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Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics

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In "Beyond Left and Right," Anthony Giddens analyzes the changing welfare state and, in this context, charts a course for the future of radical politics. Other readers and reviewers may place this book in the context of 1990's debates on welfare reform, but this more a work of sociological and political theory than public policy. In fact, by welfare state, Giddens means the whole of the state as it is concerned with the welfare of its citizens.

Giddens' analysis of various conservative and radical political philosophies--this occupies the book's first three chapters--is trenchant. His new radical politics starts, philosophically, with the insight that a conservative movement become radical and a radical movement become conservative are both intellectually inert. A new radical politics could, however, apply philosophic conservatism in the service of its values.

Also among the book's strengths are the coherence of its of sociological analysis and breadth of academic research. Giddens describes various forces challenging the welfare state in terms of manufactured uncertainty, a concept which is original, convincing, and rich in its implications. He also uses a variety of fellow academics as conversation partners consistently, but unobtrusively, giving the text a value which is quite independent of his thinking.

The last half of Giddens's book, however, is dissapointing. Perhaps that is the inherent paradox of Giddens's writing, that, as a sociologist he can so ably encompass a variety of social changes with terms like manufactured uncertainty and active trust but leave us unimpressed with the generative politics he proposes. Giddens' language is often removed from the practical world of law and politics, so it is never clear whether the superficialitiy of his treatment of issues like third world development or gender relations is deliberate or not.

Nonetheless, I recommend "Beyond Left and Right" to other readers interested in taking a tour of political philosophy and sociological scholarship. Giddens is a scholar capable of ordering his thoughts and those of others in ways which are insightful and cogent, if not always practical. This is evident in the first half of the book, which is strong.

In 1908, in his article "Ministry of Production in a Collectivist State," the Walrasian economist Enrico Barone argued that a socialist economy can mirror the efficiency of the capitalist economy by having the Ministry solve the equations for market clearing and broadcast the resulting market-clearing prices to managers of firms, who are then instructed to minimize costs. In a well-known American Economic Review article of 1929, Fred Taylor reiterated Barone's argument, adding that a socialist government could in addition achieve a more equal income distribution that a market economy based on private ownership of capital. The Great Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, in the years 1935 to 1948, countered the "Walrasian socialists" by claiming that the system of equations that must be solved are too complex to solve, and require more information that any Ministry of Production could ever possibly assemble. In the monumental "socialism debate" of the 1930's and early 1940's, the brillian market socialists Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner checked in on the side of Barone and Taylor, drawing heavily on standard neoclassical economic theory, especially the emerging orthodox standard--the Walrasian general equilibrium model. Lange even suggested that the Ministry of Production could simply act as the notorious Walrasian "auctioneer," searching for market-clearing prices by a dynamic process of "tātonnement."

Indicative of the success of the socialists in battle with their pro-capitalist antagonists was the reaction of the great neoclassical economist Josef Schumpeter. Schumpeter despised socialism for personal and moral reasons, but concluded from the Lange and Lerner arguments that capitalism was doomed, fated to be displaced by socialism in the long run. Compared with capitalism, "the socialist blueprint is drawn to a higher level of rationality," he asserted in his renowned book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). Moreover, he opined, "the socialist order presumably will command that moral allegiance which is being increasingly refused to capitalism," and "the socialist management will have at its disposal many more tools of authoritarian discipline than any capitalist management can ever have."

The reader may wonder why I being a review of Anthony Giddens' Beyond Left and Right with this episode in intellectual history. My motive is to convince the reader that until recently, it was completely intellectually responsible to see socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism, with the added attraction of its being more egalitarian. The leading polarity of the time was the disjunction of the rich and privileged against the poor working stiffs of the world, who had "nothing but their chains to lose," in the poetic words of Karl Marx. Of course, many if not most socialists outside of China and the Soviet Union decisively rejected the despotic character of "real existing socialism" in favor of "democratic socialism" of one form or another. It was perfectly reasonable, then, to see the great political conflict of our age to be that between capitalism run by the rich and socialism run by the working class.

