transformation - step up, engage, stop the hectoring and lecturing and the shoving of principles down throats, imposition of laws and edicts. I voted to Remain in the EU, but my town, neglected for years by the globalising agenda, of which Labour were a part, voted to come out - and I am tired of well-off folk with their liberal principles abusing my folk as stupid, thick, sexist, racist, xenophobic idiots. They're not. Not in these numbers. I have no doubt that there are bigots, racists, xenophobes and homophobes out there feeling that this populist revolt validates their prejudices and hatreds. But the people vote right anyway, their numbers here are not decisive at all, it’s another self-serving liberal excuse that allows attention to be diverted from their own inadequacies. Of course, we should call racists etc 'racist', they are out there. We've seen the rise in hate crime since leaving the EU in the UK, a 41% increase. I'm reading of "racist outbreaks across the country with specific reference to Trump." It's as though this populist reaction against institutional failure legitimises such outbreaks. Fight them, protest them, certainly. I have done all my life, and will continue to do so. But let's get to the roots of social and economic insecurity, and stop indulging broad brush denigration. It is the politics of self-justification. I'm reading a Guardian article saying the people failed Hillary Clinton. Yup, people are supposed to follow and obey, and the establishment takes their support for granted and banks their votes - and we go further down the road to the corporate order, erasing the roots of liberal society and politics, the roots of the principles we are being enjoined to stick "tight" to. That politics is over.

Whatever you think of their answers, they are raising the right questions, questions that the political classes and the self-proclaimed pollsters with their expert data have kept off the agenda for decades. The sense of entitlement on the part of those who cannot believe people would reject their principles and policies indicates the extent to which politicians are engaged in technocracy rather than democracy, seeing it as their job to inform and educate people from above, rather than engage them with a view to persuading them. It's been a rotten generation in politics, good riddance to it. And in developing the new politics, let's reconnect the struggle against social insecurity and economic suffering with the struggle against racism/sexism/xenophobia/racism, rather than letting them split apart, winning the cultural war whilst abandoning the socio-economic terrain where folk live their everyday lives. and ... the guy in the video is nearly as angry as I am, I'd better stop here ... I wrote a little piece on this a few days ago, just before the election. It was on the EU, but it's the same thing. I'll end by quoting that: "We can tell a new story. Such is the real meaning of politics. These political models of the media’s self-appointed data experts predicting election results project not real futures, only an enlarged version of a present rigged around particular interests and value positions. Talk to like-minded others if you merely want to reinforce your own political prejudices. The refusal to hear the voice of those outside of the echo-chamber, the failure to heed the voices of concern and protest from outside that chamber, to be so detached from people and their communities that the writing on the wall may as well be written in hieroglyphics for all the sense the elites make of it, guarantees that legitimate grievances will intensify, strengthen and one day explode in unpredictable ways. Or do the elites really think that globalisation would in time benefit each and all equally, blessing one and all with material largess? Do they not see that principles concerning more that material quantity are at stake here? Instead of looking at themselves and recognising how their concerns have become divorced from people in communities, the elites continue to presume the rightness of their positions and therefore turn to mock and slander their critics as stupid and bigoted. They fail to see their critics as the victims of their agenda of global enrichment for the few, with the burdens and costs shifted to the many. It's an elite pathology."

And I want to stop writing and criticise myself here for using terms that are integral to the establishment narrative, ensuring that it's true nature never gets exposed and brought into public view and controversy.

We need to clarify our terms. Who is this 'elite'? What is this 'liberal establishment?' OK, the 'liberals' (again, who?) are part of this pathology, not necessarily the principal architects (and they are not very liberal either, economic liberals wedded to the top-down state to force through their projects over the heads of the people). But they are implicated. It's a tangled web that takes some unweaving. For all of the talk of 'the mixed economy' putting an end to capitalism back in the 1950s, capitalism and its crises and contradictory dynamics has not gone away, nor the class politics and political concerns that go with it. And neither has the 'third way' politics of liberals seeking a way of avoiding class analysis and class politics. A central feature of the structural transformations underway is the transition to the corporate social form, erasing the roots of liberal society. This is generating a complex political-economic-theoretical conjunction. The ending of the long boom has been followed by a long neo-liberal hegemony, but what has been presented as an economics of liberalisation and privatisation is in fact a corporatisation and a concentration of economic power, the principal agents of which have been transnational capital and global finance. In all of this, the 'liberal establishment' has become ever more illiberal with respect to socio-economic issues - organised labour is tightly restricted - as it seeks to preserve its name on the cultural terrain with respect to identity politics and rights for oppressed minorities and groups. The result is a challenge to the coherence and cogency of liberalism and liberal democracy as the political-institutional realm of democracy has become less and less representative as monetary imperatives have come to do most of the talking throught the market. Throw in the market-induced ontology of individuals as ‘infinite’ consumers, and the result is a transgression of the boundaries of the social and planetary ecology. Given the continued advance of ICT and robotics, it is not so much liberal/social reformism's failure to realise its aims that is most depressing, it is the limited nature of the aims in the first place. With the possibility of a post-scarcity ecological society now well within our reach, the visionless pragmatism of liberal/social democracy now only serves to waste precious energies that could go toward building the new world.

Again, I keep reading this view that we live in ‘post-truth’ times. The way this keeps being repeated has all the hallmarks of another protective liberal fiction. My research proceeds under the shadow of Marx, Weber and a capitalist modernity which has dissolved a unifying moral compass. With the disenchantment of the world, the modern terrain is under the sway of a polytheism of values, an irreducible subjective opinion of competing views, with no way of settling disputes between them. For Nietzsche, ‘there are no facts, only interpretations.’ Nietzsche’s view is called ‘perspectivism’. When he asserted the death of God, Nietzsche was drawing attention to the dissolution of the overarching moral compass. Morality is no more than a series of value judgements, with no objective criteria for evaluating them in terms of right and wrong. We are Nietzsche’s world that is ‘beyond good and evil.’ A world of power. Morality is not about right and wrong but an expression of likes and dislikes. I believe that Nietzsche is right about modernity but wrong about the human world. There is such a thing as truth and truth matters, a view that was dismissed as ‘traditional’ when I expressed it in my doctoral research on ‘rational freedom’ – the philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle. Aquinas, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx – which holds that there is such a thing as truth (goodness, and beauty). I was challenged on the word ‘truth’. It was the age of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty and the postmodernists. Only this year I was accused of taking a ‘moralising’ approach and advised to read Foucault. I have read Foucault, and criticised and rejected him in my thesis of 2001. We have been living in a post-truth, post-value age for a long time now. In the words of Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, we live ‘after virtue.’ So when I hear the lament of the liberals that we are entering a ‘post-truth’ age I am critical. MacIntyre has been raising these issues for decades. He asks us to imagine that every piece of scientific knowledge we have should disappear overnight. We would be bewildered. This, he argues, is what has happened with morality. Try to argue for an overarching ethical framework as I do, and see the reaction. Committed to scientific truth, and expressing a disposition to assert this truth as irresistible – the laws of physics trump the laws of politics, as is frequently asserted, ignoring the fact that we live in a political world, a world of values – the same people are inclined to see morality and similar attempts to bind people to truth as repressive, arguing instead for morality as value judgements, opinions of no great relevance, meaning or purchase. We live in a demoralised world, and it shows. But, with MacIntyre, I resist postmodern scepticism and liberal impotence and gloom, and keep hold of the true, the good and the beautiful. We live within a moral landscape, hence our enthusiasm in expressing our political arguments in terms of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and bad, fairness, justice. But Nietzsche had a point – we live in a human world, a world of ethics and politics, a world of values, social identities and interests, positions and perspectives, a world of the great unmentionable ‘c’ word – ‘class’. And human beings are creative, knowledgeable and moral agents, their social practices are constitutive of this reality. A ‘truth’ politics that simply states the facts of the physical world gives us knowledge, but it doesn’t in itself motivate. There is such a thing as moral knowledge, and it involves much more than statements of fact in abstraction from communities of practice and the social world of solidary exchange and reciprocity and interaction. And that’s what galls me about this increasing lament that we live in ‘post-truth’ times. The assumption is that we, the lamenting liberals, know ‘the truth’, we are the knowledgeable ones, the intellectual elite, and those who are rejecting us are the ignorant, uneducated, brainwashed ‘mass’. But at least there is a recognition that there is such a thing as truth. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to reenchant the world by penetrating the fetish systems of power, politics and production to get at the bedrock true, good and beautiful. Apparently that makes me a Platonist. If I seem to be a bit tetchy on this point, it’s because liberal (and postmodernist) thinkers have consistently accused those affirming an ‘objective’ truth of being totalitarian. George Monbiot has done so explicitly in The Guardian, with a lazy denunciation of both Plato and Marx. I criticised this article at the time, and shall repeat the criticisms here. Monbiot writes in outraged tones as to how Marx could dismiss lumpen elements as ‘social scum’ and ‘bribed tools of reaction’. Monbiot has evidently never heard of the King and Country mobs, and clearly has no class awareness of who the supporters and enemies of dictatorial regimes from Bonapartism to Fascism/Nazism have been. It is in light of this that I would like to spend some time challenging the criticisms that the ecologist George Monbiot has made of Plato and Marx. Read this from George Monbiot. ‘A century and more ago the idea was communism. Even in the form in which Marx and Engels presented it, its problems are evident: the simplistic binary system into which they tried to force society; their brutal dismissal of anyone who did not fit this dialectic ("social scum", "bribed tool[s] of reactionary intrigue"); their reinvention of Plato's guardian-philosophers, who would "represent and take care of the future" of the proletariat; the unprecedented power over human life they granted to the state; the millenarian myth of a final resolution to the struggle for power. But their promise of another world electrified people who had, until then, believed that there was no alternative.’ George Monbiot Communism, welfare state – what’s the next big idea? The Guardian 2 April 2013 I refer people to my criticism of this caricature of the politics of Plato and Marx elsewhere, I have no time to waste on it here. (Critchley, P. 2013., Immanence, Transcendence and Essence: The Dialectics of Progress [e-book] Available through: Academia website <http://independent.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Books). But it is typical of how postmodernism set up the critique of Marx and the politics of ‘the Truth’, in capitals and inverted commas to make the point that such a thing is awfully oppressive and repressive, the servant of an elite agenda. It makes a nonsense of Marx’s critique and praxis, but kept many a pseudo-intellectual in a job. Marx’s class analysis is designed to get to the truth of modern capitalist society. It’s loss has left us speaking the vague language of rich and poor, the 1% and the 99%, ‘elite’ and ‘mass’. Monbiot accuses Marx and Engels of theorising a ‘simplistic binary system into which they tried to force society.’ Does Monbiot, then, deny that a class system exists? The fact that he refers to this simple ‘binary’ model indicates that he has no awareness of how Marx analysed fractions of classes, differentiated between manufacturing and financial interests with respect to the capitalist class. His writings on French politics exhibit a very nuanced approach to class, class fractions and politics. But it’s much easier to criticise the caricature. For what it’s worth, my own work on Marx was designed to nail this myth of the totalitarian philosopher-king, and show how Marx offered a path from the top-down educative model to a practical self-education. It has to be argued at length, backed by textual evidence. The advantage of the caricature is that it takes just a few lines to be expressed. So who believes in truth? I can talk about totalitarianism too. This liberal lament that we live in post-truth times has nothing to do with the concern for truth in the philosophical tradition of rational freedom, the tradition I work in. It expresses the very educative model of liberal enlightenment I have spent a lifetime trying to move radical politics away from. Read those claims in the context of political defeat. Instead of looking in the mirror at a failing political practice, instead of recognising a simple truth that if your politics associates itself with the very forces that your supporters oppose, then you are going to lose popularity, there is a blank assertion that we are right and critics are wrong. When the inevitable political defeat follows, there is the same assertion. Instead of listening to people and the issues they raise, there is the same arrogant, conceited, smug, self-satisfied conviction that we the few possess knowledge of the truth, and those who reject us are .. select the insult of choice, there are always a few handy. Brainwashed is always a good one. The voice of critics is utterly delegitimised. The rough voices and blunt words of the despised and uneducated masses dismissed. There’s been an awful lot of people not understanding the truth for a long time now. As I say, the writing on the wall may as well be written in hieroglyphs as far as our all-knowing liberal intelligentsia are concerned. First, they give me postmodernism and liberal perspectivism and value judgements in response to my concern with truth, then, when they suffer inevitable political defeat, having peddled their political fictions for too long, they lament the rejection of their truth. That sense of political entitlement – the hoodwinked, brainwashed voters let us down, the electoral system is broke, we can’t lose – comes out also in this ‘post-truth’ lament. And behind that entitlement and lament is an assumption that points to the monopoly of truth, knowledge and power. Now that is totalitarian. I wouldn’t trust these characters with an ounce of real power, their denigration of dissident voices gives them away. And while I enjoy my little measured rant against liberal protective fictions, let me write a little more on the term ‘elite’. I’m hearing certain voices expressing scepticism with respect to democracy, the tyranny of the majority and the ‘mob’. And I’m hearing a lot of handwringing with respect to racism, homophobia, xenophobia and bigotry. Those things are out there. But let’s get past ‘elite’ and ‘mass’, vague terms that say nothing about existing social relations. And let’s actually listen to the voices critical of the globalising liberal agenda, rather than dismiss it as an idiocracy or a mobocracy. The truth is that conservatives voted conservative, as conservatives do. There have been a sufficient number of ‘swing voters’ from the working class joining them to deliver surprising electoral victories. But if you don’t like the conservative politics that has triumphed, don’t put it down to the ignorant, brainwashed mob – the main constituency of this politics are the well-off, the affluent, those in upper income brackets. If people who you would expect to vote left have voted right, don’t dismiss it as ‘populism’, ask yourself what the hell you have got so wrong that you have failed to motivate and inspire your own natural constiuency. I’ll repeat myself (again!) – the ‘progressive’ side in politics has divided the socio-economic and the cultural terrain, abandoned the former to a corporate economics, finance and growth and focused upon the extension of rights through the law in the law as proof of its positive character. The two need to go together. When they come apart, we get an assertion of rights that bolsters the cultural conditions of contemporary capitalism but allows the social conditions of a deeper emancipation to wither and die.

