Guy Standing, PEF Council Member
Will the election of Jo Biden lead into a new progressive era? This is a question being asked all over the world. In Britain, Keir Starmer wants to model his Labour Party on Biden’s ‘path to victory’, which he described in a Guardian article as ‘paved by a broad coalition’ based on what people most value – ‘family, community and security’. That sort of statement could come from any political party, and hardly differentiates progressives from conservatives.
What is most remarkable about the US election is that a candidate as discredited and narcissistic as Donald Trump could manage to receive 74 million votes, 11 million more than in 2016, after egregiously mishandling a pandemic that has killed over 320,000 Americans.
Bernie Sanders, also writing in the Guardian, says US Democrats have to appeal to ‘working families’, and offers a standard package of social democratic policies, all eminently sensible. Both Starmer and Sanders seem to be offering a new version of Third Wayism. But progressives who have watched the spectacles of Trumpism or Brexit, are entitled to ask whether this will be anything like enough to reverse the populist tide.
We are confronted by a transformation crisis, accelerated by the pandemic and its accompanying pandemic slump. To recall a comment made by William Beveridge in his epoch-defining report of 1942, it is ‘a time for revolutions, not for patching’. Yet the left is offering patching.
Promising an agenda based on what was a progressive vision of the post-1945 era in today’s era of rentier capitalism will only appeal to about 40% of people and ‘families’ that gain from such social democratic policies and only be electorally successful if the right is worn out or egregiously corrupt and incompetent. It will not enthuse the precariat, and will not enthuse others enough to induce them to become politically active. They will do what they did in 2016 in the USA and in Britain’s Brexit referendum, stay at home.
As elaborated elsewhere, today’s global economy is one of rentier capitalism, in which more and more income and wealth is flowing to the possessors of property – physical, financial and intellectual. Dismantling rentier capitalism is the primary challenge for progressive politics. It is going to be harder because of the geo-political transformation taking place, in which China is displacing the declining hegemon, the USA, while the latter and other OECD countries adjust to their shrinking industrial base.
Dismantling rentier capitalism will be so hard because the plutocracy based around finance are so powerful. A stark indicator of finance’s extraordinary power is that financial assets in Britain are valued at over 1,000% of GDP, and are over 500% in the USA, France, Canada and Japan, and nearing that elsewhere. None of the shopping list of policies offered by Sanders, Biden or – if he offered them as implied – Starmer would dent that reality. If progressive political parties promised to rein in finance, the financial institutions and plutocrats would pour funds into right-wing parties that would shamelessly promise to protect ‘family, community and security’, with more tax cuts and stronger law-and-order.
The problem is compounded by knowledge of how the globalised system of rentier capitalism operates. Wages in real terms have stagnated in OECD countries, including Britain, for the past three decades or more, with short upward spurts amidst a secular decline. The decline has been greater than it appears, because an increasing number of people have been pushed into the precariat, for whom wages are erratic, uncertain and not backed up by non-wage benefits and entitlements.
Given the nature of globalisation, as long as social incomes are lower in China and other emerging markets and as long as finance and corporate capital can switch production and investment fast, the decline in living standards for those relying on wages will continue. Of course, a higher minimum wage and stronger unions can do some good. But not much. Meanwhile, governments of the centre left as well as right will quietly allow welfare benefits for ‘the few’ at the lower end of society to decline and become more punitive, as was the reality under New Labour and Clinton’s Third Way. Those requiring state benefits tend not to be included in the mantra of ‘hard working families’.
Reflecting financialisation, household and corporate debt were unprecedentedly high before the pandemic struck, and have grown much worse since then. Millions more are on the edge of homelessness, showing rising morbidity and acute distress, linked to increasing domestic violence, suicides and mental illness.
Presuming all this is roughly correct, will the Biden Bounce amount to a sustainable progressive revival? It seems unlikely. The only way to appeal to a potential majority is to offer an agenda and vision tailored to the emerging mass class. That has always been the case in moments of transformation. It must be a vision based on structural changes that could not be co-opted by the political right or undermined by the power of the plutocracy in funding a false prospectus. It must be a vision that enthuses by offering a revival of the sense of a Future that is different from the Past and that will appeal to the precariat. As such, it would not be shaped by priority being given to the core of supporters of a Donald Trump or Boris Johnson.
Although Keir Starmer’s Labour has been thin on policy thus far, reaching out to what I have called the Atavists seems to be its intention. Starmer’s head of policy is Claire Ainsley, and in her book The New Working Class, she argues that Labour’s policies should be ‘led’ by public attitudes and by older working-class people who value ‘nostalgia’. The problem is that this would side-line the raison d’etre of the left through the ages, which is to offer an innovative vision of a future that differs from the past, with a leadership setting out to shape ‘public opinion’ rather than be led by it.
