Liberals taking Labour's place? posted by Richard Seymour

Nick Clegg, undoubtedly flushed from having secured The Guardian's backing, is seeking to woo Labour voters by claiming that the Liberal Democrats have taken the place of Labour in UK politics. He explains: "I have always accepted the first part of Roy Jenkins's analysis which says that historically Labour and Liberal Democrats are two wings of a progressive tradition in British politics." But now the Liberals are ahead of Labour in the polls (though the electoral system is unlikely to translate that into seats), he believes that his party can take Labour's place as the main opponent of the Tories. He states that, to this purpose, he is now going all out for a Liberal Democrat majority, and rejects the call for tactical voting that soft left groups like Compass are backing.

Now, I think this is more than mere hubris on Clegg's part, but not much more than hubris. It is true that Labourism was always an electoral pact between liberals and socialists. It is true that the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party are organisations resulting from a factional split by the liberals. It is true that hundreds of thousands, and perhaps a million or so, Labour voters could now defect to the Liberal Democrats in 2010. I would not be surprised. Nor would I be displeased to the Liberals take out a few of the Blairites - eg, Luciana Berger in Liverpool Wavertree, a dimwitted careerist who made an arse of herself upon resigning from the NUS a few years ago, and whose handlers won't even let her pop out for a jar of coffee in case she commits a pratfall. But to say that this would signify the Liberals taking Labour's place in politics would be to forget how and why the Liberals re-emerged as a serious political force in the late twentieth century. The abridged narrative that we usually get is that Labour responded to the 1979 defeat by moving to the radical Left, apparently oblivious to the fact that the population was moving to the right. In despair, sensible liberals like Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams left the sinking ship and formed a new party to realign British politics - a party which would no longer be based on the old fixed class identities. That new party formed a natural alliance with the Liberals in the 1983 and 1987 elections, made powerful advances into Labour territory, then took the logical and long overdue step of merging with them.

In fact, the Labour coalition had been experiencing trouble for some time. Liberalism had started to make serious headway electorally from the late 1960s, at just the same time as the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. Labour voters, disaffected by the experience of Labour governments, were searching for an alternative kind of reformism. Some of this was because of the experience of trade unionists under Labour, which had consistently ended up in pitch battles with organised labour. The radicalisation of the 1970s therefore, did not actually have the effect of increasing support for the Labour Party, as had been the case in the past. In fact, Labour's membership fell, as did its total vote, between 1970 and 1974, and in the February 1974 general elections, the Liberals gained almost 20% of the vote for the first time since 1929. This did not come exclusively from the growing 'new middle class' of managers and supervisors, but increasingly from trade unionists. In 1964, 73% of trade unionists voted for the Labour Party. In 1974, only 55% did. By the time of the 1983 election, it was down to 39%.

When the post-war consensus that had underpinned the Labourist electoral coalition started to crumble, so did the coalition. Most of the working class base moved to the Left, and a sort of germinal grassroots democracy started to emerge. There was unprecedented levels of debate, a flourishing of ideas, in the movement. The Labour Party left drew the conclusion from the failure of Heath's incomes policies, the 1973 crisis and the rising arc of industrial militancy, that it was necessary to move beyond the consensus, effecting a radical shift in the balance of wealth and power in society. This meant higher taxation, an attack on inherited wealth, and the creation of cooperatives in failing industries to give workers a share of power (as an alternative to older models of nationalisation that simply reproduced the hierarchies prevalent in the private sector). That they found themselves unable to deliver these changes, they said, was due to an undemocratic and hostile state bureaucracy - confirming the diagnosis of Ralph Miliband, without sharing his recommended solution.

