Blue Labour (eBook)

The Politics of the Common Good

Maurice Glasman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-5095-2888-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Labour has been on a wild ride over the past thirty years. New Labour argued that we had no choice but to accept a globalized free market economy in which the race was to the swift, the open and the flexible. Corbynism reacted against this with a jumble of old school statism and identity politics. Both ultimately failed.

In this book, Maurice Glasman takes the axe to the soulless utilitarianism and ‘progressive’ intolerance of both Blair and Corbyn. Human beings, he contends, are not calculating machines, but faithful, relational beings who yearn for meaning and belonging. Rooted in their homes, families and traditions, they seek to resist the revolutionary upheaval of markets and states, which try to commodify and dominate their lives and homes, by the practice of democracy, mutuality and pluralism. This is the true Labour tradition, which is paradoxically both radical and conservative – and more relevant than ever in a post-COVID world.

This crisp statement of the real politics of Blue Labour – rather than the absurd caricature of its detractors – is Glasman’s love letter to the left-conservatism that provides Labour’s best chance of moral – and indeed electoral – redemption.

Maurice Glasman is a Labour Life peer and the founder of Blue Labour.

Inhalt

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: What's Going On?

Chapter 2: The Meaning of Socialism

Chapter 3: From Contract to Covenant

Chapter 4: Democratic Renewal

Chapter 5: Internationalism versus Globalisation

Notes

Rezensionen

"Maurice Glasman was prescient in warning of the rupture between the labour movement and its working-class base. Had the movement paid heed, it may have avoided the morass in which it now finds itself. It is vital that it listens to him now."
Paul Embery, author of Despised

"Maurice Glasman is both one of the finest thinkers in Labour and one of the outstanding conservative thinkers of our time. His vision has much to tell us about what is broken in our politics and his prescriptions can help us heal those fractures. I unhesitatingly recommend his book to anyone interested in how we can build a better Britain."
Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

"well worth reading [...] a book that ranges restlessly and often enlighteningly across politics ancient and modern, economics right and left, and philosophy"
John Lloyd, Times Literary Supplement

"An imaginative attempt at transcending binary politics, Lord Glasman's book will make for an unsettling read for many Labour supporters [...] Given where the country is, and where we are heading, nothing this important is going to be easy."
Jon Cruddas, politicshome.com

"Maurice Glasman's book is an urgent reminder that statecraft is not about immediate victories but securing well-being for all [...] clear, impassioned, grounded in specificities - something of a mouthwash after the sour taste of our regular current diet. For anyone who still believes we haven't missed the tide, it is a very necessary resource."
Rowan Williams, New Statesman

"powerfully argues for the restoration of the bonds offered by faith, patriotism, community and family aided by a guaranteed basic standard of living, and the elevation of workers' dignity above the pursuit of profit."
The Jewish Chronicle

"A slender and elegant analysis ... Here's hoping the publisher sends a copy to each and every Labour MP for Christmas."
Nina Power, Compact

Textauszug

Introduction

Blue Labour was born during the financial crash of 2008 and the dismal twilight of New Labour and the Third Way. It was also the time of my mother’s death. She had a terrible condition called progressive supranuclear palsy and I saw her become a mute witness to her own degeneration. The two came together in Blue Labour as I tried to make sense of the loss both of my Mum and of Labour. The uncritical embrace of globalization, the domination of finance capital, combined with a pitiless progressive modernism, left no place for workers in the movement they had created. It was a case study in alienation. My Mum left school at 13 to work in a factory so she could support her four younger sisters and her ill father, who died a few months before I was born. My love for Labour came from her. She told me how they built the National Health Service, how Hackney Council moved her family from a damp basement to a council flat, led the fight against Hitler and shared her fanatical commitment to ‘education’.

As she lost her capacity for speech, all I could do was watch television with her. We stared together at the unfolding financial meltdown as the combined assets of many generations were lost in speculative hubris. We watched Gordon Brown saying that it was the ‘destiny of labour to save the global banking system’ and my Mum’s eyes met mine and then she shook her head and closed her eyes.

That was when Blue Labour was born, and it turned out to be a river with many currents running through it. Some of them are philosophical and find their source in Aristotle and what is now called virtue ethics, taking in Aquinas and Alasdair MacIntyre along the way. Some are Christian, ranging from the dissenting tradition based on association, liberty and conscience, through that of Catholic social thought and its critique of capitalism based upon the dignity of labour, local democracy, solidarity and the stewardship of nature. These in turn were rooted within a biblical tradition which first articulated that human beings and nature are sacred and not simply resources for the accumulation of power or money. While Blue Labour expanded and the conversations intensified, there was a shared recognition that all these things were embodied in the Labour tradition itself and their recovery was essential for its renewal.

It became clear that any politics that could draw inspiration from the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Putney Debates, from Archbishop Laud and Gerrard Winstanley, from Saul Alinsky and Ernest Bevin, was not going to find its home within a movement dominated by Whiggish assumptions. The roots of Labour lay in its covenantal bond with the British working class. The culture and experience of workers shaped the form of the Labour movement. It was of them, by them and for them, and that was no longer the case. The steady disaffection of the working class from their party was the source of its ‘progressive palsy’.

‘Blue’ Labour began as a recognition of the sadness and demoralization that had beset the party movement and tradition by 2008. It was compromised, lacking in vitality and severed from the roots of its renewal, relationally and conceptually. Things don’t only get better, and the lack of understanding of loss and tragedy required a rearticulation of the fundamental tenets of the Labour tradition and the belief that these are both relevant and true.

