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From Individual Morality to Ethical Institutions
Glasman is what political philosophers call a ‘virtue-theorist’. For him, generalised moral rules make little sense. What matters is the quality of all of our actions in the context of the ongoing collective life of which they are a part; the extent to which such actions both contribute to and are rooted in a form of life in which individuals may flourish. There is a fundamental difference between this and Blairism. For Blairism (as for neo-liberalism in general) the only moral agent is the individual, whom government should help to become self-reliant, responsible, law-abiding. For Glasman the community is also a moral entity; only if it is rightly organised can people flourish.
This is not a “right-wing” position. In Glasman’s case it is also not a Liberal one. Glasman thinks that Liberalism treats values and principles in a way that extracts them from the communal and cultural contexts in which they have meaning and force. In so doing, it drains the ethical life from autonomous communities and depoliticises virtue by declaring that ‘the good’ will derive from formal rules and procedures professionally operated and enforced by Liberal lawyers, philosophers and politicians. These are fundamentally concerned with specifying when the state can legitimately intervene into the lives of insufficiently liberal individuals. A consequence of this is that relations other than that between individual and state come to appear as having little or nothing to do with ethical and moral life; the most important of these is the economy.
To the liberal concern for constitutional justice Glasman wants to add economic justice. But he does not mean by this only that there should be a better redistribution of wealth. He means that the working part of our life should be about virtue and ‘flourishing’, just as much as every other part. For that to be so, people should have some measure of control over their lives at work, and that work should have intrinsic value and meaning. That is why Glasman admires the culture of the mediaeval guilds and G.D.H. Cole’s attempt to invent a modern guild socialism. It is also why Glasman opposes to the Blairite project of inculcating ‘transferable’ skills – of the sort that float freely around the knowledge economy - the cultivation of vocational skills rooted in craft cultures and traditions.
For Glasman what matters most is the maintenance of autonomous communal life within which virtue may flourish. He is thus particularly concerned with the forces that threaten such community. For the right, traditionally, these threats are usually immoral individuals (single mothers, atheists, divorcees and so on). But for Glasman, not only individuals but also (and more importantly) institutions can be wholly incompatible with ethical life. And for him the most important of these, is the institution of the market.
Money Does Not Make the World Go Around
Glasman’s inspiration here is the economist Karl Polanyi who sought to describe and explain the development of the capitalist market in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Liberal economics often imagines the market as a wholly natural outcome of the interaction of human wants and interests under conditions of scarcity. In contrast, Polanyi argued that it was the outcome of a political project. Surveying England’s history of enclosure and the forced mobility of labour he concluded that “There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course…laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state”.
For Glasman political debate about the market should not be confined to the degree of legitimate intervention within it (as if it were a delicate natural ecosystem). His key concern is not how to ‘manage’ the economy or impose moral restraints upon unruly individual capitalists. The problem is much greater than that. There is a fundamental opposition between ethical community and the market because the market entails the commodification of life, labour and nature; it pulls things out of the communal context within which they have meaning by subordinating them to its one ‘universal’ measure of abstract value: ‘price’.
One part of the Labour tradition has seen its task as the use of the state to increase access to commodities - through organising to improve wages, state benefits and national economic planning. New Labour was in this tradition; accepting that we now live in a free-flowing, global knowledge economy, it saw its task as helping people to acquire transferable skills which would help them to fetch a better price on the market. This, incidentally, is what new Labour meant by social mobility. But Glasman claims that there is an alternative tradition for which commodification itself is the problem and the role of the party is the creation of collective organisations which can resist it, entangling the market in democratic “regional, civic and vocational relationships”. His examples include mutual banking, “real traditions” of craft, co-operatives and so on.
This is a specific form of anti-capitalist politics. It identifies the core problem of capitalism not as inequality or class war but as commodification. The latter is thought wrong primarily because it undermines embedded communities. Glasman’s politics, although shaped by realities of class, are not necessarily class politics: for him every community is threatened by the market and thus any community - national, regional or religious - has the potential to be part of the struggle against it. Indeed, it may be that Glasman is not in favour of community organising because of its role in challenging capitalism, so much as opposed to capitalism because it challenges community organising.
Glasman’s critique of the commodity does not originate with Polanyi, and it predates socialism. The critique of the commodity first appeared in the West as a critique of the idolatry of money; a critique of the belief that money can produce things of itself, and thus in particular a critique of usury (and it is worth noting that one of Glasman’s campaigns with London Citizens was for a cap on interest). That critique can be found in Aristotle (one of Glasman’s common reference points). Aristotle wrote of wealth creation that "The most hated sort and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it”. This criticism overlaps with a religiously inspired critique of the belief that money can create something out of nothing (a power reserved only for divinity). Or, as Glasman puts it, “the pressure of commodification violates a fundamental notion of the sacred common to all the Abrahamic faiths concerning the integrity of the human being, the divine status of nature and the limits of money…”.[iv]
This is why Glasman makes very particular reference to the challenge money poses to community life and why he argues that “Democracy, the power of organised people to act together in the Common Good, is the way to resist the power of money”.[v] Often he inveighs specifically against finance capitalism and has been particularly and powerfully critical of the City of London.[vi] It is not that Glasman doesn’t care about capitalism in general. Rather, the problems he finds in it are not sufficiently captured by pointing to its exploitation or greed. For Glasman the problem of capitalism is that it enables the sovereignty of money over common life; that trade in commodities substitutes for real production carried out by real people making things that they care about. In this respect, at its core, Glasman’s critique of capitalism is not in fact moral at all. It is ontological. To believe in money is to hold an erroneous view about the nature of the universe. Money is a false prophet.
The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics
In a lot of the comment on Blue Labour the religious dimension has I think, been both underestimated and misunderstood.[vii] Yet it is in this aspect of his thinking that Glasman is most dramatic and iconoclastic. For most political thinkers in the contemporary West it is a given that a defining opposition in our tradition is that between “Jerusalem” and “Athens”: the city of faith, governed by a transcendent principle, and the city of politics, governed by whatever the people decide. Glasman thinks that this opposition is false; that faith and citizenship can and must be reconciled. That is because today both are under threat from the same forces. The first, as we have seen, is the commodification of the world. The second, is a form of pluralism so radical that it produces communities which, although they share a polity, cannot properly speak with each other. Consequently, there can be no conversation about the common good.
This brings us to what has been the most controversial aspect of Glasman’s politics – his critique of a Liberal version of multiculturalism. Glasman thinks that when the state grants rights to communities it sets itself up as the arbiter of the rules that govern relationships between all communities. In so doing it takes power away from those communities, subordinating them to the legalistic and formal rules of the state. To be sure, it does so in the name of “equality” or “fairness” but it makes these abstract and thus empties them of real meaning; for such concepts to have value they must be embedded in real, practical experiences of relationships between people. Thus, he laments that, “competition for scarce resources and state power between different groups is a far more realistic description of civic life than an active engagement between different communities in pursuit of a common good”.[viii]
His alternative is to try and forge a conception of a common interest out of an experience of collective political organisation. This is the view Glasman finds best expressed by the founder of community organising, Saul Alinsky, and which, I am sure, he sees as embodied in his own work with London Citizens. This position, although it finds anyone without a community highly problematic, is, in the end, far more inclusive than anything the British left is really used to. For instance, Glasman thinks that one should try “to build a party that brokers a common good” with everyone, and that means that Labour should involve “those people who support the EDL within our party”.[ix] He also has no anxieties about the incorporation of religious groups into politics, a position against the grain of secular Liberalism but consonant with Glasman’s conviction that today the building of a new Athens and of a new Jerusalem are one and the same architectural endeavour: “The Abrahamic faiths embody a range of institutions and values of far greater intensity and meaning, or in the language of political philosophy far thicker, than the state, as the collective enforcer of a singular law can allow. Concepts of love, brotherhood, mercy and community are difficult to reconcile with equal rights, respect for persons and neutrality”.[x]
For Glasman the point of politics is to maintain the ‘community’ because being in community is the ‘end’ of humanity, its goal or purpose – the place within which love, brotherhood and mercy can flourish. He does not speak the legalistic language of secular liberalism (essentially the language of individual rights) but, rather, the language of faith communities and of faith in community (essentially the language of civic participation). Glasman is a true believer in civic politics, and just as the ancient religions were really all about organizing peoples against their adversaries so is Glasman’s political religion about organizing communities against the threat they face from the market and the state: “Resistance to commodification through democratic organisation. That's the position”.
But is it any good?
