It’s refreshing to read a book about social change that doesn’t pull its punches. Michael Lind’s book The New Class War is a warning that Western democracies are being tested, not just by demagogic populism, but also by neoliberal managerialism and globalised technocratic economics. Globalisation, and the technocratic managers of the free-flowing systems of finance, information and intellectual property exchange, are reducing us, according to Lind, to the status fractured banana republics.
This is the first book in a long time that I've read which makes a principled case for the expansion of the economic and political power of the working-class. Lind’s thesis is that the tripartite balance between the state, corporate business interests, and working people (those of us who have no significant assets and depend on wages), which delivered substancial levels of growth for thirty years after the Second World War, has been ripped apart in a revolution from above.
Lind argues that “between the 1970s and the present, the terms of the uneasy democratic pluralist peace treaties between national working class and national managerial elites were unilaterally abrogated by the latter.” The Reaganite and Thatcherite revolution, according to Lind, has left us with a fundamentally destabilised society, in which there is no longer any restraint on the actions of the globalising metropolitan elites over the situated working-classes.
According to Lind, the managerialist, business and technocratic elites of Western democracies have “run amok,” causing, as we have witnessed over the last five years, a “populist rebellion from below that has been exploited, often with disastrous results, by demagogues, many of them opportunists from elite backgrounds” (Lind, 2020, p. 131).
Lind casts the blame on both wings of our body politic. Hollowed out by money, a vehicle for think-tanks and PR agencies, the modern political party has become an agency for antagonism, disinformation and contradiction. The modern political party is a public relations machine rather than a representative movement of class-based interests.
Lind describes the paradox of political cross-dressing, where once aristocratic parties are now presenting themselves as blue-collar champions; while supposedly social democratic parties are increasingly representative of the university educated management class who control and populate universities, NGOs, think-tanks, charities and marketing and PR agencies. Lind proclaims a plague on both houses, but it’s his corrective solutions that I find interesting.
Rather than seeking all-out war, with one set of interests fighting against the other, Lind instead calls for a restoration of the tripartite balance of power between state, business and labour that once opperated after the traum of the depression and world war. Lind points out that the only thing that checks power is power, and so if we are to avoid domination by either populist autocracy, or its alternative, technocratic autocracy, then we need to re-establish viable counterbalances that ensure that neither is left unchecked or unconcerned for the interests of the other members in this pact.
Lind argues that a renewed sense of social federalism and democratic pluralism is the only viable “alternative to both technocratic neoliberalism and demagogic populism.” As Lind put it
“The essential insight of democratic pluralism is that electoral democracy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy. Because the wealthy and educated inevitably tend to dominate all parties, if only through their personnel, ‘territorial’ representation must be supplemented (not replaced) by occupational or communal ‘social federalism’”To achieve this, Lind suggests that whole areas of social, economic and cultural policy should be” delegated to rule-making institutions,” and that these institutions should be representative of the different social interests operating at that level.
This is akin to the model of economic distributionism that was borne out of Catholic social teaching, which asserted ‘that which can be done at the lowest level, must be done at the lowest level.’ Distributionism pushed against both state and business corporate centralism, and sought to ensure that determination of the market was driven from the bottom-up rather than the top down. Lind’s assertion is similar, but he expands the purview of the pluralist society to include our democratic processes, our cultural institutions as well as our economic organisations.
Lind’s suggests that self-organising and self-defining community bodies, with a recognised legal right to act in the interests of their communities, would be better able to “represent particular portions of the community,” and in a similar way that organised labour and business do when setting wages according to the needs of specific sectors.
Lind suggests that this engagement should include “sectorial bodies, or representatives of religious and secular creeds in bodies charged with oversight of education and the media.”
The role for the state in this tripartite relationship would be to act as the only “entity with coercive authority,” and only be empowered to exercise oversight and intervene to protect individual rights or other state interests. In the “democratic pluralist vision of democracy,” Lind argues, “the government in many areas should reign, not rule” (Lind, 2020, p. 133).
