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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Labour has been on a wild ride over the past thirty years. New Labour argued that we had no choice but to accept a globalized free market economy in which the race was to the swift, the open and the flexible. Corbynism reacted against this with a jumble of old school statism and identity politics. Both ultimately failed.
In this book, Maurice Glasman takes the axe to the soulless utilitarianism and ‘progressive’ intolerance of both Blair and Corbyn. Human beings, he contends, are not calculating machines, but faithful, relational beings who yearn for meaning and belonging. Rooted in their homes, families and traditions, they seek to resist the revolutionary upheaval of markets and states, which try to commodify and dominate their lives and homes, by the practice of democracy, mutuality and pluralism. This is the true Labour tradition, which is paradoxically both radical and conservative – and more relevant than ever in a post-COVID world.
This crisp statement of the real politics of Blue Labour – rather than the absurd caricature of its detractors – is Glasman’s love letter to the left-conservatism that provides Labour’s best chance of moral – and indeed electoral – redemption.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
1 What’s Going On?
How We Got Here
Notes
2 The Meaning of Socialism
Human Beings, Belonging and Relationships
Communities, Pluralism and Difference
The Common Good
Democracy and the Nation
Aristotle and Karl Polanyi; commodification and societal resistance
Conclusion: Labour’s Struggle
Notes
3 From Contract to Covenant
Changing the Consensus
Virtue, Craft and Reciprocity: Blue Labour Economics
The Meaning of Vocation
The Banks of England
Restoring the Body to the Corporation
Notes
4 Democratic Renewal
The Meaning of Democracy
The Meaning of Brexit
The Politics of the Common Good
Community Organizing
Statecraft, the Nation State and Parliament
Renewing the Body Politic: the Tribunes, the County and the Parish
The Fate of Social Democracy
Notes
5 Internationalism versus Globalization
A Change of Era
The Meaning of Globalization: the Priority of Capital over Labour
The Disintegration of Globalization
The Wrong Side of History
Internationalism versus Globalization
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Catherine, Harry, Thomas, Anna and Isaac.Without whom …
Blue Labour
The Politics of the Common Good
Maurice Glasman
polity
Copyright © Maurice Glasman 2022
The right of Maurice Glasman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2888-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930010
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This short book has taken a long time to write.
Blue Labour has always been a relational politics and sometimes it is hard to know how to clarify honestly where responsibility lies. I can only say that I put the book together in my own way.
Within Blue Labour, I wish to acknowledge the conversation and contribution of Cheryl Barrott, Luke Bretherton, John Clarke, Jon Cruddas, Ruth Davies, Rowenna Davis, Bernard Donoughue, Paul Embery, Ian Gearey, Jack Hutchison, Adrian Pabst, Jonathan Rutherford and Richard Tuck. I am grateful for their friendship. The Sunday evening group of Kat, Paul, Debs, Dave and Sam have helped me in more ways than I can say.
The Common Good Foundation has supported my work over several years and I thank Judy Hopkinson, Tobias Phibbs and Bryn Phillips for their daily support and encouragement. Leslie Deighton, Mark Dembowski, Jamie Lindsey, Gavin Long, Jenny Sinclair and Phillip Ullman have all contributed to this book in important ways. Arnie Graf and Jonathan Lange have been resolute in their friendship throughout the years and taught me the truths of organizing. Father John Armitage kept reminding me to read Catholic social thought. Andy Haldane has been a constant partner in working through the political economy and I appreciate his friendship greatly.
George Owers, my editor at Polity, has displayed all the virtues: patience, courage, generosity and faith. His assistance is much appreciated.
Above all I am overwhelmed with love and gratitude to my wife Catherine and my children Harry, Thomas, Anna and Isaac.
I have dedicated this book to them.
Introduction
Blue Labour was born during the financial crash of 2008 and the dismal twilight of New Labour and the Third Way. It was also the time of my mother’s death. She had a terrible condition called progressive supranuclear palsy and I saw her become a mute witness to her own degeneration. The two came together in Blue Labour as I tried to make sense of the loss both of my Mum and of Labour. The uncritical embrace of globalization, the domination of finance capital, combined with a pitiless progressive modernism, left no place for workers in the movement they had created. It was a case study in alienation. My Mum left school at 13 to work in a factory so she could support her four younger sisters and her ill father, who died a few months before I was born. My love for Labour came from her. She told me how they built the National Health Service, how Hackney Council moved her family from a damp basement to a council flat, led the fight against Hitler and shared her fanatical commitment to ‘education’.
As she lost her capacity for speech, all I could do was watch television with her. We stared together at the unfolding financial meltdown as the combined assets of many generations were lost in speculative hubris. We watched Gordon Brown saying that it was the ‘destiny of labour to save the global banking system’ and my Mum’s eyes met mine and then she shook her head and closed her eyes.
