Geoff Mulgan was a contributor to the Communist Party journal Marxism Today when it was edited by Martin Jacques, and going in a pointedly Euro-Communist direction (for those of you who remember those debates). Jacques realised that the ambitions of such new-thinking indicated that they should try to transcend their heritage, so he wound the journal up and set up a think-tank under Mulgan, Demos, who was the youngest, brightest and least directly identified with the old CPGB.
I once took part in a Demos seminar and the personal dynamics were intriguing. There were about ten people there. They were mostly the intellectual periphery of the old Communist Party. There was Phillip Dodd from the Institute of Contemporary Arts, professer Theodore Zeldin from Oxford (I think), a young Tory from the Henley Forecasting Institute, old Tory turned communitarian John Gray, a cleark from Demos, Mulgan, Mulgan's side-kick with the sci-fi name 'Perri 6' and former CP central committee member Jacques.
The interesting thing was how they related (a sociology I was well used to, coming from the left). Jacques held his piece while all the others tried to impress with tentative ideas (we were talking about Europe, I think). When anything good was thrown in, Jacques veered into sight like a vulture (ripping off some brilliant contribution of my own, to make it more banal, of course). After tying the whole thing up in some mandarin formulation, Mulgan was left spluttering about 'can't we say soemthing more positive?' But the old relationship between the two was woven into their personal dynamics. Mulgan was supplicant, Jacques was indifferent, off hand and in control. Finally Jacques was bored, got up and said soemthing like 'well, we can leave it to your staff to write it up, eh Geoff?' It was the relationship between the old Central Committee Chair and his propaganda officer.
Imagine my syurprise when I read the reports in the press a few weeks ago of a blistering row between Mulgan and Jacques at a special country house gathering of old Marxism Today contributors. The MT crew had come together to take a pop at the Blair govt. (and idirectly at Mulgan who was now working for them). But all the press was on Mulgan's side for his diatribe against the 'academic' criticisms of his erstwhile comrades. Why don't you say something useful for a change, was his challenge. It's all very well for college seminars, but I can't make policy out of this (these arguments, as anyone who has read hte book will recognise are all drawn from Richard Rorty's , Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998) The rest of the MT gang were full of vitriol for the young upstart. I genuinely wondered whether the whole thing had been staged by Mulgan and Jacques to ensure his reformist credentials, but I think now there was a real row.
The tragic thing about the one-off issue of MT that was published from the discussion is that Mulgan's article is by far the most convincing, so tortuous are the mediatations on crisis from Hobsbawm, Hall and Jacques.
I slag off some of Mulgan's stuff in my little pamphlet Need and Desire in the Post Material Economy (Sheffield Hallam U Press, 1998). -- Jim heartfield