But, yes, I am encouraged that so many are concerned with truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and have thrown off the postmodern scepticism towards such things, along with the poststructualist view that reality is a matter of ideological and political construction - a politics entirely without substance, fitting the cultural terrain of late capitalism (a view I criticised at length in the 1990s (https://www.academia.edu/10118948/Marx_Praxis_and_Socialism_from_Below).

I now see articles and petitions arguing in favour of electoral reform in the US. I've been involved in electoral reform my entire political life, going back to Charter 88 and the call for Proportional Representation from the 1980s up to the Referendum on PR in the UK, in which I took an active part. But these victories over the liberal left are not the result of constitutional and electoral deficiencies. It's the same constitution and electoral system that led to Obama being elected, with the Democrats having office for 16 years in the past 24 - why not a problem then? It's more liberal evasion and denial. There is much more to this than the ways in which we count heads - all electoral systems will have pros and cons, none are without flaws. The problem goes deeper. In the end, political battles are won by vision, not numbers. The numbers for a radical platform are out there. It is the failure - the refusal - of liberal/social democratic parties to forge those numbers into an effective politics that contitutes the real issue. I shall carry on campaigning for PR, but I'll not kid myself or anyone else that they key to the social transformation we need is institutional tinkering over how we count heads.

More than electoral reform going on here. I lived through the same thing in the UK, back to Charter 88 and the push for PR in the 1980s. I saw 'third way' liberals take radical energies down the cul-de-sac of constitutional reform in the early nineties, ditching the socio-economic terrain for Blair's promises of democratisation. In fact, my thesis was motivated by a critique of the 'democratisation' agenda. I saw it as a liberal diversion then, and I've been proven correct. In 2011 I was still on the streets campaigning for PR in the UK Referendum, going around working class estates abandoned by the liberalising and corporatising agenda of all the main parties and getting nothing but blank faces at best and abuse at worst. The vote was lost. The pushing of rights and constitutional niceties cuts no ice with people who know the problems lie deeper than the way we count heads. All electoral systems are flawed, and counting heads this way rather than that makes not one iota of difference. But feel free to waste the next 25 years on this - I know where it leads - to precisely where we are at in the UK.

It's down to the rest of us to reclaim the public realm, the republic, res publica, the things of the public. The gate swings both ways. I don't much like the finger-wagging and the finger-pointing going on at the moment. And I'll challenge myself on this use of the word 'elite'. Marx's class analysis is much better, allowing us to identify precisely who and what we are talking about when we start to diagnose the kind of pathology we are dealing with - the alienated system of production and its fetish system of power and politics. And we should be careful of this dismissive tag 'populism' too. We'd better stop demonizing folk, because turn this world into a Hell in short time if we are not careful (I do think Hillary Clinton is getting flack for the past failures of others, these problems are of long standing) and start addressing root causes - identifying the system-wide constraints upon politics and the institutional sphere in an age of global forces. In other words, let's do an institutional analysis, and examine the structural and systemic constraints on the political sphere.

I hear the response back to these charges: ‘Yes, it's all the woman's fault that people (mostly white men) freely chose a sexually violent, dishonest, tax-avoiding, racist, bullying psychopath.’ Carry on missing the point, carrying on hectoring and lecturing and asserting right-by-definition principles. It’s not all Hillary Clinton’s fault, she is the fag end of the liberal/left political machine that is firmly ensconced within the social system that is functioning against the interests and well-being of millions. And Hillary Clinton is a continuation of that politics, hence I will criticize her, as part of a consistent criticism of the politics of Bill Clinton and Blair, the liberal establishment who threw away the peace dividend and signed citizens’ freedoms with their ‘free’ trade deals. Did Hillary Clinton offer anything different to that agenda that took the world and its people and its resources to the market? No! So look beyond that point that Hillary Clinton is being unfairly blamed for this debacle. It’s not the crucial issue, there are much bigger concerns to deal with.

The arrogance and sense of entitlement on the part of ‘the liberal establishment’ (you know who I mean, Democrat/Labour, Clinton/Blair). As with Blair/Brown and ‘New Labour’ in the UK, the Democrats knew that Hillary Clinton was unpopular, associated with the failed politics of previous decades. They knew she was ‘establishment’ just as an anti-establishment popular movement was afoot. But the bog-standard, tenth rate Machiavellian ‘strategists’ remained in charge, managing and manipulating citizen expectations with soundbite, image and sloganeering, empty of value, vision and content. And this playing of political games has led to a coach-and-horses being ridden through liberal America. Own up and own your mess. Or, better still, get out of the way, clear off. There is a crisis in the agencies of the left/labour/liberalism – we have a leadership that is detached from its social base and is firmly locked within an establishment and a social system that works against that base. Electoral victories for the other side are not the result of great ideological swings to the right, not the results of racism/sexism/homophobia/xenophobia or whatever tick-box identity outraged liberals want to protest. We have been practising identity politics, politics as lifestyle and culture, at the expense of a real politics of power, authority, production and distribution of resources for too long, and the result is that the left view is nowhere to be seen in conventional politics.

We need clarification, a strategic vision and direction, and less of the tactical manipulation checking all the bases. And we need to reclaim politics, active citizenship and the commitment to the public realm. In The Overspent American, Juliet Schor asks as to ‘why we want what we don't need.’ A more interesting question for me is ‘why we don’t want what we do need’. There is a gaping hole in our politics - we can fill it if we answer that question.

The blame game is destructive. We can have a mutual self-annihilation of finger pointing and name calling, thinking the worst of each other. It's more discerning to do the institutional analysis and address the roots of the problem. I'm hearing the claim that Trump won on account of racist voters. I'm not denying racists are out there. But the numbers don't back that claim. Trump won about the same number of Republican votes as the last two elections, with McCain and Romney. The Democrats lost support. My point, in calling back res publica, is that towering high over both columns of support are the millions of disenfranchised people who couldn't vote for either. These are all citizens of the republic lying fallow.

Trump Won Because Democratic Party Failed Working People, Says Sanders

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/10/trump-won-because-democratic-party-failed-working-people-says-sanders

How you lost the world

https://samkriss.com/2016/11/09/how-you-lost-the-world/

People are busy offering their explanations and theories as to why Trump won. A much more pertinent question to ask is why, in an age of economic crisis, financial irresponsibility, widening income inequality, employment uncertainty, not to overlook the all too easily overlooked crisis in the climate system (a crisis which threatens to render all of the aforementioned irrelevant) ‘the Left’ in politics (broadly defined) keeps failing and keeps losing. The people are crying out for an alternative way of doing things, but it seems our radicals, reformers and revolutionaries have lost the ability to build a new order and win a substantial constituency in its support and its building. Trump didn’t win. He secured pretty much the number of votes a Republican candidate could be expected to win – less than Romney last time around the last time I checked the figures. The fact that Hillary Clinton’s votes went west begs questions not only of her campaign, but also of Barack Obama’s previous eight years – there is no evidence here at all of the use of office to institute a public programme that succeeds in changing attitudes, behaviours and values. People want change and a break with the globalising processes and corporate interests that are failing them; instead, there is continuity based on advancing those very forces. This corporate economics and free trade policies goes back to Bill Clinton's presidency, presented as a 'third way' alternative to Reagan's 'trickle down' economics, but which is firmly a part of the globalising and liberalising order, rather than being a coherent alternative to it. The dangers of the misconceived debate between privatisation and socialisation through the public realm are made manifest here - it's been about the extension of the corporate form all along, and the Democrats, along with Labour in the UK, have gone along with the corporatisation of public business in the name of a 'third way' alternative.

I'm hearing people argue that we need to avoid polarizing discourse. We need to avoid inflaming hatred and anger in politics, seeing one's side as irrefutably true and good, the other side as irredeemably evil. But we need clarity in diagnosing the problems we are facing. If we live in a polarized society - we do - we need to develop a political discourse that identifies and uproots those divisions. To do otherwise is to engage in an ideological project of concealing iniquitous power relations in the name of an appeal to an abstract common good.

I’m reminded of Sartre here when he commented that many attempts to go beyond Marx end up in positions some way behind Marx. The problem with a ‘third way’ philosophy that seeks to gloss over social divisions is that they deliver us back to the same place nevertheless. We need a solid social democracy entrenched in the material life process and backed by the social practices and organisations of people who are prepared to defend and extend it. The problem with ‘third way’ arguments is that they never end up beyond the left-right alternatives they reject, but remain firmly on the untransformed, diremptive terrain with a ‘middle way’ that drifts further and further to the right on account of an inability to properly contest existing power relations. The politics of a soft left and a soft right could work when there was once a centre ground and a social order that was broadly working for the majority of people. Those days have gone, the centre can no longer hold, and attempts at a third way inevitably crumble against the realities of a divided society.

'Barack Obama seems to have forgotten that we live in the world of Citizens United, where corporations and rich people’s influence on the electoral choices of Americans is already obscenely large. They are not the ones who need help.

If ever there was a moment to propel non-business interests on a frontier as crucial as the rules for the global economy, that time is now. Mr. Obama instead is at war with an unprecedentedly diverse public interest coalition that passionately worked for his election.

At the same time, Obama has teamed fully with the very same big business titans that, equally passionately, opposed his election. Apparently, Mr. Obama believes that, by calling himself a progressive and labeling the trade agreements he is pursuing the same way, he can cover his tracks with the wide array of Democrats opposing his trade agenda. Yet, every American progressive organization on the horizon opposes the TPP. They oppose it because it replicates the same corporate job offshoring privileges found in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the same failed labor and environmental standards used by President Bush in his trade deals.'

Stephan Richter, Barack Obama a “Progressive”? Teddy Roosevelt Wouldn’t Agree

On Obama’s awkward efforts to defend his trade strategy.

http://www.theglobalist.com/barack-obama-a-progressive-teddy-roosevelt-wouldnt-agree/

Why do they do it? Richter argues they do it 'because that's where the money is.' This, however, is about much more than personal aggrandisement. The closeness of parties of the left in government with business and finance, involving the abandonment of their own supporters, is not about the betrayal of leaderships. Much deeper questions concerning liberal/social (parliamentary) democracy are begged. The reality is that Hillary Clinton lost, and the reasons why are to be located not merely in personal failings but in an institutional understanding of the place of government, parties of reform, and electoral politics within a capitalist system. Such parties can use office to engage in moderate reformist activity, but only on the condition of facilitating economic processes of growth. If there are deep structural problems in the capital economy, the margins for reform are not just narrowed, the pressures for retrenchment against the people who voted for reform become well-nigh irresistible. This has been the story of the reformist tradition. So much so, the reformist parties are not an integral part of the conventional political sphere, making a virtue of vice, and accepting their institutional and economic chains willingly. Any reforms offered are conditional, ‘the (stupid) economy’ has primacy over political principle and democratic will. If principle and popular expression require social transformation, this reformist politics will rule it out. The old Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer from the 1940s Hugh Dalton once stated that the purpose of the Labour Party in the UK constitution is to subject the Left to continuous defeat. That’s an awful long time, and an awful number of ‘betrayals’ and defeats since, to learn a simple lesson. We are not talking betrayals, we are not talking personal character – they can’t all be bad leaders – we are talking an institutional analysis that locates electoral parties of reform within the state in capitalist society. Such parties cannot be parties of the social transformation required if they are to realise the principles with which they are associated. The result is continuous defeat, demoralisation and internal division. I read that elites are mystified by the turn of events in politics. That they are explains a lot about how detached they are from realities, because the voices of protest have been getting louder and louder for a long period of time. They ignored Seattle, they ignored the Occupy Movement, they carried on with their globalising agenda. ‘The Left’, in terms of organised politics, failed to give effective leadership to this voice of dissent and protest – and the protesters themselves failed to develop their own effective organs of political expression. The problems didn’t go away. We have been seeing the rise of illiberal, isolationist, nationalist leaders all over the world, in Turkey, Hungary, Russia… The grievances motivating what elite discourse refers somewhat contemptuously as ‘populism’ are familiar to anyone on nodding terms with left-wing politics – the growing disparity between (super)rich and poor, social and economic insecurity, the disruption of communities and the feeling of being left behind, the feeling of being trapped and at the mercy of forces outside of one’s control, the perception that politicians are out of touch, that governments are working to an agenda contrary to the democratic will of the people… In my period of PhD research (1995-2001) I wrote volumes on socialism as a social control which supplied the forms, means and mechanisms restoring power to the social body as against the alien control of the abstract state institutional level and exploitative economy with its system imperatives. Imagine how it feels to read Steven Poole in The Guardian asking 'why does the right have all the best soundbites', referring specifically to ‘take back control.’ ("have we been framed", 14 Nov 2016). Because the Left, no doubt, is so sophisticated as to have no need of soundbites, only good arguments. Which begs the question as to why it can not translate these arguments into an effective politics. Simple and effective, but not merely a slogan but a critique that combines diagnosis and prognosis.

