The fragmenting coalition of the “left”, some musings

Wouldn’t a better term for the third group be the cultural left? The second group is the economic left, while the first is the business-left Pepsi to the business-right’s Coke.

Not sure about this, but how about a fifth group, the quasi-Keynesian left: More enthusiastic about (or less skeptical about) growth than the eco-left but more interested in (re)distribution and (re)regulation (and controls on capital, democratizing of investment decisions, etc.) than the technocratic quasi-neoliberal left. Unless I’m much mistaken, there may even be some representatives of this fifth group among your CT co-bloggers (?).

I feel that the incoherence on immigration etc. is a big deal; I do not know how much localism is consistent with cosmopolitanism, but there are severe limits to how far you can reconcile the outlooks; to the — uncertain — extent that the eco-left is in fact anti-cosmopolitan it is not a movement I can support. I can’t help hearing “local communities” as dog-whistle racism, and the movement tends to waffle on this issue. And while I’m sympathetic to the critique of “growth” it is not clear how much of the movement actually agrees that it’s OK for living standards not to rise.

Reduced working hours and more humanized work would ultimately mean having to halt the dynamic of capital and thus overthrowing it. This is why I am a lot more sympathetic to Option 4 then Option 3: so much Option 3 comes with bad beliefs about how happy we were back in the middle ages or ultimately doesn’t explain how it will reshape society. Option 2 proponents are only left by accident: they can easily come to support the authentic, national, industrial capital against a cosmopolitan finance capital, and tend to ignore the ways in which the state serves the middle class. (Something Option 1 proponents understand quite well) Option 5, the quasi-Keynesian left, conflates employment with the satisfaction of human needs. Do we really need full employment, or do we need to satisfy human needs using the capacity we have now and can expand?

John Quiggin makes good points above re: those who oppose economic growth, but don’t even know what “growth” means. Hint: there’s nothing about economic growth that necessarily requires destroying the environment.

You omitted to quote the rest of Hutton’s prescription:

It must spearhead the case for new international rules of governance that can make citizens believe that globalisation is not a terrifying threat;

Which I found very funny. ‘new international rules of governance’ is ambitious almost to the point of silliness; ‘It must spearhead the case’ is maunderingly tentative in the best opinionleader’s style.

We shouldn’t overlook the question whether the reasons why the British left has long exhibited deficiencies of strategy in contention with the right—and when it hasn’t, its strategists have had their loyalties put under unbiddable scrutiny, its policies been at their most centrist—are other than contingent, and not readily rectifiable but essential to that body of intuitions and propensities and experiences which conspire to make groups of people consider themselves ‘left-wing’. That is: if strategic practice obliges each person of the left to subordinate her own idiosyncratic crop of priorities and principles and dreams to the panoptic strategy of a cohort to which it would help to cleave, strategic thinking requires the suspension—or sacrifice to the cynicism of calculation—of the same creeds and ideals and sensibilities that inaugurate, and account for, the ‘left-wing’ identity.

The Spanish Tahrir …from Seymour’s place a guest post by quilombosam on the May 15 2011 demonstrations in Spain

Hoping for an impossible return to the fold of Estate, or aiming for full employment––like the whole spectrum of the Spanish parliamentary left seems to be doing––is a pointless task. Reinventing democracy requires, at the very least, pointing to new ways of distributing wealth, to citizenship rights for all regardless of where they were born (something in keeping with this globalised times), to the defence of common goods (environmental resources, yes, but also knowledge, education, the internet and health) and to different forms of self-governance that can leave behind the corruption of current ones.

Jeffrey Katz wrote:

“Hint: there’s nothing about economic growth that necessarily requires destroying the environment.”

No. Not in theory. Only in practice. There are two problems with “redefining” growth so that it doesn’t rely on things that destroy the environment. One is capital accumulation and the other is government revenue. Any construct of economic growth that doesn’t prioritize those two is (from the standpoint of finance and the state) frivolous.

Any construct of economic growth that does prioritize accumulation and revenue growth necessarily requires destroying the environment. Why is that? Because employment and energy consumption both respond to efficiency improvements according to the same principle and they are linked.

Technological improvements are either labor saving or they introduce new consumer goods. In the first case, they lead to greater energy consumption per unit of labor expended. In the latter case, they require increased energy consumption period. To create jobs to replace those eliminated by labor-saving technology requires expanded consumption, including increased consumption of energy. Technological advances in energy efficiency reduce the cost of energy relative to labor, thus encouraging the substitution of energy consumption for labor and requiring expanded throughput consumption to offset that initial employment loss. Thus the energy consumption/employment cycle is a “double bind” choice.

The way out of that double bind is to take part or all of the efficiency/productivity gain of technological advance as leisure time. Although this third option may well enhance welfare and even a redefined economic growth that scores welfare improvements highly,by definition it won’t increase accumulation and government revenues.

There’s no arcane theory in the above. It simply relates a few of the most commonly accepted definitions of political economy. For a more sophisticated macroeconomic model of the employment/consumption/leisure choice, see Luigi Pasinetti’s discussion in Chapter Five of Structural Change and Economic Growth.

“The conclusion is straightforward. Even if we start from an equilibrium position (i.e. even if full employment of the labour force and full productive capacity utilisation are realised at a given point in time) the structural dynamics of the economic system cause the position to change and therefore make it impossible in general to automatically maintain full employment through time…

…the choice between more (or better) commodities and leisure is not merely a possibility, but a necessity, if full employment is to be maintained. There does not exist the alternative of not choosing!”

The classic discussion of the analogous principle governing energy efficiency and labor productivity is by Jevons in Chapter Five of The Coal Question:

As a rule, new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption, according to a principle recognised in many parallel instances. The economy of labour effected by the introduction of new machinery, for the moment, throws labourers out of employment. But such is the increased demand for the cheapened products, that eventually the sphere of employment is greatly widened….

Now the same principles apply, with even greater force and distinctness, to the use of such a general agent as coal. It is the very economy of its use which leads to its extensive consumption. It has been so in the past, and it will be so in the future. Nor is it difficult to see how this paradox arises.

