This article explains some of what I have tried to argue about the New Labour government having an approach of total social management towards the British economy and society.
What the article lacks is a materialist understanding of the influence of finance capital behind these changes.
Behind Voter Apathy, A Silent Revolution
Philip Allott International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, June 6, 2001
The gloom generated by the dreadful general election campaign in Britain has produced secondary gloom about the health of democracy itself.
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Instead, what may be happening is something much more interesting. We may be witnessing a silent revolution which, like all revolutions, may make things very much better or even worse. Britain may be leading the world into a new kind of society - post-democratic society.
The new kind of society has three defining characteristics.
1. Government is reconceived as a managerial function, not as a function of power.
2. There is an equilibrium of social power between the individual and society.
3. Public decision-making is a permanent dialogue, rather than a periodic delegation.
The conceptual convergence of a managerial approach to government and a governmental approach to the management of corporations is reflected in the vogue clichés of "stakeholder democracy," on the one hand, and "corporate governance," on the other. On this view, a government and a corporation are simply two forms of the social organization of human effort.
The total socializing of the human being is a paradoxical side effect of the revolutionary liberation of the citizen. A society based on legally determined "rights" is a society where human freedom is what society says it is. But we may observe a strange fact. The human individual has been like a well-adapted species of animal surviving a natural catastrophe. We, the people, have adapted ourselves to the myth of freedom and, after two centuries of democracy-capitalism, our capacity for self-consciousness has emerged more powerful than it has ever been.
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The writer, a professor of international public law at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.