David Miliband has given a speech tonight in Mountain Ash in honour of Labour’s first leader- Keir Hardie- which I have had sight of. It is an incredibly powerful expression of Labour’s core ideals (about which I had some thoughts just prior to the election) linked to the historical formation of Labourism as a strategy and philosophy distinct from liberalism albeit one that contains a strong thread of social and civil liberalism. It’s just with the economic liberalism element- which Hardie saw as the Liberal’s strongest urge and primal instinct- where the two outlooks diverge.
Beyond reminding the party of its heritage and re-vivifying a core and strangely mysterious figure at the core of Labour’s history, Miliband’s speech is important in two respects.
Firstly, it reclaims a language driven by human values and associations for Labour. Miliband argues:
“A life fit for a human being is about more than money and benefits. It’s about, responsibility, love, loyalty, friendship, action and victory, values that used to be engraved upon the Labour heart but which we have carried too lightly of late.”
That is a language of resuscitation. The Labour movement become a machine and now a spirit of movement is awakening again.
The second crucial point that he makes is that Hardie was a socialist not a statist. This is a constant theme which emerges of any re-reading of the voices of ethical socialism from the early to mid twentieth century- Tawney and his notions of building a common existence through transcending division, GDH Cole and his rich understanding of the transformative power of human association and fraternity, and Attlee’s somewhat paradoxical yet heartfelt conviction that socialism was about freedom and the flourishing individual- all spring to mind.
In all these ethical voices there are routes out of old v new Labour; socialism v social democracy v social liberalism; traditionalism v modernity; and republicanism v communitarianism. The creation of a plural left is dependent on this historical and self reflection. And Miliband’s speech manages to tread that careful line between nostalgia and modernist myopia. Fields of vision and timeframes are important in politics. Traditionalists see the present as a continuum of a distant past. Modernists see today as only connected with yesterday and give the past a cold shoulder. This speech managed to avoid both those traps:
“The first [peril] is nostalgia and the temptation to view his life and times as not simply better than our own, but to ignore the poverty, the exploitation, the insanitary housing, the illiteracy, the dangerous pits, the precariousness of the lives of working people at that time. Without that understanding, the genuine heroism of Hardie’s achievement in organising and leading a movement that stood at odds with the prevailing beliefs, and realities, of the time would be diminished. By disregarding the real progress that has been made, in freedom, in knowledge, in technology, in health care, in education, in politics, we undermine our understanding of how politics can shape a better world and of our real achievements in redistributing power.
The second peril is a superficial modernist contempt for the achievements of our forebears in perilous circumstances. It was not necessary to dispossess the peasantry through enclosures in order to improve agricultural efficiency. The alternative view – that it was – is indifferent to the sense of loss, of grief, of the disruption that change can bring. This is the loss of connection to people and places, to crafts and congregations, which is so often dismissed as the price we pay for progress.
The ‘third way’ that Hardie steered, between a nostalgia that is hopeless, and a contemptuous modernism, which is reprehensible, provided a very strong orientation for our Party which is a great strength to us now.”
While the speech does not provide the strategic vision for Labour, that is not its purpose. Instead, it lays down the principles and their origin that can serve a Labour renewal. And it plants them in fertile ground: a new understanding of fairness that is linking to reciprocity and contribution; a rebalanced political economy with more restrained capitalism in the City of London in order to generate more capitalism elsewhere; the community values of soldiarity, responsibility and a ‘bigger society’; internationalism; and a thriving and involved democracy.
I strongly recommend reading this speech. Along with brother Ed’s speech last week on a ‘new social democracy’- who also called for a different type of state responsive to individual lives and needs- it means there is now some serious engagement with the rediscovery of a political history and language that it seemed Labour had lost forever. Both these candidates have now sought to give meaning to the hollow shell that Labour became. Labour is embarking on a journey. These reflections are a better place to start than the shrill and tactical oppositionalism (as opposed to constructive and strategic opposition) that we have begun to see elsewhere.
July 10th, 2010 at 12:38
Good post.
But I think it is necessary to be very careful as to what is meant by ‘economic liberalism’.
The essence of the radical liberalism of Smith, Mill and down to Lloyd George is a recognition that the sovereign rights of the individual – particularly property rights – necessarily carry obligations to the Society which confers those rights.
In economic terms these obligations should IMHO be manifested in taxation of unearned income from privilege, rather than taxation of earned income. Michael Hudson was splendid on this the other day in the FT, and taxation of the privilege of exclusive use of land was then wholeheartedly also supported yesterday in the FT by that pinko subversive Martin Wolf.