The Liberals under Jeremy Thorpe offered themselves as a party of the "radical centre". They pledged to save Britain from a see-saw between the "Party of Management" and the "Party of Trade Unions", to overcome the old class divisions. As good liberal pluralists, they maintained that managers and workers were merely two of many special interest groups in society, whose disputes could be arbitrated and resolved by a benevolent government. Labour could not do this because, dependent as it was on the unions it could not operate an efficient incomes policy. (Quite the reverse, as it transpired: Labour's relationship with the trade union bureaucracy left it in a better position to negotiate the Social Contract). By the same token, a Tory party dependent on big business for its funding could not constrain prices. The old class-based parties had failed. The Liberals did not deny that there was a material basis for class divisions, and said they would attenuate this with a radical redistribution of wealth. But the basis of Liberal policy would be the individual, not masses and classes. Despite the particular ideological inflections I have mentioned here, the Liberals were merely upholding the consensus, which had failed. Their plea for some sort of class compromise was a plea for precisely the sort of arrangement that was no longer working.

The Tories, of course, responded to the crisis of the post-war order by moving toward the radical free market right: first with Heath's 'Selsdon Man', which fell to pieces, and then with the Hayekians, Friedmanites, and Pinochistas who took control of the party in 1975. Like the Liberals, they believed it was possible to move beyond class, and that individuals were what mattered. Unlike the Liberals, they weren't interested in incomes policies or price controls to achieve sovereignty of the individual. They believed that you had to take on the trade unions as the single biggest impediment on the rights of individuals to dispose of property and the profits of that property as they saw fit. The specific dogmas they espoused in this respect were not indispensable. When monetarism was seen not to be working as a policy, they dropped it. But even that was not a simple intellectual error. Hayek, Thatcher's court philosopher, understood that the point of monetarism was to put countering inflation at the centre of the agenda, and to recognise that inflation was not merely the result of macro-economic mismanagement but of the balance of political power between the unions and the employers. An attack on inflation was therefore an attack on full employment, collective bargaining and union strength.

So, you had a crisis in the post-war system; a Labour Party whose left wanted to move beyond the consensus and radically level the wealth and political power in society; a Conservative Party which wanted to move beyond the consensus and introduce radical new modes of class power; and a Liberal Party which was sticking doggedly to Butskellism. The SDP were effectively of the same opinion as the Liberals on this basic question. And in 1983, the Liberal/SDP Alliance assembled the broadest possible cross-class vote in favour of the post-war consensus. And they were indeed successful in mobilising a sizeable vote from all classes. While Labour still relied disproportionately on the support of manual workers, and the Tories found their bedrock in the lower middle class, the Liberals were not overly reliant on a single class bloc, though they tended to aim for the relatively more affluent workers. If Tory voters were mobilised by their party's stance on privatization (82%), and Labour voters by unemployment (84%), there was no single issue on which Alliance voters were galvanised. It was the general ideological outlook, centrist on class issues, radical on issues of crime and defence, that appealed to their voters.

So, a majority rejected Thatcherism, voting either for the post-war consensus or a radical alternative to it. But, and this is why the Lib and Lab factions of the "progressive tradition" needed each other, the first-past-the-post system did not translate this into an anti-Thatcherite majority in parliament. The seats system in the UK had always been rotten, from before the First Reform Act of 1832 until after the Fifth Reform Act of 1928, and it had usually worked to the advantage of the right. The Liberals, anxious to escape an alliance with the trade unions, have long proposed proportional representation. Labour, determined to maintain a monopoly on all social forces left-of-centre, have only fitfully assented to this idea. Instead, they moved farther and farther to the right, desperate to recapitulate the old electoral coalition, ultimately unsuccessful in doing so. The Tories were able to force through neoliberal reforms with all the appearance of a real mandate, and both Labour and the Liberals have adapted to that situation. Now the Liberals are run by their 'Orange Book' faction, Labour is run by the Blairites, and the Tories... well, there's a book on that topic coming out soon.

