17.12.1998

Third way to nowhere

Maurice Bernal reviews ‘The third way: the renewal of social democracy’ (Polity Press, 1998, pp166) by A Giddens, a work which some have claimed provides the theoretical underpinning for Blairism.

Marxism has been finally discredited. Socialism is dead. Old-style social democracy on the left (the ‘first way’) and neoliberalism on the right (the ‘second way’) are both exhausted and sterile ideologies. In a world where “there are no alternatives to capitalism” (p24), a ‘third way’ must be found, a new polity capable of guiding us through the momentous social, economic and technological changes that characterise the current epoch.

These are the theses that underlie Tony Giddens’ attempt to put “theoretical flesh” on New Labour’s governance of Britain, a governance succinctly and revealingly described by Tony Blair himself as “pragmatism with values”. Giddens’ goal is to formulate “a new and integrated political outlook”, to provide politics with “a greater sense of direction and purpose” and thereby to demonstrate that “political idealism” can be revived (p2).

As one of Blair’s favourite thinkers - regarded by some as his ideological guru - Giddens is a figure whose writings we must take seriously. Significantly, Blair took him to Washington as his personal adviser for the policy forum with the US leadership in February this year at which the outlines of the ‘third way’ were adumbrated. It is evidently Giddens, prolific writer on sociology and politics, successful publishing entrepreneur and director of the London School of Economics, to whom New Labour is looking in its quest for the concrete political identity and coherent ideology that will, in Blair’s words, place New Labour at the heart of an “international consensus of the centre-left for the 21st century” (p1).

While Giddens modestly describes The third way as merely an “outline”, a framework of thinking that “represents a programme in the making” (p70), some reviewers have greeted his slender volume of pensées with an acclaim unheard of since Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the words of god engraved on tablets of stone.

Will Hutton, for example, that softest of soft ‘left’ ideologues, tells us on the back cover that Giddens

“has done what many considered impossible: he has constructed a coherent and persuasive account of the third way ... this book could be decisive in persuading the Blairites that they must look to the left rather than the right for their political future. It is an important and potentially very significant political intervention.”

Ian Hargreaves, a participant with Giddens in the discussions that led to the book, and therefore hardly a disinterested observer, informs us in the promotional puff that Giddens

“has made the most significant contribution yet to laying the intellectual foundations of a modernised centre-left position. This book will be a landmark. It is a pioneering work of vital interest to the formation of political thinking on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Confronted by such lavish encomiums from some of our mightiest intellects, the present reviewer is reluctant to demur, but for him reading Giddens’ book was a frustrating and wearisome experience. What we have here is not so much a road map indicating the way to a ‘new politics for the new millennium’, but a series of disconnected and confusing signposts. True, the work is replete with the confident, ‘positive’ notions that permeate every utterance coming out of the grinning, complacent mouth of Blair’s New Labour. Giddens’ expository style relies heavily, indeed almost exclusively, on the now familiar language of aims and ‘values’, but beneath the sound and fury of the approved, politically correct, New Labour lexicon there is precious little of substance. Reading Giddens’ tome is like trying to grasp a handful of sand.

Curiously, for a work ostensibly devoted to political theory, the world of real politics is almost entirely absent from Giddens’ tour d’horizon: no detailed, critical engagement with the political, social and economic landscape of Britain as it exists; scarcely a hint of any concrete analysis. Here we are confronted by the triumph of sociology over economics, of fine-sounding ‘ideas’ over the grubby world of material reality. Giddens’ book amounts not to a treatise on politics, but to an extended rhetorical exercise in speculative ethics.

