I sent the following by e-mail to a number of people:
‘Thus Martin Jacques in the New Statesman:
‘For the next 30 years, neoliberalism – the belief in the market rather then the state, the individual rather than the social – exercised a hegemonic influence over British politics, with the creation of New Labour signalling an abject surrender to the new orthodoxy.’ (1)
As if he had nothing to do with it!’
Two of the recipients, Tim Pendry and William Clark, responded and then conducted an exchange. What follows is a section of that exchange with one minor excision.
William Clark
Where’s all that Schumpeter’s ‘business cycle’s’ justification of the universal expansion of capitalism, creative destruction and all that now? It was fine when it was wiping out manufacturing?
I seem to remember Jacques saying the world was ending (something to do with the Pacific rim tigers he mentions, but at the time said would replace the West) at the same time they brought out that ‘special edition’ of Marxism Today, which distanced (well tried to involve, really) his little group from all those gushing interviews he did with Tony Blair.
He always seemed very token left to me, but very early with it in terms of the New Labour shtick, with appearances at places like the 21st Century Trust in the very early 90s. Is the essay more than a lament by a man who is envisioning a dwindling pay cheque? But back then, and I seem to remember noting this in Lobster, it was Geoff Mulgan who was responsible for the Labour programme of re-nationalisation, while helping out Brown.
Hindsight carries with it some sort tang of self-awareness and here it is not just our leaders that are flying blind. I’ve never found anything of what he’s written useful in any way and I’ve waded through a fair bit of it, including the Marxism Today archive. I suppose alongside someone like Beatrix Campbell he shines like a young god. The mystery is why he is published and promoted by all these newspapers and so forth: ‘All the ideological assumptions that have underpinned political discourse….’ – why get someone who confesses that he knows nothing about the dimensions of the crisis to write on it?
Tim Pendry
Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
The New Labour network in the middle 1990s were looking for an ideology to launch them into power. Gramsci gave the Marxist apostates their ‘belief system’, the nearest they got to a religion – and, like all revealed religions based on texts, everything seemed beautifully logical and coherent so long as no-one asked any questions about the base assumptions which outsiders imperfectly understood.
It is like Athanasius Kircher looking for a universal original language because of his belief in the narrative of the Tower of Babel. The belief was highly productive as a hypothesis but it was not ‘true’ because the assumption was absurd. False assumptions can be useful in creativity but they should be challenged from the very start and not left alone until a mountain of proof demonstrates to the most dunderheaded (facts like Russian troops appearing on the Vistula) that the vested interests behind the new religion are wrong.
Jacques is not a bad man, just a limited and ambitious one who learnt the true art of public intellectual life in the West – the Fukuyama-Huntington-Friedman approach. Geopolitics and neo-paganism served the same purpose in Hitler’s set (though he was far too clever not to see intellectuals as tools).
Find a big idea that can be expressed in a paragraph, don’t test it to destruction, find a lot of second-raters who have been hired to churn copy in the metropolitan media, turn the big idea into a book full of assertions, get the second-raters deeply excited about something that gives them a reason to look like ‘intellectuals’, stir, simmer and serve up at dinner parties to hungry third-rate minds in the political class. Yawn!
Jacques and New Labour raise the question of what it is to be ‘left’ because two old definitions are now dead. The first related to the Enlightenment and placed reason against faith; yet reason is deeply flawed as a guide to life. The new neuroscience gives us a much more nuanced view of what it is to be a liberated human – closer to dear old William Blake than the earnest world of the Fabians and American progressivism. The second is about the worth of the state as planner since it is quite clear now that all large organisations have a tendency to sclerosis and entropy. They kill the human spirit by their very nature.
To me, the Left ends up as an ethic of opposition to any attempts to assert essentialism over the human spirit, and to exploitation of all forms of labour by others, including the majority. It also seeks to use the state and community institutions to provide improved life chances for the many and work against the concentration of power and resources in the hands of the few.
From that perspective, Jacques and then New Labour were of the right from their inception despite the rhetoric that paid lip service to these ideas. The reality of the Western centre-left is that it holds ever tighter to essentialism like citizenship and feminism and rights, while the social fabric collapses under their neglect.
It encourages the exploitation of labour of all types by making it acceptable. How? – through only making those social improvements that deal with the symptoms of exploitation rather than its causes. Thus, in this sort of Left, girls are not encouraged to pursue the higher earning potential of pole-dancing in order to please feminist essentialists and have to be shelf-fillers to please the big retailers. Wealth and power have never been so concentrated or distanced from the general population since the universal franchise was instituted.
The whole game was a play for power, no different from the pitch of any group of political gangsters and their camp-followers. Such is life without the checks and balances of federalism, coalitions and community.