Glasman has certainly sparked controversy. I do not find him advocating a uniform national culture of the sort that Tories sometimes talk about. Nor do I find him expressing an ethnically exclusive politics. But I can see why people think this. Glasman privileges a politics of collective action over a legal order of individual rights and this makes it hard for many left-liberals to fit him into the political spectrum. Furthermore, English political culture lacks a common vocabulary for talking about race, class and religion in political terms (our history is one of bitter struggle to de-politicise these) and Glasman has been insensitive to this cultural context. That is unfortunate because he and Blue Labour are trying to speak about things new Labour was embarrassed by: ethics, class and the British socialist tradition. These are things we need to talk about together.
Ultimately, I suspect, Blue Labour’s success will be limited, not unironically, by the conservatism of the Labour Party. Labour’s is an insular culture much more at home with the processes of official politics (producing candidates, harvesting votes) than with the unpredictable force of social movements and community organisations (especially ones that are religious or ‘ethnic’). In their heart-of-hearts the question which Labour members ask when evaluating political ideas is not ‘is it right?’ but ‘will it get us elected?’. Those who think that Labour lost in 2010 only because it was soft on immigration, and that one wins in politics by moving to the centre rather than moving the centre towards you, are now regrouping under the label of ‘Purple Labour’ where they will leave Glasman behind.[xi] Others will find provocative talk about Englishness and religion difficult to cope with (as, to some extent, do I).
There are also conceptual problems. At its core, Glasman’s thought is animated by the power of political movements - the energising and consciousness-raising effects of political and community action as well as the ethical experience they make possible. That’s fine, but such a politics, thriving when opposing the forces that threaten it, tends to find it harder to specify how official, government power should work, how the relations between persons on a macro-level can be administered. That generates unclarity about the state. For most social democrats the state is precisely the means through which communities protect themselves from markets. Glasman is critical of the ‘big state’, because he thinks that it weakens ethical community. That is not a ludicrous position to hold but a traditional social democrat would respond by saying that this is why democratising constitutional reform is so important. Some might feel that this defence has a practical clarity lacking in the general demand for community organising (although Labour itself is usually not much interested in either).
Secondly, and this point is made very well by Sally Davison in her contribution to The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, while overturning the idea that the market is natural Glasman seems to fall back on the notion of natural community.[xii] Mainstream Liberals will respond that, since not all communities are the same, there must be some more general criteria for distinguishing between the really ethical ones and the rest. The more radical will respond that all communities are also political constructions, often serving the interests of the few, and that politics should oppose this too. More importantly, from my point of view, in Glasman’s thinking organic community acts as a kind of deus ex machina in the struggle against commodification. Somehow, outside of the forces of capitalist enclosure, community remains, awaiting only organisation into the right form to carry out its redemptive mission. But that faith, I think, hinders deeper analysis of the balance of social, cultural and economic forces, the tendencies within them and the possible directions in which they might take things. Glasman may be right, and there is evidence for the claim, that the next phase in the history of political struggle will be centred on religious and other ethical communities united against the relativism of commodity capitalism. But I need more than an invocation of faith to convince me of this.
It seems to me that one of the things which Blue Labour has inadvertently proven is just how hard it is in England to think beyond the assumptions of the Liberal tradition. Probably, many think that a very good thing. But while the answers are not all there, Glasman has at least posed the challenging question of the common good. Belief that this question has an answer is what distinguishes ‘the left’ from everything else. The efforts to answer it constitute a tradition that needs to be remembered and in which Glasman may yet find his place.
This article first appeared on opendemocracy here
[i] http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/searchforthemastercopy/spanish-revolution-and-commons-tale-of-two-tweets
[ii] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/apr/24/blue-labour-maurice-glasman
[iii] here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/21/blue-labour-lord-glasman-conservative-socialism and here: http://www.leftfutures.org/2011/05/blue-will-never-be-the-new-red/
[iv] http://www.lishma.org.uk/index.php/articles/99-abraham-aristotle-and-alinsky-on-the-reconciliation-of-citizenship-and-faith-by-dr-maurice-glasman
[v] http://www.soundings.org.uk/
[vi] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/06/corporation-of-london-billingsgate-fish-porters?INTCMP=SRCH
[vii] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/03/blue-labour-openness-tradition-religion?
[viii] http://www.lishma.org.uk/index.php/articles/99-abraham-aristotle-and-alinsky-on-the-reconciliation-of-citizenship-and-faith-by-dr-maurice-glasman
[ix] http://www.progressives.org.uk/articles/article.asp?a=7981
[x] http://www.lishma.org.uk/index.php/articles/99-abraham-aristotle-and-alinsky-on-the-reconciliation-of-citizenship-and-faith-by-dr-maurice-glasman
[xi] http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2011/04/19/purple-bookers-try-to-revive-past-new-labour-glories/
Comments
on 15 June 2011, 8:14:43 AM
I am sure that this article, published in Italian, in Italy, cause mirth and was otherwise ignored. Well, now we have practical evidence of how ignorant Glasman is. The Italian Left which Glasman insulted, is on the move in a way that the British left could only dream of, defeating Berlusconi and his allies in the regional elections, and winning a major referendum against the privatisation of water and against nuclear power. You can read about them here:
httpCOLON//counterpunchDOTorg/ : Huge Victory in Italian Referendum
No! to Nuclear Power and Privatized Water
By MICHAEL LEONARDI
httpCOLON//wwwDOTcounterpunchDOTorg/kendrick06022011DOThtml
Miracle in Milan (and Naples)
By ROBERT L. KENDRICK
For anyone who wishes to suffer through the Glasman article, you can find it here (select the English version)
httpCOLON//wwwDOTeuropaquotidianoDOTit/dettaglio/127106/la_sinistra_in_blu_tra_picasso_e_miles_davis
We know Glasman makes things up. His history is crap. He certainly chose badly when he decided to lecture the Italian left.
on 13 June 2011, 7:52:00 PM
I rather think Ed Miliband will also fade into obscurity like his good friend Baron Mo'. If he does survive and faces Cameron in a national debate, its not the sort of thing you would want your children to watch. Newlabour DID decide to field Gordon Brown in the election, which looking back was a remarkably suicidal act. So maybe it will do the same again.
on 13 June 2011, 7:35:46 PM
In the event, Dr Finlayson provided the cheerleading piece. It did have the unconvincing swish of academic objectivity about it. But the way ground/role was shifted by the academic in response to postings rescued the piece from being just another post-it note in favour of something of which ‘new labour’ insiders with an eye to their claims to influence, approve.
If as you suggest, Maurice Glasman has disappeared by this time next year, it will be because Eband has been stabbed in the back by those now fawning over him and parliamentary colleagues currently showering him with coded praise
on 13 June 2011, 5:31:53 PM
Stan: Cute effort. I will give you one concession. There are on the left just as many raconteur opportunists as Glasman. However Glasman is attacked right across the political spectrum, and now that we have insights into his behaviour as well, it is clear that this is not what the Labour Party needs. I am confident that this time next year, he will have faded back into the obscurity from which he emerged.
on 13 June 2011, 3:07:12 PM
Once upon a time there were two brothers.And they competed for the laurels of leadership.The masses voted for one,but the priests for the other.
Even after the decision some refused to honour the winner.Many bit their lips and shook their heads,but accepted the priests' verdict for the greater good.Then the winner did strange things.He promoted to the inner ranks a rambling minstrel clad in blue,whose songs were discordant to the ears of several.
Your dilemma is that you bit your lip and showed loyalty for the greater good.My dilemma is that I supported a winner who is following skylarks cuckoos and bluebirds.
on 13 June 2011, 2:29:31 PM
The worst that can be said of him is that he is content to operate within the current hegemony; as much can be said of the liberal intelligentsia anyway. Moreover, he seems tactically distant from the bogus claims made by his friends above the Compass salt to be challenging the hegemony.