That was when Blue Labour was born, and it turned out to be a river with many currents running through it. Some of them are philosophical and find their source in Aristotle and what is now called virtue ethics, taking in Aquinas and Alasdair MacIntyre along the way. Some are Christian, ranging from the dissenting tradition based on association, liberty and conscience, through that of Catholic social thought and its critique of capitalism based upon the dignity of labour, local democracy, solidarity and the stewardship of nature. These in turn were rooted within a biblical tradition which first articulated that human beings and nature are sacred and not simply resources for the accumulation of power or money. While Blue Labour expanded and the conversations intensified, there was a shared recognition that all these things were embodied in the Labour tradition itself and their recovery was essential for its renewal.
It became clear that any politics that could draw inspiration from the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Putney Debates, from Archbishop Laud and Gerrard Winstanley, from Saul Alinsky and Ernest Bevin, was not going to find its home within a movement dominated by Whiggish assumptions. The roots of Labour lay in its covenantal bond with the British working class. The culture and experience of workers shaped the form of the Labour movement. It was of them, by them and for them, and that was no longer the case. The steady disaffection of the working class from their party was the source of its ‘progressive palsy’.
‘Blue’ Labour began as a recognition of the sadness and demoralization that had beset the party movement and tradition by 2008. It was compromised, lacking in vitality and severed from the roots of its renewal, relationally and conceptually. Things don’t only get better, and the lack of understanding of loss and tragedy required a rearticulation of the fundamental tenets of the Labour tradition and the belief that these are both relevant and true.
The first truth is that human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning. The second is that nature is not a commodity either, but a condition of life and a sacred inheritance. The Labour tradition also asserted that democracy is the best way to resist the domination of the rich and the educated and that the leadership and participation of the working class is central to this. Further, it argued that local democracy is vital, as well as forms of economic democracy that can hold state and market powers to account; a democracy that is both locational and vocational.
More than that, Labour drew upon historical memory, and not only rational argument. It drew upon the Norman Yoke and the tradition of the freeborn for the solidarity required by its associations. It demanded not only a human status for labour but also a move from the contractual to the covenantal. The human status of labour required the binding of capital to reciprocal obligations, the strengthening and not the abolition of inherited institutions such as Parliament and the common law. Labour was rooted in class but was a national party, and its internationalism was rooted in democratic nation states, in which sovereignty was required in order to domesticate capital.
Within the Labour tradition, the liberties were held to be sacrosanct, and there were four fundamental forms: freedom of religion, in which no-one could be coerced in their faith, and that meant freedom of religious practice; freedom of conscience, in that no-one could be coerced in their beliefs; freedom of expression, in that people were free to speak and create and to reject and criticize; and freedom of association, which was the fundamental form of the trade union movement, which was banned for a century before it was accepted. Within Labour, liberty and democracy are not opposed but mutually supportive political practices.
Blue Labour was also born of a recognition that any vital political tradition and movement has to go beyond rational philosophy and embrace paradox, to combine seemingly contradictory elements in new forms. Labour is a paradoxical tradition, far richer than its present form of economic utilitarianism and legal progressivism. The Labour tradition is not best understood as the living embodiment of the liberal/communitarian debate, or as a variant of the European Marxist/social democratic tension. It is robustly national and international, conservative and reforming, Christian and secular, republican and monarchical, democratic and elitist, radical and traditional, and it is most transformative and effective when it defies the status quo in the name of ancient as well as modern values. The Labour tradition has a vast and varied assortment of traditions, stories and accomplishments, great and small, and can tell a story of how things could get better out of the materials inherited from the past. And yet the technocratic managerialism of its dominant ideology could not draw upon its history for its renewal. Its radicalism, nourished by its roots, was displaced by policy driven by its head, and it was very unattractive.
This type of political tradition is to be distinguished from matters of philosophy. Philosophical arguments, like policy proposals, aspire to be universal, coherent and reasonable. Such demands may be useful in the final stages of a policy review when specific recommendations have to be ordered, but remain unsuited to either political action or ethics. Historical continuity, democracy, the necessity of extemporized action and the demands of leadership render politics contingent, comparative and paradoxical in form. Ideas are not ultimate and singular in politics, but contested and related. The English nation, above all, is deeply synthetic in form, constituted by different tribes and people who generated an unprecedented form of common law, common language and an inheritance of a commonwealth. Its political parties and movements have been stubbornly synthetic too, a matter of blending folk and academic concerns through a politics of interests. Political movements which are rooted in the lives and experiences of people bring together new constellations of existing political matter. What to philosophers is an incoherence can be a source of vitality and strength to a political tradition which contests with others for democratic power over its vision of the common good.
