Social democracy and anti-capitalist theory.
| Author | Gilbert, Jeremy |
| Position | Features |
It was enough to make the blood run cold. On 8 November 2007, David Cameron officially launched the Conservative Co-operative Movement with a speech praising the history and ideals of co-operation and claiming the ideal of collective, localised, democratic, non-profit self-organisation for the Right. In a stirring address to a Manchester audience, Cameron announced that a future Conservative government would encourage the formation of local co-operatives to run local services, as an alternative to both bureaucratic state control and profit-driven privatisation.
Have things really come to this? Can a Tory leader seriously hope to position himself against a Labour government, as an heir to the Rochdale Pioneers? It appears he can, and the details of the speech are only more dismaying. Speaking a language which carried distinct echoes of cutting-edge cultural theory, Cameron referred to 'new forms of collective activity' and 'new online forms of global collaboration' as the potential source of renewal in the public services. He could have been reading straight from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), with their evocations of the collective energy of the global 'multitude' and its production of a new global 'commons'. If social democrats want to respond to this new threat, and retain something of their leftist legacy in the twenty-first century, then this is a language which they had better learn to speak pretty quickly.
Thinking in common
In fact, 'the commons' is a uniquely interesting term in contemporary political discourse precisely because it names something which both social democrats and radical anti-capitalists hold dear, in a language which is not hostage to either of their histories. Social democrats are, if nothing else, committed to maintaining some areas of social life outside the domain of the market, maintaining a space for collective action and public values. Anti-capitalist theorist Massimo de Angelis defines 'commons' simply as 'social spheres of life the main characteristics of which are to provide various degrees of protection from the market' (de Angleis, 2007, 145).
However, anti-capitalists--be they communist sectaries devoted to the memory of 1917, or contemporary 'anti-globalisation' activists with no significant political reference points prior to the Seattle protests of 1999-are generally sceptical as to the long-term efficacy of the kind of piecemeal institutional efforts that social democrats have made over the years. The recent history of social democracy does not offer much of a basis on which to argue against this militant critique. Defenders of the 'Third Way' may see it as a continuation of the social democratic governance project, using the power of the state to enable individuals and communities to cope with the rigours of the new global economy, but from the point of view of that tradition's values and stated aspirations, New Labour and its international allies have done nothing to protect or extend a domain of social relations not governed by the logic of the market. On the contrary, in fact: the New Labour strategy has been to facilitate the extension of the market into ever-more areas of public and private life by adapting both institutions and individuals to its demands. On the other hand, the history of revolutionary anti-capitalisms, libertarian or authoritarian, offers little cheer to their partisans either.
It's interesting to note, then, the emergence of a term which seems to encapsulate so perfectly what it is that both traditions want to defend. While the rhetoric of 'the commons' and the 'new enclosures' has emerged more-or-less organically from the complex undergrowth of contemporary anti-capitalist activism, it actually offers a better way of naming what it is that is worth defending of the social democratic legacy than does most of the habitual vocabulary of social democracy.
Since the early 1990s, a movement has emerged which was once described as 'anti-globalisation', and is now more fashionably designated 'alter-globalist', or less threateningly 'the global justice movement'. This movement sets itself against the global hegemony of neo-liberalism while distancing itself from any conservative, or traditional leftist, alternative to it. Associated with a series of highly-visible protests against key neo-liberal institutions (most famously the protests against the World Trade Organisation in 1999) and with the World Social Forum project, this is a disparate and often incoherent formation within which theoretical discussion, or even detailed political analysis, are often treated as at best luxuries, at worst irrelevant distractions. By the same token, however, those ideas which have emerged and proved durable within this context, especially in those spaces which have consistently served as relays between activists and academics (such as de Angelis' own web-journal www.thecommoner.org), deserve a degree of attention by virtue of their sheer persistence. The language of 'the commons' and their 'enclosure' has proved such because it is powerful and persuasive, offering an implicit analysis of the dynamics of neo-liberalism which has often been in advance of anything thrown up by the institutions and agents of European social democracy.
This usage of the terms can probably be traced to writings from the 'Autonomist' Marxist tradition which, while small and almost negligible in terms of...
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