What Remains of Value in Liberalism?

Neoliberalism isn't the same as liberalism. When we use the term "liberalism" we are generally referring to an ethical outlook concerned as much with individual rights and behaviours as with the management of public affairs. In contrast, we largely use "neoliberalism" to mean an approach to economics and public policy that eschews ethics in favour of efficiency. If we think of the neoliberal subject at all, it is the abstraction of homo economicus. This isn't in conflict with the common understanding of liberalism, but in boiling it down to its essentials it reveals a core truth: liberalism's preference for market logic over democracy. From this arises a theory of the state (it should facilitate markets), a theory of political practice (a marketplace of ideas) and a theory of participation (electors as consumers). It is hardly a narrow or superficial philosophy, but it is one that suggests the liberal concern with ethics and subjectivity is little more than window-dressing. Two consequences of this Jekyll and Hyde relationship are a nostalgia for liberal ethics (not just in the celebration of contemporary icons of virtue but in liberalism's intellectual genealogy) and the claim that neoliberalism doesn't even exist - that it's little more than a figment of the imagination.

What I want to look at in this post is whether there is anything within that outer shell of liberalism that has both survived the neoliberal age and is worth further preservation. To begin with, I need to start with a definition. Liberalism is not canonical: there is no Big Book of Liberalism we can refer to. Of course, the absence of any single tome is regarded as proof of liberalism's commitment to pluralism and its belief in human progress, just as the worship of a single book, whether the Bible or Das Kapital, is taken as evidence of close-mindedness (this is obviously an over-simplification, but it suits the liberal narrative of the contest of ideas). Reducing liberalism to a single idea, such as liberty, is inadequate because the term is usually historically contingent. Liberty for John Locke did not mean the same thing as it did for John Stuart Mill, let alone Jacinda Ardern. The traditional way round this problem for liberalism's champions and opponents (at least on the right) is to define it as praxis rather than theory: an approach to public policy, and a set of associated cultural habits, rather than a distinct body of thought. 

In the eyes of contemporary liberal theorists such as Edmund Fawcett, author of Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, this praxis depends on four core ideas: a belief that conflict is unavoidable but consensus is possible; a distrust of power; faith in human progress; and tolerance and mutual respect. As we're in the realm of the pragmatic (if only rhetorically), one could also add a preference for "what works" and "evidence", an empirical gloss on what remain recognisably Enlightenment ideas. At this point it is worth emphasising that many people who regard the Enlightenment as a good thing have a superficial understanding of the historical reality, which would be offensive to modern eyes in many respects (see Locke once more), and are really talking about liberalism (by the same token, many contemporary anti-enlightenment advocates are actually arguing for a return to the proto or early enlightenment that encompasses Machiavelli and Hobbes, not a revival of Classical virtues or Medieval scholasticism). It is also worth separating out the theme of universalism, which is implicit in most of the core ideas - i.e. the belief that the whole of humanity is the proper domain of liberal practice, which is seen in the commitment to human rights and internationalism.

The problem with this praxis approach is that there are obvious contradictions in the history of actually existing liberalism, particularly in politics. For example, liberals have often been violently averse to consensus if it has required them to actually compromise. In one sense this is a banal point. If your opponent is unwilling to make concessions, you may have to be equally obdurate if you are going to achieve progress (see the history of the British Liberal party in the 19th century). But there have also been many occasions when political liberals have so narrowly defined consensus as to alienate even their own supporters (see the 2010-15 coalition). Likewise, liberals have been no less enthusiatic in centralising power than conservatives or socialists, and have arguably (if we adopt a party-independent definition of "liberal") overseen more of this than either. Their faith in human progress has been tempered by elitism (their instinctive competitiveness means they love winners), while they have always placed narrow boundaries on their tolerance and respect for others (see the attitude of the various shades of liberalism towards Jeremy Corbyn for a recent example).

As regards pragmatism, liberalism has shown itself to be no less prone to delusion and the pursuit of the unattainable than any other worldview. In the form of liberal internationalism, it has often caused greater suffering than the evils that it has sought to address and has produced consensus mainly in the common belief that it is a global menace. Related to this, the commitment to universalism has always been more theoretical than practical, hence it is more likely to appear in the realm of rhetoric than in the fine detail of policy. In reality, liberalism is instinctively discriminatory because it ultimately values individual choice over collective entitlement. Indeed, its commitment to human rights is ultimately a commitment to the singular right of choice ("Choose a life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television"). This bias to choice translates into a preference for equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome, which inexorably leads to means-testing and judgementalism at the operational level (means-testing is not a cost-saving tactic but an exercise in virtue).