Two ancient political traditions came together in the Labour movement. One could almost call them ancestors. On one side was the Aristotelian notion of the Good Life and the Common Good. In this the importance of politics, of virtue understood as a pursuit of a common life between estranged interests, was carried into the political life of the nation. The founders of the Labour movement understood the logic of capitalism as based upon the maximization of returns on investment and the threat this posed to their lives, livelihoods and environment, but they did not embrace class war and clung stubbornly to an idea of a common life with their rulers and exploiters and the democratic renewal of their inherited institutions. The Labour idea of the person, in which the plural institutions of civic life have a vital effect on the flourishing of the individual and are inseparable from it, is explicitly Aristotelian. This is an important root of the conservatism in the Labour tradition, a concern with the preservation of status, limits on the market, an attachment to place, starting with the common sense of people (doxa) rather than with external values and a strong commitment to a common life. This is also a direct link to the self-consciously Aristotelian Tudor statecraft tradition of the sixteenth century, which engaged with the balance of interests within the realm, pioneering endowments to promote the sciences and commerce, developing apprenticeships and slowing enclosures. The ‘Commonwealthmen’ movement in the early twentieth century, of which G.D.H. Cole and R.H. Tawney were active participants, are part of that tradition.1
The second ancestral tradition within which Labour was embedded is that which followed the Norman Conquest and actively pursued the idea of the balance of power within the Ancient Constitution and the ‘rights of freeborn Englishmen’. It was on the basis of the violation of customary practice that people resisted the subsequent enclosures and assertion of Royal Prerogative in the name of Parliament and championed the liberties threatened by the domination of one institution alone. Labour takes its place within a far longer national tradition of resistance that values a legal and a democratic order, that is both reforming and traditional, in simultaneous motion. Parliamentary socialism, the National Commonwealth, whichever way Labour chose to describe itself in its first fifty years, acknowledged its attachment to the language and sensibility of the politics of the commonwealth and a central role for the inherited institutions of governance that represented the interests of what used to be known as ‘the commons’, the House of Commons not being the least of those. The early theorists of Labour economics had a commitment to natural law in which there were prescribed limits as to how a person could be treated by political authority, and by economic ones, too. In England, in particular, these natural laws were assumed to have existed in this country before the Conquest, so they were not abstract, but embedded in the political history of the nation. Democracy and common law were used as ways to constrain the domination of the monarchy. Parliament was vital in this, as was the Church. This sensibility found Labour form in the work of Robert Blatchford and William Morris and the ‘guild socialism’ of G.D.H. Cole, S.J. Hobson and A.J. Penty.
It is far too rarely acknowledged that, alone in Europe, Labour succeeded in generating a workers’ movement that was not divided between Catholic and Protestant, or between secularists and believers; instead the movement itself provided the common life within which these potentially antagonistic forces could combine in pursuit of a common good. In cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, as well as London and Birmingham, this was an extraordinary achievement. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Labour tradition, as opposed to social democracy in Europe, which was far more explicitly secularist in form. The non-established churches, for reasons of historical self-interest, were committed to freedom of association and expression. The churches that nurtured the Labour movement were associational forms of religious solidarity, severed from state power and concerned with preserving a status for the person that was not defined by money or power alone. Aristotelianism flowed predominantly through the Catholic Church, the rights of freeborn Englishmen through the Protestant congregations of the South and the Midlands, and they came together in the Labour movement, which was committed to religious freedom. It was, indeed, a broad church.
The London Dock Strike of 1899 is a classic expression of the Labour movement in action, built on the assumption that only organized people could resist exploitation, and the forging of an alliance between Irish and local workers, brokered by the Catholic Church and the Salvation Army. The local Labour Representation Committees were the new institutions within which the previously unrelated forces met and within which leaders were elected, strategy was discussed and actions were planned. It is here that the ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled workers who had lost their status and smallholders who had lost their land make their appearance, drawing upon customary practice as a means of defying managerial prerogative. The courage of the strikers was remarkable. To disrupt trade was viewed as unpatriotic and seditious as the British Empire was a maritime emporium with London at its hub, and the force of the navy and army as well as the police was threatened against the strikers. The laws of the maritime economy, freely contractual, was held to apply to the port, which was excluded from territorial legislation.2 To build a successful political coalition on the basis of stable employment and wages was a great founding achievement of Labour politics. With Cardinal Manning, accompanied by William Booth and the Salvation Army Band, leading the striking dockers on their march, it was very difficult for the employers to use force and depict them as an undisciplined rabble.
