The Paradox of Coordination

Though we have far better tools today to allow us to coordinate, notably improved communication (social media) and predictability (data analytics), we struggle to do so outside of the trivial satisfaction of needs (Twitter, Amazon etc). Recent events, from the UK's response to the pandemic to the USA's inability to prevent an invasion of its legislature, suggest that the modern state does not find it as easy to handle either the exceptional or the foreseeable as yesterday's sci-fi envisaged. Not only is the Deep State apparently out to lunch but the formal state appears unable to marshall let alone pre-empt events. And this is not just a feature of liberal democracies. The ineptness and clumsiness of the Russian and Chinese regimes, from hit-and-miss assassinations to preventative mass detention, points to a lack of sophistication and an excess of administrative paranoia, but it also indicates that technological advances haven't delivered either the Orwellian dystopia of thoughtcrime or the Dickian dystopia of precrime. There is little qualitative difference between this and a traditional absolutism, merely an upgrade in technology. Spyware on smartphones has replaced the interception of sealed letters and blanket security laws the carte blanche. 

We may be surveilled more thoroughly but there is no sense that society is better managed, regardless of how authoritarian the state is. The proferred explanation for this difficulty in coordinating national populations is a mix of individualism and polarisation, which are superficially contradictory. As homo economicus, the neoliberal monad, we pursue our selfish interests, but this should, through the invisible hand, produce an aggregate good. In other words, it is folly to attempt to coordinate society, just as it is to intervene in the market. Obviously events like a global pandemic rather give the lie to that, though there are plenty who will insist that their personal rights should not be infringed for the benefit of public health. At the same time we are told that society is split into two irreducible halves - essentially the liberal and the conservative - whose unchanging values are rivalrous and irreconcilable (you can only be converted or deprogrammed). These homogenous blocs are engaged in a culture war and everyone must pick a side. What individualism and polarisation share is an epistemological perspective. The one believes that solipsistic obliviousness is the key to social wellbeing - i.e. we should focus on knowledge of self -  while the other holds that half the population (the other half, of course) is profoundly ignorant and must be schooled. But for either view to be true, we have to believe that ignorance has grown over time: that we have fallen from an Edenic state of common purpose and empathy.

Despite the tenacious myth of the filter bubble, we are actually far more cognisant and aware of each other than we were in the past, and not just locally or nationally but internationally too. The inhabitants of Stornoway and Penzance share far more of a culture and worldview than their forbears did, but they also share more with the inhabitants of Santiago and Poona. This should make coordination easier at the level of social norms and behaviours, yet we seem to be faced with a determination to fragment into camps built around antagonistic values, even within the highly-localised confines of the nuclear family. This isn't just the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt, not least because those "values" typically stress homogeneity and group identities. Of course much of this is the deliberate construction of a politics that obscures class interests and flattens heterogeneity (the gay OAP, the anti-racist ex-miner etc) in the service of journalistic stereotypes. But it also reflects a narcissism of small differences. The 2020 fuss over whether Last Night of the Proms should include the 18th century classic Rule, Britannia! evoked memories of the contemporaneous Jonathan Swift's reports on the conflict of Lilliput's Big-endians and Little-endians.

This determined obliviousness and wilful ignorance is occasionally remarked upon, but largely in a partisan context. So the supporters of Donald Trump and Brexit have been accused by liberals of closed-mindedness and a belief in fantastic conspiracies, while the political left has been reduced to an inward-looking "cult". Yet the accusers themselves have been guilty of the same, from the idea that free broadband is commie madness to the belief that Russia decisively interfered in a UK referendum and a US Presidential election. And when it comes to cult-like behaviour, the belief that a 78 year-old machine politician with a history of supporting domestic repression and imperial adventure is going to usher in a new age of justice is textbook delusion. For all the valorisation of science and Enlightenment values, there seems to have been a widespread embrace of the irrational and emotional among both liberals and conservatives since the 1990s. In contrast, what has characterised the left since 1989, whether in the form of wry cynicism or optimistic humanism, has been a commitment to the rational and empirical, along with a modesty of ambition. It's almost as if the true inheritors of Spinoza and Voltaire are left shitposters.