The first truth is that human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning. The second is that nature is not a commodity either, but a condition of life and a sacred inheritance. The Labour tradition also asserted that democracy is the best way to resist the domination of the rich and the educated and that the leadership and participation of the working class is central to this. Further, it argued that local democracy is vital, as well as forms of economic democracy that can hold state and market powers to account; a democracy that is both locational and vocational.

More than that, Labour drew upon historical memory, and not only rational argument. It drew upon the Norman Yoke and the tradition of the freeborn for the solidarity required by its associations. It demanded not only a human status for labour but also a move from the contractual to the covenantal. The human status of labour required the binding of capital to reciprocal obligations, the strengthening and not the abolition of inherited institutions such as Parliament and the common law. Labour was rooted in class but was a national party, and its internationalism was rooted in democratic nation states, in which sovereignty was required in order to domesticate capital.

Within the Labour tradition, the liberties were held to be sacrosanct, and there were four fundamental forms: freedom of religion, in which no-one could be coerced in their faith, and that meant freedom of religious practice; freedom of conscience, in that no-one could be coerced in their beliefs; freedom of expression, in that people were free to speak and create and to reject and criticize; and freedom of association, which was the fundamental form of the trade union movement, which was banned for a century before it was accepted. Within Labour, liberty and democracy are not opposed but mutually supportive political practices.

Blue Labour was also born of a recognition that any vital political tradition and movement has to go beyond rational philosophy and embrace paradox, to combine seemingly contradictory elements in new forms. Labour is a paradoxical tradition, far richer than its present form of economic utilitarianism and legal progressivism. The Labour tradition is not best understood as the living embodiment of the liberal/communitarian debate, or as a variant of the European Marxist/social democratic tension. It is robustly national and international, conservative and reforming, Christian and secular, republican and monarchical, democratic and elitist, radical and traditional, and it is most transformative and effective when it defies the status quo in the name of ancient as well as modern values. The Labour tradition has a vast and varied assortment of traditions, stories and accomplishments, great and small, and can tell a story of how things could get better out of the materials inherited from the past. And yet the technocratic managerialism of its dominant ideology could not draw upon its history for its renewal. Its radicalism, nourished by its roots, was displaced by policy driven by its head, and it was very unattractive.

This type of political tradition is to be distinguished from matters of philosophy. Philosophical arguments, like policy proposals, aspire to be universal, coherent and reasonable. Such demands may be useful in the final stages of a policy review when specific recommendations have to be ordered, but remain unsuited to either political action or ethics. Historical continuity, democracy, the necessity of extemporized action and the demands of leadership render politics contingent, comparative and paradoxical in form. Ideas are not ultimate and singular in politics, but contested and related. The English nation, above all, is deeply synthetic in form, constituted by different tribes and people who generated an unprecedented form of common law, common language and an inheritance of a commonwealth. Its political parties and movements have been stubbornly synthetic too, a matter of blending folk and academic concerns through a politics of interests. Political movements which are rooted in the lives and experiences of people bring together new constellations of existing political matter. What to philosophers is an incoherence can be a source of vitality and strength to a political tradition which contests with others for democratic power over its vision of the common good.

Two ancient political traditions came together in the Labour movement. One could almost call them ancestors. On one side was the Aristotelian notion of the Good Life and the Common Good. In this the importance of politics, of virtue understood as a pursuit of a common life between estranged interests, was carried into the political life of the nation. The founders of the Labour movement understood the logic of capitalism as based upon the maximization of returns on investment and the threat this posed to their lives, livelihoods and environment, but they did not embrace class war and clung stubbornly to an idea of a common life with their rulers and exploiters and the democratic renewal of their inherited institutions. The Labour idea of the person, in which the plural institutions of civic life have a vital effect on the flourishing of the individual and are inseparable from it, is explicitly Aristotelian. This is an important root of the conservatism in the Labour tradition, a concern with the preservation of status, limits on the market, an attachment to place, starting with the common sense of people (doxa) rather than with external values and a strong commitment to a common life. This is also a direct link to the self-consciously Aristotelian Tudor statecraft tradition of the sixteenth century, which engaged with the balance of interests within the realm, pioneering endowments to promote the sciences and commerce, developing apprenticeships and slowing enclosures. The ‘Commonwealthmen’ movement in the early twentieth century, of which G.D.H. Cole and R.H. Tawney were active participants, are part of that tradition.1

The second ancestral tradition within which Labour was embedded is that which followed the Norman Conquest and actively pursued the idea of the balance of power within the Ancient Constitution and the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.8.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: Aristotle • Blue Labour • British politics • Catholic Social Teaching • Contemporary Politics • Corbynism • Embery • ethical socialism • faith, family and flag • Free Market • Globalization • Jeremy Corbyn • Labour Party • left conservatism • Maurice Glasman • New Labour • Philosophie • Philosophy • Polanyi • Political & Economic Philosophy • Political Philosophy & Theory • Political Science • Politik • Politik / Großbritannien • Politikwissenschaft • Politische Philosophie u. Politiktheorie • Politische u. Ökonomische Philosophie • postliberal • Postliberalism • Progressive • the Left • Tory socialism • UK politics • Utilitarianism • virtue
• ISBN-10: 1-5095-2888-1 / 1509528881
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2888-2 / 9781509528882