Why is this so? In the main, because, once you strip away all the baroque flummery about ‘values’, what you find is very little that is new - merely an attempt to dress up some tired old notions in new clothes. Perhaps it is bending the stick a little, but Giddens’ work could be seen as an updated, slightly more ‘radical’ - ie, rightwing and troublingly authoritarian - fusion of two strands in the recent history of the Labour Party: first, the project that began on March 26 1981 in the creation of the Social Democratic Party by the so-called ‘gang of four’; second, the Labour Party’s policy review, set in train at the 1987 annual conference. The first was an open split from Labour by elements who found the party’s drift to the left too vulgar for their cultivated palates; the second, a dismantling of left social democracy from within the party, stimulated by a defeatist reaction to the ‘triumph’ of Thatcherite neoliberalism. What unites these two currents, and what animates Blair’s ‘modernising agenda’ and Giddens’ ‘programme in the making’, is a determination to hold on to the category of ‘social democracy’, while jettisoning the reformist pretence of serving working class interests. In this context, ‘social democracy’, as we shall see, essentially becomes a cover name for a strain of bourgeois liberalism, but one with a menacingly rightward trajectory.

The logical fate of the SDP was to be subsumed by Anschluss into the mainstream of bourgeois liberalism - the formation of the Liberal Democrats was the result. People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. Hence, the piquant historical irony that this amalgam of liberal ‘social market’ interests now finds itself in some respects distinctly to the left of New Labour. The Liberal Democrats are in an uneasy coalition with a ‘social democratic’ party determined to become the ‘natural party of government’ in the UK, a party that is approaching the completion of its metamorphosis from a bourgeois party of the working class to a bourgeois party of the bourgeoisie. The political terrain occupied by Blair’s New Labour is distinctly to the right of what used to pass for ‘social democracy’, even in its emasculated SDP incarnation.

The best place to begin a closer examination of Giddens’ outlook is his attitude to Marxism, because here we find a perfect exemplar of his approach. For Giddens, the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the USSR and the Soviet bloc can be taken tout court as evidence, that not simply ‘official communism’, but also Marxism itself has finally been discredited.

Marx’s economic doctrines and his theory of history can, therefore, be dismissed as plainly wrong. “In the industrial countries, there is no far left to speak of” (p42), and so, as Giddens would have it, history and life have declared their verdict:

“The economic theory of socialism was always inadequate, underestimating the capacity of capitalism to innovate, adapt and generate increasing productivity. Socialism also failed to grasp the significance of markets as informational devices, providing essential data for buyers and sellers. These inadequacies only became finally revealed with intensifying processes of globalisation and technological change from the early 1970s onwards” (pp4-5).

Leaving aside the shortcomings of Giddens’ ‘argument’, in effect, no more than a variation on Fukuyama’s capitalist triumphalism - remember that we live in “a world where there are no alternatives to capitalism” - his brief and incoherent account of Marxism betrays his own earlier political roots in old-style left social democratic reformism:

“The notion that capitalism can be humanised through socialist economic management gives socialism whatever hard edge it possesses ... For Marx, socialism stood or fell by its capacity to deliver a society that would generate greater wealth than capitalism and spread that wealth in more equitable fashion. If socialism is now dead, it is precisely because these claims have now collapsed” (pp3-4). Thus Marxian socialism is reduced by Giddens to nothing more than the desire to increase production and build a fairer society, one in which wealth is distributed more ‘equitably’.

The learned professor, who has written scores of books and hundreds of articles on politics, sociology and the like, appears never to have understood Marx at all. He would have his readers believe that Marx was no more than a reformist social democrat, and that the abject failure of left social democracy to produce a radical redistribution of wealth and power in western societies thus finally ‘discredits’ Marxism as a doctrine. Not a word about the most fundamental presupposition of Marx’s political theory, that only the revolutionary transformation of world society - an act of international self-liberation by the working class itself - can lead to the real emancipation of humankind.

True to his method, Giddens adroitly glosses over the existence of class divisions and class struggle in capitalist societies. Awkward matters of this kind are not to his purpose. Hence, the “steep decline in the blue-collar working class” (p20) is mentioned merely as a facet of the purportedly dramatic shift in patterns of political affiliation at the ballot box. According to Giddens, the “integrated working class community is a persistent image, but now largely belongs to the past” (p82). One can well believe that, from his lofty perch at the LSE, or his comfortable armchair in New Labour’s trendy political salons, the professor has little contact with the working class. But when his Labour friends trumpet the news that so many thousand new jobs have been created (or explain why the loss of thousands of others could not have been avoided), just who does Giddens imagine actually does these jobs?