From a liberal perspective, these contradictions can be taken as evidence that liberalism is dynamic, but that is akin to Walt Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes", which might be witty but it doesn't make liberalism any more coherent (indeed, this lack of consistency is a central concern in liberal philosophy - e.g. John Rawls's use of 'reflective equilibrium'). Critics can reasonably point out that these contradictions actually reveal a more fundamental and questionable set of beliefs than the admirable core ideas laid out by Fawcett. These are: that competition is applicable in all social transactions; that the restraint of power means the restraint of the majority; that social betterment is an oblique strategy so we must have blind faith in progress; and that my privacy and my property are beyond your censure. It would be unfair though to reduce liberalism to selfish individualism. If it has any validity as a moral order it is in the idea that the rights I demand for myself should be extended to others, even if the record suggests a blindness to the common humanity of some of those others (I find I keep returning to Locke). Liberalism's historic challenge has been to champion the value of autonomy while not conceding the necessity of equality, hence justifications such as Rawls's 'difference principle'.

Though it is presented as progressive, political liberalism has always been a strategy of grudging concession. It is easy to misremember the 19th century as purely a long drawn-out contest between die-in-a-ditch conservatives and liberal reformers, ignoring the many self-styled liberals who were at the centre of resistance to reform, from Irish home rule to universal suffrage. Liberalism's struggle to reconcile its principles to the twentieth century, particularly in the face of democracy and the growth of the welfare state, would lead to its political fragmentation, but this was paradoxically a sign of its ideological hegemony: both Labour and the Conservatives have been essentially liberal parties in their upper echelons for the last 100 years and it is liberalism that has dominated both the state and the para-state (the BBC, the broadsheet press, academia etc). In other words, liberalism negotiated the last century by moving beyond the hurly-burly of electoral politics to become the worldview of the state apparatus. As a consequence, changes in government became less significant. In retrospect, watersheds like 1979 or 1997 look less dramatic than 1923.

But this did not mean that liberalism became the champion of the activist state in the twentieth century. Far from it. Instead it imported a pessimism about the state's capabilities and a suspicion about political motives. Yes, Minister was a supremely liberal interpretation of British government. This cynical liberalism captured the state but it did so for essentially defensive reasons: to prevent socialism or nationalism capturing it instead. The manoeuvre involved both a self-denying ordinance, in which government and capitalism were confined to separate spheres, and an approach to welfare that combined noblesse oblige and matronly judgmentalism. These tendencies were eroded by the neoliberal turn in the 1980s, leading to the colonisation of the apparatus by commercial interests and a more shrill and disciplinary regime founded on the concept of human capital. Liberalism's problem in the current century is that the challenges we now face, most notably climate change and galloping inequality, cannot be overcome without a politics that sees the restraint of capitalism and private property as a more urgent priority than the restraint of the state. 

So what is left of ethical liberalism? Or, to put it another way, are there any features of liberal theory that remain in tension with neoliberal praxis? There are certainly many features that have fallen by the wayside, leading to the strange sight of liberals recanting what were once liberal shibboleths. For example, there has been a turn away from universalism to particularism: in practice, an insistence that while rights may be universal, the exercise of those rights is contingent. That may simply be a frank admission of liberalism's true beliefs, but the lack of enthusiasm for mounting even a cursory defence of universalism is notable. This has manifested itself recently in both an uneasiness in the face of calls for solidarity (e.g. the belief that blacks in the UK do not suffer the same prejudice as those in the US) and an insistence on performative solidarity in respect of selected minorities (e.g. the extension of potential residency rights to natives of Hong Kong at a time when immigration from other former colonies is being made more difficult). 

Just as troubling has been the liberal indulgence of moral panics over free-speech. While this is often motivated by petty self-interest - one age cohort defending its privileges against the next - it is clear that many liberals have decided that the civility required for plural discourse should be freely extended to the right but not so freely to the left. This discrimination suggests a nostalgia for a marketplace of ideas dominated by the opposing poles of liberalism and conservativism. The charge that the left is lacking in civility is clearly projection. It is liberals who have increasingly adopted an intemperate attitude to even the most mild challenge from the left. For example, the other day I was struck by a couple of tweets in which John Rentoul and Andrew Adonis decided to smear and deride George Lansbury. In Rentoul's case as an excuse for having a pop at Corbyn, and in Adonis's case in order to puff his upcoming biography of Ernie Bevin. What was notable was not merely the combination of spite and marketing, but the lack of historical nuance or generosity (Lansbury started his political career as a Liberal and remained a politician defined by his liberal Christian ethics). 

The combination of this performative incivility towards the left and the condemnation of the left for its incivility is not just hypocrisy, it suggests that liberalism is losing its bearings. The hegemony of neoliberalism has left political liberalism devoid of meaning beyond the gestural, while liberal internationalism has been revealed to be nothing more than realpolitik plus pious language. Facing this void, liberalism increasingly seeks to define itself against a malicious enemy. The liberal contempt for populism, and the tendency to see it in any and every challenge to the liberal order, is a proxy for its lingering distrust of democracy. While it would never make the mistake of dismissing the popular will as exercised at the ballot box, it will continue to elevate the courts and constitutionalism over electoral politics when it feels its interests are threatened, as was only too obvious during the Brexit saga when the achievable goal of a mildly-left Labour government willing to concede a second referendum was rejected in favour of a judicial deus ex machina that could never do more than delay the inevitable.

