A recent comment from Greg highlighted that some of the theorists I’ve cited in my ‘potted history’ “seem to want to mount an attack on capitalism as a mode of production while others seem to want to work within it to further social justice and the development of human potential.”
Yes, that’s true, but I think that’s a fair reflection of the breadth of progressive theorists. Some have wanted to replace capitalism, while others have set out ways to reform it.
Moreover, my perception is that, with some variation (notably in the 1960s and ’70s), the move has been from the latter to the former, and with increasingly modest reform aspirations.
Let’s retrace our historical steps briefly. From Marx who argued that capitalism would bring about its own collapse, we move to Bernstein and his contemporaries who believed capitalism could be transformed from within.
In the 1930s and 1940s Keynes, Beveridge and their fellow-thinkers provided the basis for a managed model of welfare capitalism, and theorists like Crosland reframed the scope of the progressive project to fit this.
More recently, following the 1980s neoliberal ascendency I’ve described in my previous post, Third Way theorists like Giddens have reframed the project again. They have addressed the neoliberal critique and refuted some of it, but also taken into account things like a much reduced belief in government intervention.
We can envisage a sloping line, varying up and down over time but trending in a single direction, which is away from a wholesale rejection of capitalism and going further and further in its accommodation with it. Not just in terms of abandoning any alternative to capitalism, but also accepting that market logic should prevail in most forms of economic activity. That is something that would have been regarded with horror during the high-tide of the mixed, managed economy in the 1950s and 1960s.
And I should emphasise that I’m not talking about the politicians here. Progressive theorists have also moved to a position of far greater accommodation.
I realise that these assertions may be rejected by some readers. Some of you may say, “Oh really? Which progressives?Which theorists?” You might claim that the pure heart of true progressivism is still beating strongly and radically, and has simply been obscured by the likes of Blair and Giddens. You will probably be able to point to individual theorists who are not accommodationists, and I’m sure some of them are doing important, ground-breaking work.
But. The centre of gravity is elsewhere.
The progressive theorists who get cited in all the journals, who have schools of thought built around them, and who the leaders of progressive political parties listen to and cite (or even the leaders of the left-bloc of parties – I’m thinking John Cruddas in the UK) are on the whole far more accommodationist than their equivalents a generation ago.
And, if anything, the serious theorists (as opposed to dissident polemicists) working out of a broadly Marxian tradition are probably where this shift is strongest. I’ve talked about Castells and the Regulationists; even if you add in Antonio Negri, things have still moved a long way from the time of Althusser and Marcuse, or Mandel and Miliband (snr). (In response to a another post, terence has cited another example of this: “Herb Gintis and Sam Bowles – two American economists who’ve made the long journey from Marxism to behavioural economics and game theory but who, in doing so, haven’t foregone left wing ideals.”)
But. Things could change.
In many ways the Global Financial Crisis was (or should have been) to neoliberalism what 1970s stagflation was to Keynesian demand management. In the initial reaction to the crisis, one could see a real opening for new ideas. For the moment, orthodoxy has reasserted itself and the problem has been reimagined as being essentially about government indebtedness, but that may not last.
And meanwhile, within the strands of progressive movement closest to the Third Way, we seem to be beginning to see projects like Open Left and the Amsterdam Process saying: perhaps we went slightly too far with accommodation.
It remains to be see whether, and how far, the pendulum will swing back towards a bolder progressivism. And if so, the question becomes how that will manifest itself in theoretical terms.
To some extent I think this will involve a return to the major thinkers of the 20th century like Keynes. But it is likely that it will also rely on new insights, and I imagine that many of them may be driven by the need to incorporate environmental sustainability into our standard economic models.
This series of posts has been largely silent so far about the work of environmental progressive theorists. There does seem to have been some important work we can turn to here — and the comments threads on recent posts have suggested some examples — but my sense is that progressive ecological political ecology has not yet seen its equivalent of Keynes’ General Theory (or Marx’s Capital or Smith’s Wealth of Nations, depending on your preference).
I’d also predict that a fruitful source of new insights over the coming period will be a cross-pollination between this ecological thinking and more mainstream economists (and political theorists) who are disillusioned by the crisis, concerned about the climate challenge, and looking for a new theoretical way forward.
An important part of the Theroretical Foundations topic will be trying to identify some of the emerging threads of that new synthesis as it begins to develop.
Links
- Policy Progress blog comment by Greg and terence
- A recent speech by UK Labour MP John Cruddas on how the Labour needs to reinvent itself
- Earlier posts discussing the Amsterdam Process and James Purnell of Open Left
- Wikipedia’s page on Antonio Negri
- The webpages of Herb Gintis and Sam Bowles (as identified by terence)
- See the post Progressive theoretical foundations — an introduction and potted history for links on some of the other theorists mentioned here.
Further Reading
- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000)
- Antonio Negri in conversation with Raf Valvola Scelsi, Goodbye Mr. Socialism (2008)
- Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism. The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (1997)