If the Liberals overtake Labour in the polls, therefore, it will not be a case of the Liberals taking the place once occupied by Labour. As in 1974, as much of their new support is coming from Tories as from Labour supporters. They are effective at outflanking Labour to the Left when they want to, which is what they're trying to do in the campaign literature I have received through my door. But their basic stance in this crisis is that they are beholden neither to the unions nor to the bankers. It's the same formula as in their 1974 manifestos, the same goal of building a centrist bloc. The difference now is that there has been no sustained radicalisation in the working class, and Labour is not standing on a left-wing manifesto; nor has there been a generalised move to the right in the population, and the Tories are doing everything they possibly can not to appear to be too right-wing. Given the prevailing ideological disorientation, the absence of mass resistance to the recession, the hatred for the bankers, the contempt for the MPs who like big expense accounts and are on sale to American lobbyists, and the utter alienation from the main parties - well, given all this, a space is naturally opening for an 'honest broker' who can appear to transcend the "special interests" and efficiently manage our way through the present crisis. The trouble is, whoever governs for the next five years is about to watch that space disappear.

Labels: class, keynesianism, labour, lib dems, liberals, neoliberalism, new labour, Post War Boom, thatcherism, tories

The religion of the masses posted by Adam Marks

In 1938 Albert Hoffman developed the most important drug of the 20th century. I am speaking of LSD-25.

LSD is a twentieth century drug. Invented, perfected and propagated in the twentieth century. It reached the height of social significance during a period of upheaval and challenge. People placed great significance on it. Its various advocates saw it as a cure for alcoholism, a lever for psychiatry, a chemical weapon, a sacrament and the agency of revolution.

The period of upheaval is, of course, the nineteen sixties. The fallout from the sixties helped create the stasis of the 80s, 90s and 21st century. It helped make us who we are today and for that reason its worth looking at. It’s also worth noting that acid a social phenomenon will probably never come again.

Why the focus on mind altering substances? More or less for the observation Hunter S Thompson made at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: consciousness expansion went out with the sixties. Looking back in 1971 he recalls:

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

The sixties were a culmination of a slow awakening from the war nightmare (by the way, what a wonderful passage that is!). The war babies had become post war adults. Scarcity and violence had been abolished. The world of virtue and delayed pleasure, the world their parents inhabited, made no sense. What’s rational is actual. The world was ripe for overturning. What do we want? When do we want it?

Now.

The extent to which the world fought back to a greater degree determined the political level of youth culture. In America there was the obvious clash with the Vietnam war draft and Jim Crow. I don’t want to dwell on it, but it’s easy to imagine Sgt Pepper in America as an uptight bureaucrat or politician instead of a charming bandleader.

The sixties were made for uppers, consciousness expansion. Unlimited horizons draw people on, trying to reach vanishing point. Take the spiritual dimension of LSD. Religion in the west taught delayed pleasure and humble worship through powerful institutions (catholic faith has to travel through a middle man, the priest, there is no other way). The youth movement did look to eastern religion for inspiration and a spiritual centre, varieties of Buddhism and Hinduism. But you still have the problem, why wait for pleasure and enlightenment when you can get it all for 3 bucks a hit?

Historians and HST fans know the next line:

So now, less than five years later, you can up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark – that place where the wave broke and rolled back.

Their energy didn’t simply prevail. The kids didn’t break on through to the other side. Youth/drug culture of the seventies was locked in a “survival trip”. Downers became the vogue: “whatever Fucks You Up – whatever short circuits your brain and grounds it out for as long as possible”.

It’s a neat illustration of social change as viewed through drug consumption.

As long as people have had minds they’ve had minds to alter. There is the Terrence McKenna theory of the legend of the fall of man (the tree of knowledge held an ergot infected fruit, which first galvanised our ancestor’s minds). An example: the Chinese were the first people reckoned to have cultivated cannabis, around 2,600 BC. Herodotus, meanwhile, was the first western historian to have recorded its use as drug (in Scythia people used to throw seeds on hot stones, inhale the vapour and “howl with joy”).

But we can already see the interaction of drug and society is more complicated than good times/bad times. Return to the spiritual theme: one of the most famous proselytisers of LSD was Timothy Leary. He promoted LSD as both a force for revolution and the foundation of a new religion (originally predicted by Aldous Huxley).

What he was driving at was the parallel between (in particular) Buddhist concepts of death and reincarnation and familiar psychedelic experiences (ego-loss, oceanic consciousness, “I know what it’s like to be dead” etc). He tried to reconcile these different experiences, to this end he wrote The Psychedelic Experience, based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was written to be whispered to the dying as they passed between incarnations.

