To win power, the left must build a narrative around ending privatisation, empowering the workforce and borrowing to invest. To stay in power, left governments must transition towards an economy based on high automation, shorter working hours and free services. 

***

After Trump, Brexit, the formation of a right wing coalition in Austria and now the M5S/Lega government in Italy, the way the current era might end is becoming clearer. Right wing populism demands an end to migration and offshoring. Right wing conservatism, in response, harnesses the populist into a programme of nation-centric free-market economics – call it “Thatcherism in One Country”.

Meanwhile, Russia’s perennial hybrid warfare against Western democracies opens up the social fissures within them even further.

The G7’s failure to commit to a “rules based global order” after Trump’s walkout then presages the actual paralysis of multilateral institutions. At worst the EU, NATO and the Eurozone fall apart.

Of course, it’s possible to imagine that the populists, the demagogues and their right wing, authoritarian voters suddenly become exhausted and satisfied with the world as it is. But it is much easier to imagine that the anger of their voters escalates, that democratic institutions become frayed and discredited, and that the nerves of liberal technocrats crack.

Either way, the project I am trying to outline in this series – namely the programme, philosophy and moral basis for a radical social democracy in the 21st century – has increasingly to be conceived as a plan for picking up the pieces, not the deepening and extension of an essentially stable system.

In my book ‘Postcapitalism’, I argued that information technology creates the possibility of a long transition beyond market-based societies towards an economy based on relative abundance, high automation, low work and free utility produced by network effects. This remains, for me, the 21st century equivalent of the “maximum programme” adopted by social-democracy in the 1890s.

However, the crisis of the short-term demands answers – and better ones than the re-treaded Keynesianism on offer from the traditional social-democratic left.

A programme of immediate, “minimum” actions and principles – which social democratic parties across Europe and North America could sign up to – would have at its heart two twin aims:

1. to revive economic growth, prosperity and social cohesion in Western democracies; and
2. to defend and deepen their democratic rights and institutions.

It would also need to contain elements of “transition” – though not of the kind originated by the Communist International in the 1920s and later associated with Trotsky’s Fourth International. Then the aim was to introduce elements of planning and workers control into the programmes of left governments, moulded around scarcity. Today the transition path has to embrace the potential for abundance contained in information technology and, of course, to deal with climate change as an urgent issue.

So the core issue for those who want to radicalise social democracy is: what kind of capitalism is it possible for us, in these conditions, to create?

Before attempting an answer I want to recapitulate the argument of my previous essays in this series for openDemocracy:

• To solve the problem of working class atomisation, and create a narrative for social democracy, the British Labour party and other social-democratic parties should focus their efforts on achieving a tangible upward movement in incomes, health, lifestyles and prospects for working age adults over the next 10 years.
• To solve the problem that globalisation empowered corporations while limiting the sovereignty of electorates, we must be prepared to retreat from extreme globalisation, into a “second trench”, consisting of national economic policymaking in the context of international solidarity, abandoning certain supranational regulations deemed currently to have the force of eternal law.
• To solve the problem of agency, we need to understand that oppression and exploitation take many forms in late-neoliberal capitalism, and that the movement to deliver a progressive government will most likely be a tribal alliance of people adversely affected. In that alliance, the traditional working class and labour movement structures will exist, but will not have hegemony; where working class culture has been inverted into a form of nostalgic ethno-nationalism, the movements and demands it produces will have to be resisted.

In Britain, the practical implications of the above are for Labour to seek a progressive electoral or governmental alliance with the Greens and left nationalists; for a rapid rise in real disposable incomes to be the number one deliverable of a progressive government; and for that government to fight for the reform of all multilateral treaties or obligation that stand in the way of social justice – whether it be the EU or the World Trade Oraganisation.

But what, practically, should a left-wing government do, and in what sequence? The answer to this is not obvious from reading Labour’s 20,000 word 2017 general election manifesto – detailed though it was, nor from the 100+ bullet points that formed the manifesto of Podemos. Nor even the 83 chapters of L’Avenir En Commun, on which Jean-Luc Melenchon fought for the French presidency in 2017.

None of these documents reads like a battle plan; in fact, they read more like an infantry manual full of standard procedures, rules and principles. None was likely to survive contact with the enemy if the parties that produced them had gained power.

To transform capitalism rapidly in the direction of democracy and social justice, you need a linked series of actions – and a project-management understanding of their synergies and interrelationships.

***

Day One

What should a left-wing British Labour government – or a Podemos-PSOE coalition, or a France Insoumise presidency supported by the trade unions and the remnants of the socialist party – do on their first day in office? The obvious answer is: survive the financial market backlash. If you observe the market turmoil caused by the possibility of a far-right/populist alliance in Italy, you get a taste of what’s in store for a government of the radical left.

The clear danger lies not just in the kind of capital flight experienced by France under Mitterrand in 1981-83, but flight on a scale resembling the “sudden stop” phenomenon that plagued Latin America and parts of Asia in the mid-1990s, and which have re-emerged in the post 2008 period (sudden stops have been defined as a sudden reversal of capital inflows causing GDP to decline by the order of around 6% in a twelve month period).

Almost everywhere a left government is conceivable, financial markets would be capable of mixing a rational aversion to risk with speculative and politically-motivated capital movements to cause the currency to plummet, growth to tank, and foreign exchange reserves to be depleted, demanding central bank action to counteract the declared programme of the winning party.

It is this – not a rerun of the coup against Allende in Chile in 1973 – that left governments need to be ready for.

François Mitterrand during the 1981 presidential campaign. Image: Jacques Paillette, CC BY-SA 3.0

Of the four remedies usually chosen to combat a sudden stop – fiscal policy, monetary policy, currency depreciation and pro-market structural reform – the last is a non-starter for a left government. With capital controls ruled out except in extreme circumstances, any left party contemplating power has to wargame how it might use reserves, monetary policy, fiscal expansion and currency maneuvers to sit tight through the average three to four quarters most sudden stop episodes last for.

I don’t intend to wargame such tactics here. They would have to be highly time and country specific. Suffice to say, as left governments appear on the brink of power, their right wing nationalist and neoliberal centrist opponents are likely to try to tie their hands, for example by running down reserves.

What is certain however, is that from Day One a left government taking power has to give as many people as possible “skin in the game” of its survival.

Fortuitously, the neoliberal model of capitalism has over the past 30 years depleted the amount of power wielded by parliaments in favour of executive power. Though the medium-term aim of a left government would be to reverse this trend, the Day One question would be: what is possible through urgent ministerial action?

Let’s take the example of the UK. Here, ministers can, technically, order their departments to do anything that is not illegal or forbidden by treaties. However, a huge realtime audit power is given to senior civil servants by their role as “accounting officers” for each department. They can object to ministerial actions and have frequently done so, most commonly on grounds of “value for money”. If not doing something is cheaper than doing it, or if a minister is proposing to pursue anything other than the value for money option, the permanent secretary can object, requiring the minister to issue a “direction”, which then becomes a public cause célèbre.

In the case of a left-led Labour government in the UK, it’s not hard to imagine the process becoming weaponised: one minister after another clashing publicly with their civil servants over whether a state investment bank, state aid to a steel works, or the choice of a public healthcare provider over Richard Branson, is “value for money”. This power, in other words, would lie in the hands of civil servants even after Brexit. Without Brexit, the rules of the single market would simply give the permanent secretary added justification.

However, the definition of value for money lies entirely in the hands of the Treasury. Though the National Audit Office is headed by an officer appointed by the Queen, the value for money guidelines (last issued in 2004) are drawn up by HM Treasury.

So the most far-reaching thing a left Labour government could do on Day One would be to set out new value for money rules aligned with the macroeconomic philosophy of its new Treasury economics team, which recognises the power of public spending multipliers to stimulate growth in excess of the sum outlaid.

This revised philosophy on public spending would ripple through Whitehall in the space of a few days. It would probably ruffle a few people’s people’s feathers, above all the National Audit Office which has been working to different guidelines. But it would remove one of the classic neoliberal objections to ministerial actions. It would free individual departments to take operational decisions in pursuit of short term objectives.

First 100 days

What might these be? If things go wrong, the answer could easily end up as: a set of reactive or piecemeal measures designed to address long-held grievances, or assuage public opinion. Or measures that make sense in the long-term but deliver very little “skin in the game” for the electorate that has installed the left-wing government in the first place.

To make things go right for a left government in its first few weeks, you have to understand the strategic objective: to change the dynamics of the whole British economy so that if ever a right wing government returns to power it will, as the Tories did in 1951, accept large parts of what the left has achieved as the foundation for a new consensus.

With this in mind here are the five things I would urge a Corbyn/Sturgeon government in the UK, or a Sanchez/Iglesias government in Spain, or Democrat government in the US under Bernie Sanders to do in the first 100 days:

1. Switch off the neoliberal privatisation machine. This is not yet about reversing existing privatisations but declaring that there will be no new ones, and stating that outsourcing will no longer be done on the cheapest-wins basis, or by preferring private over public provision. The government should state that its preference is for essential public services to be provided by publicly-owned bodies and that the market, and any competition rules required by the EU, NAFTA or WTO, will be worked-around. Furthermore, existing privatised utilities and monopolies, once renationalised, will not be run as profit-making corporations but with the aim of providing social value in the form of cheaper energy, cheaper rail travel, higher wages, and of creating templates for new forms of social ownership at large scale such as co-operatives, platform co-operatives, credit unions, ethical banks and benefit corporations.

2. Publish, and therefore signal the imminence of, a basic package of new labour rights to be legislated without consultation. The consultation stage was the election, should be the argument. The new rights should be a mixture of individual and collective:

• With regards to individual rights, the aim would be massive, free and easy access to the justice system, whereby individual workers can enforce their human rights against employers. Though in the UK it would require reversal of legislation from the neoliberal era, ministerial directives could do a lot of the work up front.
• With regards to collective rights, the removal of exemptions for small businesses, and for people in post for less than an arbitrary time limit would be easy game changers before primary legislation takes place. An employment minister turning up at McDonalds, TGI Fridays or Pret A Manger, with the cameras but unannounced, to tell the workforce that within six months they will have the right to a living wage, union representation on the board, collective wage bargaining, paid holidays and maternity leave could have as much effect on behavioural change as the legislation itself.
• The issue of bogus self-employment, which plagues industries as diverse as construction, hairdressing and journalism could be addressed by the relevant Treasury surveillance department having its staff tripled and bonuses paid for successful prosecutions of the relevant employers. Since the business model of these sectors would have to change, it would require a transition period to get the relevant workforce on the books, paying the right taxes and receiving the right benefits. But the early signal should trigger rapid behaviour change among all those businesses that intended to survive.

