From Statism To Pluralism

Democracy, Civil Society And Global Politics

Hirst, Paul, Paul Hirst Professor of Social Theory, Birkbeck College, London.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135851392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Modern societies currently lack positive alternative visions of the future. Many writers have claimed that the only option is a return to free-market capitalism, in which success and survival depend on being as competitive as possible whether as a nation, firm or individual.; Paul Hirst argues that there are viable alternative futures and widely applicable models that can be used to structure change. Hirst's distinctive approach to political theory reasons from real political problems rather than confining itself to abstract concepts.; Presenting an innovative political position, this collection of essays represents an attempt to re- state a practical third way between the discredited ideals of state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism.

1

Introduction

Modern societies appear to be trapped: between the increasingly oppressive actuality of a capitalist system drifting toward a restoration of laissez faire, and the absence of any viable alternative to it. Socialism – in the sense of a comprehensive alternative to the market system – is dead. The brutalities of actually existing socialism have fatally crippled the power of socialist ideas of any kind to motivate and inspire. Social democracy too seems muted and ineffective. The collapse of revolutionary socialism and the decline of wars between the major industrial states have removed the major justifications of social democracy for established elites – that it could prevent the worse evil of communism and that it could harness organized labour in the national war effort. Those elites have not merely turned against social democracy, but they also seem to have convinced significant sections of the population that a regulated economy and comprehensive social welfare are either unattainable or undesirable.

Modern politicians in the advanced states operate within a narrow political spectrum in which they all claim to be democrats and they all embrace the market system as the only possible form of economic organization. Yet the democracy they espouse is of a narrowly plebiscitarian variety, in which the people periodically choose who are to be their elected masters. The economic policies they advocate are those of the financial and business elites – “sound money” and the pursuit of microeconomic “efficiency”. In these circumstances the electorate have a choice between variants of the same, and increasingly they are indifferent to the political process and cynical about what it can accomplish.

In these circumstances the people have been robbed of any kind of political hope, of an imagined collective future that would be attainable and better than the present. Given this then there is little that is worth striving for in the company of others. Hope is reduced to individual success in the competitive race and aspirations reduced to a desire for material things – to a second car or a swimming pool. This political climate has also robbed social theory of much of its purpose. It now has little to say about the general character and evolution of modern societies. The result is, on the one hand, an ironic postmodernism that denies the possibility of imagined futures founded upon a rigorous analysis of the present, and, on the other hand, a reduction of social action to economics, to the calculation of the rational self-interested agent. The critical forms of social theorizing retreat from social generality into a concern with specific issues, chiefly into an obsession with personal and group identities and with the particular discontents that arise from them.

The essays collected here are an attempt to respond to this situation: on the one hand, to argue that there are alternative imagined futures that can be defended and that are capable of motivating large numbers of citizens; and on the other hand, to claim that modern societies are not condemned to evolve into variants of a brutalized consumer capitalism that excludes increasing numbers of people from full social and economic citizenship. The approach to contemporary problems offered here is distinctive in two senses. First, in terms of political theory: the approach is to reason from existing political institutions and contemporary political problems toward possible alternatives. This is in contrast to the retreat of most of modern political theory from institutions and problems of governance, either into the elaboration of abstract normative concepts divorced from political actualities and possibilities, or, into the elaboration of methodological tools for an objective “political science”. Secondly, these essays expound a definite political doctrine – associative democracy – that is, a practical third way between collectivist state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. It is a restatement and renewal of ideas that have resurfaced after many decades of neglect. In a changed conjuncture these ideas are attracting increasing support as people from diverse political positions recognize the need for and the possibility of a reform and reshaping of existing institutions that goes beyond the decayed orthodoxies of the left and the right. The objective of such reform is to deepen and to extend democratic control, thus enabling more informed decisions and thereby more effective economic and social governance. The public mood is changing toward greater dissatisfaction and a willingness to contemplate change.

But change has to be clearly outlined and the alternatives not merely enticing but also practical and attainable. The modern public is tired of utopias – the twentieth century has been dominated by attempts to turn the utopias of the left and right into practical politics with disastrous consequences. Marxism is the chief of these and it foundered above all because at its core is the anti-political ideal of a stateless society without a complex division of labour. Marxism set its ultimate social goals outside of any institutional frame and made all forms of government mere makeshifts on the way to utopia. This was a fatal mixture in which the unattainable legitimated the most ruthless pragmatism in its futile pursuit.

Modern laissez faire is also utopian. This may seem paradoxical since in modern societies markets appear to be the dominant form of economic organization. But free-market doctrines are not satisfied with the messy actuality of modern commercial societies, they aim to turn them into pure free-market systems. In doing so they ignore wider issues of governance and institutions because they wish to make markets unfettered by all extraneous constraints. Markets will be the primary form of social governance. Laissez-faire ideologues imagine a social order sustained almost exclusively by means of the exchange of goods and services between its members. Thus coordination of the activities of social actors is primarily by sales and purchases – the market is an exchange of goods that integrates the society. In this view non-market institutions have a distinctly secondary role in social governance, they are confined at best to underpinning the market. Thus a system of soundly defended private property rights and a modicum of commercial probity on the part of traders are the main preconditions for a market society as conceived by its most ardent economic liberal advocates. In its own way this is as anti-political and anti-institutional a view as Marx’s dreaming of the abolition of the division of labour in the 1844 Manuscripts.