What has remained constant in liberalism is its commitment to private property, the restraint of the state and individualism. These are also the elements of liberalism most congenial to the political right, or at least the broad right short of outright Fascism. It is still the legitimating ideology of the bourgeoisie. However, its much vaunted commitment to tolerance and pluralism has not survived into the 21st century, and it is perhaps no coincidence that these are the elements least congenial to the right. In practice, they haven't been marginalised but co-opted by conservatives to define the boundary of the acceptable, blackballing the "intolerant, woke left" and imagining society as a plurality of beleagured constituencies, such as Jews living in fear of antisemitism or Hindus living in fear of jewel thieves. Meanwhile, a more generous tolerance, pluralism and universalism are easily found on the left. The truth is that ethical liberalism long ago became hegemonic in society, just as economic liberalism did. The paradoxical result is that liberalism's victory has produced not consensus but a renewed conflict between the left and the right centred on private property as the emblem of environmental degradation and social inequality. On a weekend of protests against state power, it is the universality of political conflict that remains the most valuable insight of liberalism.

Sovereigns and Scapegoats

A paradox of the Covid-19 crisis is that not much has substantially changed in our lives, despite the vogue for "all is changed, changed utterly" opinion pieces. We are restricted under lockdown, but not unbearably so. I appreciate that I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege and that many vulnerable people are suffering, but the point is that they were vulnerable before the pandemic and already suffering. Just as the prime Minister's suddenly plummeting popularity has shocked a commentariat that had forgotten the level it was at before the "rally round the flag" effect boosted it only two months ago, so we risk forgetting that history is mostly continuity. Covid-19 has exacerbated the situation of the poor and vulnerable, but it has hurled down few of the mighty, which would be a better sign that we were witnessing a catastrophe. Measured in unemployment and lost output, the economy is not markedly worse than it was in previous recessions, such as in the early-80s and early-90s, though a lot is still in the post. The idea that stockbrokers jumped off the ledges of Wall Street in 1929 is a myth, but it did reflect a moment of genuine despair. In reality, the damage arising from the Great Crash was largely the result of bad policy in response rather than the bursting of a stock market bubble.

Though recession is forecast, and increasingly expected to run for many months, particularly if a vaccine is slow in arriving, we should bear in mind that we've experienced anaemic growth for years. The economy may have come to a spluttering halt and even slipped into reverse, but we were only travelling in first gear anyway. A V-shaped recovery is easier to engineer if you don't have to increase speed beyond a crawl. There are reasons to fear a depression, but many of those concern secular trends rather than an adverse shock. Austerity was a foolish policy response in 2010, but it had a less damaging effect than the comparable response in the early 1930s and part of the reason it was pursued was that economists and politicians expected that to be true and thought, correctly as it turned out, that the politics could be managed to maintain public support. The automatic stabilisers of the welfare state, despite the cuts, together with the refusal to move away from the debt-fuelled basis of finance, despite new checks and safeguards, meant that the position of capital could be preserved (and even enhanced through quantitative easing) at a cost to labour that was shown to be tolerable. Democracy in the 1930s threatened capital but it has served to defend it over the last ten years.

One explanation for this combination of economic resilience and minimal social disruption is that productivity long ago reached a point at which growing profits could be guaranteed to capital while subsidising make-work sufficient to create a democratic defence of the system, through a privileged electoral bloc of the in-work who could find common cause with the increasingly privileged bloc of the elderly and rentiers. The "feather-bedded" public sector of yore was mostly myth, but the contemporary equivalent of a corporate class dependent on the better-paid bullshit jobs and technology-enabled distraction is all too real. This has been made obvious by the pandemic, as professionals grapple with Zoom or complain that they're still too busy to clean their own homes. It has also shone a light on where the actual labour exploitation occurs: that is, where the make-work is negligible but wages are depressed through pecarity, zero-hours and a dog-eat-dog labour market. This truth has been partially acknowledged in the media, but it has largely been drowned-out by waffle about sourdough starters and home-schooling, emphasising the solipsism of the "isolated" (but not really isolated) family unit. This, together with the mawkish valorisation of key-workers, has made the child's coloured rainbow drawing the symbol of our collective state of mind: a happy place we can retreat to when we can't bear too much reality.

In the early days of the lockdown, the British media's attitude towards the public swung between the sentimental and the Hobbesian. This isn't new - it's the house style, after all - but the pandemic has allowed these traditional frames to be deployed at a national scale, rather than being limited to minorities or representative individuals. The collective "clap for the NHS" was the supreme example of the sentimental, while the panic-buying of toilet rolls was the chief emblem of the Hobbesian. In reality, relatively few people have consistently done either. Most of us have clapped at some point, usually in the first week or two, but only a minority of the population have kept it up despite the positive social engagement that has become a feature. Likewise, a majority of us bought a little more at the supermarket at the beginning of the pandemic, and rationalised our own actions as prudence, but we've since reverted to normal patterns of buying adjusted to the nature of lockdown. There might have been an uptick in the sale of guns and ammo in the US, but in the UK it's mostly been booze and flour, suggesting our war of all against all will be limited to drunken bakers.