3. Set up an Infrastructure Commission. The UK already has a National Infrastructure Commission which advises on long-term projects, but a progressive solution would be to set one up with executive powers, allied to a state investment bank to raise and spend the money.  While it might take more than 12 months to legislate and raise money for a state investment bank, and get regulatory clearance from the EU, the Treasury could require a sub-department to begin operating in the shadow of the intended bank immediately, assessing the likely funding decisions, modelling the outcomes etc. Meanwhile, the Infrastructure Commission should, drawing together major sectors, cities and town governments, determine the detailed plan to spend billions borrowed under new rules which allow borrowing for investment.

To the extent that a Labour – or Spanish or French left government – remained under the tutelage of the European Union, it would have to press for the reform of the Maastricht criteria or secure opt-outs from them – above all exempting borrowing to invest from the deficit limits. A US left government would, as long as it controlled Congress, face very few obstacles to enacting a major fiscal stimulus, unless China decided to use the extra borrowing to trigger a currency and debt showdown. In the medium-term, the success of such projects would be indicated by whether they began to transform blighted communities, not by the kilometres of motorway or railways upgraded. However, the major signalling job has to be done upfront. The private sector – both domestic and international – should react positively to a clear, irreversible long-term signal from government to upgrade not only the physical infrastructure but the social and environmental situations. The earlier and clearer it is given the better.

4. Change the remit of the central bank. For left governments in the Eurozone this would need a prolonged and co-ordinated struggle to reform the ECB. In Britain and the USA, much of it could happen through a letter from the finance minister. The principles of a post-neoliberal remit for, say, the Bank of England are not hard to design. They should be:

• Non-intervention in fiscal policy: then Bank of England governor Mervyn King once threatened to counteract any fiscal stimulus by the Brown government in excess of what he deemed strictly necessary to maintain inflation at around 2%. Such reasoning should be explicitly excluded, demoting the central bank from its high perch in the neoliberal hierarchy.
• A policy to promote mild inflation: under neoliberalism, because the implicit fear was of a wage take-off which never materialised, central banks like the Bank of England always put the brakes on growth and never put the brakes hard enough on recessions.
• Macroprudential regulation: i.e. spotting and preventing boom-bust cycles and the failure of systemic banks, roughly as now only with more political transparency and prejudice in favour of early intervention.

And that’s it. You would also need an industrial policy, but as I outlined in the previous essay if you want to keep a roughly multilateral and global system the industrial policy more or less writes itself: move legacy industries up the value chain, build “human capital” (i.e. skill and wage-earning potential) and keep some core industries, like steel, energy and defence manufacturing onshore and domestically owned for reasons of national security (in a deteriorating global environment).

Industrial policy and a long-term fiscal expansion would pay their dividends over five to ten years, not 90 days. But the combination of ending privatisation, empowering the workforce, borrowing to invest in infrastructure and subordinating the central bank to the national economy’s interests, not the global elite’s doctrines, are the four big pumps a left government needs to make work.

“McStrike” in Crayford, 2017. Image: War on Want, CC BY 2.0

Hard as it may be for some Corbynistas to accept, the rest is basically tactical. Whether to bring all state-owned housing back under the control of councils or to incentivise the housing associations to deliver the same result; whether to build a tidal lagoon at Swansea or a nuclear power station at Hinkley Point –  these are legitimate matters of debate inside the left, mobilising interest groups, obsessions and differing priorities. But they are secondary issues when it comes to implementing a new model, stabilising the country’s position within a fragmenting global system and giving the mass of people “skin in the game”.

The problem is, even as you revive a high-growth, high-wage, state-led economic model in northern-hemisphere countries, across the whole of the developed world the dynamics I described in ‘Postcapitalism’ are inescapable. It is these that make classic Keynesian expansion programmes unsuitable for the 21st century.

How technology alters the medium term agenda

There are four main processes triggered by information technology which, medium term, left governments have to construct responses to. They are:

• the collapsing cost of production of everything that is touched by infotech, which then disrupts the price mechanism itself (making things cheap or free);
• the delinking of work from wages, which allows leisure time and labour to bleed into one another, promoting massive under-employment and – at the bottom of the labour market – precarity;
• the emergence of new, positive, network effects, producing new use-values on an exponential scale, which are not prima-facie the property of any company or individual; and
• massive asymmetries of information, and therefore power.

As I argued in ‘Postcapitalism’, these processes fundamentally challenge the property relations on which the market system rests. In response, over the past 15 years, the following structural mutations have taken place, which a left government would need to deal with:

• The zero-marginal cost effect, which calls into being vast monopolies like Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft whose sole aim is to suppress price formation.
• The possibility of rapid automation, which calls forth its opposite: mass precarity and under-employment. Today we create millions of jobs which do not need to exist, just to include the low paid in the more lucrative mechanisms of exploitation, namely the credit system and social media (via the smartphone)
• Network effects, dubbed positive externalities by economists, which are captured by information monopolies, preventing the socially useful exploitation of user data except where it is useful to the monopolies.
• New information asymmetries, which market theory says should be eroded by competition, are institutionalised with copyright, IP and patents extended ad infinite by the power of global corporations, and with the mass of small investors permanently disempowered compared to the large, niche, unaccountable ones.

From this contrast between the potential of the information economy and its malformed present arises the need for a programme of transition which radical social democracy should graft onto – and indeed into – the more traditional measures outlined above. It should include:

1. Breaking up or nationalising information monopolies, like Facebook and Amazon, so that price competition can bring the cost of information goods closer to zero.

2. Subsidising a programme of rapid automation with taxpayer-funded basic services and basic incomes: transport, education to degree level, healthcare and housing should be at a basic level free and beyond that cheap.

3. Outlawing the seizure and colonisation of collective user data by the IT industry and make data a public good. Empower citizens to tweak and control the conditions under which private companies own and exploit their data, using mechanisms such as the blockchain. This is the principle behind current trials both in Barcelona and Amsterdam, and if generalised would represent a major reversal and limitation of the power of the info-monopolies.

4. Enacting a new, universal human right to information symmetry: “no decisions about me, without me”, if translated into the information sphere, would force global corporations to cease building business models on the basis of permanent asymmetry of power and information. Algorithms should be transparent, and artificial intelligence deployed only with informed consent and under strict ethical guidelines. Data privacy should be a fundamental human right, and flouting it should lead to the termination of a corporation’s licence to operate.

Though breaking up the tech monopolies costs you nothing (apart from political grief), the move to a basic income and services model, paid for out of taxation, would demand a major rebalancing of the tax system in favour of redistribution. Winning the argument for this becomes the key objective of a radical social democracy. Consequently, squandering redistributive taxation measures in pursuit of the pet social-democratic objectives should be, where possible, avoided.

Instead of relying on redistributive tax measures, a sovereign state like Britain, the USA or the Eurozone has the ability, using its central bank, currency and new borrowing, to fund the “Keynesian” half of what I propose here. The other half – the massive cheapening of goods and services required to make everyday life with low work hours – is what needs new, redistributive taxation.

“Your kids go to school, your healthcare becomes world class, your journey to work cheap and your home affordable… and Facebook, Google, Deutsche Bank and some hedge funds pay for it,” is a narrative that I think, if confidently outlined, could allow the radical left to breakthrough into government across the developed world. Especially once the ethnic-utopias of the demagogic right deliver, as expected, only tears and disappointment.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg meets members of the European Parliament. Image: European Parliament, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For Labour in Britain, the art of winning the next election revolves around switching off the scatter gun of progressive promises and building a tight narrative around economic transformation, wage growth and the right to free basic services. The fact that the left controls the spray gun, not the right, does not solve the essential problem RH Tawney pointed to in the 1930s: either Labour has a clear strategy or it has a shopping list written by a committee.

Tawney’s survey of Labour under George Lansbury in 1934 described Labour’s programme then as “a glittering forest of Christmas trees with presents for everyone, instead of a plan of campaign for… a pretty desperate business”.

Tawney advised Labour’s hierarchy to set out the kind of society it wanted to establish, the kind of resistance expected, and the mechanisms needed to overcome that resistance. Though Podemos and France Insoumise are equally guilty of the “forest of Christmas trees” approach, it should be said that their leaders have made no bones about the need for mass organisations focused on overcoming resistance.

***

The first half of the strategy I have proposed here draws on classic Keynesianism but goes way beyond it: it requires a revolution in thinking about the central bank; the removal of market-oriented culture across government; and the explicit adoption of a high wage and moderately pro-inflation policy that could, over time, begin to de-financialise society. And the imposition of new macroeconomic thinking in key government departments so that the likely positive effects of borrowing, spending and printing money are factored in.

The second half, though more future oriented, has fewer policy shibboleths to overcome. The art of staying in government, and delivering irreversible change, revolves around how much of this new, transitional strategy Labour (or any other left social democracy) can manage to insert into its change programme in the first five years.

Suppose it goes right. What could a radical left government expect to achieve in four or five years?

In week one and month one: survive the financial backlash and mobilise the people by giving them clear, tangible things to defend. In the first year, kickstart growth and wage growth through fiscal and monetary expansion. In years two to five, allow infrastructural investment and human capital growth take over and, if possible, produce a sustainable upswing. Meanwhile, begin the microeconomic transformation to the new kinds of business model, ownership and technology regulations that are needed to allow the move to a shorter-hours, higher welfare economy.

This is still only an outline. But it’s a clearer outline than the ones contained in any left manifesto in the past three years. The clearer and simpler the outline, the more easily it can be communicated to the managers, civil servants, trade union/community activists and entrepreneurs who will have to respond to it.

I can anticipate numerous objections – and will deal with them if people respond to this essay. But to one objection I want to be brutally honest in advance.

Is this strategy designed to allow the populations of the developed world to capture more of the growth projected over the next 5-15 years, if necessary at the cost of China, India and Brazil having to find new ways to break out of the middle income trap? Would it, in other words, flatten out and reverse the trends captured in Branko Milanovic’s famous “elephant graph” over the next two decades?

For me the answer is yes. This is a programme to save democracy, democratic institutions and values in the developed world by reversing the 30-year policy of enriching the bottom 60% and the top 1% of the world’s population.

