Social Entrepreneurs

As the likelihood of Jeremy Corbyn being elected leader of the Labour Party has increased, the parallels with former leaders have come thick and fast, with Michael Foot being the default option. The message of doom is unmistakable but misleading, not least because there is no alternative contender of the calibre of Denis Healey today and because everyone seems to have forgotten that Foot was the compromise candidate between the Bennite left and the right. What Foot offered was clumsy unity, exemplified by the decision that the 1983 manifesto (immortalised as "the longest suicide note in history" by Gerald Kaufman) would reflect all conference resolutions, no matter how aspirational or gestural. Corbyn is no less of a party man than Foot, but has already shown himself more pragmatic by focusing his campaign on policies that capture the imagination of both party members and different segments of the wider electorate, from anti-austerity through public ownership of the railways to scrapping Trident. Ironically, the New Labour evisceration of conference has allowed him to be both more specific than the other contenders and less hobbled by unpopular policies, such as Harriet Harman's misjudgement over the Benefits Bill.

Some commentators have shown a little more historical awareness by referencing George Lansbury, who led the party between 1932 and 1935. "Good old George" was a hugely popular figure, which reflected his humble background and personal integrity as much as his politics. He was a Christian pacifist, a longstanding supporter of women's suffrage and largely devoid of personal ambition, though his saintliness irritated some. Official history has cast him as a romantic naif because of his pacifism in the 30s and the revelations of covert Bolshevik funding for the Daily Herald, the newspaper he had helped establish in 1912 (it was reinvented in the 1960s as the Sun, before being bought by Rupert Murdoch). He was famously accused by Ernest Bevin (then TGWU General Secretary) at the 1935 annual conference, when his pacifist principles were in conflict with the party's demand for economic sanctions against Italy over Abyssinia, of "hawking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what to do with it". He resigned shortly afterwards and was succeeded by Clement Attlee, another product of East End local government.

What this legacy has obscured was Lansbury's crucial role in rebuilding the party after the MacDonald split in 1931, which required a none-too-common mix of organisational talent and motivation, not to mention his achievements in local government, notably the Poplar Rates Rebellion of 1921, his visionary contribution to Poor Law reform, and the role of the Daily Herald both in the wider advance of the labour movement and as a critic of official propaganda during WW1 and after. He was also a highly effective Parliamentarian, both as a backbencher in the 1920s and as leader of the opposition to the National government of MacDonald. Though he died in 1940, he helped lay the foundations for the victory of 1945. This is no mean record, and is perhaps an unflattering contrast to Jeremy Corbyn, who for all his integrity and decency has had little tangible impact during his political career either at a London or a national level. Where the parallel is stronger is in the desire of the media to use foreign policy and security (Hamas, NATO etc) as a wedge between Corbyn and Labour supporters; and in the chuntering about a possible coup, though this time emanating from the PLP rather than the trade unions.

The contemporary parallels with the Islington North MP have tended to frame Lansbury as an "admirable but unworldly pacifist" (Michael White in the Guardian) and "the most left-wing leader Labour has ever had" (Andy McSmith in the Independent). It's worth noting that Lansbury's left-wing policies included old-age pensions and a national minimum wage, and that his pacifism was instrumental, focused on multilateral agreement (notably via the League of Nations), rather than merely expressive. During the Ed Miliband era, Jon Cruddas (one of Corbyn's nominators) sought to rehabilitate Lansbury as a leading light of the One Nation/Blue Labour/English tradition of the party, emphasising his virtue and inspiration in a direct appeal to the heart: "Politics is always first and foremost poetic because if it lacks the spirit to transform people and give them hope for a better life then it will fail to tackle the fundamental power relations that keep them in their place, however many policies it has lined up". Cruddas continues to push his radical/conservative schtick ("the electorate in England and Wales is both economically radical and fiscally conservative"), some of which can be seen reflected in Corbyn's policies. For example, the call for a "people's QE" is clever politics but incoherent economics, which marginalises genuinely radical alternatives like "helicopter money".

If Cruddas remains in a bind over the correct combination of heart and head, the Labour party establishment has no doubts that pragmatism is the supreme virtue, exemplified by Gordon Brown's insistence on "power for a purpose". The problem is that the New Labour record suggests that Brown failed to understand the true purpose of some of his cherished policies, from light-touch financial regulation to the capital-subsidies of tax credits, while the suspicion is that Blair was only too well aware of the real agenda, from Iraq to the indulgence of the rich. In a contest with the bland and the compromised, a candidate who appears "genuine" and "principled" inevitably looks attractive. As Obama proved in 2008, a "cleanskin" offering vague hope is a perfectly conventional neoliberal platform, as indeed was Blair in 1997, so it is amusing to see critics of Corbyn denigrate choosing the expressive over the instrumental. Campaigns based on hope tend to attract the previously marginalised, or re-attract the previously disillusioned. That Corbyn may be tapping into the mass of the disenchanted and disenfranchised is bewildering to candidates committed to a transactional model that welcomes the alienation of the electorate from an increasingly professionalised and arcane politics. Paradoxically, Labour needs to get over government if it is to become a government again, and Corbyn may offer the quickest route to that eventual outcome even if, like Lansbury, he won't be along for much of the ride.

