The Good Society: A Pariah's Eye View

Late last year Mute was invited to contribute to an online debate on ‘The Good Society' and the future of European Social Democracy, in which participants were given 700 words to answer a long and windy tract by John Cruddas (UK Labour Compass group) and Andrea Nahles (German SPD). We duly supplied the number of words most closely corresponding to future opportunities for Social Democracy, i.e. none.

What follows, then, is a sort of thought experiment, a word limit-compliant hint, more or less within the organisers' vocabulary, if not their syntax, that the problems with the terms of the debate start with ‘Society', ‘Europe' and ‘Democracy'.

'There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families.'

– Attributed to Margaret Thatcher

‘Societies' are really states, the logic of states is that of conquest, the logic of conquest is ultimately identical to that of slavery.'

– David Graeber, 'Debt: The First Five Thousand Years', Mute, vol. 2 #12.

Thatcher was half right. As she demonstrated in political practice, there is no such thing as ‘society', only contending interests and the institutions developed and deployed in their contention.ⁱ A world of nothing but competing ‘individuals and families' would only be conceivable as a consequence of final victory for the interests Thatcher represented. In the meantime those interests have kept up the collective struggle to bring it about. Tactics shifted slightly in the 1990s when ‘society' returned to official political language (as in the European ‘Third Way', although G.W. Bush‘s re-election slogan The Owners' Society best expresses the stakes), with a renewed emphasis on mobilising ‘community identity', or collective self-coercion, in support of the institutions ensuring continued upward transfer of wealth. But the interests of ownership and the institutions of management remained unchanged, and their representatives' enthusiasm for ‘society' should surprise nobody. The word implies that capital's ascendancy is simply a reflection of human nature.

As David Graeber notes, ‘society' also implies a nation-state (and the inhabitants' voluntary self-identification with it). But the economic crisis has shown (if anyone still doubted it) that not just ‘global systemic risk' but also local questions of ‘good and bad work' and basic social needs are determined by global claims of capital which operate beyond the reach of national states, under the protection of the same ‘property rights' which states themselves exist to guarantee. Any single ‘Good Society' or ‘civic state' would be forced to function under these constraints (such is the melancholy history of social democracy) unless the constraints were overthrown everywhere.ⁱⁱ Overthrowing them sounds the more appealing option, but despite a reference to ‘global economic democracy', the question of the power to overthrow anything at global level remains unresolved in the Good Society tract. This is no accident: the question can't be answered in the text, because the basic category of ‘society' is (a.) national rather than global, and (b.) consensual rather than conflictual. Modest claims for ‘social justice' can be worth winning, but the stakes have been globalised to the point that such gains must apply everywhere in order to be secure at all. This cannot happen unless ‘rights' to an immense amount of ‘property' are not just locally infringed but cancelled generally and without recourse.

Building the Good Society hints at the inadequacy of addressing global conditions through nation-state politics, but thinking in terms of ‘Europe' instead is not a satisfactory alternative, least of all for an avowedly ‘democratic' project. To put it with 700-word-text bluntness, the European Union is (a.) another nation-state, and (b.) not democracy. The Lisbon Treaty gives formal legal standing to European statehood, under-reported as the fact may be.ⁱⁱⁱ As for the ‘nation' part, this is manifest in the combination of internal labour mobility and outward fortification, and is viscerally understood by millions of non-European citizens whose lives are bound to European territory (migrants from former colonies, Turkish ex-Gastarbeiter, native-born non-citizens in the Baltic Republics or Slovenia...), whose pariah status is captured in the Italian expression extracomunitari. The bigotry of citizenship aside, an enclosed European unit is no more able unilaterally to transform or elude global structural reality than are units like Britain, Poland, Luxembourg, etc. Meanwhile the function of the most powerful EU institutions (the Commission, the Council) is managerial rather than even formally democratic. Therefore it is wishful thinking to invoke ‘Europe' as a vehicle of globally effective democratic/left politics without at least also proposing drastic upheaval of the (newly-Constituted) EU institutional structure.

Matthew Hyland <infuriant AT autistici.org> is a contributing editor of Mute

Info

For John Cruddas and Andrea Nahles' text, 'Building the Good Society', see http://clients.squareeye.com/uploads/compass/documents/good%20society%20english%20WEB.pdf

For the resulting ‘Good Society Debate', see http://www.social-europe.eu/category/good-society-debate/page/2/

Footnotes

i The right word instead of ‘interests', of course, is really ‘classes'. It's avoided here only because there isn't space to free it from the connotations of cultural identity – ‘class' as attribute of personality, so that a notion like ‘classism' is allowed to pass unridiculed – in which decades of sociology and journalism have mired it.

ii An unattractive third alternative, of course, would be retreat into national autarchy.

iii See, Anthony Coughlan, ‘A Profound Assault on Social Democracy', Spectrezine, 26 June 2007, http://www.spectrezine.org/europe/Coughlan3.htm