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Book review

The future of radical politics

Paul Hirst 
The main title of this book should be ignored, if you want to read it profitably. Lagoons of ink will be spilled trying to define the Third Way. All to no purpose. The idea that we can build an inclusive radical centre that can sidestep fundamental conflicts of interest is moonshine. It will not outlast the whims of spin doctors in a hurry. There has been only one practical Third Way between authoritarian state socialism and laissez faire capitalism and that is some form of social democracy. Giddens' book should be read for its sub-title. This is encouraging because a fashionable modern intellectual has come to realise that a revitalised social democracy is the only viable future for radical politics. 

It is easy to caricature mid-century social democracy as class based and statist, committed to top-down solutions delivered through the politics of the nation state. In a more socially fluid, individualised and internationalised world this politics would cease to have popular appeal. Social democracy is necessary because socialism and laissez faire capitalism are possible social systems; it is their human cost that makes them unacceptable. Socialism as an alternative system of resource allocation to the market is attainable, but only at such a cost in liberty and prosperity that free people will not now choose it. Only a dire crisis requiring rationing and draconian planning, like a complete environmental collapse, could legitimate it. Laissez faire capitalism means leaving society to the effect of unrestrained market forces. It leads to periodic catastrophic crises - like that afflicting the 50 millions reduced to beggary in Indonesia - and to continuous gross inequality, that blights and reduces lives. The same objective, therefore, confronted with this choice of possible but extreme social systems, must be to regulate, stabilise and humanise capitalism. That has always been the task of social democracy - to do it within the dual constraints of the parliamentary system and the market. 

Giddens set out to update social democracy so that a modern radical politics can respond to five new dilemmas. First, globalisation: that is, internationalisation of economic and social relations. Second, individualism: that is, the decline of tradition and the growth of self-aware individuals who seek to shape their lives by their own choices. Third, the breakdown of the classic class-based opposition of left and right, creating the need and opportunity for a new broad based radicalism of the centre-left that reaches out to embrace diverse constituencies. Fourth, the problematicity of political agency after class and the decline in the saliency of national politics and conventional political parties in citizens' lives. Lastly, the need to incorporate environmental issues and a new politics of risk requires a new philosophical conservatism, not a blind reliance on tradition but conscious action to behave cautiously to conserve those features of the environment and society that we value. It involves constraining utilitarian rationalism and favouring sustainability. 

Giddens tries to resolve these dilemmas by acting in new ways that break with the statist top-down aspects of the old social democracy. Democracy itself needs to be democratised. The nation-state will not disappear, but it will shift power upwards toward new cosmopolitan, democratic, international institutions and downwards toward regional authorities and third-sector governance. The state needs to be renewed; to become a provider of more efficient services and also more transparent, directly involving and consulting citizens. The new social democracy needs to incorporate a strong and active civil society, not to seek to displace it by state provision. It needs to rely on strong voluntary associations and also on a renewed, but more open and democratic, family structure.  

The economic policies of this new politics should promote human capital and the capacity to manage risk rather than encouraging passive dependence on benefits. Giddens proposes a social investment state, that re-allocates resources toward making a people employable and adaptable. This does not mean cutting welfare, but reconfiguring it. Radical interventionist economic policies at the national level are not discussed. There seems to be little scope for a redistribution for macro-economic policies that boost output and employment, or for active industrial policies. These are clearly part of the economic legacy of old-style social democracy that he regards as having been made obsolete by changes in technology, economic structure and globalisation. 

As an agenda for the renewal of social democracy Giddens' book has much to recommend it. It is far sharper and more together than Blair's own Fabian Society pamphlet. It is, however, sharper and more definite on the dilemmas that face policy than on solutions to them. But it must be said that some difficult issues are dodged: had they been addressed this would be both a more radical and a bleaker book. For a sociologist, Giddens has very little to say about the current structures of power and authority. His emphasis on social fluidity tends to ignore the power structures and sources of conflict that have emerged since the '60s that make the new social democracy as hard a task as the old. 

Giddens argues that a central value of the new politics is that there should be no authority without democracy. Yet we live in an organisational rather than in a democratic society, one composed of large public and private bureaucracies that are precisely authority without democracy. Most state agencies are only remotely and partially responsible to elected politicians, who have their own agendas, and not at all directly responsible to those they serve. Most companies are economic autocracies that are answerable in political terms to nobody, not even their shareholders. Hierarchical organisations are squeezing the voluntary associations in civic society, either marginalising them or forcing them to mimic bureaucratic and managerial practices. These forms of top-down authority have grown in power and scope and have enabled managerial elites to direct an increasing proportion of the revenue stream of organisations towards themselves. 'Fat cats' are not an accident, they are a direct consequence of the growing maldistribution of power in the organisational society. 

We need a radical programme to re-shape company governance, to democratise quangos and to reverse tends toward bureaucratisation. These trends have become general in the public sector in the UK, where paper results rather than real services have become ends in themselves. Democratisation of these institutions will not be easy because it challenges the power and, therefore, the wealth of a new class of managers, consultants, inspectors and ancillary professionals. To democratise the company will be difficult, for it challenges the most powerful institutions in our society. It is necessary not only in itself, but for every economic performance. For every relatively open company that involves and values its workforce, there are dozens of humdrum bureaucracies and several petty tyrannies that make work a misery. To cut back power is to limit the source of wealth of the new class. This will not happen without a fight, one as real as reformers faced against the old plutocracy at the beginning of the century and more daunting because the new hierarchs are far more numerous. 

At the international level, the idea of cosmopolitan democracy also confronts realities of wealth and power that make the struggle for a fairer and more accountable world difficult to contain within the non-conflictual political instincts of the Third Way. The world is starkly divided between rich and poor, both within and between nations. Countries like Brazil, China and Indonesia exhibit staggering degrees of internal inequality and conditions like those against which the nineteenth-century socialists railed. On a global scale, the richest fifth receive 82.7 per cent of world income and the bottom fifth just 5.6 per cent. No form of democracy can contain such inequalities. In terms of international institutions we face a stark contrast between democracy and efficiency. 

Technocratic agencies like the IMF or World Bank, are well resourced and answerable to the wealthy elites of the OECD that fund them, but not to the poorer countries on whom they act. Under-funded United Nations agencies are increasingly neither effective nor accountable. The problem with the UN, or with any scheme of international governance outside of OECD control, is that the majority has no resources and is all too often made up of states like Iran or Sudan that utilise international democratic procedures but are not themselves democracies. Sorting out the institutions of world governance thus confronts us with a bleak choice. For example, we urgently need to control the financial markets and to contain turbulence. In which case we shall have to rely on the institutions created by and controlled by the rich states. Almost all our possible solutions to improve governance on a world scale will not be globally democratic. 

Christians used to talk of the broad and the narrow way. The latter was hard and led to salvation. Social democracy is not an easy way and its results are less certain. There is no broad and easy way, Third or otherwise, to tackle the entrenched accumulations of wealth and power. 
  

Paul Hirst is Professor of Social Theory, Birkbeck College, London and author of From Statism to Pluralism 
  

Published in association with New Times 

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Revised: 17/03/99