I’m not saying that Jevons is infallible, only that he is enunciating what amounts to an article of faith among economists regarding the long-term effects of new technology on employment. So if one wants to challenge the Jevons Paradox with regard to energy efficiency and consumption, one can only do so at the risk of discarding the economists’ creed with regard to labor-saving devices and employment. No cherry picking allowed of when you want the principle to apply and when you don’t.

I don’t think there really are a “left” and “right” any more. There’s a huge center and maybe half a dozen edges.Where, for example, is the “left” that fights for workers’ rights in “Communist” China?

“Technological improvements are either labor saving or they introduce new consumer goods. In the first case, they lead to greater energy consumption per unit of labor expended.”

How is that so? An improved microchip might save labour, use less energy and require less energy and natural resources to be produced simultaneously. So long as the saved labour is taken as leisure rather than some other resource hungry activity, youve just saved part of the environment through a tech improvement.

And my impression is that neo-liberalism has been pretty good at driving down working hours over the last few decades. Of course, it could do so more evenly if the benefits of growth were more evenly distributed (fewer rent seekers plus some broad income transfers).

Nick wrote:

So long as the saved labour is taken as leisure rather than some other resource hungry activity, youve just saved part of the environment through a tech improvement.

I agree. But so long as the saved labour is taken as leisure there has been no increase in GDP, i.e., no economic growth. I’m not arguing against efficiency or technological improvement. I’m just saying that WHAT COUNTS for economic growth is throughput. I don’t like the way the national income accounts are put together any more than Simon Kuznets or Marilyn Waring did. But there’s a good reason why governments don’t abandon the standard. Revenue.

This is a good post.

But, Chris, you have to admit, several of your co-bloggers are on Team Hutton. The space between Summers and Quiggin, say, is hard to make out.

I don’t see why you need to stigmatize the anti-capitalist left as ‘leninist,’ much less ‘washed-up’ and ‘authoritarian.’ In the case of France, the NPA has engaged recently in an experiment in grass-roots democracy in place of trotskyist centralism (with admittedly mixed results), while Mélenchon’s ‘citizen democracy’ is gaining ground in its call for a revolution-by-ballot. The point is, capitalism is in a terminal state and rank-and-file voters and workers are starting to know it: the financial sector has seized the high ground and is engaged in conspicuous looting. Leftists discouraged since 1989 need to try once again to make the case–as social movements and the anti-capitalist parties are doing in France–that a truly socialist alternative is the only conceivable hope for addressing either the inequality problem or the approaching environmental catastrophe.

Also, I think a left suspicious of economic growth should ally itself with right-wing rent-seekers, since they’ve been remarkably effective at preventing growth. American laissez-faire economics has been reducing the American carbon footprint for years simply by crashing its economy and putting millions of people out of work. Maybe an overclass of rich parasites is precisely what we need to avoid the spiritual and physical perils of mass material prosperity, like someone who loses weight by getting a tapeworm.

It occurs to me while reading this, that the quasi-neoliberal “it’s the economy stupid” left serves no purpose. Capitalism can take care of itself. What’s needed is aggressive action on behalf of the non-rich and the wage-earning classes.

“The space between Summers and Quiggin, say, is hard to make out.”

Umm, not to me, and apparently not to Goldman Sachs either.

Which category includes the people who were occupying the Wisconsin State House the other day? Or even these people, to pick a local story at random?

We’ve grown used to thinking about the traditional mainstream “left”, trades unionist, labourist, concerned with things like employment and wages and working conditions, as a quaint anachronism. But it seems to me that they’re resurgent rather than not these days. And (with an passing acknowledgement to category 3), these are the people who matter.

There isn’t actually a left at all, much less a multiple coalition thereof. “Left” ought to entail some actual means of redistributing wealth and power in a more egalitarian way within society. None of the “lefts” identified here are really out to do that.

However, it is worth noting that most of them pretend to be out to do that. Thus the neoliberals who term themselves leftists pretend that their policies will make society more democratic and egalitarian; this is not, of course, the case. The Stalinists who term themselves leftists claim the same, with some justice in terms of egalitarianism but virtually none in terms of democracy.

One major problem with people analysing the left is that they don’t take account of the discrepancy between pretense and action. Another problem is that this discrepancy often drives left-wing parties further towards pretense (inasmuch as many far-left organisations end up collaborating either with right-wing or with corporate entities, contrary to their professed beliefs) or that this discrepancy leads left-wing parties to lose contact with ideology altogether (as with the American Democrats, New Labour and — to a large extent — the ANC in South Africa).

It appears that only #2 (populist nationalism/syndicalism) entails mass-participation of ordinary people, workers. In that case, that’s the only real political left there is. The rest are various intellectual pursuits.

35: Gut Labour.

the NPA has engaged recently in an experiment in grass-roots democracy in place of trotskyist centralism

Well, I guess it’s a start, but y’know, don’t rush into anything…

Cameron is effectively in power purely due to the incompetence of brown.

Or, as Jose Zapatero is finding out, simply because he wasn’t in power when the shit hit the fan. To a first approximation, everywhere in the democratic world, the party in charge when the GFC blew up suffered, and then opinion began to drift leftwards.

In Germany, the super-neoliberal FDP benefited not because anyone came back from the bank Chernobyl thinking “I know! What we need is a tax cut for hotels!” but because they were the biggest party that wasn’t in government and that was enough to push a CDU-FDP coalition over the top. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy just barely managed to squeeze in before the balloon went up. Neither of them are now looking very well. In the UK, there was an initial swing to the right, but by polling day the Tories had lost most of their lead and just barely staggered home.

I would point out that – from a UK perspective – there’s a significant divergence of interests between different bits of the “business community”. West Midlands automotive engineering != City of London investment banking. This is usually visible on issues like the European Union, but the divide is complex and its effects not easily predictable.

The list in the opening post left out the socialist fogeys.

What a fantastically stupid comment at #48.

It was to correct something that I knew to be incorrect. That’s an honourable purpose. Now what was the point of your comment?

