Alan Johnson argues the democratic Left should be for a radical re-balancing of power and resources.
This is the first in a series of articles on the future of the British Left. To read a different view, click here.
What if they are both wrong? What if both the social neo-liberalism of Tony Blair and the ‘Stop the War’ anti-Westernism of Jeremy Corbyn are both inadequate responses to the exhaustion of social democracy in the West from the late 1970s, and the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the East a decade later? Such, at least, is the intuition of some of us who will launch a new journal of the democratic Left later this year.
Beyond Corbyn
A ‘Stop the War’-shaped foreign policy is at best a useless pose and at worst a sell-out of our natural allies – democrats, liberals, feminists, free trade unionists, two-staters. Yes, ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is a good foreign policy maxim; yes, we should reject ill-conceived neoconservative interventionism of the Iraq kind.
But we remain internationalists and we do not walk by on the other side. Cheering on proxy Islamist forces as Corbyn and Livingstone do is a betrayal of our deepest values – democracy, liberty, anti-totalitarianism, gender, sexual and racial equality, national self-determination, internationalism and human flourishing.
Corbyn says the Islamist terror gang Hezbollah is ‘an organisation that is bringing about long term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region.’ That is shameful of him. Actually, Hezbollah is currently propping up Assad and starving Syrians to death in the town of Madaya. The warmed-over Stalinism of the pro-Putin Seumas Milne, or Diane Abbott’s rose-tinted apologias for the mass-murdering Chairman Mao, are no better.
Instead, we need a democratic, anti-totalitarian and internationalist Left that fights with the democrats against the Islamists, not, like Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, with the Islamists against the democrats. One that enables the human rights campaigners fighting for their lives against authoritarians, not, like Corbyn’s Stop the War, denying them a platform.
We Left-wingers need to accept there if a ‘responsibility to protect’ and we need to forge international alliances with governments and civil society actors so that we can make good on that commitment without ‘doing stupid stuff’.
We need a Left that will revere the French anti-Nazi and pro-European socialist Leon Blum, not the vicious antisemitic thugs of Hamas. We need a Left that reads Michael Walzer’s essay ‘What is Left Internationalism?’, not Socialist Worker and Mao’s Little Red Book.
Beyond Blair
But the Corbynistas get something right. And it’s something existential, for any democratic Left. Simply put, the results are now in: ‘social neo-liberal’ or ‘third way’ economic and social policies have failed to offer a genuinely progressive response to the ills of neo-liberal global capitalism.
Namely: deregulation, the unshackling of anti-social corporate power and spread of environmental degradation; financialisation, a new age of greed, the banking crisis and austerity; privatisation, the decay of the public realm, the collapse of social housing, the spread of social cruelty, the spectacular rise in inequality and the fraying of the commons; the assault on trade union and workplace rights; and the rise and rise of a crass bottom-lineism, a possessive individualism that is slowly coarsening the culture, creating a one-dimensional world in which our potential for rich individuality and co-operative sociality is strangled.
Faced with those ills, Corbyn’s supporters are crying out: ‘Let us be Social Democrats!’ But are the rest of us really listening? If the democratic Left is not for a radical re-balancing of power and resources – global social democracy – then it will die and it will deserve to die.
There is simply no meaning to a Left today that does not – as the inheritor of the promise of the enlightenment and the democratic revolutions, and as universalists standing for the ‘planetary humanism’ of Primo Levi and Paul Gilroy – believe in a radical economic policy that challenges the untrammelled and destructive power of global capitalism.
Global social democracy
An open online journal of ideas for people who want to explore a terrain beyond Blair and Corbyn will open its pages to serious thinking about two big ideas: Left internationalism and global social democracy.
We believe these two ideas should form the political horizon of a renewed social democracy in the 21st century. It’s a long term intellectual project, (the journal won’t be commenting on the latest sacking from the shadow cabinet).