Glasman does indeed, ‘set himself above the sweaty mob.’ That’s the nature elite pluralism. In the early years of the Blair regime much was made of Communitarianism. Nothing came of it. But with the development of localism and its centrality to the further comodification of society, Communitarianism is taken serious by the elite as a means of keeping the development of working class politics away from an analysis of capitalism and state power. Glasman criticises Blair not for his commitment to expanding the pursuit of profit, but for not following through with communitarian policies of amelioration and reconciliation. In an earlier age he would have been one of those radical paternalistic Tories who opposed reactionary Tories and the Whigs with equal enthusiasm.
on 13 June 2011, 12:35:12 PM
Ultimately my concern is that it takes a herculean effort to change the world through words and actions. The efforts of the great change makers, William Wilberforce, Beveridge, Keynes, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, are astounding. They wrestled with contradictions and consciously and positively avoided the easy options of stringing together words that sounded extremely erudite but had little bearing on how things could be changed in the real world. One thinks of the mass of examples with which they littered their texts, to make absolutely sure the practical implications of their concepts are
understood. Great change makers strive to connect with people as they are not with people as they would like them to be and to show ways in which
ideas and concepts can be converted into real life and above all they are
prepared to make compromises to achieve their goal of improving the human condition.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have what I would call raconteur
philosophers, first or second-rate brains that enjoy demolishing any kind of received wisdom other than their own, sketching what they think are
interesting ideas rooted in obsolete ideologies and spicing them up with clever and sometimes nasty insults against those who do not fully follow their
own perspective, never setting out how we can from here to there. The anti-Glasmanites posting on this thread are typical of this breed. They set
themselves up above the sweaty mob and the sweaty compromises that
have to be made to achieve things in this world although they have no right
to do so, throwing out complex, indecipherable,ideological analysis and solutions which have proved to be outrageously unworkable in an effort,
above all, to seem to be superior to all those engaged in the hard work of improving the human condition starting from where we are at. Like Tracy Emin, they depend on like-minded others to elevate what they produces to levels of acclaim, and obscure contributors to the Compass threads are only too pleased to be of service.
on 12 June 2011, 6:37:29 PM
on 12 June 2011, 6:24:32 PM
On the other end of the spectrum, we have what I would call raconteur philosophers, second-rate brains that enjoy sketching what they think are interesting ideas they have picked up from somewhere else, and spicing them up with deliberately contrived and unexpected juxtapositions of ideas or words. Glasman is typical of this breed. He sets himself above the sweaty mob, although he has no right to do so, throwing out vague suggestions and outrageous history, in an effort, above all, to seem fascinating. Like Tracy Emin, he depends on others to elevate what he produces to levels of acclaim, and obscure academics like Finlayson are only too pleased to be of service.
If Glasman was a serious thinker with transformative ideas, there would be no need for "what does Glasman really mean" threads of this nature. I dont blame Glasman for trying. Why not ? If we are fool enough to be taken in, then its scarcely his fault. The history of ideas is littered with confidence tricks.
on 12 June 2011, 5:51:43 PM
I can see why it is politically necessary to seek to locate Maurice Glasman’s understanding of comodification firmly within the Marxist tradition and in terms of Glasman’s personal political dialectic, it probably once was. After all, for all that before its transformation into ‘new labour,’ Labour was reformist socialist; it also contained strands at least of Marxist analysis. Arguably in very much a politically marginal form it still does. Today’s Glasman appears to have retained an intellectual appreciation of Marxism and certainly finds it both stimulating culturally useful. It is not to diminish Glasman to make the unexceptional observation that that thousands of other thinkers whether or not they were on the Left, did and do find Marxism both stimulating and culturally useful. In this sense it is part of intellectual human capital. But that is surely quite different from the claim made by Mr Finlayson on behalf of Glasman that the latter, by a cultural attachment to the role of comodification, is in any purposive sense recognisably socialist in his politics. On behalf of Glasman Mr. Finlayson hopes, - as it were, - to pass off a yoking together for a synthesis.
One of the intellectual differences between Labour’s Left and Right neo-liberals, (in possibly crude shorthand, Compass and Progress,) is that the Right are much more confident and honest in the way they look to the Right in developing ideas and policies. But look just a little deeper: both Left and Right appear to be, (and are in practice,) much more comfortable in discerning, making and cultivating overtly rightwing, pro market and conservative links and ties as the basis of a common culture than Glasman’s sense of moral repellence towards the consequences of comodification and Compass’s elite serving holy text, ‘The Good Society,’ might at first imply. In the context of Labour neo-liberalism there appears to be the emergence of a 21st century Edmond Burkeanism in which ‘The Good Society’ and more certainly Glasman’s understanding of comodification, are firmly located. In passing, the attempt to press GDH Cole and all that he stands for, in defence of Glasman is splendidly inventive. But it is mere assertion; part of the yoking together process Mr Finlayson wants to pass off as a synthesis. In opposition to this 21st century Burkeanism within Labour neo-liberalism, we have a less conservative, (but in ‘new labour’ terms not necessarily less ‘progressive’) commitment to the role of the market in driving forward politics and civil society. It is this less conservative grouping and ideology within Labour neo-liberalism, with whom those centred on Eband and his ideologist Glasman are in internal conflict.
Alan Findlayson says that he cannot see how it is that Maurice Glasman is a neo-liberal. Whilst Glasman’s rhetorical and moral interpretation of comodification is far from being an indication of even reformist socialism, it does not necessarily follow that because he is politically and ideologically a supporter of capitalism, (admittedly a critical one but surely capitalism’s own dialectic makes critics at sometime of all its supporters; as socialism’s dialectic surely also does of all of its supporters,) it does not instrumentally follow that Glasman is a neo-liberal.
The difficulty for the supporters of capitalism, (and Glasman makes it crystal clear that he is a supporter of capitalism,) is that in a very advanced capitalist state, with the most open economy in the world, they have no wriggle room; no material basis upon which to backup even the loudest assertions that they are not neo-liberals. If Glasman et al were making such claims from say Russia or even Italy; from say Paraguay or Swaziland, they might just have an arguable case to make.
But to return to the UK. Look at the restructuring of the economy and society. Longer lines of production, shorter runs of production; the weakness of collectivism; the emergence of powerful anti-collectivist elements in the middle class; the market driven emancipation of men and women like Maurice Glasman from the class imperatives of socialist solidarity between workers by hand and by brain. Now people like Maurice Glasman are part of a plurality of elites at once competitive with each other and in real solidarity with each other. Arguably this solidarity is stronger than ever was the earlier petty bourgeois intellectual, the earlier Maurice Glasman or whomsoever’s solidarity with fellow workers who were workers by hand.
I see Lee’s contempt for the claims to the common good. Certainly the Common Ground has real material foundations in comparison to which the windy rhetoric about the common good has none. Nonetheless it has some ideological purchase and is of course no more virtuous, no more disinterested than a soiree in Maurice Glasman’s drawing room, a benefits review, or a policeman’s baton.
on 12 June 2011, 3:47:29 PM
****************************************************************
I completely agree. The key issue is to confront Newlabour's unqualified support for the neo-liberal agenda which Blair adopted from Thatcher. Whether one or other faction of Blairism or Brownism is milimetres more progressive than the other, really doesnt matter. Most of the debate we have here is about inconsequential tiny nuances of difference among the various Newlabour factions. We need to begin to do some straight thinking.
The model is really quite simple. The political spectrum in Britain has contracted to a single tranche in which all three main parties share the same commitment to neo-liberal perpetual economic growth, which has the effect of intensifying income and wealth differences, results in massive household debt, and creates constant economic instability that causes unemployment. This model doesnt work. There will be no "RECOVERY", which all three parties refer to constantly, disagreeing only mildly on how to attain it. There may be periods in which the economy is slightly less dislocated, short spurts of temporary employment, but the relentless stagnation and gradual deterioration will continue as the main trend. And alongside, we have intensified the rate at which we are poisoning the atmosphere and the earth, which will end in catastrophe, and increasing misery for those caught in floods, hurricanes, and drought.
What the three parties offer does not address, even marginally, what is needed in the way of a radical transformation away from futile efforts at perpetual growth, towards a sustainable world in which wealth and assets are more justly distributed, and uncontrolled consumer mania and debt is replaced by responsible, more collective living.
One can call the path to that transition "socialism" if one is orthodox and is of that persuasion. But somehow or another it has to come, or our civilisation vanishes, with an increasingly painful trajectory to that point.
Against this backdrop, the differences between Osborne and Ed Balls is microscopic. Both are light years away from even comprehending the problems, let alone having the intellectual capacity to determine solutions. What we need is not a return of Newlabour at Westminster as opposed to the Coalition because we wont be saved by swapping Tweedledum for Tweedledee.
The 100 odd posts on this thread have been largely wasted in a pointless diversion. Bluelabour and Glasman are irrelevant to the real social and economic problems we face, and the academic analysis and debate here was vacuous and irrelevant too. The tragedy Britain faces is that Tony Blair effectively destroyed the Labour Party, or wounded it savagely. It has never recovered and is, as is apparent in the debate about Bluelabour, lost in weeds so deep, it doesnt even know when the sun is shining. WE have a double tragedy. Unlike the rest of Europe, which has (an albeit weakening) left-wing political sector, the Labour Party is pretty well all that Britain has. That is why the Labour Party has to be reclaimed.
That is a massive battle, not only because Blairism and Brownism Newlabour has hegemonic control of the Party, but because those who claim, like Compass, to be committed to reforming the party, have never been willing to recognise, concede and state how badly Labour has deteriorated, and the terrible condition it is in. You cant reform if you dont tell the truth about what needs to be reformed.
