Following the deep-going crises of the seventies, the balance of the compromise was shifted such that organised labour was weakened, welfare was re-tooled as ‘workfare’ – a new disciplinary system to keep the unemployed on their toes – and the state took a growing interest in enhancing private sector profitability by reducing wage costs and removing regulations that businesses found obstructive, and opening up the public sector to commodification. These changes were legitimised by neoliberal ideology, and to some extent directed by those educated in it. Neoliberalism, broadly speaking, initially emerged as a break with classical liberal thought. Its pioneers were those like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek who, in the early twentieth century, regarded with horror the effects of mass democracy on the liberal order of private property. Regarding the emerging welfare state as a threat to property-based liberty, they initially looked to authoritarian Rightists to protect property, and then sought to reinvent the liberal state to protect it from democracy. According to their story, the essence of liberty was the ability to make choices with one’s resources in a free market. Meanwhile, the essence of economic efficiency was unimpeded, quasi-Darwinian competition between rival producers, in which good ideas and practices would ineluctably out-compete the bad. Get the market out of the way and a pacific ‘spontaneous order’ would emerge which was far better for human welfare than government programmes. This, of course, was the soft sell. The slightly harder sell was General Pinochet. That is to say, this ‘spontaneous order’ had to be underwritten by a violently interventionist state, one whose repressive capacities were enlarged even as the democratic and welfare functions atrophied. Moreover, far from empowering ‘markets’, whatever this might mean, they tended to empower the largest, most economically powerful financial and industrial corporations on whose cooperation national governments depended.25
Perhaps one of the most sophisticated means of constraining democracy was the series of recommendations endorsed by the ‘public choice’ school developed by James Buchanan and William Niskanen.26 Arguing that state bureaucracies were necessarily inefficient and self-serving, and that any ‘public service’ ethic was hypocrisy writ large, they favoured the subordination of most public functions to market-like mechanisms. Services should be privatised or, if not actually run by corporations, should emulate corporations where possible. Markets should be introduced between providers, and competitive mechanisms set in place. Services should be removed from direct political control where necessary: aside from full privatisation, the proliferation of quangos in British political life was one of the early alternatives to democratic control. This, of course, was anything but efficient. The companies brought in to run services inflated costs drastically. Internal markets notoriously inflated overhead costs in the NHS to scandalous levels.27 But what it did achieve was a crony relationship between state actors and privileged businesses, involving the state more deeply in making life easier for business, while reducing its democratic capacities.
This internal reorganisation of the state was soon accompanied by its integration into a network of international institutions – the World Trade Organization, the European Union, and soon the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – which collectively constrain governments in an ‘iron cage’ of regulations demanding fiscal austerity, competition and privatisation in public services, and the rolling back of laws deemed uncompetitive. The scope for democratic participation grows narrower by the day. The net result is precisely what Crouch refers to as ‘post-democracy’:
While elections still exist … public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams. The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them. Behind this spectacle of the electoral game politics is really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites which overwhelmingly represent business interests.28
In this view, it is not apathy that characterises a growing chunk of the electorate so much as their exclusion from effective political power. And matters are likely to get worse. One reason for this is that, since the credit crunch, the owners of capital are hoarding money rather than investing it.29 This phenomenon is by no means restricted to Britain, yet in the UK alone, hundreds of billions of pounds are set aside rather than put to work to create jobs or growth. Profit rates being too low in the private sector, firms instead look to government to improve investment conditions by reducing the cost of labour and by creating new opportunities for them in the public sector: this is a far more important part of what the government calls ‘austerity’ than its spending cuts.30 This exacerbates the peculiar and particularly corrupt form of relationship between the state and privileged sectors of business that is emblematic of the neoliberal era. But it also leaves Britain’s economy weak, sluggish and ongoingly susceptible to crisis, and forces the state to be on hand, ever ready to lend new support and to extract more from a weary public. As the state becomes less and less democratic, and more geared toward crisis-management, the alienation and volatility of the electorate is likely to increase.
The other aspect of the popular withdrawal from parliamentary democracy that this brought about has been the withdrawal of governing elites ‘into the institutions of the state’. As parties have lost their social roots, they have become more oriented toward ‘office-seeking’ in a way that is increasingly detached from their electoral success.31 The extreme case of this is the technocratic coalition government wherein parties of whatever hue and social basis find themselves seeking to win a share of governing power in order to lead from the centre. Party leaderships are increasingly inclined to conceive of their power in terms of influence within the existing state apparatuses and non-elected institutions, assets which they can build up even as they lose electoral support.
