Blackwood Project 2001. Geoff Boucher

Speculative “Theses” on Ethical Politics

Thursday, 9 August 2001.

The emergence of the global Third Way movement, as a force for the renewal of social democracy and social liberalism, indicates the opening of a space of contestation beyond identity politics and the struggle for cultural recognition - the space of ethical politics.

Ethical politics means the contestation of universality, or the struggle of competing universals. The shift in the conjuncture from the militant particularism of identity politics towards the contestation of universality that characterises ethical politics is linked to the struggle for what Gramsci called “intellectual and moral leadership”.

This space is a product of contradictions within the restructuring of international corporate production, liberal democracy and the culture of late modernity, which constitute the process of “globalisation”.

While the opening of this political space cannot be reduced to any one of these dimensions alone, nevertheless the dominant influence is exerted by the process of international corporate restructuring, which is “the general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity” (as Marx would say). One indication of this is the emergence of the “anti-capitalist” movement worldwide, which is the radical correlative of the Third Way. At the same time, the foregrounding of the ethical component of politics - as a politics of the contestation of universality - means that this is a conjuncture primarily of cultural politics, and not a conjuncture of the politics of state power or a struggle for control over production.

Socialists must promote the discourse of universality and intervene in ethical politics.

To combat the malaise of postmodern relativism and the moralising rejection of all debate on social alternatives (“Marxism means, forward to the new Gulag!”), to be effective in a conjuncture still dominated by economic rationalism and the reduction of state services, we urgently need a new Enlightenment and a concept of socialist politics linked to ethical universality. Yet the moment for abstractly counterposing universality to the militant particularism of identity politics has passed. The silent passage of those ideological barometers, the theoreticians of identity politics, into the camp of “competing universalities” during the last five years is symptomatic of an invisible cultural shift on the Left from identity politics towards ethical politics. Even talk of the legitimacy of “lifestyle politics” - with its stress on narratives of self-identity and implied concern with cultural pluralism rather than hegemonic forms of universal values — comes too late. Socialists have to intervene in ethical politics, not just advocate the empty form of universality. The ability to do this presupposes an analysis of the emergence ethical politics in the current political conjuncture, a theory of the terrain on which ethical politics forms and a strategy for intervention into this conjuncture.

Clearly, the major universals of today are “democracy” and “rights”.

On the one hand, the traditional parties of the ruling class and the mass media are anxious to establish that the universality of liberal democracy and human rights does not imply indigenous reconciliation, timely foreign intervention against fascist militia or domestic social justice. This is politics of the containment of universality. On the other hand, the parties and organisations of the mainstream opposition (especially the parties connected to the Third Way) are proposing the “democratisation of democracy” and the “new universality of human rights” as the basis for substantive (as opposed to merely formal) autonomy. Likewise, the “anti-capitalist” protesters are not anti-globalisation but pro-inclusion: that is, they stand for the radical extension of universality.

Ethical politics is not a separate, substantive domain (as I initially proposed) but a component of any political struggle.

The new conjuncture foregrounds the moment of ethical politics, however, precisely as an index of the weakness of the forces opposed to corporate hegemony. The terrain of struggle is effectively defined by the antagonist; the mass movements seek mainly to expand this terrain or to deflect it towards moderate substantive goals.

While applauding the shift towards universality and advocating a socialist politics linked to ethical universality, the Left must neither renounce political struggles aimed at the state, nor mistake the moment of ethical politics for a new mass radicalisation on the model of the 1960s (or 1930s).

The thesis that politics worldwide has progressed “beyond Left and Right” to a new opposition between autonomy and community is symptomatic of the turn from radical free market ideologies and the atomised individualism of the 1980s, through the identity politics, militant particularism and virulent ethnic nationalism of the 1990s, to the politics of the contestation of universality. This transition from the particular to the universal is most strongly marked on the Left, where a host of new forms of radical ethical politics is gathering in the wings: the “renewal of civil society,” “radical democracy,” and the radical moralism of the new “anti-capitalist movement”. None of these political strategies is inherently incorrect - except insofar as they renounce any efforts to transform the capitalist state, mistaking the potential of civil society and the politically indeterminate character of democracy for the possibility of comprehensive social justice within capitalism. Meanwhile, the standard “revolutionary” Left perspective in this conjuncture - globalisation as the emergence of a new, transnational capitalism, the retreat of the state to a bureaucratic-police “nightwatchman” role for corporate capital, the aggravation of class contradictions without the buffer of the welfare apparatus or ideological legitimacy, the descent of the world economy towards a new global depression, the molecular beginnings of a new mass radicalisation with the “world anti-capitalist movement” versus the neo-nazi Right, in short, “the 1930s in slow motion” — is a radically false fantasy scenario.

Instead, the contrary is closer to the truth: it is precisely the success of the multinational corporations in restructuring their operations that opens the new conjuncture.