However, I am realistic enough to know that there is not a cat in hell’s chance of such taxation ever being passed in a representative democracy with an Executive arm. The privileged turkeys who own and run the country will never enact Christmas.
But to return to the point, the ‘Orange Book’ Liberals have made common cause with the Party of privileged property righst – the Tories – in what is essentially the ‘neoliberal’ Washington Consensus approach. It is to New Labour’s eternal shame that they swallowed this Kool Aid.
My problem with Labour is that they still do not appear to have recognised that this paradigm is fundamentally and conclusively knackered. This is because it has resulted in our society having become in economic terms terminally unequal. 90% of people are now in debt to the other 10% and – as Phillippe Legrain (another land tax man) points out, 0.3% now own 69% of land – which is a banana republic statistic.
In my view the solution is already rapidly evolving – bottom up – through a new synthesis of radical liberalism and mutualism. The enabling factor is the pervasive direct instantanous connection of the internet, which cuts out intermediaries, whether Public=State or Private = rentier shareholder. I call this ongoing process ‘Napsterisation’.
In political terms the ouctome of a Napsterised society will be either Orange Labour or Red Liberalism; a networked Guild Socialism creating what is a essentially a participative State on the one hand: but on the other hand a networked ‘market society’ where surplus is shared by reference to a value standard, but where there is no rent or profit to ‘unproductive’ landlords or shareholders. Such is the ‘Co-operative Advantage’.
In such a collaborative paradigm, politics will essentially be reality-based and action oriented. The policy will create the party and not vice versa. Interactive partnership protocols require only the consent of the participants.
July 12th, 2010 at 10:33
Chris,
As always a, extremely throught-provoking comment. Just one question: how would ‘value’ be captured in the napsterised economy. Isn’t there a risk that the transaction costs market knowledge will be too great for most to participate in such a way? An advantage of the wage economy is its simplicity and relatively low transaction costs. The only way to lower transaction cost is to have a high-trust environment: how would that develop?
One further comment, it seems incredible to me that the left has given up on democratising the economy. It is the Right who have made the most substantive moves in this direction in recent decades as the left got skewered on nationalisation. Silly and utterly bemusing to me.
July 13th, 2010 at 22:27
Anthony
At the risk of mutual backscratching, it’s a pleasure to respond to thought-provoking posts.
“Just one question: how would ‘value’ be captured in the napsterised economy”
I think we need to look again at the very bases of political economy: ie the ‘Factors of Production’ themselves, which are to all intents and purposes the definitions of what underpins ‘Value’ or as I like to think of it – ‘Money’s Worth’.
In other words, we must examine the metaphysics of value.
Martin Wolf is currently questioning the long-standing (and in my view purely ideological) conflation by neo-classical economists of ‘land’ with ‘capital’ in his excellent FT Diary post here
http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2010/07/12/why-were-resources-expunged-from-neo-classical-economics/
I chipped in with the following comment….
>>
I think we are long overdue a 21st century revision of ‘Factors of Production’.
In my analysis there are three:
(a) Location – in three, even four dimensions (eg airport landing slots)
(b) Energy – in dynamic/kinetic and static/potential (eg carbon fuels) forms.
(c) Knowledge – either subjective (what’s between our ears, and dies with us eg information, intuition, contacts, common sense, entrepreneurialism and so on); or objective ie data representations recorded in some way, including music, video, software, books and so on..
in this analysis Labour may be deconstructed into:
(a) Keynes’ ‘unqualified labour’ which is essentially manpower or energy;
(b) Subjective knowledge/qualification with which an individual puts his manpower to most profitable use.
So you pay a top class dentist (say) £6.00 an hour for the use of his energy/manpower; and £394.00 an hour for the use of his knowledge. Then you pay for the use of the specialised equipment (including the knowledge embedded in it); the use of the practice building, and most of all, for the use of the Harley Street location on which it sits. And your bill is £1,000 per hour.
All of the above Factors have a use value, and in order to deploy this use value economically we are used to the ‘finance capital’ legal protocols we think of as property rights, both absolute (eg freehold land, or shares) and temporary (eg leasehold land or debt contracts).
As one commenter noted there is a big difference between use value and exchange value, and it is the protocols of finance capital and the financial system that enables us to integrate them.
Unfortunately our existing system is broken, and needs to be fixed, and in my view what will achieve this is the ongoing process of dis-intermediation through direct instantaneous connections of the Internet. These will enable direct ‘peer to peer’ investment and credit based upon the above Factors, and this requires a new approach to the ‘finance capital’ protocols, which is the subject that most interests me (sad, I know).
>>