Yes, these two big ideas are no more than signposts on the way toward a serious social democratic alternative to neo-liberalism and ‘Stop the War’-ism. Granted. And building an electoral coalition able to deliver them will be hugely difficult. Of course. But as I wrote in World Affairs last year:
“we democratic Leftists now know more than enough about the two roads travelled by the Left in recent decades – one marked ‘social neo-liberalism’ terminated in us being ‘intensely relaxed’ about people getting filthy rich, the loss of millions of working-class votes [and the victory of Jeremy Corbyn, we can now add]; and the other, marked ‘anti-imperialism’, ended in a reactionary cult proclaiming ‘We are all Hezbollah now!’.”
The road we have not taken is global social democracy: democratic, egalitarian, internationalist, and liberal. We should take that road, even if, like the poet, we cannot yet look down it far.
Alan Johnson is the editor of Fathom and works for the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM)
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31 Responses to “Comment: Neither Corbyn nor Blair, but global social democracy and Left internationalism”
David Coats
Oh dear, as usual the comments thread is populated by Tories and ignorant Corbynistas.
I agree with much of what Alan has to say, although I think he is neglecting the important revisionist tradition in the Labour Party – which also draws inspiration of course from Edward Berstein’s exchanges with Rosa Luxemburg in early C20 Germany (no doubt Jezza is a big Luxemburg fan).
The task, it seems to me is to find a synthesis between the new politics of the democratic (“new” soft) left that Alan describes and the views of those people (perhaps few in number today) who draw intellectual inspiration from the pre-Blair Labour right.
It’s important to make clear that social democracy is philosophically concerned with extending the liberties available to most citizens – what Amartya Sen would call giving people the capabilities they need to choose lives that they value. Labour’s historic preoccupation with income equality has distorted the lens a bit (other inequalities may be just as important) but the general objective ought to be clear. Greater equality is an instrumental goal – we place a high value on it because it enables more people to enjoy healthier, more fulfilling and hopefully happier lives.
The pre-Blair right were just as suspicious of untrammelled free markets as those of a more soft-left persuasion. Witness for example the Jenkinsite SDP’s critique of Thatcherism in the early 1980s and David Owen’s current views about the reform of the NHS. What the old intellectual right lacked (and now needs) was a comprehensive critique of capitalism that was itself not anti-capitalist. It makes no sense to suggest that a Labour government would do away with large corporations, investment banks or international trade, but it is equally wrong to suggest (as the New Labour position implicitly accepted) that filing the rough edges off the pre-crisis status quo was the best that we could do.
It’s not as if figures outside or on the margins of the Party haven’t been making these arguments for years. What after all was Will Hutton’s “The State We’re In” all about? More recently, both John Kay and Adair Turner have offered radical critiques of the current orientation of economic policy. In the US both Joe Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have exposed the limitations of the pre-Keynesian thinking that as captured parties of the right. Yet all of these thinkers are in favour of broadly capitalist economies. Or to put it differently, capitalism may have been financialised, but financialisation is a result of deliberate policy choices, not a necessary characteristic of capitalism.
The Corbynistas don’t have much to say about any of this and probably won’t engage in the discussion, seeing it as irrelevant. For the rest of us, however, there is scope for a rich and fruitful conversation that could put the Party back on the road to recovery, assuming of course that we can persuade enough of Labour’s selectorate that Corbynism is simply defrosted Bennery minus the elements that made Tony Benn interesting.
Good luck with the new journal. It’s desperately needed.
Gerry Downing
Some of us are pleased to see the back of narrow minded bigots like you.
Cole
And didn’t they do well in 1983? Took till 1997 to recover from that previous bout of
Bennite self indulgence.
Cole
I suppose you’re another selfish Corbynista. Hope you’re enjoying yourself making Labour unelectable. Of course Corbynistas are just the Tories little helpers.
Cole
So these van drivers (don’t you love the Corbynista snobbery?) voted Tory in May because they really wanted Corbynism. That’s insane.