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A left turn?

Dec 16, 2012 Editorial

In his recent critique of the PPP, which he had served for half a century, Ralph Ramkarran wondered whether “the baby had been thrown out with the bathwater’ when market fundamentalism replaced the party’s ‘scientific socialism’ after 1992.  Tony Judt, the journalist who was stricken with motor neurone disease, asked the same question of the ‘left’ in his native Britain just before he passed away two years ago.
“If it is to be taken seriously again, the left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy. But it will no longer suffice to identify the shortcomings of “the system” and then retreat, Pilate-like, indifferent to consequences. It is incumbent on us to reconceive the role of government. If we do not, others will.
So what is to be done? What sort of language – what political or moral framework – can the left propose to explain its objectives and justify its goals?
There is no longer a place for the old-style master narrative: the all-embracing theory of everything. Nor can we retreat to religion. But even if we concede that there is no higher purpose to life, we need to ascribe meaning to our actions in a way that transcends them. Merely asserting that something is or is not in our material interest will not satisfy most of us most of the time.
What is it that we find lacking in unrestrained financial capitalism, or “commercial society” as the 18th century had it? What do we find instinctively amiss in our present arrangements and what can we do about them? What is it that offends our sense of propriety when faced with unfettered lobbying by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else? What have we lost?
Of all the competing and only partially reconcilable ends we might seek, the reduction of inequality must come first. Under conditions of endemic inequality, all other desirable goals become hard to achieve. Whether in Delhi or Detroit, the poor and the permanently underprivileged cannot expect justice. They cannot secure medical treatment… a good education, and without that they cannot hope for even minimally secure employment – much less participation in the culture and civilisation of their society.
In this sense, unequal access to resources of every sort – from rights to water – is the starting point of any truly progressive critique of the world. But inequality is not just a technical problem. It illustrates and exacerbates the loss of social cohesion – the sense of living in a series of gated communities whose chief purpose is to keep out other people (less fortunate than ourselves) and confine our advantages to ourselves and our families: the pathology of the age and the greatest threat to the health of any democracy.
If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself. The inculcation of a sense of common purpose and mutual dependence has long been regarded as the linchpin of any community. Inequality is not just morally troubling: it is inefficient.
George Orwell once noted that the “thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality.” This is still the case. It is the growing inequality in and between societies that generates so many social pathologies. Grotesquely unequal societies are also unstable societies. They generate internal division and, sooner or later, internal strife – usually with undemocratic outcomes. As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But that is not enough. If we think we know what is wrong, we must act on that knowledge.
Philosophers, it was famously observed, have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

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