Giddens is not an economist, but that is no excuse for confusing the evident decline in the manufacturing sector of western economies with a decline in the number of people engaged in wage labour. The fact that this labour is now exercised increasingly in the fashionably designated ‘weightless’ service sector does not change its objective character in the slightest. In common with most bourgeois British intellectuals, Giddens seems to regard class in a narrow, trivial sense as something to do with the trappings of social rank, with status and manners - no cloth caps and ferrets: ergo no working class. Like politicians, who tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read in the newspapers, the avant-garde of contemporary sociologists propagate the myth that ‘we are all middle class now’ - and then believe it when it is fed back to them by the broadsheets.

For Giddens, the working class as such, and even more the growing underclass produced by the polarisation of wealth and opportunity in Britain, is mainly significant in terms of the threat which it poses to “social cohesion”. This is a nice euphemism for the status quo, in which the ruling class and its myrmidons should be allowed to enjoy their wealth, power and privileges undisturbed. Defusing the threat to “social cohesion” - ie, stabilising increasingly fissiparous social relations in a period of accelerating capitalist crisis - is actually a good working definition of what ‘third way’ values are actually all about.

Giddens’ approach to Marxism and to the class question are examples of his failure to come to grips with the complexities of real politics, but they are, after all, quite understandable in the light of his overall objective. The same can be said for the markedly schematic, rhetorical approach he adopts to the problem of left and right in politics. Here, paradoxically, there is a measure of agreement between us, though for quite different reasons. Giddens is right, of course, to point out that “Socialism in the west became dominated by social democracy - moderate, parliamentary socialism - built upon consolidating the welfare state” (p4). He is equally right to say that ‘old-style’ or classical left social democracy personified by the post-war Labour governments, with their commitment to full employment based on Keynesian demand management, state intervention in industry and so forth, came to grief in the 1970s, with the end of the long post-war boom.

Where we differ, needless to say, is on the question of why classical left social democracy in the UK ended in the cul-de-sac of the 1976 IMF bailout of the Callaghan government. This was not because of some failure of ‘policy’ on the part of government, not because they took ‘wrong’ decisions (though doubtless in their own terms they did take many), but because of objective developments in capitalism itself on an international level. The declining rate of profit, the dislocation to production and markets caused by the oil crisis, and many other factors produced a situation in which the comfortable post-war consensus was doomed to disintegrate. The ‘first way’ failed for the simple reason that its reformist goal of ‘humanising’ capitalism through modest redistribution and the creation of a welfare blanket was always dependent upon and inconceivable outside the context of a generally benign economic environment. When that environment changed, the scope for meaningful reformist palliatives died with it.

Where Giddens is least controversial, from this point of view, is undoubtedly in his portrayal of neoliberalism as exemplified by the advent of the Thatcherite right. He correctly points to the intrinsic contradiction in neoliberalism’s espousal of the unfettered market: “Individualism and choice are supposed to stop abruptly at the boundaries of the family and national identity, where tradition must stand intact. But nothing is more dissolving of tradition than the ‘permanent revolution’ of market forces” (p15). Even now, we tend to underestimate the neoliberal radicalism of Thatcher’s active endorsement of social inequality and her root and branch attack on institutions like the welfare state, which, in the words of the neoliberal ideologue David Marsland, “wreaks enormously destructive harm on its supposed beneficiaries ... cripples the enterprising, self-reliant spirit of individual men and women, and lays a depth charge of explosive resentment under the foundations of our free society” (p13). Yet when we come to look at Giddens’ own nostrums for tackling the problem of the welfare state, or, for that matter, when we review Jack Straw’s recent green paper on the family, we find disturbing echoes of just such neoliberal, authoritarian approaches, but this time dressed up in the guise of a ‘communitarian’ ethic.

It is when Giddens turns to the supposed “exhaustion” of distinctions between right and left in contemporary polity that he really begins to tie himself and his poor readers into all kinds of knots. Yet this is probably the cornerstone of his schematic justification for the adoption of the ‘third way’ and its associated ‘values’. The question at issue (explored in depth by Giddens in his second chapter on the “five dilemmas”) is whether there has been a “qualitative change” in the relevance of the traditional left-right polarity in politics.