It might appear odd at this point to put Lansbury aside and compare Corbyn with a media creation such as Michelle Mone, the "lingerie mogul" who has been appointed the government's "entrepreneurship tsar", however there are two interesting parallels. The first is the emphasis on embodiment: the qualities of the person rather than the institution. The popularity of Corbyn does not reflect an expectation that Labour will form the next government, while the choice of Mone does not suggest confidence that government of any stripe can summon up a wave of entrepreneurship. Her brief is a "review of obstacles faced by people in disadvantaged areas when it comes to setting up their own businesses". The exercise has been commissioned by Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, rather than by the Chancellor or the Business Secretary, which suggests a rather narrow definition of entrepreneurship. According to a government spokesbot, the review "will have a particular focus on disadvantaged groups including benefit claimants, women, young and disabled people and ex-offenders". In other words, this has nothing to do with incubating disruptive startups, negotiating the hurdles of international trade, or networking with venture capitalists. This is clearly an exercise aimed at encouraging more JSA claimants into subsidised self-employment.

There is scepticism about the choice of Michelle Mone for the job, which is inevitably tinged with sexism (she "pulled herself up by her bra-straps") and not a little jealousy: "Because she is flogging bras and knickers she gets models, and she gets PR way ahead of anything she should get". This rather misses the point that a government "tsar" is by definition a PR role. The question is: what is signified by the choice of the signifier? Mone's backstory is straight out of Samuel Smiles - overcoming humble origins and tragedy through sheer will and effort - but with the modern addition of success defined as a life of glamour rather than probity and charity. She is exemplary. In the same way that George Lansbury and Jeremy Corbyn are taken to embody integrity and decency, she is taken to embody the spirit of enterprise and personal empowerment. Whereas some previous tsars (like Mary Portas) thought their advice was actually being sought, and were miffed when it was ignored, I suspect Michelle Mone knows her job is simply to be. Where she and Corbyn differ is that he is a vessel for varied and even inchoate hopes, many of which he is fated to disappoint, whereas she is a role-model for "right behaviour": not relying on the state for support, seeing the market as a solution to all ills, and constant personal striving.

Most politicians, including Corbyn, think we should encourage small businesses and entrepreneurship. The harsh facts are that SMEs don't usually create jobs beyond the founders, and few will produce any significant levels of turnover. Most are distributive rather than productive, which means little gain to national GDP and thus average wages. Though startups can force older and less efficient businesses out of the market, thus raising aggregate productivity, they can also simply depress revenue levels and thus inhibit necessary investment. This is particularly the case with lifestyle businesses where incumbents may be prepared to accept a fall in income to preserve their independence. Most startups are shops or marginal service providers whose relative success depends on the carrying capacity of their local market rather than their innate talent. As FlipChartRick notes, "Encouraging people in poor areas to set up new businesses will simply shift them from one form of poverty to another and may well shunt some of their neighbours who are currently running businesses back into unemployment".

As an industrial or employment strategy, investing en masse in individually under-capitalised startups is daft. You'd get a far better return investing in infrastructure, encouraging foreign direct investment, or simply "picking winners" in key industries, which is closer to Corbyn's traditionalist strategy. The mundane reality of his soundbite about a "people's QE" would probably be a sensible increase in government debt (at historically low interest rates) to fund investment. This would undoubtedly benefit many more UK citizens than the Bank of England's QE exercise, which boosted share prices to the advantage of the rich, but it is hard to characterise this as "empowering" unless you cleave to the traditional social democratic view that the state is the people. The second parallel with Michelle Mone then is the assumption that the state, whether in the form of the DWP or a national investment bank, should intervene. Where they differ is that Mone seeks to discipline labour, fragmenting solidarity through ceaseless competition and recasting precarious self-employment as success, while Corbyn seeks to discipline capital, directing it to pro-social ends.

What's missing from Corbyn's politics (like Gordon Brown's) is an understanding that the nature of capital has changed since he entered Parliament in 1983, and that the future need is for its democratic distribution, not its further concentration, no matter how estimable the purpose to which the state puts it. This requires a radical programme beyond a more progressive tax system. Entrepreneurship needs to be recast as giving people the power to create their own meaningful purpose rather than vainly emulating a narrow model of glamourous success that is unachievable for the vast majority. Small businesses need to be seen as the consequence of a healthy economy, not its spluttering engine or a form of outdoor relief. Capital needs to be seen as today's productive opportunity, not tomorrow's exclusionary inheritance. A modern-day George Lansbury might be advocating withdrawal from NATO and unilateral nuclear disarmament, but he might also be advocating a citizens' basic income.

Terms of Trade

The recent scenes at Calais, of queues of goods lorries and desperate migrants, remind us that migration and trade are intimately linked, but this is a truth that we spend a lot of time glossing. Even those sympathetic to migration on humanitarian grounds can be delicate about the economic realities. For example, FlipChartRick has pointed out that Theresa May's proposal to "help African countries to develop economic and social opportunities so that people want to stay" will actually stimulate greater migrant flows because, as incomes converge, more Africans will have the wherewithal to pay for transport across the Mediterranean. This is right but incomplete. The relative cost of getting to Europe for an African migrant is a factor both of her wealth and the price of transport (whether an airline seat or a cramped bench in an open boat). Trade lowers transport costs, both because of economies of scale and the impetus to productivity improvements. In other words, the dynamic is equal parts push and pull.