I would say that this characterization of the issue was dominant and unshakable until the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, and gender equality movements of the period starting in 1965. Of course, socialists participated vigorously in these movements, but they (I include myself here) thought that these battles were mere training-grounds for class war and the eventual triumph of socialism. What really was happening, of course, with the complete dissolution of the working class as an agent of socialist change, and the rise of new emancipatory movements based on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and simple freedom and dignity. Symptomatic of this new emancipatory thrust was the founding of Amnesty International in London in 1961, with its stress on human freedom and dignity, and its reliance on public support to counter human rights abuses. Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1978. Other progressive movements based on the environment, eradication of poverty, animal rights and other social issues also grew prominent beginning in this period.

During this period, the working classes in most capitalist countries abandoned socialism with stunning alacrity. Margaret Thatcher was elected May, 1979, and Ronald Reagan in November, 1980. Neither conservative victory could have occurred without the active support of working class voters, who were disenchanted with a labor aristocracy of unions that feathered their own nests at the expense of the public, and welfare states that rewarded socially pathological behavior. If this were not enough, the Soviet Union collapsed between 1985 and 1991, and China became capitalist following Deng Xiaoping's 1979 economic reforms. China's new economic order initiated unprecedented economic growth, mirroring similar, if less dramatic, reforms in South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore. Finally, Third World socialism collapsed as well during this period. For instance, while Cuba failed and a hypocritical African socialism produced economic misery, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and other Latin American countries thrived based on vigorous support for markets and private enterprise.

I recall vividly this period during which left-radicalism collapsed. There were two general responses from intellectuals committed to progressive social change. One group, the socialist ideologues, maintained that nothing had really changed, drew their wagons in a circle, and simply continued to preach the gospel to one another. The second group maintained their radicalism, but became crusaders for the new social movements, including strong support for liberal democratic political principles, which they maintained had been virtually abandoned as a foreign policy goal by the leading capitalist countries. It took perhaps another ten years after the inception of the Thatcher-Reagan regimes before even this meager hint of "radicalism" was abandoned, and progressives turned became reformists pure and simple.

Samuel Bowles and I were certainly in line with this latter movement. In 1975, we published Schooling in Capitalist America, which promoted market socialism and worker-owned firms. By 1985, we had given up on socialism, and we published Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought, which espoused a radical communitarian/worker-control form of market capitalism---radical because we argued in this period that democracy and capitalism were reaching a parting of the ways, as democracy increasingly hampered the ability of firms to make profits. By 1995, we realized that this vision of worker-controlled firms was not viable (the reasons are pretty technical, but the come down to the inability of worker-controlled firms to attract capital investors, and worker-ownership was infeasible because it required workers to hold undiversified asset portfolios). I now support liberal democratic capitalism as the neatest invention since sliced bread.

The transition of the left from opponents of capitalism to reformers within capitalism required a lot of rethinking. Sam Bowles and I accomplished this in a series of books that I still think have interesting things to say, but were surely ignored by the politically relevant actors of the time in the United States. Anthony Giddens had more luck (or perhaps talent). He is best known as the brains behind the 'third-way' politics of the United Kingdom's New Labour movement in the late 1990s, during which he became something of a guru to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Giddens sought to forge a new kind of politics that moved beyond the traditional debates of the political left and right.

What Giddens realized was the left had not only to jettison its most radical visions, but also must learn something from the right, which after all had long predicted the downfall of socialism. Perhaps the most important revision, in the context of British politics, was Giddens' re-evaluation of the welfare state. For the old left, the struggle for the welfare state was seen as a class battle of the have-nots against the haves. In Beyond Left and Right, Giddens recognizes that the welfare state is not a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, but rather a system of government-provided insurance policies that allow people to manage the risk in their lives, especially illness and unemployment. Giddens advised the Labour government in just this manner, but of course, in the United States, Bill Clinton came to the same conclusion without the need for an academic advisor of the stature of Giddens.

This book is worth reading for historical flavor, but it not highly insightful or far-reaching in its scope. Rather, it is a self-help book for radicals who want to come to terms with a new world order.