It is a programme to deliver growth and prosperity in Wigan, Newport and Kirkcaldy – if necessary at the price of not delivering them to Shenzhen, Bombay and Dubai.

The post What kind of capitalism is it possible for the left to build? appeared first on New thinking for the British economy.

In his second essay in a new series for openDemocracy, Paul Mason argues that only a new left internationalism that accepts a limited reassertion of national economic sovereignty can defeat the rising tide of authoritarian populism.

If there is a founding document of social democracy it is Eduard Bernstein’s ‘Evolutionary Socialism’. Written in 1899, it taught the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) that capitalism had permanently stabilised; that socialism would be achieved through parliament – not the industrial class struggle – and that the working class of the 20^th century would be neither culturally homogeneous nor spontaneously socialist.

Social-democrats should stop waiting for a mega-crisis to kill capitalism, stop obsessing about mass strikes and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and make a moral case that, while capitalism had improved the workers’ lot, socialism could do it better. [i]

The stability lasted a mere 15 years, ending on the day Bernstein’s party voted for the war budget of Kaiser Wilhelm II. By 1919 the dictatorship of the proletariat was an actuality – not just in Russia but in Bavaria and Hungary. What was left of the SPD entered the first coalition government of the Weimar Republic where, on Bernstein’s advice, it resisted the attempts of its own left wing to “socialise” the economy and ruthlessly suppressed the communist left.

If there is a re-founding document of social democracy, it is Anthony Giddens’ book ‘Beyond Left and Right’. Published in 1994 it emerged, like Bernstein’s work, from a critique of orthodox Marxism. Like Bernstein, Giddens argued that the structure of capitalism had changed, creating conditions that made the old programme of state-led socialism permanently impossible. Once crystallised into the doctrine of the Third Way, in the 1998 book of the same name, Giddens’ ideas provided the ideological frame for social-democratic governments in Britain, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands, and for Bill Clinton’s second term in office.

Unlike Bernstein, Giddens never claimed capitalism had become permanently stable; instead it had become permanently mercurial in a way that was potentially benign, so long as progressive governments could take control. The task of social-democrats was to help working class people survive amid the permanent insecurity and disempowerment that globalisation had unleashed. Instead of a programme to clear the capitalist jungle, social-democracy would become a kind of survival kit.

The general crisis of social democracy is happening because the world Giddens described has vanished. The world of Trump, Putin, Erdogan and Xi Jinping is as different to the world of Blair and Schroeder as the street fights of Weimar were to the peaceful, electoral socialism of the 1890s.

Twice, then, in the space of a century, social democracy has entered crisis because its strategic project came to be based on conditions that ceased to exist. If we survey the remnants of centrist social democracy and social liberalism – Renzi in Italy, Schulz in Germany, Hillary Clinton in the USA and the Progress wing of the British Labour Party – the image that springs to mind is of shipwreck survivors clinging to pieces of wreckage.

Schulz clings to Merkel, Renzi wanted to cling to Berlusconi, but they both lost so many votes it became pointless. Hillary Clinton clings to Wall Street. Labour’s Progress wing clings to the possibility that a new, Macron-style centrist force will emerge to save it from the nightmare of the Corbyn leadership. All of them are clinging to a form of globalisation that has failed; and for the Europeans it has become obligatory to cling to the Europe of the Lisbon Treaty – even as this, too, is failing.

To renew social democracy we have to do what Bernstein and Giddens were trying to do: construct an analysis of the world we live in. Both argued from premises concerning the future dynamics of capitalism, the role of the state in the economy, and the atomisation of class structures, cultures and alliances that had prevailed in the decades before them. Significantly, both were critically engaged with, and borrowed eclectically from, the Marxist method of historical materialism – a method of no concern to the party apparatchiks who used their theories as adornments for the project of managing capitalism.

Starting from a material analysis of the world – rather than a list of policies, tactics and principles – is a tradition that got lost inside European social democracy during the neoliberal era. Neoliberalism’s ideological premise was always anti-theoretical: don’t ask why this kind of economy exists, or how long it can last – just accept it as permanent and get on with making it better.

So amid the panic – as the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) draws level with the German SPD in opinion polls, and as the Italian Partito Democratico (PD) slumps below 20% while populists and xenophobes surge – we must start by analysing the situation, not by issuing frantic demands that the word “go back to normal”.

***

If neoliberalism is broken, what exactly is the central mechanism that has failed? It cannot be that the collapse of a mere banking system has turned large parts of the population of the West against universal rights and cosmopolitan social arrangements.

Goldsmiths University economist William Davies offers two definitions of neoliberalism which explain why the world Giddens described – and fairly accurately – has disappeared.[ii]

The first is “the elevation of marked-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of state-endorsed norms”. Davies points out that neoliberalism, over time, became less about the creation of exchange-based relationships and more about the imposition of competitive behaviour in areas where no market could exist.

School league tables and global university rankings are just two examples of this – a third being the fake tendering process which has seen billions in public service contracts handed to firms like Carillion and Interserve. For Davies, it is economic calculation – not markets per se – that is being coercively forced into all aspects of life under the neoliberal system. That leads to his second, pithier, definition of neoliberalism: “the disenchantment of politics by economics”.

Neoliberalism failed because it was not a solution to the problems of the Keynesian system but, in fact, a work-around. What caused the ruin of both models was their inability to sustain both productivity and corporate profitability.

Between 1989 and 2008 growth was driven by unsustainable financial expansion, by fiscal deficits, by the rapid catch-up of Asia and Latin America, and by the expansion of the working population. In 2008 a global system reliant on financial fiction exploded. As a result, we now have a global economy kept afloat by $19 trillion of central bank money creation, by the permanent socialisation of banking risk, and where many of the advanced industrial countries exhibit the following features:

1. Rising inequality boosted by the surge in asset values triggered by quantitative easing.
2. Entire sectors dominated by rent-seeking monopolies.
3. A global financial elite clustered around the defence of its strategic privilege – which is to keep its wealth in offshore jurisdictions and unavailable to the tax collectors of nation states, and therefore immune to redistribution.
4. High under-employment and precarious work, as millions of people are employed in what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”; real wages failing to keep up with the rising asset wealth of the 1%; and a historically low wage share.
5. A global market that has begun to fragment along regional and national lines; the stalling of trade liberalisation treaties; the Balkanisation of finance systems and the information economy; and the beginnings of an open trade war.

There are typically three kinds of response to this situation among national political elites. The first is to try to maintain the status quo, resulting in the continued rise of inequality, continued impoverishment of workers and the lower middle class. This is the approach of Macron in France, Merkel in Germany and the liberal-conservative Remain lobby in the UK.

The second is a kind of “nationalist neoliberalism”: the attempt to deepen the coercive introduction of market mechanisms through a partial break with the multilateral global trade system. This is the intention behind the European Research Group (ERG) inside the UK Conservative Party: to scrap environmental and safety regulations, and to scrap – as Liz Truss wants – professional licensing and qualifications that are said to “suppress growth” by insisting that doctors, airline pilots or physiotherapists must be licensed and therefore difficult to replace with the precariat.

It is, in effect, “Thatcherism in One Country” – and it also forms the unacknowledged common ground between the three factions of the German right: the AfD wants deeper free market reforms but no immigration; the Free Democratic Party (FPD) wants Germany to double down on gaming the Eurosystem to let the rest of Europe go hang; so effectively does the right wing faction of the Christian Social Union (CSU) around Alexander Dobrindt who, for good measure, wants a “revolution” to roll society back to a pre-1968 social conservatism.

A third response – best illustrated in Europe by the Law and Justice government in Poland – is to break overtly both with neoliberal economics and “liberal democracy”. Law and Justice has secured a 49% poll rating not only through crass nationalism and dog-whistle antisemitism, but by daily verbal attacks on “liberal democracy” and the elites who profit from it, and by distributing significant universal welfare payments to working class people. Liberal democracy gets in the way of the real democracy – which is the will of the white, Catholic Polish people, untrammelled by such things as an independent media, judiciary and multilateral obligations. That is the message of Law and Justice.

None of these responses can remedy the breakdown of neoliberalism strategically. The problem is, however, two of them could work temporarily and locally, providing that the national elite concerned is prepared to renege on multilateral obligations to its trading partners. In the 1930s such attitudes were described as “beggar thy neighbour”. In modern parlance, it’s about being prepared to say to other countries: fuck you.

Law and Justice has placed itself on a collision course with the European Commission, while the Tory ERG wants Britain to stage a hard, confrontational exit from the EU altogether. Trump, likewise, with tax cuts that will boost America’s debt pile and a trade war over steel, is determined to deliver a revival of prosperity in the USA at the expense of its key trading partners.

Social democracy’s problem is that for 30 years it moulded its project around the priorities of the neoliberal model, and around the certainty that a multilateral global system would (a) always exist, and (b) deepen.

Both conditions have been falsified, while the neoliberal elite’s priorities are rapidly evolving to adapt to the growing power of authoritarian kleptocrats and the Mafiosi who trail behind them.

The basic problem with the Macron strategy – carry on regardless with a globalised free market – is that it cannot be done by standing still: you have to double down on the coercive imposition of competitive behaviours and values onto a population weary of being coerced. You have to renew TTIP; you have to do more privatisations; you have to go expanding the EU to the East, pulling in yet more xenophobic and corrupt national elites. If we return to Davies’ definitions (the elevation of market principles to state endorsed norms, and the disenchantment of politics by economics), we can say with certainty that these are strategies that no longer work. People have had enough of free market coercion and are prepared to “re-enchant” economic decision making with the only things that lie to hand: nationalism and xenophobia on the one hand, radical anti-authoritarianism, feminism, environmentalism and leftism on the other.

To renew social democracy, we need to stop clinging to the wreckage. Even though it was mainly window dressing for Blair and Clinton, the Third Way was a serious and coherent theory. Some of its premises survive even though, as a practical project, it is dying.

***

Giddens’ framework for radical politics in the neoliberal era consisted of six priorities. The first, to “repair damaged solidarities”, involved recognising that even the free-est market makes people interdependent. While the neoliberal right would have us stab each other in the back, people with a stiletto between their shoulder-blades will still need a hospital to go to.

Second, social democracy had to accept that instead of improved economic conditions, people would fight over “life politics” – that is for the individual freedom to behave as they please. Unequal opportunities to do so – as we are today seeing with the #MeToo movement – could, he said, be a much stronger driver of protest and radicalism than pure economic inequality.