To begin with, Giddens appears to accept the arguments put forward by the Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio in his book Left and right: the adversarial nature of political discourse means that there will always be polarisation. When the two camps are more or less evenly balanced, the distinction is evident; but when one or other party becomes so dominant as to exclude the other, then both sides have an interest in questioning the relevance of this distinction. Giddens himself cites the case of Britain under Thatcher:

“The side that is more powerful has an interest ... in declaring that ‘there is no alternative’. Since its ethos has become unpopular, the weaker side usually tries to take over some of the view of its opponents and propagate those as its own opinions. The classic strategy of the losing side is to produce a synthesis of opposing positions with the intention in practice of saving whatever can be saved of one’s own position by drawing in the opposing position and thus neutralising it” (p39).

Out of the mouths of babes - and even professors of sociology - we do sometimes learn the truth. As everyone will recognise, this was exactly the situation of Labour in the 1980s. As Giddens himself, in a moment of candour, points out, “The claim that Tony Blair has taken over most of the views of Thatcherism and recycled them as something new is readily comprehensible from such a standpoint” (p40). Indeed so, professor. Under pressure from the ideological ascendancy of Thatcherite neoliberalism, Labour eventually decided that the only way to avoid a fifth defeat at the ballot box was to don some borrowed Tory robes and claim them as its own.

So far, so bad - at least we can understand this common sense exposition of opportunism. Any man or woman in the street can understand why Blair became Thatcher in trousers. There really was “no alternative”. Now, with a parliamentary majority of 179 seats, Blair can do more or less what he pleases. But the time will come when his government will falter. Should the Labour left reassert itself, then, in order to survive, Blair will once again be obliged to change his coat - or at least its outward appearance. On this reading of the vagaries of bourgeois politics, Bobbio and Giddens appear to concur that “the left-right distinction won’t disappear” (p41).

Yet almost in his next breath Giddens opines that “it would be difficult to resist the conclusion” that there actually has been a qualitative change in British politics (p43). It is almost as if somebody from Millbank had taken him by the lapels and said, ‘Tony, you’re in danger of getting off message here. The left is passé. What we need you to tell people is that the future belongs to a vibrant, new centre-left for the new millennium.’

Abruptly then, we are reminded:

“With the demise of socialism as a theory of economic management, one of the major division lines between left and right has disappeared ... The Marxist left wished to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a different system. Many social democrats also believed that capitalism could and should be progressively modified so that it would lose most of its defining characteristics. No one any longer has any alternatives to capitalism - the arguments that remain concern how far, and in what ways, capitalism should be governed and regulated. These arguments are certainly significant, but they fall short of the more fundamental disagreements of the past” (pp43-4).

In other words, as Giddens puts it, “Social democrats should take a new look at the political centre ... the idea of the ‘active middle’, or the ‘radical centre’ ... should be taken seriously” (pp44-5). The ‘radicalism’ of the new centre-left would express itself in terms of a concern with traditional leftwing preoccupations such as equality and social justice - in a word, with “emancipatory politics”. To give more substance to what, after all, is a pretty anodyne restatement of liberal doctrine, rather than any kind of leftwing ideology, Giddens informs us that “we are talking of the alliances that social democrats can weave from the threads of lifestyle diversity ... a reformed welfare state, for example, has to meet criteria of social justice, but it has also to recognise and incorporate active lifestyle choice, be integrated with ecological strategies and respond to new risk scenarios” (pp45-6).

The reader will rightly ask what on earth this guff actually means. It is a question that will recur often when we turn in a moment to the exhaustive and exhausting litany of politically correct slogans that comprise the ‘third way’ in all its glory. Before we do so, it might be helpful to throw some light on Giddens’ very Millbank obsession with ‘lifestyles’ - not so much in order to satisfy intellectual curiosity, but to illustrate the extent to which Giddens appears to occupy a world far removed from that in which we mere mortals live.