When Dugsie calls for "A Real Labour Project", the word "real" applies twice. He calls for a REAL PROJECT to reclaim and rebuild REAL LABOUR, not some pathetic charade like Bluelabour championed by idiot third-rate academics. What is happening in Labour right now, and alas Compass is part of it, is a circus. Its not real and it wont lead to real change. In the wee dark hours of the night, Neal Lawson knows that. What will it take to muster up the courage to admit that ever since Blair took control, no serious, competent, properly grounded effort has been made to reclaim the party, and what are announced as reform efforts are increasingly frivolous, and (in the case of Bluelabour and Glasmanism) insulting.
I know only too well how determined the vested interests are to maintain and continue the charade of fake reform, so that they can remain at the helm. I know that it is impossible to have any meaningful dialogue with people like Cruddas and Glasman, because they want to conserve what is there. Without it they would have no perch.
So, if anyone is wondering why I (and others) were so aggressive in our treatment of Glasman, that is the reason. We dont like being duped, especially in such a crass and open fashion. Its an insult, and we are not willing to be complicit in playing games to keep the vested interests on their perch. We need to grow up and be serious. There are terrible prospects awaiting this country unless there is a fundamental change in our complacently right-wing politics, and the start of talking the truth to power. I hope that this appeal will strike at least one cord in Neal's heart in the wee dark hours of the morning when he tells the truth to himself.
On Glasman, please turn around and see what you have got into bed with. Its ugly, cynical, and the longer you stay in bed, the more you will regret it.
on 12 June 2011, 3:06:21 PM
on 12 June 2011, 1:28:57 PM
on 12 June 2011, 12:33:13 PM
These are interesting extracts you post. However, you edited the Economist article, removing all the parts which indicate the broader political context (in essence the Economist endorsing Locality because it is more charitable and paternalistic than London Citizens which is political and rejecting Glasman for being too close to activist politics).
Your other post is not a statement ‘from’ London Citizens but a petition to be sent ‘to’ them.
There is an issue underneath all this worth discussing (it's about strategies in response to the Big Society agenda, going along with it in the hope of doing some good as Locality has or opposing it in terms that the press will use against you as Glasman has). However, you and I will not be discussing it.
I pointed out several posts ago that you had made up some quotations, which you presented as Glasman’s and demanded I justify. Your response to this - the comment of 5:48 on June 11th - neither explains nor apologises for this.
It is often hard to establish common ground on which to have meaningful discussion: it requires mutual generosity, patience and kindness. It cannot be achieved where there is dishonesty and "bad faith".
I’m done.
Alan
on 11 June 2011, 9:16:37 PM
"Blue Labour founder: “Labour should involve EDL supporters”
by Don Paskini
April 21, 2011
Lord Maurice Glasman, founder of “Blue Labour”:
1. Labour lied about immigration and should recognise that is not the case that everyone who comes to Britain should have equal status with people who were born here. Labour needs to involve people who support the English Defence League within the party as a way of reconnecting with working-class people.
2. In order to do this, Labour should adopt the community organising approach which led London Citizens to mobilise people to call for several hundred thousand illegal immigrants to be given British citizenship.
3. “Blue Labour’s” plan for persuading the Labour Party to adopt a grassroots-led approach and reconnect with working-class people will be via its founder becoming a member of the Leader’s inner circle and a member of the House of Lords, and through contributing to pamphlets published by the Blairite “Progress” pressure group.
If this sounds confused and incoherent – it is. Actually, I think it is nastier than that.
Lord Glasman got his peerage mainly as a result of his work with London Citizens. The success of London Citizens is due, in large part, to migrant workers.
Community organisers who have come to the UK from Colombia, Poland and other countries around the world; minimum wage workers who gave testimonies which moved the powerful to tears and then to act; leaders who mobilised hundreds and thousands to march and take action; inspirational people who built relations and campaigned together for social justice regardless of their country of birth.
Yet Glasman now, apparently, believes that these people should not have equal status with people born in Britain, and that Labour should seek ways to involve the small handful of violent thugs, racists and criminals who support the English Defence League, even though the EDL are detested by an overwhelming majority of working-class people.
It’s always a really bad sign when you find people with a bright new idea who urge Labour to do one thing, and then do the opposite themselves. “Blue Labour” urges Labour to be about reconnecting with working-class people, using relational community organising principles to build up from the grassroots.
Say what you like about Phillip Blond and the Red Tories, but at least he didn’t build his career on the back of the efforts of migrant workers and then turn round and demand that his party acknowledge that migrants don’t deserve equal status with native British workers.
Rather than telling us about their interesting policy ideas, supporters of Blue Labour should try a bit of put up or shut up."
on 11 June 2011, 8:53:47 PM
"NO TO ENGLISH DEFENCE LEAGUE RACISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA
“To build a party that brokers a common good, that involves those people who support the EDL [English Defence League] within our party” (– Lord Maurice Glasman, London Citizens Leader, Founder of Blue Labour)
London Citizens is a partnership of over a hundred and sixty mosques, churches, synagogues, schools, universities and trades unions, which for years has fought to defend the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers, the poorest, and most vulnerable in society.
However, London Citizens and Citizens UK have now become infiltrated and publicly associated with “Blue Labour” – a right-wing tendency in the Labour Party which in an effort to win right-wing anti-immigrant votes preaches that the Labour Party should engage with supporters of the racist, Islamophobic English Defence League, and that it is not the case that “everyone who comes is equal and has an equal status with people who are here” (Lord Glasman)
We are the Citizens of London and of Britain and we did not vote to allow London Citizens to betray us in this way. We demand that the Management and Trustees of London Citizens and Citizens UK:
1. Publicly and clearly condemn the statements of Lord Glasman, London Citizens leader, concerning engagement with English Defence League supporters, and instead affirm clearly that Islamophobia and racism is always to be opposed, never appeased
2. Publicly and clearly reject the “Blue Labour” position on accepting inequality between immigrants and native-born British people, but rather that London Citizens and Citizens UK will always fight for scrupulous equality of provision for all people in this country
3. Publicly and clearly return to the strict separation of London Citizens and Citizens UK as civil society standing totally apart from political parties, making politicians accountable, and that London Citizens and Citizens UK removes all Blue Labour party politicians from positions of leadership in both these organisations"
on 11 June 2011, 8:45:38 PM
From the Economist:
The row was triggered by Maurice Glasman, an academic and political campaigner behind the traditionalist, anti-globalisation Blue Labour movement. Professor Glasman was recently sent to sit in the House of Lords as a life peer by his friend Ed Miliband, the Labour leader. He was giving evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee of the House of Commons, and during his evidence launched into a group, Locality, which has been awarded a big government contract to train community workers.
According to an account from Third Sector magazine, Lord Glasman told a committee hearing on the Big Society:
Community organising is based on working-class people taking action and having power. The government's contract for its community organising programme explicitly said it wanted this model to be adopted, but then the government gave the contract to Locality, a paternalist, eat-your-vegetables-and-don't-smoke type of organisation. Locality has no experience of training people from within deprived communities. They are well-intentioned busybodies; that's what they have always been.
Lord Glasman, the Third Sector report adds, seemed particularly cross that the government had not given the contract to the charity London Citizens, with which he has worked closely, because this would have risked triggering confrontation, saying:
Once there was a realisation that real community organising would lead to a genuine mayhem, messiness and conflict, they gave the contract to the toffs.
Does Ed Miliband agree with his adviser Lord Glasman? Does he think that middle-class community organisers should take a back seat to more authentically angry activists keen on stirring up "mayhem, messiness and conflict"? This is a live issue for the left, and for the young opposition leader. Think of his disastrous address to a well-behaved trade union rally against the coalition government's spending cuts, at which he hosed down the crowd in Hyde Park with flattery, telling them they walked in the footsteps of the civil rights movement in America ..............
A final question strikes me. What does Lord Glasman make of the wealthy, highly-educated professional woman who recently decided the best way of inspiring a group of schoolgirls from a tough London school was to invite them to lunch in the hall at Christ Church, a grand Oxford college and to urge them to believe in themselves and aspire to an Oxford education, before giving each a farewell hug? Bagehot found himself moved by news reports of the event, as it happens, and above all by the excited reactions of the girls to the mentor in question, Michelle Obama (snatching a few hours from her husband's state visit to Britain to meet the schoolgirls in Oxford)."
on 11 June 2011, 8:22:51 PM
on 11 June 2011, 8:08:15 PM
"Lord Glasman, the "Blue Labour" strategist, who has branded Locality, the charity that won the contract to deliver the government's £15m community organising programme "well-intentioned busybodies". Third Sector reports that Glasman told the Public Administration Select Committee inquiry on the big society:
"Community organising is based on working-class people taking action and having power.The government's contract for its community organising programme explicitly said it wanted this model to be adopted, but then the government gave the contract to Locality, a paternalist, eat-your-vegetables-and-don't-smoke type of organisation.Locality has no experience of training people from within deprived communities."
