Reappraisals (69 page)

THE LOSERS IN today’s economy have the most interest in and need for the state, not least because they cannot readily imagine taking themselves and their labor anywhere else. Since the political Left by convention and elective affinity is most motivated to capture the support of this constituency (and had better do so if we are to avoid a selective replay of the 1930s), the present afflictions of the European Left are of more than passing concern. And they are serious. Since the late eighteenth century the Left in Europe, variously labeled, has been the bearer of a project. Whether this project has been the march of progress, the preparation of revolution, or the cause of a class, it has always invoked the historical process, and history itself, on its behalf. Since the decline of the industrial proletariat, and more precipitously with the end of the Soviet Union, the Left in the West has been shorn of its agent, its project, and even its story—the “master narrative” within which all radical endeavors were ultimately couched, which made sense of their programs and explained away their setbacks.

This is self-evidently the case for Communists, but it is no less serious an impediment to moderate social democracy as well. Without a working class, without a long-term revolutionary objective, however benign and nonviolent in practice, without any particular reason to suppose that it
will
succeed or a transcendent basis for believing that it
deserves
to do so, social democracy today is just what its great nineteenth-century founders feared it would become if it ever abandoned its ideological presuppositions and class affiliation: the advanced wing of reforming market liberalism. Now, just as it has been relieved by the death of Communism from the crippling mortgage of revolutionary expectations, is the European Left to be reduced to defending hard-won sectoral gains and glancing nervously and resentfully at a future it cannot understand and for which it has no prescription?

The reconciliation between the European Left and capitalism is still fresh and long overdue. We should recall that as recently as 1981 François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party came to power on the promise and expectation of a
grand soir
: a radical and irreversible anticapitalist transformation. And anyone who supposes that this was a peculiarly and typically French aberration should reread the British Labour Party’s 1983 election manifesto—the “longest suicide note in history,” in Labour Member of Parliament Gerald Kaufman’s felicitous phrase. But today the Left is no longer shackled to irrelevant, ineffective, or unpopular policies. On the contrary, the sort of society that the French, Swedish, Italian, and even the German socialists claim to seek is a fairly accurate reflection of the generalized preferences of the majority of their fellow citizens.

The real problem facing Europe’s Socialists (I use the term purely for its descriptive convenience, since it is now shorn of any ideological charge) is not their policy preferences, taken singly. Job creation, a more “social” Europe, public infrastructural investment, educational reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial. But nothing binds these policies or proposals together into a common political or moral narrative. The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society. In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest. And since the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a
conservative
.

The brief success story of European social democracy and British Labour over the past half-century can be seen in retrospect to have depended on the same fortuitous circumstances as the welfare states they helped create. Now the Left wants to preserve its positions and its hard-won sectoral gains. In defending these acquired rights and supporting those who would add to them—like railway engineers and truck drivers in France who demand retirement on full pensions at fifty-five or even fifty—the Left (and sometimes the Right) in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere confuses and discredits itself and its case by a failure to choose between ultimately incompatible claims. It is not so much fighting the ideological battle against neoliberal heartlessness as it is seeking to conserve privileges on behalf of the broadest possible constituency of well-organized voters who are anxious at the prospect of reduced income and services.

This paradox, if it is one, is not original. The left was often
socially
conservative—notably during the French Revolution, when some of the most radical moments occurred on behalf of artisans’ struggles to preserve established claims and privileges, and again during the early Industrial Revolution. Trade unions, especially those in the skilled trades, were always instinctively conservative—even when supporting radical political solutions. But theirs is an unconvincing posture, and given the impossibility of avoiding
some
unsettling changes in coming years, it is an improvident one.

In these circumstances the dangerous illusion of a radical center or “third way” has taken hold. Like the French Socialists’ 1997 slogan “Changeons d’avenir” (“Let’s Have a Different Future”), Tony Blair’s “radical centrism” is an empty vessel, clanging noisily and boastfully around the vacant space of European political argument. But whereas the French Left’s clichés are familiar, those of New Labour are seductively novel at first hearing. Of course, there are political advantages to being in the center. In normal times that is where the winning votes are to be found in any binary representative system. But if times become somewhat less normal, as seems likely, the center will be quickly evacuated in favor of more extreme options. For the moment, Blairism consists of the successful displacement of the old, discredited Left by what might be termed the
bien-sentant
center: the politics of good feeling, in which lightly retouched Thatcherite economics are blended with appropriately well-intentioned social adjustments borrowed from the neighboring liberal tradition. In this way the charge of heartless realism is avoided without any need to imagine alternatives.

It is a tempting solution; but it is a mistake. Like the “as if” and “civil society” language of the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian opposition in the 1980s, it is a good and effective weapon in the struggle against insensitive or authoritarian governments. But once those governments have been overthrown or defeated, the morally unimpeachable advocates of antipolitics find themselves confronted with political choices for which their previous experience has not prepared them. They must either compromise—and lose their credibility—or else quit public life. For most of the past century, the European Left has somehow managed to do both. If it is to do better in the future, to avoid repeating its historical pattern of morally redeeming failure, it must return to the drawing board and ask itself these questions: What sort of social improvement is both desirable and envisageable under the present international configuration? What sort of economically literate policies are required to bring such an objective about? And what sort of arguments will be sufficiently convincing to make people vote to see these policies implemented?