Third, in place of solidarity there would have to be “generative politics”: social democracy had to create a space between the state and the market in which people could do things for themselves, which neither the state nor the market were capable of delivering.

Fourth, recognising that globalization would weaken the formal democracy of states, Giddens called for a democracy of self-help groups and social movements. These, it was understood, should forget trying to bend the state to their wishes – it was irrevocably under the control of corporations and destined to shrink – but they could achieve stuff for themselves, empower themselves, and boost their own emotional literacy in the process.

Fifth, the left must be prepared to rip up the welfare state. Instead of a safety net designed to protect people against “what might happen”, it had to be a kind of survival guide. The welfare state, said Giddens, was sexist, bureaucratic, impersonal and never fully eradicated poverty anyway.

Finally and perceptively, Giddens warned that a neoliberal global order would lead to violence, and that the left needed to find ways to mitigate that. When social conflict occurs in a globalised free market, Giddens said, you can’t solve it by coexisting or by separation.

“No culture, state or large group can with much success isolate itself from the global cosmopolitan order,” Giddens wrote.[iii] As a result, conflicts would lead more quickly to open violence and the left would have to be the party of dialogue not conflict.

What strikes me today about this political framework, on which Third Way social democracy was built, is its absolutism. The state would wither, the market would triumph, the welfare state would have to be abandoned, class solidarity would collapse, and individual lifestyle politics would dictate everything. This was the assumption.

But nearly 25 years after its publication all of the things that were considered already gone are still here, even in a society like Britain which became under Major, Blair and Cameron a laboratory of social atomisation. The RMT union is still able to shut down London’s Tube network; the welfare budget still makes up 34% of all state spending in the UK; market experiments in the railway system have gone badly wrong. Even at my local tube station in London, there is a union rep who defies the management instruction to wear a name badge by sporting one with the word “Lenin”.

Though Giddens never subscribed to the “end of history” thesis, the assumption underpinning his project was that markets were efficient and tended towards equilibrium and prosperity. Like Bernstein, he created a formula for coping with capitalist stability that failed to survive the return of instability.

In the hands of Blair, Clinton and Schroeder these assumptions became an excuse for venal collaboration with the interests of corporations against those of the very people who voted for social democracy. But even in their purer, academic form, Giddens’ assumptions have been negated by the political, economic and social realities of the capitalism that emerged after 2008.

The most important fact about the new reality is that, since 2008, states, regions and communities have begun to attempt to exit the system. What was deemed impossible has become the dominant trend: the desire to cancel, reverse or block globalisation. Whether it be the globalisation of workforces through migration, or the privatisation of the public realm in the name of trade liberalisation, or the impoverishment of industrial communities through offshoring.

Interestingly, the very forces Blairism assumed were spent – community, trade unionism, working class identity and of course language and ethnicity – have been factors driving this rush for the exit, both to the left and right.

As Giddens predicted, such projects are met with violence – sometimes literally as the Catalan people found out on 1 October 2017 – and sometimes via the more subtle coercion of closing a nation’s banking system, as the Greeks experienced in June 2015.

But wherever the “exit” strategy is adopted, the key institution is the one Giddens – and Blair – assumed would have diminishing power in a neoliberal universe: the democratically elected national government.

As to what is driving the desire for exit, it is primarily insecurity. All over the world, state welfare provision has been ripped up, but not replaced by any new forms of solidarity as Giddens advocated. As I wrote in the first essay of this series, one of the huge drivers of populist anger and insecurity is the enhanced fear of “what might happen”, whether it’s the possibility of the working class person falling into the under-class because they lose their highly precarious job; or a migrant occupying a place in front of you in the doctor’s waiting room; or a home-grown jihadi terrorist blowing up your children at a pop concert.

“No more change!” was the demand campaigners in Thuringia told me they heard on the doorstep, from voters who had switched to the AfD. Ludicrous as it may sound to the paid-up technocrats who still believe in neoliberalism, it is a rational desire when change brings only stress, impoverishment and anxiety – and in this case perceived competition for a limited welfare and social budget.

Practically, far from empowering those from whom the safety net was removed, neoliberal policy during the crisis became increasingly focused on coercing them, as with the scandalous disability assessments by the DWP in the UK or in the mass incarceration programmes of black people in America which boomed under both Clinton and Obama.

Finally, and ironically, it has been the populist right and radical left, together with some cosmopolitan nationalist parties and environmental NGOs, who have engaged with the task of “repairing damaged solidarities”. Blairite social democracy might have urged people to discover the new solidarities of suburban life, or the professionalised workplace or the private members’ gym,  but these were unavailable to the newly impoverished lower-strata of the workforce neoliberalism created. They clung, instead, to what was left of their old solidarities, which – as I have described in ‘The Great Regression’ – were often stripped of their progressive content.[iv]

***

That the Third Way doctrine suffered the same ultimate fate as Bernstein’s “revisionism” is no accident: both were formulated during the upswing and stabilisation phases of a global economic model. Neither could survive the model’s crisis.

Indeed, understanding that our task today is to construct a “crisis politics” – not a survival guide for the losers within a successful form of capitalism – is the first step towards a solution. In subsequent contributions I will try to spell out the details. Here, however, it important to state the broad conclusions if you accept the idea that neoliberalism is over.

First, the rise of authoritarian nationalist projects among some western elites is both logical and inevitable, given their histories. You only have to listen to the British elite’s continuous dirge of devotion to Winston Churchill to understand how powerfully the myths, narratives and traditions of national bourgeoisies guide their actions, even in the age of Davos and globalised consumer culture.

When I asked Polish progressives at a seminar last month, “why is a section of the Polish elite prepared to break with globalisation and seek nation-centric and xenophobic solutions?”, they simply shrugged and said: “that’s what they did in the 1930s”.

It is not that the globalism of the elites during neoliberalism was fake – only that, in the entire history of industrial capitalism there have been only two modes of regulation: the nation-centric one and the multilateral globalist one. Most elite groups in the world have intellectual traditions that can accommodate both, and some are prepared to reach into the dark basement of those traditions to revive the nationalist ideologies that suited their grandparents. What sections of the elites and intelligentsias of Poland, Hungary, Italy and Austria are doing now is no mystery. It’s a reversion to type.

Second, the rise of authoritarian populism and xenophobic narratives among the populations of many western democracies is – as I argued in the first essay – the result of the breakdown of a coherent narrative and of intense perceptions of insecurity. The strategy of keeping the economy on life support does not keep the ideology that underpinned neoliberalism on life support. The reward for all the backstabbing, atomisation and conformity to market individualism was supposed to be prosperity. Once that disappeared, the story became incoherent.

It follows from this that social democracy – and the wider progressive movements it must ally with – needs to construct very quickly a new narrative about how the world gets better for you, your children, your community. People want to know how life becomes less insecure, and how change becomes more predictable and manageable. Unless the left answers that question, the xenophobic right will do so.

Third, logically the new project of social democracy must be framed around a radical break with neoliberalism. What is destroying our movement is that a whole generation of social democratic leaders have tied their personal prestige and identity to an economic model that no longer works.

Schulz wanted to keep Merkel in charge forever; Renzi in Italy would rather see Berlusconi in power than admit the grievances that are driving people towards the Northern League and the Five Star Movement were real. Indeed, when I spoke to Italian social democrats before the election disaster of 4 March, it was always the possibility of being beaten by Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, not the racist FI-Lega Nord alliance, that haunted them. In Britain, the spectacle of Haringey’s Labour leader Claire Kober self-destructing amid mass popular opposition to her housing privatisation project, is a vignette painted from the same colour scheme.

To be clear: a break with neoliberalism  means a limited, reversible and calibrated retreat from some aspects of globalisation.

To salvage what is salvageable from the global system we must prevent its implosion: that means preventing the chaotic breakup of the EU, the collapse of multilateral global trading arrangements and – the ultimate threat – a spate of mutual debt defaults during which everyone heads for the exit in a disorderly manner.

Here the analogy with trench warfare holds good. If the front trench is overrun, the last person standing in it is going to get bayoneted. Better to retreat to the next trench and defend that.

This has informed my approach to Brexit. The substantive issue was always going to be: what form does the semi-detached relationship of Britain to the EU take in future. I voted Remain because the alternative – which has now transpired – was Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg constructing Thatcherism in One Country, with Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ used as a handbook.

Because people were told freedom of movement was non-negotiable inside the EU, they voted to leave it. They did not believe the assurance that “ever closer union” no longer applied to the UK – and the actions of the European Commission during the Brexit negotiations have tended to confirm that suspicion.

Given that, it is neither possible nor desirable to use intrigue and elite chicanery to override the votes of 17 million people. What is possible is to persuade them to accept a limited – and thus reversible – semi-detachment from the EU in the form of a Norway style agreement, a customs union or something in-between.

The question for Europe’s social democrats is far bigger than the one that usually greets me in seminars and one-to-one meetings, which is “how do we emulate Corbyn?”. Nevertheless, it is worth reminding ourselves that UK Labour’s current recovery and dynamism is premised on the fact that, first, Britain was always effectively exempt from the Maastricht rules mandating fiscal austerity.

Corbyn’s ability to draft a post-austerity manifesto, centred on a £250 billion borrowing programme and a £50 billion tax redistribution plan, together with some limited renationalisation and a state investment bank, was an act of imagination unavailable to Renzi, Sanchez and Schulz.

On top of that, Corbyn has – correctly – accepted the result of the Brexit referendum, refusing the invitation from the die-hard Blairite right to destroy his own party by labelling a third of Labour voters deluded xenophobes.

What lesson can the rest of European social democracy draw from Labour’s success? The exact lesson they refuse to draw: which is that “retreating to the second trench” means adopting as an overt goal a revision of the Lisbon Treaty in favour of greater social justice. Europe has to be redesigned to allow state aid, nationalisations, the equalisation of social safety nets and minimum wages – removing the Maastricht criteria on debt and borrowing which mandate austerity.

A Corbyn government in Britain, and a Sanders or similarly left-led Democratic Party government in the USA, would at least have some fiscal freedom. Until they can imagine themselves operating in the same way – either collectively across an alliance of core EU countries or individually – the European social democratic parties will go on destroying themselves for the sake of Lisbon and the Bundesbank. They should stop doing so.

***

Which brings us face to face with a general principle: over the next five years the venue in which authoritarian populism and economic nationalism have to be fought is the nation state itself, and state-level democratic institutions.

