Bunfight over Jacobin’s ‘culinary luddites’ article

Jacobin magazine this morning published a trenchant polemic, ‘A Plea for Culinary Modernism’, by historian and philosopher of science and technology Rachel Lauden, against the current trend toward foodie politics (local, organic, paleo, anti-GMO, gluten-free, CSA, food sovereignty, etc.) and in favour of industrial food production. It’s also quite a long read and an extensive history of our relationship to food since our emergence as a species.

I found Lauden’s piece to be a superb corrective to the foodie parts of a broader category of anti-modernist politics that I strongly disagree with. Evidently many other progressives are feeling the same way, as the piece (actually a reprint from Gastronomica magazine) has been exceptionally widely shared. However, the Facebook comments underneath the post on Jacobin’s page suggest that many, many people also hated the essay: “Epic Jacobin fail.” “Absolute bullshit article.” “One of the stupidest articles you've ever published. Hipster contrarianism in its purest form.” “I'm not going to read this article.”

One of the people who really, really disliked it was Anthony Galluzzo, a Facebook friend of mine (but whom I’ve never actually met in the flesh) who, like me, is a regular Jacobin contributor, and also, like me, has written what I suppose could be called ‘pro-modernity’ pieces. He was one of the last people whom I thought would disagree with Lauden.

I’m publishing here our friendly argument from the aforementioned thread on Jacobin’s FB page because such threads are ephemeral and I thought this one was worth preserving.

As you’ll see, I disagree with a lot of what Anthony says, but far from everything, and all of it in any case is much more considered and subtle than the usual kneejerk anti-modernist reaction to anti-anti-modernist critiques.

Anthony starts off, and then our mutual friend Will Hough invites me to respond. There have been no edits to the original conversation with the exception of the addition of a few paragraph breaks to make for easier reading. 

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Anthony Galluzzo Historical accuracy isn't really my criterion for whether food is good or not. "Artisanal"-another flavor of gourmet-is better aesthetically. And as noted below, too many straw men or rather straw hippies here.

Yes, we need a better, more sustainable, large scale industrial agriculture, of which small scale organic farming will form a tiny part. Why always these antinomies? So our only choice is between McDonalds ("edible" garbage) and "Luddism"? This is a C student-level example of the false dichotomy. And why are the masses consigned to Big Macs again? Note the subtle hints of reactionary cultural populism-fancy food is only for fancy people, after all!

And as for celebrating bad mass produced food as a "modernist" gesture...this increasingly predictable kitsch Jetsonism is veering into self-parody at this point. I will take farm-to-table over Soylent any day.

Will Hough I agree re the straw men. As for the rest, I'm hoping Leigh Phillips will help me sort it out.

Anthony Galluzzo The problem isn't the technical point (s) per se-there is a campy aesthetic here-a callow 1950s era futurism (the wonders of Jell-O and canned foods) used as a fuck you to some hypothetical Park Slope neo-hippie. Tiresome.

A sensuously aesthetic life for all-which will include "reconfigured* traditions, many of which were once the province of elites-should be one primary goal of socialism.

And do Michael Pollan or Anthony Bourdain really offer their recipes as historical claims? Please. Sophisticated geek trolling-the future as endless McRibs at the Jetsons' place. Kill me now.

Will Hough This'll do for sorting things out, thanks.

"A sensuously aesthetic life for all-which will include 'reconfigured' traditions, many of which were once the province of elites-should be one primary goal of socialism."

Miguel Antonio Gomez A tiny part? You might want to check your facts, buddy. Small farmers produce most of the world's foodand they are doing this with less than a quarter of the world's farmland.http://www.grain.org/.../4929-hungry-for-land-small...

Anthony Galluzzo I am critiquing the article, if you didn't notice, buddy. My point being that a sustainable future will depend on a better, large scale industrial agriculture and small organic farming. These false dichotomies make for stupid-ideologically coded-debates.

Connor Kilpatrick Anthony Galluzzo, now is the perfect time to confess to you how much I love the Olive Garden's Zuppa Toscana soup.

Anthony Galluzzo Cheer whiz and Spielberg movies-a Marxist vision that even Fox News can get behind, Seriously, I generally love Jacobin, but this article is embarrassing and the constant trolls will only undermine the magazine. Also, some more nuanced takes on environmentalism would be nice. It's not always an either/or.

Anthony Galluzzo Make sure to snap a pic of every McDonalds you visit in Europe, Connor -no "feudal" food for you: #accelerate

Miguel Antonio Gomez Oh but there is a dichotomy, Anthony Galluzzo! There is indeed a big contradiction between the two 'modes of production'! The most obvious one is that they compete for resources: space, land, water, financing, etc...

Anthony Galluzzo So what's your take on the essay, Miguel Antonio Gomez? We need to go all organic and local? Neo-agrarianism? Elaborate.

Anthony Galluzzo What's the Eco-socialist perspective, John Gulick?

