Blackwood Project 2001. Geoff Boucher
The distinction between the Left and the Right in politics dates from the French Revolution. It is the result of sheer contingency - the stupid chance that the spatial arrangement of the seats in the National Assembly happened to hold the radical-progressives on the left and the conservative-reactionaries on the right. The terms Left and Right therefore distributed the possible oppositions of the political field - progressives and reactionaries, radicals and conservatives, egalitarians and elitists, democrats and authoritarians - into possible combinations within two mutually exclusive camps. This spatial metaphor - together with the polarised politics of a revolutionary period - designated a bipolar universe, where something could be left-wing or right-wing, but not both. While Left conservatism, Right progressivism and so forth - including all of the possible combinations and permutations that can be made with these terms - are possible, a Left-Right is impossible. Not only that: while the boundaries regulating whether a demand, social class or political party is on the Left or the Right have shifted dramatically, the relevance of the distinction has remained constant. Thus, for instance, the demand for universal manhood suffrage, advanced by the Chartist movement in 1830, is a leftwing demand in 1830, a rightwing demand at the time of the suffragette movement and a radical rightwing demand now. The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, has generally migrated from the Left to the Right - with significant exceptions in some Third World countries, where leftwing national liberation movements led by bourgeois politicians exist. The relationship between the Left and any demand (democracy, for instance) is not fixed. Yet while the terms “Left” and “Right” are arbitrary, what they designate is not - and it is not reducible to a combination of the remaining oppositions in the political field (progressives and reactionaries, radicals and conservatives, egalitarians and elitists, democrats and authoritarians).
According to the Italian philosopher, Norberto Bobbio - whose argument in Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction (1996) I am following here - there are three modes for the subversion of the Left-Right distinction. Ranging from moderate to radical, these are:
The invention of a “centre” which postures as a reconciliation of “extremes,” but actually responds to the most insistent electoral pressure, whether this comes from the Left or the Right. Fundamentally lacking a political strategy, the “included middle,” the traditional centre parties, are essentially characterised by pragmatism and opportunism: “practical politics without a doctrine” (8). Insofar as these centrist parties have any political inclinations at all beyond the next term in office, they designate themselves as “Centre-Left” and “Centre-Right,” thereby indicating the nullity of the centre itself.
The combination of rightwing and leftwing policies in an effort to undermine the authority of the binary opposition between Left and Right. The ecological movement in Germany is an excellent illustration of this mode of “transversal politics": claiming that ecological questions transcend politics completely, the Green Party has in practice offered an eclectic and sometimes internally inconsistent combination of policy frameworks, while the party itself has experienced the polarisation between its left and right wings that gave rise to the “Fundos” and “Realos”. This is a fine demonstration of the truth that while environmental destruction is beyond politics, its social solutions are highly political - in the sense of the Left-Right distinction.
The “inclusive middle” of the Third Way is, by contrast, “a doctrine in search of a practical politics, and as soon as this is achieved, it reveals itself as centrist” (8). For Bobbio, the Third Way is a political fantasy. Indeed, “the crisis of the Left has led to the recent success of the ideal of liberal socialism, which is a typical expression of ‘inclusive middle’ [Third Way] thought” (8). The appearances of Third Ways historically are linked to political crises, and usually to the efforts of the Left or Right to disguise themselves as their opposites during protracted periods of marginalisation.
Bobbio proposes that the Left-Right distinction be divided on the basis of the relative hierarchy between (social) equality and (natural) inequality. The Left values increasing social equality over the maintenance of social inequalities. The Right values defending natural inequality and regards many social inequalities as results of (ineradicable) natural inequalities, and increases in social equality as utopian or authoritarian efforts to eliminate natural inequality. The distinction between equality and inequality is not intended as an axiological distinction, but as a descriptive system: the foundations of the Right in inequality and the drive of the Left towards equality do not imply the eradication by the Left of all inequality (for instance, natural inequalities are ineradicable), nor the opposition of the Right to all equality. The distinction implies that the relative proportions of equality and inequality in a doctrine are the basis for describing this politics as on the Left or on the Right.
To flesh out this distinction between Left (equality) and Right (inequality), Bobbio constructs two ideal types at the far ends of the spectrum of equality and inequality: Rousseau’s extreme egalitarianism and Nietzsche’s extreme inegalitarianism. Distinguishing between the adjective “egalitarian” (meaning, pro-equality) and extreme egalitarianism, Bobbio argues that extremism tends to negate the very equality/inequality defended in the first place. The value of Bobbio’s distinction is that it allows a political map onto supposedly ethical questions “beyond politics,” for instance, human rights: the inegalitarian believes that natural differences are more important that social rights (and that libertarian rights are more important than social rights such as education, work and childcare). There is therefore a leftwing and a rightwing stance on human rights. Neither of these stances is intrinsically opposed to human rights. They answer the critical questions regarding redistribution differently. These definitive questions are: for whom, of what and on the basis of what? (61). Bobbio, meanwhile, is highly suspicious of both egalitarianism (the same to everyone) and inegalitarianism (everyone for themselves), contending that these have an amazingly simplified concept of redistribution. In the light of existing social inequalities and possible natural handicaps, what sense can there be in the maxim of “the same to everyone” - for instance in the case of somebody suffering both racial discrimination and physical handicaps. Surely they need more of the social resources than everyone else - which supposes a complex articulation of redistribution with the principles of selection (for whom, of what and on the basis of what?).