The notion of governance has been introduced here in a very general sense, one that goes beyond specifically governmental institutions and which can include markets as one of the principal means of governance. Governance in this broad meaning can be defined as the means by which an activity or ensemble of activities is controlled or directed, such that it delivers an acceptable range of outcomes according to some established social standard. Governance has become more problematic in recent decades as its prevailing forms have become more difficult to apply to changing conditions and activities and less certain in their outcomes. This failure of the prevailing methods of governance has meant that increasingly we have been stumbling in an organizational twilight in which there are no readily applicable and generalizable methods of how to control and direct social activities. Rapid social change has undermined both the means of governance – making it difficult to offer tested and reliable models of how to govern that are relatively easy to learn and to apply – and it has made it difficult to define what are acceptable outcomes by which to judge the efficacy of such means, since hitherto given distributions of resources or patterns of activity have been subject to rapid and unpredictable change.

Associative democracy is relevant once again because it addresses this crisis of governance. It offers means of control and co-ordination that can work in more complex and changing conditions, and it also points to new social standards by which to assess outcomes. Before considering it we need to look at how and why the prevailing forms of governance came to fail. There are three basic governance mechanisms and widespread models of social organization that have been dominant in modern industrial societies: hierarchy and imperative control; exchange – co-ordination through contracts and market transactions; and negotiated control – bargaining between the affected interests in an activity to co-ordinate their actions to attain agreed outcomes. These models are highly generalized – they could be applied to states, to industrial and social sectors, to companies and other enterprises. They were not inconsequential, however, since they provided a frame in which various specific methods and techniques of control could be placed – for example, surveillance is a distinct style of control, but it can operate best within a hierarchical structure in which superordinates survey subordinates. We will now consider each of those three mechanisms-models in turn.

1.1 Imperative control

In this model governance operates through a dominant agency with exclusive control over all aspects of the activity in question and which coordinates and directs through the hierarchical transmission of orders to subordinate agencies and personnel. As in the classic model of bureaucracy the subordinates receive orders and transmit evidence of compliance up the chain of command, thus ensuring that superordinates know whether the outcomes have been attained and providing the informational conditions for continued governance. Hierarchy is a bounded information system, in which the conditions of control are internalized in a structure of command. As such it is far wider than the notion of bureaucracy; bureaucratic organizations being a subclass of imperative control. This mode of governance can operate in very different social and ideological circumstances.

State socialist centrally planned economies are instances of imperative control on the scale of a whole society – administrative structures replace markets as the main mechanism for the transmission of information and the allocation of resources. The planning apparatus requires all sectors and enterprises to comply with plan directives and targets and to provide indicators of compliance whereby their performance is monitored. Central planning is a distinct governmental model – one that could be copied and transmitted. It is the specific governmental apparatus of socialism, distinct from the general ideological postulates of writers like Engels who imagined that socialist societies would be simple to organize. However, apparently entirely opposed types of institutions could utilize what is the same basic model of governance. Thus company-level planning and the related practices of Fordist or Taylorist workplace organization control, in which the tasks of conception and execution are rigidly separated, are also instances of governance through imperative control. Both the capitalist and socialist variants are feasible governance strategies (at the price of authoritarianism in differing degrees), if the circumstances to be thus controlled are relatively stable and the outcomes can be set in terms of easily measured and monitored quanta.

These conditions apply less and less. Central planning failed partly because its existing control technologies were inadequate to the scale and scope of the activities to be co-ordinated and because consumers were no longer satisfied with being fitfully provisioned with a given range of goods. However, top-down company planning is also undermined once output shifts from stable runs of standardized goods and services, and a relatively undifferentiated output. Rapidly changing product mixes and an emphasis on customization and the quality of products weaken the capacity of imperative control from top to bottom at company level. This leads to three major changes: first, forcing the decentralization of decision-making to levels where appropriate information is available; secondly, the granting of greater autonomy to the producers of goods and deliverers of services; and thirdly, the development of more complex and multicentred methods of monitoring product quality and productive performance.¹

Similar considerations apply to public services organized along traditional bureaucratic lines. Bureaucracy spread from the army, postal services and railways to such services as health, education and welfare – centralization improved both the quality of such services and their consistency. This form of provision was viable well into the twentieth century because the social services demanded were simple in character and the requirements for their delivery fairly uniform – elementary education, basic workers’ housing, standard unemployment insurance, etc. They could be hierarchically administered because they were easily replicable locally and uniform in character – leading to more or less standardized provision. New public services are more diverse in their mix and far more complex in their character. Publics are more demanding and less deferential. The professionals responsible for service delivery need to have more knowledge, and hence more discretion, and are consequently more difficult to control from above. Thus, for example, universities are more difficult to monitor than elementary schools as mass higher education comes close to being a commonly available public service. It is very difficult to decide centrally what should be taught in universities and to determine if the outcomes are satisfactory.