On her blog, Locality's Jess Steele responds:
"...either you're just pretending and poking us to create conflict because you're so bitter and cross that we presented an alternative, collaborative approach to community organising, or you're so ignorant (in all senses) that you don't know what the real world holds, out there beyond Shoreditch."
Toby Blume, meanwhile, adds:
"Lord Glasman is a now a close advisor to Ed Miliband and the leading proponent of 'Blue Labour' – a response to Phillip Blond's Red Tory idea and an attempt to reassert the Left's ownership of key Big Society ideas like mutualism – makes his comments even more disturbing. If the Labour leadership's idea of creating a 'new politics' is to attack national charities with a strong track record of supporting local community action and enterprise, then they are in an even bigger hole than the polls suggest. Ed Miliband would be well advised to distance himself from these comments and consider looking beyond the usual suspects for some progressive thinking."
on 11 June 2011, 5:56:21 PM
drumming up ticket sales for Maurice "Blue Boy" Glasman against all-comers.Then you transformed into a firm but fair referee cautioning against low blows.At one point you were Glasman's tag partner against Lee and Dugsie.Then you were a judge revealing your scorecard on the intricate middle rounds where Paul was ducking and weaving in his crafty southpaw style.Finally you are transmogrifying into a ringside commentator claiming to give an authoritative analysis of the carnage so far.When the boo boys of the EDL object to the verdict and start hurling chairs maybe you and Maurice will emerge in security garb to talk them down with ideas in common.But I think you ought to warn Stan for shadow boxing,his posts are powder puff stuff compared to the usual fierce jabs.I'm sure Angela and I will be queuing for your next scheduled event,"Cool Labour vs. Post New Labour"."This time it's ...
on 11 June 2011, 5:48:46 PM
Just let me point out that this "hater" of the British Labour tradition was a member of the Labour Party while you were in nappies. I do not consider either Glasman or Purnell as being representative in any way of British Labour tradition. If you do, I offer my sympathy and regrets.
I honestly dont care a damn what you think about me as an interlocutor, just as I am sure you arent interested in my views about you as an interlocutor. I read and studied a lot of Glasman and read many reviews before your article was posted here. It would be utterly illogical of me to make up my mind "in advance" given that I am passionately committed to the reclaiming of Labour, which has always been my party. If Glasman was the way forward, I would have celebrated it. Even you dont seem to think that he is, so why are your knickers in a twist ?
on 11 June 2011, 5:03:20 PM
*********************************************************
How Baron Glasman treats fellow community activists:
"How dare the Lord?
Posted on May 25, 2011 by jesssteele
Recently enobled Lord Glasman, of ‘Blue Labour’ fame, allegedly let fire some insults in the Palace of Westminster today:
@kayewiggins @tobyblume Glasman calls Locality “toffs” – says real comm organising would create “conflict and mayhem”
Kayewiggins: Maurice Glasman being v critical of Locality’s comm organising contract. Calls Locality “paternalistic” and “well intentioned busybodies”.
As an unelected peer of the realm in an overstuffed second chamber, this is a direct insult to every member of the movement of grassroots community organisations connecting hundreds of thousands of people rooted in real communities all over the country.
Locality is a solidarity network of community-led organisations in some of the most deprived areas of the country from the Outer Hebrides to the tip of Cornwall, from Hastings to Hull, Cumbria to Camberwell, working with an average of 267,000 people every week. Every type of place you can find in this country has its response in an enterprising local organisation, with the ambition to be imaginative and resilient, to meet local needs today and in the long term.
They’d be pretty amused to be called ‘toffs’, especially by a member of the House of Lords! As a membership organisation, Locality is led by our 600+ members, with more joining every week. We represent their views and our key decisions are made by them, so the name-calling is simply inaccurate.
You dare to be so obnoxious because you think it’s your duty to create conflict, but while your insults slide off the duck’s back, your approach to organising – “rubbing the resentments raw”, generating “conflict and mayhem” – could be seriously dangerous to communities themselves. What happened to Alinsky’s rule that “the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative”?
Community Organisers is about bringing communities together, building relationships and trust, helping people develop the skills and confidence to tackle issues that matter to them. With madness in the financial sector, welfare sliced by billions and local services in shreds, why would anybody want to create more ‘mayhem’? We want to tap into the things people actually care about, not what lords tell them or politicians hand down. We want to build on some of the fantastic work already being done in local communities and support local people to make neighbourhoods better, fairer places to live.
So either you’re just pretending and poking us to create conflict because you’re so bitter and cross that we presented an alternative, collaborative approach to community organising, or you’re so ignorant (in all senses) that you don’t know what the real world holds, out there beyond Shoreditch.
We’re all glad about the campaign for the Living Wage. Who wouldn’t be? Talk about Motherhood & Apple Pie: a straight ask, well sought, well fought, and we all owe Citizens UK for that. Everyone will always be grateful, glad and inspired. But if Ed Miliband thought he was rewarding that great people’s campaign, he may have chosen badly in enobling the Billy Bunter of the movement.
‘Blue Labour’ has something to offer in re-colouring a story some of us have been living for decades and Ed has known for years, but if it’s going to insult the places that do exactly what you’re talking about, you’ll just be the name-calling bully in the playground.
We’ll show you what solidarity looks like. Locality is a network of actual, real-life community organisations and they do not appreciate your loose talk in the Palace.
Locality members and friends will no doubt tell Lord Glasman and his patrons what they think of his insults. For now, I’m going to get some sleep and live to make another day worthwhile… "
on 11 June 2011, 5:00:28 PM
On the concept of the common good: the question at hand is not what the common good is; that can only be addressed in a specific context, to a specific question or problem. The question is the general one of whether or not there is such as thing as the common good. A defining feature of “neo-liberalism” is that it rejects the very idea. It is against the acceptance of that within new Labour (and the loss of the principle in politics more broadly) that Glasman has mobilised. That is ideologically significant but I suspect that the moment will pass, and not least because so many of the left are eager to kill it off (as also are you).
With regard to the two quotations you have provided. Thank you for these.
Before we talk about them further perhaps you could indicate their sources so that we can explore their context. The first two sentences of the first one are from his essay in The Politics of Paradox but are not followed by the words you have quoted. I did not recognise the second quotation so I googled it. Google came up with just one link, which is unusual. This was to a discussion forum where you had posted these words as your own summary of Glasman’s essay. That is, they are your words and not his. Why would you do that?
I find that on that discussion forum you have written a long explanation of why it is important to be rigorous and not to attack people but only their arguments. How does that square with publishing an invented dialogue which, instead of addressing what someone actually said, makes fun of it in a demonstration of deep-seated anti-intellectualism and hatred of the British labour tradition? And how does it square with your sarcasm in response to Glasman’s excellent example of Barcelona and Man Utd.? By your own standards you ought to bring forward a rigorous analytical explanation of why Barcelona football club ought to be sold to private investors and why this would enable it to do better.
I am getting the impression that you are not an honest interlocutor; that you have decided in advance what you will think and nothing will move you from it; that in response to any thought out remarks you will either make things up or retreat into trying to mock people for having read books that you haven't.
on 11 June 2011, 4:43:50 PM
I think your credibility is shot, sir, whoever you are behind the mask of anonymity....ironic isnt it ?
on 11 June 2011, 4:34:15 PM
"At a fringe meeting, Labour MP Chuka Umunna insisted, “I want a good capitalism that works—not one where you are pitching worker against employer.”
on 11 June 2011, 4:26:19 PM
On the concept of the common good: the question at hand is not what the common good is; that can only be addressed in a specific context, to a specific question or problem. The question is the general one of whether or not there is such as thing as the common good. A defining feature of “neo-liberalism” is that it rejects the very idea. It is against the acceptance of that within new Labour (and the loss of the principle in politics more broadly) that Glasman has mobilised. That is ideologically significant but I suspect that the moment will pass, and not least because so many of the left are eager to kill it off (as also are you).
With regard to the two quotations you have provided. Thank you for these.
Before we talk about them further perhaps you could indicate their sources so that we can explore their context. The first two sentences of the first one are from his essay in The Politics of Paradox but are not followed by the words you have quoted. I did not recognise the second quotation so I googled it. Google came up with just one link, which is unusual. This was to a discussion forum where you had posted these words as your own summary of Glasman’s essay. That is, they are your words and not his. Why would you do that?