There are 52 references to 'social control' in this book of mine Marx, Praxis and Socialism from Below

(https://www.academia.edu/10118948/Marx_Praxis_and_Socialism_from_Below) and 94 in this Marx, Reason and Freedom

(https://www.academia.edu/10006922/Marx_Reason_and_Freedom_Communism_Rational_Freedom_and_Socialised_Humanity)

In this work, I was greatly influenced by the philosopher Istvan Meszaros, who wrote The Necessity of Social Control. The idea of ‘taking back control’ is hardly something the Left have never heard of (begs the question of where The Guardian has its head buried these past decades). In my own work, I develop Marx’s view of freedom as self-determination through the practical reappropriation of the power alienated to the abstract state and capital and its reorganisation and exercise as a social power. Of course, this begs – and receives – an account of the means and mechanisms of this ‘social control’. But – and this is the big but – the social transformation developing such social control is precisely what reformist parliamentary parties of the left-of-centre rule out as utopian and dangerous. It all depends on what you think ‘the people’ are capable of, and whether a politics is prepared to make available participatory structures so as to foster and sustain popular involvement – reality-constituting praxis based on the coincidence of self- and social change. Meszaros also wrote The Structural Crisis of Capital. John Bellamy Foster writes: “Today the structural crisis of capital provides the historical setting for a new revolutionary movement for social emancipation in which developments normally taking centuries would flit by like phantoms in decades or even years. But the force for such necessary, vital change remains with the people themselves, and rests on humanity’s willingness to constitute itself as both subject and object of history, through the collective struggle to create a just and sustainable world. This, Mészáros insists, constitutes the unprecedented challenge and burden of our historical time.” It is that structural crisis and the demand for social control that establishes the central theme of the observations I make in this piece. This argument echoes the views of Ralph Miliband in Divided Societies: ‘The failures registered by parties of the Left in government do not produce great ideological shifts in the working class. They merely produce disillusionment and cynicism, and a greater availability to the frantic propaganda directed at the working class by conservative forces. All the more is this effective when these forces, unlike their opponents, appear assured, united, and confident. The remarkable thing is not that a substantial part of the working class responds—as it has always done—to these appeals, but that a large part of it does not, and remains, in electoral terms, faithful to the parties of the Left’ (Miliband 1989:222).

Miliband is concerned with the failures of the traditional parties of the left and how these are to be explained. His argument, however, has relevance in relation to revolutionary socialism too. The electoral parties have frankly failed in office and, understanding that real power lies with capital rather than the electorate, have come to adopt orthodox economic policies that divide and demoralise their own class constituency. The Communist parties, meanwhile, have vacillated between the rhetoric of their revolutionary mission and the reality of their social democratic practice. ‘It is to such factors, relating to the condition and performance of these traditional parties of the Left, rather than to vast ideological and political shifts in popular opinion towards 'neo-conservatism', that their loss of support must largely be attributed. ‘The root of the problem, which is of historic proportions, lies not in the working class, nor in 'the electorate’, but in, these political agencies themselves, and notably in the main political formations of the Left in advanced capitalist countries - namely social democratic parties’ (Miliband 1989:223).

Miliband concludes that:

‘Challenge and advance will not occur until what may be called the crisis of the agencies has been overcome - until, that is, mass parties of the Left are able and willing to speak and act as parties committed to the advancement of 'reformist' policies and struggles within the perspective of a fundamental transformation of the social order.’ (Miliband 1989:223).

The facts make it clear that there is no ideological conversion at work here. This populism does not form a coherent political philosophy. It is a reaction against certain socio-economic processes in the context of the political failure of the reformist Left. The data that is in shows that Trump received slightly less votes than Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 and slightly more than John McCain in 2008. About the same, no change. Trump won because Clinton lost, and Clinton list because the reformist project yet again raised expectations that it could not fulfil, delivering its supporters over to economic processes that operate to remove control from people over their material life processes. Hardly the social conditions for political enthusiasm. Substantial numbers of those who voted for Barack Obama didn’t vote for Clinton – some five million. That’s not an ideological conversion to whatever it is that Trump stands for – it’s a rejection of what the reformists have promised and yet again failed to do. Yet again, reformism is shown to have been practising an anti-politics, sinking principle and making its promises conditional upon ‘economic growth’ (another of those depoliticised neutral terms that populate discourse and put politics on ice – more precisely, economic growth refers to the process of accumulation and the self-expansion of values upon which the capital system depends.) Against critics and protestors, the dominant narrative has extolled the material benefits of globalization. And those areas where global trade, finance, communications and technology have enriched numbers of people have been contented enough to go along with the global corporate agenda. Those left behind, those affected by stagnant incomes, those damaged most by the financial crash of 2007/2008 have been ignored. All bets were placed on growth – and its egalitarian distribution - through free trade, liberalization and globalization. There are liberal folk out there who are anxious to nail the myth that the Trump and Brexit victories are to be explained as a revolt of the ‘alienated white working class.’ I’m concerned that this ‘nailing the myth’ shouldn’t become another liberal blind eye and deaf ear to the plight of the white working class. For years, the liberal elites – and I will call them that here – I saw them, I heard them, in politics and press, comfortable, educated, middle class people with nothing in common with the people they were so quick to disparage – referred to working class voices on issues of immediate social concern as ignorant, xenophobic and racist. There was no sympathy, only contempt, because the people concerned couldn’t articulate their views in ways that the liberal intelligentsia found palatable. It isn’t racist to raise issues of immigration, my right wing friends tell me. It isn’t but it could be. It certainly will become a full-on right wing explosion of bigotry and hatred if political leaders and parties continue to talk-down to people and deliberately fail to hear their legitimate grievances and concerns. But, true, this is not a white working class revolt, this is the abandonment of left politics on the part of a section of the white working class and its turn to the right – and the constituency of this right remains what it has always been, the affluent, the comfortable, the well-off, those who benefit most from the status quo and therefore have less motivation to change it. But if the liberal establishment miss the point here – the failure of the left in office, the division and demoralisation of its own supporters – then they will carry on failing. No, this is not a revolt of the alienated working class, it is how a section of the working class is reacting to the strains of a politics and economics that is harming their lives, becoming ‘swing voters’ in sufficient numbers to swell the ranks of the right in politics and ensure the triumph of the right and the defeat of the left. Lost jobs, savings and homes, ripping out the heart of communities, diminishing prospects, the end of hope – these people and these places exist. And who has been on the side of the exploitative forces, the gamblers, the casino capitalists, the liberalisation that gave the rich and powerful the freedom to predate upon the world? And who organised the bailouts for those who had enriched themselves through practices that tipped economies over the cliff into bankruptcy, whilst the people who voted for them to represent them bore the brunt of this gambling? I tend to switch off whenever I hear someone grumbling about political correctness (always remember what PC was aimed to stamp out, I say), but there is a failure here to keep the social/economic concern with exploitation, redistribution, equality and control in touch with the cultural concern with identity and rights that has divided the constituency for progressive politics from within, pitting allies in the struggle against domination and oppression against each other. Why? Because identity politics is a lot easier to deliver on than winning against capital on the social and economic terrain – simple. And resentment against PC and the assertion of rights for any number of groups and minorities is bound to grow amongst people suffering the economic consequences of globalization, and whose voice is not being heard at political level. Did you think the people from declining deindustrialised areas would simply slump into silence in their wastelands and go away as being of absolutely no use to anyone in politics, right and left. That resentment can turn nasty against the PC straightjacket, which patrols the very language that people can use. Don’t like it? Wise up. And toughen up. Engage in some real politics, instead of mobbing up in the media and using the force of law to silence and suppress. ‘Man-up’! Here’s a provocative take on the whole debacle: Trump is ‘tapping into America’s deep dislike and distrust of the feminization of American culture. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, represents exactly what Donald Trump is reacting against. She is Nurse Ratched. She is the organized, cunning, planning, smiling Mommy who expects everyone to behave so that the home will be neat and tidy and together so everyone will be happy.’ ‘Feminism has brought with it the organized Mother. Here is the prim and tidy housekeeper. Everything in its place. Everything spic and span. You need to clean your room, wash your hands and turn up in time for supper. Its bossy momma, and right alongside Bossy Momma is Mater Terribulis: The terrible mother. If you don’t obey you will be punished. Don’t you know this is for the best? If you don’t comply you will be fined. If you don’t take your medication Nurse Ratched will make sure you get electric shock treatment.I’m saying all this not to make value judgements one way or another, but simply to observe what has been happening at a deep level of our society. I’m not denying the real benefits, insights and contributions that feminism have brought, and they are considerable, but I am noticing some side effects.Where does Donald Trump fit in? I think he’s the figurehead of a pushback. Think about it. There he is, posing on the cover of Playboy magazine. His third wife is a nude model for goodness sake, and he is unrepentant that his first two marriages broke down because of his philandering. It’s like he’s saying, “I’m a guy. OK?”Furthermore, he plays the macho man to the hilt. Does he call women pigs and slobs and make jokes of their feminine functions? Sure. He doesn’t care and he knows his supporters–both the men AND the women–don’t care.’ (Trump and the American Macho Pushback, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2016/09/trump-and-the-american-macho-pushback.html?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Catholic%2009%2028%2016%20(1)&utm_content=&spMailingID=52424256&spUserID=MTMyMjA5MTgyMjM1S0&spJobID=1005065949&spReportId=MTAwNTA2NTk0OQS2). Generalise that to PC as a whole, and the identity politics the Left has been practising to the exclusion of class struggle at the socio-economic level begins to look very fragile and flabby indeed. Without its conditions at the level of social relations and material life, assertions of rights are empty indeed. There is an increasing number of voters who would identify themselves as neither left nor right, they are loose cannons who will respond to anyone who speaks their language. My phrasing there is quite deliberate. I don’t mean those who address their concerns, I mean speak their language. They don’t want lectures on how precisely to phrase their concerns and express their demands, they want a pair of ears and a promise to shake up ‘the system.’ It doesn’t make it right, of course (anticipating a lecture here). Noam Chomsky makes the point effectively in this interview: ‘The Democratic Party abandoned any real concern for working people by the 1970s, and they have therefore been drawn to the ranks of their bitter class enemies, who at least pretend to speak their language -- Reagan's folksy style of making little jokes while eating jelly beans, George W. Bush's carefully cultivated image of a regular guy you could meet in a bar who loved to cut brush on the ranch in 100-degree heat and his probably faked mispronunciations (it's unlikely that he talked like that at Yale), and now Trump, who gives voice to people with legitimate grievances -- people who have lost not just jobs, but also a sense of personal self-worth -- and who rails against the government that they perceive as having undermined their lives (not without reason).One of the great achievements of the doctrinal system has been to divert anger from the corporate sector to the government that implements the programs that the corporate sector designs, such as the highly protectionist corporate/investor rights agreements that are uniformly mis-described as "free trade agreements" in the media and commentary. With all its flaws, the government is, to some extent, under popular influence and control, unlike the corporate sector. It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people's minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by and for the people.’ (Trump in the White House: An Interview With Noam Chomsky, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38360-trump-in-the-white-house-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky).

Chomsky is right to draw attention to the use of the term 'free trade agreement' or 'free trade deal' or 'free trade treaty'. More neutral terms that hide politics behind economic ideology. All trade is managed, there is no free trade - agreements, deals and treaties indicate negotiations, deliberations, laws, the drawing up of rules ... and the ability of politics to be active in determining the rules of the game.