Trump will be beaten at the level of Federal elections, the Supreme Court and the FBI, not the WTO or the United Nations. Orban, Kaczinsky and the Blue-Black coalition in Austria will be beaten at the level of the national cultures, parliaments, intelligentsias and the national demos – not through the authority of the European Commission and tongue-lashings by Guy Verhofstadt in the Brussels parliament (welcome though these may be).

Done intelligently, and without conceding to the rhetoric of the right, a limited reassertion of economic sovereignty is going to be key to the revival of left politics both in Europe and the USA. Indeed, if it had been done five years ago then, like a flu jab, it might have prevented the current sickness.

Working out how to reform capitalism to meet the needs of those on stagnating wages and in precarious jobs becomes easier once you accept that the place that is going to be done is national parliaments and regional assemblies. They will still have to be constrained by multilateral agreements, but they will probably look more like the flexible deals that preceded the heyday of neoliberalism, not the inflexible ones that are currently falling apart. Customs unions, free trade areas, bilateral currency pegs, an exchange rate mechanism rather than a single currency for Europe, and a two-speed structure for the EU itself – these might have to be the forms in which globalisation survives.

For social democracy, internationalism – which was rooted into its practice from the formation of the Second International in 1889 – is a strong trench to fall back on as globalism evaporates. The globalism of elites – from Mar-a-Lago to Budapest – is proving depressingly fragile; the internationalism of left parties can, given the right basis, prove much more durable.

And social-democrats will not be the sole occupiers of this second trench: liberalism, radical left, feminism and green movement have all made strong intellectual contributions to the progressive, internationalist ideology that will have to replace free market globalism.

The advantage of forcing social democratic politicians to focus on the dynamics of their own society is that in most countries they face the same demographic challenge: cultural conflict between an educated, younger workforce with liberal values and a less educated, older workforce clinging to social conservatism. It is a split between the city and the small town; between old and young; and, at its worst – as with the alt-right in America and the populist right in Poland – it weaponises gender inequality as well.

From Bernstein to Giddens, the prophets of stability socialism always focused on the atomisation of class and community loyalties, and the decline of solidarity. As early as 1899 Bernstein warned that “the precision tool maker and the coalminer, the skilled decorator and the porter… live very different kinds of life, and have very different kinds of wants”. It would be easier to unite them around race and nation than it would around pure class politics, he wrote. A century later Giddens’ entire project was premised on the idea that most social solidarities – even ethnicity and nationality, let alone class – would be atomised under the impact of marketisation and networked individuality.

It turns out that the current struggle is not between atomization versus old solidarities; it is in fact a death match between two spontaneous solidarities that can no longer coexist.

For now, wherever the authoritarian right is on the march, it is mobilising people around nationalism, racism and sexism. Yet the ideology of an educated, networked, diverse, globally focused and tolerant section of society is equally spontaneous and, in some places, stronger.

In one way, the salariat, the Millennial generation and their natural allies among ethnic minorities, women, the LGBT community have achieved what Giddens had called for: an agency born out of fear. As he wrote: “Values of the sanctity of human life, universal human rights, the preservation of species and care for future as well as present generations of children may perhaps be arrived at defensively, but they are certainly not negative values.”

Instead of a proletariat with a historic, positively-defined mission, we might have to make do with a motley tribal alliance with many missions, some of them conflicting, Giddens said.

I will return to this question of agency in a future essay, but here it is worth acknowledging how closely Giddens’ 1994 position anticipates what came to be known in the anti-globalisation movement as “One No, Many Yesses”.

The difference is, today, we have two “Noes”: no to neoliberalism and no to the xenophobic right. In turn, that limits the number of “Yeses” that are practical in the short term: yes to defending universalism, yes to mitigating climate change and yes to upholding the rule of law. That should be the terrain on which the progressive forces of humanity come together.

But social democrats should not flinch from adding one more “yes” to this list, and that is to the right of electorates to use democracy to regulate and control the market at a national level – even if this means reforming, suspending or defying the institutions through which global corporations have dictated the world’s affairs for 30 years. That is the ground on which social democracy and the radical left should converge.

The journey towards a radical social democracy will be fraught with temptations to ditch what was progressive in the era of free market globalisation alongside what’s been wrecked. In fact, studying centre left thinkers who tried to move the SPD on from Bernstein between 1914 and the early Weimar era – Karl Kautsky, Otto Bauer in Austria and the workers’ control advocate Karl Korsch – I am struck by how unstable the centre ground was between Bernsteinism and Bolshevism. Every attempt by the German centre left to stabilize, humanise and democratize capitalism was outflanked by the venality of the ruling elite and the brutality of the street politics the far right adopted.

If there had been no USSR and no Leninism, could that large and vibrant movement of German workers who vacillated between the communists and the social-democrats in Germany between 1919 and 1929 have succeeded in creating a more sustainable left social-democratic pole of attraction than the one the doomed Communist Party of Germany (KPD) did? It’s an interesting ‘what if’. Put another way, in a time of crisis and breakdown, is radical social democracy even possible?

Because today there is no equivalent of the USSR, no Lenin, and a much-weakened industrial working class, we are destined to find out the answer to that question through our own practice.

Today we need a form of social democracy attuned to a period of crisis, not stability. Accepting the need for it is the first step towards achieving it.

[i] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm

[ii]   Davies, William. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Theory, Culture & Society) (p. xiv).

[iii] Giddens, Anthony. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (p. 19). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

[iv] “Overcoming the Fear of Freedom” in Geiselberger H, ed The Great Regression, 2017

The post The second trench: forging a new frontline in the war against neoliberalism appeared first on New thinking for the British economy.

Just over two weeks ago I went to Paul Mason’s Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture, on ‘The Radical Left in Power — Challenges for Labour in Government’.[i] The lecture theatre was full. I stood in a corridor leading from the lecture theatre to the lobby, and even that corridor was full. It’s clear that Mason — author of Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future — is one of the most important, and sought after, thinkers working on the present and future of the British Left (perhaps alongside Owen Jones, Mariana Mazzucato, Gary Younge, and Jeremy Gilbert).

But I left the lecture, an hour later, feeling a little empty. I didn’t feel like I’d heard an inspiring vision for what was possible under a Corbyn-led government, or a convincing account of how Corbyn and co. might address inevitable challenges. Mason fell back on tired, technocratic language: the language of “resilience”, “innovation”, and “human capital”. Even he seemed to realise that “human capital” was an ugly phrase, wincing and acknowledging this the second time he used it. When he spoke about what the new Corbyn paradigm would be, he said it would be a mixture — some arrangement of “state, market, and non-market”. But he did not say what this mixture or arrangement might look like. And though the lecture was meant to be about the general “challenges for Labour in government”, the focus was on economic policy, hived off from questions of foreign policy or race or justice, for example.

What the lecture did help me realise is that we are all — or at least all of us engaged with progressive politics in the United Kingdom, all with some hopes for a Corbyn-led Labour government — wrestling with what needs to be done on the British Left, how that is to be done, and who decides. And, as Paul Mason eloquently argued, we all need to direct our intellectual energies to these dilemmas, especially those of us with the privilege of having time to think about them.

So, coming out of this realisation and Mason’s encouragement, here’s my attempt to sharpen some of the questions I think those that identify as being part of the British Left need to grapple with — along with some suggestions about further work that needs to be done to get to some answers. I discuss questions in the realm of economic policy in particular, building off Paul Mason’s prompt, though I try to say something about how economic policy is connected to other parts of policy and politics. Others — especially people at the New Economics Foundation, Novara Media, Momentum, and in local Labour branches around the country — have contributed to sharpening these questions. I tweeted about at some of them a week ago. This is my effort to articulate my thoughts in a more elaborated, considered form, and to say a bit more in closing about the strategy for taking these ideas forward.

I write this all as a supporter of the Corbyn project, who is nonetheless open to criticisms of that project that need to be addressed; as a non-economist, who has a basic grasp of economics and an interest in new economic thinking; and as a critic of neoliberalism, hungry — like others are — for a different dominant political paradigm that better meets the needs of our time.

1. What kind of State will a Corbyn-led Labour government build?

If the 2017 election manifesto and the policy discussed since then is anything to go by, a Corbyn economic paradigm is not just going to be any haphazard arrangement of market, State, and non-State — and will involve a rejuvenated role for the State. That is clear from the proposal to nationalise the railways and from the proposal (to borrow the words of Tony Atkinson) to restore more progressive rates of taxation, amongst other things.

This role for the State needs to be articulated coherently. To justify this expanded vision of State action, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and others need to speak about why the State can be better at the market in carrying out key economic tasks: for example, the State can borrow more cheaply than the private sector, the State can achieve economies of scale, and the State can coordinate activity across different civil service departments. They need to speak about what they want the State to do — which might include a more expansive industrial policy, of the kind Mariana Mazzucato has alluded to.

But they also need to show how this State will address the shortcomings of the post-Second World War State. The State of the Attlee-Beveridge-Bevan era secured major achievements such as the establishment of the NHS, but it was also dominated by white men in positions of leadership and top-down.

No one in the Corbyn camp is talking about a return to that kind of State; one of the Tories’ easy attack-lines has been that a Corbyn government would take Britain back to the ’70s, or earlier. However, more needs to be done to show how newly nationalised services — like the railways — can be run in a bottom-up way.

What is the role for co-operatives in public services? Can new legal forms and structures support a different form of public ownership? And what place do trade unions have in all of this? Some answers to these questions are offered in outline in Andrew Cumbers’ interesting report for the Labour Party on different models of public ownership: he writes about the need to improve co-operatives’ access to finance, more democratic accountability on the boards of newly nationalised services, and the role of municipal public ownership. Jeremy Gilbert has also pointed to the two strands of Corbynism that pull apart from each other — one top-down and focused on Jeremy Corbyn, the other bottom-up and emphasising mass movement politics — and highlighted the need for the Labour Party to be clarify this tension. The organisation We Own It has been communicating in an accessible way the value of this new public ownership.[ii]

Thinkers and campaigners could usefully dedicate their energy, in the way called for by Paul Mason, to this sort of work: setting out the kind of State the Labour Party wants to build, explaining how this State interacts with and supports the community, and being specific about the policies that will realise that kind of State. (I say more below about how thinkers and campaigners can work together on this.) All of this is essential to building a new framework of thought beyond neoliberalism.

2. What is that State working towards?

A rejuvenated State, however, is not an end in itself. It is not the answer to our problems. It is a means to an end: a tool that can be used to build a better society. The harder task is spelling out what that better society looks like.