Rick is essentially employing the "rising expectations" theory of social change, which dates back to Alexis de Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution of 1856. As people's expectations rise (represented here by disposable income), so they become restless and ambitious. There is a similarly antique flavour to much of the other material that Rick quotes in his post. For example, a Wall Street Journal article on rural Senegal: "Flat screen TVs and, increasingly, cars—mostly purchased with money wired home by villagers working in Europe—have reshaped what was once a settlement of mud huts. The wealth has plugged this isolated landscape of peanut farms and baobab trees into the global economy and won respect for the men who sent it". Mutatis mutandis, a similar article could have been written about Sicily in 1900 (feel the respect) or Ireland in 1960. This is a trope in which labour is exchanged internationally for commodities, thereby introducing the market economy into hitherto backward areas (mud huts, no less). It's the cousin of the gift of civilisation trope, in which the intrepid explorer takes a gramophone into the jungle to introduce the benighted natives to Caruso.

Another quote from South Africa's Mail & Guardian has a similar sense of the bleedin' obvious being rediscovered: "One of the more intriguing nuggets about the Africa emigration story is that far from fleeing poverty, migrants out of the continent are likely to be relatively well off, and are rarely from the most destitute families". Migrants tend to be younger, fitter, better-educated and more qualified than the norm in their home country. Twas ever thus. This applies both to economic migrants and refugees, with the latter tending to be relatively better off but persecuted groups rather than the poorest segments of society or marginalised minorities. For example, there are more urban Christian refugees (often middle-class) than rural Yazidis fleeing Syria. The chief difference between economic migrants and refugees is that the former tend to be more optimistic, essentially because they are leaving of their own free will. They literally have the "get up and go" spirit that Norman Tebbit so admired. It is this optimism that in turn fuels their willingness to take risks, jumping trains or trying to walk the length of the Channel tunnel.

My favourite quote in Rick's post comes from a Nairobi-based NGO: "Modern mobility is also empowered and inspired by unprecedented levels of connectivity – particularly through email and social media – and the virtual proximity of a seemingly obtainable better life. Immeasurable though it may be, we cannot underestimate the force of aspirations, dreams and adventurism of many young people stuck in what they regard as politically restrictive, socioeconomic backwaters". If you substituted "the postal service and cinema" for the contemporary wonders of technology you'd find yourself with boilerplate that could have been used at any point over the last one hundred years. You'd also be able to use it in the context of intra-national migration: "stuck in what they regard as politically restrictive, socioeconomic backwaters" could have come from the synopsis of most provincial UK novels published in the 50s and 60s (think Keith Waterhouse, Stan Barstow et al).

Where once we blamed racy novels and Hollywood for filling our young peoples' heads with dreams, now we blame satellite TV and Facebook. To assume that "unprecedented levels of connectivity" have produced a sudden awakening of aspiration and therefore a boost to migration is ahistorical. I had a childhood friend who emigrated to Canada in the late-60s, who was equally excited by Jack London's White Fang and Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures. His family returned after a couple of years, having failed to settle (his souvenirs included a genuine parka and a 6" Bowie knife). The point is that they could afford to do so, the cost of transport having fallen over time, so emigration was no longer a one-way ticket. The 70s saw the end of assisted migration schemes like the Australian Ten Pound Poms programme, and also the increase in repatriation by migrant pensioners, notably to the West Indies and Ireland. All of this was driven by falling transport costs which were in turn a reflection of the early stages of globalisation.

Rick could also have pointed out that as a nation develops, more of its workers will have tradable skills, a fact that the NHS is relying on over the coming decades. The dependence of the health service on migrant labour is often deployed by pro-immigration advocates as if the pro-social nature of the job should make a difference (it's the forgivable counterpoint to media tales of "foreign criminal gangs"), though it strikes me as a risky strategy because this reminds people of infection. The fear of migrants is not just simple xenophobia but a rational appreciation, based on solid history, that you cannot trade without the risk of spreading disease, hence our continuing fascination with flu outbreaks and spiders in bananas. But we over-estimate the probability of infection, and the prevalence of social ills, partly because we project our ambivalence about trade (exploitation, food-miles, the loss of domestic jobs) onto migrants. While it is certainly wrong-headed to see migrants as economic competitors in aggregate, the bigger cognitive failure is to imagine that we can have the benefits of global free trade, from kiwi fruit to Spotify, without an increase in international labour mobility.

This gets to the nub of the issue, which is that nations with complex economies are inevitably driven to greater trade in order to maximise their absolute and comparative advantages (a fact recognised since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo), hence the secular trend towards larger free trade areas like the EU and multilateral treaties such as TTIP. This applies to factors of production as well as products and services, something which the EU's "four freedoms" (goods, services, capital and labour) explicitly acknowledge. The era of globalisation is the era of migration, from the Mediterranean to the Rio Grande, from the Baltic to South Africa. In the UK, successive governments have struggled with the contradiction of a neoliberal commitment to free trade and a conservative prejudice against incomers, producing a variety of faux-pas from Gordon Brown's "bigot" to David Cameron's "swarm". This reaches a pitch of inanity in the UKIP claim that "Outside of the EU we could control our borders whilst ensuring that free trade continues without free movement of people".