If you merely try to respond to what focus groups and the media are saying today, you might appeal to the ‘median voter’, but chances of political success will then come down to a selling game in the next electoral cycle. This is a timid, unconfident, unprincipled approach. You will not overcome the stay-at-home tendency. A warning signal is that while Labour has climbed in the opinion polls, it has been haemorrhaging many thousands of members, even before Starmer’s spat with Jeremy Corbyn.
During the Covid shutdowns, Labour enthusiastically supported the government’s furlough scheme, and demanded that it should continue. A progressive ‘Opposition’ should have asked the basic question any progressive movement should ask: Does this scheme increase or reduce inequality? If it increases it, we should propose alternatives.
Without doubt, the furlough scheme increases inequality in the labour market, giving three or four times as much to higher-income earners as to those in the precariat, and scarcely anything to those on the margins. It is subject to high and predictable fraud, with greater ease for white-collar members of the salariat. Even when evidence revealed that, Labour persisted in supporting the furlough scheme. This suggests it lacks an anchor of progressive values. It recalls New Labour, epitomised by Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair’s rejection of concern over inequality.
As argued in an arrticle for Open Democracy, income and wealth inequality are much greater than conventional statistics reveal. Building a new income distribution system that reverses the trends towards greater inequalities should be a top priority. Giving priority to raising the minimum wage, while welcome, would do little for the precariat and nothing to tackle the structural reasons for inequality.
If Keir Starmer wants to give priority to ‘security’, the way to do so would be to move towards a basic income as the anchor of a new distribution system. But Labour seem wary of considering that . They say instead that Universal Credit must be improved. Universal Credit is the most regressive social policy in the past century, with its spiteful conditionalities and sanctions, high exclusion errors and poverty traps. It has even become a major cause of indebtedness. It provides insecurity to its intended recipients. No progressive should be giving it the time of day. Labour should oppose it resolutely.
The left, globally, must devise a strategy to dismantle rentier capitalism. Yet there appears to be no recognition that this is the problem. Among the priorities should be a comprehensive critique of the vast subsidies given to special interests. According to Treasury statistics, tax reliefs and subsidies come to £430 billion a year. Most have no moral or economic justification, and are regressive. Then, there is an urgent need to develop a strategy to weaken intellectual property rights. It is absurd that big corporations can string together patents that give them monopoly profits for twenty years, or in the case of pharmaceuticals forty years.
While developing a plan to build a new income distribution system, including an overhaul of the tax system, the primary issue should be developing a strategy for addressing the ecological crisis. Clearly Biden and the Democrats will be vastly better on this than Trump, and Labour could only be better than the Conservatives. But this poses a deep problem for traditional social democratic parties.
They believe in economic growth and maximising ‘jobs’. So far, if there is ever a contradiction between jobs and ecology, labour unions on which they depend opt unerringly for jobs. Social democrats try to shift ground by offering ‘green jobs’. But the more one looks at what this might mean, the more reason for scepticism.
There is a danger that they cannot find many good ‘green jobs’, and that much of the resource depletion and global warming effects will be shifted into the blue economy, which the European Investment Bank, the European Commission and the World Wildlife Fund predict will be creating more income and jobs than the terrestrial economy by 2030. Nobody on the left seems to have taken cognisance that the growth model they have favoured for decades has already created a marine ecosystem crisis of epic proportions.
There is a corresponding danger in thinking that Labour and Biden’s Democrats will persist with a neoliberal economics approach to the ecological crisis. This is based on attempting to value ‘natural capital’, the belief being that if a market value can be placed on all of nature then incentives can be designed to conserve the valuable bits. Critics have exposed the errors of this approach. There is no avoiding a reassessment of economic growth as an objective. Social democrats seem unable to address the ‘de-growth’ movement or its rationale.
This leads to what progressives should be doing on fiscal policy. The need for tax reform and a higher overall tax take has never been greater. Where does Labour stand? So far we do not know.
Then there is the crucial area of educational reform. Here again, social democrats have been collaborators in creating a cause of their lack of support. As part of the Third Way model, neo-liberal economics was extended to all levels of education. Social democrats inhaled the view that schooling and universities should be designed to create ‘human capital’, and prepare people for the job market, to be good jobholders. They have seen ‘the education industry’ as an extension of the market economy. This is a new philistinism.
One is entitled to think that, as this marginalises subjects and ways of thinking not geared to producing human capital and jobholders, the teaching of culture, history, literature and civics will be neglected. Having been in academia, I can testify that this is precisely what has happened. A result is a citizenry ill-prepared to withstand the appeal of populists selling simplistic political slogans. Is there any sign that progressives want to reform the education system, or have policies to do so?
One could extend this critique. There is nothing transformative on offer. This writer hopes he is wrong to think progressive creativity will be shunned in the complacency induced by Biden’s victory, and that this will not be a period of re-heated Third Wayism. The omens are not good. The precariat should lead the revolt to strengthen the backbones of those in positions to develop transformative alternatives. If they do not or cannot, the Biden Bounce will be a Blip, and populism will soon have another round to forge a dystopia none of us should want.
This article first appeared in Open Democracy on 16th December 2020
photo credit flickr