Transcript
A (0:00)
Well, my name's Robin Archer and I'm the convener of the Ralph Miliband program here at the lsc. And I'm delighted to welcome you all to the second last in our public lecture series on the future of the left. And I'm particularly delighted to be able to welcome Professor Jayati Ghosh. Jayati is professor of Economics at Jawaharl Nehru University in Delhi, which, as I'm sure you know, is what of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in India. And she's written extensively in a range of areas on macroeconomics, on international finance, questions of employment trends, and also questions about women and development. And I think it's safe to say that she's been a forthright and lucid critic of neoliberal trends in the last few years. But she's not just a scholar of great repute. She's also been actively involved in numerous social movements and she's served as an advisor to governments, notably to the government of India, where she's one of a handful of people that advise the Prime Minister on the National Knowledge Commission there. And she's a regular columnist who seeks to reach out to a broader audience with her ideas, writing for several newspapers and journals. Particularly notable is the fortnightly Frontline. No Indian intellectual with self respect can be without it. And some of you may know that she's a regular contributor to the Guardian here in the United Kingdom. Her work's been widely recognised. I just want to mention one particular accolade which I think is particularly admirable, speaking for myself, which is that she won the International Labour Organisation's prize for decent work research. And it gives you some feeling of the significance of this accolade to point out that her predecessors in winning this prize included Nelson Mandela and Joseph Stiglitz, who later went on to win the Nobel Prize. So I'm very, very pleased indeed to welcome Jayati here this year to speak to us as part of our Ralph Miller Band program. So please welcome Professor Jayati Ghos.
B (2:30)
Well, shall I.
A (2:31)
It's up to you. You choose.
B (2:34)
Maybe. I don't know, it might be easier if I stand there. Well, thank you very much, Robin, for that very, very warm and in a sense, perhaps undeserved introduction. It's really a great pleasure to be here. For me, it's a great honor, actually, to be invited to deliver a lecture in the Ralph Miliband. I suppose, as we all know, Ralph Miliband was an outstanding social scientist and a very innovative Marxist thinker. I mean, he was In a sense, he was a beacon to progressive people around the world, including in India, because I think his own work and the work that he promoted in the New Left Review and the Socialist Register was very much part of what made, for example, Marxism as a mode of thinking so attractive, because of the spirit of inquiry and questioning, as well as a fundamental commitment to a socialist future. And in a sense, his work also gave us the confidence to interpret the world around us, even when we disagreed with some particular interpretation of his own. I think Miliband showed us that ideas can and should be handled with care and with passion and also without dogma or fear, including the fear of exposing one's own shibboleths. So it is as a tribute to what is a very inspiring combination of personal commitment and intellectual integrity and even fearlessness that I chosen what probably sounds like a very ambitious topic. Because, after all, you can't really talk about one single emerging left in any part of the world. And it's really brave or actually foolhardy to talk about the emerging left in a much broader emerging world, because left politics and left positions have always been extremely diverse and will probably continue always to be very diverse within and across national boundaries. Because given this profusion and variation and the multiplicity of approaches, probably you could justifiably argue that trying to fit all types of progressive thinking in very different parts of the world into one common box is not just over simplistic, but actually misleading. I think this is a perception that is also a reflection of what could be called a kind of accentuated fragmentation of left positions. Because really, for much of the 20th century, it was much easier to talk of what could be called an overarching socialist framework, a kind of grand vision within which you conduct specific debates. Of course, there were many strands of socialism, however you define it, and there were also fierce and often violent debates and conflicts between them. But even so, I think they shared more than a common historical lineage. I think they also shared a fundamental perspective, or, if you like, a basic vision. So let me try to do a crude simplification of this vision. I think it can be summarized as perceiving that the working class is the most fundamental agent of positive change, and that it is capable, once it's organized, of transforming not only existing property and material relations, but also wider society and culture through its own actions. Now, actually, in recent times, even the very idea of a grand vision is in retreat. It's been battered not just by the complexities and limitations of what you could call actually existing socialism, but more recently by the ferocious triumphalism of the opposite. If you think about it, insofar as any grand vision has existed in recent times, it's the one that has come to dominate public life in the late 20th century, that is the market as a self regulating and inherently efficient mechanism for organizing economic life. Now, in fact, this is an idea that has already been there and done that if you look at it in the late 19th century. It had already fallen by the wayside a century before, but it's been resurrected and dusted off for use in a slightly more postmodern format, which has really become the theoretical underpinning of the vast explosion of global economic integration under the aegis of finance capital, which is what we call the period of globalization. In fact, this is not a position that was ever about reducing the economic role of the state, that broad neoliberal position. It is really about changing the nature of state intervention towards more open protection of the interests of large capital in various forms, in ways that Miliband himself would have recognized through his own discussion of what he called the close partnership between capital and the capitalist state. And this