It is no coincidence that the UK's pre-eminence as a trading nation coincided with its openness to migrants, famously including Karl Marx among the many undesirables, nor that it started to introduce immigration controls (the Aliens Act of 1905) at a time when it was facing growing market challenges from the US and Germany and consequently attracted to protectionism (the Tariff Reform League was founded in 1903). The last large-scale attempt to expand trade while minimising migration was the clumsy arrangements negotiated between the European Community and Comecon in the late-80s, which were little more than disguised aid. What advocates like Nigel Farage are really after is free trade for the City and an impossible blend of pro-SME import substitution and favoured multinational brands for the rest of the country. In contrast, Donald Trump's plan to slap tariffs on Chinese imports to the US and build a wall to keep out Mexican migrants is a model of internal consistency.

Above the Sea of Fog

The traditional start of the summer holidays is marked in even-numbered years by international football tournaments. In odd-numbered years it is marked by a Martin Kettle article in The Guardian insisting that politicians should develop a more extensive cultural hinterland, ideally centred on an appreciation of Richard Wagner. I don't know if this is just the lazy recycling of the same piece while he is otherwise engaged at the Bayreuth Festival, or whether it's an idiosyncratic rider to his contract that he should be allowed to indulge this particular hobbyhorse every couple of years, but I do know that his philosophy is as depressing as it is familiar.

In 2011, Kettle greeted the Israeli State Orchestra's appearance on the Bayreuth fringe as a welcome step in the rehabilitation of the composer of The Ring Cycle: "Wagner was indeed an antisemite and a composer. But that does not make him an antisemitic composer, whatever that means, any more than being a reactionary ant-Dreyfusard makes Cézanne a reactionary painter. I confess that I do not understand what antisemitic music is". This is historically tone deaf, as the categorisation of music, or any other cultural product, as either halal or haram is clearly a political judgement. Wagner is the antisemitic composer supreme because the Nazis (abetted by his family) made him so, not because of his antisemitic essays or any questionable tropes in his operas. Kettle almost concedes this point in his own contradiction: "None of this means that the ban on the playing of Wagner in Israel and by Israeli orchestras is anything other than utterly understandable". Well, quite. It's a political decision.

What this shows is Kettle's desire to demarcate areas of life, but to then use the resulting dichotomy (art versus politics) for instructive purposes: a pointer to better political behaviour. This compartmentalisation is one of the chief legacies of Ancient Greek philosophy, with its alienation of gods and men and its distinction between personal ethics and communal politics (Greek tragedy, and biography - e.g. Socrates, addresses the tensions this gives rise to). It stands in obvious contrast to the totalitarian approach of the monotheistic religions, in which scripture and clerical interpretation extends to all aspects of the natural world. The great irony is that Wagner's "transcendence" (i.e. overwrought romanticism), as much as his conservative vision of an ordered and organic world, was taken as supportive of the Nazis' totalitarian ambitions: the Gleichschaltung (coordination) of society. It is precisely the quality that Kettle praises in Wagner, his ability to stand outside of politics, that makes him such a favourite of politicians, particularly those of a neoliberal persuasion who see a similarly transcendent (and instructive) role for the market.

In 2013, Kettle observed that "Politics may seem to rule the public roost much of the rest of the year – but it is a striking fact that politics has no power against the summer. ... This, after all, is the time of year when politics can no longer keep up the pretence that it is all-encompassing". But Kettle isn't going to fall into the trap of sports administrators down the ages, claiming that sport and politics don't mix and have been separate spheres since the sacred truce of the original Olympic Games (which actually mixed sport, religion and art, including the political skill of rhetoric). The singling-out of politics as an area of life that must be restricted is too obviously a reactionary impulse, so better try something a bit more sophisticated: "So it is therefore also an opportunity not for suspending all thought about politics but for trying to put politics into a more life-enhancing balanced context. ... I know this from watching and listening to Wagner, and I know it with absolute certainty too: I know that political engagement and a sustained cultural life are twin necessities of the civilised condition, twin embodiments of the belief that the world can be a better place than it is".

In his latest post from the interface of politics and high art, Kettle sums up his worldview thus: "I’m fascinated by politics because it embodies life as it is in reality. I’m fascinated by music because it expresses life as it might ideally be." It might be a little glib to simply claim that I'm the opposite, but I certainly don't think that politics should be reduced to a pragmatic managerialism that stultifies imagination and reinforces conservatism. Politics must embody aspiration at the social as much as the personal level, otherwise it is reduced to the transactional, utility-maximisation of neoliberal lore. Equally, the idea that music gives us access to a higher realm is just religiose, po-faced nonsense (the traditional corollary of the idea that "primitive" rhythms are bestial). Kettle needs to muddy his Apollonian elitism in the Dionysian moshpit. Much great music succeeds because it provides a thrilling perspective on reality, not because it "takes us to a better place". I suspect Kettle's distaste for genuinely popular music reflects a fear of that mundane, unsettling power.

The recurring theme of Kettle's pieces is the "philistinism" of British politicians, which has long been shorthand for their isolation from the continent and reluctance to embrace the European project. The summer months, when well-paid columnists decamp to their spiritual homes in the Dordogne, Tuscany and various Mediterranean islands, is an opportunity to recharge cultural batteries in the warm south before re-engaging with the recalcitrant denizens of these misty, northern isles. For some, like Kettle, it is also a chance to reaffirm the "higher project" of neoliberalism, which has a well-known weakness for Alpine mountains, from Mont Pelerin to Davos. Wagner, and the festival setting at Bayreuth (pan-European, exclusive and with the faint whiff of transgression), offers an emblem not only of a syncretic European culture but of a higher power that animates our collective will, ensuring good order and common sense through its political personifications (Frau Merkel to the fore) while vouchsafing a hint of the sublime to the adepts of the invisible hand.