Leigh Phillips I'm surprised at your antagonism to the article, Anthony, after the other day, you were quite rightly fulminating against Carol Lipton for her salmagundi of anti-vaxx, primitivist, pseudoscientific, Malthusian, ‘other ways of knowing’, noble-savage brain rot. This essay is countering many of the same tendencies with respect to food. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to all the evidence-phobic, faddish waffle everywhere you go about gluten-free, chemical-free (impossible unless what is on offer is a perfect vacuum, as everything is made of chemicals), paleo, local, all-natural, organic, anti-GMO, etc., etc. It’s not trolling to contest the problems of what the author calls ‘culinary luddism’. It’s not the term I would have chosen, as the Luddites of the 19th Century were a lot more complicated than the term luddism would suggest, but otherwise, the essay is a brilliant, provocative piece of popular history.

More broadly, we are living at a moment when a rainbow of anti-modern ideologies dress themselves up as anti-capitalist, or at least anti-corporate. Yet for all their claim of opposition to capitalism, when you scratch the surface, they very frequently turn out to be quite neoliberal and market-friendly while unconsciously drawing on 19th Century counter-Enlightenment thinking or early 20th Century Blood and Soil reaction, and usually come marinated in postmodernist anti-rationalism and relativism.

We find these counter-Enlightenment ideologies within a great deal of environmentalist thought in particular; within the technophobic opposition to nanotechnology, space exploration, cloning, genetic modification, neuroscience, human enhancement, etc., etc.; within the essentialism of identity politics; within the mysticism of alternative medicine; within the scepticism of civil liberties mounted by safe space, trigger warning, ‘no-platform’ forms of campus censorship; but also within foodie culture. To contest the Malthusianism within environmentalist ideas is not to deny climate change, or stop worrying about overfishing or pollution, say, but to propose real solutions to these problems. To contest technophobia is not to embrace the ‘gadgets + capitalism = awesome’ naïveté of a Wired or Popular Mechanics magazine, but to offer future-oriented egalitarianism. To argue against the magical thinking of alternative medicine is not to abandon our challenge to Big Pharma. To contest the censoriousness, viciousness and victimology of SJW berserkers is not to abandon the fight against racism, misogyny and homophobia, but to argue for a better, universalist mode of campaigning against these phenomena. Similarly with this critique of the ahistoricism of contemporary foodie culture, the argument is not to damn aesthetic pleasure in artisanal food, craft beer, etc., but to remind of their fundamental dependence on industry that has brought so much benefit and how industry is not to be done away with, but captured by us and planned in the interest of all.

A growing number of Marxist writers—myself included and I think a lot of folks in ‘the Jacobin ecosystem’, if you’ll permit me to project a little here—are growing increasingly frustrated with the hegemony of such counter-Enlightenment ideas on the left and are groping towards a way of critiquing them without alienating those who unfortunately but with the best of intentions embrace these ideas. The Accelerationists likewise are largely on the right track, albeit steeped in a philosophical register impenetrable to most. Elsewhere, the self-styled Eco-modernists are interesting and definitely coming up with very good solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss but insufficiently confronting the contradictions of the market system.

Do we always get it right? No. Are we sometimes inelegant, ham-fisted or even sneering in this regard? I’m the first to admit that my curmudgeon performance around these sort of issues is a little clumsy at times. But this isn’t the same as trolling. And for all the fumbles, I remain convinced that our best hope for breaking out of the neoliberal impasse lies in a universalist, global, future-oriented, labour-centric revival of the modernist project, not a small-is-beautiful retreat to some Golden Era that never existed. And so this critique must continue to happen, however maladroit it may be sometimes. (That said, I don’t think this essay is maladroit in any way. It’s a superb piece of writing)

Anthony GalluzzoThe fact that you're surprised illustrates my point, Leigh Phillips-apparently there are only two caricatural positions on this (and other issues) where one is either Carol Lipton-a "hippie" devotee of counterenlightenment-OR an unequivocal advocate of McDonalds.

Some general points: there was no one enlightenment, and romanticism is also a development within the aufklarung-imminent critique-which both Hegel and Marx understood. The problem of alienation and its overcoming was central to Marx's project. I am just as disturbed by scientism and recent attempts to posit some reductionist folk enlightenment-reinventing Marx as a technocrat, for example-as I am opposed to the the obscurantism I critiqued on Ms. Lipton's thread. Both positions are equally false antinomies, as is the opposition between a reified technophilia and a reified technophobia. Human techne must be a conscious, collective, and rational praxis conceived with both material limits and human ends in mind (which include a non-alienated mode of human living, plus the aesthetic, affective, and imaginative dimensions of human self-making).

As for the specific issue addressed in this article, who is advocating the complete abolition of industrial agriculture here? One of the writer's many straw men in what is a very poor article. Certainly not me-look at my comment above. I wrote that we need an industrial agriculture that is better-more sustainable, healthier...and yes, more conducive to aesthetically preferable foods. Such a development does not necessitate the complete abolition of organic farming, which will play one-probably small-role in food production.

