Several weeks later, this is what the academic community – and above all the students and staff of Middlesex Philosophy – are still asking themselves. The shock has been widespread and deeply felt. A wave of threatened and actual redundancies, and a responding wave of frequently-successful protests against them, has shaken British universities over the past year, as managements prepared for the series of deep funding cuts that began in April and are expected to continue for several years to come. As commentators have pointed out (see the Guardian article here), philosophy is often a vulnerable discipline, under these circumstances, for a range of political reasons: most notably its apparent lack of fit with the government’s drive to push more students into ‘degree’ programmes tailored to the demands of commerce.

Middlesex is an exceptional case, however. Not only is it one of very few places in the UK where students can follow programmes in ‘continental’ philosophy (which is what Anglo-American philosophers call what everyone else in the world calls ‘philosophy’) and in particular its radical leftist and feminist variants, but it has been for many years a beacon of internationally-renowned research, one of relatively few such research centres to have survived and prospered in the ‘new universities’. While some parts of government in recent years have been trying to reinstall the rigid hierarchy between research-focussed elite universities and their lesser counterparts that was disrupted in the 1990s see [Boonery and Open Democracy),
centres like Middlesex’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy have shown that non-elite institutions can become homes of dynamic world-leading innovation in subjects that don’t require massive levels of infrastructural investment.

Neoliberal corporate governance

This, it appears, is precisely the problem for Middlesex Philosophy. British universities receive funding for research on the basis of the performance of their respective departments in the periodic research assessment exercises, which preoccupy British academics (to the exclusion of all else) every few years. Having performed particularly well in the 2008 review, Middlesex Philosophy is due to earn its university a considerable income over the next few years. As shocking as this may seem, there are no restrictions on how universities can deploy internally the research income that their departments earn through this mechanism, and no rules compel them even to carry on employing the people who earned it for them in the first place. It appears that Middlesex management have taken a corporate decision to take the university further downmarket, and that to this end they intend to divert all of the university’s Philosophy-earned research income into other projects (none involve the development of research in the university) while closing the centre and all of its well-regarded programmes.

This is neoliberal corporate governance at its most crude. Students and academics have become used to the imposition of a paradigm, which tries to force the complex collaborative process of education into the box of a commodity transaction, treating students as consumers in a competitive market place and academics as sellers of pre-packaged ‘transferable skills’. But this is taking things to a new level – imposing the logic of asset stripping where even a moderately business-oriented management would see an opportunity for sustained growth and investment.

On Tuesday 4 May 2010, when management failed to keep an appointment with them to discuss the crisis, students occupied the executive suite at the university’s Trent Park campus. After a couple of days, and literally thousands of expressions of support from around the world (including many luminaries of radical philosophy), they occupied the whole of the Mansion House building there, using it to host two days of philosophical and political discussion with over 150 people in attendance, the following weekend.

At the time I write, over 30 students remain in occupation, with no immediate plans to leave, and plans for further events to come – spirits remain high and a culture of thorough discussion and consensual, non-hierarchical decision-making has emerged. The occupiers make clear that their key reason for occupation is not simply the planned closure as such, but the refusal of management to consult or even adequately to inform staff and students. This is symptomatic of an endemic problem in the new universities in Britain, where structures of real accountability and democratic participation in decision-making are virtually non-existent – reinforcing the tendency to replicate corporate models of practice and the relationships. I asked them how far their study of radical philosophy had informed the practice of occupation, and they were frank about the divergence of views on this topic: ‘there’s some people who think that philosophy is important to what we’re doing – there’s others who think it’s fairly contingent … the underpinning is the fact that they’re trying to close the department.’

Where the attitude of the students differs from that of many academics is that, in their words, ‘we’re trying not to push the fact that it’s an excellent department’. The research rating of the department is not an issue for these students and they challenge the obsession with research status that informs the attitudes of many academics, and much of the current system for the distribution of funds by government, saying, ‘We love our department not because of the rating but because of what we’re learning.’

