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July 30, 2011
David Runciman in a review in the London Review of Books of The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox: The Oxford London Seminars 2010-11 (ed. Maurice Glasman et el) introduces the idea of Blue Labour, its antagonism to liberalism, and rescuing democracy from liberalism.
Martin Rowson
For Glasman one of the problems with liberalism (understood in terms of intellectual heritage and political instincts) is:
the inability of liberal politics to resist the depredations of international finance capitalism. This is the real passion that motivates Blue Labour: a sense that the country has been raped by the bankers, and all on the watch of a Labour government. They want someone, or something, to stand up to what the editors call in their introduction ‘the destructive, itinerant power of capital’, and they are acutely conscious that New Labour barely even put up a fight. That’s because liberals never put up a fight: all they do is talk about individuals, with their rights and responsibilities, their choices and their freedoms, without noticing that individuals are like confetti in the face of the whirlwind power of money.
An example is the way that the Blair government was beholden to the City of London--finance capital. Obama rescuing Wall Street is another example.
The other problem for liberalism from Blue Labour's perspective is that liberals prefer concepts to concrete experiences. In the end, they prefer nice ideas----like justice, equality and fairness--- to real people and life as it is lived. Glasman thinks in terms of ordinary people, their disempowerment by the powerful forces of the global economy, local struggles and community organisation and reinvigorating democracy. The emphasis is on mutualism, organising from the bottom up and local communities participating directly in their own welfare provision---strong and united local communities looking after themselves.
The Labor Party in Australia, with its espousal of the neo-liberal policies and emphasis on ‘aspiration’ and consumer individualism, has too often neglected precious aspects of our identity and our relationships with one another, riding roughshod over popular attachment to the institutions, places and traditions that we hold dear. In the process, Labour has allowed the conservative side of politics to own too many symbols of national identity and belonging.
If some issues really can be effectively tackled at local level--heritage issues in a capital city, then some challenges are systemic and national--the challenge of bringing about a fairer distribution of resources and in dealing with the pressing environmental issues, and require coordinated national and international action.
Democracy can stand up to capitalism. It succeeded pretty well between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the oil crisis of the 1970s, but it requires politicians to harness the power of the democratic state to broadly redistributive ends, which command the general assent of the people they represent.
Will the social democratic parties of today be able to do this?
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The world according to Thatcher: "...you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first..."
So if you can't look after yourselves.... meh....