Timeless Values

The Iraq debacle and the crisis of 2008 meant that New Labour was never required to explain its wider failure (despite winning three general elections, it was progressively losing popular support). Though specific issues have been thoroughly criticised since - PFI, the poor returns to education, the lack of economic dynamism, the erosion of human rights - the neoliberal programme has largely escaped discredit. Even the claim that Gordon Brown spent too much in the later years is essentially an attempt to suggest that New Labour back-slid, reverting from its youthful Blairism to the slovenly ways of old tax-and-spend Labour. This has allowed the Blairites to continue presenting themselves as a progressive force in politics, sloughing off unhelpful baggage as the errors of Brown and Miliband. In this they have been ironically helped by the accommodating nostalgia of the Corbyn insurgency, which has been big on performative decency but light on policy specifics beyond the tried and tested (free childcare, nationalised railways etc). We appear to be stuck in one of those Gramscian moments when the new cannot be born, giving rise to the morbid symptom of Harriet Harman's interim leadership.

The criticism of Liz Kendall (more than the other candidates, who are clearly neither as "new" nor as Blairite) has often been about character, in which the left accusation of "Tory" (aka bitch) is as irrelevant and insulting as the Daily Mail speculating about her weight. British political culture has always been significantly more concerned with personalities than the "ishoos" that Tony Benn used to insist on, not least because it has managed to preserve the form of court politics, from Prime Ministerial patronage to the absurdity of the House of Lords. Though many have criticised the policy desert of the leadership contest, what commentators are really bemoaning is the lack of personality and novelty (the simultaneous eclipse of Boris Johnson means the Tories offer no respite), hence the excitement generated last week by the Old Pretender's latest intervention (the Young Pretender having presumably decided that familial loyalty obliges him to sit this one out).

As a hegemonic ideology, neoliberalism does not encourage self-doubt, but it is striking nonetheless how the Blairites have continued to annihilate their own past, insisting that historical inevitability requires the party to move further to the right ("win from the centre") rather than attempt to recapitulate any earlier purity. As Tony Blair insisted, "This change requires new thinking. And 2015 is not 2007 or 1997. So yes, move on. But don’t move back!". The theme of irresistible change is one of neoliberalism's key borrowings from Marxist thought. This is not the classical liberal belief in benign progress - social advance moderated by individual liberty - but the idea of change as a simultaneous threat and opportunity, a dynamic that creates its own contradictions and anxieties: the "global race", the need to invest in personal human capital, the surrender to the wisdom of the invisible hand etc.

The economic dimension of neoliberalism attempted to assuage the understandable fear of ceaseless change by claiming that the aggregate product of markets would be a form of optimal stability (the Great Moderation), which in turn suggested that even bigger markets (further globalisation) would lead to even greater stability. This has obviously lost credibility in recent years, with the restoration of "normalcy" requiring the cognitive dissonance of a belief in the market's simultaneous reliability and unreliability (the Chinese are embarrassing to the global order because they make this overt). In contrast, the political dimension has traditionally sought to leverage fear rather than assuage it, with the "global war on terror" being a prime example of how this then follows the pathways of economic interdependence. As Blair explained in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: "Today the threat is chaos; because for people with work to do, family life to balance, mortgages to pay, careers to further, pensions to provide, the yearning is for order and stability and if it doesn't exist elsewhere, it is unlikely to exist here" (so let's stabilise the fuck out of other countries).

This rhetoric insists there is no connection between the positive urgency of modern life and the negative threat of chaos. Instead, instability is framed as an external rather than an internal force; while the new economy is assumed to be the collective will of the people, rather than a politico-legal design. Warming to the theme of history's march, Blair casts globalisation as evidence of human progress: "But globalisation is a fact and, by and large, it is driven by people. Not just in finance, but in communication, in technology, increasingly in culture, in recreation. In the world of the internet, information technology and TV, there will be globalisation. And in trade, the problem is not there's too much of it; on the contrary there's too little of it. The issue is not how to stop globalisation. The issue is how we use the power of community to combine it with justice". Of course, this is "justice" in the sense that Rawls and Nozick redefined it, subordinate to principles of liberty and property and cavalier about historically-situated community.

One of the key features of the political implementation of globalisation has been the promotion of Carl Schmitt's "state of exception" (the idea that sovereignty is the power to proclaim an exception to the normal rule of law) from the national to the international sphere. Intervention in the affairs of another state has historically been justified through an argument between realism (states pursuing rational if morally-ambiguous self-interest) and liberalism (the imposition of one's own moral order, justified in the name of humanity or progress). Realism was the default position in the postwar era of detente, with the wars of the 1990s marking the shift towards liberal intervention. 2001 marked the globalisation of the state of exception with the birth of the apparently never-ending "global war on terror". Though there was a lot of facile talk about "blowback" in respect of US foreign policy after 9/11, the longer view will surely be that this was part of a wider process of globalisation in which al Qaeda did its bit by globalising terrorism (on a similar note, the symbolic power of IS is the idea - owing as much to postmodernism as the Quran - that the caliphate can be proclaimed anywhere).

