Two pieces here by Tim Pendry. The major piece is followed by an addendum, which began as the text of a letter from Pendry to Dr Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance in response to an article of Gabb’s. Pendry copied me his letter and I saw that it would go nicely with the longer piece about the early days of Demos. My thanks to Sean Gabb for permission to reproduce it here. – RR
The article on Demos by William Clark in Lobster 45 was most interesting since I was in on the creation of the organisation and I can add a few notes. Geoff Mulgan recognised my role in a letter which said: ‘You have been instrumental in shaping the Demos concept and marketing it to the private sector. No-one else has played such a significant role in that respect’ (May 5th, 1993). It seems reasonable, ten years on, to add a footnote for the historians and, for others, a bit of analysis.
The story is that Simon Haskel (later Lord Haskel), then Chair of the Labour Finance & Industry Group (LFIG), asked me to help out Geoff Mulgan. I had been active in the LFIG aspects of the media communications programme which had been designed to show that Kinnock’s Labour Party had at least some business support (this was before the ‘prawn cocktail circuit’). This programme had been judged a limited success no thanks to the rather naive approach to business of the Leader’s immediate circle.
Geoff Mulgan was then (1992) a research assistant to Gordon Brown and LFIG was close to the John Smith/Gordon Brown Scots network, though Blair was very much in the frame even at that time as a rising moderniser allied to the same power base. Mulgan and Martin Jacques, the almost iconic editor of the Marxist journal Marxism Today, had been trying to get Demos off the ground for some time but it had been getting nowhere. Could I advise? I agreed to help and my analysis was that they were trying to raise lots of relatively small sums of money at great effort from traditional Labour networks which had no money.
You have to cast your mind back to a time when Thatcherism was culturally triumphant. The wealthy middle classes, let alone the rich, were little interested in the ‘men in brown suits’ who appeared thoroughly unelectable and those that were wealthy were only going to ‘invest’ in sure winners. I knew of only three significant sources of funds at that time from traditional networks (though there may have been others) and all were spoken for:
- the trades unions political funds which were keeping a mismanaged party afloat;
- the ‘blind trusts’ of the LFIG and related circles (later superseded by the Levy fund-raising machine) which were limited and directed at the senior political members of the New Labour Right;
- and the funds which were being used to build the ‘new unionism’ and similar operations out of 6 Cynthia Street. 6 Cynthia Street was the headquarters of Democratic Left, which had been the beneficiary of the final struggle between the hardline ‘tankies’ and the euro-communist revisionists of the old Communist Party as the latter’s limited national influence collapsed under the enormous strain of dealing with the unravelling of the Soviet Empire. The vicissitudes of late communism in Britain are for another author but the bottom line was that Democratic Left inherited the assets of the Communists and proceeded to divert them, somewhat cautiously, into a series of initiatives that might be called ‘left third way’. The founders of Demos and Democratic Left’s activists overlapped socially but Democratic Left clearly had other concerns and a different agenda related to ‘mobilising the masses’, particularly trades union activists, so that it was not a source of funds for what may have seemed to them a somewhat elite exercise.
The final result of traditional efforts to raise working capital had been a fund-raiser at Frederick’s in Islington (just yards away from Granita) that raised little, appeared self-congratulatory, had the usual suspects as guests and took a long time to organise with scarce resources.
Inner crew
The inner crew were ‘Gramscian’ Marxists through and through. I was not a Marxist (I would simply say, if asked, that I was an existentialist who had chosen to be a democratic socialist) but where they knew the theory of capitalism, I knew the practice. As for the theory, ‘post-Fordism’, the brand attached to the New Times network’s analysis of late capitalism and the subject of an influential book of essays in 1987, to me it was your mental state after you had traded up your car from a Cortina. My motivation was simply that it was something to do and might help the Labour Party (for which I had a strong sentimental fourth generation attachment).
The solution was simple: to reposition the think-tank towards the people with the spare money and the motivation to invest as ‘insurance’ for the future. I might easily lay claim to the invention of ‘public/private partnership’ ideology to achieve this; but, in fact, it was a logical outgrowth of the ‘New Times’ model. I, therefore, advised the creation of an Advisory Board (as ideological cover) with 50% private and 50% public sector participants and the targets were then found to meet the revised ideological need. These targets were to be reassured by the company they kept and by modern design and management methods and then asked to support a ‘non-political’ ideas programme for the modernisation of the Left.
Demos upgraded the design themselves and Mulgan and his young team could have graced the team at any one of a number of rising new management consultancies a style still reflected in the Mezzanine floor in York Road where their successors live and work. These are talented young people and it would be wrong to minimise their abilities or commitment. Then, I set about giving some ballast to their meetings with sources of funds. I even did a ‘modernising’ interview with the Independent.