I remain unconvinced by Chris B’s conflation of the “Blue Labour” ideologists and their international equivalents with the growth of grass roots militancy prominently, though not exclusively, appearing among the most threatened sectors of the white collar workforce. There’s no evidence that these people are particularly socially conservative or indeed form an ideological bloc of any variety. They are, however, powerfully motivated by immediate economic concerns which tend to override differences on other issues.

I think these people matter a great deal, chiefly because they’re where the action is, as opposed to the speculation; Maurice Glasman and his mates, not so much, except to the extent that they try to introduce toxic ideas into the broader movement.

On Chris’s reference to Cohen, well, Cohen seems to have written that in the 90s, at the height of the Clinton boom, when the world was rather a different place. The ‘proletarianisation’, as we used to quaintly put it, of the lower middle class is part of the deliberate strategy of at least the US, German and British governments and it involves a major restructuring of society, as Vince Cable was telling us at the weekend. seems needlessly pessimistic to assume a priori that this process will not lead to a renewal of class politics with positive outcomes for the ‘left’.

I think I’d probably indentify myself as culturally and philosophically closest to 1), the dreaded technocrats, with the proviso that the people currently leading that tendency have done a shockingly bad job over the last twenty years, by abandoning Keynesian stabilisation policy and making all of the wrong compromises – ie, taking on right-wing ideas that never actually worked in their own terms. I think the examples of the Nordic economies and even Scotland show that you can have a basically technocratic Left which is also egalitarian; the mere fact that New Labour ended up as a colony of chancers and “economic rationalists” who weren’t any good at economics, doesn’t necessarily mean that all such exercises will. In other words, I’d consider myself part of the Paul Krugman left.

dsquared, your position seems to me to be the most rational, and the most hopeful — even the most necessary given a world full of nuclear bombs, nuclear power stations, rising global temperatures, shrinking lakes of oil, and crop monocultures based on genetically-engineered plant hybrids whose long-term effects seem to be a matter of hoping and preying praying.

And yet we’re still largely the same beasts we’ve always been, are we not? So how exactly do we connect politics and rational technocracy? Marx thought he knew, Keynes thought he knew, and now I suppose Stiglitz, Krugman and DeLong think they know. I don’t think they do. I don’t think anyone knows. Isn’t that why we’re all here, looking at options 1-4 and scratching our heads?

Re. 1 & 2: From my non-policy, long disaffected from political activism point of view, I have trouble seeing the difference between 1 & 2 and the not-left-at-all center or even center-right, but maybe things are different in the UK.

Chris: 1+2 giving way to 2+3

Dsquared: the people currently leading [tendency 1)] have done a shockingly bad job over the last twenty years, by abandoning Keynesian stabilisation policy and making all of the wrong compromises – ie, taking on right-wing ideas that never actually worked in their own terms.

One could make the argument that it was the gradual dropping out/corruption/elite dismissal of 2) from the original postwar egalitarian agenda, for a variety of technological, demographic, and ideological reasons, that allowed progressive forces to eventually organize themselves almost entirely around meritocratic, cosmopolitan, neo-liberal principles that were only nominally redistributive and egalitarian. The radical edge of 3)–the mutualist/localist, New Left, social democratic/anti-capitalist edge–seemed irrelevant to all except the most idelogically interested when the Liberal Capitalist-Welfare State Consensus was doing a pretty good job generating/protecting employment and social insurance policies; but when the obvious promise of financialization and globalization to the elite classes made it clear that unions, etc., were just getting in the way of continued growth–and when, to be fair, racial and cultural clashes and prejudices made much of 2) pretty distasteful to the majority of the increasingly well-educated members of 1)–they were (perhaps in part deservedly) kicked to the gutter in progressive coalitions, and 2) had to look for somewhere to go…and has been looking for 30 years. Certain strands of 1) has found some ways to appeal to parts of 2); hence the libertarian-cultural conservative fusion. But the hope has always been–or at least, has always been for me–that 2) and 3) can get together into a coalition of their own, with enough political power to balance out the bad ideas which 1) has absorbed, and get the egalitarian agenda back on track. You see glimmers of it occasionally, but it hasn’t fully happened yet. Maybe it never will (which, I suppose, is one reason why 4) will never go entirely away).

And with respect to Russell’s #63, my view is that the problem was the same global bout of insanity that led to the subprime crisis – the liberal technocratic elite honestly believed (Airmiles’s Lexus and the Olive Tree being a classic text) that they had a magic technology that could generate sufficient abundance to avoid all the nasty problems they’d been dealing with for the last dozen decades. Post crash, I’m hoping for a saner, more moral punditosphere.

Who is in this box? Well I guess New Labour in the UK, plus (in practice) the leaders of the main European social-democratic parties. In power, this group (or those who think like them) have achieved very little. They certainly haven’t done much to stem the rise of inequality, to protect working-class communities from the winds of globalisation, to end poverty, or, for that matter, to protect the environment.

And if they had had any success on the environment, you’d have credited it to the eco-left, who apparently don’t need to be in power to make a difference. (Anyway: Kyoto Protocol?)
As for poverty – it’s been falling in Britain since the 1997 Labour victory. So have carbon emissions (admittedly Australia’s had zero success here, but the British left’s done OK).
http://www.cpag.org.uk/povertyfacts/

I for one would be happy to see a kind of Burkean center-left that was focused on maintaining the gains of the past–and on staunchly opposing the craziness of the reactionary right–those who’d like to oppose this from the left can; but, this, however, is not what we have (except perhaps in a few communities that are so disconnected from the rest of the country that I’m increasingly pessimistic about their ability to stay in touch enough to keep from effectively becoming insane vis-a-vis the rest of the culture).

Dsquared,

And with respect to Russell’s #63, my view is that the problem was the same global bout of insanity that led to the subprime crisis – the liberal technocratic elite honestly believed (Airmiles’s Lexus and the Olive Tree being a classic text) that they had a magic technology that could generate sufficient abundance to avoid all the nasty problems they’d been dealing with for the last dozen decades.

