After Thatcherism the latest ism isn't Blairism. It's called the Third Way. It's the subject of pamphlets, a new book and - Tony Blair was there yesterday - a high-powered New York seminar. It's good to have a thinking prime minister, says David Walker, but a bit more rigour wouldn't go amiss.
The Guardian / Tuesday September 22, 1998
Capitalism doesn't just suffer from financial hypertrophy, it's structurally weak. As it creates wealth, it concentrates it to excess; as it ensures that production rises continuously, so it tends to exclude more and more men and women from the world of work. Capitalism carries disequilibrium within itself and there is only one counterweight: politics.
There, the other day, you had a successful European social democratic prime minister not in office for very long focusing his mind on the world financial crisis. No, it wasn't Tony Blair. This was the French leader Lionel Jospin - and he wasn't invited to Hillary Clinton's confab. Perhaps the language is a bit too direct, a little too marxisant. And yet our Tony is evidently not unfamiliar with Karl, at least that famous passage about philosophers having to understand the world while socialist heroes are in business to change it. Change that to social democratic and liberal heroes. Politics, says the Prime Minister, is 'first and foremost about ideas. Without a powerful commitment to goals and values, governments are rudderless and ineffective'. It's a remarkable thing to be saying now, nearly a year and a half into his term as the real world starts to bite and the polls cool. Whether he is judged successful in his bid to redefine a social-democratic or left of centre/liberal project, he has decided to invest a considerable amount of of time and energy in thinking aloud.
But is the new label really necessary? In the Eighties, under the editorship of Martin Jacques the magazine Marxism Today achieved a brilliant marketing coup by inventing the term Thatcherism. An 'ism' is a coherent doctrine yet what Mrs Thatcher stood for was anything but - Thatcherism was a farrago of free markets, monopolies, authoritarianism, nannyism, liberalism, Big Defence, national sovereignty and cultural and economic abasement to the United States. Even 'New Right' is hard to discern, once you move away from the undoubtedly successful project mounted by Arthur Seldon and pals at the Institute of Economic Affairs to change the way we think about production and markets. But that victory accomplished, the right is nowadays in a mess, dependent on a flow of samey ideas about poverty, race and welfare reform from the United States. Here in Britain the Conservative Party is chasing its tail, desperately trying to re-found itself on the issue of Europe while the gales of international economic crisis blow. If what Tony Blair has to say about globalisation (and Europe) is vacuous, it is considerably more fibre-stuffed than what the right can muster.
The trouble with trying to form ideology in an unideological age is that you end up describing what you are doing and giving it a fancy title. Thus the Third Way becomes what Tony Blair and his Cabinet have done since May 1997 but, presumably for modesty's sake, they won't call it Blairism. Third Way is a far from original label. As a political idea it is at least as old as Eduard Bernstein's bid in the last decade of the 19th century to detach the German Social Democrats from marxian communism by taking the parliamentary road. In 1959 the postwar German SPD did it again by 'accepting' capitalism. It's also been claimed by the Right. Felipe Gonzalez, the former Spanish social democratic prime minister, remarked sardonically the other day that when he was a lad Franco claimed his was the Third Way between capitalism and communism.
For Tony Blair, the First Way is individualism, aka neo-liberalism or Thatcherism. It did some good things (and he wants to keep it in personal relationships) but it neglected social solidarity and national cohesion. The Second Way is old-style social democracy embracing the nationalisation associated with Peter Mandelson's granddaddy Herbert Morrison. It's interesting that in Mr Blair's new Fabian pamphlet there is no reference to earlier Labour or Social Democratic Third Wayers or revisionists. Tony Crosland and David Owen have been airbrushed out of history.
The Third Way cleaves to social democracy's old egalitarian goals - opportunity for poor people plus social solidarity - but is pragmatic about how to achieve them. It offers 'not a shopping list of policy prescriptions...' so much as a set of reflexes. Partnership is a key word. Government's job is to be kind and supportive to capitalism, or as the Prime Minister prefers to put it, has to ensure business is confident, successful and profitable. The state must not second guess employment decisions by private firms. It should, instead, promote competitive markets, boost human capital and ensure 'effective access to the labour market'. About reciprocal obligations by private employers to the public weal, the pamphlet is silent.
Yet in the Third Way citizens do have responsibilities as well as rights, including the social obligation to bring up children as competent, responsible citizens and to support those such as teachers who are employed in the task (does that include forking out more in taxes so teachers get paid more?).
Third Way government is inherently limited... 'one of the strongest claims for the Third Way is that tax must be kept under control'. Because he is, after all, a British politician, Tony Blair's version is pretty thin on theory. For more of that we need to turn to a book published last Thursday by the sociologist Tony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, where there are more signs of the Demos-influenced, 'post-modernist' agenda and, among other things, environmental sustainability gets a look in. Professor Giddens, the dust jacket says, is frequently referred to as the prime minister's guru. He does, it's true, go some way towards filling gaps in the Prime Minister's pamphlet. For example, on gender and the family. The Prime Minister counsels Third Wayers against fatalism and cynicism. But according to Professor Giddens some acceptance of the inevitable is in order when it comes to personal behaviour: it is beyond the capacity of the state to change the way men and women come together, mate and procreate and split up. The traditional family is dead, he says, but divorce is a bad thing. The way forward (the process of deduction is obscure) is family democratisation. This means 'equality, mutual respect, autonomy, decision-taking through communication and freedom from violence'. Relate couldn't have put it better.
Tony Blair's fans on the right will be disappointed that all he can say about the infernal Sixties is that they were 'a decade of personal liberation' and will be affronted that he attributes to Mrs Thatcher carrying Sixties' individualism into the economic sphere. Third Way women, by the way, should be offered the chance 'to fulfil their full potential according to their own choices'. Could the husband of Cherie Booth have said anything else? What the Third Way does not do is give much of a steer on some of the crucial issues of the day. Is spending more than 40 per cent of GDP on government - a level identified as the portals of serfdom by the new right - to fall into old socialist habits? Continental social democrats would say no and cite annual rates of growth of real income per head showing how the low taxing United States achieved precisely the same figure as the high taxing Germans and Italians between 1980 and 1997.
Does the Third Way help relieve us of our present discontents? Or, to put that more concretely, are controls on international investment justified when, as the New York Times said on Sunday, experts prepare to re-think systems as free flowing capital sinks nations? Professor Giddens talks about establishing an Economic Security Council within the United Nations - an intriguing proposal given the popularity still in that body of the statist and interventionist reflexes the Third Way is meant to be expunging from the domestic body politic. It is at this point that the intellectual weaknesses of the Third Way become obvious. This is not Das Kapital or the Constitution of Liberty; it's more an odyssey by Candide. When, in March, the International Monetary Fund's newsletter said capital liberalisation was 'irreversible' it was asserting the kind of teleological confidence marketeers have commonly exhibited of late. Is it misplaced? The answer can surely only be convincing if it is couched in terms of some theory of world economic order or even, whisper it who dares, analysis of capitalism, the word used with such Gallic style by Lionel Jospin - whose own programme for action turns out, surprise, to be as vague and hopeful as Tony Blair's.
• 'Le crise mondiale et nous', Le Nouvel Observateur, September 10-16,1998 • Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, 1990 • Is There a Third Way? Institute of Economic Affairs, 1998 • Die Zeit, September 17 • Tony Blair, The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century, Fabian Society (fabian-society at geo2.poptel.org.uk) • Anthony Giddens, The Third Way, Polity Press, Cambridge 1998
David Walker edits Analysis.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)