I find that on that discussion forum you have written a long explanation of why it is important to be rigorous and not to attack people but only their arguments. How does that square with publishing an invented dialogue which, instead of addressing what someone actually said, makes fun of it in a demonstration of deep-seated anti-intellectualism and hatred of the British labour tradition? And how does it square with your sarcasm in response to Glasman’s excellent example of Barcelona and Man Utd.? By your own standards you ought to bring forward a rigorous analytical explanation of why Barcelona football club ought to be sold to private investors and why this would enable it to do better.
I am getting the impression that you are not an honest interlocutor; that you have decided in advance what you will think and nothing will move you from it; that in response to any thought out remarks you will either make things up or retreat into trying to mock people for having read books that you haven't.
on 11 June 2011, 4:12:29 PM
on 11 June 2011, 4:02:38 PM
J: So, I see someone called Robert Tinker has just published something on that Bluelabour stuff on Open Democracy
E: Yes, read it, took a paracetamol and opened a lager.
J: So what does it say ?
E: You know, lots of words, usual kind of Pseuds Corner material, but in essence, I think there were two central messages.
Firstly, Glasman, he's thr toff prof that made this stuff up...he doesnt think Labour should promote stuff like justice or fairness, because they are too theoretical..you dont know what they mean in actual practice.
J: Fair enough, so what does he propose in their place ?
E: He wants something called the Ethics of the Common Good, made up by a bloke called Tawney.
J: So what does that mean when its at home ?
E: Doesnt say.
J: So its just as theoretical and abstract ?
E: Seems so. But then he says this Common Good stuff should be applied in actual real life where people are living.
J: So whay cant justice and fairness be applied in actual life where people are living ?
E: 'Cause apparently, justice and fairness are universal abstractions.
J: Well, if they are right, I cant see what is wrong with them being universal, and if they are applied in actual life where people are living, they wouldnt be abstractions, would they ?
E: You've got a point. Search me, apparently for some reason the Ethics of the Common Good are better. Probably because some top prof made them up, and Labour wants to seem better connected with great thinkers.
J: So does Tinker say anything else ?
E: Yeah, he goes on about how important tradition is and how it is inherently conservative, but that that is what Labour should be based on.
J: Like the Tories believe ?
E: Yeah, well here it gets a bit tricksy-like. The Labour version will be "conservative" spelt with a small "c" rather than a big "C".
J: And that makes a difference ? Surely if Labour works by tradition, then nothing changes and we all remain as badly off as we are now, except that there is a difference in the spelling ?
E: Yeah, well you see, tradition doesnt apparently have to be static. It can be dynamic, and deal with people's actual grievances and look at future options.
J: So why call it "tradition" then ? Surely anyone can say "this is the tradition, but that is what we should do, as close to the tradition as possible" ?
E: Yeah, that is what I think "dynamic tradition" is.
J: Sort of like common-sense. Like we all have our traditions, dont we, but its time something is done about X, so we work out what to do ?
E: That is how I would read it, but its apparently a very profound idea, and someone called Alasdair MacIntyre writes whole books about this stuff.
J: And that's it ?
E: Well, Tinker just ended by saying it was all about working out how to make capitalism socially acceptable. So it sounds like business as usual to me. So that's it for now. Maybe they will have another article next week. Cheers....my round.
on 11 June 2011, 3:39:41 PM
on 11 June 2011, 3:16:12 PM
I am a Marxist, not an orthodox one, but I agree broadly with Marx's writings on commodification. Glasman believes that one can achieve "decommodified and autonomous labour" within capitalism; you, Paul and I agree that it cant be done. As Glasman offers no explanation for a frequently repeated statement, it is reasonable to conclude that its not a serious proposition, and that in this instance he is not offering anything of value, regardless of whether its a phrase Marx used. Marx too would have said that commodification is inherent to capitalism.
We have established by the quotations I offered, that Glasman not only sees no need to challenge capitalism, but only its excesses. He also has a bizarre problem telling the difference between capitalism and socialism. So we know that he does not believe in radical transformation despite the fact that he rather embarrassingly applies the word "radical" to himself. He has attacked both the Left and the Right of the labour movement, and that fixes him in the centre I assume. He speaks (completely inaccurately) about the labour movement not being interested in violent class conflict. He wants "a common good" for everyone, not just for workers. I think it is quite reasonable on that basis to say that he is advocating political accommodation within the current system, with activism used to DEFEND local communities rather than ADVANCE workers rights on a national scale. That is the big disagreement Stuart has with him.
OK, so none of that proves Glasman is a neo-liberal. He does say quite a few times that he is not. That doesnt mean that he is not, either. Just asserting something with no further analysis isnt proof or inherently convincing. I would not, based on what I have read of his, be able to say with certainty that Glasman is a neo-liberal; but only that he is content to accommodate the neo-liberal system, or offers no practical or understandable strategies for changing neo-liberalism. My guess is (and its a guess) is that if pressed, he would say he is against the "excesses" of neo-liberalism. But I hope Paul picks up this challenge and explains the basis on which he is confident that Glasman is a neo-liberal.
You speak of my "hostility to the thought that there might be a common good". I dont believe I have ever expressed such hostility in the terms you state. I expressed the perception that the way Glasman peppers his work with the phrase, allows him to escape responsibility for explaining what his goals are and how they can be achieved. That may not be a conscious strategy on his part, but it may be. Its not as if "common good" is an afterthought in his work. Its the lynch-pin around which all of his interpretation of history and "radical" change orbits (I guess things dont orbit around lynch-pins, but what the hell!) Its the equivalent to a big build up, after which you announce that it will all depend on "factor x", or "good neighbourliness", or "being fair". That reduces his writings to a self-parody.
"Common good" is an archaic and rather trite concept. We now like in a global world of massive corporate power, neo-liberal hegemony, impending climate catastrophe, in which there can be no change in just one country because of the massive interconnectedness of things. If you have a lynch-pin principle, it needs to be unpacked, explained within the context of our global economic system (not merely on the basis of small communities). Jesus had the "Good News", which was a revolutionary and radical idea that God was actually intervening in the affairs of humans and would show the way to a world which the meek would inherit. That had some power in enemy occupied Palestine fighting for its liberation. "The Common Good", the way Glasman uses it, offers me nothing at all. I dont know whether that means doing the best you can "the greater good for the greater number", which is a pragmatic vision; or whether it implies standards that have to be reached for everyone. I dont know how it is measured, what changes it implies, and therefore whether its even feasible. Without further elaboration, its no better than "hope you can believe in" or any similar thought candy. If its just a religious sort of idea like charity, he should say so.
That is why I called it the "huge cop out at the centre of his thinking". Maybe it would have been better if I had called it "the gaping hole" as we dont know what Glasman intends when he writes or whether he even has a coherent idea of what he believes.
on 11 June 2011, 1:52:28 PM
on 11 June 2011, 1:37:14 PM
Paul expressed the view that Glasman is a neo-liberal. That doesn’t seem right to me. I cannot find him saying things that can be sensibly understood as belonging within the framework of neo-liberal ideology. In fact he says things that are completely incompatible with it. That includes his critique of commodification which is deeply embedded in the Marxist tradition. You call this a justification but on its own it is neither that nor a criticism. It is simply a fact. It would be a justification if one accepted Marx’s critique of commodification which you, evidently, do not. I think that maybe Paul does but also that maybe Paul has a particular interpretation of it which he finds to be in contradiction with Glasman. I therefore asked him to say more – not in order to get at him or trick him or anything. I asked him because I’d like to know. I’d like to talk about it with him some more because I think that if we did we’d both come out of it knowing more and thinking better.
You have also specifically asked (or ‘challenged’) me to say more about “decommodified and autonomous labour”. Well, actually you’ve asked me to tell you about Glasman’s understanding. I’ve already done that, in the form of a 3000 word essay. If you read that essay you will see that it is almost entirely an explication of Glasman’s statement: “Resistance to commodification through democratic organisation. That's the position”. That is a fairly straightforward and well established sort of politics but, evidently, lots of people were confused by Glasman and put off by the reporting of it. It seemed to me worthwhile putting into the public domain a straightforward explanation of where Glasman is coming from; where in the broad ecology of Western political thinking a statement like that comes from.
So I don’t think I really need to say more about his politics and, as I said, it is not for me to justify it to you. You could ask me to imagine the sorts of justifications I might give if his were my politics. But while that would have some interest as an intellectual exercise it does not have enough for me to do it just because you demand it of me in a peculiarly mean tone.
What I can do is tell you more about what these terms mean in general since they are fairly well established within some political communities. There is far more written about them than can be summarized here so I will be brief and where you want to know more you can ask and, if you like, I can refer you to further reading.