I agree–but, unless I’m reading you incorrectly, doesn’t this imply that you believe that it was with the full embrace of finance capitalism of globalization in the 90s that the wheels came off the egalitarian project? Whereas it seems to me that while the vocabulary has changed, the notion of a “magic technology” has been at work longer than that, going back to Reagan/Thatcher and the embrace of some elements of a, up until then, thoroughly (and rightly) marginal libertarianism. The liberal technocratic elite didn’t call it that, but what else to call the wave of deregulation that suddenly seemed logical, circa 1981?

Also, to what extent was the technocratic left in charge of anything in the 2000s? Apart from the Brits and Lula?

greatest mobilizations of marginalized groups

There are millions of things wrong with this claim, the central ones being labor and anti-imperialist movements.

Imagine I used a laudatory but not-as-wrong phrase to describe feminist and civil rights movements.

Chris’s non-US taxonomy also happens not to account for the fact that e.g. factory workers are not considered poor but rather middle class, and that white factory workers may be either populists or union members, and in the former case they are not “left.” (This can hardly be addressed by imagining it might be possible to have a left coalition of the Tea Party and Reagan unionists.)

sorry, “and not necessarily practical.”

I was just thinking that it was one Paul Krugman who was against the 35 hr week in France

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/53393/paul-krugman/is-capitalism-too-productive

I wonder if he’s changed his views.

Bertram –

I think this post could benefit from a revision done in a more open-minded fashion.

1. Your schema is, shall we say, somewhat incomplete. It definitely ignores internal caucuses within social democratic parties – Compass is not the same thing as the Blairites, etc. – it doesn’t really address unions except as a throwaway line lumping them under populist nationalists (debatable at the least), and as people have pointed out, it leaves out women, people of color, GLBTs, immigrants, etc.. And the way it’s framed suggests a not very subtle attempt to suggest that eco-leftists are the only way to go. One example of this is the lumping together of cultural conservative/anti-immigrant with economic populism within group 2 – Paul Krugman is certainly more economically populist than he once was, and he’s definitely broken with orthodoxy on trade, but he’s not culturally conservative or anti-immigration.
2. In terms of the debate on growth and leisure, several things need to be addressed: firstly, the issue of mass unemployment. It is wrong-footed in the extreme to say that at a time when millions of people are out of work that we need to shift to less work without really specifying how we’re going to square the circle of spreading the work (35 hours laws don’t necessarily solve the problem because you still have the issue of management responding with higher productivity demands, mechanization, outsourcing, and casualization instead of higher employment). Secondly, the issue of low wages and the spread of casualized labor – if we want to bring down hours worked, raising wages and regulating the labor market so that less people are working two jobs to survive (9.3 million involuntarily part-time employed just in the U.S). Thirdly, I think we need to deal with the question of redistribution – there’s no reason why working people who’ve experienced stagnant and declining income can’t see rising living standards if we redistribution resources from the wealthy downwards, rather than relying on new consumption entirely.

bianca steele @12: “Sorry to be cynical, but is what is meant by “reduced working hours” something like more part-time jobs for mothers and the downsized or elderly”

Rather the other way around, I would think. Shorter working hours will make it possible for people who are currently working part time to work full time instead. That is at least what the trade unionists and feminists who are agitating for the six hour working day say.

dictateursanguinaire @32: “interesting to compare this to the American left: 1 and 2 are predominant, 3 is much smaller amd openly attacked by much of the media left”

That’s interesting, since I think many European leftists, including myself, have exactly the opposite impression of the American left. The impression is that 2, basically the labour movement, is much smaller in the US, while 3, “identity politics” etc., is more predominant.

Alex @45: “To a first approximation, everywhere in the democratic world, the party in charge when the GFC blew up suffered”

But the opposite has happened as well, with both right-of-centre and left-of-centre governments. Within the last two years governments have been reelected in for instance Norway, Portugal (!), Sweden, Australia, and Canada. And since you wrote “democratic world” and not “advanced industrial economies”, there are countries like Brazil that should be included as well.

Chris Bertram @55: “(1+2 giving way to 2+3)”

Don’t forget the 1+3 “Schröder-Fischer”-type coalition. It must be at least as common as 1+2.

dsquared @57: “I think the examples of the Nordic economies and even Scotland show that you can have a basically technocratic Left which is also egalitarian”

But their election victories have been quite spotty during the last decade, especially in Denmark and Sweden. Group 1 does have a problem with its mass appeal, and it doesn’t help when they gets closer to group 3 than to group 2 either. Because these days, there are populists on the right wing too.

bianca steele @69: “I for one would be happy to see a kind of Burkean center-left that was focused on maintaining the gains of the past—and on staunchly opposing the craziness of the reactionary right”

That’s how most of the European left have been for the last decades. Even declared revolutionaries are mostly talking about the defensive struggle to defend the welfare state against the neoliberal onslaught.

alex@73: “Also, to what extent was the technocratic left in charge of anything in the 2000s? Apart from the Brits and Lula?”

Around 2000 12 of 15 EU countries had social democratic parties in their governments. The USA had a Democratic president, Canada a Liberal government. If some kind of left was in charge in these countries, it must have been the technocratic one.

DivGuy @74: “You’ve created a “taxonomy” of the left without the civil rights left and without the feminist left. You’ve created a taxonomy of the left without women or black people.”

Feminists and immigration rights activists are an important part of group 3. Women and black people are of course a part of group 2 as well. Workers of the world, unite, and all that.

That’s interesting, since I think many European leftists, including myself, have exactly the opposite impression of the American left. The impression is that 2, basically the labour movement, is much smaller in the US, while 3, “identity politics” etc., is more predominant

This is basically the problem I was pointing out in my post – though I honestly didn’t quite get the parochial context, and it makes more sense now that I see that I really should have picked up on that.

Anyway, reducing the civil rights and feminist movements to “identity politics” is terrible analysis. Both have strong roots on the left – the success of the feminist movement has been deeply related to bridges it has built with labor and the traditional left, and as I said above, the civil rights left has always been truly left on issues of the political economy. If you think that these powerful forces on the American left – movements of women, racial and sexual minorities – are merely playing “identity politics” and that they should be understood as merely a subset of the (imagined to be) white and male eco-left, you mistake the American left badly.