This was also a gap in Paul Mason’s Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture. Mason spoke of reclaiming social mobility as an ideal, and referred in moving terms to his father. But an important question remained unanswered when Mason mentioned social mobility: mobility towards what? Across the twentieth century, particularly in the United States in the context of discussions of the American Dream, social mobility was hailed as a sign of a successful society. However, references to social mobility were all too often silent about where mobility was leading, allowing a basic truth to remain unuttered: that many proponents of social mobility simply sought access to wealth for all. Is that what we should be focused on, in progressive politics today?

Of course, some answers are close to hand, and were implicit in Mason’s talk. Social mobility is about ensuring that class positioning, or other forms of oppression, do not dictate the shape of a person’s life. Social mobility means that people are not held back. It means that people have access to the opportunities that those born into privilege take for granted: opportunities to be educated, to find meaningful employment, to lead lives of security, to draw on the bonds of community in order to become individuals.

Yet we could still do more to state — in language that is fresh — what the goals of social mobility, and the State, are. If the State is transitional, as Gramsci says, we need to know the next step in that transition. Paul Mason spoke of radical social democracy, a theme he has continued to explore in his public writing. That concept could be unpacked further; I have also written about a new ideal of public democracy,[iii] since I think the limitations of social democracy have been well laid out, including by Joseph M. Schwartz and Bhaskar Sunkara.

The need to avoid stale terminology has led me, in the past, to write about love as the object of politics: not a banal love, a love that collapses into generalised and directionless niceness, but a deep sense of warmth that is directed towards others — a love that might motivate anger and conflict just as much as it motivates goodwill and generosity. Others will disagree with love being identified as the end-point of economic policy, and a progressive policy platform more generally.

What is clear, though, is that some sense of direction can help to mobilise people to take action. For as historian Robin Kelley has said: “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down.”

3. How will Corbynomics be integrated into a broader policy platform?

Paul Mason’s talk was not only disappointing because it narrowed a discussion of ‘The Radical Left in Power’ to an analysis of economic policy. It also disappointed because Mason, from that hemmed-in starting point, took a limited view of what economic policy is.

I think in the last twenty or thirty years ‘the economy’ has been viewed in more and more blinkered and technocratic terms. It has become regarded as a collection of numbers: the central bank’s interest rate, the level of growth over the past quarter, the inflation rate, the unemployment rate. (Nancy Fraser has hinted at this shift over time in an illuminating recent talk with David Harvey for Verso Books, available online.) But the choice to make the economy about these metrics, over others, involves value judgments. And the economy has always been about more than the sum total of a set of statistics covering inflation, interest rates, growth, and unemployment (as important as some of these might be).

Therefore a vision of economic policy under Corbyn needs to be connected to other features of the Labour policy agenda. One of the attractions of the current Labour Party is that it has attempted to integrate analysis of race and class (at a time when thinkers such as Keaanga-Yamahtta Taylor are working through similar issues in the States). But how will anti-racism and class consciousness — as well as a willingness to reckon with colonial pasts — feed into economic policy? Momentum has done fantastic work building progressive political energy amongst young people in the United Kingdom. How will economic policy deal with the problems faced by young people across the country, especially debt, and draw on their organising skills? The environment must also be a part of this debate. Can a government still follow the traditional Keynesian prescription — pumping money into an economy to boost aggregate demand — at times of crisis if that boost simply means greater consumption, and a contribution to global warming? Is that old Keynesian model appropriate, too, given the globalised structure of the British economy, and the likelihood that this increased spending might leak offshore rather than revive British aggregate demand? All of these questions must be explored if an economic policy is to be consistent with a broader Left agenda, and if a (justifiably) wide view is taken of what ‘the economy’ is today.

***

There is more and more talk of the need for progressive strategy in the US and the UK, as we see a resurgence of interest in radical politics — and as a Corbyn government appears to be within reach. Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin, recently set up Catalyst, a journal of “socialist theory and strategy” (my emphasis). I heard discussion of this at an interesting recent talk by Madeleine Davis of Queen Mary University, London, called ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy Redux’. By ‘strategy’ I think what is meant is the coordination of different actions that are needed to bring about a better future.

But one final question is: whose responsibility is it to develop strategy, and to answer some of the questions laid out above? How should responsibility be divided between people like Paul Mason, who have done hard thinking about future economic and political challenges, and others doing work on the ground to organise campaigns?

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have offered the promising suggestion that in contemporary activism there is a need to flip the usual roles given to leaders and the rest of the mass movement: instead of leaders dictating strategy and the mass movement implementing tactics, the mass movement should dictate strategy — with logistics and tactics left to leadership. That is the approach already taken by many activist and campaigning groups. It is discussed in this conversation between Michael Hardt and James Foster from Novara Media.

This is, in one sense, the bottom-up model of change that is meant to underlie the Labour Party: remits are proposed by members, with the leaders having the responsibility to carry out the action taken to turn remits into policy and law. But for some time, in the United Kingdom and overseas, the ability of the mass movement to shape change within social democratic parties has become stunted. Work needs to continue to make membership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom more meaningful, including through reform of internal processes. (Max Shanly’s note on strengthening Young Labour offers some ideas of reform in one part of the party.)

It may be that Hardt and Negri’s suggestion also leaves leaders of a social movement only doing administration — and that this is too technocratic. Whilst there does in my view need to be greater power given to members of a mass movement, leaders — as Jeremy Corbyn has demonstrated — may play some useful role in charismatically giving voice to ideas emerging out of the movement.

What is the role of intellectuals in all of this? We might need to challenge old dichotomies here, too: in particular, the distinction between intellectuals and non-intellectuals. it is important to remember that ‘intellectuals’ are not the same as ‘university academics’ — and by intellectuals I mean something broader than university academics (without at all demeaning the work of those academics).

Everyone is capable of doing intellectual work. There are different forms of intelligence — analytical, emotional, cultural, social, and practical intelligence. (Each of these forms of intelligence also comprises different parts: analytical intelligence, for example, might mean a comfort with abstraction, a skill for drawing distinctions, an ability to foresee and combat counter-arguments, or a combination of these things.) As Gramsci wrote in his ‘Prison Notebooks’:[iv]

“There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens. Each [person], finally, outside their professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, [they are] a “philosopher”, an artist, a [person] of taste, [they participate] in a particular conception of the world, [have] a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore [contribute] to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.”

In short: we’re all intellectuals. Some people have the privilege of being paid for intellectual work, including those at universities (though their pay and work conditions are not always as good as they should be, as the upcoming University and College Union strike highlights) — and those people can, where possible, use the time they have to work through these challenges. Others, including those who write for a public audience, may have a skill in finding words that speak to people’s instincts and intuitions, and if they can use this skill for the purpose of advancing a broader movement, that is all for the good.

But then the intellectual work that feeds into strategy — the work that clarifies what actions need to be taken — must be combined with practical work: coming up with a sequence of those actions (something Paul Mason alluded to in his Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture), thinking through what is possible (while always pushing to widen the existing Overton window, in the spirit of what Mark Fisher discusses in Capitalist Realism), and organising people to make the action happen.

A division of labour — tailored to the task ahead — can help to clarify the different forms of intellectual work that must be done, the practical work that can discipline that intellectual work, and the way that mixed intellectual-practical labour adds up to a strategy. (After all, as Marx notes in volume 1 of Capital, division of labour is not necessarily a capitalist idea: it is rather the case that a capitalist conception of division of labour has been developed that distorts our proper place in the world.) That division of labour will emerge out of the fierce furnace of activism, and in calmer moments of community-building and conversation.

In sum, then, the work of developing the strategy — to accompany the theory — of Corbynism is partly intellectual and partly practical. The responsibility of developing that strategy lies with all of us.

[i] Some of this lecture has been reproduced in this piece for openDemocracy: http://neweconomics.opendemocracy.net/neoliberalism-destroyed-social-mobility-together-must-rebuild/. (Paul Mason was not, however, wedded to his notes in his Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture, and there are sections in this openDemocracy that did not appear in his lecture.)

[ii] I sit on the Board of We Own It.

[iii] I have written about this in my book, The New Zealand Project, and in this piece about street art: https://thedial.co/articles/graffiti-politics-on-street-art-space-and-public-democracy.

[iv] My particular thanks to Franck Magennis for his comments on this section, and his suggestion of this quote from Gramsci.

The post Economic policy and strategy for a Corbyn-led government: reflections on Paul Mason’s Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture appeared first on New thinking for the British economy.

In 2010, the British right wing media and political parties told a very convincing story about the economy that persuaded the public we had no choice but to make massive cuts to public spending. You probably know it already: there was no money left, the economy was like a household budget, we’d maxed out the nation’s credit card, and it was time to tighten our belts. Anyone who watches the news will be familiar with this story, and if you’ve ever gone door knocking, you will have heard people repeat it back to you with total conviction. Since 2010, there have been 120,000 excess deaths linked to austerity, the Red Cross declared a humanitarian crisis in the NHS, and use of foodbanks has soared. Why, in light of all of this, did people still support it?

This was the backdrop for the Framing the Economy project. We believed the public endorsed a right wing story about the economy because progressives had failed to come up with an alternative. There weren’t that many progressive spokespeople on current affairs programmes, and when they were it was like they didn’t know what to say. So four organisations came together to understand how British people understood the economy and what new story could be told to persuade them to share our ideas. The four organisations that led the project were NEF (New Economics Foundation), NEON (New Economy Organisers Network), PIRC (Public Interest Research Centre) and the Frameworks Institute.

Of course a lot has changed since 2010. We didn’t expect the host of The Apprentice to become the American President, for example. But the tumultuous politics of the last eight years do suggest the austerity consensus is breaking down, and that there is a real opportunity for a resonant progressive story about the economy to win public support. After the 2017 election, where the Labour Party defied all odds to destabilise the government on an anti-austerity programme, the need for a project like Framing the Economy seemed more urgent than ever. The public are finally ready to hear about an alternative economy. This project is to help communicators explain how we might create one.

So in June 2016, shortly after 52% of the British public voted to leave the European Union, we got to work. The project consisted of three phases: first, we would conduct in-depth interviews with a cross section of British voters to understand how they conceive of the economy. Second, we would compare these interviews to how progressives think of the same thing, to identify gaps in our ways of thinking. And finally, we would come up with a new and resonant story, rich with metaphor, that would be able to close those gaps. The eventual story would be rigorously tested, so we could safely say it moved people’s thinking from where they were originally to where we wanted them to be.