One of his reasons for junking the idea of class is that a supposed ‘value shift’ has occurred in the UK as well as in mainland Europe - a shift from “scarcity values” to “post-materialist values”, accompanied by “a changing distribution of values, which fits neither class lines nor the right/left dichotomy”. In arguing this dubious but undoubtedly trendy sociological point, Giddens relies heavily on the work of the political scientist Ronald Inglehart, whose thesis it is that “After a certain level of prosperity has been reached ... voters become concerned less with economic issues than with the quality of their lives” (p19). The outlook of the ‘affluent majority’ has apparently moved away from the social democratic ethos of collectivism and solidarity. Individual achievement and economic competitiveness are now in the foreground of people’s concerns.

This sounds like a tarted up description of the dog-eat-dog mentality, with its stress on the individual ambition and hedonism that is emblematic of Thatcher’s neoliberal social doctrine. Far from deprecating it in a manner consistent with his alleged concern for “equality, social justice and emancipatory politics”, Giddens appears to condone it, or at the very least to suggest that the new social democracy of the ‘third way’ should take it on board as part of its effort to “weave alliances from threads of lifestyle diversity”. In any event, the ‘affluent majority’ is an elusive, in fact non-existent, category. The working class people among whom this reviewer spends his life - real workers, not figments of the imagination - have precious little time to devote to considerations of “lifestyle choice”. Their overriding concern is with keeping (or in many cases finding) a job, and with all the mundane problems that are the bread and butter of folk who live outside the circles in which the learned professor clearly moves. Before he lectures us on ‘values’, Giddens should try to get out more.

Turning to the substance of Giddens’ ‘third way’ values, we are confronted by a difficulty. His book is stuffed full of the most pious-sounding homiletics and earnest exhortations. One loses count of the slogans and watchwords - many of them enclosed in little boxes of text to assist us in learning our ‘third way’ catechism. But when the weary reader finally reaches page 155, they will still be somewhat confused about what the ‘third way’ actually means and how it is all supposed to happen.

To begin with, it seems significant that Giddens himself is defensive about the connections which readers might make between the ‘third way’ as such and Blair’s New Labour project. He points out that the prime minister’s critics maintain that “Blair and New Labour have persisted with the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher” (p24), and that “many see the New Labour project as an empty one” (p155), as so much hype, dependent for its efficacy on image manipulation, soundbites, stunts and all the rest of it. Indeed, this is precisely how we do see things, and we are right to do so. Rather than springing to the defence of his friend and pupil, Giddens hastily tells us that his “aim is not to assess whether such observations are valid, but to consider where the debate about social democracy stands” (p155). Clearly, it would be self-defeating in terms of credibility, if Giddens were to associate his own agenda with Blairism. To do so would be to risk being seen as an apologist for the kind of politics whose provenance devotees of the turf might describe as ‘by Jenkins out of Thatcher’.

Yet the “prime motto” which Giddens chooses for his ‘third way’ politics is “No rights without responsibilities” (p65) - a slogan culled from the lexicon of communitarianism, that discredited body of poorly camouflaged rightwing doctrine with which Blair was flirting in the period before his election last year. Giddens makes the connection explicit:

“Old-style social democracy ... was inclined to treat rights as unconditional claims. With expanding individualism should come an extension of individual obligations. Unemployment benefits, for example, should carry the obligation to look actively for work” (p65).

So, as you see, Labour’s ‘new deal’ version of workfare has a profoundly moral basis. The welfare state as such should constitute not a safety net for the poor and destitute, but a “common morality of citizenship”. Welfare itself must have a “positive” connotation and not be targeted largely at the poor, as in the United States. The commitment to “positive welfare” must involve “the cultivation of human potential” (ie, obliging people to fend for themselves) rather than “after-the-event redistribution” (giving people money). Where unemployment is concerned, welfare is, in effect, a way of educating people about their responsibilities and disabusing them of the notion that they have any ‘right’ to state aid merely because they have no work. Without such an education in civic virtue, the workless might be stupid enough to imagine that the taxes they paid when they were in work somehow entitled them to receive some of that money back in benefits. We are already seeing what the reality of this “prime motto” means to New Labour in other areas, such as disability benefit, the first of many projected measures of ‘radical centre-left’ welfare reform.