The sheer ferocity of the market storm within which Labour was born in the nineteenth century, the scale of the dispossession – of property, status and assets – generated by the creation of the first ever free market in labour and land, the simultaneous enclosure of the common lands, the criminalization of association, the scrapping of apprenticeships and the eviction and proletarianization of the peasantry meant that the only port in the storm was the security that people found in each other.
The burial given by the Co-operative Society is another example of the retrieval of status generated by the Labour movement, the dignity of death given by solidarity in life. The pauper’s grave was one of the most fearful fates of dispossession. It was a combination of subs-paying membership, co-operation with chapels and churches and the practices of mutuality and reciprocity that provided the resources out of which a human status for the person could be retrieved and retained. The reverence for life, the honour given to each member through his or her membership and dues, were not drawn from a secular or modernist ethic, but a radical solution that was fashioned from traditional assumptions and practices. Labour as a radical tradition was crafted by both workers’ and Christian institutions as they confronted the hostility of both an exclusivist state and an avaricious market. They called their ideology socialism and their party Labour.
The fourteen years since the birth of Blue Labour have not been happy ones. Labour has lost four elections in a row, losing increasing levels of working-class support. Ernest Hemingway observed that people go bankrupt in two ways, gradually and then suddenly. The same could be said for Labour’s divorce from the people of its heartlands, which has in turn enabled the Conservative Party to form a new class coalition, consummated by Brexit.
The Party is weak but the tradition is strong. It offers a framework within which previous mistakes can be rectified, and a plausible claim to rational superiority to its rivals. The Labour tradition, alone in our country, resisted the domination of the poor by the rich, asserted the necessity of the liberties of expression, religion and association, and made strong claims for democratic authority to defy the status quo. It did this within a democratic politics of the common good that resisted violence and strengthened democracy.
The argument of this book is that it might be a good idea to do it again.
Notes
1.
G.D.H. Cole,
Labour in the Commonwealth
(London, 1918). R.H. Tawney,
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
(London, 1922), p. 145.
2.
Terry McCarthy,
The Great Dock Strike
(London, 1988). The banners in this book tell the story.
1What’s Going On?
The era of globalization was based upon the idea of change without continuity, of a modernity without tradition. The consequences were deemed inevitable and alternatives were considered nostalgic, populist or doomed. As technology knew no borders, as stable employment evaporated into transferable skills, enormous changes were embraced as necessary. Immigration was viewed as a fate outside of political negotiation, universities were expanded, house prices surged, manufacturing was replaced by the knowledge economy, real physical presence was replaced by virtual reality, the relationships and constraints of community were replaced by self-defined identity. Choice was elevated as the ultimate freedom even as it was entirely constrained by technology, markets and law.
And yet this view of reality wasn’t true.
Notes
1.
See Yuri Slezkine,
The Jewish Century
(Princeton, 2006).
2.
Tony Blair, speech to Labour Party Conference, September 2005. These sentiments were echoed by President Xi in his foundational speech on socialism with Chinese characteristics: ‘History looks kindly on those with resolve, with drive and ambition, and with plenty of guts; it won’t wait for the hesitant, the apathetic, or those shy of a challenge.’ Xi Jinping, speech to Chinese Communist Party Congress, October 2017.
3.
Antonio Gramsci,
Quaderni del carcere
, vol. II (Turin, 1930), pp. 33–4.
4.
See Sam Quinones,
Dreamland
(London, 2015).
5.
For the decline in the returns to labour across all western economies, see ILO and OECD, ‘The Labour Share in G20 Economies’ (Antalya, 2015).
6.
Pierre Manent, ‘Repurposing Europe’,
First Things
(April 2016).
7.
G.K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy
(New York, 2004), p. 86.
8.
See Richard Tuck,
The Left Case for Brexit
(Cambridge, 2020).
9.
Chris Bickerton,
From Member States to Nation States
(Oxford, 2012).
10.
See
chapter 4
.
11.
See
chapter 5
.
12.
John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss,
Stepping Stones
, Centre for Policy Studies (London, November 1977). This is perhaps the most significant think tank document ever written.
13.
See Nick Land,
Shanghai Basics
(Beijing, 2010).
14.
Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki,
The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission
(New York, 1975), p. 13.
15.
Ronald Butt, ‘Economics are the Method: The Object is to Change the Soul’,
Sunday Times
, 3 May 1981.
16.
Anthony Giddens,
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies
(Cambridge, 1992).
17.
Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim,
Individualization, Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences
(London, 2002).
18.
Philip Gould,
The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party
(London, 1999).
19.
Robert B. Reich,
The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism
(New York, 1992), p. 41.
20.
See
chapter 5
.
21.
Mervyn King, Edinburgh business speech, 19 October 2009.