On this basis he was able to sell LSD as a sacrament to an affluent but alienated generation. By the sixties, western Christianity had long been in decline, its basis worn away by numerous scientific and social discoveries. Perhaps its sole appeal remained as a communal focal point, the ritual being an end in itself (best described, and critiqued in the bleak lyric of Eleanor Rigby: perhaps the Beatles most blunt social commentary).

This had very little appeal for a generation that felt it didn’t have to wait for the afterlife when it knew it could have heaven on earth. But why wasn’t there heaven on earth? Now we get onto the first part of Leary’s prescription.

We've talked a lot about the rise of the military/industrial complex in WW2 and the determining effect it had. While the permanent arms economy was able to deliver a long boom and keep the working class sated it thoroughly smothered all life and vibrancy.

Leary was a renegade Harvard psychologist. His philosophy has been described as a blend of “post-Freudian psychology, zen and New Left utopianism”. When regarding society he drew on the model of the Id, Ego and Superego. The id is unbridled desire: I want, I need. The superego is the conscience: I should, I ought. Where these two meet the ego, the outward personality is formed. What people feel they should or ought to do is determined by society.

In Leary’s (and our) age this is industrial capitalism. If people were so intensely atomised, moulded and reorganised by the capitalist system, introducing a powerful hallucinogenic drug such as LSD, with its sense enhancing, ego-shattering power, could easily catalyse social revolution.

This was a widely held model, from Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies to the Situationists. Sensory disruption, the freak out, the acid test, became a standard tactic for political activists. The fact that any Russian populist could have told them the limits of the “propaganda of the deed” didn’t matter. The target was the head, the military/industrial complex, the rational machine that processed young people into crew cut drones fit for the factory, office or army. Acid would break people’s commitment and belief in that system.

Which is an irony as LSD was, if anything, the creation of the scientific (and military) establishment.

The hallucinogenic properties of LSD-25 were first discovered on April 19th 1943, 5 years after it was created, when Albert Hoffman experimented on himself in what’s now known as the Bicycle Day (Hoffman asked his assistant to escort him home on a bicycle after the effects began to kick in).

LSD was introduced into America in 1948 and was soon hailed as a cure-all for schizophrenia to criminality to alcoholism. In the 50s it was common to use the drug in psychiatry. Between 1950 and 1975 over 1,000 research papers were written into LSD and other hallucinogens. Many of them were connected with research conducted for the American government, who investigated its potential as a truth drug, a form of psychic torture and even a chemical weapon (there’s some wonderful footage still around of the effects of LSD on military discipline).

Thousands upon thousands of people participated in these tests, from Timothy Leary to Ken Kesey to the actor Cary Grant. It was out of military bases, hospitals and, in particular, university campuses that LSD made its way into wider circulation, becoming a recreational drug.

What of drugs and society today? LSD will probably never have the same importance it did forty-fifty years ago. The common reaction to alienation and exploitation over the past twenty-thirty years has been flight. Autonomism came out of Marxism. It was refined into a theory that proposed instead of promoting and organising social confrontation, radicals should aim for immediate, small-scale (but, presumably spreading) rebellion, creating an autonomous space free from capital.

An early example of this would be the flight of the New Left in southern California to agricultural communes in a “back to the land” movement. We might suggest that widely practiced autonomism would be just as unsuccessful as the communes of the sixties and seventies. Without a stable axis, New Left politics and in particular LSD culture, drifted from oceanic consciousness to introspection and finally to outright self-regard and avarice… just in time for the eighties!

The neo-liberal era drug of choice has been ecstasy. In Britain the Second Summer of Love, the anti-poll tax movement and the fall of Thatcher came hot on the heels and complimented each other. They were pivotal in creating modern Britain. MDMA is the running theme of that period.

We live in an age where people are fighting to recover class-consciousness, ideas such as solidarity and social well-being. The job is still at hand. While LSD has a great past Ecstasy could still have a momentous future.

Labels: 60s, Drug Culture, LSD, Military/Industrial Complex, New Left, Post War Boom