Our interviews revealed several “cultural models” held by most members of the British public to understand how the economy works. We use the word “how” because cultural models show us how people think of the economy as a whole, rather than what they think about single issues – which is what opinion polls tell us. Cultural models are the durable, deep assumptions we hold to organise information and interpret the world around us. They are shared by all of us. Here are the main cultural models we found:

Cultural models

What the economy is and how it works

• People only really understand the economy as the monetary system and expressed this through the metaphor of circulation. They don’t consider things like social care, for example, to be part of the economy.
• People think the economy is always on the edge of disaster, using language like ‘tumbling’, ‘falling’, and ‘rocketing’ to describe it.
• People conceive of the economy as a container, with people putting in (contributing) or taking out (draining). The government was assumed to control what goes in and out of the pot, as well as how its contents are distributed.
• People actually don’t understand how the economy works, by and large – except for in quite limited ways. They also lack confidence in talking about it.
• People think that the economy exists in competition with the environment – what is good for the environment is thought to be bad for the economy and vice versa.

Why the economy works as it does

• People think the system is rigged by elites in government, business, and the media who pull the strings of the economy for their own benefit.
• People viewed the media as having a hidden agenda and were very distrustful. Having said that, several of our participants who said they distrusted the media later dispensed arguments that correspond with popular news frames.
• People assumed greed is a basic part of human nature: all people are motivated by a desire to enrich themselves, even at the expense of others.

How the economy should work

• People wanted Britain to have more national self- reliance, producing key products at home and be able to meet its basic needs without relying on other countries. Globalisation and, to a surprisingly small extent, Europe are the foil for this model.
• People often idealised an earlier time – typically the post-war period – when wages were high, jobs were more secure, inequality was low, there was a greater sense of community, and ‘we did more manufacturing’.
• People believe the government has overall responsibility for managing the economy.
• Overall people were extremely fatalistic and didn’t think the economy could be changed for the better. This meant that they often drew a blank when asked about different ways to run the economy.

Telling a new story

Because we found so much fatalism in the responses of our interviewees, we felt that we could not make economic arguments to the public if there was a pervasive belief that change simply wasn’t possible. For that reason, the story we told argued that the economy had been designed as a result of human choices, made by a small elite, and could be redesigned with different choices. After testing and analysis, we found two powerful but fairly different stories that help shift people’s thinking. If you want to use them in your work, we recommend you read our full report on the project first. It contains lots of information how to best deploy the stories so they’re most effective, and there’s some pointers on what to avoid doing so you don’t undermine your argument.

Story 1: Resisting corporate power

There are a lot of different ways to interpret the term “populism,” so it is important to be clear that when we use the term, we mean a story that pits elites against the people. Story 1 is a fundamentally populist story. It contains the following elements:

• The value of equality or economic strength
• The explanatory metaphor of reprogramming the economy
• An explanation that connects the dots and explains: 1) how corporate elites have programmed the economy and how this has undermined equality/economic strength, and 2) how the economy can be reprogrammed to promote a strong/equal economy.

Here’s a sample message that uses the value of economic strength. Our research shows this value is particularly successful in convincing Conservative voters, but this story can also be employed using the value of equality (but not both at the same time).

Over the last forty years, our government has become a tool of corporations and banks, and as a result our society has served their interests while failing to provide the broad-based supports that our economy needs to work well. This has weakened our economy, so it doesn’t meet people’s needs.

Our economy is like a programme that is constantly being revised and updated. Corporate elites have gained the password to the economy, and have programmed the economy to work well for corporate users. But the public have been locked out, so the parts of the economy they rely on have been neglected. As a result, many users of the economy experience constant glitches, and the economy as a whole doesn’t run well.

By programming the economy for financial services rather than manufacturing, we’ve destroyed the types of good jobs that put money back into the economy. And cutting taxes and privatising industries has undermined our ability to invest in ways that strengthen the economy and keep it running smoothly.

As a society, we need to prioritise a strong economy over the desires of corporations and wealthy elites. We need to reset the password and give control of the economy back to the public. That way, we can reprogramme the economy so it works better. We can create a strong and durable economy by guaranteeing decent wages for the least well-off, investing in local communities, and restoring public ownership of common resources like energy and transport. Creating a good society means taking back the password to the economy from corporate elites and reprogramming the economy so it runs smoothly and makes a good life possible for all users.

Story 2: Meeting our needs

Sometimes it might not be appropriate for communicators to tell a populist story about the economy. So for these cases, we recommend the second story, which doesn’t blame elites but instead focuses on how the economy fails to meet people’s real needs. It includes the following elements:

• The value of fulfilment
• The explanatory metaphor of economic tracks
• An explanation that connects the dots and explains: 1) how our economic tracks have made it difficult for people to reach fulfilling lives, and 2) how the economy can be rebuilt to get people to their real needs.

Here’s a sample message that shows how these elements can be put together:

A good society makes it possible for everyone to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life. Yet, our society is currently focused solely on profit, and people are forced to chase money rather than happiness.

Our economy is like a railway network—it’s built to take people to particular places. The laws and policies that we make lay down tracks that determine where the economy takes people. Right now, our economy is built around profit, rather than being built to get people to their true needs. By allowing businesses to use zero-hour contracts, provide low wages, and require people to work more and more hours for the same pay, we have built economic tracks that move profit forward but leave people without the things they need to achieve wellbeing and realise their potential. When people don’t have decent wages or stable jobs, this undermines wellbeing in all sorts of ways. And for those of us who do have stable jobs, the need to work more hours means less time with our families and to pursue our goals in life outside of work.

As a society, we need to prioritise happiness and fulfilment over profit. We need to lay down economic tracks that make it possible for people to arrive at a meaningful life. We can build an economy that gets people to happiness by guaranteeing decent wages for the least well-off, banning zero-hour contracts, and reducing working hours. Creating a good society means laying down economic tracks that enable us to get to our real needs rather than keeping us all on a train whose only destination is profit.

Making sure people listen

So we’ve got a new story on the economy. But we need to make sure the public will actually hear it. To do this, NEON is founding a Communications Hub which will provide tools, research and training to make sure people in communications will be able to get the stories we’ve identified into the public sphere as efficiently as possible. We know certain frames already exist in political discourse – like the ‘system is rigged’ cultural model – but progressives need to insert themselves into public debate to make sure these frames are wielded in a way that does convince people to share our ideas.

The Communications Hub will launch in Spring 2018. It will expand on NEON’s existing programme to train progressive spokespeople who appear in the media, as well as introducing new training programmes like a training programme for press officers. The Hub will also help communicators frame their messages effectively, connect communicators in the same sector to one another, and share the latest research on framing and public opinion. In short it will do all of the things communicators should be doing, but simply don’t have time for. With the Communications Hub and the two stories from the Framing the Economy project, NEON will be able to provide the tools for communicators to fundamentally change the way we talk about economy – and then progressives can start telling stories that are as effective and impactful as the one the public bought into about austerity.

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Paul Mason, Dr Faiza Shaheen, Anthony Barnett and Dr Johnna Montgomerie discuss whether radical social democracy offers a way out of the crisis of neoliberalism, and what that means for future economic policy. 

The debate is part of a new series by Paul Mason exploring what radical social democracy means during the next decade. Paul’s first essay in the series can be read here. 

* Dr Faiza Shaheen is Director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS)

* Anthony Barnett is co-founder of openDemocracy and author of The Lure of Greatness. 

* Dr Johnna Montgomerie is Deputy director at the Political Economy Research Centre, Goldsmiths University of London. 

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This election comes during a remarkable period in British economic history. Over the past ten years real wages have suffered a larger decline than in any other advanced country apart from Greece. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, recently said that Britain is experiencing its “first lost decade since the 1860s”.

Faced with an unprecedented squeeze on living standards, families across the country have resorted to desperate measures. The number of people using food banks in the UK reached 1.2 million in 2015-16 – up from just 26,000 in 2008-09. Unsecured household debt – credit cards, overdrafts and other forms of consumer borrowing such as payday loans – is set to reach record highs.

Years of austerity has pushed public services towards breaking point. A steep decline in funding relative to GDP has left the NHS facing a “humanitarian crisis”, while cuts to school budgets have forced head teachers to axe staff and raise class sizes. Decades of underinvestment has left the UK lagging far behind other advanced economies. British workers are now 22% less productive than workers in the US, 23% less than in France and 27% less than in Germany. Precarious jobs and zero-hours contracts have grown throughout the labour market.

Now, with Brexit on the horizon, things are likely to get worse before they get better. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, a combination of stagnating wages and cuts to working-age benefits means that real earnings will be lower in 2020 than they were back in 2008. According to the Resolution Foundation, we are on course for the biggest increase in inequality since the days of Margaret Thatcher. Never before has the outlook for living standards been this bleak.

But this period of economic decline is not the result of “natural” forces. It is the result of a faltering political and economic order that has reigned supreme in Britain for four decades. A system which has put blind faith in market forces, and tipped the balance of power towards capital and away from labour. A system which has prioritised London’s status as a global hub for financial services, while leaving other regions to suffer at the hands of industrial decline. A system which has allowed wealth to flow upwards by rewarding value extraction more highly than value creation.

In 2008 this system came crashing down when the poster boy of deregulated market fundamentalism – the financial sector – failed catastrophically, taking the whole economy down with it. But without a clear alternative to take its place, the response was to double down on a broken model.

Nearly ten years on, and the economic recovery has been the slowest on record. In fact, when measured properly, there has been no economic recovery – output per head of population still remains below the pre-crisis trend. Interest rates remain stuck at zero, while the Bank of England has relied on £435 billion of quantitative easing to keep the economy afloat. Despite the upbeat rhetoric from the government and right wing press, the reality is that Britain’s economy remains on life support.

It is within this context that the political upheaval of the past twelve months – both at home and abroad – must be viewed. If an economic model delivers stagnating living standards, rising inequality and growing insecurity, it should not be surprising when citizens revolt.

In different ways, both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are symptoms of this faltering economic model. Despite backing Remain in the EU referendum, Theresa May’s reign as prime minister is a direct product of the Brexit vote. While the reasons for Brexit are complex, evidence shows that geographical distribution of living standards, industrial decline and exposure to austerity played a key role in determining how people voted.