generates, of course, a very real and formidable concentration of power. Now, this feature was never really disguised, but it became much more overwhelming and therefore impossible to conceal in the governmental responses to the global crises since 2007. So the association of the ideology of supposedly free markets with strong tendencies to greater concentration of capital and the use of the state to further accentuate these tendencies and aggrandize capital has now been laid bare, I think, for everyone to see. Now, it's also true that the material processes that are unleashed by such a trajectory of unevenly shared burdens of crisis are no longer seen as socially acceptable in much of the world. This is becoming evident not just in the developing world, but also in many parts of the European continent. And there are many places that have therefore experienced, if you like, quiet or not so quiet revolutions. But it's probably fair to say that even as the resistance to global capitalism builds up in the south and in the north, it's tended to be accompanied by sort of gloomy perceptions that the grand socialist visions of the future, if you like, are no longer possible. They're really not anymore something that is considered feasible. If you look at much of the popular protest that is evident today in various places, it's still essentially about resistance, not transformation. And it involves, if you like, rear guard actions to stem the tide of brutal fiscal austerity, measures that deny social and economic rights of citizens, but within the economic system, rather than conceiving and putting in place alternative systems. So there's a basic lack of confidence in anything other than capitalism as a way of organizing economic life, which still permeates popular protest in Europe and the United States. So the purpose of the left is seen to be somehow to exert a restraining influence on the worst excesses of contemporary capitalism. So the left is seen, if you like, as a civilizing and moderating force, not so much as a transformative and certainly not a revolutionary force. But elsewhere in Latin America, Asia, Africa, I think the discourse is becoming quite different. There's much more dynamism in the global left than is currently perceived. And there are also varied moves away from tired ideas of all kinds, really. So the rejection of capitalism is also accompanied not just by imagining alternatives, but by shifting views about what constitutes the desirable alternative. And this has meant the interrogating of what could be standard tenets of socialist understanding in the past. There are several features of these emerging left movements, certainly in Latin America, where they're also associated with state power in many countries, but also in other areas of Africa and developing Asia, which are moving away from traditional ideas associated with socialist theory and practice. I'm not saying that these are very always formulated in very clear theoretical terms, or that they are part of a consistent and holistic analytical structure. Many ideas also keep changing with the rough and tumble of everyday political praxis. But it's also true that in a sense, this lack of a well defined theoretical framework or perspective, and instead the reliance on a set of occasionally vague but well intentioned declarations that generate some practical goals, is a feature of many such left movements. Despite this, I still think that the praxis, and increasingly the analysis, if not always explicit theory, if you like, of various left movements in different parts of the world, are increasingly transcending what could be called the traditional socialist paradigm. What was this traditional paradigm? Well, it had an emphasis on centralized government control over an undifferentiated mass of workers, and it's instead incorporating much more explicit emphasis on the rights and concerns of women, ethnic minorities, tribal communities and other marginalized groups. Recognition of ecological constraints and the social risk necessity to respect nature. There's explicit recognition of all of this, for example, in the new constitutions in Bolivia and Ecuador, but they are also increasingly articulated by groups all over the place. Trade unions in southern Africa, the new left intellectuals who are in China, social movements in India and many other places. So I would like to argue that you can actually identify some critical aspects of commonality, some common threads that appear in these different discourses of the emerging left. And I would like to identify seven of these tendencies in what are otherwise very different political formations and very dissimilar social and economic contexts. These are not always new ideas. Let me also emphasize in many cases they're often not more than just old ideas that appear new simply because of changing context and the collective failure of memory, but at least selective recall in the traditional left. And obviously these are not ideas that are shared by all varieties of leftist thought today. For example, there are Maoists in India, in my own country, who would not accept several of the positions described that I'm going to describe. But let me consider these seven different themes. The first is the attitude to what constitutes democracy. Now you consider some of the older socialist approaches in which the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was actually misinterpreted, and in some cases it still continues to be used that way to suppress formal democracy. Within the newer emerging Left, there's much greater willingness to engage with and even rely on formal democratic processes and the procedures and mechanisms that were associated with bourgeois democracy, like elections, referenda, laws, delivering rights and related judicial processes. So even as left movements and parties have recognized the limitations of electoral democracy, and in fact the increasing and sometimes alarming potential for the effective takeover of democratic institutions by money, power and corporatized media, which is so evident in the United States, for example. But still the emerging Left relies more and more on using formal democratic institutions in different ways to further the broader cause. For example, the radical governments of Latin America derive their legitimacy from the ballot box. And it's the other way around. Right wing anger is actually directed towards what are derided as populist policies of these left wing governments