From the tutting of the Guardian to the invective of the Sun and Mail, the assumption in March was that people were untrustworthy, selfish and stupid, with the "covidiot" very much to the fore. As the supermarkets adjusted their supplies, and officious police clamped down on guerilla sunbathing and picnics, unnecessary and self-indulgent travel became the chief spectacle of antisocial behaviour. Of course, this meant focusing on an even smaller minority of the population, literally picked out by police drones in some cases, which led the press to replace its narrative of Hobbesian conflict with the trusty scapegoat: the individual whose egregious disregard for the rules shows contempt for our solidarity and collective sacrifice. Dominic Cummings is a perfect choice for this role, given his combination of privilege and arrogance and the suspicion of hypocrisy that comes with being in the public eye (a suspicion that reflects both popular cynicism and the Hobbesian worldview of the press). What has been funny (at least to me) is that his defence of his actions has been impeccably Lockean, from his insistence on the tolerance of competing beliefs through the justification of selfish reason to the rights of property (that bluebell wood). 

Where Thomas Hobbes and John Locke famously intersect is in the realm of social contract theory. At the heart of this is the question of how much liberty an individual will surrender to the authority of the state in return for social protection and the maintenance of order (in plain English, the protection of property). While Hobbes saw authority (the sovereign) as an inherent necessity of society, Locke saw it more as the collective delegation of self-interested individuals. Both were contractarians, but Locke emphasised the contract as rational rather than essential or instinctive. In this regard, Boris Johnson has proved himself to be a Lockean rather than a Hobbesian, and this as much as anything may explain his sympathy for Cummings. Despite his childhood ambition to be "World King", he is clearly a reluctant sovereign (as an aside, it is amusing to see liberals berate him for being an ineffective dictator). Like David Cameron, the danger he poses to society is largely the product of his class prejudice and intellectual laziness, rather than the megalomania, paranoia or bigotry that have distinguished previous inhabitants of Number 10. Far from imposing his will as if it were justified by divine right, he is currently engaged in trying to make a deal with the British people, just as he did over Brexit.

That deal concerns not only the trade-off of lives for economic health, but the degree of responsibility to be shared in easing the lockdown. Johnson has been obliged by circumstance to act as the sovereign, but he would far rather the people exercise their own judgement - use "good British common sense" - to determine what was appropriate, just as Cummings supposedly did. In this sense he is far more of a dealmaker than the arbitrary sovereign in the White House. His chief adviser is a lightening-rod for those who oppose an early easing of the rules, but he has also become a useful stick for anyone who wishes to beat the government generally or Johnson specifically. Keir Starmer's decision to not join other opposition party leaders in demanding Cummings's resignation is less a cunning plan of sitting back and allowing the Tories to kick lumps out of each other and more an indication that he is understanding of the government's dilemma and supportive of its intent. As such his message is intended for business, not the electorate, and that message is that balancing the needs of the economy and public health is a matter superior to party politics. This is the purest essence of neoliberal thinking, in which loud virtue and the clamour of the mob gives way to rational deliberation among men of property. John Locke would have been proud.

Last Orders

The Dutch journalist and author Rutger Bregman has been in the papers recently puffing his new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History. Following the sunny optimism of his advocacy of a liberal UBI in Utopia for Realists, his latest is a Pinkerish celebration of human progress and decency: a humanist teleology that has inevitably found favour with the liberal establishment. One of the central parables (it's that sort of book) is about the "real" Lord of the Flies, a group of Tongan youth who survived a 15-month shipwreck in 1965-6 through cooperation and ingenuity, which stands in clear contrast to William Golding's bestseller (which was an actual parable, rather than an exercise in misanthropy that revealed its author's tendency towards child abuse and Nazism, as Bregman bizarrely imagines). Just as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is emblematic of the transition from mercantilism to capitalism and imperialism, so this meta event (forget the book - that's not important) is typical of contemporary neoliberalism, from Bregman's privileged position (he has spoken truth to power at Davos, naturally) through the amelioration of selfish human capital by pro-social teamwork represented by the lads' tale to the market for the film rights.

Bregman is typical of the media milieu now asking whether neoliberalism "is gasping its last breath" in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic (of course liberals like Joe Stiglitz have been asking the question since the millennium). He explains its original triumph in the 1970s as the result of crisis (barely explained) prompting governments to adopt "the ideas that are lying around", in Milton Friedman's phrase. This obviously obscures the reality that classical liberal ideas about prices and revealed preference were current from the 1940s, even as he provides a whistlestop tour of the history of the Mont Pelerin Society, but it also ignores that what made liberalism "neo" was the splicing of free markets and unfettered capital with the activist government and welfare state that arose in Western Europe and the US in the twentieth century. As to the ideas that are lying around today, his survey alights on the need to tax wealth more (Piketty, Saez and Zucman), to leverage the entrepreneurial capacity of the state (Mazzucato), and to be more forgiving of public debt (he cites MMT advocate Stephanie Kelton). All of these are "radical" ideas only insofar as they nudge up against the outer limits of conventional liberal thought. There is no suggestion here that property relations or the power of the state are intrinsically problematic.