Lest we should jump to the conclusion that this moral precept applies only to the working class (except, of course, that the working class is “a thing of the past”), Giddens hastens to assure us that “As an ethical principle, ‘no rights without responsibilities’ must apply not only to welfare recipients, but to everyone. It is highly important for social democrats to stress this, because otherwise the precept can be held to apply only to the poor or to the needy” (p66). This is the kind of cant and hypocrisy which emerges whenever Giddens’ moralising tract raises issues directly bearing on the interests of the disadvantaged.

But at least his discussion of welfare-related issues has the virtue of clarity, in two senses: it is intelligible, and it exposes the social authoritarianism that lurks behind the author’s ‘social democratic’ phrase-mongering.

With the exception of his lucid, if politically and economically limited discussion of the implication of globalisation (Giddens fails to point up the serious effects of the globalisation of labour as well as finance capital), clarity is definitely not a characteristic of the book as a whole. This is what makes it hard to read and even harder to summarise in a review.

The textbook layout may lull the reader into thinking that the work can be grasped in an orderly fashion, but even the most skilled sociological exegete would have difficulty in making much concrete sense out of an endless stream of fresh-minted categories that are, on closer inspection, either unspecific or banal: we are told, for example, that ‘third way’ social democracy must add to its concern with emancipatory politics an engagement with ‘life politics’ (a category coined by Giddens in his earlier book Beyond left and right). “Whereas emancipatory politics concerns life chances, life politics concerns life decisions. It is a politics of choice, identity and mutuality”, embracing “issues to do with the changing nature of family, work and personal and cultural identity” (p44).

The ‘third way’ values which relate to life politics are listed as: equality, protection of the vulnerable, freedom as autonomy, no rights without responsibilities, no authority without democracy, cosmopolitan pluralism and philosophic conservatism (p66). In programmatic terms, the ‘third way’ is rooted in concepts such as the “democratisation of democracy” (p70), which supposedly means devolving power both downwards and upwards so as to found a polity that is “neither superstate nor only a free trade area”, reinventing government by sometimes opting for “market-based solutions”, and sometimes “reasserting the effectiveness of government in the face of markets”.

The renewal of community, a theme that is “fundamental to the new politics”, means fostering “the local public sphere”, encouraging “social entrepreneurship”, and creating a “balance of autonomy and responsibility” with “diversity and choice in the democratic family” (p70). The “social investment state” will provide the foundation for life politics by promoting a “new mixed economy” that must focus on “a synergy between public and private sectors, utilising the dynamism of markets but with the public interest in mind”. There must be a “balance of regulation and deregulation on a transnational as well as national and local levels, and a balance between the economic and the non-economic in the life of society”, so as to nurture a society of “responsible risk takers” in the spheres of government, business and the labour market (p99).

In a magnificent crescendo, Giddens extends his vision “Into the global age”, calling for the fundamental restructuring of the division of powers currently operative in the European Union, and advocates a move towards truly “global governance”, whereby existing political and administrative institutions will be incorporated into new legislative, administrative, intergovernmental and judicial bodies, at the head of which will preside an “Economic Security Council” as part of the United Nations (p129).

Enough is enough. Pity your poor reviewer, who spent several days of his life in a vain effort to extract any meaning other than the trite and superficial from this torrent of sociological vacuity and “philosophical conservative” idealism masquerading as theory. No doubt he failed because his critical faculties are still under the sway of a Marxism that has been “finally discredited”, a Marxism that tells him that Giddens is a charlatan, a purveyor of ideological snake-oil. Can this really be the stuff with which New Labour means to fill the ideological vacuum created by its abandonment of every last vestige of ‘old-style’ left social democracy?

In their quest to discover some sort of theoretical legitimisation of the Blair project, even the Millbank intelligentsia must surely soon come to realise that the ‘third way’ is simply a non-starter, that it is, indeed, the way to nowhere.