that provide them with these overwhelming popular mandates. In other countries, the emerging Left is often the greatest champion or defender of these formal democratic institutions, as well as the most concerned with their corruption and manipulation by entrenched interests and corporate power. So there's much more focus on procedural democracy and attempts to go beyond liberal democracy with new experiments in deliberation, consensus building, and so on. This engagement is really quite different from earlier socialist formulations in which all institutions of the bourgeois state were seen as inherently and deeply tainted and incapable of reform, or being used to bring about positive changes, change in favor of the people. And it's also an extension, it's more than an extension, in fact, of the earlier idea of the role of the left as bringing about sort of national democratic revolutions in countries that were still entrapped by feudal and colonial structures, because it embraces, even only if it's only implicitly the idea that the process is not unidirectional. In fact, leftist engagement with democratic institutions and processes can also transform the nature of left parties and organizations themselves. And this is also reflected in the changed approach to democracy within left parties and organizations. The tendency is not universal, but I think there is evidence that within emerging left groups there's increasingly a trend towards the rejection of top down models of party organization, exemplified in the democratic centralism of Communist party parties, for example, and moving towards more open democratic forms of parties and coalition building. So that within an overarching framework and a set of shared goals, there's a much greater tolerance and even respect for a polarity of opinions within the Left. The second big feature, I would say the relatively new feature, is the rejection of over centralization. The centralizing, homogenizing state was a. Was a major element of actually existing socialism in much of the 20th century and even today. It is kind of embedded in the consciousness of many of those who see themselves as socialist. Indeed, in the classical Marxist view, scale itself and the tendency of capitalist production to generate larger and larger scales were seen as paradoxically positive features. They enabled a combination of large groups of workers who could be mobilized to alter production relations, and they allowed the effective and more rapid transformation of these relations to the benefit of all people. That was the perception. And it is also true that there were good reasons for the socialist celebration of largeness, if you like, which are still valid. The social coordination of investment remains an integral feature of a desirable economy, even when this is not explicitly acknowledged. And development in the most essential sense of economic diversification necessarily requires centralized decisions. We have Robert Wade in the audience who knows a lot about these things. And large scale investment must be planned in some degree to be successful. Strategies of accumulation, the encouragement of socially desirable production of goods and services, and the distribution of wealth and income. They necessarily require some and often very substantial degrees of centralization. So it does this. Once you recognize this. This does mean that even in the emerging left, you cannot have a blind or simplistic celebration of everything small. Nevertheless, most tendencies in the newer left praxis typically foreground the need for generating or enhancing the viability of small scale production. So this is a clear reaction against past attempts at centralized control of all aspects of material life, which have been experienced as rigid, inflexible, hierarchical and lacking in accountability, which in effect made them the opposite of what was intended. It's also true that material conditions, I think, have changed to make largeness less desirable or necessary in some respects. For example, there's the recent experience of the downsides of largeness. The banks that are too big to fail, they become unaccountable and untaxable companies, and so on. And also technology, especially the convergence of ICT and energy technologies, is opening up new possibilities for productivity growth in decentralized settings, which increase the possibilities for locally managed, decentralized and globally connected post carbon economies. So emerging left movements and the states in which they dominate do not require or expect centralized ownership and control over all economic activities. Smallholder cultivation, small providers of goods and services, as well as manufactured goods, are recognized as worthy of direct state support and being provided sufficient enabling conditions for their activities. I have to differentiate this from this sort of celebration of informality and of strategies like micro finance, which are so beloved of the international development industry, because it's not about that. Where economies of scale are significant, there is renewed exploration within the left of forms like cooperatives and combinations in different forms. So it's really about trying to find a balance between large and small, which obviously differs according to context. Now, it's already evident that once you have an approach like this, it requires a much more complex approach to property rights. And I would argue that this constitutes the third major difference of the emerging left from earlier forms of socialism that did away with all private property and only recognized personal property. New Left thinking is generally quite vague and even ambivalent about private property, disliking it when it's seen as monopolizing or highly concentrated, for example, in multinational corporations, but otherwise not just accepting it, but even like in the case of small producers, even actually actively encouraging it. So increasingly there is explicit recognition of other forms of property rights, particularly communal property associated with traditional indigenous or autochthonous communities, who in turn are no longer derided as pre modern relics that have to be done away with, which was really part of the earlier socialist conception. Just as these emerging left tendencies in the emerging world engage more positively with formal democratic institutions, institutions and processes, so they also tend to speak more and more in the language of