Socialists oppose capitalist globalisation; reformists want to make it work for the global poor. Which side are you on?
Part of the left still insists that it is socialist. But it has made two fundamental errors that will doom it to irrelevance - or, worse, a relevance based only on empty fame in media that want to keep it going in order to enliven dull politics.
First, it opposes capitalist globalisation and all that is reckoned to go with it - free trade, transnational investment, increased competition. It believes that this makes the rich richer and, more to the point, the poor poorer. Second, it opposes the practical efforts to give the world some ethical and humanitarian rules, believing that these are an expression of American imperialism.
This socialist left has less and less to do with the centre left. While there are still alliances across the divide - for example, the coalition governments of Germany and France - leaders of the green or communist left find it ever harder to keep their activists in line with government positions, and do so at the price of deepening ambiguity. In Britain, the largely extra-parliamentary socialist left has little popular base. As in the United States, it is increasingly confined to the academy, the media and a few of the older industrial centres.
Its view that investment, trade and competition impoverish the developing world has two bases in reality. First, the gap between rich and poor, both within countries and between them, is growing. In the 1980s, the highest salaries in the UK were roughly 20 times the average; now they are 180 times the average. Second, the poorest part of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, is getting steadily more desperate, and in the 1990s received steadily less aid.
Otherwise, the evidence is against the left. Almost all developing countries have given up socialist strategies. The state- or collective-owned sectors, such as in China, India and Russia, are weights around the necks of these countries and their progress; their private sectors provide the dynamism, the growth and a large share of export earnings. In the World Trade Organisation's talks in Doha, Qatar, last month, the largest demand from developing countries was for freer trade - in agricultural products and textiles, which clamour for markets in the developed countries.
The socialist left has no ideological base with which to oppose capitalism other than opposition to its many injustices. For the first time in two centuries, there is no overarching political project that proposes another system. This helps to keep the loose coalition united, but it makes opposition a fragmented and opportunist affair, with no vision of a better world.
The centre left has accepted capitalism as the hard-wiring of national and global economics. But it wants to explore how capitalism can work for the common, rather than solely the corporate and individual, good. To the socialist left, such policies are at best palliatives, at worst hypocrisy. In the UK, the growing willingness to raise taxes to fund public services denotes an intention to protect and even extend the publicly financed areas. The next step is the translation of such a national strategy to much more effective action on a world stage.
But the socialist left sees humanitarian or ethical globalisation as an empty concept, serving only as a cover for western, specifically American, power. It sees a continuum between the cold war strategies of propping up regimes in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and the post-cold war interventions in the Balkans, Indonesia, Africa and now Afghanistan: all point to a seamless search for global hegemony and imperialist domination.
This is wrong. The end of the cold war marked a real shift. The military values that had been maintained, with difficulty, throughout the confrontation between the western and Soviet camps have largely dispersed, in favour of the values of individualism and consumerism. The power calculations of the cold war are no longer accepted. Leaders have the luxury to articulate and develop ethical theories - even where (indeed, especially where) practice lags behind rhetoric.
The US has been slow to adapt. Part of it shares the impulses and reflexes of the new world - it is at the forefront of every kind of consumption, and it is more hedonistic than any other society. But another part, mainly on the right, rejects co-operation with much of the rest of the world except on its own terms; it backs a large military force and a unilateralist approach.
So the left's real struggle in the future will not be to oppose American imperialism (which no longer exists), but to persuade the US to sign up to a world in which common values are adhered to and policed - and where that policing is not the de facto imposition of US, or US-backed, power. The leader of that struggle (partly a covert one) is currently Britain's centre-left government.
The socialist left sees the US as murderous in its bombing of Afghan cities and desperate to widen the war to other targets. It sees Britain as a poodle, trailing behind its master in the hope of a biscuit and a pat on the head when the war is won. Yet Tony Blair, the man who has positioned himself closest to the side of the US, now articulates the most coherent opposition to the world-view of its dominant elite. In speeches in October and last month, he proposed that the rich states embark on a mission to bring "greater understanding between nations and between faiths, and above all justice and prosperity for the poor and dispossessed". The proposed deployment of British troops in Afghanistan, delayed through disagreement with the US, demonstrates the difference of approach: one sees the conflict as an opportunity to bring aid and a measure of order, the other focuses exclusively on winning the war.
All the major figures in the British cabinet strongly back Blair's approach. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has done more than other finance ministers to argue for debt relief and increased aid; indeed, the UK has increased its aid budget by a larger percentage than any other rich country. Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, has produced strategies for development and managing globalisation for the benefit of the poor which are seen as models for other states. Robin Cook, the architect of an "ethical dimension to foreign policy", has tried to bring the more reformist global movements into the same tent as social democracy, arguing in a speech in Oxford last month that "it is not anti-globalisation to argue that relationships in the global economy should reduce poverty, respect human rights and protect the environment".
The centre left has an emerging theory and practice of global governance. It is still being formed, and it is riven with disagreements and contradictions: for example, the extent of trade protection against the exports of poor countries, and the position of Britain, France and Germany (all with social democratic governments) as large suppliers of arms. It is, however, a thickening strand of policy, which diplomats and officials are struggling to work out in practice. Its institutions are imperfect and congested - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO. Or they are novel and untested - the special war crimes tribunals, the international criminal court. They do not yet constitute a system; they lack authority; above all, they lack any popular underpinning. There is no global "people".
The rich states of the world no longer have national aims or territorial ambitions. They are interested in influence, and in institutions: the first to achieve economic gain, the second to police the global economy. They use force to repel aggression, protect minorities, deter challenges to state-building. The aim is not to annex territory or even to impose a proxy government, but to achieve peace so that modern, commercial relations can flourish. The US, in this sense, is in agreement with the European states.
The centre left's occupation of the middle ground, its encouragement of entrepreneurialism, its relative harshness on crime and terrorism, and the mutual admiration between its leaderships and those of many corporations delude the socialist left into thinking it is a right-wing force. In fact, the right - especially the US right - has itself an emerging strategy, which includes the revival of nationalism, opposition to global compromise and, in Europe, opposition to all immigration.
Capitalism will remain dominant, but also diverse and malleable. The point for the centre left is to shape it to the advantage of the poor of the globe, just as it has, over the past century, tried to shape it to the advantage of the poor of the state. The socialist left has no alternative to capitalism; it may miss the opportunity to lend its strength to the alternatives within.
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