The trades unions, with one or two rising young modernising exceptions, were not interested and they were represented as a sector by a non-TUC affiliated general secretary. The exceptions, in any case, tended to be associated with the TUC which was adopting its own version of the ‘third way’ under the leadership of the circle which was to surround John Monks; whereas its members’ unions adapted more slowly to new conditions by latching on to the union role in the Clinton New Democratic coalition, to the European regulatory corporatism of Jacques Delors and to Will Hutton’s ‘stakeholder’ rhetoric as a combined model for a new working relationship with the Labour Party.
Democratic left
Democrat Left played a small but very influential role in creating the language for this shift from the confrontationalism of the 1970s and early 1980s but hard-line left-modernisers made little headway in capturing the heart and soul of the trades union movement. The GMB’s John Edmonds might be regarded as the quintessential new-style centre-left union leader but the left-modernisers were deeply disappointed when Jack Dromey was defeated for the leadership of the TGWU. Outside the TUC, the revisionist Left had influence but no power, squeezed between the thoroughly right wing AEEU political machine (which was soon to be placed at the disposal of Tony Blair) and a group of trades union leaders who remained thoroughly workerist in their dealings with the modernising Party.
On the other side of the political divide I remember visiting the Tory-inclined Scottish and Newcastle Brewery and being satisfied that we had found ourselves a neat boundary on the Right (in other words, that social Tories were prepared to invest in modernising Marxists). But I stood back from an out-right selling job, merely helping to change and adapt the rhetoric to make sure that no rich horses were frightened.
The Company Secretary of the Hanson Group, archetypical at the time of predatory capitalism, agreed to sit on the Advisory Board. This was, quite rightly, regarded as a major coup.
Adam Lury, a new wave (of the day) advertising executive and now on the Foreign Policy Centre board, and Bob Tyrrell of the Henley Centre (part of Sorrell’s WPP Group) represented the new media and communications sector which were a key element in the Demos model of the universe.
There was, of course, a Financial Times intelligentsia connection as well represented by both Martin Taylor and Ian Hargreaves who might be regarded, at the time, as ‘social liberal action intellectuals’, drawn towards Europe and liberal globalisation, much like the newspaper.
Of course, none of these necessarily bought into the Marxist analysis but there was a growing convergence of views between the more liberal ‘capitalists’ and the revisionists of ‘New Times’.
I could spend pages giving the inside dope on the ideology but all you need to know is that it was ‘New Times’ in action. William Clark’s critique comes from the side that I knew less well but was critically important the Gramscian cultural infrastructure bit, full of talk of new networks of communication etc. etc..
I was certainly present at the introduction of Etzioni’s communitarian ideas through Demos and even wrote something naive in that spirit in their journal to fill space, though (quite rightly) the team were reluctant to allow me to play at being an intellectual.
It was also genuinely pluralistic, with links to Liberal Democrats, hard-line Thatcherites and the early progenitors of the ‘third way’ but never traditional socialists or ‘nationalists’ of any hue. I recall Paddy Ashdown and Vincent Gable at early seminars and there brief flirtations with one or two Conservative neo-liberal intellectuals. Like the early IEA and Adam Smith Institute in its time, it was up for grabs by either main political party for a brief period but the logic was for it to be the intellectual base (alongside more pragmatic organisations such as the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, Renewal, Nexus, Progress and so on, some of which were backed by the AEEU and by private funds) for the New Labour Right and the ‘third way’.
Geoff and I were quite close for a brief period though there was nothing to hold the relationship together in the long term. It was I who, in a memorable conversation outside Green Park tube station, advised him strongly not to go down the ‘new party’ route after the Kinnock defeat but to stick with the Labour Party. A position that is still rational just!
The new Marxist right
Now to the analysis. Our drifting away, Demos and I, was not an unpleasant one and was a natural break. The reasons, on reflection, help me to analyse what it represented then and its role in the subsequent decade. Obviously, since I did not really believe in the post-Berlin Wall neo-Hegelianism of the new Marxist Right, once I had done my job I had no reason to hang around. I was a traditionalist who thought modernisation was merely a necessary reform to preserve the tradition. In any case, from 1995/6, I ditched the LFIG network and concentrated on helping the moderate Left (whenever they could actually understand that modernisation did not mean ‘sell-out’) Labour Reform, Grassroots Alliance, Catalyst, Tribune and so on.
I had retained a residual belief until around 1993/4 that Demos and other modernising groups were designed to ‘modernise’ the Labour Movement in order to produce better democratic socialists and not to displace or manage the Movement from outside. In this, I was wrong and there was one particular conversation in which I found the careerism of the young participants to be expressed far too blatantly for my liking. By all means, be cynical but not in front of the troops. It was this that really resulted in my simply deciding to drift away. Since then, I have felt rather like a guerrilla fighting a constant rearguard action against a better resourced and more ruthless enemy as we peasants fall back deeper into the jungles and the mountains. But it was the ethically right if unrewarding choice; and, eternally optimistic, we, or our children, will enter the town centres once again some day.