As for the article, it is a beastiary of fallacies: for example, modern organic farming is just that: modern. It is dependent on modern agricultural techniques-adapted to a different scale-and does not imply a return to the medieval period or feudal relations of production-a conclusion either dishonest or moronic on the writer's part. You notice the author's historically illiterate use of Luddism-one of many such flaws here. I don't think Michael Pollan, Anthony Bourdain, or other artisinal locavore types-gourmets and gourmands-would claim they are making historical statements about actual peasant diets, nor are they offering a blueprint for revolution; it's better, more aesthetically pleasing-pethaps healthier-food that they advocate in the end. McDonalds is shit. The poor should not have to eat McDonalds, Everyone should be able to eat farm to table luxuries, although it can't make up all of our diet....

Will Hough I'm just going to peek in again to say that I feel like a prize fight promoter.

Anthony Galluzzo...and I am sorry, but it is hard not to see in this essay a certain, deliberately provocative, cultural politics, camouflaged as no bullshit empiricism. It's bash the straw hippie married to a reactionatey populism-McDonalds FUCK YEAH!-that I can also detect in other forms (celebratory paeans to the blockbuster mode of culture industry). Sophisticated trolling, which sometimes mars a magazine with which I am in broad agreement.

Also, I see no value in equating eco-radicalism, SJWs, and trigger warnings under the broad, and largely meaningless, category of irrationalism; while I might be opposed to these phenomena individually, they are distinct things and must be criticized on their own terms.

The team sport mentality-with its cartoonish misrepresentations (primitivist! futurist! You either accept the entirety of a position or you are the enemy or an SJW or a witch) is as far from dialectical as you can get, while intellectual progress won't happen when our only two argumentative modes-and this isn't directed at you in particular-are snark or cheerleading.

Anthony Galluzzo I am done. This consumed my whole day. My two cents.

Will Hough ...and that I do agree with Anthony that the article situates the debate in a false either/or way.

Leigh Phillips Because I’m running late with some other things, bullet points will have to suffice, Anthony. I appreciate the thought that has gone into your reply, and from your status updates, I really think you’re a mensch and would very much like to meet you in the flesh one day. But nonetheless:

- Who is promoting this scientism and technophilia? Where exactly on the left does this dominate? Really where? This is the real straw man.

- Rather, it is po-mo anti-realism, anti-positivism, relativism, scepticism of science, small-is-beautiful gemeinschaft and identity politics that is hegemonic.

- If there’s anywhere that can be said to remain home to technophilia and scientism, it’s Silicon Valley/TED talks neoliberalism. Again, find me a defender of this on the left.

- Who is cheerleading, being snarky? Laudan’s piece is really thoughtful, very well written, and empirically backed. This is the farthest thing from trolling.

- People like Michael Pollen, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein do *indeed* advocate a retreat to the local and small and away from ‘industrialised agriculture’, ‘mega-projects’, ‘extractivism’ (whatever that means), etc, but of course this is a hypocritical muddle, as they consistently are using the products of industry, the large-scale, and mining. These aren’t straw men; they’re bestselling authors.

- Very influential figures on the green left such as Derrick Jensen and Paul Kingsnorth go still further and advocate primitivism. You can buy Jensen’s books at Walmart for a discount. Kingsnorth writes for the LRB. These are not marginal figures.

- Of course there was more than one Enlightenment. The Moderate Enlightenment of Voltaire, Hume, Newton, et al, who made their peace with monarchy, slavery, empire, the Church and capital, and the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, D’Holbach, Condorcet, Diderot and Paine, defended and extended by Marx. (This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but, you know, bullet points, as I said. cf. Jonathan Israel’s scholarship in this regard)

- This turn away from the future, from modernity, from Enlightenment, by the left is itself a product of the world-historic defeat of the working class in the 70s/80s and the foreclosure of possibility presented by the collapse of the Soviet Union (a welcome development for freedom-lovers everywhere, but simultaneously the handmaiden of End-of-History capitalist realism). When the future has been cancelled, resistance—such as it exists—degrades into a kind of nostalgia. (Here Mark Fisher’s writing has been absolutely vital) In other words, socialism may no longer be possible, but locally-sourced hand-woven granola underwear is.

- Thus reviving the modernist project and overcoming the neoliberal impasse are one and the same goal.

- Bourdain is no locavore.

- Organic is a complete swindle. (My piece here on that:http://bit.ly/1EorCzf )

- Once you actually consider the evidence for localism, you find it’s counterproductive with respect to GHG emissions (cf. Greg Sharzer’s ‘No Local’; my upcoming ‘Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts’; or Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu’s ‘The Locavore’s Dilemma’)

- There are no hard-and-fast material limits to what humans can do, with the sole exceptions of logic and the laws of physics. The history of our species is a history of overcoming material (natural) limits. Long may our breach of natural limits continue, delivering ever greater degrees of freedom to humanity.

