What does it mean to be modern? Any politics that seeks to be both progressive and popular must be able to answer this question. It must do so in terms that are at once optimistic and resonant with people’s everyday experience.
Historically, all our game-changing governments have presented a new vision of what it meant to be modern, changing the terms of political debate for a generation to come. In 1945, Labour presented itself as in tune with the then-new world of “scientific” economic planning, efficient centralising management and organised industrial production. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher redefined the legacy of 1945 as old, inefficient, rusty, sclerotic; for her, modernity was defined by the energy of the entrepreneurial individual, set free from the bonds of tradition or social responsibility.
New Labour accepted her account entirely, distancing itself from Thatcher only to the extent that she had been forced to promise her supporters that somehow, while revolutionising the economy and the labour market, she would be able to protect their “traditional” way of life from immigrants, feminists, hippies and gay people. Blair was able to present himself as more modern than Thatcher and her successors only by embracing multiculturalism and sexual diversity, while insisting throughout his premiership that adapting to the cold, cruel realities of a neoliberal economy and wholly privatised culture was indeed the only way that a country or a person could be truly modern.
The problem now is that Blair was so successful in making this assertion that even many of his critics seem implicitly to accept it. Only by rejecting modernity, they seem to imply, can we ultimately reject neoliberalism. In recent years, the most widely reported attempts to imagine a non-Blairite programme, strategy and rhetoric for Labour have appealed to the supposedly inherent conservatism of the English: an inherent conservatism of which Ukip’s recent success is understood to be irrefutable evidence. In fact, we think there is little evidence for this claim, outside a few localised contexts. In most places, it isn’t “family, faith and flag” that are central to most people’s culture today. It’s friends, families and Facebook.
And here lies the clue to what a new definition of modernity, and modern politics, might look like in the 21st century. For while Facebook may well be a vast parasitic engine for the harvesting of our collective energy, it is also more than that. The success of Facebook is evidence that the true tale of what is happening to human beings in our era is not only that told by Blair, Thatcher, or their culturally conservative critics. It is not simply that we are becoming ever more isolated, competitive, and hierarchical, or that old forms of community are the only ones that matter. We are also desperately seeking out new ways to connect, to communicate, to involve ourselves and each other in the shared project of making and re-making our world, ways which are more democratic and collaborative than either traditional forms of community or the universal marketplace of neoliberal culture.
In a new pamphlet for Compass , Mark Fisher and I advocate a number of means by which the progressive left could articulate a politics that builds on this desire for democracy. For example, we point to a range of highly practical and well-designed policies that would see the governance of public services radically changed: doing away with league tables and targets whose failure is so widely understood, and giving real control over service design and delivery to the users and providers of services, acting co-operatively.
We highlight the widespread detestation of that bureaucratic micro-management which characterises institutional life in both the public and private sectors, and ask why the left should always assume that resentment of it must be channelled into support for the populist right, especially when it was the new left of the 1960s that first opposed such bureaucracy explicitly. We suggest that both government and public sector managers could facilitate creativity and risk-taking in far more imaginative ways by looking to the history of the music industry than by borrowing from corporate management theory.
The story of the 21st century is not yet written. When it is, will the left be a part of it? If it is to prosper, we argue, the left must articulate its own account of what it means to be modern; if it doesn’t, then it may fade entirely with the memory of the 20th.