So instead of whining away over Trump and Brexit, the liberal left should lose its sense of entitlement to support, as though these votes are the property of the left of centre parties. These parties need to earn them, not demand them as of right. The key question is why so many voters are now rejecting the dominant parties, and voting for smaller parties or independents or maverick voices who speak the language of revolution aimed against ‘the system.’ And an even bigger question is why the dominant left of centre parties won’t (personal failings of leadership) or can’t (institutional constraints, the location of the party/state within the capital system) abandon a politics-as-usual that maintains a status quo that is failing its own supporters. Either way, the social transformation we require to deal with the structural challenges we face is always off the agenda. We need a new politics that looks elsewhere, and doesn’t expect the reformists to do what they won’t and can’t do. The reason for reaction isn’t hard to find – and those who don’t know, don’t want to know. Neoliberalism is a class politics that uses the external force of ‘the economy’ to constrain behaviours and actions. At the centre of this strategy was a deliberate concern to invert the traditional politics of redistribution, increasing the share of capital at the expense of labour. Allied to the globalization of economic relations, it involves a commitment to growth at the expense of income. It is naïve to expect that a rising tide would raise all boats. That’s the political claim designed for electoral appeal. A form of trickle down, which promises that as society grows richer through economic growth, all people would become richer too. Not equally so, that depends on the politics of redistribution through the state, but richer. And for those advocating such a politics, that is enough, and doesn’t require the state and a proactive tax policy. It didn’t happen. Do we need the figures? Why not just practise some real politics and listen to the voices of the people who are pointing to something going badly wrong in their lives and their communities? The relationship between growth and income is not direct, with household income lagging behind national economic growth. Do you really need the facts to make good these claims? Thomas Piketty was heavy on facts in his Capital in the Twenty First Century. He was also quick to deny he was a Marxist. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson were also big on facts in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. The facts are out there. My question is what good do facts do in a political world? Why not listen to the people on the receiving end and fashion an effective politics based on the terms they use – ‘unfair’, ‘unjust’ – and better still involve them in the social transformation required to bring about the egalitarian and just society? You know … politics … about values and the voice of the people. To state it bluntly, there are areas outside of the growth sectors of the economy who have been losing out, seeing their incomes trailing way behind growth. It’s a question for politics – if all you are going to do is ally your politics with economic growth, then there’s no need for politics and government: thin it down and let the market go free to allocate resources without interference. Concealing this anti-politics with identity politics delivers anything but social transformation beyond the status quo – it is the use of law to buttress the cultural wing of late capitalism. The professional educated middle class will go along with such a ‘reformism’, and the bankers, financiers, executives will carry on feeding their faces in the global trough. And the result is a vague political analysis of ‘elites’ who rig the rules of the game in order to enrich themselves at the expense of others, bagging the biggest slice of the economic cake for themselves, and a ‘populist’ reaction in response. Rich and poor, elite and masses? Did Karl Marx write in vain? We need a class analysis is we are to be more precise and develop an effective politics of social transformation. I have a very old book at home, British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze by Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe. It points out the falling rate of profit as a threat to the future of the capital economy, and the need on the part of the ruling class for an effective politics that strengthens capital against labour. The book was written in 1972, seven years before Margaret Thatcher came to office and inaugurated the neoliberal agenda that did precisely that. That’s the irony and the tragedy – the facts and figures made a strong revolutionary case, but the theoretical approach has to be bolstered by an appropriate politics and practice if change for the better is to come. To put it simply – in the language that people understand – the facts and figures on income and inequality these past decades have made popular protest against ‘the establishment’ all but inevitable. The form that this protest takes depends upon many factors, political positions as well as capacities for social organisation on the part of the protesting voice. The vagaries of an ‘anti-elite’ movement beg all manner of troubling questions. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx referred to ‘the dangerous classes’: ‘that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.’ (Marx MCP Rev1848 1973). A ‘populist’ revolt can swing both ways. It can ask the right questions but be swayed into the wrong answers – rejecting one ‘elite’ to fall in behind another. Either way, the structural fault-lines underlying the contemporary capital system means that an ‘anti-elite’ populist reaction is certain. That this should have surprised the educated classes in politics, media and journalism should tell us where their heads are. Where that reaction goes, whether it can form itself into a coherent political movement, depends. My question is one for the Left – if multimillionaires on the right can lead a revolt, why on earth can’t you?

This is a time that casts light on the institutional and structural challenges we face. This is an issue that goes well beyond personalities and picking leaders. If there is a design fault in the system, the greatest, most inspiring, leader in the world will fail. And the fact is that the institutional and systemic constraints on the political realm have been so disabling for so long that the most able people don’t enter politics anymore; as power has gone elsewhere, so have the most creative people. It is becoming easier to see through the rationalizations of political positions with respect to ‘the economy’, the mystifications which see political will where there is only economic imperatives, the protective fictions that blame ‘government’ for the failures of the economic system. That being the case, we go beyond the personnel of politics to examine the underlying structures of our social and institutional framework. We now have to learn a lesson we have spent the last century doing our best not to learn – that the problems we face are not the result of incompetent leaders, parties and governments but have deep structural roots. We are charged with the task of institution building so as to give effective expression to democratic will and social control with respect to the structural roots of society. As against clearly impotent and illusory claims to manage the economy institutionally, effective institutions require the transformation of the entire social metabolic order, a rewiring of our social and economic life so that any ‘management’ comes from within the functioning of the system. The capital system is fundamentally an anarchy of production, and that anarchy, expressed in the competition of capitals, will always work to subvert institutional constraints and regulations.

Unsurprisingly, political commentary remains focused on political leaders and parties, the personalities and the war of words and the recriminations. It’s exciting, it’s easy, it’s entertaining and it has an audience. But this political realignment at the unchanged institutional level is not the key question at all, merely a moving around of the furniture that leaves the pillars of the building still standing. It’s still the anti-politics based on a business model. The more significant issue concerns the fundamental transformations we need in political economy and representative democracy. The existing modes of doing business and politics are imploding.

This involves a thoroughgoing rejection of neoliberalism, certainly. The critique of neoliberalism is on the lips of many at the moment. I would, however, insist we go deeper. To criticise neoliberal economics is once more to imply that the problem is a technical one rather than a systemic one, this time a problem of economic theory. The solution to the failures of one theory is to select a better theory. Back to Keynes? If neoliberal economics is so bad and Keynesianism so good, how is it we abandoned Keynesianism in the first place? The capital system was in crisis before neoliberalism; neoliberal economics was a clear class politics aimed at changing the balance between capital and labour, redistributing resources from labour to capital, weakened the organised power of the working class to boot. As economics, neoliberalism was and is lousy, as a class politics it has been immensely successful in attaining its goals. And it is this combination of political success and economic failure that has taken the wind out of the sails of liberal/social democracy and its claim to exist as a vehicle for governance for the general good and human well-being.

The opportunity is now before us to penetrate the institutional surface and engage in a structural analysis in order to discern the contours of a new social order, a vigorous realm of democratic self-activity and self-organisation, based on new social forms of commoning, which is advancing outside of the conventional political realm. To those who charge that such a politics, organised on the associational space of civil society, is utopian, I would simply ask how many more times will you swallow the claims of economic management for the greater good through government, how many more failures are you willing to endure, how many more times are you going to lead people up the garden path, before you see through the protective fictions by which the capital system has democrats dancing to its tune and taking hits on its behalf as the public face and visible target? If you want an institutional realm that works, you need an economy that is amenable to the democratic will as expressed through extensive public spaces.

Just how low does the political system have to stoop before people realise that there is more than a personal failure at work here, more than institutional failure too, but a system failure that rests on a structural fault line. Fail to address that, then expect more of the same, only worse. How bad can it get? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The political system is dysfunctional because it rests on an economic system that is not a public realm, subject to democratic will and persuasion, but is a regime of private accumulation that subjects political institutions to systemic constraints. It doesn’t matter what the people want or what politicians promise, if it challenges the mechanisms of accumulation and valorisation, it doesn’t happen.

Instead of a public space based on citizen interaction and discourse, we have technocratic management and manipulation above and a politics as entertainment and spectacle in the media. Such ‘politics’ keeps the demos entertained, but generates hot air rather than enlightenment in being more concerned to press the emotional hot buttons than incite rational deliberation and decision.

The economic market of atoms buying and selling finds its political counterpart in the electoral market of parties selling packages of slogans and promises and individual voters choosing which package is likely to leave them ‘better off.’ It’s a marketplace, a congeries of subjective preferences and opinions and self-assertion, not a public realm involving active citizen participation and dialogue. Meanwhile, politics as a realm of decision and policy making takes place elsewhere, where nth rate Machiavellian ‘strategists’ plot the winning of what is laughably called ‘power’. This is not a democratic politics based on democratic participation and self-expression, but as the pursuit and monopolisation of ‘power.’ Of course, this Machiavellian exercise is a nostalgic fantasy for a public realm long gone. What is really attained is office, profitable enough for ambitious, value-free career politicians, but not real power – political power remains dependent on economic structures. The limits of political power are soon felt under the impact of the economic exigencies of the capital system.

So, no, feminist friends, I am not pointing the finger at Hillary Clinton. I’m not even pointing the finger at Barack Obama or even Bill Clinton. Or Tony Blair. These people are the personifications of institutional constraints, structural parameters and system-wide tendencies which together constitute and define the capital system. Their failures are not technical failures of economic management, they are the political failures of indulging in protective fictions that imply ‘the economy’ is a neutral machine amenable to the will of government. In time and again raising expectations of the people with claims of managing the economy for the good of each and all, in time and again abandoning its own constituency in doing the bidding of the system and its principal agents, not of the people, in time and again bending to the imperatives of the system, without ever seeking to deliver the public lesson as to the forces constraining political policy and action – the liberal/social democrats deserve the contempt in which they are held. Because, in the end, the people who pay the biggest price for their illusions are the people who elect them, put them in office, swallow their promises, only to suffer the social consequences of failure.

Certainly, the liberal/social democrats are opposed at every turn by the conservative parties and forces in society. We can take that as read – that’s what makes them conservatives. Does anybody think a ruling class, representing people who benefit most from the status quo, will ever play fair and make life easy for political opponents? Once trapped inside the institutional realm, with the fundamental parameters of the economic system and social structures unchallenged and unchanged, liberal/social democrats are easily picked off, stymied and suffocated. Once the straightjacket of systemic constraint and structural power of prevailing economic forces is accepted, then the political room for manoeuvre narrows to the secondary and unimportant. The basic problems of inequality, poverty, unemployment and underemployment, financial scandals remain unaddressed, and instead of proactive government with respect to the economy and climate change, we get free trade deals and a further diminution in the power of politics. In going so tamely along with the dominant agenda of globalization, liberalisation and privatization/corporatisation, the liberal/social democrats have been willing accomplices in their own doom. To the big issues of power, they are running on empty; they offer no practical solutions to the problems we face because, within these institutional parameters, none can be offered. And it is for that reason I say that capitalist crisis is accompanied by a crisis in representative democracy.

Go back as long as you like, any representative democracy you like, the politics never change, the promise of modest, incremental reforms within the system, conditional upon economic growth. There is a rationale to this. To do more implies a political challenge to the social system that the liberal/social democrats rule out; their concern is to manage and regulate the system, not overthrow and transform it. So it’s best to be clear that there is a clash here between two fundamentally different, and opposed, modes of politics. Within the capital system that is deeply integrated in private power and the global market, democratic power cannot pass into an economic interventionism that obstructs the mechanisms of accumulation and valorisation, that is, the very condition of fulfilling the promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment’ upon which liberal/social democratic electoral popularity depends. When this level is reached, either parties and people become part of a political movement to transform the prevailing social system, or parties pull back, curtail democratic inroads into the power of capital, and the people accept this lowering of ambitions. Social division, insecurity, economic instability, inequality, crisis and crash – and again we get the counter-revolution to the revolution that never ever comes. The extra-parliamentary politics of social transformation is ruled out as utopian and dangerous, and so we get endless re-runs of the same old protective fictions which keep the system limping on. The problems we face are problems of system failure; they are inflicting crises with transformatory significance; they require system change. The slow driver is as big a menace as the speeding driver. The continual denial of the need for systemic transformation leaves politics with a populist void at its heart, a void that is quickly filled by establishment figures putting themselves at the head of the people and leading them back into the cul-de-sac.

As I wrote in 1995 in Industry and Europe:

'Much rests on the argument that the state possesses the capacity to manage capitalism, whether capitalist crises are the result of deficient demand and hence could be corrected by demand management. The Marxist argument proceeds from the assumption that private property in the means of production implies that the state power is secondary and derivative. Public power is dependent upon private economic power. The ‘state has only the illusion of being determinant, whereas in fact it is determined’ (Miliband in Miliband and Saville 1965:280).

