Space and spectacle

Modern capitalism loves its spectacular sky scrapers. I was recently in Singapore where the downtown skyline is just an extraordinary forest of office buildings, jutting into the sky, each attempting to outdo the other for no apparent reason, other than they've got the money to do it. There is an ugly masculinity to these protruding phallic objects, each competing to be the biggest. The same could be said of the Petronas towers in KL or indeed of the crazy capitalist dystopia in the desert that is (apparently, I've never been) Dubai.

Built on grossly unequal models of economic development, they are unquestionably symbols of private (and privileged) splendour amid public squalor. These spectacular symbols of the triumph of the market economy rise out of nowhere, having no relationship with and imposing themsleves on the people who live, work and play around them.

I recently attended an excellent new exhibition in Brussels at the Bozar Expo called A Vision for Brussels which makes these very points, starting with a big picture of the Gherkin with a red cross through it. One then gets shown a film in which a group of young architects set out their vision for a Brussels redesigned as a fitting capital of a federal Europe. They start by knocking down the European parliament building that has only just been built. Their detailed plans include redesigning the parliament building as a flat 10 metre high building, with its roof acting as a huge public square which includes large works of public art - the enormous heads of numerous leading European political thinkers. See below.

Their basic idea is to redesign Brussels to be a coherent capital for Europe, in which the 'Eurocracy' as they called it does not feed off the living city as a kind of alien parasite (which was basically how they described the existing situation), with wealth and infrastructure skewed to benefit EU institutions at the expense of the ordinary citizens of Brussels. They wanted public spaces, amenities and a transport system fit for the capital of Europe and for European citizens to live in. Good stuff.

I remain ambivalent about the Gherkin. Up close and personal I recoil - a dramatic but unwelcome rupture in the space around it, a celebration of muscular capitalism, unaccessible to the average citizen. From afar, however, I remain awestruck. If you cycle down Kingsland Road on a hot summers day with that thing rising up in the distance, you can't help being impressed, inspite of everything.

Virtue and sufficiency

The title of this blog refers to renaissance virtues. Its also the title of a book by the philosopher Quentin Skinner - but what I'm getting at with that is that there are a range of ethical imperatives or ways of living one's life that I am trying to think about (reflect on in this space) and act upon. A 'renaissance man' (or woman) would do this in a holistic way, in the many different aspects of one's life.

One of these modern twenty first century virtues is to reduce one's impact on the environment or stop oneself contributing to global ecological apocalypse. The science on climate change is indisputable - although I spent some days earlier this week at a conference with people from the Institute of Ideas, who (in their odd contrary approach to everything) dispute the science. The fact that the International Panel on Climate Change, made up of the world's leading scientific experts in the field, has said that there is now almost no doubt that the world is heating up and that we are contributing to it, is frankly good enough for me.

The consequences, set out in the IPCC's report, are frightening and it is already too late to avoid many of them: the world will get hotter, there will be more extreme weather conditions, bigger and more tropical storms, heatwaves, floods and droughts, rising sea levels - all is this is now certain in our lifetimes and there is apparently little we can do to prevent it. More worrying is what Donald Rumsfeld (talking about Iraq) called the 'known unknowns' - there are likely to be feedback effects of these climatic changes that we cannot model because of the complexity of the climate. These effects could range from the marginal to the absolutely catastrophic - the IPCC concluded that they simply can't predict how screwed we already are (they were told to stick to certainties).

Apparently we can still act to prevent some of this - but we have a relatively short envelope available and we need revolutionary changes in the whole basis of the global economy. I have to say looking at international failure to cooperate over other less pressing problems - one has to be scetpical about our capacity to put the long term survival of our species over short term economic self-interest or at least not until the consequences are 'in our face' - by which time it will already be too late.

So what does one do when faced with all this? Pessimism is a wholly rational response given the evidence in front of us. But what about the efficacy of 'doing one's bit'? Is personal virtue sufficient? Its a simple fact that me cycling to work, turning off the stand by button and recycling everything I can (all of which I now do) won't make any iota of difference. Nor would it even if the whole of the UK did the same - we contribute 2% to global emissions, so whatever we do as individuals or as a society will ultimately be insufficient.

I guess this shows the limits of a politics of personal virtue. I once had an argument with a Christian friend of mine in Cuba - who felt at the time that Christ's method - of doing the right thing, of living true to oneself and living according to one's conscience, was in fact the good or desirable life. I countered that, while such virtuous behaviour at the individual level was desirable and indeed imperative, it was wholly insufficent from an ethical point of view. One also needed to join or form political movements, organise collectively with one's fellow citizens to transform society in a more just, democratic and sustainable direction. Living like a saint in one's own home is all very well but it is also to a great extent fiddling while Rome burns.

But then what is sufficient politically? The problems are so great - do they not require a massive personal investment in political activity? Signing the odd petition and writing to one's Member of Parliament don't really seem to square up to the challenge of wholesale global self-destruction.