Neoliberalism will remain hegemonic until the material and political conditions that gave rise to it - the combination of captalism and democracy - change. A crisis may interrupt that hegemony, even require it to be temporarily suspended, as happened in 2009 and is happening again today, but the very responsiveness of capital and the state in a period of crisis is an indicator of its persistence. If Gordon Brown hadn't "saved the world", somebody else would have. The material conditions and the levers of state power were in place, and the commitment to international cooperation was instinctive. Neoliberalism's champions during the twentieth century emphasised its internationalism for two reasons. First, because that reflected the material reality of rapidly advancing globalisation and the free movement of capital. Second, because it provided a way of disciplining nation states (The Washington consensus, "market sentiment" etc). That second reason in turn meant that a revolution against neoliberalism was unlikely to succeed at a national level. As global revolution was now improbable, and frankly inconceivable after 1989, it was reasonable to think that this marked "the end of history". 

The political rise of the xenophobic right over the last decade does not represent a turning away from neoliberalism but a conservative reframing of it in order to secure democratic legitimacy ("neo-illiberalism", perhaps). Likewise, the progressive proposals for a modest tax on wealth, for greater pro-social state activism and a more sophisticated view of public finances are a liberal reframing that seeks democratic legitimacy for the continuation of the capitalist system. At the material level, the nationalistic turn of neoliberalism reflects the slowing of globalisation since 2000, measured in terms of trade and complex supply chains, and the political ramifications of the global savings glut and its associated current account deficits. The former has fuelled divisions over international dependency (most starkly in the debate over Brexit), while the latter has led to talk of "trade wars" and competitive international rebalancing, employing the language of a century ago while blithely ignoring the ground reality of a highly-integrated world system. Globalisation is running out of puff because it has succeeded, not because it has failed. 

Neoliberalism isn't beleagured, let alone in reverse. It is adapting its form while preserving its central tenets, such as the universal applicability of markets, the superiority of the price signal over planning, and the management of atomised labour as human capital. All of this is visible in the British government's immigration bill, with its emphasis on the demands of "the economy", its dropping of targets (proving that these were merely a technocratic fetish) and its adoption of a points-based valuation of the individual (you as an applicant now have your own target). The Conservative government will not regress to some older political order, such as authoritarian nationalism, even if it does adopt some of the characteristics and indulge the fantasies of reactionary groups on the right. What it will do is carefully read public opinion in order to assess the optimum degree of xenophobia or authoritarianism to deploy, as we've seen in its decision to exempt workers in the NHS and care sector from the migrant healthcare charge. This is being presented as a victory for virtue (and "forensic" opposition) by the liberal press, but it's merely a distraction from a proposed system that is far more liberal than conservative.

The "return of the state" commentary that has become popular during the pandemic is partly an anticipation of a more interventionist Tory government, committed to regional rebalancing and large infrastructure projects, and partly a relief at the end of the Corbyn interlude and the associated assumption that managerialism and technocracy have reasserted their grip on the Labour party. This nostalgia for the high neoliberal era is fundamentally no different to the nostalgia for "our finest hour" or the "spirit of '45". The past is always employed as a lever for the present, but our selective use of it clearly indicates an agenda, and what the current agenda points to is the maintenance of the neoliberal ideal of government as the guarantor of markets and the manager of human capital. For example, consider how fetishising the "national story" can be used to reconcile the conflicting demands of the people for social protection and the demands of capital for deregulation and personal risk-taking, which has reached surreal heights in the UK with the government's strategy of elevating the defence of the NHS above the defence of the public.

Viewed through the prism of humanism, neoliberalism is always with us. This is true in two senses: the liberal tenet of the responsible and free individual and the associated idea of governmentality - the way in which society is managed towards an assumed optimum without recourse to the blunt discipline of systematic coercion or the prohibitions and obligations of law. For Michel Foucault, homo economicus was not merely a rational agent, produced by Enlightenment theories such as Utilitarianism, but a form of subjectivity whose genealogy can be traced back to the displacement of the pagan view of sexuality as experience (ars erotica) by the Christian hermeneutics of the self and its techniques of confession and the pastorate, which eventually leads to the scientia sexualis of the 19th century and the biopower of capitalism. He didn't live to see the FitBit, but he wouldn't have been surprised by that "technology", with its combination of penance, personal confession and competition.

For all its softly disciplinary nature, Foucault also saw the emancipatory potential of neoliberalism for minorities: "a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players,and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals" (the Birth of Biopolitics, pg 259-60). This is more than an oblique celebration of the San Francisco bathhouse scene of the 1970s. The key point here is that concept of environmental intervention: the network of power relations that simultaneously liberates the individual from older forms of subjectivity (such as Christian guilt or the normative discipline of the Enlightenment) while constraining social action against the system itself. Foucault was attracted to the former - the ability to create the subject without recourse to law or morality - but he didn't neglect the latter. 