Will Hough Best of the bullets, though maybe the least pertinent to the subject (because the one who arranges the prize fight gets to referee too):

"Of course there was more than one Enlightenment. The Moderate Enlightenment of Voltaire, Hume, Newton, et al, who made their peace with monarchy, slavery, empire, the Church and capital, and the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, D’Holbach, Condorcet, Diderot and Paine, defended and extended by Marx. (This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but, you know, bullet points, as I said. cf. Jonathan Israel’s scholarship in this regard)"

Leigh Phillips I’d rather it not be a prize fight at all, Will. Anthony’s point about avoiding snark, cheerleading, and team-sport mentality is really well taken. He is absolutely correct here. It is vital that we not be sectarian. I don’t know if I always get that right. (As I said earlier: I reckon I play the role of curmudgeon in a ham-fisted clumsy way far too often and I always feel gross inside afterward when I do. I became a socialist not because I wanted to jeer at people, but because I love them) …I just don’t think that this applies to Lauden’s very thoughtful piece.

Will Hough I didn't mean it quite in that sense at all, Leigh Phillips, but rather as an aspiring fighter enjoying the opportunity to witness a formidable exchange between allies that is remarkably instructive for a leftist novice like me.

Anthony Galluzzo Leigh-the left is miniscule, but you ask where do we find technophilia/scientism on the left to match the anti-modern strain? We have already discussed accelerationism-the hot new thing-about which I have mixed feelings. I would also call attention to the prominence of new atheism, and Dawkinsite social Darwinism, in certain left liberal circles.

That said, my comments above were directed specifically at Jacobin-there is, I think, a better way to make some of these points without the constant resort to a simplistic contrarian kitsch futurism. This framework doesn't allow for other possibilities-for example, consider a technolocalist scenario in which the majority of the population is concentrated in a mega city surrounded by a massive greenbelt that would provide our urban dwellers with most of their food-a scenario that would involve high tech agricultural methods, transportation, and infrastructure. Whether this arrangement is feasible or not, it's unthinkable within the current terms of the debate (primitivist vs futurist).

I have entertained a Promethean vision as well, but my doubts increase with time-even in such a scenario, technology must serve expansively conceived human ends (including those old humanist Marxist issues, like alienation and species being).

And, I would add to the moderate and radical Enlightenment of Israel, the early romantic or idealist trajectory stretching from Kant through Schiller and Hegel; these were all thinkers for whom imagination, affective life, and the aesthetic state were crucial elements of any substantive rationalism. Fredrick Beiser's work is great on this tradition. This enlightenment shaped Marx.

Another way of putting it is that the 1790s antinomy of proto-futurist rationalism (Paine) and traditionalist historicism (Burke) is synthesized, resolved in Marx. But I have wandered too far afield. We should meet sometime, and I look forward to your book. I still don't like the Jacobin piece: no Big Macs!

Anthony Galluzzo One final point-what distinguishes Marxism from earlier radicalisms is its emphasis on historical conditions, our historicity, as opposed to the rational futurism of a Paine (how Marx combined Paine with Burke in a way). The utopian future isn't a year zero; the new society emerges from the old. Walter Benjamin develops this model in the most compelling way, for me, in depicting the revolution not as an absolute break but a reconfiguration of the past, under which even its victims are redeemed.

This vision informed my comment to Will Hough above about the socialist transformation of historically elite traditions. It is a perspective totally lacking in the Jacobin article, in which the writer would have us reject modern peasant bread because the original was full of sawdust. She can't imagine the ways modernity-which she claims to love-preserves, transforms, and even redeems the past, its traditions and detritus.

Anyway, Corey Robin has recently written thiughtfully on the left and its complex relationship to history, which has disappeared in our current cartoon showdown pitting primitivist ancestor worship against museum burning future fetishism.

Will Hough Benjamin's "Illuminations" is next up in my crowded queue, so I hope he speaks to the dialectical process you talk about here. I'm finally into "Witness Against the Beast" and it seems to me that Thompson's analysis owes a good deal to the same idea re reconfigurations.

Leigh Phillips Hmmm. I have my misgivings about accelerationism as well, but they come more from how writers like Alberto Toscano, Ray Brassier, Benedict Singleton and so on write in the impenetrable register of Continental philosophy (although the Accelerationist Manifesto itself and the writing of Nick Srnicek is much more approachable), and, more importantly, how it sits in the realm of the abstract and seems, as you say, a ‘hot new thing’ that could evanesce tomorrow morning the minute the next philosophical fashion comes along. (Whatever happened to Speculative Realism, for example?).

Meanwhile, there are very real, tangible, contemporary and near-future issues that Accelerationists could apply themselves to, such as the anti-modernist tendencies on the green left (which is far from miniscule; it is the house ideology of the Guardian and most of the multinational multi-million-dollar green NGOs) that is one of many blocks on successfully navigating climate change (which is actually eminently soluble, but, yes, does require large-scale public-sector infrastructure, most notably nuclear power); and the innovation desert of the last four decades that even the EU and World Bank fret about (and, in the case of the absence of new families of antibiotic, the single greatest global public health risk); the effective abandonment of space exploration; the incapacity of neoliberalism to tackle the threat from near-Earth asteroids; how do we navigate the radical open-endedness to further experiment with our nature (species being) that human genetic enhancement may be offering in the next few years; what is the progressive take on strong AI, its risks and benefits; what is to be done about the coming decades of vast unemployment produced by a heretofore undreamt of scale of automation; etc., etc. The Accelerationists intrigue me, but these concrete subjects intrigue me more. I’m curious as to your own misgivings. Nonetheless, I don’t really see any scientism amongst these humanities folks, still less any technophilia. Anti-anti-modernism isn’t isomorphic with technoboosterism.