I may have bumped into Geoff once or twice after that, when he was ensconced in Number Ten (he is undoubtedly an intellectual asset to the Prime Minister and I remain an admirer of his organisational ability, intellect and determination) but I have never sought to cultivate people simply because they had access to power life is too short.
There was a third factor in my estrangement and this is what I hope will strike a chord with readers. Demos was an outgrowth of a fairly wide circle of leftist intellectuals with a Marxist background, the sort that realigned their beliefs in the wake of the crumbling of the Soviet experiment and ended up running New Labour and ultimately the Government. In 1992, we would not have envisaged that a Labour Government would pre-emptively invade sovereign countries, liberalise the global economic infrastructure and adopt authoritarian methods of social control at home.
In retrospect, the seeds of this ideology of social control through cultural manipulation lie in the events of 1992-1994, in the Marxist revisionism of the late 1980s; in wonderment at the Clinton victory over George Bush in 1992 (seen as a victory for the ‘Left’); and in the belief that society had changed irreversibly towards an individualism that needed managing to reach collective ends. One senior Labour-supporting business figure said to me well before 1997: ‘Mark my words, we will see New Labour rule through regulation’. He meant that social ends would be achieved by imposing general rules on the population to be carried out by the leading vector of progressive change business, preferably big business.
This was the seeding of the New Labour-corporate alliance which, in turn, developed from the ‘New Times’ reevaluation of ‘progressive forces’ in the light of the decadence of communism.
Democratic centralists
More to the point, the Marxist revisionists inherited one aspect of their ultimate origins as traditional Marxists they started out as democratic centralists and they will politically die as democratic centralists. This may explain why much of the ‘peasant resistance’ to the new order has come from radical democrats both within the Party (such as the Grassroots Alliance) and outside it and that much of that resistance has created an uneasy alliance between traditional left-socialists and traditional trades unionists and right-wing social democrats.
At that time (in the early 1990s), as the ultimate ‘out’ group in a Thatcherite world, some of the revisionist Marxist net-works had grabbed the Moscow Gold and freed themselves from the ‘tankies’. They managed to get themselves secure if low paid jobs in the cultural studies departments of universities, in the TUC and in the ‘collaborationist’ trades unions; and they floated around the North London media set that was to underpin the coming ‘modernisation’ of the Party. The group was careerist in part and desperate in part. I was actually slumming it with them at the time, from the heights of serious participation in financial capitalism, handling aspects of the sort of capitalist restructuring that they only theorised about and deep into the world of media manipulation in that context.
Thus, the paradox of the early 1990s: predators like Jimmy Goldsmith (and, in a very small way, myself) were seeing the harm that radical capitalism was doing and trying to find ways to chain the process through ‘mobilising the masses’ from below. On the other hand a bunch of depressed Marxists were convinced that capitalism could be restrained by elite-driven stealth regulation and was the actual vector of the progressive changes envisaged by their theory.
This division is now becoming the basis of the global politics of the post-9/11 world between neo-liberal imperialism and national defence of peoples against global forces of all types.
If there is one thing the Marxists of the New Right fear it is the masses, which they assume to be stupid proto-populists of the right. Thus they adopt the methods of Berlusconi to manage the vote instead of adopting the slower but much surer process of building a complex bottom-up culture of civil society built on locality, the civic centre, the trades union and on voluntarism in a mixed and entrepreneurial economy. These are the true guarantors of liberal values, property and the rule of law and for consent to redistribution and the maintenance of the welfare state.
The legacy
The lasting legacy of both neo-Marxism and Thatcher is, instead, the destruction of much of traditional civil society. This creates social disorder that requires yet more draconian measures in a spiral of radically destructive ‘freedom’. Thus, in my highly dissident view, New Labour is a natural and paradoxical outgrowth of communism using adapted but similar methods for adapted but distortedly similar long term ends. The revisionist Marxists provided the intellectual under-pinning of New Labour rhetorically progressive but actually enslaved to the tide of history (represented both by the whims of the hegemon and globalisation) and very much authoritarian and democratic centralist by instinct. (1)
Now, a decade on, an unholy alliance of ‘third way’ social liberals and US ‘neo-conservatives’ has developed from two factions in a shared vision of ‘benign’ neo-imperialism, both underpinned in turn by ‘progressive’ business interests.
Shallow political base
However, William Clark should not get over-exercised by Demos. It was a vehicle for the transmission of some ideas and an aid to the career of some individuals. Demos played an important role in its way in the ‘marxisation’ of the British state throughout the Blairite revolution but its political base is very shallow and, by transiting from the Old Labour Right of Smith and Brown to the New Labour Right of Blunkett and Blair, it has probably and irretrievably lost important links to the community base of the centre-left.