The collapse of state socialism is thus a spectacular special case of a more widespread failure of the most commonly adopted non-market mechanism for co-ordinating services and activities. It is a failure that stems from the increasing complexity and localization of activities, and from the information required to govern these dispersed services proving to be beyond the capacity of hierarchical monitoring. It is a failure that managers, both public and private, continue in the main to find threatening and in response to which they seek substitute means of supervisory control over necessarily diverse and dispersed activities. The “audit explosion” is thus as much a consequence of the failure of top-down control as it is an attempt to find ways of continuing it.² Accountability upwards and transparency of activities for supervisory agencies are sought through ever more detailed accounting procedures made possible by computerization, standardized reporting mechanisms also facilitated by information technology, formula-funding schemes, and centralized quality-control systems. In the main those mechanisms can only succeed in asserting central control at the price of losing the advantages gained by localism and flexibility. This is what has happened in much of the public sector in the UK – the result is a mess in which the benefits of localism are often lost and effective hierarchical control is not restored.

Consumers generally find the moves towards customized production and tailored commercial services more satisfactory than standardized mass products. However, there are some real virtues in standardization and uniformity, and this has been particularly the case in the non-market public service sector. Consumers here, particularly those who have been conditioned into social democratic expectations, find diversity disquieting – they expect services to be uniform and equally available between different localities and social situations. Uniformity of administration and bureaucratic service delivery ensured a degree of equality and universalism in provision of services to citizens – this was desired by socialists, social democrats, and administrative rationalists alike. Indeed, such common uniform services provided foci for national continuity and identity – thus nationalists and civic republicans could welcome such homogeneity as promoting national character and political culture. Citizenship and the techniques of bureaucratic governance were closely connected. An example of the political effects of such uniform public services is the old monopoly public broadcasting systems like the BBC; critics fear that a multiplicity of channels will undermine a common national media culture and, therefore, part of national identity.

1.2 Exchange

It may seem curious to say that markets as a form of governance share in a crisis of modern techniques of control and regulation of activities, for market institutions and ideas seem to be dominant. Yet markets are only effective means of co-ordinating a wide range of activities and governing the action of numerous social actors either if they are combined with a strong mix of non-market institutions and activities, or if a very wide range of substantive outcomes is deemed acceptable. The notion that “free” markets are a method of co-ordination in and of themselves, without the need for other complimentary institutions, is only true in special circumstances.

Free markets cannot be a generalized mechanism of mediating between socially distinct and divided labours unless the conditions of perfect competition and perfect information are close to being met. A society of freely interacting small producers and traders, where the means of livelihood are fairly equally distributed, might permit markets to be the dominant form of social governance. A minimalist state and voluntary association for non-market activities would supplement a society organized around exchange. In a society with large corporations, a complex division of labour, and very large numbers of wage workers, these conditions cannot be met.

Moreover, modern expectations are strongly substantive – people may be told that “you cannot buck the market”, but still they expect modern corporate capitalism to deliver broad-based prosperity and growth. Modern populations will not just accept whatever market exchange happens to deliver, and the notion that weakly regulated markets will tend to provide broadly egalitarian outcomes – full employment, growth and acceptable living standards for the mass of people – is too improbable to be credible. The problem is that modern free-market rhetoric tends to work towards undermining the forms of social embeddedness in non-market institutions that have helped both to enhance the performance of capitalist economies and to mitigate their worst features.³ Welfare provision, for example, has helped both to ameliorate the effects of markets, cushioning the effects of sickness and unemployment, thus contributing to the political stability of capitalism, and to sustain mass demand, sharing the benefits of prosperity and creating more consumers. A purely competitive society in which individuals rise and fall on their luck or efforts, in which they themselves make provision for contingencies and risks through private saving and insurance, is likely to be a highly unequal society and one in which consumption will tend to be rigidly divided between rich and poor. By contrast modern mass consumption capitalism requires broad-based prosperity, a solid middle class who consume the bulk of its products. That middle class, the social basis of high and rising effective demand, is not a creation of the market alone but of an ensemble of social institutions that prevent radical social differentiation: free education, public financial support for private housing, collective consumption through infrastructure and public investment, social insurance and public health provision. Free-market rhetoric is thus undermining the foundations of modern capitalism in its advocacy of policies that destroy or hollow out the social institutions that allow markets to work effectively and relatively fairly.

1.3 Negotiated control

The classic form of such governance through negotiation and bargaining between the agents in an activity is corporatism – the macroeconomic and microeconomic regulation of capitalism through co-ordination by bargains struck between the ...