The fact that the Left is in office in most of Europe today is irrelevant to these requirements. Many of the Socialists who now govern (in France, Britain, and Italy, for example) got there because of the collapse or splits of the local Right. In Britain and France a system of proportional representation would have deprived the present Labour and Socialist parties of their parliamentary majority in the elections of 1997. In that sense, they are minority governments without mandates or long-term policies, whose strongest suit is the promise that they can undo some of the damage wrought by their predecessors in office, simply by doing something different. They will not be reelected indefinitely if they fail to come up with something better than their present offerings.

To begin with, the Left might want to make a virtue of the necessity entailed in abandoning the project by which it has lived and died this century. History is the history of more than just class struggle, and the economic identity of social beings that was so central for nineteenth-century social theorists—whose encumbered heirs we remain—is now distinctly peripheral for ever more people. The disappearance of work— something the nineteenth-century utopians could only dream about!— is a crisis, but it is also an opportunity to rethink social policy. Some members of the European Left have latched quite effectively onto the idea of protecting the
exclus
: but they still think of them as just that— excluded from the norm, which remains that of fully employed, wage-earning, socially integrated workers. What needs to be grasped is that men and women in precarious employment, immigrants with partial civil rights, young people with no long-term job prospects, the growing ranks of the homeless and the inadequately housed, are not some fringe problem to be addressed and resolved, but represent something grimly fundamental.

There must, therefore, be a role for the state in incorporating the social consequences of economic change, and not merely providing minimum compensatory alleviation. This has two implications. Given the limited range of policymaking initiative in monetary and fiscal matters now open to any one government, the control or regulation of production in all its modern forms is not only undesirable but impossible. But it does not follow that we should divest the state of
all
its economic controls. The state cannot run a car company or invent microchips, but it alone has the incentive and the capacity to organize health, educational, transportation, and recreational services. It is in the social interest to have a flourishing
private
productive sector, yes. But the latter should provide the means for a thriving
public
service sector in those areas where the state is best equipped to provide the service, or where economic efficiency is not the most appropriate criterion of performance.

The proper level of state involvement in the life of the community can no longer be determined by ex hypothesi theorizing. We don’t know what degree of regulation, public ownership, or distributive monopoly is appropriate across the board, only what works or is required in each case. Intervention mechanisms inherited from decisions that were appropriate when first made but that have since become anachronisms, like farm price supports or early retirement on full pay for state employees, are indefensible, above all because they inhibit the growth required to provide truly necessary benefits. Conversely, reductions in state involvement in the provision of public housing, medical facilities, or family services— cuts that seemed to make demographic, economic, and ideological sense when first introduced in the 1970s and 1980s—now look perilously socially divisive, when those who need them have no access to any other resources.

The modern state still has a considerable say over how the economic growth generated in private hands might best be collectively distributed, at least at the local level. If the Left could convincingly argue that it had a set of general principles guiding its choices in the distribution of resources and services and could show that those principles were not merely stubborn defenses of the status quo, making the best of someone else’s bad job, it would have made a considerable advance. It would need to show that it understood that some must lose for all to gain; that a desire to sustain the intervention capacities of the state is not incompatible with acknowledgment of the need for painful reconsideration of the objects of that intervention; that both “regulation” and “deregulation” are morally neutral when taken in isolation. As things now stand, the continental Left merely records its (and its electors’) discomfort at the prospect of rearranging the social furniture; while Britain’s New Labour clings to power on the bankrupt promise that in these tricky matters it has no (unpopular) preferences of any kind.

Reconsideration of principles is notoriously hard, and it is unfortunate, if not altogether accidental, that the Left finds itself confronted with the need to reimagine its whole way of thought under less than propitious economic circumstances. But there is never a good moment for untimely thoughts. For some years to come, the chief burden on the government of any well-run national community will be ensuring that those of its members who are the victims of economic transformations over which the government itself can exercise only limited control nevertheless live decent lives, even (especially) if such a life no longer contains the expectation of steady, remunerative, and productive employment; that the rest of the community is led to an appreciation of its duty to share that burden; and that the economic growth required to sustain this responsibility is not inhibited by the ends to which it is applied. This is a job for the state; and
that
is hard to accept because the desirability of placing the maximum possible restrictions upon the interventionary capacities of the state has become the cant of our time.

Accordingly, the task of the Left in Europe in the years to come will be to reconstruct a case for the activist state, to show why the lesson for the twenty-first century is
not
that we should return, so far as possible, to the nineteenth. To do this, the Left must come to terms with its own share of responsibility for the sins of the century that has just ended. It was not so long ago, after all, that West German Social Democrats refused to speak ill of the late, unlamented German Democratic Republic, and there are still French and British Socialists who find it painful to acknowledge their erstwhile sympathy for the Soviet project in precisely its most state-idolatrous forms. But until the European Left has recognized its past propensity to favor power over freedom, to see virtue in anything and everything undertaken by a “progressive” central authority, it will always be backing halfheartedly and shamefacedly into the future: presenting the case for the state and apologizing for it at the same time.