rights, which is in a sense the fourth new tendency. least in the developing countries. These rights are not seen in the individualistic sense of libertarian philosophy, but they're more broadly defined in terms of entitlements as well as recognizing the need for social and political voice, not just of citizens, but of communities and groups. In a sense, when you think about it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its listings of various rights, can be interpreted as A socialist manifesto, since it requires the recognition of a wide variety of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights to be not only inalienable, but effectively a way of life. The way that various left governments and political groups have interpreted this in practice has been related to demands for citizens or groups entitlement. So from the state there tends to be much more explicit recognition of the rights of the elderly, of children, of young people, of people with disabilities. The acceptance of the rights of indigenous peoples and communities and even nations within the country is also much more common within the emerging left. So it must mean that there is greater recognition of a wider and more diverse character of the classes and groups of the exploited, which in turn requires changing modes of organization and mass mobilization. The fifth new feature, in a sense, is that the emerging left goes beyond traditional Left paradigms in recognizing various different cult and possibly overlapping social and cultural identities that shape economic, political and social realities. The standard left paradigm that emerged in the 19th and 20th century saw class as the fundamental contradiction within societies and imperialism as the defining feature of relations across countries. There was a tendency to see other cultural attributes as certainly less important and anyway more in the nature of subordinate and transient tendencies, pre modern or semi feudal relics of the past, which would be destroyed or at least attenuated by the expansion of market forces and capitalism generally. But the resilience of these socially determined patterns, as well as capitalism's remarkable ability to incorporate patterns of linguistic, ethnic, social exclusion and discrimination as factors in commercial activity and labor markets, has forced a more nuanced understanding. This has led to a realization that addressing issues only in class terms is no longer sufficient. And many strands of the emerging left are now considered much more explicitly and even dominantly, sometimes with addressing the inequalities, oppression and exploitation that arise from these non economic forces. It's not always clear that this shift in focus is inevitably justified, especially as class and imperialism are still such powerful determining forces. But certainly this is an important characteristic of many emerging left movements. The most significant such attribute is gender. And this is the next aspect, in a sense, that is explicitly incorporated into emerging left tendencies. A changed attitude to the woman question, if you like, and associated with this a more complex attitude to the nature of exploitation. I mean, of course, women have always been part of the working class. Even when they've not been acknowledged as workers in their own rights, they've always been essential to the functioning of the system, not only through active involvement in production, but in social reproduction. But even so, it took a very long time for women's struggles to be accepted as an integral part of working class struggles for a better society in general. For more than a century, trade unions and workers organizations were generally male preserves. And this was very true in large parts of the developing world. And the male breadwinner model of the household in which the the husband, father worked outside to earn money and the wife, mother did not get outside income and handle domestic work, dominated even in left thinking. It's really taken prolonged struggle and determined mobilization to generate greater social recognition of the role of women not just as wage workers in different forms, but also in terms of the crucial significance of unpaid household and community based work. Now I do think that these specific social, cultural, political constraints that mold the lives of women are better recognized. I don't mean to say that patriarchy has suddenly disappeared from the ranks of leftist organizations and movements. I think, unfortunately, this is a much longer struggle. But in a sense, the wider perception of the ways in which the gender construction of society affects both men and women in so many aspects of their lives is at least explicitly, if not always in practice, a more serious concern in the emerging left. Finally, the relationship of human societies with nature. I think this is undergoing much more comprehensive interrogation than ever before. Traditional Marxists tended to be technology fans. They would glory in the development of productive forces as expression of the forward movement of society and object to relations of production that thwart or prevent this forward movement. Now, it's true that this need not require an exploitative and aggressive attitude to nature and to the use of natural wealth. But in actual practice this was only too often the case. The requirements of an organic and sustainable attitude to nature were rarely factored into discussions about accumulation and productive expansion. I think all this has changed quite dramatically in the recent past, and it's partly because one of the primary contradictions of capitalism today is expressed in the ecological limits that are increasingly evidenced not just by climate change, but by pollution, degradation over extraction and other destruction of nature. These have created undeniably unsustainable patterns of production, consumption and accumulation, which are generating open conflicts about resources and forcing societies to change, often in undesired ways, and therefore calls for a more humane and just. Societies have to incorporate these critical concerns. So today many of those who call themselves socialists see environmental conservation, the protection of ecosystems, biodiversity, the integrity of a country's genetic assets, the prevention of environmental damage, the recovery of degraded national basis as matters of public interest and strategy. I have said earlier that these positions are not completely