Creative resistance is a necessity

At the time of writing these students are not entertaining the possibility of defeat, and they deserve all the support that the rest of us can give them. Middlesex Philosophy, along with the journal Radical Philosophy, which is closely associated with it (and is still self-published at a time when most such journals have become cash cows for major corporate publishers), remain outposts of resistance to the process of enclosure and commodification of all sites of collective learning, creating and expression which typifies contemporary capitalism and the ‘knowledge economy’. This process touches all of us – degrading our conditions of existence and circumscribing our opportunities to explore what it means to be in the world, working to contain all of the creative energies, which we generate within the confined of roles of consumer and entrepreneur. Creative resistance to it is not a luxury but a necessity for all who want a future not entirely dictated by the logic of the market.

Kentucky Fried Education: The Market Assault on Reason

Tariq Ali at Middlesex University

Saturday 15 May, 3.30pm, Trent Park campus

For more information and to follow events at Middlesex – and to lend your support – visit http://savemdxphil.com/

Jeremy Gilbert is a writer, researcher and activist, for more information see here

The key difference between the situation today and the aftermath of the great crisis of 1929 is the absence of any identifiable constituency or agency capable of acting as a countervailing force to finance capital. The willingness of governments to throw 30 years of neoliberal economic doctrine out of the window in the past couple of months attests to their absolute terror at the thought that finance might lose its hegemonic position. It seems clear that no other force is currently capable of exercising that role: of organising, ordering and stabilising a sufficient range of social spaces, actors and institutions to preserve some semblance of civilised order.

At local, national, and global levels, institutions that could even potentially act as democratic counterweights to the power of speculative capital are hard to discern. Contrast this with the middle decades of the last century, when communism, organised labour, and the strength and autonomy of municipal governments all posed serious challenges to capital and made it possible for governments to implement the very high levels of regulation and socialisation typical of ‘Fordist’ capitalism.

The weakness of the state

The importance of this observation is that it draws our attention to one always-salient fact: the relative weakness of all governments when faced with the dynamic and relentless force of capitalism. Capital’s capacity to innovate, to reinvent and reorganise itself, to circumvent regulation and to disaggregate opposition has been well understood at least since Marx. Unfortunately, many political actors, commentators and citizens seem even yet to underestimate it.

The experience of the mid-20th century has left a powerful residual memory of a time when great power was in the hands of the state. During that time, a particular configuration of late-industrial technologies (electrical grids, advanced railway systems, motorway networks, early broadcast networks, pre-nuclear advanced munitions) required unprecedented levels of centralised co-ordination and gave national governments historically unique capacities to control flows of resources, people and ideas.

There are two main points to observe here. One is that the kinds of control and regulation that could be exercised by national governments during that epoch were specific to an industrial-technological context that has long been superseded in the cybernetic age, when punitive tax regimes or stringent labour laws can be evaded at the click of a mouse. The other is that even under those favourable technological circumstances, governments were only ever able to discipline capital effectively in situations where capitalism itself was still relatively underdeveloped, or where powerful social coalitions could be consolidated and mobilised against it (such as the alliance of unions, government institutions and manufacturers that made Roosevelt’s New Deal possible).

Today, globalisation and the difficulty of effective labour organisation leave left-wing governments in a comparatively much-weakened position. Despite this, the great Fabian fantasy – the dream of benign and omniscient government re-ordering social relationships from the centre of administrative power – maintains a grip on the imagination of both ‘left’ and ‘centre-left’ that is crippling in its consequences.

The weakness of the left

Radical critics have consistently and correctly pointed to New Labour’s enthusiastic embrace of most of the neoliberal programme, and suggested possible alternative directions. But they rarely, if ever, do so with any attention to this fundamental question: what might have to happen first in order to make it politically possible for governments to pursue such progressive agendas?

For example, can anyone really doubt that if New Labour had attempted to resist the international imperative towards privatisation, as many wish they had, then the press and the City would have turned on them savagely? Does anyone believe that New Labour in 1997 had the kind of movement behind them that has enabled Hugo Chávez et al to stand up to the ‘Washington Consensus’? Even with regard to such a controversial policy as the Private Finance Initiative, New Labour is entitled to ask how else its critics would have funded a massive wave of capital investment in the public sector without drawing on non-existent treasury resources – resources which could in turn only be replenished by means of politically intolerable tax rises.

