Where To, Now?

I read with interest and some confusion, the column in today's Financial Times by Marc Dunkelman, on why the far-right and its noisome, and more often than not noisy, politicking is of appeal to an increasingly large segment of civil society. His thesis in the piece - bearing in mind that he is a senior fellow with the democratically-aligned think-tank the Searchlight Institute - is that democracy isn't working [I agree] and pretty much everything is broken [which it is], because governments are losing the trust of their electorate by signally failing to cover all the bases of public service and supply [which is also true]. 

Where I diverge from his thinking is when he posits that the reason for this increasing lack of trust, or indeed any faith, in the system(s) of government we employ, is that liberal, progressive thinking has 'hamstrung' governments in their delivery of infrastructure and public services. Further, he characterises a 'paranoia' among the Left regarding the 'abuses' of public power before the 1970s that has, in his framing, led to overcompensation, and the creation of endlessly vacillating state systems that find themselves unable to perform their democratic, civic duties on behalf of the population. Really? That the rot we are witnessing is the fault of conspiracy-theorising intellectuals on the Left tying governments up in regulatory knots?

Nope - I don't run with that one - the reasons governments have invariably screwed us over are fairly straightforward: greed, grift, the markets and big business. The fact is that the immediate postwar period of reconstruction gave us a[(n) albeit too brief] period of social stability, when stuff actually did work, and we created a civil society - certainly here in the UK - that looked after its population. Money was found and the big problems were dealt with. But the negative issues that emerged came not from some over-weaning intellectual Left elite crushing the life out of innovation and entrepreneurialism: they emerged out of the ultra-laissez faire of neo-liberalist economic theory in the mid and late 70s, and which holds sway to the present day, including over the present Labour government.

Things are broke because, as far as big capital's concerned, you pays your money, you takes your choice, never mind the quality of product or service or their impact on the planet and the working public. The problem with governments and their failures of civic duty and public service is not that they are 'hamstrung' by the Left, but rather that they are in absolute thrall to an outmoded and out of control economic theory that demands that business and the markets know best. They simply know nothing of the sort. Corporate business is entirely self-interested, by definition: money and its multiplication being its sole aim. Society is simply another resource to exploit in that aim: it is blind to all else, and is ultimately the harbinger of its own destruction if its internal logic is carried through to its natural conclusion. Put simply, the model is unstable and ultimately unsustainable, and it will eat itself in the end, but only after taking down the rest of us and the planet in the process.

That a down-trodden society finds an appeal in the power of ultra-right-wing rhetoric, conspiracy theories and xenophobia is not exactly surprising: there is plenty of historical precedent to show that 'strong men' often appear to offer magic bullets to cure a society's ills; only on taking power by popular mandate to replace them with real bullets in the oppression of their erstwhile electorate. That much is history, and it applies, very often, as much to the Left as to the Right, although for very different political reasons. Democracy is the sole domain of neither, and the very concept of democracy itself is the product of an ancient, slave-owning society. Go figure: we needs some very new thinkin' here, methinks...