That club has perhaps eighteen months more in the sun at most (the cleverest will do a David Freud and switch to the Tory Party) and is then set to be replaced by their Tory equivalents. They are ageing, they have failed and been seen to fail in their analyses; and, now, their medium, the print media, is about to slide steadily down the tubes. Fear, naked fear, amongst the book-writing journos on my Facebook list, is sometimes palpable. They really do think that they are going to be financially wiped out and unemployable in their fifties!
William Clark
I’ve noticed a number of highly placed academics who use Jacques and [Stuart] Hall as representations of the ‘Communist’ approach as regards theories of the state, Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE would be a good example. This closes off a lot of debate about the penetration of business interests and usually comes with a dismissal of C. Wright Mills’ work, falling back on a pluralist version of events: what you see is what you get. But we see so little actual decision-making and the tyranny of the ad hoc, with Tony’s sofa as the throne. The New Labour legacy seems to be a world dominated by the language of marketing, and by strategic vagueness, rhetorical demands, WTO ‘rules’. Accountability, always applied selectively, is undermined by this tyranny of the ad hoc. That and notions such as ‘multilevel governance’, the coming together of disinterested people across boundaries. In reality it has meant an ever-increasing plethora of think-tanks, foundations, public-private partnerships, NGOs and wholly unelected national and international bodies. These preclude negotiation, notions of fairness and justice; they are invariably undemocratic set-ups; and are agencies of exclusion. These ad hoc set-ups are pervasive both nationally and internationally.
Beliefs should be tested to destruction; but destruction of what? What was genuinely revolutionary about Marx? Or take Engels’ The Origin of the Family; this is the late 1880s, and he argues (in the introduction I think) that up to the 1860s, there was no history of the family; history was still under the influence of the five books of Moses. So that’s not much more than 100 years ago. And much the same could be said of those who did not want to speak in the code that Hegel spoke; this seems a genuine change which came under such assault.
What of all this end of ideology (ideology): Fukuyama-Huntington-Friedman, one could also add Charles Murray, greatly marketed by the new right. The New Labour set seemed attracted by how the ‘Thatcher think tanks’ had done so well, but I wonder how much they knew here, the extent of the influence of the Heritage Foundation, how this tied in with US Public Diplomacy drives of the 1980s, the Mont Pelerin crowd (the herd of disgruntled Austrians annoyed by the social democrats and Freud); and what Ralph Harris called the ‘Phantom Academy’: Hayek’s notion of a process of using second-hand dealers in ideas (for second-raters) to spread the gospel.
What you say seems to chime in with this: what did the people in Demos really think that Eurocommunism merged with the IEA would produce? Hall (in particular) and Jacques seemed to have left very early in the game and we have people like Ian Hargreaves running the government’s public diplomacy, Lord Stevenson almost earning his bonus just for chutzpah alone, and Mark Leonard having wandered through the Foreign Policy Centre, the Centre for European Reform pushing NATO expansion for Lockheed. Power, influence, money – they got it, they used it. We’re back where we started. Perhaps there was some sort of dialectic at work.
Tim Pendry
Perhaps someone will write a thesis on how the intellectual came to consider himself (alongside the academic) in a market of ideas where an idea could be valorised, perhaps securitized. There is an old but useful trick in marketing PR which suggests a pyramid of selling:
- BRAND [logo]
- TAG-LINE
- THE VALUE PROPOSITION (the single paragraph)
- THE SALES LETTER (one page of A4)
- BROCHURE (equivalent to pamphlet)
- BACK-UP RESEARCH (the book)
All must be consistent but busy people go from the top and take what they need. The brand is simply an assurance of something, the tag-line describes what is being assured, the value proposition is where you hear about what I can do for you in general, the sales letter is more precisely what I can do for you, the brochure is rarely read but gives bottom to the sales pitch and the back-up research is for the nerds in the back office.
At a point in history, this form of thinking (almost certainly derived from the world of Lord Stevenson) appeared in British politics. The pamphlets were no longer read but handled and the back-up research was ‘taken as read’ as politics became no longer about representation of those below but being a ‘chief executive’. Others did the thinking while you handled power.
Bob Peston’s little pot boiler (2) has bits on Brown’s years as chancellor which shows that he switched into this mode of thinking surprisingly easily for an old school ‘historian’. Everything became brand – New Labour; tag-line – the slogan; value proposition – revised Clause IV; and policy initiatives on one side of A4. Stakeholder pensions, an utter failure of policy, would be typical.
There is nothing wrong with the methodology in itself so long as the politicians act with integrity and judgement and have the intellectual weight to know that the product they sell actually does add value. In the case of New Labour, the product was a jerry-built Lada of the old school rather than the modern people’s car they claimed it to be. Throw them out!
Tim Pendry comments on current affairs at http://asithappens.tppr.info/
William Clark’s website is at http://pinkindustry.wordpress.com/
Notes
- <www.newstatesman.com/economy/2009/02/financial-crisis-china-banks> As editor of Marxism Today, Jacques opened his columns to the Thatcherites.
- Brown’s Britain (London, 2006)