The problem with demand management, moreover, is that state expenditure will induce capitalists to increase investment and employment only if the rate of profit can also be increased. The capitalist mode of production is characterised by profit and capital accumulation as the central dynamic of economic activity, by private property and appropriation, and by the continuous necessity for economic agents to realise surplus value through the sale of commodities. And these remain the defining characteristics of the modern economy, whatever the claims that there has been a managerial revolution and a transition to a mixed economy (Touris 1961:40/56; Miliband 1989:26/37; Coates 1991:97/9). In working within the logic of the capitalist economy, Keynesians must accept the centrality of private accumulation to production, investment and employment. Keynes proposed to reform capitalism rather than abolish it, his ‘socialisation of investment’ intended as a substitute for the socialisation of production (Dobb 1955: 215/25). Economic management therefore came to refer to the state facilitating the process of private accumulation based upon the claim that contemporary capitalism can overcome the tendency to stagnation through public expenditure. But Keynesian state intervention cannot itself create those circumstances which improve the rate of profit and does nothing to ensure the necessary relationship between profits and accumulation. Economic progress under Keynesian economic management would increase the organic composition of capital faster than the rate of exploitation, lowering the rate of profit and causing investment to fall (Dobb 1955:224 ch 1; Mattick 1969; Pelling 1986; Fine and Harris 1980). For Marxists, crisis results from the failure to produce sufficient surplus value to justify investment. Crisis is not, therefore, a problem at the realisation stage, to be solved by demand management.

It is this power of transnational capital which has effectively rendered the social democratic reformist incarnation of socialism obsolete. The notion of ‘parliamentary socialism’ (Miliband 1987) lacks coherence and cogency when national government, national capital and the national interest have all been rendered subordinate to transnational imperatives and priorities. The ability of governments to achieve and maintain full employment, manage the economy and guarantee economic growth through national institutions, mechanisms and tools has long been eroded. The failure of reformist social democracy to develop an alternative has made it easier for advocates of neo-liberalism to take advantage of the obvious impotence of political institutions to extend the uncontrolled use of the market mechanism.'

Politics is trailing behind economics. The dominant political parties of the conventional political sphere are running on empty, fractured and incoherent, lacking a meaningful political philosophy, because none can be offered, and none are required anyway – whichever way the system blows is the right way; it is the only way for those confined within the attic of the political superstructure. The liberal/social democratic tradition is bankrupt, it has come to the end of its tether. To the extent that it steadfastly rules out social transformation, it digs its own grave. Amongst radicals and thinkers, the cutting edge work being done concerns a post-growth economics, a quality of life economics, commoning, all of which challenge the accumulative dynamic of the capital system for the sake of social and ecological health. To the extent that liberal/social democracy won’t go near such thinking, then they remain wedded to the old delusions of economic management, the ‘mixed economy’, ‘responsible’ or ‘ethical’ capitalism – delusions because the self-expansion of values has nothing to do with morality and will and democratic persuasion and everything to do with economic imperatives. So this is not a defeat of particular political figures, it is the demise of a political tradition, and it has been a long time coming. Liberal/social democrats spent the fifties and sixties telling people that capitalism no longer existed and that what we had was a ‘mixed economy’ based upon the public regulation of the private economy. Those claims were ideological then, they are laughable now. A liberal/social democracy that carries on peddling that delusion stands revealed as an ideological project designed to conceal power relations, insulate them from democratic challenge and alteration.

I don’t doubt that the right wing populism and its leaders have no coherent policies and strategies for dealing with the problems they exploit, but that’s not the issue. The point is, they are appealing to people because, in the first instance, they ask the questions that the professional politicians prefer not to ask and delegitimise as unrealistic and naïve. And they appeal to people who are not prepared to swallow the same false prospectus that liberal/social democrats offer election to election, the jobs, the growth, the benefits of free trade, ‘the white heat of technological revolution’ that UK prime minister Harold Wilson promised back in 1964, the educational and training opportunities, all of which promise to unleash a society of all the talents, as Gordon Brown promised. Drivel. Economic crisis and a rise in unemployment and nothing the economic managers can do, or want to do, about it.

The promises are never fulfilled, and they can’t be. Because the systemic imperatives attendant on the process of capital accumulation exceed the institutional capacity of the political realm to translate democratic will into public policy and deliver social security, economic stability, and a decent standard of living. A politics conditional upon economic growth remains the bedrock of liberal/social democracy for this simple reason, in a capital system based upon an accumulative dynamic, endless economic expansion is a non-negotiable. Consider this, and see the extent to which the attempt to address the problems of climate change and global warming face severe political and institutional challenges.

Over time, this relocation of socialism from the social realm to the abstracted political sphere fostered an attitude to politics that is not healthy. Instead of an active involvement with others in popular organs of social control, there developed a passive reliance upon an electoral politics that atomised the citizen body as individual voters. What Ralph Miliband called ‘parliamentary socialism’ created an exalted expectation of what government could achieve vis the transformation of society, upon which radical demands depended. The elevated nature with which government and government action has been treated over the decades is an illusion that inflates the power of the state in relation to system-wide constraints and structural realities, creating expectations of a top-down regime of politics that are utterly incapable of being realised. Certainly with respect to socialism and the social transformation upon which a new social order depends. That, most certainly, is an illusion on the part of those socialists who entertain it. That leaves the ambition of moderate, incremental reforms as and when ‘the system’ can afford them – which is less and less as the effects of structural transformations in the global economy make themselves felt. And when the space for modest reform narrows and disappears, and the survival of the system requires austerity and retrenchment – when the most cherished ideals and principles of the liberal order require social transformation – then what? Here, the failures of liberal/social democracy are manifest – the parties of the liberal left have almost always willingly allied with the reaction, and those that haven’t have been forced by systemic economic necessity to do so. And the reason is clear: within a capitalist economic order, the state is determined, it is not determinant, its power and resources are secondary and derivative, meaning that it must facilitate the process of private accumulation as a condition of its own power, resources, popularity and legitimacy. Any government that fails to serve ‘the economy’ will be beset with fiscal difficulties sufficient to bring it down. Hence the initial claims of parliamentary socialists were dressed up in terms of economic management. When the increasing limitations of the state sphere in this respect became manifest in an era of globalising economic relations, pretensions at management were abandoned to a competition policy promising ‘economic growth.’

This realization, while disorienting for those entertaining notions of the democratic will being translated into public policy to fashion the new social order from above, is to be welcomed. Why? Because it points to very serious questions about the kind of society we want to have. And the idea of a society that has been created by a top-down regime of political action is as far away from any definition of socialism that I want to see – even if it were possible. This much is certain, the idea of using the state to ‘build socialism’ from above is an entirely unmarxist notion that, for Marx, inverts the real relation between state and civil society. Before proceeding any further, radicals would do well to read Marx further, deeper and better on this relation of politics to society. Then place initiative back into the hands of the people as agents of change. And see less power in the hands of what Marx called ‘state priests’ and ‘alchemists of revolution’, the people who asserted the power of political will to refashion society from above.

The claims of economic regulation for the greater good are threadbare by now. Any success in this area is entirely conditional upon economic growth. It’s an anti-politics, and the money we pay to these politicians is exorbitant given their status as glorified rubber-stampers. It’s a rigged game we are playing, the people know it, their leaders strive to conceal it. But it’s becoming more and more difficult for them to do so. Their cover is blown, they are working hand in glove with corporate capital and finance. Of course they rule out transformation, when they are integral parts of a system to be transformed!

We are now on uncertain terrain. The main parties of the conventional sphere no longer command the respect and loyalty they once did, they no longer inspire enthusiasm. Society has fractured, its divisions run deep and can no longer be reconciled through the old political narrative. There is an increasing refusal on the part of people to accept the verdicts of the elections. There is a struggle of right and wrong, or right and right at work. Lacking an objective moral compass with which to compare actions, there is individual and group self-assertion. In an age that has encouraged narcissism and entitlement, there is an increasing reluctance to accept head counts at elections. That fosters a politics of anger. But that anger reflects something much deeper. Society is fragmenting, unravelling the older ties and loyalties and communities that held people together. Modern society has been put on the most ephemeral and transitory of ties, those of economics. The divisions are running too deep for the ritualized left-right turn at the wheel to be able to reconcile. The electoral process is increasingly incapable of giving expression to the critical problems of society, such as economic insecurity, inequality, climate change and environmental degradation. All of these key issues are off the agenda, falling way down a list of priorities topped by the economic imperatives of ‘jobs, growth and investment’, the very business model of politics that is generating these problems in the first place. The result is a government and politics that is characterised by ideological assertion, mutual mistrust, scorn, contempt and a destructive partisanship. The increasing tendency of one side to demonize the other stems from real social division and, I would argue, from a religious tendency to personalise and moralise social, institutional and structural failings, so that successes and failures are attributed to personal character. The result is a tendency of political arguments to become personal, vituperative, and nasty. The news media prefers it this way, boosting sales and ratings by entertainment and spectacle at the expense of rational investigation and deliberation and citizen interaction, crucial elements of democratic institutions. The neoliberal agenda has been to use economics as a political tool of class politics and, to that extent, it has succeeded – government has been used aggressively to unleash ‘market forces’ and tilt the balance from labour to capital. This is what Ralph Miliband in Divided Societies called class war from above. The main protagonists in the 'class struggle from above' are those who own or control the main means of domination in capitalist society: ‘employers on the one hand and the state on the other, with the hands usually clasped in a firm grip’ (Miliband 1989:115). And that class struggle from above had to be waged all the more aggressively since the capital economy was struggling to create value, suffering a profits squeeze that was threatening the entire system. Since the end of the long boom in the early 1970s we have been living in an age of long crisis and stagnation, a slow-1929. Neoliberalism as an aggressive class politics from above has intensified class divisions and social inequalities and undermined the basis for political consensus through the electoral system. The result is a politics of mutual antipathy and ideological logjam. And, I would argue, a politics of shadow boxing, since the ideological splits of left and right, ‘socialism’ and ‘free market’ are utterly bogus. The only consensus is a consensus around the neoliberal agenda, which entails the aggressive proactive use of government to impose economic policies and strictures. The market is not free, the economic game is most certainly rigged by government. When the deepest economic crisis for eighty years resulted in 2007-2008, the response of business and finance was to blame government for allowing them to make the decisions they make and take the actions they took – government had operated a deliberately light touch with respect to regulation, taking the brakes off, and so encouraging the drivers to crash the car.

In the context of government subject to corporate capture and the constraints of banking and finance, aggressively promoting economically divisive and socially destructive policies, a consensus framework for using government for human betterment is no longer believable, and may not even be possible. The social roots of such a programme may no longer exist, the divisions of society may run too deep, the economic conditions can no longer be guaranteed. For all of the endless political commentary of today, the critical dimensions of the problems we face are missing – the capital economy is running out of value, it lacks the drivers that supply mass employment, it cannot distribute sufficient resources equally to enable a functioning society that is at peace with itself. The growth economy is running out of growth, and it cannot supply the growth with equity that a society at peace requires. That being the case, the space for liberal/social democracy offering moderate reforms on the back of continuous economic growth is disappearing fast.

It is for this reason that I argue the need to move beyond a debate that is conducted within the old terms of Keynesianism vs monetarism, government and free markets, and come out of the reformist paradigm of economic management, government intervention and regulation, redistribution through tax policy, ‘ethical’ and ‘responsible’ capitalism, capitalism with a human face, the ‘mixed economy’ – all those familiar nostrums of the middle or third way, by which ‘the left’ shied away from class division and exploitative relations. If you don’t like class struggle, then you will have to devise social forms that put an end to class relations and class exploitation. The cover of neoliberalism has been blown – it is an aggressive class politics waged by capital against labour. To deny it is to engage in ideological mystifications. We have seen through the rationalisations and the protective fictions. And we have seen that liberal/social democracy is a part of the mystification. The days of referring neutrally to ‘the economy’ and of defining economic problems as technical and theoretical problems is over – we see the world as it is, we see that we live in a political world, and that these decisions are political decisions concerning a chosen and desired way of life.

