An ambidextrous politics?

Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics
Polity Press, 1994. 276 pp.
Reviewed by Neville Spencer To most socialists, a title such as Beyond Left and Right, would signal a dosage of fatuous small "l" liberalism. The author of this book however has gained a certain amount of respect even amongst Marxists for his previous work, in particular for the two volumes of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism which outlined his somewhat sympathetic critique of the Marxist theory of history. Giddens' rejects historical materialism because he sees a concept of history driven by certain laws as being teleological. He claims that the nature of history is contingent and does not have a "direction" to it. In part, this rests on his rejection of Marxists' practice of granting primacy to the economic in explanations of history. Beyond Left and Right is Giddens' attempt to extend into the realm of politics the ideas originally expounded in Contemporary Critiques. His politics aims to resolve the central problems of modern society which he outlines in four themes — combating poverty and the gap between the poor and the affluent; redressing the degradation of the environment; contesting arbitrary power; and reducing the role of force and violence in social life. For Giddens, the central element of modern society which makes possible the resolution of these problems is the expansion of social reflexivity. Over the last few decades the acceptance of acting on the basis of tradition has broken down. Instead actions and values increasingly need to be justified on their own logical merits by an increasingly informed public. Giddens sees the rise of the green movement as the key which can turn this heightened reflexivity into action for a more just society because the problem of environmental degradation is a global one — the eventual uninhabitability of the earth will affect both rich and poor. Due to the declining acceptability of simply carrying on in the old ways without justifying one's behaviour, this cross-class environmental necessity for social change can cause even the affluent to change their ways. Giddens sees in this the possibility of an end to the "productivist" drive (the obsessive need to produce for its own sake), allowing both a sustainable relationship to the environment and an end to vast disparities in wealth. This attempted alternative to a Marxist theory of history is somewhat feeble. First, placing social reflexivity at the centre of the analysis ignores but does not escape the issue of the material social conditions. Increased social reflexivity has developed on the basis of changes in information and communications technology, and increased awareness of the world has been made necessary by the global nature of modern capitalism. It is not independent of (but is in fact largely caused by) the economic conditions which make it possible. Secondly, Giddens ignores the fact that capitalism creates an economic drive to pollute which cannot be reduced to a psychological factor of "productivism". It is in the interests of capitalists to live in a world free of pollution and environmental degradation, that's true. It is also true that capitalists, as much as anyone else, know that current productive practices are making the world less and less inhabitable. But this has not produced a willingness on the part of the wealthy to do anything about it. In fact, as the behaviour of wealthier nations at international forums such as the Rio Summit have demonstrated, they actively manoeuvre to derail any attempts at real change. Capitalists may want environmental degradation to stop but they always want others to stop it. It is, in the vast majority of cases, more profitable to produce in environmen­tally unsound ways. Capitalists who get twinges of con­science about this tend eventually to be run out of business by those who have no qualms about producing in the most profitable manner possible. This is an inherent economic feature of capitalism. A society in which such behaviour is an economic necessity might produce a productivist psychology, but ending productivism would mean ending its root cause, which Giddens fails to identify. Giddens proposes a sort of welfare state, though one some distance removed from what is normally understood as "the welfare state". Rather than a state which decides on the needs of the poor or excluded and then benevolently aims to provide for them, Giddens envisages a state which creates the conditions for people to help and provide for themselves. However because Giddens believes a classless society is impossible, this welfare state is still set within the bounds of a class society, albeit a far more equitable one. Again, Giddens advocates the possibility of this sort of society on the basis of increased social reflexivity paving the way for a more benevolent ruling class. Once again Giddens overlooks the question of what social-economic preconditions could possibly allow such benevolence which would be simply incompatible with the continued existence of class society. On the subject of alternative political systems Giddens is critical of the social democratic left's conception of the welfare state on the one hand and the right's neo-liberal agenda on the other. And much of this discussion is useful. His discussion of socialism however is extremely cursory, verging on the sort of "communism is dead" headlines splashed across the tabloid media. He attempts no analysis of the nature of Soviet communism and the possibility of democratic socialism is never entertained. In essence, Giddens replaces historical materialism with a historical psychologism. His analysis is untenable, however, because social reflexivity cannot hold the explanatory weight he tries to give it. The political perspective which results, while more theoretically sophisticated than liberalism, is not far distant from the small "l" liberal agenda of making capitalism nicer.