The New Statesman in the UK describes, with references to supporters and literature, four new progressive sensibilities, all with a flavor of ‘p2p’ in them.
I find it extremely good news and significant that a mainstream social-democratic outlet notices this broad renewal in political thinking.
Stuart White on the four strands:
Left Communitarianism
Neoliberalism rests on an atomistic picture of the individual as an isolated, competitive profit maximiser. But human beings are social creatures: we need to recognise our interdependency and make a virtue of it. We need a social vision that emphasises solidarity and mutuality. This is the “good society”. Concretely, this points to a renewed emphasis on economic equality and collective action, albeit with a stronger role for civil society than in the past. The market must be kept firmly in its place, which is not in the public sector.
Left Republicanism
The task of progressive politics is radically to disperse power and opportunity and to rebuild a deliberative public sphere. This requires restructuring the state so that individuals participate more directly in decision-making (for instance, through decentralisation and collective co-production). It requires resituating Labour politics in the context of a wider, grass-roots social-movement politics. It also requires a new politics of ownership, one that seeks both to widen individual asset ownership and to democratise the control of capital through, for example, new social pension funds.
Texts: Building a Citizen Society by Stuart White and Daniel Leighton (published in association with Compass), which also contains contributions by Marquand and Alan Finlayson; Associative Democracy by Paul Hirst;
Centre Republicanism
The task of progressive politics is radically to disperse power and opportunity. This requires restructuring the state in a much more decentralised direction; individual empowerment in public services; a wider distribution of assets; and a stronger policy of protecting – indeed, expanding – civil liberties and lifestyle freedom. The left should get over its fixation on high taxation of labour income and put more emphasis on taxing unearned wealth and environmental bads.
Texts: “The new egalitarian capitalism” (www.nextleft.org). David Miliband’s recent John Smith memorial speech, “Turning the Tide on Democratic Pessimism”, with its emphasis on “empowerment”, shares much with this perspective.
Right Communitarianism
The urgent task is to fill the moral vacuum created by a combination of neoliberalism in the economy and lifestyle liberalism in society. This requires that we rebuild a strongly moralistic civil society to meet social needs that neither the free market nor the conventional welfare state can meet. To this end, we must build a new political and economic localism. We must “recapitalise the poor” in order to empower them to crawl out from under the welfare state, and the welfare state itself must be cut back. State policy will limit market freedoms. A nihilist liberal politics of arbitrary freedom must be replaced with one of collective morality.”
But what do they have in common?
Stuart White:
“All four perspectives are critical of the existing British state and, perhaps, of conventional conceptions of the social democratic state more generally. There is an apparently common language of “empowerment”. However, the perspectives can disagree strongly on the form which that “empowerment” should take. For example, centre republicans see empowerment as being centrally about choice mechanisms in the public sector, but this is anathema to left communitarians.
Left (and perhaps centre) republicans favour a complete refounding of the British state on the basis of popular sovereignty. They support calls, such as that made by the all-party campaign group Unlock Democracy, for a citizens’ convention process to generate proposals for constitutional change. Right communitarians, certainly Phillip Blond, find the whole theory of the modern sovereign state questionable. Blond looks to a neo-medieval model of fragmented sovereignty in opposition to the modern ideal of unitary democratic sovereignty.
2. Expanding the role of civil society
Arguably, all these perspectives espouse increasing the role of “civil society” relative to the market and the state. This is linked to the themes of restructuring the state and remoralising society. It is reflected in the interests that many of the perspectives take in organisations such as the broad-based London Citizens alliance, a grassroots body that “works with local people for local people”. It also marks a point in common with the theory of “associative democracy” set out by the sociologist Paul Hirst in the 1990s.
However, the perspectives do not necessarily all have in mind the same definition of “civil society” or the same picture of what it is supposed to contribute. In the left perspectives, there is perhaps more emphasis on civil society as a site of political mobilisation. And while all the perspectives seem receptive to civil society’s picking up greater responsibilities in the provision of welfare, here, too, there are disagreements. The left perspectives will see the central state as retaining at the very least a key role as a collective financer of provision, even if production is sometimes transferred to the third sector. Right communitarianism might not be comfortable with that.
3. Spreading asset ownership
Three of the four perspectives – the two republicanisms and right communitarianism – share a focus on widening asset ownership. This is not something one sees much focus on in left communitarianism (perhaps the idea is seen as too individualistic). But again, even where there is agreement on the general idea, there may be disagreements on the direction of policy. The republican perspectives, centre and left, stress asset ownership as a right. The right communitarians, on the other hand, are concerned to offer wider access to capital in more conditional ways that promote what they see as pro-social behaviour. The republican perspectives, centre and left, see a role for tax policy – for example, inheritance and capital gains tax – in a strategy for promoting a more equitable distribution of wealth. This is not on the right communitarian agenda.”
There is also a strong moral dimension to the new approaches, stresses Stuart White:
“Three of the perspectives – the two communitarianisms, and the left republicanism – share a concern about mores. There is an anxiety about, indeed hostility to, a social ethos that is individualistic, consumerist, materialistic. There is a concern to “remoralise” society, to promote a society in which people lead lives that are much more informed by a sense of the common good. The centre republicans are criticised by those from the other perspectives as perhaps being too reconciled to contemporary individualistic mores.
Again, however, there are differences. For at least some left republicans, it is important that the common good should be understood fundamentally in terms of specifically civic and secular ideals such as liberty and equality – a point of agreement with the centre republicans. Barack Obama’s inauguration speech is seen as a model in this respect. Right communitarians tend to see secularism as part of the problem to be overcome. Left communitarians are ambiguous in this area. They sometimes incline to a political language of the “good life”, a language that has some illiberal connotations. But it is not clear how this language relates to classic arguments in political philosophy about how to conceive the common good.”