new, and certainly there are many strands of earlier left thought that contain some elements or versions of all of these ideas, certainly the concern with women's rights, the recognition of other forms of oppression and discrimination, and even some concerns of the relationship with nature can be discerned even in the writings of Marx and Engels, as well as other socialist thinkers. But it is also true that these seven features of the emerging Left do represent departures from the traditional Left paradigm that became, in a sense, the body of knowledge that many of us inherited. But despite these differences, I think there are also elements of strong continuity that still remain. And there are two that I would like to highlight. The attitude and the significance of the nation state and the attitude to imperialism. I think it's intriguing that despite many cultural, economic, social changes brought about by globalization, these concerns have remained, especially in the developing world. At one level, of course, the nation state. The focus on the nation state is obvious because if there are demands for rights of individuals or communities or nature, you have to define them in relation to the locus whereby such rights will be ensured. And the nation state remains the basic location for such demands and negotiation. It is the terrain in which these demands for rights are actually carried. The struggle is carried out, and the demands generated by the proliferation of current economic forces require state intervention in all sorts of ways. Reigning in finance, generating economies of scale, determining the extent of the use of the products of nature, the redistribution of assets and income, all of these things, things. So how leftists engage with the state, even when they recognize what Miliband would have called it, you know, the executive arm of the bourgeoisie, it is still an arena of constant negotiation. I think there's a fine line that left engagement with the state must tread between compromise that thwarts all progressive intent and an insistence on purity that is not just false, but actually renders Left forces irrelevant. But in addition, the transformation of the state is still seen as necessary, but it's perceived to be possible through a much wider range of strategies than were available to the traditional left of the 20th century, including the participation in democratic processes that I have talked about before, and demands for larger democratic empowerment of the people. But it's also true that material forces have transcended the somewhat limited boundary of the nation state. The cosmopolitan character of capitalist production and accumulation that Marx talked about in the Communist Manifesto has never been more evident, and this has abundant implications for effective popular collaboration and mobilization for change. How that will translate into effective Left practice is, I believe, still an open question. I think it is really a dilemma that hasn't been resolved. This leads, in a sense, to the second continuity. The concern of the emerging left in the emerging world, with imperialism in the broad sense, imperialism not in a very conventional sense, but imperialism in the broader sense of the use of the nation state in the struggle of large capital to control economic territory of different kinds. This can be land and other resources, labor markets, knowledge and technology, and so on. Now, I think this is actually an area of difference with left tendencies in the developed world, or at least some left tendencies in the developed world, which increasingly tend to view imperialism as an outdated concept which has been rendered irrelevant by globalization, and sometimes, at least from the outside, seem to forget or even ignore the material content of much of international relations today. But the struggle for economic territory of different kinds is at least as significant as before, and in fact, the relative decline of the only current superpower has further accentuated it. So the left in the emerging world is not only concerned with these tendencies, but also has to confront it in its quotidian practice, which includes not just standard weapons like war and military aggression, but also newer instruments like the control over privatized intellectual property rights and trade agreements, or economic partnership agreements that fundamentally protect large capital of particular nations. For these and other reasons, the left, and in fact more than the left, a broader public perception in the developing world, tends to be much more cynical about the intent and nature of humanitarian intervention to forcibly export democracy and other attempts to enforce the international rule of law in very selective cases. When I first thought of the subject matter for this lecture, it seemed as if the alternative progressive visions for future organization of economies and societies were both more likely and more prevalent in the global South. And indeed, just as there are those who think that the fulcrum of global power is shifting, however slowly and unevenly, towards the south and some countries in the South. It can be argued that the more exciting and imaginative forms of socialist praxis are increasingly to be found in countries that are currently in the global periphery. But recent happenings in Europe and even the United States suggest a more complex reality in the north, as well. As the established beliefs get challenged and there are more thoughtful formulations of feasible alternatives, as the Occupy movement or the Indignados and other political movements suggest, as more and more people engage and recognize with how current economic structures operate in ways that are fundamentally inimical to their interests, the stronger and sharper becomes the search for economic alternatives. I think that this is inevitable because the fundamental premises of the socialist project remain as valid as ever. What are those fundamental premises? The unequal, exploitative and oppressive nature of capitalism, the capacity of human beings to change society and thereby to alter their own future in a progressive direction, and the necessity of collective organization to do so. The fecundity of socialist alternatives cropping up in different parts of the world suggests that whatever we may think to the contrary, in what are otherwise generally depressing times, this project is still very dynamic and very exciting. Thank you very much.