I think, in conclusion, one has to do both - I'm not sure I have a 'maker', but if I do, when I meet her I want to be able to look her in the eye and say - look I cycled to work, I recycled, I turned off the telly after Newsnight. I lived the good life.

But I also have to be able to say that I fought the good fight. Getting the British governmnet to commit itself to a 60% reduction in carbon emissions was a huge achievement for environmentalists in this country. Internationally this allows Britain to lead by example and demonstrate what is possible if the will is there - hypocracy would mean the Chinese can justifiably slam the door in our faces. There are reasons to be cheerful.

Personally I now need to work out what I can do beyond cycling and sorting the rubbish into separate boxes.

Pirates of the Caribbean

I recently finished reading Tariq Ali's new(ish) book on Latin America, Pirates of the Caribbean. Axis of Hope.

The book is a series of reflections on Latin America's turn to the Left following a number of more or less recent visits by the author.

The best (or rather most entertaining) thing about this book is Ali's acerbic treatment of those he sees as supporters of neo-liberalism and what is widely known in the region as the 'Washington Consensus'.

Take his treatment of two anti-Chavez journalists based in Caracas:

This pair stationed themselves permanently in the posterior of the Venezuelan oligarchy and its political parties. Viewing everything from this advantaged position, these two reptilian journalists became the principal keepers of the oligarchic flame in the Western media.

He describes one of these men memorably as a 'sordid bard of a discredited social order' and accuses the other of 'having developed a tone, a method and the journalistic ethics of denunciatory articles that was oddly reminiscent of Pravda during the Brazhnev epoch'.

This is great stuff.

I also enjoyed Ali in discussion with a number of Cuban cultural figures during a visit to Havana. When they asked him what he thought of their revolution, he says:

It was our revolution, too. We grew up together. My generation fell in love with the Cuban Revolution. It was the lyrical element that appealed to us. The element that conditions the psychology and morals of any society. We read your books, those amazing posters you produced were up on our walls, we reprinted speeches of Fidel and Che in our magazines, we defended you against dogmatic Marxists who didn't believe you had a made revolution and against the liberals who believed you had..and because we loved you we trusted you. Then you betrayed us by going into bed with a fat, ugly bureaucrat named Brezhnev and you defended the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and this turn affected your culture and the lyrical element almost disappeared and so we had to separate.

And now? he is asked.

Now we are both old. We need each other. It's love in the time of cholera.

This paragraph sums up why I feel so ambiguous about the book. Extremely eloquent and witty throughout - plus I go along with much (though certainly not all) of the argument, but expressed with an arrogant certainty and self-assuredness that undermines one's sympathies with the author. This is a commentator who apparently knows it all - and apparently knows it all much better than the people who actually live in the countries he has briefly visited.

This is especially true of those on the Left he believes have veered off course. He dismisses the left of centre governments of Chile and Brazil as if they were as bad as the neo-liberal administrations they replaced (he would no doubt make the same judgement about Labour and the Tories in Britain, so this is not to be unexpected). He is right that both Chile and Brazil remain highly unequal countries (among the most unequal in the region) but he neglects to mention the very significant reductions in poverty that have occurred under both Lula and the Chilean Concertacion government. The fall in absolute poverty in Lula's first term was dramatic in comparative terms.

He unfairly dismisses their more gradualist social democratic approach as first a sell out to Washington and second as merely 'a matter of choice.' I disagree on both counts. Both these governments and the political parties on which they are based are still pursuing an identifiably reformist left project and have enjoyed some notable successes in social terms. Furthermore the role of structure and agency in determining their course is much more complex than Ali makes out. In Chile, for example, there was the Pinochet constitution which dramatically limited the Left's room for manouevre in office. They also faced a highly aggressive right-wing opposition with a not inconsiderable level of popular support. The economic structure inherited from Pinochet was highly regressive, but was also delivering growth at the time the centre-left government came to office which made it politically difficult to make radical structural adjustments.

In the case of Lula I have greater sympathy with Ali: I think Lula miscalculated how much room for manouevre there was following his landslide election and history is likely to judge him overly cautious. However, despite the corruption that has plagued Lula's administration (as it has every Brazilian government since the first democratic presidential elections in 1989) and despite the commitment to excessively high interest rates, Lula and the Workers' Party have managed to deliver a significant reduction in poverty explaining the overwhelming support for Lula in the poorest regions of Brazil in last year's elections.

Too many commentators make simplistic distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' Lefts, ignoring the varying structural constraints and historic trajectories in place in each society. Personally I have always supported the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, but I also have much sympathy with the broader Left in the region, parts of which I know very well. These are good people working in varying conditions. I don't doubt that at important junctures key actors like Lula or Ricardo Lagos could have pushed the envelope further than they did, but I reject Ali's approach to the role of structure and agency - which verges towards an assertion that almost anything is possible, if only the political will is there. This is just too simplistic. Chavez has been brave but he has also benefited from the oil boom and without that his room for manouevre would have been much less.