If there is a lesson in all this, it is that, following the neo-liberal experiment, the neo-Marxist experiment and (in the US) the neo-con experiment, the people and their representatives must really start to keep their intellectuals and their elites on a tighter leash.
There is one other lesson. I assisted in taking a group of ‘out’ Marxists and putting them into the ‘system’ but it remains a question which group had the upper hand Marxists or the ‘system’. Well, you can guess that my answer is pretty clear the ‘system’.
The Marxists of the right had a product to sell and the state establishment were buyers. The Foreign Policy Centre’s ‘neo-imperialism’, communitarian-authoritarian solutions to public order, ‘national interest’ neo-liberalism these are all extensions of state power over a fairly supine populace which no longer has a party of the centre-left to represent it.
Whether it be free trade, migration, public diplomacy, social order or whatever, the neo-Marxists have become junior partners in the attempt to restore executive authority at the expense of legislature, judiciary and civil society. The direction of events, noting the use of terrorism as excuse for some fairly radical and largely unnecessary policing innovations, should disturb not just natural liberals and democrats but conservatives and trades unionists.
Personally, I am relaxed in the long run the Marxists have been hoist by their own petard: the theory of ‘internal contradictions’.
We are seeing the components of the centre-left coalition and of civil society beginning to reformulate their strategies of resistance and the state-party continuum failing to understand that rhetoric must have some relationship to facts on the ground: e.g. if you say WMD are there, they must be seen to be there as you described them to be there. In addition, conservative thinkers are realising that being the party of the Crown in the country is not a lot of use if the Crown is in control of the centre-left and likes it that way. As a result, neglected areas of the Tory heartlands rural areas, small business, middle management are beginning to question the competency and benignity of the executive regardless of party and this has to be a sound development for the future.
There are now two dangers on the centre-left: that the process of resistance is led or captured by a new generation of ‘intellectuals’ (God preserve us from people who think but do not understand!); and that the intellectuals who are presented to the public are Marxists of yet an older school, like some of the second-raters who float around the socialist fringe or the nastier bits of the hard left.
So, while William Clark is right to draw attention to the organisation and its associates, he is really fighting a battle of long ago and far away. The current battle is with those who once used these organisations for their own and possibly much more sinister political ends the democratic centralist national security state. As for cultural politics take the power to commission and distribute from the centre and give it to the locality and you have half your answer.
Addendum
14th October
Dear Sean
There is a great deal of merit in your analysis: (2) you are one of the few writers on current issues who has understood the ideological roots of the centre-left elite revolution but you have misinterpreted its target.
The ostensible target is certainly conservatism (or rather the older generation of the elite) but the real target is the Left itself and above all that Left which is concerned with popular self-determination through bottom-up collective organisation. In short, the current centre-left operation is not a war on conservatism at all, it is a neo-conservative war on popular self-determination.
As a non-Marxist traditionalist of the Left, I see the displacement of a redistributionist and ‘workerist’ (or rather a community) agenda with one that emphasises a somewhat dubious cultural revolution in which a self-regarding but admittedly vigourous ‘benign’ elite simply replaces an out-moded and decadent one. This is partly generational.
In this neo-Marxist programme, apparent improvements in the lot of the masses do not come from self-defining struggle, from learning through doing and from coalition-building in the street but from ‘grants’ of power and of resources from above.
The only purpose of ideology in this view is to capture and retain power and, in this sense, the best teacher of the centre-left was the Thatcherite neo-liberal experiment. It was Thatcher’s crew who displaced coalitional diversity with a political monoculture based on the use of increased state powers and a spurious war on the ‘enemy within’ and so ruined our national political ecology.
Redistribution and community empowerment and individual freedom both now take second place to a whole range of special interest concerns where new largely appointed micro-elites emerge to speak for manufactured identity communities and the State (the real beneficiary) orders matters for communities and individuals alike through excessively centralised executive authority.
We thus see the fragmentation of our society into shifting coalitions of interrelated micro-elites whose task is no more than to aim to rule the people more benignly and inclusively than the old more coherent but certainly more wicked traditional elite had done but rule is still rule and not to be confused with self-determination.
Human nature being what is, this new elite soon descends into authoritarianism when the masses fail to share its values and policy imperatives. Acting benignly at public expense in foreign lands is hubris. As discontent grows, communalism (instead of communitarianism) and nihilism (instead of libertarianism) grow. We are on the slippery slope.
Notes
1 Interestingly and unconnectedly (so I believe) a similar phenomenon in the US took anti-communist Truman Democrats in the 1950s and ‘Scoop’ Jackson Democrats in the 1970s into the Republican Party to become ‘neo-conservatives’, self-styled as social democrats with a global vision.
2 < http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc113.htm >