Giorgio Agamben described the US attitude towards prisoners of the "global war on terror" in 2005: "What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws". In a globalised, porous world, this style of governmentality easily seeps back into the domestic sphere. Historically, we have tolerated the systematic abuse of human rights abroad and have had no difficulty compartmentalising our behaviour (consider David Olusoga's documentary series on the compensation of British slave-owners), but now we see little odd in repatriating this instrumental contempt for the rights of others, from curbs on domestic free speech, via suggestions that we strip UK citizens of their passports, to denying benefits to women who have the temerity to have a third child.

Though we are still prone to judging communities en masse, e.g. asking all Muslims to apologise for jihadis, the wider trend is towards a more individuated scheme of responsibility, seen most clearly in the "personal plans" and sanctions of welfare reform, as befits a marketplace of isolates paying mortgages and furthering careers. The consequence is that we start to lose sight of people's individual social grounding, and are then surprised to be disoriented by the chaos of the market. This has produced the amusing sight of the Labour party fretting about entryism by Toby Young and Derek Hatton (yer barred!), both excited at the prospect of paying £3 to vote for Jezza. Ironically, if they'd limited the leadership vote to full party members and union affiliates (i.e. actual communities), they wouldn't have had this problem, but that's the market for you. The vetting process appears to be to ask wannabes to agree with the statement "I support the aims and values of the Labour Party, and I am not a supporter of any organisation opposed to it". Tough.

As Tony Blair claimed last week, Labour's preference for heart over head "makes us mistake defending outdated policy with defending timeless values", though he rather ruined the effect by reducing those values to managerialism: "what is right as a matter of policy is right as a matter of principle". What the Blairites are reluctant to concede is that the "timeless values" that attract Labour supporters are not the likes of liberty or meritocracy, let alone pragmatism or the market, but the sort of instinctive solidarity and equality of outcome long dismissed by hardcore neoliberalism as the garden path that leads inevitably to the road to serfdom. Of course, the Labour establishment isn't going to diss these values to their face. From the Blairite permanent revolution to the reinvention of sterile historic forms by Tristram Hunt and Maurice Glasman, the aim is to regulate dissent. The mooted coup by John Mann and others is pure Carl Schmitt: we demand a state of exception now. What Corbyn's bemused candidacy has inadvertently revealed is that the timeless value of New Labour is intolerance.

The Postcapitalist Imaginary

What is meant by "postcapitalism"? The trigger for this question was Paul Mason's recent puff-piece in the Guardian for his forthcoming book of that name. This isn't a critique of the book (a review copy has not turned up in the post) but a consideration of the concept and specifically what I take to be the determining philosophical frame. The idea of postcapitalism is implicit in the conceptualisation of capitalism as a historic force, so it's at least as old as the Communist Manifesto of 1848, but the term itself coincides with the popularisation of "postmodernism" after 1968. This is significant because postmodernism's scepticism about historicity and linear progress implies the coexistence of different stages of development, which is characteristic of the postcapitalist belief that the future is emergent and diffuse, rather than something that clicks into place come the day of revolution: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed", as William Gibson put it. What I'm interested in is this postmodern inflexion of postcapitalism, which I think Paul Mason (to judge by his other writings on the subject) is representative of.

The first point to note is that postcapitalism has the characteristics of speculative fiction, not just because it imagines what a future society might look like, but because it takes inspiration from literature and cinema as much as history and economics. It is concerned with ethics more than econometrics. The postmoden influence can be seen in a tendency towards stylistic mashups and paradox, such as the trope of advanced technology recreating antique social forms: microserfs and the broadband-enabled crofter (steampunk is the ironic mirror of this, in which antique tech is reimagined in modern social forms). This also explains the privileged role of technology in the postcapitalist imaginary, as both a metaphor for the ceaseless energy of capitalism and a paradigm for its potential supersession. According to Frederic Jameson, in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, "The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself".

The second point to note is that postcapitalism is an implied social critique of capitalist practices and institutional forms, such as marketisation, globalisation, the firm etc. Though history is littered with functioning economic systems that claimed (in so many words) to be postcapitalist, the term really gained currency as a response to the "actually existing capitalism" of the neoliberal era, particularly once it "finally triumphed" over those other systems in 1989 and the Washington Consensus became hegemonic. However, postcapitalism is always at risk of lapsing from a specific critique into an emotional rejection of modernity that culminates in the construction of a pre-capitalist idyll (but with WiFi); an antique society in which freedom from the market simply reproduces older forms of oppression. Some of this reactionary impetus is merely the employment of older templates for want of imagination, but some clearly appeals to a conservative yearning for order and certainty in the face of churning modernity, which is easily projected, like a Rousseau-inspired Instagram filter, onto indigenous peoples and nature.

Mason paints a picture of an emergent process: "Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm". He groups a number of phenomena together as evidence of immanent postcapitalism, including the sharing economy, the commons and peer-production. "I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: 'This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation'".