Marx’s theory of capitalist society is built around an investigation of the concept of the commodity – in brief, the process by which we have come to think of the products of our labour not as things we made but as autonomous objects endowed with a value that is exchangeable for other autonomous objects. Marx wonders at the idolatory of this (he calls it fetishism) and seeks to show how at the heart of this is a concealment of the exploitation of labour, its commodification and thus the separation of labour from life and its subordination to the system as a whole. How that is concealed, how the concealment is maintained and its effects are a central (I would claim that they are the central) theme of Capital Vol. 1. The ethical dimension of this (which is also intimated in earlier work by Marx) is found in his hostility to the treatment of people as things and their alienation from the products of their own labour, from their labour itself and from themselves. That leads on to Marx’s politics which are, as is well known, the revolutionary transformation of society into one where labour is not a commodity, which entails the liberation (or autonomy) of the worker: power of his/her own labour through collective ownership. Labour that is not commodified has value in itself and as itself rather than only having it in so far as it can be exploited.
Now, you then ask me how such decommodified and autonomous labour can be compatible with capitalism. I don’t think it can be. I am not sure why you are asking me. In fact I asked that question of Paul. I asked it of him because he made the case that Glasman should be thought of as ideologically neo-liberal. Neo-Liberal ideology and the decommodification of labour are not – as far as I can see – compatible. But Paul is critical of Glasman for being a neo-liberal. That is why I asked him to say more about his reasons for thinking that Glasman’s advocacy of decommodification is compatible with capitalism.
You ask for historical examples of the compatibility of decommodified and autonomous labour with capitalism. Again, I don’t know of any, and you’d have to ask Paul. I guess that one could find Trotskyists who might be understood as saying that Soviet state-capitalism didn’t treat labour as a commodity, but I can’t imagine one thinking that labour in the USSR was autonomous.
There are of course lots of examples of political projects that have tried or claimed to organise production on the basis of non-commodification and the autonomy of labour. I am guessing from your previous remarks (and in particular your hostility to the thought that there might be a common good) that you find all of these attempts as objectionable as you find Glasman but we can talk about them more if you wish.
on 11 June 2011, 12:09:30 PM
on 11 June 2011, 12:02:08 PM
**************************************************************
Two Glasman quotations regarding capitalism:
"The economic and democratic regeneration of local economies requires a reciprocal partnership between capital, state and society. You could call it socialism in one county. Socialism is a condition of sustainable capitalism, in that universities, schools, libraries, vocational institutions, the rule of law and democracy, all provide public goods that are necessary for its flourishing and growth."
"Efforts to directly confront and fight capitalism are irrational, because capitalism has brought huge benefits to the English working class. Its the excesses of capitalism, especially the speculative side of finance capitalism, that has brought the misery. And Trade Union radical responses have been unhelpful. Corporations are not by any means inevitably exploitative, although some are. What is needed is not an alternative to capitalism, but a capitalism regulated according to the principles of the Common Good."
****************************************************************
The first statement is patently bizarre and largely meaningless. But it does imply an acceptance of the principles of what Glasman mysteriously calls "sustainable capitalism". That too is an absurd concept. If its not sustainable, it vanishes; so by definition, all capitalism that persists is in some way sustainable.
The second comment is a declaration against left-wing critiques of capitalism. He apparently decides what are excesses, and which corporate acts are exploitative. He offers no principles other than "the Common Good" which is an excuse for not offering any principles and is ultimately the huge cop-out at the centre of his thinking.
When and why do we take a political philosopher seriously ? It is easy for a philosopher to say whatever he thinks is intriguing or popular, or panders to a particular group. We decide that he may be serious if his declaration fits into a broader strategy in which actions, albeit not necessarily specified in detail, are apparent. The statement also has to have logical feasibility.
Here is Finlayson's justification for taking Glasman seriously:
"His critique of commodification is very squarely in line with a long tradition of moral opposition and, of course, deeply indebted to the critique of the commodity around which Marx built his later economic theory."
Well, people are speaking Marxist traditional opposition to aspects of capitalism all the time. The fact that Glasman does so is of no special interest because its so common. The fact that the tradition may be there, is no indication that Glasman understands it, and it cant be used as a legitimization that Glasman is really serious about commodification. So that part of the defense can be quickly dispensed with.
"Are you suggesting that Glasman's goal of decommodified and autonomous labour is compatible with capitalism in a way that is unacceptable? "
We dont even know what Glasman's goal of "decommodified and autonomous labour" is. He hasnt described it beyond labels, and Finlayson hasnt explained it. So it remains an unsubstantiated assertion, and therefore cannot rank very highly in terms of seriousness.
Why does Finlayson ask the question in such a strange way. It makes it almost impossible to answer it. Is this intentional ? What is wrong with the question:
"Are you suggesting that Glasman's goal of decommodified and autonomous labour is incompatible with capitalism ? "
So, here is another challenge for you Alan: You explain what "decommodified and autonomous labour is, and how it can be compatible with capitalism. Any historical examples will be much appreciated.
I am not actually expecting you to take up this challenge; but you can always surprise me.
on 11 June 2011, 11:03:32 AM
Paul is always clear, coherent and consistent. If that is 'hard left' let us please have some more of it. He doesn't use terms like 'the good society' which may mean all things to all people. He is outside the advertising consensus of New Labour, Tory and Lib Dem and represents something more real in the tradition of the Labour Movement. We need t return to that if we are ever to find our way again.
on 11 June 2011, 10:37:37 AM
Alan
on 11 June 2011, 10:36:05 AM
In response to a question a couple of days ago from "Dugsie" - these things are not written for other academics. Academics have to publish specialist work for an audience of specialist peers and they do so in obscure specialist journals that are hard to find. Other things are written for whoever wishes to read them.
Paul Maclean (and I must say I respect you greatly for being one of the few here not to hide behind anonymity) raises some interesting points. My argument in the essay was that Labour will be interested in the centre ground and thus Glasman will be too much for it. I am interested in why you see him as part of the centre ground himself. I wonder if you could say more about why you think of Glasman as committed to capitalism in the way you describe? I can only go by what he has said and written in public and I don't find that there. His critique of commodification is very squarely in line with a long tradition of moral opposition and, of course, deeply indebted to the critique of the commodity around which Marx built his later economic theory. Are you suggesting that Glasman's goal of decommodified and autonomous labour is compatible with capitalism in a way that is unacceptable?
What are the reasons for thinking of Glasman as a "neo-liberal critic of capitalism?" Neo-liberalism is founded upon a particular conception of the rational and autonomous individual acting in an open market in commodiites. Glasman rejects that conception of the person and opposes the open market and the commodification that fuels it. Whatever it is he is saying it isn't neo-liberalism. Indeed, many of the posters here seem to have concluded that Glasman is advocating some sort of reactionary corporatism.
I think it is obvious what Glasman is advocating: G.D.H Cole/Hirst associationism. Whether that is a good thing is a separate question. But if there are reasons to think that he thinks something other than this, or to see his critique as compatible with neo-liberalism then please do present a different interpretation and refer us to his remarks.
on 11 June 2011, 9:51:35 AM
"Labour’s rational core has become one of contesting the Tories for dominance of the Common Ground they share and upon which any right to form a government is now based."
"For Blue Labour, as with ‘new labour’ democracy is one of the necessary means whereby, the working class majority, are reconciled to the interests of capital. Glasman’s rhetoric is mostly the trite common place of the emoting liberal petty bourgeois that he is"
***********************************************************
Brilliant apotheosis of what Glasman stands for.
Stan, I dont understand where the "pouring scorn on anybody who doesn't follow the failed ideology of the hard left" comes in. What Paul has offered is a cogent and confronting critique. There is a huge amount of posturing and pretense around the "reforming Labour" movement. It started with David Miliband's statements about "his commitment to socialism"; followed by his brother's assurance that Newlabour was over; followed by statements by Cruddas, Umanna, and others about the depth of the reform from which a revtalised Labour would emerge. Gradually over the months, the hollowness of this posturing has been exposed by Ed Miliband's statements showing his commitment to remain strictly centrist, to oppose any move to the left, and to fight the Tories on their own ground. Time and time again, the munchkins from the Shadow Cabinet have made statements indicating their full agreement with the principles of the Coalition policy, Balls and Mrs Balls being the most candid. It is obvious that the Right within Labour is running the party, and in that sense, there is very little that Mili-labour stands for which is in conflict with classic Blairism. There are simply personality differences about which courtiers should be preferred.
All Paul has done is to prick the posturing bubble, to show that Newlabour remains unchanged, neo-liberal, committed to the Thatcherite/Blair agenda, and no different, in essence, to a somewhat less posturing Coalition administration. The most important and telling utterance of the entire period since the election that brought Cameron to power, has been Ed Miliband's announcement that he is not intertested in and will not do policy. That is an announcement that the belief system remains unchanged, and the "Newlabour Reform" consists purely of internal party processes, and better behaviour towards potential voters. Its all about marketing.
