Inevitably the battle of ideas may mean, as Marx and Engels said, they they spent much of their time fighting those apparently politically close to them rather than the real enemy. Nevertheless that is a different question from the need both to unite with and struggle against middle elements in the course of practice.
The Third Way is treated as fit only for derision by some. But a dual policy is better adopted. There are advantages in social democratic or left of centre regimes winning elections in a number of countries. Certainly illusions should not be reinforced that they have ultimate answers. but we need a more dialectical approach to what is innovative and what is reformist in their proposals.
This recent interview by Anthony Giddens to the editor of New Times, shows some development of his thinking and some gaps between him and the Blair government. He would appear to be more of a social democrat. The Blair government seems to me to be trying to operate like a government of national unity. In both cases of course the sharpness of the class contradictions is obscured, but there is also an issue of what the enemy is - whether it is finance capital or the Conservative Party.
Chris Burford
London.
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Left renewal
'The modernising left is a renewal of the left,' says Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and Tony Blair's favourite sociologist. 'It applies the values of the left to our new conditions. So it is a modernising project. And what modernisation means to me, in a nutshell, is responding to all the changes associated with globalisation while trying to deal with the deficiencies of an earlier phase of political thinking.'
As Labour's official pathfinder for the Third Way, Giddens is a global networker, jetting between seminars with Bill Clinton and discussions with continental European social democrats in an ambitious and increasingly successful attempt to draw leading intellectuals and politicians together. He has just delivered the Reith lectures on ways of coping with globalisation from studios in London, Washington, Delhi and Hong Kong. 'There's an extraordinary interest in the Third Way debate across the world, from the EU countries, to the United States and the third world,' he says. 'Everywhere I go, I find people involved in the same kind of debates. You simply can't go back to old style, top-down socialism. And even those who used to believe in free-market fundamentalism don't anymore. The two old positions are no longer acceptable.
'Third Way politics is not an attempt to find a point that is mid-way between American market liberalism and traditional style socialism,' he says. 'It is an attempt to respond to all the major changes going on in the world, from personal life to the nature of work, the nature of sovereignty right up to debates about the global economy and the future of world society. 'There are new political as well as intellectual divisions around those issues. But everywhere a modernising left is looking for a new kind of radicalism - which means abandoning previous positions and traditional left-right distinctions - and developing a new theory of social justice based on values of inclusion, solidarity, countering inequality and caring for the vulnerable.'
'Politics is now organised around differing responses to globalisation,' he continues. 'Across Europe and the US I find similar responses. The old left says that globalisation isn't happening or that it is destructive - a particularly common response in France and Germany. Then there is a new far right, world-wide, which agrees that globalisation is destructive but wants to respond first of all with economic protectionism, opting out of the world market place, and then with cultural protectionism; in other words, racism and xenophobia. And in the middle there is a self-destructing neo-liberal right and a modernising left. And the modernising left seems to me the only cogent position.'
The new challenge of globalisation is not the only one faced by the left. 'We've also got to address a host of inherited problems and difficulties. The British welfare state as it was set up in the years after 1945 was a mixed bag. There were good things about it, but also bad things - the consequences of which can be seen on our crime-ridden housing estates. There are similar problems with labour markets, health services and so on. The Third Way involves finding solutions which are neither owned nor wholly funded by the state.'
Critics argue that Giddens is providing an intellectual gloss to Labour's pragmatism, but he is better understood as someone who is trying to help the party them understand how far, and irrevocably, the world has changed and wean Labour from the state. He is emphatic that his role is not party-political. 'I see myself as an academic and intellectual contributing to a global debate over the future of left-of-centre politics and trying to inject some idealism back into it. If that helps the Labour Party, all well and good, but I don't see that as my prime role. I'm not a tribalist, and I'm not a party activist. I'm more interested in ideas than party issues.'