Lind gives this tripartite structure a set of working names. Those that represent the economy he calls ‘guilds.’ Those that represent government and political practice he calls ‘wards.’ And those bodies and institutions of culture he calls ‘congregations.’ As Lind describes,
“In the economic realm, the guild would exercise countervailing power on behalf of working-class citizens against employers and investors. In the realm of government, the ward would exercise countervailing power on behalf of working-class citizens against organised money and organised expertise. And in the realm of culture, the congregation would exercise countervailing power on behalf of working-class citizens against overcalls media elites and overclass academic elites” (Lind, 2020, p. 136).I’m drawn to this model, for three reasons. First, it is the first proposal I’ve seen for the wholescale reintroduction of the power of organised labour into our economy. I’ve previously described the emasculation of trade unions as like taking one of the shock absorbers off a car and expecting it to traverse difficult terrain without any noticeable difference. Lind’s argument is that active labour institutions who operate democratically and accountably, will act as a natural compensatory mechanism as society and the economy changes.
In this regard, many will agree that Lind’s assertion that neoliberal corporations who whip away factories and businesses from established communities, so they can exploit cheap labour and tax breaks in and from other countries, has hollowed-out many of our communities, and has given rise to the forces that drive populism - leading to Trump, Brexit and worse.
Lind makes a strong point, which is my second reason for giving his proposals serious consideration, that a democratic pluralist approach to social renewal can’t be secured through electoral democracy alone, but “must be accompanied by power-sharing arrangements among classes and subcultures in the realms of the economy and the culture.”
According to Lind, these power-sharing institutions “need not resemble one-person, one-vote political democracy,” but they must be defined and undertaken on the basis of well-defined “social checks and balances” that are put in place in addition to political checks and balances. As Lind argues,
“Decisions should be based as much as possible on hard-won and lasting consensus among negotiating parties, classes and creeds, not on fluctuating numerical majorities” (Lind, 2020, p. 147).I would expect to see our media redefined in this arrangement. The corporate media hegemony is proving difficult to shift and undermine. Either the free-market reigns, or the state is expected to provide. In our media economy not much else exists in-between.
Following Lind’s model, however, there would be an equal role for community and civic media platforms to grow, develop and operate as community institutions. These community media congregations could be storehouses of social capital. They could be tasked with the development and building of community identity. They could facilitate exchange between independent community media practitioners working for the commonwealth and the social good, rather than private economic interests or the autocratic technical management institutions of the state.
The final factor that chimes with me in Lind’s model of a democratic pluralist society is the recognition that the wider state that we live in, and share - our commonwealth or social federation - should not be regarded simply as a “mass of individuals to whom a general will can be attributed,” and I would add gamed. But is instead, a "community made up of smaller communities” (Lind, 2020, p. 148).
This goes to the heart of the alienating forces at play in neoliberalism and technocentric management society, workplace and media. Today we are defined as service users, customers, or worse, simply units of information. In Lind’s social federation model, however, we have the chance to be recognised as citizens with rights.
It would be naive to suggest that different communities in this model will all have the same resources and power to operate in this social federation, but that might be tempered by stripping away some of the layers of entitlement and privilege that each group assumes to as their right in the deliberations, representations undertaken, and the decisions they arrive at. If all deliberations are published and shared, openly, immediately, then more people might be brought into the process because it is designed to include their views.
Lind rightly points to the differences that mark communities in terms of both practical wealth and in social capital. Lind proposes that participative engagement by working-class people, in reality, can only checked by the sheer numbers of people who are empowered to engage in the process of social development. This means building institutions that recognise people as empowered citizens with a collective identity.
As Lind argues, only the “reassertion of the political power, economic leverage, and cultural influence” by “wage-earning majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds” can stop the “degeneration of the US and other Western democracies into high-tech banana republics.”
To arrest this decline, and to build on the strengths of our conventional electoral politics, we not only need, according the Lind, reformers who can rebuild old institutions, but reformers also who can also “build new ones that can integrate working-class citizens of all origins into decision-making in government, the economy, and the culture, so that everyone ca be an insider” (Lind, 2020, p. 170).
I can’t see any reason why community media cannot be one of these institutions.
Lind, M. (2020). The New Class War - Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite. Atlantic Books.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://decentered.co.uk/book-review-michael-lind-the-new-class-war/