A particularly crass example of this could be found in the run up to the 2015 general election, in which Nick Clegg (having won influence by securing the support of disaffected Labour voters anxious about the extent of planned austerity measures and increased tuition fees – subsequently to squander this support once in coalition) warned that a government without the Liberal Democrats would lack legitimacy.32 Of course this proved to be untrue, but it suggested that Clegg’s strategy for ongoing influence was not to win as many votes as possible – even then, the looming Liberal Democide was apparent to all – but to situate his party as parliamentary king-makers in exchange for some policy incentives and influence on select committees. But coalition governments of the centre are merely an extreme and unusually express example of what is generally taking place in a more granular, gradual and tacit way, visible in the growing profile of political professionals, special advisors, pollsters and focus groups whose existence increasingly appears to be about representing the government to the electorate, rather than the reverse. This partially explains why, given the choice between breaching an established governing consensus and cleaving to it while losing electoral support, party leaderships tend to choose the latter.
It is not that politicians are completely oblivious to their growing detachment and insulation from the public. Following the 2015 general election, Hansard described a ‘deeply disillusioned citizenry that will be hard to motivate’ to vote.33 Later the same year, the House of Commons Liaison Committee began a series of hearings intended to address the decline of parliamentary institutions in British society.34
Its first report notes that, already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the professionalisation of party machines, the strengthening grip of the executive of the state and the decline of parliament were already grounds for concern regarding the status of democracy in Britain. In its potted history, it also goes on to acknowledge the emergence of a stream of disengaged, ‘antipolitical’ sentiment rising in the Britain of the sixties, and the efforts made by some parliamentarians to reform
an increasingly out-of-touch Westminster. Strange to relate, the closer its historical sketch gets to the present day, the wider the gap appears between the problem and the proposed solutions, which involved improving the functioning and powers of select committees. The political establishment knows that it is losing touch – it just doesn’t have the smallest clue what to do about it.
‘I read some Marx and I liked it’: The Young Radicals Looking for a Political Home
It has been customary for some commentators, particularly those aligned to Labour, to bemoan the non-voting young as either huffy Kevin-the-Teenagers or Lauren Coopers, or as excessively discriminating to the point of self-indulgent. Polly Toynbee hits this particular sweet spot of commentariat arrogance with a regularity that can’t be accidental. Speaking of those who refuse to vote in defence of political principle – the majority of non-voters – she scolds,
Their vote is far too precious to bestow on any of the parties on offer. No one is good enough for them, as if they expect a personal bespoke party, regardless of the necessary compromises in assembling a majority, blind to how parties work as portmanteaus of ideals and interests willing to travel together. Did those over-fastidious ones ever roll up their sleeves in the past five years to start a new party or movement, or shift an existing one?
Yet in the same breath, Toynbee complains about those who have rolled up their sleeves for anything other than the palest pink social democracy, above all those inclined to ‘vote Green’. ‘A vote’, she stiffly rebukes, ‘is not a personal accessory to show the world who you are.’ Naturally, these very same commentators are those who have been most likely to complain about the mobilisation of the young behind Corbyn for ‘ignoring the electorate’.35
Another way of looking at it is to suppose that those disproportionately young people who mobilised to support Corbyn have a longer perspective than the next election. That the ways in which they are, in fact, rolling up their sleeves to shift an existing party is a recognition that political change takes place on registers other than the parliamentary. That by trying to change Labour, they have reference to something more than the few hundred thousand voters in swing constituencies who typically decide election outcomes. What is at stake here is a generational change that, though it has been seen in other countries first, is now intersecting with Britain’s democratic decline to produce this challenge to the status quo.
From the first ruptures of the anti-capitalist movement to Occupy; from Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela to Spain, Portugal and Greece; Leftist success has been propelled in large part by new movements of the young. Even in the United States, hardly a typical case in other respects, Bernie Sanders’s support is overwhelmingly concentrated among the under thirties.36 Much is written, not wholly incorrectly, of how these activists are shaped by ‘post-materialist’ values – support for peace and gay rights, for example. But far more fundamentally, this generation is the one to suffer the most from the consolidation of neoliberalism, as they are paying more for access to higher education, have far less access to diminished public services and welfare, and suffer far higher rates of unemployment. Their housing situation is, particularly in large urban areas, abysmal, and they are far less likely to have a chance of affordable rent, let alone home ownership. They face a more financially uncertain future and later retirement than previous generations, as more of their old age income will be dependent on financial products. And they have inherited a political system that is less responsive and more insulated from public influence than at any point since the universal franchise was first achieved. But if all that explains their militancy, it does not explain why it should now take the form of a highly improbable mass entry into Labour. What else could these activists be doing if they were not trying to pull Labour to the left?