What Foucault's reading of Gary Becker and other Chicago School thinkers suggested was that neoliberalism provided a space for resistance and autonomy in a way that previous regimes of governmentality didn't. This can be bracketed as simply another contradiction of capitalism, but it also helps explain the tenacity of neoliberalism today. For many (albeit in reality predominantly white, western, well-off etc) this has been an era of personal freedom and rapid material gain. The social liberalism that produced gay marriage and "wokeness" has been substantial and will not be reversed by atavistic bigotry. The ultimate winner of the culture wars is certain, if only because of the obvious generational divide that the conflict reflects. Like it or not, this "progress" has been a triumph for neoliberalism. Consequently, we shouldn't be surprised if there is a reluctance to concede that neoliberalism is passing from history, nor that many staunch defenders of the status quo still claim that neoliberalism isn't even a thing, which is the best evidence of its continuing hegemony. 

Emotional Labour

All jobs, in the simple sense of activity you do in return for payment, are inescapably power relations. What distinguishes work from barter is that one party must exchange their labour, and it is invariably that party who is at a disadvantage in terms of power. An argument against the simplistic model of work as a transaction tending towards equilibrium, in which resources are optimised by matching demand through the mechanisms of market and price, is that there is always a deadweight cost associated with masking the reality of the power relation. This largely falls on the worker, who must often contribute additional emotional labour (suppressing your irritation in the face of a frustrating customer, for example, or laughing at your boss's crap jokes), which subtracts from their actual labour by wasting time (there are other thiefs of time, of course, but ceteris paribus). One way in which the power relation operates is by increasing that emotional labour at the expense of productive labour.

Though this waste can be rationalised at the microeconomic level as simply another preference on the part of the buyer of labour (I am paying you to tug your forelock because that maximises my utility in terms of self-esteem), at the macroeconomic level it is clearly a deadweight loss to society in a similar manner to the "old Spanish practices" that lower efficiency on the shopfloor. A further loss can potentially arise when the employer feels obliged to invest some of their own time justifying the power relation and resisting claims that it is exploitative. This can be a necessary investment if negative publicity leads to commercial loss, but for most buyers of labour it is neither public relations nor emotional labour but simply the curation of their own ego. Whether that in turn constitutes a deadweight loss to society depends on whether the employer might otherwise be productively using that time and energy. A further complication arises when the buyer of labour is also a worker: they might be forgoing time that they would otherwise use for earning.

Well, that's enough theory. Let's now turn to the working week of Sarah Ditum, one of the many soi-disant radical feminists in the media whose political centrism (or even steady drift to the right) usually entails a "gender critical" perspective. Despite not employing a domestic cleaner herself, Ditum chose to berate Owen Jones for his suggestion that those who do employ cleaners should simply pay them to stay at home during lockdown and so avoid putting them at risk of infection. The motivation on Ditum's part seems to have been simply her ongoing resentment of Jones, the two being on opposite sides of the TERF war, though she also appears to sympathise with the original claim by Theo Usherwood, the Political editor of LBC, that the most supportive thing you can do for "households that might not be financially viable without work" (i.e. the poor) is to let them labour in the homes of middle-class professionals. 

This culminated in her writing a piece for the Spectator on 'The underlying sexism of the conversation about cleaners and Covid' in which she made plain her target: "the righteous left ... that insists ‘blow jobs are real jobs’ decries the woman who hires another woman to scrub limescale out of the bathtub". It's worth repeating again that Ditum does not herself employ a cleaner, so you have to wonder why she is suddenly an expert on the subject. A cynic would point out that articles that trash the left, and Owen Jones in particular, are always going to find a buyer in the Tory press: just ask Nick Cohen and David Aaronovich (for the record, Ditum was supported on Twitter by Hadley Freeman, David Baddiel and Janice Turner, the latter even managing some homophobic snidery about Jones's lack of children). But what I want to focus on here is not the question of her credentials, which would be playing the TERF/SWERF game, but her implied hierarchy of work: the idea that cleaning and sex-work are categorically different.

Earlier in the article she says: "There’s an old linguistic slippage that has made the words ‘dirty woman’ become, over time, ‘sexually available woman’. And though standards of propriety have changed, the association between cleanliness and feminine morality has not. A woman who declines to do housework, or who simply points out that doing it is labour, is a bad woman". There is obviously an association of dirt with poverty, and of poverty with prostitution, but this doesn't explain the particular place of domestic servants in the history of sexuality. The contemporary association of cleaners with sexual availability (it's an established porn trope) has nothing to do with the morality of the female (or sometimes male) workers. It has to do with the ability of employers (mainly, but not always male) to coerce them into sex. It is an odd blindspot in an ostensibly feminist article on cleaners that workplace sexual harassment isn't even mentioned.

This brings us back to the issue of the power relation, but it also highlights the extent to which the ego-curation of employers depends on selective blindness (the irony here is that as someone who doesn't employ a cleaner, Ditum has mimiced the ego-curation of those who do and parlayed that into paid work). Another example of this is found in the way that the corporate classes distinguish between "working at home" and "working from home". The first is mildly shameful, if you're not an independent professional, because you get little done but also realise how little the job requires anyway. The second is a privilege that only makes sense in the context of an office-based norm. A key part of that privilege is that it reduces the amount of emotional labour demanded (which normally accounts for a lot of the office-based inefficiency). But even this distinction, which has been made more salient for many by the Covid-19 lockdown, occludes those for whom "working at someone else's home" is how they make a living. 