I do think that, now looking back on the post with the recognition that I misread some of its more narrow concerns, that the marginalization of the feminist movement is still a major problem. Many of the currently pressing issues of feminist advocacy are significantly workers’ issues – equal pay, family leave, workplace safety and discrimination – and much coalition-building work is already ongoing there. There are many evident places for coalition building between the labor left and the feminist left, and creating a taxonomy that forces labor into box 2 and either ignores feminist movements or somehow subordinates them to the “eco-left” misses precisely one of the places where good work is ongoing.

Bertram – (I preface my posts this way to make it clear whom I’m responding to, especially in cases in which I’m talking to more than one person at the same time; just a style thing)

In terms of more open-mindedness, I think you could be more open-minded toward members/activists of social democratic parties, rather than lumping them in with one (albeit recently dominant) faction of their party, and definitely toward economic populists, rather than lumping them in with cultural/ethnic conservatives.

I would also urge breaking down the “eco” group – shoving everything in there, as does Norwegian guy at 87. I don’t think it’s good practice to simply say “all real gains/social movements are part of my enviro group;” it obscures real differences between groups within alliances, and it makes invisible the constituent elements of those alliances (like labor unions being a big part of anti-cuts groups, for example, which screws up the taxonomy).

@dsquared 57

“the people currently leading that tendency have done a shockingly bad job over the last twenty years, by abandoning Keynesian stabilisation policy”.

What are the Keynesian stabilization policies that have been abandoned? When the recession hit U.S. in 2001, the FED reduced the fed-funds rate. Later, when the economy improved (a bit), the FED increased the rate, to reduce it again with the current crisis. This is Keynesian stabilization monetary policy.

We also had a stimulus packages with this recession. Sure, this was not large enough according to Krugman, but this is also Keynesian stabilization fiscal policy.

In your statement, are you thinking of the excessive liberalization of financial instruments that presumably led to the crisis?

I am not trolling here, just trying to understand what you have in mind.

As it has been already discussed to death, here and elsewhere, modern feminism, anti-racism, GLBT, multiculturalism, and probably immigration too are mostly neoliberal causes. They are a natural subset of 1, neoliberalism with a human face. All are equal before The Market.

saddling itself with… hobby horses

Admittedly there might have been a better way of putting that. And Harry’s post, which I’d had in mind, was from 2009 so not that recent either.

Netbrian @88: Krugman has written about the economic consequences of mass immigration on the working class, and he is not in favour of open borders. Not sure if he is restrictive enough to count as anti-immigration, but he certainly isn’t laissez-faire either. He wrote some columns about immigration in 2006, but they’re now behind the NYT paywall. While his negative attitude to illegal immigration is mainstream on the centre-left, at least in much of Europe, his criticism of legal immigration is less common on the left.

DivGuy @89: Identity politics was an unfortunate choice of words, there was a reason I put it in scare quotes.But what I meant was that while some of the “cultural” wings of the left are, perhaps, as strong in the US as in many European countries, the “economic” wing – the trade unions – are significantly weaker. I would expect this to lead to a different balance in left-wing alliances.

chris @92: Feminism and anticapitalism have a long history together, at least since the time when Clara Zetkin organized the first International Women’s Day. And of course, it’s well known that women are more left-wing than men, so they don’t seem to be fearing soc1alism that much. There’s probably more women than men that are active in environmentalist movements as well.

And of course, it’s well known that women are more left-wing than men

Economically or socially? Partisan politics tends to produce a blend of the various axes of political difference, but it’s obvious why women would be, um, antitraditionalist on issues surrounding family structure — many of the traditions amount to oppression of women.

Of course, you could argue that the axes aren’t genuinely independent and as long as there are any downtrodden, women are likely to be overrepresented among them (a pessimism that seems backed by history), and that no matter what it says on paper, the rich are more free than the poor in every society; therefore, the cause of economic equality *is* the cause of freedom, if freedom is defined in a pragmatic rather than an idealized-abstraction sense. (The freedom to run your factory any way you choose is little use to someone who happens not to own any factories.) And thus the wealthier any particular woman is, the more pragmatic options she’ll have to avoid being coerced into a family structure that would oppress her.

This is egalitarian, certainly, but I don’t see how it is anticapitalist, unless you think that right-wing capitalism is the only kind. Maybe the problem is just that “capitalism” covers too much ground. Opposition to the US’s current CEO salaries isn’t necessarily opposition to any private ownership of the means of production. (And, in any case, history shows that collective ownership is no panacea — if effective *control* is centralized in a small number of people, they wield as much power as any capitalist pig, if not more so, and can use it just as badly.)

P.S. ISTM that the term “fragmenting” in the thread title implies a past of greater unity. Assumption of facts not in evidence? Leftists have been sniping at each other since before the Red and White Armies made it literal, and that was before most of the thread participants are likely to have been born. For that matter, IIRC, the terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” themselves refer to internal divisions within a still older revolution. And I doubt you could have written a completely neat typology even then without someone complaining that they had been left out. (If you founded a group entitled “Leftists Who Don’t Fit Into Any Of So-And-So’s Categories”, I bet people would join. And then argue over what the group’s purpose should be, other than demonstrating the inadequacy of the typology. Splitters.)

More seriously, ISTM that two of the defining facts of the left are that they refuse to subordinate their particular agendas to follow a leader, and that they are willing to acknowledge the existence of complexity rather than shoehorning things into simpler frames, tendencies which seem pretty much guaranteed to produce a movement that is both internally heterogeneous and aware of it. And insofar as this is a timeless truth about the left, it can’t also be a specifically recent phenomenon.

Bianca, related to what you said and relevant to Yglesias’ claims is that many more workers are now salaried. A wage earner’s hours are supposed to be accurately measured, and for a union wage earner this is likely the case. Now more workers are salaried, which I assume is calculated as 40 hour weeks, though in my experience, it is much more likely to be more than less. Also, people used to marry longer and stay married througout life. In the age of single-earner families, it was not unusual for a middle-class woman to marry around 20 and never be in the labor market again. Less than 5 total FTE years in the workforce would not be unusual, though perhaps below average. Nowadays, even stay-at-tome moms put in about 10 years before the first kid shows up, and are likely to return to the workforce once all children are mature. Yet, Yglesias sees all this as an increase of leisure. Not that being a stay at home mom is “leisure”, but the work component of it hasn’t decreased that much since the 50’s, so this extra employment has to be coming at the expense of true “leisure” to a considerable degree.