And I don’t know if I recognise this contrarian kitsch futurism at all. I’d have to be shown examples of that. Your own piece, ‘Soviet Space Opera’, which I much admired (not just for favourably quoting me), could easily be denigrated as such: http://bit.ly/1HA8AuA Or perhaps that’s what you mean when you say you have over time drifted from this prometheanism. But that would sadden me if you’ve abandoned your earlier position. There are so few of us promethean pinkos around.

As for Dawkins and the New Atheists, every leftist and even most liberal lefts I know have very little time for them, correctly identifying the bullying elitism, imperialism and Islamophobia that undergirds their ideas. But even here, these Iraq-war-cheerleading fedora-wearers aren’t quite the same thing as scientism.

What you describe as technolocalism I think fits very much with my own hopes: vast, richly cosmopolitan megalopolises producing their own food within urban limits, dismantling hydroelectric dams that are no longer needed thanks to advanced nuclear fission and fusion, amid a planet of vast tracts of wilderness that are nevertheless human-superintended (return of the woolly mammoth perhaps? Elimination of the mosquito?) for maximum human flourishing and aesthetics is pretty much in keeping with my own hopes, so I think we’re on the same page here. But speak to any typical localist green and they would be horrified at such a vision, even though this returns so much more land back to wilderness than any organic, low-tech agrarian or primitivist society could achieve.

I genuinely care about climate change because of how it threatens human flourishing. But I find that the biggest barrier to enacting the infrastructure changes we need to correct the problem—after the barriers posed by the fossil fuels industry and public-sector-phobic neoliberalism—is the anti-modernism science-scepticism and small-is-beautiful ideology of the green left.

I’m comfortable at recognising the vital, emotion-oriented, affective role played by romanticism/idealism (Jeez, I’m no emotionless, hyper-rationalist robot. I’ve got stirring, rousing Spanish Civil War posters on my wall), so long as we recognise its dangerous seductions as well. I’m more enamoured with Jacob Bronowski—mathematician, biologist, defender of the Enlightenment tradition in ‘The Ascent of Man’, but also poet, playright and biographer of William Blake, and the efforts of CP Snow to overcome the Two Cultures of science and the humanities.

I’ve not read Fredrick Beiser, but I’ll seek him out, and that Thompson book on Blake looks useful too.

Anthony GalluzzoI  haven't abandoned it, Leigh. I think that the absence of a viable left over the last few decades has led the utopian impulse to some strange places. I harp on romanticism because it seems like we are closer to the 1810s and 20s than the era of the communist party-utopian socialists of the primitivist and Promethean variety (Wordsworth vs Godwin, Shelley)... A peculiar landscape. But I like your work, Leigh. I am growing tired of a certain, repetitive Jacobin fixation on SJWs and hippies. Like hipster-bashing, hippie hating can be a reactionary fixation on a symptom that obscures cause.

Will HoughI too think that the fixation on SJWs sometimes gets in the way of working towards viable radical solutions even more than the SJWs complained of get in the way of working toward such solutions. Sometimes, maybe the thing to do is to ignore the sideshow rather than gawk and point at it, since those under the SJW tent thrive on attention. There's no reason that I can see to keep giving it to them, especially if you are sure that they are a distraction and have nothing to offer when it comes to solutions.

Leigh PhillipsYou’re right that we need to be on our guard against a smug hippie hating. There’s certainly a nasty, nerd-elitist strain of ‘we’re smarter than the mouth-breathers’ amongst the liberals in the Skeptic Movement in the US and UK.

The recent mean-spirited cheering of the Australian government’s denial of government services to parents who refuse to vaccinate their children is a concrete example of how anti-hippie triumphalism can quickly run into an inegalitarian ditch. http://bit.ly/1HnJQmH

And the Spiked folks are very good in their defence of modernity, civil liberties and criticism of identity politics, but holy shit the sectarianism of that website! (“Everyone sucks but us.”) And some really bad, hyper-contrarian positions from time to time too: (“Gay marriage is an abandonment of gay liberation. Therefore we’ll back religious anti-gay-marriage conservatives.” WTF?) And above all, they really hide their Marxism under a bushel.

The CPGB in the UK is writing some good things on a number of these points, but, god, ditch the word ‘communism’. It is never going to fly in eastern Europe, or indeed anywhere else, and with good reason.

Platypus are interesting and robustly intellectual amidst a wider, ‘activism-ist’ left that frequently spurns intellectualism, but secretive and hyper-sectarian and have a fetish for the Frankfurt School that I don’t share (not least due to the central role played by Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment in reviving anti-modernism on the left). So I don’t know if anybody has it exactly right yet.

