Читать книгу The Dignity of Labour - Jon Cruddas - Страница 14

Democracy is endangered. Most obviously in countries like Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Poland and Hungary, but also in places with more resilient historical traditions, such as Italy and the United States. Here in the UK it is being severely tested. Having analysed global datasets covering 4 million people in 3,500 surveys across 154 countries, researchers recently concluded that dissatisfaction with democracy amongst the developed countries is at its highest levels for almost 25 years, and suggested the rise of populism was not so much a cause but symptom of this dissatisfaction. In the UK in 2019 dissatisfaction levels were the highest ever recorded. Another recent study of long-term shifts in public attitudes suggested growing UK disenchantment, declining confidence in parliamentary traditions and a willingness to embrace authoritarian ideas that ‘challenge core tenets of our democracy’.¹⁰ History has not ended, it has been upended. Modern liberal democracy, the political philosophy that told us competition was the guiding principle of human activity and the guarantor of true liberty, has incubated sinister new forms of populism.

Harvard professor Michael Sandel has argued that the rise of authoritarian populism is best understood as the fault of the progressive left.¹¹ He suggests an ‘economy of outrage’ when reacting to the collection of right-wing populists gaining ground across the West, so that energy is channelled into creative intellectual and political responses. These would move beyond understandable protest and resistance, and address, dissect and remedy the fundamental failure of progressive politics, primarily its ethical detachment.

The hallmark of post-war social democracy was a moral desire to confront capital through the creation of the welfare state and wider strategies to contain and regulate the market. Yet the project became stale. Its concerns contracted towards the technocratic, often ineffective, administration of growth. The ethical energy of social democracy evaporated and was, by the late 1970s, effectively challenged by a resurgent New Right. The centre left politicians that succeeded Thatcher and Reagan, such as Blair, Clinton and Schröder, left unchallenged the essential market orthodoxies that preceded them. In office Obama succumbed to the same forces in contrast to the early moral clarity he expressed when running as insurgent candidate. Today’s populist uprisings reflect a backlash against this soulless managerialism and offer an ‘angry verdict’ on a long-term liberal compact with capital; one that has entrenched economic and democratic inequalities and rolled back genuine social mobility. Any account of modern populism must recognize social democracy’s loss of soul.

It is a powerful argument with challenging consequences. Rethinking the purpose of progressive politics requires moving beyond acknowledging economic grievance and enduring inequality. It requires a very different conversation, one that addresses moral and cultural questions regarding the lives we wish to live, and how the current disparity between that ideal and reality can find painful, often angry political expression driven by resentment and humiliation. Sandel locates in a global context the juxtaposition, or paradox, of personal hope and practical despair that Bloodworth identified regarding the work we wish for compared to what we perform.

Sandel suggests the left requires a new telos, a new public philosophy, in order to respond to this epic challenge. To help this reformation, he identifies four themes for progressive politics to confront, linked to questions of work, human labour and the creation of community.

First is the need for economic strategy to engineer inclusive growth, one that confronts the escalating inequality which feeds today’s authoritarian impulses. Such redesign must rethink wealth creation and distribution, including that created by and apportioned to human labour.

His second suggestion involves the language used by today’s liberal progressives, emphasizing opportunity and the removal of barriers to success. Meritocracy, a term initially coined in the UK as an ironic description to justify inaction over inequality, has further entrenched elite privilege. Sandel urges us to challenge the harsh judgements that liberals and progressives impose on those who are viewed as ‘unsuccessful’ in a meritocracy – not least in the resentment this builds, fuelling backlash. It adds to a sense of cultural detachment in politics and a disrespect for the work performed by many of our fellow citizens. Having valorized financial and educational achievement, we appear ill-equipped to understand the feelings of those that live outside these defined parameters of success. This needs to change, as today’s progressives are developing a politics tacitly aimed at, and embraced by, society’s winners.

The third theme relates to the meaning and future of work and how this will affect the lives we wish to lead. Our economies have been reoriented away from building things to managing money. Material reward and social esteem have closely followed, drifting away from the traditional jobs carried out by the working class whose prospects look increasingly endangered. We are told that technological change might further erode the dignity of such work or render it obsolete. Many on the progressive left have embraced such thinking.

For instance, for Tony Blair and New Labour, knowledge work signalled the end of the post-war economy and traditional Labour approaches to work. The working class was on the wrong side of history. Knowledge work was the future, and the famous meritocratic slogan ‘education, education, education’ captured an economic policy focused on human capital. This false technological nirvana is resurrected today by utopian ‘post-work’ theorists who embrace Universal Basic Income (UBI) to take us there. Such an approach can suggest a certain disdain for jobs not considered worthwhile, reinforce the detachment of progressive thinking and help build the forces driving authoritarian populism. Whether we wish to welcome or resist such a future in the years ahead, the nature and future of work will be critical themes for progressive politics in any new telos.

Finally, Sandel requests renewed concern for the moral significance of national boundaries, a philosophical request for politics to return to its classical origins in terms of the creation of community. The rise of the populist right is inseparable from the politics of community and nation – unfashionable terrain for the left.

In order to rebuild the ethical character of the left, therefore, it must accept its own culpability in any account of our unstable democracies. This will not be easy. It requires a politics of work, something we have lost. Moreover, modern progressive thinking has tended to embrace a liberal cosmopolitanism in ways that assert a privileged global citizenship over other forms of fidelity and attachment. Sandel suggests a set of moral obligations to specific electorates whereby politicians seek to build resilient, stable communities – ones that share sacrifice, risk and reward within defined boundaries.

Overall, to challenge the modern story of dispossession and abandonment offered by the populist right, progressives must forge a positive reimagination of community and nation anchored within a politics of work. This will not be straightforward because it returns to the contested terrain of belonging, community and nation where many immediately detect reactionary, exclusive associations.