@101: Very good point about the various political axes. There are several different important political cleavages, and they are often more visually independent in multi-party than in two-party systems. Exactly who the left is allied to, inside and outside of parliament, at different times may vary.

Women are on average to the left of men on economic policy. There are probably several reasons for this. Perhaps women are generally more egalitarian, and maybe less concerned about status, hierarchy and competition. And/or women are more likely than men to work in the public sector, something that correlates with more leftist views, and obvious economic interests. The rise of the welfare state made it possible for many women to enter the workforce, both by being employed there and because they no longer had to spend as much time caring for young and old family members.

These days this will also be the case on social issues, but there are also often more religious women than men, and there has always been a constituency of fairly traditionalist women. A century ago there were secular liberals in some countries that argued against female suffrage, because they considered women to be more under the sway of the church than men. Even today, Christian Democratic parties often have a majority of female voters.

Biana, the relevance of salaries is that salaried workers do not usually work a fixed schedule of hours. They may work more or less than 40 hours a week, but I assume they show up in these statistics as 40 hours, because that is the default for “full time”. When I say “more or less”, I mean “(most of the time) more or (mostly theoretically possibly) less”. So hours work per worker is probably being underestimated for these workers.

Tim Worstall: “Again…”

You can say “again” again, Timmy. You’ve been hawking this study since way back but I don’t recall you ever addressing the specific issues the Sandwichman raised (originally at MaxSpeak) about data quality and interpretation. The unemployed folks in Jackson, Michigan caring for their elderly relatives never had it so good!

Tim Worstall at TCS Daily gets all dewy-eyed about the “American Social Model”, based on the TRUTH (“There’s only one small problem with this idea. It turns out not to be true.”), FACTS (“there’s one uncomfortable little fact…”) and PROOF (“The latest empirical proof”) contained in the Gary Becker-inspired data torturing exercise performed by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. I suspect from its eager reception by Worstall, and earlier from the Economist , that the study’s conclusions will soon become an article of faith for the you-never-had-so-good crowd.

There’s only one small problem with Aguiar and Hurst’s truefactproof: it’s all a question of judgment and data quality. The authors at least have the integrity to say so in their conclusions, even if their abstract hypes the extent to which their interpretation “documents” what they suppose it does.

Page 30: “Any definition that distinguishes “leisure” from “work” is a matter of judgment.” Check.

Page 33: “The ability to examine different patterns in time use over four decades hinges critically on the quality of data within each of the time‐use surveys.” Check.

Let’s start with data quality, since that’s no doubt the last thing that would occur to a booster like Mr. Worstall. Aguiar and Hurst compared data from five surveys, conducted by three different organizations over the course of nearly 40 years — in 1965, 1975, 1985, 1993 and 2003. Just to give some sense of the subtlety of what’s involved in such an exercise, the 1965 survey consisted of interviews with 2,001 individuals, 776 of whom were from Jackson, Michigan.

Now, I’m sure Jackson, Michigan is a wonderful place to conduct a survey. But whether a survey conducted there is comparable with one that is nationally representative is another matter. Also, it turns out that the 1965 sample included only 17 non-working men. You can weight your demographic categories all you want, but you’ll never be able to weight a very small, unrepresentative sample into a representative one. Garbage in, garbage out.

One does have to admire the daring with which the researchers benchmarked their apple, orange, peach, pear and banana comparisons, though. They benchmarked the market work reports from the surveys to market work data in larger studies. In other words, the results of these surveys were fairly robust on questions that required much less of a subjective judgment. Cool. And unpersuasive.

Speaking of judgments, how does one deal with the fact that time spent traveling to an activity is included in the activity? For example, driving to Mickey D’s for a happy meal counts as leisure, while driving to the store to shop for groceries would be non-market work. Notice the difference? I didn’t think so.

Caring for ill or elderly family members is, of course, a leisure activity because it would be too complicated to count it otherwise. Ditto for child care. Likewise, watching TV probably accounts for a sizable chunk of the increased leisure of those less-educated adults who have been especially blessed with increased leisure over the past 40 years. Three cheers for TV! It sets the underemployed, on-call, contract, just-in-time, precarious, contingent workers free!

It short, while the study may provide some interesting food for thought, it is in no way conclusive. It is proof only that you can massage some counter-intuitive and headline-grabbing conclusions out of an odd assortment of loosely-similar surveys.

Around 2000 12 of 15 EU countries had social democratic parties in their governments. The USA had a Democratic president, Canada a Liberal government. If some kind of left was in charge in these countries, it must have been the technocratic one.

I submit that this was quite a while ago now and there’s been plenty of water under the bridge.

This is as good a characterisation as I’ve yet seen of the state of the groups allegedly known as ‘Left’ – and it rings true across a variety of contexts. A few comments:

a) The existing leftist Nordic governments in Iceland and Norway are coalitions involving representations of groups one, two and three, with a fifth, the neo-Keynsian technocratic left, as suggested.

b) Agree that Neo-Keynesian technocratic left is a subgroup, which is normally associated with the technocrats, but can equally be associated with types of national populism. So it is more than just an adjunct of the technocrats… Iceland being a case in point, where national priorities have found leftist advocates.

c) Some hard-left groups (generally on the anarcho-communist side) have made great efforts to overcome the tendencies towards vanguardism, to the point where there is a lot of permeation between eco-socialists and types of worker-control communism. So whilst the description might apply to many groups, to others, it will not.

d) Perhaps should make clear that UK Labour is fractured only partially on the basis of ideology, and just as often because of personality issues. So whilst there might be 40 or so leftist MPs, many will dislike each other at the same time as showing the worst traits as described in the fourth group.

Following from Chris Bertram’s post at 112: this is the key sentence of the article he linked to.