The idea of immanence, like the phrase "survival mechanism" and the appeal to "a change in our thinking", points to the religious undercurrent of this analysis. The Gospels could be accurately summarised as "a new way of living in the process of formation" (that final word nods to Gramsci, the last Christian martyr). The use of terms such as "escape route" and "bolt-hole" also hints at the vestiges of hippy millenarianism that more broadly inform techno-utopianism, in both its libertarian and anticapitalist variants (if he ever writes a manifesto, Mason might employ as its rubric: "turn on, tune in and drop out"). The words "nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do" imply that the emergence of postcapitalism is dependent on the capture of the state, which is orthodox socialism. They also imply a political revolution ahead of a change in material circumstances, which is an odd proposition from anyone with a grasp of history, let alone a Marxist. Clearly, existing governments are in no hurry to "promote" an alternative to capitalism, and Syriza's experience suggests that even the mildly-sympathetic are likely to be ostracised and undermined by the rest.

The late 60s marked the end of the century-long era love-affair with technology as the driver of social progress (reliance on humankind itself having taken a knock at Auschwitz). This was partly driven by asymmetrical wars (notably Vietnam), the fear of nuclear catastrophe and the growing evidence of environmental degradation, but it also reflected the increasing anxiety of privileged groups in the face of social mobility and civil rights, both of which seemed to be enabled by technology, from new communication media such as TV to labour-saving devices that encouraged women into work. This ambivalence produced both varieties of rejection (from hippies to Christian Fundamentalism) and a conscious recasting of technology as the means both to achieve personal liberation and restrain state power, culminating in the famous Apple Mac "1984" advert.

The idea that technology might simultaneously save and destroy the world would give rise to a religiosity (the "technological sublime") that would lead to transhumanism and the singularity. More obliquely it would influence the Californian Ideology (aka "dotcom neoliberalism"), and in particular the idea of a networked society of the elect (the "digerati"), floating free of class relations and nation states. This took a predictable battering when the smoke of the dotcom bust lifted to reveal a landscape dominated by the new tech grandees, such as Apple and Google, but that just led to a doubling-down on the emancipatory potential of the technology, particularly as social media appeared to energise traditional autonomism and horizontalism. Much of postcapitalism respectfully nods back at the operaismo of Fiat workers and the work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, with little sense of irony.

Mason describes three aspects of the emergence of postcapitalism: the impact of technology on work (not just automation but the freelancing of the sharing economy); the abundance of information (i.e. zero-cost replicability and the vain - in his view - attempts to monopolise data); and collaborative production (which bypasses both the market and managerialism). The heart of this is an assumption that the replicability central to digital technology (though let's not forget the pioneering work of the C60 mixtape) will progressively erode the value of capital goods, though paradoxically this assumes that the composition of capital will continue to shift towards the informational despite the declining returns. In other words, the tendential fall in the rate of profit is superseded by the tendential fall in the value of capital. Let's ask Taylor Swift what she thinks.

There is an echo here of a Marxist syllogism: technological determinism ("The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist") and the remorseless accumulation of capital ("the larger capitals beat the smaller") gives rise to the concentration and immiseration of labour ("What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers"), which leads to the supersession of capitalism. In Mason's version, technology both disperses and empowers labour, while simultaneously undermining the market value of information, which is taken to be the now-dominant form of capital. In combination, this produces a social movement that bypasses capitalist practices and institutional forms. This isn't persuasive. Mason is betting that the phenomena of the interstices ("co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems") are harbingers of the future, rather than the limits of resistance. They haven't overtaken the economy to date, and there is no good reason to supect that high-speed broadband will make much difference.

Like the well brought up Marxist that he is, Mason does not neglect the dialectic: "Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism". This builds on the central Marxist idea of the inevitable gestation of first socialism and then communism from within capitalism, due to the system's own contradictions. This new variant of dialectical materialism sees technology take on the gravedigger role once reserved for the proletariat. Just as the concentration of labour was thought to herald the inevitable end of the bourgeoisie, so the diffusion of labour may do the same. Which is a neat irony, if true.

There are two obvious problems with this. First, the collaborative exchanges enabled by technology are as likely to reproduce social relations in which property dominates. This is clear from the early stages of the "sharing economy", in which "the larger capitals [continue to] beat the smaller". This might change, but I see few grounds for optimism at present. Mason insists that the new monopolies (Google, Facebook etc) "cannot last", but this is a profession of faith ("information wants to be free" - to be fair, he may provide more substance to this claim in his book). The evidence is that capital (with the state in tow) is doing a fine job monopolising data already. The decline in production costs for music may be driving prices towards zero, but profits are maintained because the same process is expanding the market. Let's not forget that per-track sales were introduced by Apple. When an Eskimo buys a 99-cent Elvis track off iTunes, that represents a slice of profit unattainable by the music industry in the 1960s. Ultimately this process must run out of steam; but not yet.

Second, huge areas of the economy are going to remain capital-intensive. While Mason redefines an airliner as an "information factory", it remains a damned expensive factory. The Internet has shown itself to be powerful in exploiting the collective knowledge of people (both data and programming), in a way that was hitherto impossible, but there is little evidence that it's about to democratise mining or car production. Says Mason, "We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society ... Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too". True, but the airliner itself will still cost millions, in the same way that Taylor Swift live will command a premium.