It is a time not of reformism, but of reformation. The space for piecemeal incremental reforms from above on the back of continuous economic growth has diminished, whilst the social divisions run too deep to be reconciled at the political level. I read Jonathan Sacks rejecting both the right for its adherence to a golden age that never was and the left for demanding a utopia that never will be. Both positions, he argues, are dangers to freedom. As an alternative, he advocates a capitalism with a human face. Isn’t that the familiar ‘third way’ claim that is now collapsing around us? Instead, let us engage in constructive work building new institutional frameworks and socio-economic forms, being mindful of the dangers of projecting principles of a priori rationality and imposing them upon reality – and people. The challenge is to work with real social forces and canalise them in healthy and productive directions, involving people in the changing of the world so that social transformation is also a self-transformation. That participatory, praxis-based approach is the best antidote to the dangers of utopianism, moving away from technocratic and elitist programmes enacted and administered from without and above to practical transition strategies that have people building the new world for themselves, a politics of, by and for the people. In which case, we move from the critique of capitalist political economy to constructive work. Instead of waging class struggle in the abstract, a struggle mediated by the ‘revolutionary party’ and placing power in the hands of government and the state, we build our own forms of self-mediation, serving as organs of governance and economic provision. This would be take the slogan ‘take back control’ and turn it into something meaningful in terms of institutions of governance, economic activity and social provision. I develop this in terms of reclaiming power alienated to abstracted state and economic spheres and its reorganisation and exercise as social power. In the past I have argued this as a social control vis alien control, something I define in terms of new modes of governance and self-organization, new forms of social self-mediation which involve an internal societal and moral self-regulation as against coercive forms of external institutional and economic imposition. This social self-mediation arranges power in terms of levels of competence and comprehension, involving a descaling of power downwards and a rescaling of power upwards as appropriate. This scaling to human dimensions and proportions allows for the extension of participatory structures and creates the means and mechanisms for assuming individual and collective responsibility. This framework is thus based on the democratic constitution of authority, creating the social and institutional forms enabling an active assertion of the principle of self-assumed obligation, the principle that holds that individuals are bound only by those laws that they have had a hand in making. Government in hoc to business and finance and subject to systemic economic constraints is a denial of this principle. The precise social institutions and mechanisms regulating this social control remain to be developed and applied. Such is the nature of building the new social republic. They cannot be devised before the fact, and the extent to which they are defined and imposed as a priori principles, then the dangers of a repressive utopianism that seeks to make reality conform to reason do indeed exist. But that is not the approach to social and self-transformation advocated in a praxis-based approach. This is a political question, one involving values, participation and practices, not an engineering or technical problem to be resolved in advance and executed according to orders from above. The interesting part for me is the typical liberal rejection of Marx and Marxism as statist. Because Marx is distinguished for being critical of the state, demanding its abolition as an alienated social power. Friedrich Engels expresses the marxist repudiation of the state as the instrument of social control:

"The society that organizes production anew on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machine where it will then belong: in the museum of antiquities, side by side with the spinning wheel and the bronze ax."

From his early writings in the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State and On the Jewish Question to the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx consistently demanded the practical restitution of the power alienated to the state (and capital and the commodity form) to the social body and its organisation and exercise as a social power belonging to each and all.

"It is by no means the goal of workers who have discarded the narrow mentality of humble subjects to make the state 'free'. In the German Reich the 'state' has almost as much 'freedom' as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed on society into one thoroughly subordinate to it; and even today state forms are more or less free depending on the degree to which they restrict the 'freedom of the state'.

The German workers party - at least if it adopts this programme - thus shows that its socialist values do not even go skindeep, for instead of treating existing society (and the same holds true for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or future state in the case of future society), it treats the state as an Independent entity with its, own ‘intellectual, ethical and liberal foundations'."

Marx Critique of the Gotha Programme 1974:354

The socialism of Marx is not state control at all but a social control constituted by the reabsorption of the alienated state power into the self-organising society. Ironically, representatives of the reformist tradition consistently accuse Marx of being a state socialist. In truth, it is the reformists who advocate incremental reforms through government on the back of economic growth who are the state socialists, making Faustian bargains with the very alien powers that deny social control.

The view I outline here involves a new public life, a society of social self-government and citizen interaction embedded in the associational space of a transformed civil society. This implies a process of democratisation involving both a political and socio-economic decentralisation and recentralisation. 'Society’ organised in such a way will be in ‘control’, taking back the power alienated to extraneous bodies and systems and creating new steering media. Marx criticises the state as an alienated social power but retains a place for government. This ‘society’ (we need to elaborate the precise institutional forms) will exercise 'legitimate governmental functions' (The Civil War in France), extinguishing the class, coercive functions of the state. ‘The state’ continues only in the form of a juridical framework which is designed to ensure the common good of the whole, protecting individual rights and liberties and serving to prevent self-interested behaviour.

I, therefore, argue for a reclaiming not only of the physical commons but also of the political and ethical commons, arranging social relations on the recovered common ground so as to create the social identity capable of constituting the common good. Thus, social self-government is to be insulated from the danger of a sectional self-interests degenerating into private monopolies, usurping the public good and degenerating into capitalist competition. The challenge, then, is to elaborate the institutions and systems enabling a public/commons harmonization at community, city, regional levels.

Critics can continue to warn of the dangers of such utopianism. Rather than dismiss such warnings, we should heed these criticisms to ensure that our practice is not guilty of dogmatic assertion, ideological blindness and wishful thinking. We need an ongoing interaction of theory and practice. And we need democratic participation and active consent. We need active and informed eco-citizens capable of constituting a new social order. And we need viable forms of governance, economic exchange and social provision.

But warnings of utopianism should not be taken as justification for further attempts to make a failing status quo work. The status quo is not an option. I repeat, the slow driver can be as big a menace as the speeding driver. It is this political and institutional paralysis and collective failure of the political imagination that has brought institutional and economic failure and which is breeding a right-wing populism harking back to a golden age that never was. Against right and left, Jonathan Sacks calls for a ‘capitalism with a human face.’ That is not a new call. It’s not a call to be dismissed. The ‘socially responsible market’ economy of Germany has a record of success. But it too is subject to the crises and constraints of the capital economy. For John Maynard Keynes, capitalism is ‘irreligious’ – the bottom line is the making of money and profits. ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the Prophets’, exclaimed Marx. If the process of private accumulation is frustrated rather than facilitated, there is crisis. Is the point that to treat ‘human resources’ humanely more profitable? What if it isn’t? What is the measure, human or monetary value? The apostle of the free market Adam Smith argued that slavery is a valid economic institution if it could be shown to be more profitable.

The argument for a capitalism with a human face amounts to an argument for setting the legitimate activities of the private economy within a social and moral infrastructure that serves to constrain self-seeking and hold society together. The problem, however, is that this was the argument of the likes of Smith, of Hegel, of the religious tradition – it has proven incapable of resisting the reduction of ties and loyalties to the nexus of callous cash payment. As conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter argued, modern capitalism is parasitic upon the moral and social capital of previous civilisation, dissipating it to buttress its money-making activities, but is incapable of replacing it. For Schumpeter, arguing in the 1940s, the moral implosion of the capital system will come before its economic implosion. These observations put a big question mark against assertions of a capitalism with a human face.

A further point to be made against Sacks’ rejection of left wing utopianism as a danger to freedom is that the processes and practices bringing about the new social order are already underway. Numerous forms of commoning exist in the world already, and these forms of self-organized commons are growing in number, scale and complexity all over the world. These forms are based upon active participation and are implementing new solidaristic forms of exchange. They are forms of self-mediation that meet the needs of people more directly and more effectively than either the state or markets. We are beyond the sterile debate between central plan and free market, and we should ensure that those still engaged in that debate are wasting their own time, not ours.

In fine, the conventional political sphere and existing ways of doing business – the ‘abstraction of the modern state’ (Marx), its bureaucracy and mass parties, ‘free’ markets dominated by corporate players (price makers rather than price takers), the financial sector and its abuses, the symbiotic relation between the state and capital as alienated social powers – constitute a social order that is no longer capable of meeting the social, economic and ecological challenges we face. Liberal/social democracy and its reformist approach no longer works because it is too wedded to the outmoded and dysfunctional ways of doing business and politics. The structural fault-lines are too great for institutional tinkering. The constraints are too great. Governments and political leaders revert to neoliberalism in practice not merely for reasons of personal gain, but on account of institutional and systemic necessity – within these social arrangements, it is the only game in town. And the game is failing the people. The age of reformism is over; it is time for reformation.

The split between the old ways of doing things and the new will grow ever greater as new productive forces continue to emerge to empower individuals and groups and facilitate their self-organisation outside of existing, failing, modes. The alliance of representative institutions of government and free markets is breaking down. Instead of government buttressing a failing economic system with taxpayers’ money, ‘light’ regulation and legal privileges, we should be looking to reclaim government as the agency of the common good facilitating and extending the commons on the social ground. Rather than capitalism with a human face, we should be acting and organising to ensure that economics performs as it should, as a system of satisfying real needs. That entails a critique of political economy, exposing the way that a capitalist economy is structurally predisposed to be socially exploitative in origin, ecologically destructive in impact and iniquitous in the distribution of gains and costs.

The claims that such a system can have a ‘human face’ can only rest on the factual observation that greater numbers of people the world over are enjoying standards of living far higher than previous generations and previous civilisations. The figures do show this. So why the need for an alternative? Because the system is failing in its own terms, running up monetary and ecological debts, because the inequality in life opportunities and money is breeding division and resentment, because the endless accumulation of material quantities does not suffice to feed the hunger for meaning, because of a pervasive social dis-ease and displacement, and because the new productive forces make better ways of doing politics and business available. The argument that the material end of growth justifies the means is an example of diabolic means-ends rationality that I have criticised elsewhere.

In considering the demand for capitalism with a human face, we would do well to bear in mind Marx’s demand for the triumph of ‘the rule of man’ over ‘the rule of property.’ (Marx to Ruge EW 1975:208).

At a certain point, reforms aiming at a ‘human’ capitalism, should they succeed in asserting the 'rule of man' over the ‘rule of property’ will come to block the mechanisms of valorisation, accumulation and reproduction. This is where we were in the 1970s and 1980s with theories of the ‘overloaded state’ and calls for a ‘straightjacketed democracy.’ Are we being asked to revisit these old debates and fight these old battles? The advocates of the free market won that political struggle. At stake, in their view, was the very free market capitalist economy upon which the money to pay for social reforms was created – kill the economy, kill the space for reformism. Marxists, too, are clear that these mechanisms cannot simply be humanised or democratised; they are systemic imperatives that are not subject to constitutional demands, social reforms and democratic persuasion – the process of accumulation must be facilitated. Humanisation and democratisation, therefore, can proceed only so far within the constraints imposed by the process of private accumulation. At the point at which democratic will and government intervention – whether we call it humanism or reformism, it’s the same ‘third way’ thinking that now stands exposed as impotent - interferes in and subverts the mechanisms of investment and accumulation, there will be a capitalist reaction, both systemic and political through capitalist agencies and organisations. The question of a reformation beyond reformism has, therefore, to be faced. I suspect that more than a few 'democratisers' and ‘humanisers’ will retreat as soon as the notion of a class struggle from below is placed on the agenda as the response to the class struggle that is continually waged from above. There will be arguments for unity and social peace. The response back can only be that there can be no social peace on the basis of social structures that generate and entrench social division.

The world cannot take much more of the ‘rule of property’. The question for the friends of freedom is this, once the institutions of the prevailing social order are shown to contradict the principles of freedom, which will you choose? That question can be avoided no longer. The defence of liberal principles is missing a major development here, the extension and entrenchment of the corporate social form and the gradual erasing of liberal society. In which case we can expect further assault on liberal democratic institutions and principles. But to develop appropriate means and mechanisms of collective control capable of turning the objective socialisation underway in democratic directions, it is going to take more than reassertions of liberalism. And if we continue to work within a cultural and socio-economic split, fighting against racism/sexism/homophobia/xenophobia on the one hand whilst abandoning the socio-economic terrain of class and exploitation on the other, then the fascists will drive a coach and horses through us a disorganised, impotent, whining liberal rabble of narcissists and egoists hooked on assertions of identity.

I made these arguments over twenty years ago, quoting the likes of historian Eric Hobsbawm and Todd Gitlin, who rightly pointed out that the principles of the Left in politics are universal; lose sight of that, switch from issues of economics, class, exploitation and distribution to an exclusive focus on identity politics, and there is no Left. We have lived through a generation of cultural advance and socio-economic defeat and retreat. We need to reunite the wings, and cease abandoning the class struggle to promises of economic growth. There is no future in being the cultural wing of the global capital system, any gains made can be withdrawn in socially and economically straitened circumstances; the victory of reactionary forces on the economic terrain will be followed by victory on the cultural terrain. Past warnings unheeded, we can only hope that the difficult times we are mired in will expose the structural fault-lines underlying it all, causing humanisers and democratisers to become commoners willing and able to undertake or get involved in the various projects and initiatives underway which, together, at local, city and regional level, point to a democratic recovery of the physical, electronic, ethical and political commons. The end will be an Ecopolis constituted by federal organs and relationships of social control. It won’t happen unless you build it, it will be easily dismissed as utopian and dangerous if it remains a mere idealistic projection in the hands of ideologues bent on political power. But it is crucial to the institutional and structural transformation required if we are ever to be able make good our claims for a humane and democratic and liberal society in which the freedom of each is coexistent with and conditional upon the freedom of all. We need to build constructive models and we need to participate in the transitions required for their realisation.

We should now see that the institutional world by which we seek to govern our lives is constrained by structural forces and system-wide tendencies that order and direct change much more than the promises and speeches of politicians, mere assertions of ideals and principles concerning justice, equality, freedom and democracy, and assorted wishful thinking. We know the principles we should be espousing off by heart by now, we have repeated them often enough. But when not backed by commensurate practices, it is a mere idolatry of words we pay lip service to, not noticing that they have parted company with the structural and social realities by which life is lived.