Paul has also shown how absurd it is to take one element of capitalism, commodification, and believe that you can leach that out of the system while the rest of the system remains intact. Capitalism IS commodification. It's the equivalent of saying that we should have Socialism without any collective ownership. The truth is that Glasman isnt proposing this as a serious policy. Its a pretense, a piece of kite-flying trying to create the impression that he has a serious agenda.
Now Stan, let me explain what would be nice. Instead of constantly attacking people for saying negative things about Glasman (which is pointless as they are going to continue to do do), why dont you enter the debate ? Why not show where Paul or I are mistaken. Challenge our analysis. Draw different conclusions about what Glasman has said. Is it possible for you to do that ?
on 10 June 2011, 11:31:09 PM
You do me far too much honour with charges of scorn from a ‘hard left’ position.
I should have thought that far more pertinent from your perspective is Glasman’s view of his own narrow understanding of the non elite world of the English working class and their status of dependency: dependency on the elites for whom ‘new labour’ has always spoken.
on 10 June 2011, 8:53:03 PM
I don't agree with everything that Glasman says but he deserves a more grown-up response than he is getting here.
on 10 June 2011, 8:04:09 PM
The framework then is not provided by ‘Blue Labour’ in the terms Alan Finlayson seeks to deploy that term, that brand; but rather is provided by Labour’s ‘new labour’ commitment to the neo-liberal economy and society. Parade Maurice Glasman if you really must. But let’s not guild the Lilly, please.
In so far as ‘Blarism’ remains a useful political and analytical tool, it is parody to suggest that it sees “the individual as the only moral agent.’ The dominant anti- Blair Right within Labour really ought to be able to do better than this particular Aunt Sally. Their difficulty however is that their own social and communitarian conservatism is as hardly different in practice from the ‘Blairism’ they seek to airbrush from their own politics and ideology. The Aunt Sally is set up and in its crudity tarnishes whatever claims might be made for, or ethical worth appropriated by, the Labour Right and their now apparently principle ideologist, Maurice Glasman.
Within Labour neo-liberalism, its rational core has increasingly become more than that of shifting the centre ground of politics to the Right and hand in hand with the Tories defending and extending that that shift; for that framework is now firmly established and challenging it is no more the purpose of nominally ‘Labour’ politics than it is of Tory or Lib Dem politics. Labour’s rational core has become one of contesting the Tories for dominance of the Common Ground they share and upon which any right to form a government is now based.
What is genuinely surprising about the apparent strength of Blue Labour is the willingness of the marginally reformist neo-liberals, (exemplified by Compass,) and the less reformist neo-liberals in Progress, to both of them let Glasman/Blue Labour, set the pace and tone for the Labour Party. Within the neo-liberal paradigm they all share, Labour’s coalition of neo-liberals are apparently content to let the most economically, socially and ideologically conservative of their number make all the political running. This is not just a function of the structure and content of the Common Ground. Important as this Common Ground is, it might be thought that Glasman’s stark and cogent commitment to it might worry Labour neo-liberals whether or not they are as comfortable on the Common Ground as Maurice Glasman clearly is.
As a neo-liberal critic of capitalism, Glasman has latched on to comodification as its most potent fault. Non- Marxist, (and most particularly anti-Marxist,) critics of capitalism from social democrats to Fascists are apt to reify an aspect of capitalism in the belief that to overcome the given potent fault, is to usher in a new capitalism with anything from a Good Society, to a New Order, according to taste. Glasman, using rhetoric about democracy which socialists might find at first glance appealing is in reality deploying it to defend the neo-liberal settlement quite specifically. For Blue Labour, as with ‘new labour’ democracy is one of the necessary means whereby, the working class majority, are reconciled to the interests of capital. Glasman’s rhetoric is mostly the trite common place of the emoting liberal petty bourgeois that he is. But in addition to this, his particular brand of socially conservative rhetoric ought to trouble the metropolitan liberal elite more than it apparently does. Whilst it probably strikes a kind of dog whistle cord, (excuse the mixed metaphor,) with some in the liberal elite, (e.g. Jon Cruddas,) are not the rest of them just a little perturbed by Glasman?
Maurice Glasman would probably claim that his patriotism and deeply conservative provincialist rhetoric is really designed to appeal to what he has in his mind as an idealised and subordinated working class; employed, conservative and longing to follow the political and cultural lead of Blue Labour. If this is so, then it tells us much more about Labour neo-liberals than about those whom ‘new’ and ‘Blue’ Labour seek to politically, culturally and economically exploit to their own advantage.
on 10 June 2011, 4:58:52 PM
On the issue of immigration the three parties have imposed mass uncontrolled immigration which has maintained or lowered wage levels. But the price for this has been paid by the working class for which the Left has total contempt. Blue Labour recognises this while the LEft denies it. This is a key issue which in the past has been closed down by vociferous shouts of 'racist' and 'racism' by the Left sans culottes.
Why not discuss it now
on 09 June 2011, 9:57:53 PM
But I don't think Blue Labour will have many definite views on this.
Much easier to "find common ground" on perceived immigration dilemmas.
The EDL want to prevent Muslim communities building places of worship.
Anyone who for a minute who identifies with this hokum is a "fascist fellow traveller" in the same phalanx as the BNP,National Front,and the BUF.
A national identity that tolerates and promotes dialogue with such groups has lost its self respect.
on 09 June 2011, 6:42:41 PM
I didnt notice anything specific on crime in Glasman's writings. Perhaps someone can bring that to our attention.
on 09 June 2011, 12:30:36 PM
In an earlier comment she said
"I do not support Blue Labour largely because religion should be kept out of politics. However there are other issues such as national identity, the importance of locality, fear of crime and mass immigration which the LEft avoid . This avoidance is based on appearing reactionary. But avoiding the issue is no solution as the problem remains."
Except for the bit about religion (which I think can be a force for good if the nasty elements can be excised in some way) I would go along with Angela's take on the issues raised by Blue Labour and I think that it is these that this thread should have focussed on rather than the issues raised by others.
Sorry Angela for giving you this support. It will not help your credibility here.
on 09 June 2011, 9:14:36 AM
on 09 June 2011, 6:39:10 AM
Stuart White has, in his own way, shown that Bluelabour, or more precisely Glasmanism, is a synthetic creation. It owes nothing to tradition of history, despite its false and unsubstantiated claims to be the culmination of such traditions. Most of its acceptable principles are common-sensical and shared by many other political ideologies. Its not just Glasman who wants to re-activate democractic processes at the local level...people have been campaigning to do this for years. For a while, until he became a Tory, Nick Clegg was committed to giving local constituencies the right to recall unacceptable MPs. It is in fact an insult to the political community activists who for decades have worked to challenge the hegemony of party and London politics, to suggest that Glasman has offered them a new idea.
The worst aspect of Glasmanism is its hypocrisy. It condemns the left for relying on "abstract" ideas of fairness and justice, and yet I have yet to see anthing that Bluelabour has published that isnt utterly abstract. Has Glasman ever described how the Common Good" or "Good Society", which are highly abstract, over-simplified concepts, would apply in a 21st Century country controlled by corporations and a neo-liberal establishment in a globalised economy in danger of destroying the planet through atmmospheric pollution ? No, neither Glasman nor Rutherford have ever described how rthe big leap takes place between their parochial community activism and national and international politics. In fact Bluelabour is so abstract that it has spurred this debate about what it actually means.
You dont make a set of beliefs radical by appending the word "radical" to every second idea or claim. I see nothing radical whatseover about Bluelabour, or even original for that matter. The most right-wing ideas, the anti-immigrant sentiments, the opposition to state-provided welfare, the little english sentiments, the placing religion at the centre of politics, are all derived from right-wing sources going back to Enoch Powell, the Tory right, and Norman St John Stevas. It doesnt help to say "Glasman is not being racist/jingoist when he advocates..". If it walks like a duck.....
on 09 June 2011, 6:03:29 AM
on 08 June 2011, 11:35:47 PM
A couple of preliminary observations. Much of the debate around Blue Labour is written at a level which is not easily comprehended by apolitical people. Who is it written for ? Fellow academics ? If so, what is its purpose ? Those of us who argue for social democracy are not necessarily seeking any kind of accommodation with capitalism. We may simply be recognising that socialism, as a world system, is not in prospect in present circumstances, but, as an aspiration, it may inform our kind of social democracy.
on 08 June 2011, 10:57:56 PM
Obviously, I can't post a link here but it's easy too find on the 'Our Kingdom' part of the Open Democracy site.
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