The Left-Right spectrum can therefore be regarded as stretching from egalitarianism to oligarchy:
Egalitarianism (typified by Rousseau) - equality - inequality - Absolute Inequality (oligarchy) (typified by Nietzsche).
Bobbio tends to align the extremes of egalitarianism and inegalitarianism (oligarchy) with authoritarianism. Bobbio maintains that the authoritarian variants of the Left-Right distinction, communism and fascism, dominated the definition of the relation between the Left and the Right and the field of concrete social demands during the twentieth century. The Left’s opposition to private property is rooted in the struggle for equality. “For the Left, the struggle for the abolition of private property and for collectivisation has also been a struggle for equality and the removal of the main obstacle to the creation of a society of equals” (81). This opposition to private property on the basis of the value of equality preceded communism and social democracy by many centuries - as Bobbio demonstrates from extensive historical sources. The shift following the collapse of historical communism, towards democracy and the abandonment of the attempt to abolish the market, is not a move “beyond Left and Right,” but a transition beyond the distribution of leftwing and rightwing demands characteristic of the last century.
Nonetheless, Bobbio displays a moderate liberal prudence in his hostility to “extreme egalitarianism” that is likely to prejudice the question in relation to egalitarianism itself. Using Rousseau as an ideal type condemns egalitarianism before the fact to political authoritarianism and a reductive simplicity in the articulation between redistribution and the principle of egalitarianism. Perhaps, just perhaps, it might be suggested, this was because Rousseau lived in a more simple society that had not experienced the catastrophe of twentieth century forms of dictatorship... Nothing compels a contemporary egalitarianism to authoritarianism or simplification. Indeed, Bobbio’s own argument - that the articulations between equality and radicalism, progress, authoritarianism, or whatever, are contingent historical products, results of political struggles - speaks against the automatic alignment of egalitarianism with authoritarianism. Yet whatever the weaknesses of Bobbio’s position - and they are strictly secondary and contingent - the central proposition is clearly true. In the twenty-first century, the struggles of the Left for an expanded democracy and the restriction of the market (the maintenance of a fundamental opposition to private property in the means of production) can be expected to take place explicitly under the sign of equality.
Giddens effectively acknowledges this with his significant shift in policy, from ambiguity concerning equality to a defense of the relevance of the concept. The differences between Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way (1998) are highly symptomatic. In Beyond Left and Right, Giddens rejected the phrase of a “Third Way” because of the ambiguity introduced into the term by its various historical designations (fascism, Eurocommunism, market socialism...). Yet as the title indicates, in The Third Way, Giddens whole-heartedly embraced the name. The only explanation can be that the Blair and Clinton administrations had already begun to identify themselves as a “Third Way” and Giddens’ theoretical strategy is reformist in orientation: he seeks to enter the designation and transform its internal structure from within. At the same time, confronted with the reality of the Third Way in office (a doctrine in search of a practical politics that rapidly reveals its hand as mere pragmatism), Giddens shifted formally to the left. The substantive policy difference between Beyond Left and Right and The Third Way concerns equality. In the earlier work, Giddens remains uncertain about the precise position and importance of equality in the programme of a renewed social democracy. By contrast, in the subsequent work, Giddens presents the “life politics” of the “new social movements” as a supplement to the politics of emancipation. High levels of inequality cannot and should not be countenanced by social democracy.1 Yet the contours of a policy framework designed to diminish inequality remain undefined - or inconsistent. Instead of a definite policy direction aimed at equality, Giddens presents the historical-evolutionary thesis of a generalised transition towards “post-materialist” values as a result of affluence - generated in part by the very welfare state that Giddens proposes to dismantle. Emancipatory politics - the struggle for equality - is consigned in the terms of this epochal shift to a “post-traditional society” to a mopping-up operation, cleaning up the remaining stains of modernisation. Instead of a defense of the welfare state and a democratisation of its processes, Giddens endorses the mainstream economic rationalist “wisdom” concerning the privatisation of state assets and the deregulation of the labour market. In the space formerly occupied by the welfare state’s equality-directed policies, Giddens places “positive welfare” - a raft of new policies designed to enhance identity formation, address “life politics” and advance the concerns articulated by the (affluent) bearers of “post-materialist values”. In short, emancipation can be left to the automatism of the market, which, as Hayek tells us, is sure to deliver more equitable outcomes than any state bureaucracy can. As for the plebs in the two-thirds/one-third society, “equality as inclusion” will have a distinctly coercive face: more police, less services, work for the dole schemes and (once employed), the inevitable reduction in bargaining power consequent upon the deregulation of the labour market. Formally egalitarian, Giddens demonstrates the truth of Bobbio’s observations that the advent of a Third Way “beyond Left and Right” is a sure sign of the marginalisation of one of the political poles, and that the Third Way in power gravitates inevitably towards pragmatic Realpolitik. It remains only to say that the content of Third Way policies at a time of dominance by the Right tends inexorably to be ... right wing.