Will Davies has made the point that under neoliberalism workers have been divided into capital and labour; that is, the modern conception of human capital versus the traditional conception of unindividuated labour. This division is popularly described through the concept of skill: human capital is high skill, manual labour is low-skill (you'll note we rarely talk about mid-level skills though these obviously exist and actually account for most workers in formal sociological terms). The issue of skill has come to the fore during lockdown because the topical definition of "key-workers" includes people who were previously considered to be at either ends of the skill spectrum: doctors and carers. This has made the divorce between actual social esteem (our respect for those who help us) and presumed social esteem (the valuation of human capital reflected by pay) even more acute. The defence of the status quo in the face of this cognitive dissonance is an appeal to sentimentality, hence the weekly clap for the NHS.

Esteem goes back to the origins of society and predates its appropriation by hierarchy. A more modern idea, which emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, is that of self-actualisation. Though it has a broad definition, it too was appropriated by hierarchy, specifically the hierarchy of work. Doing a fulfilling job became the epitome of self-actualisation. The defence proferred by middle-class professionals who hire domestic cleaners has sought both to appeal to our belief that many jobs are mis-labelled in terms of skill and to insist that self-actualisation is a motivator at all skill levels. Thus Sarah Ditum pays cleaners a backhanded compliment by insisting she isn't up to the job, or at least the level of the "skilled" ("I am not a clean person. Maybe a six out of ten on the clean scale"), while David Baddiel suggests his cleaner, who he is currently paying to stay at home, wants to work because she is bored, thereby failing to appreciate that telling him she is bored and keen to return to work (in response to his enquiry) is emotional labour. And so the circle closes.

Authoritarians and Dirtbags

Earlier this week, Paul Mason circulated a pre-publication draft of a new paper by the political scientist Paula Surridge. Entitled 'Values, volatility and voting: understanding voters in England 2015-2019', it is the latest installment in the ongoing debate about the role that "values" play in the preferences of the electorate, relative to traditional "economic" concerns. The paper focuses on the last three general elections, with the obvious implication of "hard lessons for Labour". It thus ignores the 1980s, which is arguably when values - as expressions of cultural norms rather than philosophical principles - were formally reintroduced to politics with the reaction to the permissive legacy of the 1960s that Margaret Thatcher supposedly embodied (see also the parallel history of the US Moral Majority). It also ignores New Labour's appropriation of values in the 1990s ("Tough on crime" etc) and its steady loss of public support in government during the 2000s despite its increasing commitment to reactionary rhetoric and authoritarian social policy. In other words, this is about Labour post-Blair.

What caught my eye were the statements employed to locate survey respondents on the two contrasting axes: the left-right (economics), and the liberal-authoritarian (values). It is telling that the statements used to position voters on the two scales have quite different "voices". The materialist statements read as if they were the product of a vox-pop or focus group; in contrast, the non-materialist statements read like newspaper editorials.

Left-right scale:

- Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off
- Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers
- Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation's wealth
- There is one law for the rich and one for the poor
- Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance

Liberal-authoritarian scale:

- Young people don't have enough respect for traditional values
- Censorship is necessary to uphold moral values
- For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence
- Schools should teach children to obey authority
- People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences

Of course, we shouldn't imagine the one as authentic and the other as inauthentic. The economic statements could have come from a Boulting brothers' film, while the value statements can be easily-sourced in most pubs. Both sets of statements are freighted with priors ("ordinary", "fair" etc), but there is a clear difference in tone. One explanation is that newspapers, as predominantly rightwing propaganda, tend to focus more on values than economic justice, so they are simply more likely to use the associated vocabulary, which then reinforces common parlance. But this doesn't explain why the five value statements should focus on respect, morality, crime (twice) and authority. Compassion and tolerance are values too, but neither is explicitly addressed and can only be negatively inferred (consider in this context the tortured attempts by Labour politicians to describe "British values" in recent decades). There is an ideology implicit in the choice of these particular statements.

Surridge claims that "These two value dimensions are theoretically, and empirically, uncorrelated at the individual level. This means that it is not possible to predict where a voter is positioned on the ‘liberal-authoritarian’ dimension by knowing their position on the ‘left-right’ dimension." And yet she also notes that "The means [i.e. statistical averages] of the scales indicate that on average voters were to the left of the notional centre point of the left-right scale and to the ‘authoritarian’ end of the liberal-authoritarian scale." In other words, we have a structure that suggests a sweet spot just inside the "left authoritarian" quadrant. Any biaxial analysis will claim that the axes are independent, but in this case they're clearly interdependent. Much of what we articulate as values are actually the product of material conditions and our response to them (e.g. fear encourages mistrust), while statements about those conditions are in turn coloured by our values (e.g. the expectation of fairness). In this sense, the social history of Britain since the late-1970s has been about how changes in the economy and associated ideology have influenced sentiments. For example, precarity has eroded solidarity while the notion of human capital has encouraged a dismissive attitude towards welfare.