There has always been a strand of disappointment in modern Marxist theory with the failure of the industrial proletariat to fulfil its historic role. This stretches from critiques of the soviet system to critiques of labourism. For some, the workers have been misled by state capitalists; for others, the fault lies in false consciousness and the resilience of capitalist ideology. This has led many theorists to transfer their hopes from the traditional vanguard to disadvantaged social groups, from Gramsci's subalterns through anticolonialism to identity politics. Come the hegemony of neoliberalism, this culminated in the binary opposition of the global "multitude" of Hardt & Negri and later the 99% of the Occupy movement. Even the modish "precariat" can be seen as an attempt to conjure into existence a contemporary class consciousness.

For many postcapitalist theorists, technology now replaces social relations as the defining characteristic of the progressive class, though this implies a degree of educational privilege that clearly marginalises the poor (you can't eat software or construct a dwelling out of it). Indeed, the transfer of our hopes onto technology looks like an admission of the redundancy of labour. As Mason puts it, "Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they 'cannot silence or disperse' ... By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being". This is to confuse the accessibility of the network with the concentration of will (have you seen social media?). Technophile postcapitalism wants everyone to be connected (and thus mediated) in order to fulfil their role as the "agent of change in history". This is not a million miles away from the Leninist view that what the "backward" corners of the Earth required first and foremost was industrialisation in order to create a proletariat.

Mason is understandably more authoritative when he deals with contemporary economics: "Austerity ... means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up". This is spot-on, but he could also have noted that in the realm of ideology it entails harmonisation of political institutions and social mores as well. While this takes a progressive turn in the developing world (i.e. becoming more like the West, which obviously produces tensions), it means a return to more hierarchical and familial forms in the developed world (which produces other tensions). By this I don't mean cultural conservatism (e.g. anti-gay), but rather the redefinition of progress in liberal bourgeois terms (e.g. pro-gay marriage while suspicious of fecund single mothers). Where freedom once meant the ability of an abused wife to leave her husband and get a council flat, it now means the right of a council tenant to buy her property and leave an unencumbered inheritance.

Is this an ultimately vain attempt to resist the social transformations triggered by technology, or is it actually the product of those changes? Is the historic purpose of the Internet the creation of a truly global bourgeoisie? The message of globalisation may be that we can no longer develop independently (the eurozone crisis may be telling us the same thing). As the factors of production become more mobile (and we might consider information as a new factor that is perfectly mobile), wages are diffused, which is good for Bangalore but less good for Birmingham. In aggregate, this actually increases scarcity because it increases demand. There is then a race between the growth of a global population with disposable income (or debt) and the fall in production costs of commodities. I suspect there will be enough scarcity (real or engineered) to support capitalism for some time to come.

The problem with vulgar informationalism (e.g. the "knowledge economy") is that it focuses on pure forms that are often marginal in their economic impact (Wikipedia wiping out the encyclopedia business is a very small earthquake), though they may have a strong ideological role in culture. Thus we routinely elevate social media above database technology (I never thought I'd feel sorry for Larry Ellison). We forget that institutional forms of capital are just as likely to adopt new technologies as be undermined by them. Railways easily moved from steam to diesel to electric-power. There is a clear continuity between the first factories of the eighteenth century and modern "sheds", even if the latter are increasingly populated by robots. Selling books on social science or economics to a generalist audience requires bold claims, so Mason is obliged to predict a clean break despite conceding that the emergence of capitalism itself was not the product of any such sudden shift. Political revolutions, such as 1642 and 1789, marked the culmination of phases in a much longer revolution in technology and social relations. The idea that capitalism (and presumably the capitalist state) will soon wither as a result of a technology that was purely theoretical as recently as 50 years ago is nothing if not ambitious.

Postmodernism's scepticism about historicity, the idea that we can meaningfully understand historical events and divide them into chronologically unique periods, was both a response to the assumed acceleration of modernity and its simultaneous loss of focus/telos. As Francis Fukuyama's End of History meme would show, this attitude could easily serve an ideological purpose after 1989, insisting on the reality of progress but denying the possibility of dialectical historical change. In other words, denying the possibility of any future "post" state: neoliberalism as the eternal present. The response to this in the 90s was the growth of "anticapitalism" as a politics of resistance and rejection, or just bloody-mindedness (the anti-globalisation protests, the anarchist "black blocs", the slow movement etc). As the rediscovery of history in the Balkans, the Gulf and eventually downtown Manhattan proceeded apace, this gave rise to a renewed desire to describe what a better world might look like. Postcapitalism is the combined product of anticapitalism, the social implications of the Internet, and the paradoxical ahistoricity of late capitalism, which in denying any further linear progress opens up the possibility of departures in an unlimited number of other directions.

A final thought. Turning once more to William Gibson: "When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart". Postcapitalism isn't a species of utopianism, in the sense that a teleological critique like Marxism can be said to imply a utopia. Postcapitalism is a continuation of the twentieth century programme to deconstruct capitalism, to uncover the ethical, rather than scientific, basis of its inner workings, which is why it has enjoyed such a vogue since 2008. Postmodernism has served to exempt it from the obligation to explain how its normative strictures can come into being (why what should be will be), which in turn shields it from the charge of pessimism levelled at earlier critical theory (why what should be cannot be). Its embrace of technology is instrumental and usually couched in language indistinguishable from that employed by journalistic boosters and evangelical business consultants. For all its talk of the social and the collaborative commons it is primarily focused on the personal, imagining "escape" in the same way that trains and automobiles once offered a route out of rural idiocy, or imagining "salvation" in the manner of deracinated social mobility. Postcapitalism looks remarkably like emancipatory capitalism.