Since becoming prime minister, Theresa May has made a concerted effort to appeal to Brexit voters. Rather than tackle the root cause of genuine fears – a failing economic model – she has played into a toxic narrative which attributes blame to immigrants. In both style and substance, Theresa May’s Conservative party is bearing an increasing resemblance to Nigel Farage’s UKIP: a party hell bent on pursuing a hard Brexit, obsessed with reducing immigration, and nostalgic for archaic remnants of a bygone era – from fox hunting to grammar schools.

But despite the rhetoric of “an economy that works for everyone”, the Conservatives’ manifesto offers nothing new in the way of economic policy. Instead, we are presented with more of the same: more cuts to welfare and public services, lower taxes for corporations and the well-off, slashing “poor and excessive government regulation” and Orwellian rhetoric around a “strong economy”.

Where new polices do appear, their effect is usually to make peoples’ lives worse, not better. The commitment to reduce net immigration to “tens of thousands” is not only steeped in xenophobia, but is an act of gross self-harm. Even the government’s own forecasters say that reducing immigration to the tens of thousands will seriously harm growth and increase government borrowing by up to £30 billion. Combined with scrapping of free school lunches, the means testing of winter fuel allowance and the now famous ‘dementia tax’, the direction of travel is a continuation of the status quo, but slightly worse.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, meanwhile, embodies the mood of discontent and a hunger for something different. After twenty years of politics dominated by spin, sound bites and triangulation, millions of people viewed Corbyn’s sincerity and honesty as a breath of fresh air. Initially written off by the political and media establishment, his resilience in the face of constant attack has gradually won over sceptics. But it is not personality or persona that is Labour’s secret weapon – it is policy.

Corbyn’s unashamedly social democratic manifesto represents a marked departure from the politics of recent decades, and contains many sensible policies. A new National Investment Bank would provide long-term patient finance to upgrade physical and social infrastructure across the country. Taxes would be increased on the wealthy to pay for struggling public services. Key utilities would be brought back into public ownership, student tuition fees scrapped, corporation tax increased and workers’ rights strengthened.

Unsurprisingly, the right wing press decried that the manifesto would “drag us back to the 1970s”. But none of Labour’s flagship policies are remotely controversial in Germany, which is the most productive and dynamic economy in Europe, or in the Scandinavian countries, which consistently sit at the top of global rankings on socio-economic development. The hysterical response from the media shows just how detached Britain has become from the mainstream of European economic thinking.

Labour’s proposal to double the size of the co-operative sector – supported by the introduction of a “right to own” policy – is a bold and ambitious way to reinvigorate enterprise and democratise ownership of capital. The proposal to break RBS up into a network of local public banks would create the kind of mid-tier banking system that is the lifeblood of Germany’s industrial power. The pledge to utilise the public sector’s £200 billion spending power in procurement to help create good local jobs, protect the environment and reduce inequality could be transformative. The promise to introduce a financial transaction tax would put a break on harmful financial speculation, and help return finance to its rightful place as the servant, not the master, of our economy.

Many commentators have been quick to judge party manifestos on the basis of whether each individual policy measure has been “fully costed”. Journalists get excited about the prospect of tripping up politicians with questions about “where the money will come from”. Unlike the Conservatives, Labour made a noble attempt to the cost their manifesto. But as many economists have already pointed out, obsessing over specific policy “costings” may be good journalism, but it is bad economics. It makes little sense to obsess over whether each item of addition spending is matched to a measure to raise additional revenue, because this is not how government spending actually works.

Moreover, assessing individual policies in isolation overlooks the dynamic interactions which determine the health of the economy. Taken as a whole, Labour’s manifesto would reboot the economy by kick starting the positive feedback loop between investment, productivity, wages and tax revenues. It would also help to rebalance the economy away from London and towards other parts of the UK.

But while Labour’s offering is a welcome step in the right direction, it is no panacea. There are many areas for improvement. Addressing the housing affordability crisis means not only building more homes, but fixing our broken land market. An ageing population and growing intergenerational needs a bolder approach to social care and inheritance. Moving towards a low carbon economy requires a systematic greening of the economy, not just targeted investment. Automation, big data and the changing nature of work demands a more radical rethink of welfare policy, and a more sophisticated debate about ownership in our economy.

The media has failed to engage in this debate, or even acknowledge the scale of the challenges we face. That’s why at openDemocracy we are bringing people together to get to grips with the long running economic crisis unfolding in Britain, and figure out a new economic programme.

Join the conversation, and help us build an economy to meet the challenges of the coming century.

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It’s just seven days until the polling stations close.

Depending on your constitution (and/or the most recent poll you have seen), you might feel we are living in exciting (or terrifying) political times, or you might agree with Brenda in Bristol that there is just too much politics these days. Either way, it’s important not to lose sight of the long-term changes we are working towards. Knowing how to communicate effectively is a key part of creating this change.

At PIRC, we work with others to explore how to best frame the issues we care about (creating a nicer, more equal, happier, greener world). From the varied groups and issues we’ve worked on (including our current work on Framing the Economy), we’ve summarised five things anyone working for a more equitable, democratic and sustainable society should keep in mind when communicating with people in this week before the election (whether you’re out door-knocking, sending your final email campaigns or writing blogs).

1. Speak to people’s best selves

We aren’t as divided as we think. Just as we can all be horrible sometimes, we can also be really wonderful. Research suggests people are much nicer than we think; and that we share more values in common than we assume. In particular, people prioritise values around caring about others more than we think.

Research also suggests that what we focus on can encourage different values and sides in people. So, if we talk about economic benefits, people are more likely to act with concern for personal financial gain. If we talk about collective care, people are more likely to act with concern for their communities. What this means is we need to focus as much as possible on our (collective and individual) better selves.

In a similar vein, think about when your own mind has been changed. Has it been when someone’s been shouting at you, condescending you, or calling you an idiot? Unless you’re a bit of a masochist (and that’s fine), the answer’s probably no. So respect the people you’re talking to—they’re not stupid, and they’re not evil—and respect the journeys they might have to go on to really hear what you’re saying.

Will we convince everyone? No. But we’ll also lose our own supporters (and possibly our souls) if we bend to their requests in order to win everyone over.]

2. Yes, ‘the system is rigged’: so what?

Most people already agree with you. The system is broken. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. The ‘establishment’ are not to be trusted (variously understood as bankers, corporations, politicians, and the media). Even better: people care.

The bad news? People are cynical and fatalistic. People think we’re screwed, and there’s not much we can do about it.  So when you say “The system is rigged!” people don’t think “And we can work together to fix it!” They think “And that’s just the way it is cos people are selfish / it’s always been like that / nothing changes.”

Naming the problem is important, but not sufficient.

If we want to motivate and energise people this election (and—gasp—beyond), we need to talk way more about solutions. Clear, constructive, collective solutions. Solutions that match the size of the problems we face. There’s no point beinging unrealistic—it’ll just cause disillusionment and disappointment when it doesn’t happen—but let’s show that there are ways of doing things better, and that change is possible.

3. Repeat, repeat, repeat

You know how frustrated you get when you’ve seen that terrible advert for the 400th time? Well, it’s kind of on purpose. Advertising is made to be repeated over and over and over and over because, however annoying it becomes, that’s the way it sticks in your brain. Savvy politicians know this—hence those repeated rhetorical flourishes we can all cite word for word. If you want people to remember what you’re talking about, get your message clear, as snappy as possible, and keep getting it out there.

It also means that working together and acting in solidarity with each other is good for all of us. We should be repeating and passing on each others’ messages in order to give them more strength.

Sound obvious? Perhaps the less obvious bit is that even when you’re talking about how annoying the advert is you’re reinforcing their advertising. (Just like saying ‘don’t think of an elephant’ doesn’t stop you thinking of an elephant!) In other words, don’t repeat messages you don’t agree with, even to refute them.

This means myth-busting is a bust. One study showed that people who read a myth-busting factsheet about vaccines were more likely to believe they were true afterwards, and actually attributed the myths to the health organisation sponsoring the factsheets. So if you’re talking about policies or rhetoric you don’t agree with, give them as little airtime as you can. Instead, repeat and reinforce your own.

4. Care is competence

5. Disrupt xenophobic nationalism

Post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-Manchester, we need to be ever-vigilant for the racist and xenophobic nationalism that casts a huge shadow over so much of our political debate. The response to this has often, at best, been too quiet: too many of us have sat in that shadow. At worst, people have pandered to these beliefs in order to win over those with opposing views.

We must, instead, undermine these frames.

Remember that myth-busting doesn’t work, so this doesn’t mean saying ‘immigrants/ refugees  are not / do not…’. Instead try the show don’t tell principle: showcase diverse voices and faces, telling a story of our country that is inclusive and fair through what people can see.

At the very least, we all—whatever our issue—should check over what we’re saying for whether it could be read in a way that excludes people of colour or immigrants from the story of our country.

YES!

If you want a bit of inspiration, the Irish campaign for a yes vote on the marriage equality referendum in 2015 is a good ‘un (they won an ‘impossible’ 62% yes vote):

• Speaking to people’s best selves. The campaign (after much research) decided to focus on a positive story of Ireland as a generous, fair, equal and inclusive country: in which marriage equality was a perfect next step of progress. They situated gay and lesbian couples within their wider families and connected with their various audiences with a variety of very human messengers. They used humour and got people out knocking on doors and creating their own campaign videos. And they consciously refrained from talking about it as a rights issue or focusing heavily on unfairness.
• Showing change is possible. The campaign was all about change, and focused heavily on the solution rather than spending time talking about the problem (except when appropriate, like when asked why the change was necessary). It was really clear on its campaign asks and how people could get involved. And there was a huge, grassroots uptake of the issue: thousands of canvassers and people making their own materials; other organisations getting involved.
• Repeating, repeating, repeating. Campaigners refused to get into debates with the No Campaign, or get drawn on their insidious claims, as they found very early on that saying ‘it’s not true that x’ just fuelled an unhelpful debate. Instead, they knew their own key messages and stuck to them: that this was a positive family issue, that reflected the character of a nation centred on generosity, equality and fairness.

Lastly, take care of yourselves, and each other

Campaigning, canvassing, even just talking to your own family about politics, can be really, really hard. Hearing the lies told in the media and the horrible events that occur daily is heavy stuff to take. It can all be a bit exhausting at least, and traumatic at worst. Make sure you’ve got some people you can shout and swear at (like, good friends with tea / cake / beer). Take time out. Sleep. Eat.

Remember self-care is a political act.

This article was originally published by the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC). 

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