Yet anti-modernism is very real and hegemonic on the left at the moment, and we *have* to figure out how best to challenge this and revive the modernist project.

I actually think that Jacobin is one of the few places where they’re more or less getting it right on how to challenge anti-modernism in a non-sectarian fashion. I feel the same about their tentative criticism of identity politics, especially the writing (in Jacobin and elsewhere) ofAmber A'Lee Frost and Connor Kilpatrick and a few others I can't remember right now (on the latter subject, I think the ISO is also putting out some great things these days). Identity politics is also hegemonic and it too needs to be challenged.

Amber A'Lee Feminists for Big Macs.

If I were a social democrat, what would I think about the UK and Alberta elections?

The pundits’ electoral post-mortems after the UK defeat and Alberta victory tell us nothing about the 40-year-long, global trend of social democratic morbidity.

Last week was quite the manic-depressive few days for social democrats.

A shock, historic win for Alberta’s New Democrats after 44 years of conservative rule in the province, giving hope to the centre-left around the world that if they can win in Canada’s Texas, they can win anywhere. And a shock, historic defeat for the British Labour Party, suffering its worst share of the vote since 1918, squeezed between the Scottish National Party north of the River Tweed and a hard-right UK Independence Party in England and Wales that dug away at support in the Labour heartlands.

In both cases, social democrats of assorted flavours have quickly offered up their explanations for the results. There has been crowing in Alberta about the importance of leader Rachel Notley’s charisma, her party’s moderate pitch that including a commitment to continued development of the tar sands, and the clever strategizing of her campaign director.

In the UK, Blairites such as Labour leadership hopeful Chuka Umunna, David Miliband and, well, Blair himself have been swift with their told-you-so’s that the microscopic shimmy to the left under Ed Miliband was a deadly error, while what remains of the left of the party (if one can think of such figures as Tristram Hunt and the mercurial Peter Hain as on the left) is arguing that the straightforward, unapologetic social democracy of the SNP is clear evidence that on the contrary, the party has lost the confidence of the working class. Here too, there is focus on the strategists. What happened to the pixie dust that 2008 Obama chief advisor and ‘political magician’ David Axelrod was supposed to sprinkle over Miliband? How was it that 2012 Obama campaign manager and 2015 Cameron strategist, Jim Messina, triumphed over his rival Democrat operative and ‘brother’ instead?

For the class of professional political agents who now dominate social democratic parties at the expense of the trade union activists that once made up their cadre, the discussion over what went wrong and what went right emphasises strategic technique above all. Even the inter-Milibandian question of whether policies should tack slightly left or right is not really an ideological fight, subsumed as it is under the rubric of the great game of political strategy. Though some like Hain or Hunt may still have a vague instinct that the world should be fairer than it is, overt ideological principle has long since been set aside. In this world, Notley’s team simply played a better game than Miliband’s.

Yet for all the internal polls, focus-groups and Big Data analytics upon which strategists, psephologists and the politicians themselves depend, they are missing the bigger empirical picture. For all the Axelrodian, Crosbyite swapping of advisors between parties in different countries, they are also lacking a true global view of the existential crisis of social democracy.

And when one does take this long, empirical, internationalist view, as Greek political scientist Gerassimos Moschonas did with a seminal piece of research a few years ago, one realises that Notley’s gob-smacking victory and Miliband’s gut-wrenching loss are both just two outlier data points of foam, frothing atop the broader current of the decades-long decline of social democracy, and that better advisors, or this or that policy tip-toeing leftward or lurching rightward can do nothing to reverse it.

For his paper, Moschonas crunched the numbers on support for social democratic parties across 16 European states from 1950 to 2009. This is important because with many more data points than just the typical pundit or politico’s focus on a single, national election, the research smooths out the signal of what is happening to social democracy everywhere from the noise of what is just due to local circumstance (a more charismatic candidate, a bad bit of scandal, better strategists, this or that policy, Blairism vs not-so-Blairism, etc.).

He found that support for social democracy averaged across all jurisdictions maintained itself throughout the 1950s and 1960s at the high water mark of trade union strength and the welfare state at about a third of voters (33.2%), and has declined ever since, with each decade worse than the last without exception. Down 1.5% in the 1970s; down 0.6% in the 1980s; down 1.9% in the 1990s; and down 2.6% in the 2000s.

Averaged across the fifty-year period investigated, that’s a steady droop of over two percent every ten years. Extrapolated to the present halfway mark through the 2010s, social democracy will have declined on average across all jurisdictions by another percentage point as of 2015. We should however not discount the possibility that the decline may have accelerated, as the decline became more pronounced in the 1990s and 2000s, or that there may be a ‘Pasok’ point of no return—a level of support below which the decline rapidly becomes a rout.

Beyond the steady decay of support, Moscschonas found an increase in voter volatility—that is, sharper swings in levels of support—again since the 1970s. His prognosis for social democracy is bleak, as the “rationale of numbers” makes clear.