This is surely attested to by the universal acceptance of economic rationalism, the disappearance from the parliamentary scene of any mention of class politics and the non-arrival of the “global economic downturn” predicted during the entire decade of the 1990s. Drawing on Ernest Mandel’s adaptation of long wave theory and recent work on “the logic of international restructuring,” economic globalisation appears to be the combination of the emergence of a new technological paradigm in production, new frameworks of accumulation (“post-Fordism”) and a struggle between rival production paradigms linked to the dominant imperialist centres. According to Mandel, the end of a period of stagnation (approximately 1990) and the beginning of a new upswing is not an automatic function of technological development, but determined in the last instance by the balance of class forces. We have to face the possibility that the bitter labour struggles of the 1980s and 1990s, combined with the unprecedented opening of the markets and cheap labour of the former “socialist bloc” have resulted in a working class defeat. In the metropolitan countries, the working class has resisted capitalist restructuring by means of a protracted strategic retreat punctuated by sharp strike and protest waves. While these have come close to becoming generalised in Western Europe, they have nowhere been unambiguously victorious and, in the English-speaking world, they have been sectorally isolated and sometimes defeated outright. The balance of class forces at the point of production present in the different paradigms of international restructuring (“post-Fordism,” “Toyotaism,” “flexible specialisation”) is the result of these defensive struggles: less disastrous than the period immediately after the Second World War, but married to the dismantling of the welfare reforms of the postwar era and many of the centralised wage bargaining mechanisms that also emerged from this period.

Ethical politics emerges as a result of splits within the historic bloc of the hegemonic alliance.

There are three critical dimensions of corporate hegemony at stake in ethical politics: the legitimacy of the nation state as an instrument for class policy nationally and internationally, the contours of a restructured hegemonic alliance at the domestic level (who’s in, who’s out) and the depth and character of the ideological values that will dominate in what might well be a new period of economic upswing.

The legitimacy of the nation state in foreign affairs.

With the possibility of working class insurgency effectively suppressed, imperialist rivalries have emerged into the open, in the form of diplomatic antagonisms regarding the costs of world peace and struggles over trade policy. The international capitalist restructuring from the late 1970s to the end of the 1990s has produced not “globalisation” but a “triadisation” of the world economy, with the contraction of foreign direct investment and global trade back into the metropolitan countries. At the same time, the sovereignty of the nation state has been undermined, leading to the formation of imperialist alliances, since nation states are now only effective global actors in cooperation with other nation states. The “New World Order” has seen the imperialist ruling classes concentrate on the repression of unruly semi-colonial governments (“rogue states” and “terrorist regimes”) and crisis-management in the developing countries and former-socialist states. The (re)emergence of imperialist rivalries, the decline in American hegemony and the emergence of fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism in the developing countries creates the context for the “new wars” of intervention. Such interventions have so far been prosecuted under the banners of democracy and humanity, where the capitalist state is seen as the bearer of the universal values of liberal democracy and human rights (rather than an instrument for social justice or a neutral arbiter in domestic antagonisms). At the same time, the advanced capitalist countries (and especially the USA) have resisted mass pressure for just interventions to prevent genocide and annexations, preferring cantonment and superpower deals to supporting legitimate independence struggles or military defense of civil populations. The legitimacy of the nation state in this conjuncture depends, therefore, on its ability to continue this policy of discriminating between ferocious protection of imperial interests and “too little, too late” when it comes to the actual defense of democracy and human rights.

The legitimacy of the nation state in domestic policies.

Economic rationalism and the privatisation of the state bureaucracy have been legitimised with reference to the powerlessness of the nation state in the face of the world economy. The stark legacy of this conjuncture of aggressive reduction of wages, conditions and living standards is what might be called, following Marxism Today, the “two-thirds/one-third” society. The limit to the withdrawal of the state from industrial relations and economic policy has also been touched, with the emergence of private corporate security forces (not limited to the Australian waterfront, but an international phenomenon) and the extreme vulnerability of even major capitals to fluctuations in the financialised global economy. No advanced capitalist nation state can tolerate a situation of potential sudden sectoral economic collapse, industrial civil war or the breakdown of law and order in the major metropolitan centres indefinitely. At the same time, the economists and politicians are mesmerised by the prospect of national decline into the ranks of the Third World - and this possibility is displayed in the mass media like a severed head, dangled gruesomely in front of any labour party threatening to break ranks and return to Keynesian economic management or social welfare. These policies are not directly on the agenda, of course, but when a theorist like Anthony Giddens proposes policies of social inclusion linked to the cultural politics of lifestyle pluralism, this already goes way too far for the interests of capital, since even in the context of work for the dole schemes such policies require a level of financial support well beyond the horizons of contemporary “sound economic management” (i.e., privatisation and deregulation). What is required, from the perspective of the multinationals, is a relegitimisation of the nation state divorced from the welfare state compromise. This might be accomplished by the combination of a purely formal universal inclusion, linked to actual discrimination (divide and rule) and the generation of popular condemnation for those who fall outside the boundaries of this formal universality (the “undeserving poor” and the “criminal underclass”). Once again, the political lines are drawn up regarding the frontiers of inclusion and exclusion from the universality of democracy and human rights; once again, the radical questions revolve upon whether the nation state will be legitimated with reference to a purely formal universality that actually masks substantive discrimination, or whether opposition can be rallied around the extension of universality and its substantive content.