A prolific writer, Giddens has offered ideas aplenty in the last ten years. In such books as Consequences of Modernity, Beyond Left and Right, Transformations of Intimacy and The Third Way he has provided important tools for thinking about our fast-changing society. The thrust of his argument is that we live in a post-traditional social order in which established ways of doing things have to justify themselves anew, and will not be reproduced without question; all modernisation is self conscious - in fact everything, from government to selfhood, has become a reflexive project; in our lives, and in politics, we deal with risks that we manufacture ourselves; socialist notions of agency are an anachronism; we have to repair damaged solidarities by reconciling autonomy and interdependence; life politics are more important than life chance politics; generative politics - in which individuals and groups are allowed to make things happen themselves - are the alternative to state action; we must democratise our democracy; and good living, as well as good politics, depends on dialogic democracy and negotiated consensus.
'In the past there was a big working class and the basic problem was how to get it into the wider society,' he says. 'Now there is a small working class - under 20 per cent of the working population, however you reckon it - and a large white-collar class working with information technology in decentralised work settings. A younger generation in Europe and the US is against racism and militarism. On the whole we are successfully moving towards a more cosmopolitan society.
'This new political culture is something that everyone in politics has to adjust to. It is liberal and it doesn't believe in top-down government. Any left-of-centre government has to begin from that premise. We are trying to create a 'win-win' politics by finding solutions that benefit most people in the society, and that's hard for people from the old left to adjust to. For example, ecologists may have to fight big corporations on some issues, but everyone shares an interest in a safer environment, or getting people into decent jobs. The old left prefers to ask who is the enemy.
Despite an obvious preference for ideas over policy or political calculation, Giddens does have some tough questions and challenging new priorities for the government. When he projects his Third Way forward into the second term, it turns out to include some surprisingly hard climbs, and demanding twists and turns.
First, Labour must regain its grip on Britain's identity and sense of its future. 'I think that we must try and sustain a cosmopolitan nation, and not let it be riven by nationalism. Nor do I favour indefinite fragmentation or a thousand city states. We need a renewed identity for Britain as a whole which will keep the Scots and the Welsh in. This requires a motivating project and Labour hasn't completely found that yet. The idea of Cool Britannia wasn't successful, but it pointed in the right direction.'
Giddens is also at odds with new Labour's growing doubts about electoral reform for the House of Commons. He insists that the outcomes of the elections to the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly provide no justification for delaying the rest of the constitutional reform programme. 'I'm in favour of proportional representation on the Jenkins model for the country as a whole,' he says, 'and sooner rather than later. It's a good thing that PR forces you to speak to other parties and find consensus. That's the only way to get rid of adversarial politics.'
Giddens also wants an end to the government's awkward silences on the future of taxation and a shift away from its emphasis on equality of opportunity. 'In the next phase of its existence, and supposing it wins the next election, the Labour party has to make a more concerted attack on inequality,' he says. 'I don't accept this is the territory of the old left and not a job for the modernising left. I'm strongly opposed to the idea that social justice is just equality of opportunity. I would like to see Labour get a more robust account of social justice than it has at the moment. However, it's not simply a question of raising income tax or spending more, although I am in favour of a high tax society as long as it is based on diversified and discretionary forms of taxation. We need more public debate on these issues. But alongside that, we've got to tackle the welfare state, which in the UK hasn't been very good at reducing poverty and inequality. We've got to develop new and pioneering programmes of support if people are going to be willing to pay for public services.'
Giddens has frequently written about the need to reduce levels of force and violence in international relations. So how did the bombing of Serbia become part of the third way? 'What we are experiencing is the shifting nature of international relations and sovereignty,' he says.
'What's happening in Kosovo is an example of a new kind of war. These new wars happen around the edges of disintegrating states threatened by banditry and ethnic divisions. It's not, so far, a war between nations. It's a battle between traditional, mystic territorial nationalism and a new European cosmopolitanism. I think the emerging international community has to be prepared to use force in these circumstances, because those who threaten its values use force.'
As always for Giddens, new problems need hard-headed but imaginative solutions. 'As sovereignty is no longer an absolute principle,' he says, 'we must develop new institutions which will be able to cope. We must rethink the role of Nato and deal with the lack of integration of European forces. But I think we must also keep some version of the Nato alliance, with both the Americans and the Russians involved. I'm also in favour of pioneering some quasi-utopian trans-national forms of democracy. As we have a European Parliament, why can't we have an African parliament and an Asian parliament too? And perhaps we should have a directly elected second chamber of the United Nations?'