‘So the first thing that we should do is just accept the Tory spending plans as set out in the spending review. We might not like them, but in reality we can do nothing about them. It would be bold and brave and, at a stroke, we will give ourselves permission to be heard again on the economy.’

By Peter Watt. (a former general secretary of the Labour party.)

Yowza. It really does remind one of the old Private Eye skit about ‘modernisers’ in the Labour Party suggesting ditching the old name (with its connotations of poverty and failure) and replacing it with something more up to date, like the ‘Conservative Party’.

I object to the “national populist” characterisation. Two things – it strikes me as a framing device used by group 1) to smear anyone to their Left with being a BNP supporter.

Secondly, I object to the notion that the European “populists” are in any way on the Left. When did any of them ever stand up for workers’ issues, as opposed to offering trivial one-off gimmes when they were in a pinch? They moan a lot but they don’t do it. They don’t have a critique of capitalism, they don’t systematically represent workers qua workers, they don’t have an universal concept of human rights (quite the opposite) – they don’t have any of the distinguishing features of the left.

In fact, the people who vote for them are the arsehole tendency – the social authoritarians.

To be honest I think Marx did a better job of this in 1848 (see section III). Not sure if all his categories match up with Chris’, but I think he had an apposite term for #3: ‘petit bourgeois socialism’. As I recall, he also gave a bit more prominence to something which is curiously absent from this post and comments: the working class.

As they currently manifest, Marx would probably also have filed most of #4 under “petit bourgeois technocrats”…

What would Marx have made of them? We don’t really know. He published several books criticising them at length, but then he was always kvetching about stuff: just ignore him.

Marx criticised everybody, raged and stormed and alienated everyone in spitting distance. As a socialist organiser, he was absolutely shit. It doesn’t invalidate his theories, but left just about the only ‘true’ interpreters of Marx as Marx & Engels themselves. Trying to live in 2011 exactly according to orthodox Marxist approaches – at least, according to some cult leader’s current interpretation – is exactly why group #4. is listed above as being irrelevant. Personally, I sympathise with communists, but Marx was as big a utopian as any of them with his talk of ‘hunting in the day, and painting in the evening.’ In what way is that more scientific than Robert Owen, who’d identified the practical deficiencies of capitalism, who invented the word communism… and who actually walked the walk? Marx was an outstanding social scientist, a great man, but no Messiah!

engels: On the contrary, I think the working class have been very much present in both post and comments, in number of ways, but principally via the fact that they are diminishing as a proportion of the population and that this poses problems for the left. Cf both my reference to André Gorz in orginal post (when writing about group 2) and my reference to Cohen on the subject in comment #43. Obviously the “diminishing” claim could get us involved in various classic disputes about the “correct” definition of social classes, but that probably wouldn’t be all that productive.

(Incidentally Cohen didn’t write that as Chris Y believes, at the height of the Clinton boom, but earlier. The first place those thoughts were published was in a paper published in 1990 which would have circulated in draft for some years beforehand.)

Does anybody know when exactly, between the publication of Cohen’s defence of Marxism (in 1978) and his circulation of the draft Chris refers to (some years before 1990), the working class ceased to exist?

Chris: in the UK there are particular symbols attached to concept of ‘working class’ that practically constipate the idea of a dynamic social movement. So when talking of trades unions, ‘working class’ is indelibly associated in the public consciousness with smokestack industries, most of which have pretty much gone, along with nearly all of the other industries, for that matter. If, however, you were to talk of ‘working people’ then there remains a lot of scope for activity: the massive job of organising casual workers, the mixed effects of a diverse workforce… I’m not saying ‘working class’ as an expression should be banned, merely that in the UK, there are a lot of suppositions…

It’s not quite so straightforward as ‘Marx disapproved of utopian socialists.’

How lucky for me, then, that I didn’t say this!

What Cohen seems to be saying in that lecture is that the “nothing to lose by their chains/a world to win” pronouncement is not applicable to the modern western situation. That was true in the 1990s and it’s certainly true today as well. And fair enough. It doesn’t, however, negate the usual day-to-day power struggle.

RAF: I’ve had to make this point before, but when Europeans say “populists”, they mean people like Jörg Haider, Robert Kilroy-Silk, Pim Fortuyn, or Marine Le Pen*. Basically, anyone who likes to use a bit of anti-corporation rhetoric but pursue a tax-cut agenda, say nasty things about immigrants and nice ones about the WW2 collaborationist regime, uses a lot of hair product, and has been the subject of at least one fawning and retrospectively really embarrassing column by a neocon editorialist.

Chris is European and it’s also obvious from his description of them that he’s thinking of something like the left-hand side of the Ulster loyalists – David Ervine, perhaps.

*I would argue that the BNP is still basically fascist and UKIP is a Tory splinter group. The platonic ideal is someone who is either semidetached from his party like Haider or whose party was created entirely as a life support system for their ego like Fortuyn or RKS. Of course the FN has roots in good old fashioned fascism but MLP is shaping a course to be as much like Haider as possible within the obvious biological constraints.

In the U.S., one once had great hopes for the SEIU, and for AFSCME. I can’t help but think, though, that all the people who are still clinging to the cliff — i.e. believing that being middle-class is only a matter of having middle-class social values — still disdain Las Vegas hotel-room maids, and are unlikely to allow themselves to be led by them. As for AFSCME, Wisconsin is surely a sign of something, that something probably being the fact that public sector unions — in this country at least — are a one-legged stool. (The other two, industrial and craft unions, having already been kicked away by several generations of Reaganites, it’s no secret why unions are no longer considered by very many as the kernel of some sort of pushback against the imperial state.)

It seems to me that once you have a fascist economy in place, it’s only a matter of time before fascist politics and government begin to be advanced by the punditry as once again worthy of consideration, especially if dressed in the rhetorical finery of representative democracy.

Oy! Marx the politician had no idea of the complex perfidy that capital could get up to once its true gladness had come to pass. On that we all seem to agree. Marx the moral philosopher, however, would still have some things to say to us, if only we weren’t too distracted to listen.

