Labour and the Atlantic Left : An Exhausted Modernist Project

The first of the pictures accompanying this blog is by Diego Rivera, and depicts Frida Kahlo distributing arms. The second is by Civechio, and depicts Christ washing feet. The post is a rough sketch of what I think, but I would welcome constructive criticism.

One hundred years ago, the celebration of 'modernity' ran alongside a distinctive and separate intellectual movement, modernism. It spanned dozens of thinkers and writers, and stretched across the world. Modernism had different iterations in different places. Mostly, though a summary of the movement is difficult, it was concerned with novelty, cheap energy, technology, and the obsession with the surfaces, materials and social machinery of everyday life.

It was as possible to imagine being a radical artist in the modern moment as it was to be a social engineer; in fact, the two went together. Industry, innovation, and a particular view of science were melded and moulded. Modernism worked through manifestoes, fetishised the primitive and the irrational as things to be overcome, and turned against the past. It hung identities upon activities, and sought even by surgical and chemical means to redefine human beings whilst suggesting that man--and it was usually man, not humanity--could master nature even to the stars.

I think that the climate of modernism had a definite intellectual impact on all the institutions of society. It changed churches, for instance, forcing them as near to relativism and engagement with the cheap-energy driven impulses and capacities of wider society as they could go. It helped build nations.

It built upon a need to systematise the world when all men were declared equal but God or any other absolute was removed as the foundation of their equality. It was obsessed with process, and pushed off from the obsession with procedure and constitutionalism that had engaged political and legal debate for the preceding two hundred years. I think that tort law, and in particular the tort of negligence, were as much associated with a modernist impulse as Diego Rivera's paintings or the idea of comprehensive schools.

In Britain, modernism affected the development of the Labour Party very much. From a compound of statist Liberals, class representatives, and Christian Socialists, practically but not wholly bereft of nineteenth century Marxism, Labour nursed social democratic and radical modernists at its Oxbridge-led heights. When, aided by the grammar schools, they came into their own in the sixties administrations, they were as dissonant as the notes in a Schoenberg symphony, except in the common idea that they nursed of government as at heart a form of machinery.

Like modernism in art, they achieved things that changed the landscape--literally--and the ways that people saw things. They created the Open University, pushed the idea of comprehensive education, and let rip the social libertarianism of the Jenkins years. They built towerblocks and concorde. They created a country called London.

They were always held back though, or down to earth, by other Labour strains. One were the resolvedly Labourist unions, determined to protect industry and the pay and conditions of workers. Often these groups went beyond all sense and prevented all planning; mostly, they got under the modernists' intellectual skin by celebrating what the elites must have thought of as their primitivism.

Some parts of Labour were hangovers from the authentic English liberal and dissenting tradition of the levellers; some were products of an insulated and self-protecting system of Oxford and the Bar that, until the fifties at least, functioned on the basis of tradition, common law, and robust empiricism. Some were Christian, in a way that did not adapt to modern realities.

Then the modernists struck back, reaching into the Trotskyism that was just one facet of their mode of operation. It wasn't so much that they infiltrated the Labour Party. It was more that they undermined institutions for what they conceived of as all the right reasons. They borrowed from the great, idiosyncratic, liberal and religious American movement of civil rights that essentially righted the wrong of slavery, and the moral fervour of the campaign against Apartheid and nuclear holocaust, and they turned it to the purposes of a deliberate and final manifesto in which equality, non-discrimination, and the elimination of all the things that stopped the state being viewed as a machine were elevated to holy writ.

Then they changed their form again. If high modernism was associated with an age of oil, late modernism and its debased regeneration, post-modernism, were in retrospect a response to two things. One was the achievement of all the modernist aims just as the oil began to run out and the world came to depend upon chimerical credit and a form of state-underpinned capitalism. The other was the intellectual exhaustion of the whole, relentless, shock of the new, and its passage into a culture of death.

And so, as art ended up concerned with more and more abstracted depictions of narrative, or even piles of rubbish and accumulations of the mundane, labour politics became a vehicle for the mouthing of claptrap and a desperate search for novel modern policies. These were, in their refusal to face reality or to contextualise, in truth merely the vehicle for a bankrupted tribalism that mixed self-advancement and a quasi-religious attachment to the rituals of political life in the Labour machine. Like all bankrupted traditions, it was prey to snake-oil projects and prone to hatred of anything substantial, be it the working class or religion or otherwise.

Sooner or later, this had to break the Labour Party. I suppose that what people who look at British politics now need to ask, is, 'was the old labour party effectively broken by 1997, or has the neo-liberal government of Brown and Blair finished it off?'. Other pointless questions might include 'did it die in the 1980s?', 'Can a left and a liberal party take its place?' and 'how did the conservatives come to talk the modernist talk whilst walking the corporate-liberal walk?'



Thankfully, all those questions are now pointless to me. I don't want much to do with the left's death throes and it does not want much to do with me. I'd like to see society, community, liberty and a smaller, less arrogant state take its place, but frankly I think that anyone who pays much attention to politics in the narrow sense in the next few years is losing out.

I would urge you to look to your mind, your soul, your family and your business, and to adapt yourself to a long return from the modern. Some things that worked and that were useful, we'll have to take with us, and I am not wholly sure where things are going; but, when it comes to Labour and the left, I suspect in the United States as much as here, the caravan is moving on. Working people and the old and the cold and the poor and the sick and sinners and citizens deserve better. It is time for people of goodwill to say goodbye, before you are forced to.

Embrace a republic of truth and love, in your own life, before it is too late.