I think the emblematic discourse of today is not a dispute over Trumpian "facts", or the schadenfreude as another Brexiteer says "This isn't what I expected", but rather a liberal loudly denouncing a leftist in patronising and deliberately offensive terms. I'm sure you're familiar with the charges and the tone: you lack realism because you are politically immature, you embrace conspiracy because you can't get your own way, your support for socialism proves you are an antisemite etc. Some of this is simple bad faith, and some may even be projection, but what it also points to is how liberalism has increasingly taken on the aura of a religion, demanding auto da fés ("Apologise! Apologise again!") and adherence to a catechism that inevitably breeds schism (the horror of the UK's gender-critical feminists at Biden's executive order on trans rights highlights not only the weirdness of Britain's TERFs but the instability of liberalism more generally). This is annoying enough at the level of the individual, but it becomes acute in a political system built on intra-party coalitions as the demand for ideological purity is self-defeating. This patronising intolerance appears to be particularly afflicting Labour at the moment, neutralising its criticism of the government's competence and alienating significant numbers of the membership ahead of the local elections still scheduled for May.

Political parties have long relied on the domain expertise of marketing and PR folk to improve their communications and media engagement. But they have always insisted that this is auxiliary to their core competence of winning elections, which is firstly a political leadership matter, centred on the offer to the electorate and the critique of the opposing parties, and secondly a party organisation matter, centred on canvassing. Labour's recent decision to employ a management consultancy to advise it on how to win the next election is notable because the remit (insofar as it is known) appears to encroach on this core competence. Some of this will no doubt turn out to be the usual case of consultancy self-promotion, which dovetails with the old trick employed by management whereby measures that are potentially unpopular within the organisation are driven through under cover of the claim that they are only "following third-party advice", but there is also a sense that this goes beyond a return to the technocratic managerialism of the Blair years. Starmer's Labour appears to be unabashed by its own ignorance. In this it appears to be adhering even more tightly to the neoliberal conception of politics as marketing and parties as firms, sensitive only to price signals (focus groups, opinion polls) and resolutely opposed to theory (even of the third way variety - there is no Anthony Giddens in Starmer's coterie).

It was only a year ago that "winning the argument" was roundly dimissed as irrelevant if you can't win the election, and yet here we are being told that the new leadership is so unconfident of its native ability to do the latter that it feels obliged to outsource much of its planning and design. This could be excused as the habitual approach of a leadership whose background owes more to bureaucracy than campaigning, or even as a performative gesture to reassure business that Labour's new management is on the same wave-length, but it doesn't wholly obscure the paradox that the party does not appear to trust itself. That the PLP does not trust the membership beyond its utility as canvassing fodder is hardly news, but this development also suggests that the leadership isn't entirely convinced by the PLP, or even the current front bench. Ironically, this is not that much of a departure from the last year of Corbyn's leadership when the PLP was marginalised in the development of the 2019 manifesto (though understandably so given the efforts of many of its members to undermine the 2017 version). 

Labour failed in 2019 because it was unable to coordinate an effective electoral coalition. The forces arrayed against it were obviously considerable - not only the Conservatives but all of the minor parties, who targeted Labour more than the Tories, plus the media and the then-loudest voices in civil society (the People's Vote campaign, the anti-antisemitism lobby) - but it still failed to do as much as it might have done. This was partly down to personalities and talent, though they weren't much different to 2017, but it also reflected the simple truth that Labour found itself disadvantaged because its position on Brexit didn't coincide with the dominant narrative of a polarised public. It didn't come clearly down on one side or the other. That it has subsequently made the choice, and done so almost casually, simply indicates that it believes that particular axis of polarisation is now redundant. So what has taken its place? It is becoming clear that Keir Starmer doesn't (at least for the moment) see Boris Johnson and the Tories as his chief opponent, let alone the wider forces of capitalism or reaction. That role is held by the left, which means that the polarisation at the heart of the leader's politics is a peculiarly narrow one with little resonance among the wider electorate. 

Combined with his belief in Labour's organisational ignorance, this gives the impression of a party that is both parochial and vacuous, which really doesn't look like a winning formula. The Conservative government has provided ample evidence at the national scale of the shortcomings of the market, from the inept test and trace programme to the way that the selfish interests of many businesses, encouraged by the Chancellor, are undermining public health. It has tried to defray criticism by a new polarisation, between the irresponsible people and the virtuous state (a stretch given the personalities involved in the latter), while the press has discovered a new polarisation between Covid survivors and sceptics. Meanwhile, Starmer's Labour finds itself marginalised: prevented by its commitment to constructive criticism (and its own authoritarian instincts) from properly defending the people from the charge of irresponsibility, and an also-ran in the dismissal of Covid sceptics due to its own mis-steps over school opening and its premature call for an "exit strategy". We have a government that has proven incompetent at coordinating the nation in the face of a major threat to life and health (a crisis of governmentality, no less), and an official opposition that appears to have eschewed the coordination of civil society against that government (a crisis of the counter-movement) in favour of performative outsourcing and factional beef.