I don’t doubt that Trump et al poses a serious threat to ‘the liberal international order’, as is being alleged. I would challenge those who assert this by questioning in what way this constitutes a criticism of Trump. Many of those voting for him want this global free trade order challenged and changed. That order has not proved beneficial to each and all, and the failure of ‘the liberal establishment’ to address the grievances of people and consider their concerns legitimate has invited this backlash.

To repeat, the rejection of a global free trade neoliberalism for a national neoliberalism is to jump out of the frying pan into the fire. It offers no solution to the problems we face, and may well make them worse. But at least it does recognise that we do indeed face problems, and that globalization is a busted flush. The people who now turn and condemn the rise of a populist nationalism need to be challenged – where have you been when the voices of criticism and protest against globalization have been raised? The fact is that liberal/social democracy abandoned its working class constituency and exposed their communities to the forces of globalization, jettisoning a class politics centred on economics for an identity politics whose claims were all capable of being met within the capital system. These parties of the Left effectively became the cultural wing of globalising capitalism. They left behind their own people, abandoning a distinctive political position in favour of assertions of prosperity for all as a result of free trade.

We need to be careful. The ‘revolt of the alienated white working class’ does not a socialist revolution make. The fact that we are talking about older males in declining, deindustrialising areas goes some way towards explaining why they have been politically abandoned in favour of electoral appeals to other groups. But there are many victims of globalisation, not just the one group. There has been a failure to acknowledge this. Rather than favour some groups against others, there is a need to develop a politics that combines social justice on the economic terrain with a continuation of cultural struggle at the level of identity politics. It’s not an either/or, and the extent to which we practise a politics that keeps class and identity politics apart we divide within, fail and fall.

This ‘liberal establishment’ encompasses the parties aiming at government, but also elements in academia and the media. Trump has shown that it is possible to practise a politics that operates outside of the parameters of conventional discourse and punditry. He didn’t play by the rules, he didn’t learn and parrot the right lines, he didn’t respect the do’s and don’t’s of how to wing elections; he went against both the conservative and liberal establishments, his own party, the centres of economic power, against the intellectual establishment. All the things radicals have been told they can’t do, in case they rock the boat, threaten powerful people and deter the ‘floating voter’, Trump did. Politicians, journalists, economists, intellectuals, experts of every political stripe found their expectations and predictions confounded. Now, radicals should ask, why on earth didn’t we do that?! The pollsters, pundits and nth rate Machievallian ‘strategists’ calculating the odds in abstraction from real politics and people can now be told firmly to go away.

It was down to the radicals to strike the major blows against globalization, but their thunder has been stolen. The reason why is not difficult to find – the stranglehold of liberal reformists constantly downplaying popular concerns and depressing radical demands. We have been party to a politics of diminishing expectations. And we know that the liberal political establishment is implicated in this, promising less and less with each passing election – ‘we will only promise what we can deliver’ said Tony Blair – and failing to deliver even that.

But the obvious institutional failure is the expression of deeper structural transformations that have rendered the liberal/social democratic politics and discourse impotent at best, a rationalisation of corporate power and global finance at worst.

We need to distinguish between tactics and strategy in politics, and between accidental and structural changes. When asked what a prime minister most feared, Harold MacMillan replied ‘events, dear boy, events.’ Events are the stuff of politics, but they are not merely the discrete, incremental phenomena they appear to be, they are often the expression of deep, long-term causes. The political events we are seeing today, which do threaten the unravelling of the international liberal order, are not mere accidents, and are not the result of a right wing populist nationalism, but the expression of deeply rooted structural and social transformations proceeding within the global political economy. These global shifts have been playing out since the ending of the ‘long boom’ in the early seventies. The problems of that era have not gone away, they have gone global, and no amount of juggling money and statistics – and loading up deficits and debts – can conceal the fact. On the inside of the big bloated tent, political pundits and commentators, journalists, experts, party apparatchiks, tycoons and politicians themselves have kept on reinforcing their own prejudices with each other, rather than take a look outside at the deep and long-term structural and social forces at work. I am just surprised at the surprise when, time and again, the predictions, speculations and warnings coming from this direction prove to be false. Of course they do! They talk as if the future already exists! They thereby deny the key force of politics, the creative agency of people, projecting existing trends and tendencies into the future, extrapolating political actions from static and passive positions.

We have been living in an age of deep structural transformation, with the events of the political and institutional sphere sweeping politicians along in their trail. Politics has been trailing behind these transformations, trying to deal with the consequences of the ending of the long boom (from the Second World War to the Oil Shock of 1973). This age has been characterised by excess, the return of mass unemployment but also the expansion of consumption fuelled by a rise in real wages as well as the increase of personal debt. Rather than generate real value in the economy, there has been a boom in property, speculation and finance, the processing of wealth as opposed to its production. The result is stagnation, an inability to sustain the growth that a growth economy needs. The economy lacks drivers, lacks value, has intensified inequality, cannot distribute incomes and life chances equitably, and is undermining the building blocks of a viable society.

By the 2000’s, Britain had a chancellor, who in time would become prime minister, Gordon Brown, who boasted of the ‘light touch’ of financial regulation and the ending of boom and bust economics. The British economy was embedded in a global chain of irresponsible financialisation and speculative profiteering. The Day of Reckoning cam in 2007-09, with the deepest economic crisis for eighty years, a bust of epic scale. Only the actions of government prevented full scale collapse. But we remain in the slow-1929, remain in debt, remain low on real value – the economy is running on empty.

It takes guts to stare realities in the face. It is considered electoral suicide to expose the voting public to the deep structural movements underway in order to demand radical social transformation. Politicians offer the promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment’ because that’s what an electorate dependent on these things wants to hear. The result is that liberal/social democracy continues offer policies and narratives that correspond to its own institutional rationale as moderate and incremental reform paid for by economic growth, but which are utterly detached from deep, long-term structural realities. As for the media, what do they know? Just self-serving familiar boloney that confirms rather than challenges a political vocabulary, and a gorging on punditry and predictions that feeds a demand for politics as entertainment, but sheds no light on issues in terms of rational investigation and deliberation. The result is a political world utterly detached from realities. A world of vacuous slogans and empty promises. A world of rising inequality, stagnant real wages, a fall in the share going to labour in relation to capital, a fall in the creation of new jobs, falling public and private investment, increasing public and private debt. If I had to reduce economic truth to one line it would be this: a society that saves and invests prospers, a society that doesn’t falls. Growth is sluggish, global trade is contracting, the victims of free trade are increasing, voices of protest are increasing, more and more. The big question for me is why more and more are speaking the language of isolationism and protectionism instead of socialism. Where did the Left go? Well, we know that part of it has been in on globalization, backing free trade against calls for management and regulation.

And still, the free trade deals are lined up – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the EU (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between the US and eleven other Asia-Pacific countries, but significantly not China. As Britain pulls out of the EU and extols the virtues of free trade, the trade deals being developed are about the forming of trade blocs, the TTP being explicitly concerned with Chinese competition. Trump’s promise to protect US industry and employment from Chinese competition is much more appealing to voters than the nostrums of free trade and promises of all good things to come in the long run. The liberal establishment? They’re with Wall Street and the City, of course. Liberal/social democracy is good for the comfortable middle class, it is easier to indulge the cultural politics of identity rather than engage in socio-economic issues concerning exploitation, poverty and the distribution of resources. And here we run into the social limits of an identity politics that makes no sense to the poor, the marginalised, the unemployment, those on zero hours contracts. The liberal elites long abandoned the victims of globalization, they considered it an unappealing electoral image, and instead chose to focus on the ‘aspiring classes’ and cultural politics, those on the inside doing well or with prospects of doing well. Such a politics is utterly detached from the structural transformations underway. On the economic terrain, it exchanges a concern with class, exploitation and redistribution for assertions of a growth and prosperity to come. Check the figures and ignore the laments of the liberals – women voted for women, black and Hispanic women voted for Trump.

Write this message high and in capital letters – CLASS MATTERS! Workers of all lands unite, and ditch the liberals who continually deliver you over to your exploiters, manacle you with your own consent, confine you within the very exploitative class system that it is in your interests to resist and overthrow.

I am not speaking with hindsight here. Over twenty years ago I made precisely this claim that class and class analysis is much more important to the politics of social transformation than an identity politics which, for all of its worthiness, leaves existing social relations unchallenged and unchanged. If I may quote myself from Industry and Europe vol 3 Transnational Monopoly Capitalism (https://www.academia.edu/657291/INDUSTRY_AND_EUROPE_Pt_3_Transnational_Monopoly_Capitalism 1995).

‘In The Twilight of Common Dreams, Todd Gitlin asks: ‘What is a Left if it is not, plausibly at least, the voice of the whole people? .. If there is no people, but only peoples, there is no Left’ (Gitlin 1995:165). Whereas for the Left freedom is a collective project that embraces all people according to a universal identity, identity politics pertains more to different ‘peoples’, seeking emancipation with respect to particular issues of race, ethnicity, sex and gender. There is no necessary reason why emancipation in these terms should be incompatible with the aims of transnational capital. Quite the contrary, the increasing participation of women into the work force and the increasing use of migrant labour – largely unorganised, often low paid and casual, usually lacking in social and environmental protection – indicate the extent to which identity politics is quite compatible with transnational capital and may even complement it.

In this respect, identity politics on the political Left is the counterpart of economic neo-liberalism on the political Right. The old collective goods and solidarities of traditional conservatism – church and state, family and community, national interest – and socialism – working class struggle, trade unions and cooperatives, class interest – are giving way to a libertarianism of a new right and a libertarianism of a new left, both of which are congruent with the cultural conditions and requirements of a globally mobile capital. The Left in politics is defined above all by the commitment to social justice and equality as universal values. The Left is universalist or it is not at all. The Left cannot base itself on identity politics since its values and its goals are universal, addressing all on account of their common humanity rather than some sections of the people on account of being something particular. It would appear that the contemporary reconstitution of the political Left around identity politics is part of a process by which transnationalism creates a politics and a culture in its own image, shifting perspectives away from struggles concerning economic issues, class and exploitation, towards cultural issues of identity and lifestyle, away from production and work towards consumption and leisure.

The advantage of such a politics to transnational capital is obvious, forming a parallel in the political sphere to the pliable, unorganised and controllable workers in the sphere of production. It is a form of political disarmament which serves to protect transnational capital from political controversy, challenge and change as it dismantles political and social codes, restrictions and protections of all kinds all over the world.’

And from Industry and Europe vol 4 The Economics of Peace, Freedom and Justice I wrote this:

‘There is an old syndicalist poem called ‘Know your enemy’ which makes the point well:

“He does not care what colour you are, provided you work for him;

he does not care how much you earn, provided you earn more for him;

he does not care who lives in the room at the top, provided he owns the building;

he sings the praises of humanity, but knows machines cost more than men;

bargain with him he laughs and beats you at it; challenge him and he kills;

sooner than lose the things he owns, he will destroy the world.”

(Front cover Workers’ Control Ken Coates and Tony Topham ed 1970 Panther)

The key line is ‘he does not care what colour you are….’ Or what sex, religion, age and so on. Identity politics and rights discourses pursue particular emancipations within a greater oppression, but they do not form the universal challenge to that greater oppression. The effect of rights discourse and identity politics in place of the old collective struggle organised around class is the redefinition of left of centre politics as culture and lifestyle, implying an assertion of rights and identities within rather than against existing the existing structures and relations of class power. It makes the world safe for transnational capital.

The principles, struggles and slogans of the Left are universal in that they apply to all human beings equally, not to this group or that group in particular. Without this universal ethic there is no Left and no opposition to existing relations of power. With globalisation, capital has become universal; at the same time, the Left has fragmented into a particularism that can be pursued within the system, but not in opposition against it.

Increasingly, politics is reduced to individuals and identities, with problems being defined in individual terms (corporations are legally defined as individuals) with solutions to problems being pursued through the law courts. Given the expense of the law, such legalistic politics is strongly biased in favour of those with money.’ (https://www.academia.edu/657292/INDUSTRY_AND_EUROPE_Pt_4_The_Economics_of_Peace_Freedom_and_Justice).