So Ali does a good talk in this book, but it would benefit from a little more research and a good deal more humility.

On Gramsci and New Labour

There was a brief period between the intellectual collapse of Leninism and the rise of 'Third Way' social democracy when the Left, certainly in many European countries but also across Latin America, re-discovered the thought of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci.

I want to briefly argue here that we should go back to that period in the 1970s and early 1980s when Gramscian thought helped to reinvigorate both ideology and political action within many major parties of the Left, especially those that became associated with Eurocommunism.

Essentially what Gramsci did was retain the transformative potential in Marxist socialism, but give it a democratic strategy suitable to Western European conditions. Essentially he gave ideology and culture priority over physical force in the battle for social change. For the working class to secure power it was insufficient to storm the Winter Palace and physically take the reigns of power - even if it did so, it would only be able to consolidate itself in office by securing 'ideological hegemony' in society at large.

He rejected the causal primacy that orthodox Marxism gave to the economic sctructure over the so-called 'super structure'. In a wonderful section of The Prison Notebooks he says:

The superstructures of civil society are like the trench systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics, during the great economic crises. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organise with lightning speed in time and space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly the defenders are not demoralised, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose their faith in their own strength or their own future.

In the West, there was a proper relation between the State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer dicth, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.

(Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks p.235.)

In other words capitalism was not the dominant social system merely because of economic success or, in the absence of it, the capacity of the state to repress dissent, rather it was supported by a set of widely shared beliefs and ideas throughout society. It was through the combination of economic structural factors and hegemony at the level of ideas that capitalism formed a successful 'historical bloc'. It was therefore important for the forces of the Left to win the 'war of position' (or strength in civil society) in order for them to win the final 'war of movement' (the final push to power).

These ideas led the Italian Communist Party of the 1970s to reject Leninism and adopt a democratic political strategy. Essentially the primary task for the Left was to persuade the population of the case for social change, to build up hegemony at the ideological level. Without taking on the ideas of their enemies, they stood little chance of either taking power or, more importantly, transforming Italian society.

So why is this relevant today and from a British perspective?

The current malaiase on the British Left and within the Labour party comes in part because, on the one hand, New Labour is exhausted in terms of ideas and has pushed the party as far into the centre ground as it is willing to go. And on the other hand, the solutions offered by the party's Left have no real traction with the electorate - if John McDonnell were to be leader of the Labour party we would lose the next election.

So whats the problem? The problem is that we have yet to seriously win the battle of ideas in this country. We have moved to the centre ground, but we have yet to seriously drag the centre ground to the Left. We are as a consequence stuck between the scylla of New Labour, saying that only further moves into the centre ground can guarantee electability, and the charybdis of John McDonnell/Michael Meacher, proposing a set of policies which, while to many of us on the Left instinctively appealing, have little popular traction.

One prominent leader of the Latin American Left puts the challenge like this:

It is one thing to try to influence the centre... its another to move oneself to the centre, with soul, with ideas, with everything

(Jose Pepe Mujicia Cuando la Izquierda Gobierne p.18)

Political scientists put it differently: you have to accomodate yourself to the centre of gravity within the electorate, this is inevitable if you are to win elections, but unless you are to lose your idoelogical thread altogether, you must also try to shape the preferences of the electorate. Successful seduction is not a one way process - but this is what Blair would have us believe.

Now, of course, to some extent I am being unfair on the Blair era. We have succeeded in changing public attitudes in important areas. Clearly this is a much more socially liberal country than it once was: the legislation on gay rights and anti-discrimmination this government has introduced is here to stay. In terms of constitutional reform, too, we have clearly shifted the centre of gravity in favour of democratic change (even if Blair himself has appeared at times uncomfortable with the consequences). The Tories have also been sucked to the left on the health service and education, having to rule out immediate tax cuts for fear of provoking a Labour-led 'Tory cuts' campaign of the kind that proved so successful in the last two elections.

But what about attitudes to social justice? While Labour has delivered a serious and significant reduction in relative (and an even greater fall in absolute) poverty and the Tories now mouth platitudes about social inclusion, public attitudes remain actually very conservative on issues of redistributive change. By and large polls show that people do not see poverty as a major issue and they generally oppose the idea that government should redistribute wealth through higher taxes on the rich.

After ten years we have not seriously shifted the electorate in our direction on this the core issue, the basic raison d'etre of the labour movement. A similar story could be told in the areas of asylum and criminal justice, where the government has arguably stoked up right-wing attitudes rather than challenged them.

We will only get out of the strategic dead end in which we find ourselves if we develop a strategy for winning voters over to the ideas that would underpin a modern left programme.

We should go back to Gramsci.