The focus on values and how they interact with the material dimension has allowed the political field to be conceptually fragmented, first into quadrants and then into more granular groupings of dubious accuracy. This is much more pronounced on the left than the right, which is a reflection less of social reality than the belief that the left is fissiparous coupled with the overwhelming media power dedicated to proving the point by encouraging factionalism. The media's anthropology of the right tends towards court politics (who now remembers the Cameroonians?) while largely ignoring the differences between fractions of capital (hence Brexit was analysed more through the lens of values than economics). In contrast, the media's anthropology of the left is obsessive about lineage (e.g. Tom Newton Dunn's notorious exposé) and difference, from the rivalry between Unite and Unison officials to the heterodoxy of the dirtbag left. The aim is to deny the possibility of a progressive coalition centred on economic justice and social equality. As this combination is ostensibly respectable, it has become necessary to associate it with repellent characteristics, hence the insistence that the Nazis were socialists or the perennial attempts to link the left with support for terrorism.

Many of the Surridge's findings will come as no surprise: that voters on the centre-left economically but in the middle of the values scale were more likely to vote Conservative than Labour in both 2015 and 2019 (it was 50/50 in 2017), which obviously calls into question what centre-left actually means; that Remain voters with right-wing economic views preferred the Conservatives, despite the supposed importance of Brexit to them; and that voters with left-wing economic views but authoritarian values similarly biased towards the Conservatives, particularly in 2019. This simply reinforces the anecdotal evidence of last December when soi-disant liberals once more found excuses to vote for a government that they were sure would be terrible, while Labour found its vote eroded by both FBPE obduracy and "Corbyn is a terrorist-lover" smears. So what does it mean? Mason's stated concern is coalition-building: "I do want to build the labour movement as a coalition that includes the so-called 'authoritarian' left voters, but to the extent we fail to keep the so-called left authoritarians (nationalise railways and bring back death penalty, as @p_surridge describes) you have to then construct a wider alliance with the 'left liberals'".

As a journalist, Mason tends to talk in terms of discrete electoral blocs, but it should be obvious that the electorate is more complicated than that, and certainly more complicated than the quadrants implied by the biaxial model. After all, it is possible to support nationalising the railways but not the death penalty. If you don't recognise that complexity, you end up appealing to a fictional population: missing your target because the rhetoric is that little bit off while alienating previous voters. New Labour's attempts to reinforce its electoral coalition by shifts towards the authoritarian pole had a poor record (so much so that's its now trying to burnish its anti-Nazi history). The party's one success in broadening its coalition was in 2017, post-Blair, when it retained leavers while attracting younger, more liberal voters. Mason understands this (he's not an idiot), but his popular frontism suggests not just electoral expediency but a pessimism of the intellect. He clearly doubts that the "left authoritarians" can be won back in sufficient numbers and suspects that Labour is at risk of losing "left liberals" to minor parties or demoralisation. This points to a tendency towards catastrophism on the left, as distinct from the utopianism with which it is usually charged, which was all too evident in the reactions to the December election result.

The left (or "far-left", in contemporary liberal parlance) is distinguished by a scepticism about grand narratives, a contempt for hypocritical virtue and a love of parody. It is, in other words, postmodern, which in itself is a red rag to the bull of the right. The left is criticised by the right and centre for its rudeness and its distaste for traditional political shibboleths, but this is to ignore that its style is a critique of its own past errors rather than simple bad manners. It has adopted facetious cynicism as a way of dealing with its historicised anxiety. The horrors of the bureaucratic left in power (and I'm using "left" here in its widest possible sense), from the gulags to Iraq, have left it burdened by guilt and suspicious of its own promises, despite those historical episodes proving that the "left" in power is rarely actually left. This is why sarcasm is as characteristic as optimism. In contrast, the right has regretted nothing and learnt even less. Its lack of reflexive cynicism is evidence that it is untroubled by its own history, hence dressing up as a Nazi or celebrating Pinochet is at worst a breach of etiquette, while showing off your collection of racist and eugenicist books is barely worthy of comment.

One consequence of this is that the organised left lacks ruthlessness, as seen in the lost opportunity of the Labour party under Corbyn, a man whose mild ethical socialism and collegiate style proved inadequate in the face of bad-faith and hypocrisy. The Labour left's enjoyment of the Labour right's discomfort between 2015 and 2017 was a classic strategic error. Instead of reforming the party, they assumed the right was a busted flush, or could at least be contained by a left-leaning membership and supportive unions. The recovery of the right was not preordained, but it was always likely given the social and political forces determined to blackball the left. Surridge's paper does not resolve Mason's dilemma about how to build a broad left coalition, essentially because it isn't designed to. Rather it situates the debate ever more firmly on the values dimension. For the left, fighting on that territory is a profound mistake that plays into the hands both of the Labour right and the Tories. Harold Wilson, who trimmed between left and right throughout his career, said that "The Labour party is a moral crusade or it is nothing". In reality, Labour is the party of the economic dimension or it is nothing.