Though restricting his investigation to Europe, Moschonas’ numbers are not likely to alter much if extended to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—as well as India and the US if we consider the Congress Party and the Democratic Party in the last two cases to be analogues of social democracy. (South America and South Africa would also be interesting cases to consider, even though they have had quite different experiences with democracy, and indeed with social democracy, as the neoliberal limiting of the policy space available for a government since the 1970s is the same for these regions)

If we extend our analysis beyond social democracy, we find that they are not the only victims of this process. Here, we can take another metric: membership in political parties. And when we do, as Ingrid van Biezen and her colleagues did in a separate, 2013 paper, we find that membership in political parties across the board has plummeted sharply over the same period, from the 1970s to the present day.  The UK, France and Italy have lost about one to two thirds of their members in the last three decades. The Nordic parties have lost 50 to 60 percent of their membership rolls. Across all established democracies, the absolute number of members has almost halved since 1980.

“Party memberships in contemporary European democracies have now fallen to such a low level that they no longer seem to offer a meaningful indicator of party organisational capacity,” Biezen writes. “This inevitably calls into question our dominant way of thinking about political parties as a meaningful linkage mechanism between the general public and the institutions of government.”

We forget that historically, it was not merely elections that were the vehicle of popular political engagement, but the political party itself—and its associated sports leagues, “ladies’ auxiliaries”, political education classes, and study groups—was a transmission belt of ideas from the general public to elected officials and vice versa.

And similar declines can be found in trade unions and in a range of civic bodies, from churches to community service organisations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, and parent-teacher associations.

It is remarkable that no social democratic intellectuals are currently devoting the most focussed attention to this crisis of social democracy, to this collapse in civic engagement. Although, since the death of Tony Judt, there really are no social democratic intellectuals worth the title left. There are tribal social democratic pundits like the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee or Owen Jones, but no real social democratic thinkers. There is just this or that recommendation for how the domestic or regional party can do better.

No one is asking: “Why is social democracy dying?”, “What happened in the 1970s that caused this?” “What happened in the 1990s to accelerate this phenomenon?”

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It is no accident that the decline kicked off in the 1970s. This was the decade of the break with the Keynesian consensus that had held firm across the political divide since the end of the war. Full employment, integration of trade unions, demand management and a generous welfare state had been embraced by the right as much as the left since 1945 in response to the three decades of war, revolution, depression and holocaust from the Bolshevik October to the Second World War. At the end of hostilities, elites had been afraid that if they did not provide some modicum of the social reform that the majority were demanding, they would receive social revolution. Capitalism had to be the very best version it could be in order to dissuade people from opting for communism. But by the 1970s, full employment had produced high rates of inflation that may have floated away the moderate debts of workers (car loans, mortgages) but bit deep into large holdings of capital, and a bolshy workforce that not only restricted the surplus value employers could extract, but also contested capital’s droit de seigneur on the shop floor, because if workers didn’t agree with what management wanted, they could just walk down the road and get another job the same afternoon. A militant workers' movement produced full employment, which in turn produced a militant workers' movement. It had to be broken. 

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan usually take the blame for ushering in neoliberalism—that combination of supply-side economics, privatisation, deregulation, welfare spending cuts and, later on, corporate-led globalisation--but Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan and US Democratic president Jimmy Carter and his Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker, were earlier pioneers of the battle against inflation. The ‘Volcker Shock’ hiking interest rates to 21% reduced manufacturing output, slashed median family income by 10 percent, and raised unemployment to 11 percent. High interest rates quickly spread to the rest of the advanced capitalist world. Similarly, it was Carter, not Reagan, who initiated banking and transport deregulation.

It did not have to be this way. Sweden’s social democrats did consider responding to the economic crisis of the 1970s not with a challenge to the power of labour, but with a more thorough-going socialisation of the economy than social democracy had until then been willing to consider. But the party backed off from the Meidner Plan, as the strategy was known, in the face of predictably fierce opposition from capital.

This retreat by social democracy from its post-war policies was the beginning of labour’s growing disenchantment with its erstwhile representatives. But what had been begun by social democrats was perfected by conservatives. In set-piece battles with trade unions in the UK and US, the most militant sections of labour were soundly defeated, teaching a lesson to the rest of the labour movement that the days of pushover bosses and regular wage hikes was over. François Mitterand, elected in 1981 on what today would appear as a hard-left platform likewise was handily tamed by capital within months. Similar crackdowns on labour spread around the developed world, perpetrated as much by social democratic administrations as by conservative ones (and in the case of Joschka Fischer and Gerhard Schröeder’s coalition government in Germany at the turn of the millennium, Green-tinged ones too).

At the time, it appeared as though the losses were a temporary set-back. In retrospect, it is clear that the 1980s was the site of a world-historic defeat of the working class. The force that had been the central object of politics for 150 years was exiting the stage. 

In addition, the individuating and atomising processes required by neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s to break the trade unions also undermined conservative and apolitical mass organisational forms. This helps explain the wider decline in civic engagement. 