This is not to say that the Labour government first elected in 1997 could not have pursued a progressive agenda as an alternative to its uncritical implementation of neoliberalism. But it is to raise the question of what exactly it is that critics on the left think that ‘progressive’ governments ought to do under conditions that are clearly unfavourable to the pursuit of democratic objectives. Leftist criticism far too often falls into the same trap as centrist Fabianism: imagining, or implying, that governments simply act on the world in a vacuum, making things happen just because they want them to. A more sophisticated approach would be to ask why the government has done so little to act to change the broader political conditions themselves, and to think about what it would have looked like had it tried to do so.

The Fabian fantasy is generally a delusion of the left and the technocratic ‘centre’, while the right normally suffers from it only during periods of desperation. The recurring fantasies that ‘traditional’ values can be re-asserted by government diktat, or that building prisons will somehow reduce crime, regularly grip the Tories when they are presiding over a major recession or mired deep in long-term opposition, but are usually abandoned whenever actual policy programmes have to be implemented.

The Conservative tradition proper has always understood that political success was not just about government making the right decisions, but about the mobilisation and selective empowerment of multiple constituencies. Today, we are living with the consequences of one of the most brilliant strategic realisations of this insight in British history. Central to the consequences of the credit crunch in the UK is the recruitment of a large section of the population into the speculative economy over the past 25 years.

Securing (and deploying) cheap credit against rising asset values is not merely a typical behaviour of contemporary capitalists: it is, as Braudel showed, arguably the constitutive practice of capitalism as such, ever since its beginnings in medieval mercantile Italy. The transfer of vast quantities of social housing stock to the private sector (at below-market prices) in the 1980s, the attendant policy of restricting its replenishment by denying local councils the right to build, and the deregulation of the financial services industry, all had the long-term effect of both restricting the supply of housing in this decade and enabling large numbers of new homeowners to benefit in cash terms by borrowing against the rising market values of their homes.

The decade 1997-2007 saw an orgy of consumer spending and rising household debts fuelled by mass participation in the consequent bubble. The result is that a falling property market has potentially devastating political implications. But the long-term socio-political consequences are even more dramatic. In effect, a large section of the British public has, for the first time, seen its spending-power derived from assets exceed (if only for a short time) that derived from wages. The result is that for the first time, a large section of the public has had very good economic and emotional reasons to think of themselves as, in effect, capitalists: concerned more with interest rates than wage levels and benefiting from rising asset prices.

Whatever the outcomes of the current crisis, the point to take from this situation is that the Thatcher government knew very well what it was doing in the early 1980s. Despite the obvious potential dangers, it was creating a new constituency of speculative asset-owners drawn predominantly from the social group who had previously been the mainstay of the labour movement: skilled manual workers. In doing this, it was creating a new locus of power, which could be expected to pressure any government to pursue particular policy objectives – low interest rates, easy credit, low inflation, low levels of financial regulation – irrespective of that government’s nominal political identity. We are still living with the consequences.

An alternative strategy

The question is: what might a progressive government’s equivalent strategy be? What would be our equivalent of council house sales: a policy that would be relatively easy to effect, but whose long-term consequences would permanently alter the power dynamics of British political culture? It is to this question, and not to a shopping list of fantasy policies, that the left should turn its attention in the coming years.

From this point of view, there are several key areas in which no effective action has been taken by New Labour and which could have provided the basis for a sustained and strategic route out of the current crisis if they had been attended to earlier.

First, for example, it is only in the past three years that the government has made even insignificant moves towards encouraging a revival of organised labour, and its record on pushing for flexible working across Europe more than offsets this gesture. Yet there cannot be any meaningful democracy in a society in which the entire field of work is depoliticised. It may be that the trade union movement as it currently exists needs to be reinvented beyond all recognition, but this is the kind of process in which governments can take a co-ordinating role, and politically it would have been quite possible for government to promote the idea that trade union membership is a social good (encouraging social solidarity, a meaningful engagement between employers and employees, and so on), and to facilitate the full-scale modernisation of British trade unionism. This has not happened to any significant degree: if it had, then a revived labour movement could now be proving an invaluable ally to a government faced with financial crisis and Tory revival.

Second, the distorting effect of media monopolies on our political culture is very well known. The rise of blogging, social networking and alternative web-journalism offers unprecedented opportunities for the growth of a new media culture that is far more democratic in its structures and organising ideologies than the one that has prevailed for the past few decades.