Who’s in, who’s out.

Meanwhile, corporate restructuring has profoundly affected the structure and composition of the middle classes, as well as generating a vast new layer of white-collar technological employees and blue-collar technical officers whose consciousness is profoundly middle class, but whose degree of control and supervision of the labour process indicates a proletarian structural role. In the context of a defensive working class retreat, politically the most significant development has been the bifurcation of the middle classes between what I shall call the “liberal middle classes” (the traditional professions) and the “technocratic middle classes” (the emergent technological and managerial strata). Corporate restructuring involves a shift within the hegemonic bloc, as the representatives of the liberal middle classes and petit bourgeoisie are displaced, and the new technocratic middle class representatives take their place. No mechanical division between different attitudes towards universality can be supposed to exist between these two layers of the middle classes, but nevertheless, I believe that we can suppose that - as their cultural and economic privileges are eroded - the liberal middle class is most likely to be attracted to discourses of the extension of universality as an articulation of their interests with the interests of potential allies.

The depth and character of the dominant ideological values.

It is significant that none of the other, major universals of bourgeois ethical discourse (independence, community, equality, liberty) have been thrown forward by the new struggles. Instead of these - relatively substantive - values, the emphasis has been on the formal-procedural values of parliamentary democracy and (limiting the abuse of) human rights. This is a reflection of the weakness of the opposition to corporate hegemony in the current conjuncture. Two levels of socialist intervention into this conjuncture seem possible. The first is the struggle for the extension of substantive universality. The second is the expansion of the field of universality itself, to include not only the other, major universals of bourgeois ethical discourse (independence, community, equality, liberty), but also their radicalised forms (solidarity, egalitarianism, liberation).

To counterpose “real politics” to ethical politics, now, is madness.

The dilemmas and contradictions of the Socialist Alliance indicate this very clearly. Of course, there is nothing wrong with testing the political mood by running explicitly socialist candidates. The real lunacy begins when their failure to significantly out-poll the One Nation candidate is interpreted as a sign that the Socialist Alliance represents a potential minority alternative to the Labor Party (as opposed to a fringe alternative scarcely differentiated from the cranks and fascists). At the same time, the very organisations triumphalistically proclaiming their electoral “successes” insist on watering down the platform of the Socialist Alliance to a form of leftwing reformism …in the light of this very “success”. Frankly, this is where they should have been from the start - without the politically suicidal name “Socialist Alliance,” but with some perspective on how to move from tepid reforms to militant politics. Likewise, in the anti-globalisation protests, to slap the label “anti-capitalist” onto protesters who, in their overwhelming majority, have not actually considered a worked-out social alternative to capitalism, is a sign of a deep refusal to actually engage with a mass movement. What animates the majority of these protesters - as with the protests around racism and Timor - is a sense of moral outrage at the clear injustice of the new world order, combined with a desire to see the proclaimed universality of democracy and human rights actually extended to some of the people who don’t have them. To demand that these people “face up” to the prospect that this will not happen without militant confrontation and anti-capitalist politics is ultimatism, pure and simple. The road from minimalist ethical politics to confrontations with the capitalist state runs through more ethical politics, not less.

Ethical politics is a cultural politics of the contestation of universality.

Capacities and subjectivity are shaped with reference to forms of universality (the internalisation of norms of conduct, not only as forms of competence, but also as conscious ethical frameworks and moral standards). Without a morality, there is no subject and therefore no social practice. This is because social practices are materially bounded but open-ended, and social agents (while not the creative and completely conscious agents of Giddens’ theoretical fantasia) are never robots or cultural dupes. Social agents therefore require a combination of flexible innovation with self-limiting restrictions: the name for this is the conscious ego with a moral conscience and the theory of the formalisation of morals is ethics. From the Left, ethical politics involves challenging the non-inclusive nature of the dominant universal values (expanding the framework of universality) and demanding that universal values affirmed by the hegemonic alliance be adhered to in practice (confronting capitalism with its own ethical norms). It means the materialist critique of bourgeois ethics by locating the field of bourgeois ethics in concrete social relations and the institutional framework of capitalist society. This is designed to articulate radical ethics, not as some new morality sucked out of a professor’s thumb or scribbled on the back of a leaflet, but as the transformation of bourgeois ethics. This is not their negation for a political instrumentalism where power is its own justification, nor an equally instrumental concept of the dialectic of revolutionary ends and means (which leaves the ethical status of the socialist revolution a prisoner of the mythology of historical necessity). It means developing social practices that connect with the radical criticism of bourgeois ethics.