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Reclaiming the market for the left?By Martin McIvor Review of The End of Poverty: A Historical Debate by Gareth Stedman Jones (Policy Press 2004) The influential Cambridge historian Quentin Skinner has argued for an intimate but delicate connection between intellectual history and contemporary critique. The past has no authority in itself, nor are its problems necessarily those of today. But it can be “a repository of values we no longer endorse, of questions we no longer ask”. By excavating lost traditions and forgotten debates we can avoid becoming “bewitched” into taking our inherited moral, political and social assumptions for granted. Skinner’s own work on the history of European political thought has revived interest in a civil republican tradition that, with its emphasis on public participation, offers a vantage point for rethinking the liberal obsession with defending the private sphere. In The End of Poverty Gareth Stedman Jones presents an exciting sequel to this story – an attempted modernisation of the republican ideal that would render it applicable to large commercial societies. The result is a radical prospectus that, Stedman Jones contends, could provide the starting point for a new, “post-socialist” social democracy for today. The heroes of Stedman Jones’s extraordinary story are the English radical Thomas Paine and the French Enlightenment philosophe Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet. Both are widely commemorated for their roles in the American and French revolutions and their inspiring articulation of a rationalist, democratic optimism against the corruptions and mystifications of the eighteenth century church and state. But it is less well known that each devoted considerable thought to the development of what now can be seen as the earliest proposals for universal insurance and a redistributive welfare state. In 1794 the new French Republic funded the posthumous publication of Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, which broke a centuries-old taboo by proclaiming that the persistence of poverty was not the result of timeless natural laws or unquestionable divine will, but arose only from “the present imperfections of the social art”. It could be remedied by the establishment of universal pensions, sickness and life insurance, capital grants for young adults, and state education geared to the production of independent, self-reliant, freethinking citizens. Around the same time in England Tom Paine in the Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice made detailed proposals for instituting progressive taxation and death duties to fund a system of child benefits, old age pensions, and grants to support education (using arguments that have more recently been seen as an early justification for something akin to a “basic income” scheme). It was “only by organising civilisation upon such principles as to act like a system of pullies that the whole weight of misery can be removed”. As Stedman Jones points out, an intriguing feature of these proposals is that they were motivated less by a humanitarian concern to relieve hardship than by a realisation that economic security was essential to active citizenship, and that stark polarisations of poverty and wealth would undermine the stability and cohesiveness of a democratic republic. Paine claimed that under his plan “the poor, as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of the government”, while Condorcet aimed for “a rich, active, populous nation without the existence of a poor corrupted class”. But what seems most unfamiliar to contemporary readers is the fact that, in their battles against the old feudal establishment, both thinkers turned to the market and the new “commercial society” heralded by writers such as Adam Smith as their intellectual and social ally. Smith’s writings could be seen as revolutionary in their celebration of the legitimate desire of the poor to improve their lot, held back only by state regulation and regulation that merely served to protect existing concentrations of power and privilege. “Laws and government”, Smith wrote, “may be considered … as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor and to preserve to themselves the inequality of goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor”. Inspired by such a vision, Paine and Condorcet aimed to combine the liberating dynamism of the market with well-designed social protections against financial uncertainty and risk. Such a society would genuinely unleash the energies and talents of all its people and could, they imagined, be expected to lead to a progressive equalisation of social and economic conditions. This unique combination of modernist republicanism with progressive political economy was broken down by the disillusion and drift which overtook post-revolutionary France, and the fierce reaction to the threat of similar disturbances in England. Smith’s followers toned down any radical political implications of his work, while conservatives such as Burke and Malthus forged a very different alliance between what in their hands became the “dismal science” of market economics and the political defence of social and economic inequalities. Nineteenth century European liberalism, insofar as it concerned itself with the “social problem” of poverty, viewed it as primarily a problem of morals and manners – anathema to Paine and Condorcet – wishing only that the poor could be persuaded to save more and breed less. Against this background a new egalitarian politics emerged in Europe, that of “socialism” – essentially anti-capitalist and grounded in class identifications and ideals of common ownership. In Marxism it took perhaps its most developed form; other variants borrowed heavily from romantic and even religious protests at the ravages of industrialisation. But common themes can be identified, in a tendency to downplay “the political” in favour of “social” and “economic” questions, and a stance of fundamental antagonism towards commercial exchange relationships. The standard rebuttal to all this would be that the redefinition of the left’s agenda that took place in the nineteenth century was quite correct, and justified by history. Paine and Condorcet were progressives in their time, but prevented by their “bourgeois” worldview from seeing that the operation of the market economy must render chimerical their dreams of political equality, and that only the forces of class and collectivism could carry social progress forward to its next stage. But Stedman Jones’s provocative implication is that, following the collapse of Soviet communism and amid the tightening siege of West European social democracy, the lessons of history are not so easy to read. Could it be that the conservative backlash of the early nineteenth century forced a wrong turn in the ideological history of the left, cutting it off from the resources of republican activism and economic dynamism that could again be mobilised to its side today? Certainly the diagnoses of socialism’s historic weaknesses are pertinent, though there are of course important exceptions. From the generation of New Left thinkers with which Stedman Jones could once be identified, through the radical democratic aspirations of the Bennite left, the republican programme of Will Hutton’s The State We’re In, and experiments in participatory governance in Porto Allegre, many have sought to strengthen the “citizenship” dimension of the left’s social and economic programmes. It is also arguable that socialists’ instinctive discomfort with market institutions of any kind may at times have inhibited an adequate engagement with the problems of economic theory and policy in a “mixed” economy. Gordon Brown argues for an end to “state versus market” debates and a search instead for ways to strengthen each where they can be shown to “advance the public interest”. Equally resonant, however, are more radical schemes, such as the proposals of socialist-feminist economist Diane Elson for a “socialised market” where strong public regulation, worker and consumer cooperatives and a universal basic income guard against exploitation and unpredictability. Some have even seen a “radical bourgeois” strand to the Alternative Economic Strategy of the 1980s in its support for local enterprises and manufacturing industry against the concentrated economic power of multinationals and the City. There is no doubt that revisiting Paine and Condorcet’s engagement with the radical possibilities of modern society can provide a stimulus and rich resources for thinking about these questions anew. But the most basic question that Stedman Jones’s book forces us to take seriously is whether it is more utopian today to imagine that a free market economy can be rendered compatible with dramatically reduced inequalities, or to imagine that further extensions of public ownership and democratic planning may become possible again in the years ahead. The answer to that question may not be as obvious today as it would have seemed for much of the twentieth century. It is a question that the history of the twenty first century may decide. Martin McIvor is director of the left thinktank Catalyst and recently completed a PhD thesis on the earliest political writings of Karl Marx. Published in Red Pepper magazine, December 2004. |
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