If I may offer a few words of well-deserved praise for my good self – that analysis is spot on. At a time of class exploitation, economic insecurity, unemployment, rising inequality and attacks on working class organisation, assertions of rights coming from within the realm of identity politics ring hollow. What ever happened to workers’ rights? Whatever happened to a working class that was united and capable of engaging in the self-activity and self-organisation in advancing their class interest? The passive politics of an electoral politics that splits people up as discrete individual voters who alienate their political power to a minority of actors has resulted in a dissipation of political and organisational capacity. The current crisis is what happens when we transfer individual and collective responsibility for realising ideals, values and principles over to other people or agencies or forces – political leaders, technology, ‘economic growth’ – and thereby lose the ability to associate with like-minded others, stand together through fair and foul weather and do it ourselves. There are many people demanding an authentic public community, but too many, in an age of atomistic self-seeking and self-assertion, have lost the ability to build and sustain the forms of the common life which are key to such a community. Here is the real damage inflicted by the relocation of socialism from the social to the abstracted political realm, away from forms of working class self-activity to choosing between electoral packages to be delivered by politicians through government. This switch was based on the optimistic view that the waste and instability of the capital system could be managed and the economy directed from above to ensure an economic growth that benefitted all. We remain within that mindset, with promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment’ being sufficient to win popular support for a political platform. The actions of those demanding climate action are constantly thwarted by this assertion of jobs and income as a short-term priority that takes precedence over the long-term health of the planet. The ambitions of the working class have been so diminished that they no longer fight the conditions of their wage slavery, they take the promise of a job to be a political ideal, the threat to that job as cause for revolt. Dependency, passivity, electoral politics as a learned incapacity in which the responsibility for acting is transferred elsewhere – politicians and their promises, economic growth. If you want a genuine public community, you will have to body-build your political and moral capacities. If not … don’t expect Harold Wilson and economic growth to deliver it. People prefer the illusion to the reality, because the illusion gives them something that reality often denies. It’s easier to engage in the politics of illusion than a politics in tune with structural realities. That’s how we have ended up here.

‘Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.'

—Hannah Arendt.

We’ve had the illusions, the false promises, the electorate consumed them, and are now vomiting it all up. The tragedy of left politics has been that it relocated its sphere of activity from the social realm to the abstracted political and institutional realm, replaced working self-organisation with election campaigns and government policies, abandoned Marx's principle of working class emancipation in favour of party-state action through professional politicians and thereby replaced the practical and theoretical critique of the capital system, grounded in the material organisation and socialisation of the working class with the alienated forms of nationalisation and, after that, with a flat identification of progress with economic growth – a white flag of political surrender. The result is a travesty of Marx and socialism, with social powers continuing to confront individuals in alienated forms. The whole process has been a deradicalisation that has rendered people passive and incapable of joining together to build the alternate social order. Instead, people demand the alternative, they ask others to do it, they put slogans on their banners and demand that their political opponents do the job for them. It’s the age of narcissism and entitlement, of people who assert rights but lack the political, moral and collective nerve to back them with actions. Instead, they rely on the force of government and law. It’s the age of liberties. An age in which political muscle has turned to flab. It’s the age in which morality has been reduced to value judgements, opinions, of no greater significance than the subjective preferences registered on the economic market. An age of self-assertion, an age in which everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and believe it to be true because it is their opinion. An age in which the views of others can be dismissed with the words ‘well that’s just your opinion.’ An age in which there is neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, truth nor falsehood, just irreducible subjective preferences lacking in objective criteria by which to evaluate them. Think that’s moralising? Argue climate change and climate science with a denier and see opinion and political ideology trump knowledge and reason. But it goes much wider than that. Asserting entitlement to an opinion is a way of asserting one’s view as the truth, a truth that is not up for argument or negotiation. People want a genuine public community, but don’t want the common strictures and moral codes that constrain individuals and make them exchange individual assertion for citizen interaction, discourse and deliberation. Where does that come from? Some blame the social media, but it predates that, as Weber’s criticisms of a ‘convulsive self-importance’ at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism makes clear. It’s endemic to modern society. And now that self-importance and self-assertion, that sense of entitlement to one’s truth, is spilling over into politics, fuelled by real social divisions, to turn into a politics of anger, violent demands to the effect that we want what we want, we are entitled to it, and someone should do it for us. If someone should do something, you are that someone! If there is something to be done, join with others, win support and do it! A person’s opinions aren’t true and right because they are the opinions of that person – they need to be argued rather than asserted in order to discern their truthfulness and rightness. The loss of the overarching frame offered by an objective reality and morality deprives us of the critical standard required in order to evaluate views expressed. I argue for a public community constituted by spaces of citizen interaction and discourse. But if individuals assert rather than argue, then no such community is possible. There can be no discursive space in politics when individuals will not and cannot discourse. In fine, we are now involved in the rebuilding of the public realm, dealing with the consequences of an age of subjective self-assertion and licence.

I’ll end by noting the irony of the present situation. Trump, UKIP, Le Pen and the NF etc are considered ‘dumb’, stupid, of appeal only to the bigoted, the racist, the uneducated. And yet they are so stupid as to look at the realities of failing institutions and economies in the face and call time on the grand large scale projects of the EU and global trade, rejecting their promises as illusions and lies. I say their answers are wrong, but their questions are right. And they are questions the political and intellectual establishment, elites and experts have chosen not to ask. These forces express the transformations underway in the global political economy and have responded to the reactions against aspects of these transformations in a way that the liberal ‘third way’ Left has not. Indeed, that liberal left has remained wedded to the very globalization that has caused social dislocation, has steadfastly chosen to ignore very vocal protests from radicals over the years, and has crashed on shoving the global agenda down the throats of people. The Seattle protestors of 1999 were right in their arguments. They were not anti-globalization, they were arguing against the globalization of economic relations whose principal agents were the transnationals, the banks and global finance. They argued for a global civil society. That could have formed the progressive agenda for the past two decades. (The Global Civil Society Movement http://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/single-post/2009/12/18/The-Global-Civil-Society-Movement). The Occupy Movement also raised the right questions. And the liberal establishment carried on. And now we have the dismissal of populism. It’s all of a piece with a long line of talking over the voice of the ordinary folk. But now the irony, the clever folk have been turned over by the dumb and the uneducated – because there are still people out there who can meet the suffering working class face to face, and will do so if you don’t. ‘Populists’ have been giving voice to the victims of globalization in the culpable absence of the conventional Left.

And what of that ‘Left’? Back in the 1950s they made the ideological claim that capitalism no longer existed, instead there is a ‘mixed economy’ in which the private economy is regulated by the public realm in the interests of the general good. I call this ideological in Marx’s critical sense – ideology not as a system of beliefs but as rationalisations which serve to obscure and mystify reality, so concealing power relations as to preserve them from political controversy. As the delusions of this position became clear with the ending of the long boom in the early seventies, this view, and the Keynesian demand management that went with, it was abandoned, first of all by a deliberate attempt to constrain the working class and its organisations within the ‘social contract’ policies of a state doing the bidding of capital – what workers correctly called the ‘social con-trick’ – and then, with the failure of that, with a full frontal embrace of the economics of neo-liberal globalisation. Where critical analysis and a grasp of structural realities was required, the ‘third way’ left aiming at government within the capital system has offered nothing but a succession of protective fictions. They have tarnished the name of socialism in the process, identifying it with top-down, statist programmes rather than any genuine socialisation and democratisation. That ‘third way’ Left now finds itself mired in yet another crisis. I won’t write it off. This is not the first time it has collapsed in ignominy, it clearly speaks to a constituency out there, a constituency that too is leery of radical transformation. And there are substantial numbers ready to vote for it. This Left has come back from worse than this, from the complete collapse of the depression of 1929-1931 and the rise of fascism. But this Left and its claims of being able to manage capitalism for the general good has, by now, lost any credibility. Resurrect it, bring it back, put it in office – what will it do differently this time compared to all the other times? But the space for social democratic/liberal incremental is diminishing all the time given the long term structural transformations in the capital system that are underway. And this reformist Left will never intervene to lead the social transformation required to resolve the contradictory dynamics of the capitalist order. It’s a bankrupt politics expressing the bankrupt capital economy. Not just the bankruptcy of neoliberal economics. The problem is not one of economic theory. This crisis of capitalism is of long term structural significance and predates neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was an attempt to resolve the crisis in favour of capital as against labour. In succeeding in winning the class struggle on the political terrain, neoliberalism has merely increased and intensified social divisions, and these divisions are now being expressed politically – people are increasingly refusing to accept the results of elections, they see that there is too much at stake, there is a loss of commonality making it possible for unity and reconciliation through politics, and there is also the narcissism and entitlement of the age. It is not a good combination of elements. What the future holds depends, of course. Are we going to put our banners down and stop expending our energies marching up and down demanding that others do our bidding? Will we go home and body build our political and organisational capacities? Will the racist and xenophobic Right triumph if we don’t? Of course they will. Because these problems are not going to go away. Happy days will not be here again, they were never here in the first place. The institutionalised liberal Left seem congenitally incapable of dealing with these problems. Indeed, their ideological role seems to be to deny them and to keep subjecting radical voices to defeat and marginalisation.

We should know that we live in strange days indeed when the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes an article that receives a heading like this: 'We are witnessing the birth of something horrible. Only radical change can save our civilisation.'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/11/we-are-witnessing-the-birth-of-something-horrible-only-radical-c/

What, I would like to know, is this ‘something horrible’ and what kind of ‘radical change’ is required in order to check it and bring about a decent social order? I agree with plenty that Sacks writes in this article. He concludes:

‘A politics of hope is within our reach. But to create it we will have to find ways of strengthening families and communities, building a culture of collective responsibility and insisting on an economics of the common good. This is no longer a matter of party politics. It is about the very viability of the freedom for which the West fought for so long and hard. We need to construct a compelling narrative of hope that speaks to all of us, not some of us, and the time to begin is now.’

(http://www.rabbisacks.org/beyond-politics-anger-daily-telegraph/).

I admire and respect Jonathan Sacks. But when he rejects both Right and Left equally as dangers to freedom, the former pursuing a golden age that never was, the latter pursuing a utopia that never will be, I have to object – it depends. Which Left and what utopia? Examples of commoning and cooperation are already underway. These are the instances of self-socialisation from below by which we will build the new social order. This is quite distinct from imposing a priori political rationality upon reality via the state, which I agree is utopian, totalitarian and a danger to freedom. But Sacks himself is open to the charge of utopianism when, for all of his great insight and wisdom discussing the ‘politics of anger’ (and I agree with plenty of what he says concerning building up our social ecology), he argues for a ‘capitalism with a human face.’ It is the familiar language of the ‘third way’ Left, the idea that the capital system can be institutionally and, in Sacks’ case, morally constrained to the good. Tell me how those constraints are capable of making democratic inroads into the power of capital, blocking mechanisms of accumulation, without provoking a reaction leading to demands for unfettering and deregulation. The problem with such a politics is that when the inevitable crisis of capitalism comes, it is the brakes that get the blame for the car crash, not the intrinsic features of the car and choices of the driver. Jonathan Sacks wrote a fine book called The Politics of Hope. I agree with a lot of what he says there. But we have to wary of embracing the politics of misplaced hopes. We all want peace, unity and a genuine political community, but these things cannot be built on facts of social division, inequality and injustice.

I shall end with a quote from Ralph Miliband’s book from 1989, Divided Societies, where Miliband argues for the dissolution of the private and gigantic concentrations of economic power which characterise modern capitalism, the drastic diminution of the massive inequalities of contemporary society, the disappearance of the private ownership of large concentrations of capital and property, and the partnership between public and popular power.

‘It is extremely improbable that the issues discussed in this chapter will soon be put to the test: the conditions do not at present exist – and will not exist for some time to come in any advanced capitalist country – for the coming to power of the kind of government that would seek to bring about a radical transformation of the existing social order. But .. it is quite realistic to think that these conditions will come into being in the next ten, twenty or thirty years – a long time in the life of an individual, but a mere moment in historical time. In this perspective, class struggle for the creation of democratic, egalitarian, co-operative and classless societies, far from coming to an end, has barely begun.’

(Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies, 1989 pp 234/5).

If the system is failing, there will be a substantial constituency in favour of its reform or, if the system is incapable of reform, for its abolition. And people will support those who promise radical change. They will not be enthused by those who promise continuity. A simple enough political truth, that the left parties of reform don't, won't and - raising profound institutional questions - can't get.

Robert Reich: It’s Time to Dismantle the Democratic Party and Start Anew

Trump’s victory only confirms that the Democratic Party as it stands is a corporate fundraising machine that doesn’t speak to the needs of working people. We need to build a party that actually represents the working class.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19625/robert-reich-donald-trump-democratic-party-president

Some quotes from this article to think about:

'As a first step, I believe it necessary for the members and leadership of the Democratic National Committee to step down and be replaced by people who are determined to create a party that represents America – including all those who feel powerless and disenfranchised, and who have been left out of our politics and left behind in our economy.

The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it. We need a people’s party – a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican party, which is about to take over all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a New Democratic Party that will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.

What happened in America Tuesday should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.'

'Hillary Clinton’s defeat is all the more remarkable in that her campaign vastly outspent the Trump campaign on television and radio advertisements, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Moreover, her campaign had the support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic party but also many leading Republicans, including most of the politically active denizens of Wall Street and the top executives of America’s largest corporations, and even former Republican president George HW Bush.'

'Trump, by contrast, was shunned by the power structure.'

'Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.

The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.'

'Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.'

'They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12%today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.'

'The power structure understandably fears that Trump’s isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn’t care less about growth because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.

The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.'