One of the major casualties of neoliberalism as it has been rolled out across Europe has been the classical social democratic party. Almost uniformly, albeit at different paces and to differing degrees, they found themselves overwhelmed by the transformations in the global economy and the resistance of business to their attempts to keep the old status quo going. As the priorities of national states switched from full employment, as a condition for the old class compromise, to counter-inflation and balanced budgets, as a condition for businesses to keep investing, social democracy abandoned the policy instruments that had made it distinctive. Only in Sweden and Austria was there a brief period in which counter-inflation existed successfully alongside extensive public sector investment and an institutional commitment to full employment, but this did not survive the turn of the nineties. In Britain, New Labour had consecrated neoliberal orthodoxy before its election in 1997, such that nothing else was expected. In France, a ‘plural-Left’ government led by the Socialist Party was elected just as the European Stability and Growth Pact was passed, committing all signatories to fiscal discipline. Although it was committed to a modest Keynesian programme, such as the thirty-five-hour week, it did not have to be coerced into respecting budgetary orthodoxy, keeping public investment under control and restraining wage demands. And in Germany, the Social Democratic Party was elected in 1998 with the Greens as coalition partners and with some idea of an interventionist state, but was already committed to fiscal orthodoxy and deep welfare cuts inspired by Clinton’s move to ‘end the welfare state as we know it’.37
In short, social democracy has lost its purpose in line with the loss of agency of parliamentary democracy to represent the electorate. In place of social democracy, a strange new hybrid form has emerged, sometimes called ‘socialliberalism’. Although still functionally social democratic in the relationship to organised labour and the working-class electoral base, the leadership of such parties is undeniably neoliberal, and the direction of policy is aimed at gradually converting the base to a neoliberal common sense. This has proved costly in electoral terms, as this new breed of social-liberal parties have struggled to adequately distinguish themselves from their centre-Right rivals. One result of this is that since 1989, a series of radical Left parties have emerged across Europe, to challenge the rightward shift of social democracy.38 Pinning their hopes on a ‘vacuum thesis’, according to which the evacuation of a traditional social-democratic political space should leave space for a new Left, parties including the Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, the Front de gauche in France, and Die Linke in Germany, were launched to occupy the vacant space. Emphasising a modern combination of left-wing themes, from class politics to ‘post-materialist’ and left-libertarian concerns, they have fused old elements with the new: the remnants of traditional Communist Parties fused with defecting left-wing components of social democracy, a range of revolutionary fragments and activists schooled in the social movements and public assemblies.
Socially, these parties are far less supported by industrial workers than their equivalent older formations, the communist parties, and far more by the lower end of the salariat. Their support base also tends to be far more concentrated among those under thirty-five years old. These parties have thrived above all when they have remained aloof from coalitions with centre-Left parties and maintained a policy of frontal criticism on markets, privatisation, redistribution and Europe, but their electoral success has been far in excess of their real social depth. These parties, it must be frankly admitted, have struggled to turn their electoral profile into real power. They have only in two cases, Spain and Greece, succeeded in fundamentally altering the dynamics of party competition. And in no case have they changed the neoliberal constitution of state power. Nevertheless, in terms of gaining some form of representation for a left-wing constituency that had been neglected, they have enjoyed some success.
So why did Britain not see an equivalent party form? It was not for want of trying: the ultimately abortive experiments in launching such ventures in the UK range from the Socialist Alliance, to Respect, to Left Unity. Only in the case of Respect were electorally significant results obtained, and even these were short-lived. These organisations pr
oved to be far too narrow, based on ramshackle coalitions of the fragments of the far Left and the odd Labour refugee, to make a sustained bid for a national political presence. They gained minimal union backing and, in contrast to continental rivals, were not nourished by the addition of major splits from social democracy. Essentially, what prevented them from being more than protest parties was the demoralisation and defeat of the Labour Left.
The defeats that were inflicted on the British Left in the 1980s were, cumulatively, far more traumatic and disabling than anything comparable visited on their continental allies. From the miners to municipal socialism, every political and cultural organisation of the Left and the labour movement had defeats handed to them both by the Thatcher government and by a Labour leadership determined to free itself to adapt to the new order. By the time Blair had taken control of Labour, their expectations were set to somewhere below zero. The broad lines of policy which they were compelled to accept were such that, however disappointed people may have been, there was no great galvanising shock when a New Labour government began to implement policies previously associated with its electoral opponents, such as Private Finance Initiatives and market-based public sector reform. Only the prime minister’s strange alliance with a right-wing US president in the prosecution of adventurist war produced a potentially life-threatening crisis for the Labour leadership, and even then only a single MP decamped – George Galloway, who was expelled rather than walking out of his own accord, much less leading any kind of split. Rather than split like other social-democratic parties, Labour simply haemhorraged members as well as voters.
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