Alex, maybe you just dislike the word ‘populism’. Call it ‘grassroots activism’, or something.

Chris Bertram –

Fair enough, but you might not be mistaken if you were a bit clearer about what you meant – when you lump in labor unions with anti-immigrant groups (“Culturally conservative, worried by immigration”), argue that the working class is in decline, and won’t serve as an “agent of social change,” it’s easy to miss your qualifiers.

What I’m arguing, and what I think Alex is as well, is that you need to separate out economic populism from cultural populism. Unite, Unison, etc. are all economic populists, but they aren’t cultural populists.

On the broader topic: I’ll defend the term populist, as I’d defend the term progressive, because I think their original meanings have value. The original Populists – coming out of the Grange, the Farmer’s Alliance, the People’s Party, and the Knights of Labor – did something unique in the history of political ideology. They took a bunch of people who had been bred-in-the-bone Jeffersonian anti-government individualists, and united them around the idea that class conflict and republicanism could co-exist, that the central government had to be empowered over private capital, that the state had both the right and authority to act in the interests of the producing classes and the producer the right to call in the state to protect his rights and provide him with the tools for economic independence.

Without the Populists, there is no through-line between the American Revolution and the American Left.

I don’t want to be part of your revolution if I can’t criticise all day long.

But Blue Labour is an entirely elite project, as far as I can see. Glasman managed to write a whole double page screed in the Obscurer about it without once mentioning the words “trade union”. Such ground level reality as it has can hardly have been all that anti-immigrant given that the actual organising Glasman is talking about took place in Tower Hamlets, among immigrants.

I’m only 48 hours late and the party is already over! I’ll mutter a few things to myself anyway.

Way back at comment #3, LFC wrote: “how about a fifth group, the quasi-Keynesian left: More enthusiastic about (or less skeptical about) growth than the eco-left but more interested in (re)distribution and (re)regulation (and controls on capital, democratizing of investment decisions, etc.) than the technocratic quasi-neoliberal left. Unless I’m much mistaken, there may even be some representatives of this fifth group among your CT co-bloggers (?).”

At #4 John Quiggin identifies himself with this fifth group.

What dsquared says at #57 seems to place him in this fifth group too. And he describes himself as “part of the Paul Krugman left.”

Chris Bertram’s reaction to the above was:

At #40: “Various people have quibbled with my catagorization by saying that Keynsians might form a distinct group. You might say the same about Rawlsians or whatever. I suppose I’d observe that whatever the facts about the ‘correct interpretation’ of these approaches, self-described Keynesians (or Rawlsians) are actually distributed across these groups.”

At #55: “[I’m] trying to discern some deep fault-lines of principle and allegiance that might shape how people line up in the future. … No doubt there are some intermediate people, etc etc and some currents of thought that don’t fit neatly.”

And at #58: “It seems to me, fwiw, that Krugman has been edging towards the left populist nationalist crowd in recent times. So 1.5?”

In reply to #40 I’d say that Keynesians such as Krugman belong to the same group as Rawlsians – namely, LFC’s fifth group, which I’d call the Keynesian liberal egalitarian left. (I’d place Dworkin as well as Krugman and Rawls in this category.)

I think it’s Procrustean of Chris to try to fit Keynesian liberal egalitarians into one or more of his four categories. Re his suggestion at #58 that Krugman straddles 1 and 2: I haven’t encountered any evidence of nationalism or cultural conservatism in Krugman’s writings. What he has written on behalf of protectionism, for example, is completely devoid of nationalist inspiration. See here, for example: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/protectionism-and-stimulus-wonkish/ He’s also been a harsh critic of the neoliberal economics of Peter Mandleson and New Labour.

Rather than seeing people like Krugman (or Rawls or Dworkin) as straddling deep fault lines, I see them as maintaining a coherent, unified position which is roughly along the lines that LFC describes.

Who are those neoliberal technocrat lefties? Social democrats who dont hate the EU and have a problem with some anti market policies that shift disproportional amounth of money to the old labour core voters like coal subsidies? Count me in. In the non caricature world, neoliberal tendencies are far stronger within sucesfull green parties.

Mike, LFC,
that sounds very much like older Scandinavian Social Democracy.

LFC and Pär: I now see that it’s easier to characterize the traits of group 5 than to name it. Maybe the somewhat cumbersome “Keynesian liberal egalitarian or social democratic left” would do the trick.

And to add a bit to what I say in my reply at #159 to Chris:

Even if people such as Rawls or Krugman have affinities with one or more of the four groups in Chris’s typology, that doesn’t establish the case for excluding group 5 from his typology.

For one thing, it’s probably true of many thinkers who are offered as an exemplar of the ideology a given group that they’ll have certain affinities with some of the other groups. So finding affinities in Rawls with group 1, 2, or 3 is no more reason to exclude group 5 than finding affinities with 2 in people who exemplify 3 would be a reason for excluding 3 from the typology.

Moreover, whatever affinities Rawls or Krugman have with 1, 2, and 3, neither of them could be regarded as an exemplar of (as opposed just to having affinities with some of) the ideology of any of those groups. They are, however, exemplars of 5.

Here, in a nutshell, is Paul Krugman’s position on immigration:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/the-curious-politics-of-immigration/

He’s pulled in both directions when it comes to immigration. But he’s not pulled by the cheap labour reason for immigration of group 1, or by the culturally nationalist reason against immigration of group 2 (where these are the reasons for and against that he identifies with different wings of the US Republican party, where they exist in more virulent form than in groups 1 or 2).

Rather his reasons for and against are different and much more creditable:

On one side, they favor helping those in need, which inclines them to look sympathetically on immigrants; plus they’re relatively open to a multicultural, multiracial society. I know that when I look at today’s Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in America.

On the other side, however, open immigration can’t coexist with a strong social safety net; if you’re going to assure health care and a decent income to everyone, you can’t make that offer global.

I believe Dworkin has expressed similar sentiments. And I think a lot of others who seem otherwise to fit naturally within group 5 would too.

Category #1 is nicely summed up as “Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.”

“A Washed Up, Marginal Reply to Chris Bertram”

http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=372