Meanwhile the viability and even desirability of the entrance of the masses onto the stage of history was dealt three sharp knocks: the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 of course (coming atop earlier blows from the show trials, the purges, the gulag, the famines resulting from the collectivisation of agriculture, and the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968), but also, in smaller ways, the Iranian revolution and the genocidal regime of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, which challenged the idea that popular mobilisation is always in the service of progressive ends. Repeated cries from democratic socialists of “That’s not what we meant!” have barely been heard. Instead, the capitalist realism of ‘the end of history’ and ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) is almost universally accepted. This goes part of the way to explaining why shifting left or the establishment of new parties to the left of social democracy such as Syriza, Die Linke, Podemos and the Socialistische Partij, have only in the last half decade or so since the economic crisis had any electoral success: Many workers may be bitterly disappointed with social democratic perfidy, but, quite understandably, they simply do not believe anything better is possible. 

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Tristram Hunt comes closest to understanding the pickle social democrats are in when he identifies part of the problem as being the limited policy space available to social democratic governments who face multi-billion-dollar capital flight from their territory within hours of their election. Writing in the Guardian after the election, he says: “[O]ur economic policy needs to be built on the essential conundrum of social democratic politics in an age of restricted public finances.” Capital flight and economic sabotage has long worked to try to tame left-wing administrations, but prior to the financial liberalisation begun the 1970s, it was more difficult for capital to up sticks, and, with almost every state imposing relatively high, progressive taxes throughout this period, there were few jurisdictions to which capital could flee.

Today, in an era of $21 trillion in offshore accounts, transfer pricing, aggressive tax competition, unaccountable (in the case of the ECB, extraterritorial) independent central banks, and globalised production, there is very little policy space left available for any one country—and that policy window is closing ever tighter. Social democracy in one country is no longer feasible, if it ever was. Social democracy had been feasible in so many countries after the war in essence because they all (or at least all that mattered to capital) did the same thing. This cannot happen today.

Thus the disintegration of social democratic principle, and consequent erosion of support from working class voters, results from the constraints that capital imposes on the nation-state rather than from a Tony Blair or François Hollande or Tom Mulcair being ideologically more conservative.  So simply seeking a more left-wing leader or party is insufficient. A return to Keynesian demand management, as the likes of Paul Krugman and Robert Reich suggest, is equally unfeasible; it ignores why Keynesianism was abandoned in the first place.

And indeed, we do find that when parties to the left of mainstream social democracy, or at least with more expansionary fiscal stances, such as Syriza, the Greens or the Scottish National Party, enter government, they are no less constrained by capital. 

For social democracy to be a viable project again, there would have to be some global level of government that could tame capital; a jurisdiction from which capital could not flee. But, like the derisory options of a check-mated king, a move in this direction also confounds. Capital itself already recognises the need for transnational and even global governance. There are simply too many policy areas, from trade to the internet to climate change, that are of global consequence and cannot be tackled by one jurisdiction alone.

But this move toward global governance is not a move toward democratic global government, but passes via post-democratic structures such as the WTO, the IMF, the UN Security Council, the G8, G20, the European Union, and even the UNFCCC. These bodies are created via treaty and their laws, regulations and directives negotiated by ‘experts’ behind closed doors instead of crafted in public, open chambers by democratically elected representatives. And these structures work assiduously to further delimit what elected governments can do, removing great swathes of policy areas, particularly fiscal policy, from the realm of democracy, to be placed instead in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, diplomats and judges.

So social democrats cannot simply wait for elites to construct a global governance architecture and then take it over. The architecture of global governance is itself a block to social democratic aims.

Furthermore, in order to replicate today the conditions that permitted social democracy its moment from 1945 to 1975 in the first place, the construction of a robustly militant working-class and bottom-up internationalism, comparable to the class's pugnacity of the first half of the 20th Century, outside the current elite-led intergovernmentalist framework, would be necessary. It took an external threat for elites to concede social democracy the first time around. They will need to be similarly threatened this time around.

In the 21st Century, this doesn't just mean American workers coming together with Chinese workers and German workers with Greek workers, but rather the abandonment of the national idea altogether, a transformation of workers’ conception of ourselves toward that of a global category. That is to say, an international—or perhaps it would be better to say ‘universal and anti-national’—working class movement independent of national parties of whatever stripe; a global syndicalism, if you will. ('Workers of the world, unite', rather than 'Workers of all lands, unite')

In other words, the precondition of a renewed, viable social democracy is identical to the precondition of that set of ideas that goes one step further than social democracy: socialism—the capture of capital, not merely its taming. The revival of social democracy is inseparable from the revival of socialism.

But demonstrating the viability and desirability of independent working class action, of socialism, is, in the face of the volume of apparent evidence of its failure, of course a huge ask. And the seeming impossibility of this task will keep sending social democrats back to attempting the same old, same old, even as it delivers diminishing returns. 

All this is of course a vast, perhaps multi-generational undertaking (and one in which the growing labour insurgency in China, independent of the trade union bureaucracy and the Communist Party, will have to play a major role).

But social democracy in the 21^st Century has no other option.