Yet government has not even begun to think about the possibilities of strategically encouraging such a development. Instead it cowers before Murdoch on a regular basis and even makes threatening gestures at the BBC (that great relic of the late industrial age, and of its hierarchical but collectivist values) when it thinks that is what he requires of them.

Third, it is widely acknowledged that government has made no serious moves – outside of the special case of national devolution – to reverse the Thatcherite trend towards the evisceration of local government. Even the Greater London Authority has no serious power, and that of the London mayor is strictly limited. However, the prevailing critiques of this situation only reflect the persistence and ubiquity of the Fabian fantasy.

Almost invariably, the ‘new localism’ speaks the language of decentralisation, of Whitehall ‘giving up power’. What this discourse fails to grasp is the extent to which local government has not simply been weakened by centralisation to Whitehall, but by the same global processes that have weakened Whitehall itself. Local government is not weak simply because Thatcher and Blair took some of its powers away, but because the mobility and fragility of local communities makes it increasingly impossible to mobilise constituencies against the actions or wishes of international corporations, which work tirelessly to acquire the rights to develop land, take over public services and speculate on property in their localities.

The point is that Whitehall does not actually have the power the ‘new localists’ imagine it to have accrued at the expense of localities. Rather, the UK government has largely acted as a conduit through which the international neoliberal programme to dismantle layers of potential opposition to capital has been implemented.

This is not to say that government could play no role in enabling new, localised democratic communities to come into being. It could do a great deal to encourage and facilitate the development of new and more participatory forms of local politics from which new centres of democratic power might emerge.

But, as in the case of the labour movement and the media, it would be a mistake to imagine such developments in terms of central government ‘handing down’ power from a position of prior omnipotence. It would be much more useful to conceptualise the process in terms of government actively facilitating the growth of alternative centres of power which might (or might not: this is always a danger) prove useful allies in the struggle to contain, direct and re-organise the creative/destructive force of capital.

Could any of this happen? Maybe, maybe not. What is clear is that the left will be wasting its time, and will never recover any credibility, if it merely harps on about all that the government has done wrong without proposing a viable alternative strategy. This is a moment when the crisis of neoliberalism may well prove terminal, but we will achieve very little by crowing or by proposing unworkable returns to the policy strategies of the 20th century.

The question that will soon emerge is whether the route out of the crisis will involve some revival and reinvention of democratic forces, which might help to stabilise the world economy without concentrating still more power in the hands of unaccountable institutions like the WTO or the great investment banks; or whether a new phase of capital accumulation will simply see state institutions take on an increasingly authoritarian role in securing conditions for profitability and social stability, with Singapore – or even China – replacing the US as the world’s hegemonic model. Those who hope for the former outcome would do well to think carefully about exactly what to demand of beleaguered governments, at a time when still-powerful voices will be calling loudly for the latter course to be followed.

This is all that can be said with certainty, and what the outcome will be depends on many factors. Martin Kettle argued in The Guardian shortly before the election that it was foolish to believe that a radically curtailed majority would push the government to the left, instead arguing that the fear of losing more swing voters to the Tories would have the opposite effect. The Conservative leadership are certainly far more despondent at the result than they can admit, as Howard’s rapid resignation illustrates. Having done all they can to target key marginals, having done as much as they are able to redistribute a static share of the vote in favour of more elected MPs, they may well have gone as far as they can without some significant change in the political landscape. Many in the New Labour leadership will argue vociferously against offering them that opportunity by provoking such a change, as a marked shift to the left by the government clearly would.

So the future may not be rosy, or even vaguely pink, but there are some grounds for optimism. In a sense, the left has emerged as an active electoral force for the first time in a long time, crystallised by the anti-war movement to which a huge proportion of the public could be said to belong, and playing a variegated but significant role in the outcome of a national election. It should not be forgotten that this could not have happened without a combination of factors: the massive anti-war demonstration of 2003, which in turn could never have happened on the scale it did without the support of the Daily Mirror (as the Stop the War Coalition largely failed to appreciate), and the presence of a viable electoral alternative to the left of Labour in the form of the Liberal Democrats. If any progress does come from this election result, it will have been because of this whole complex of factors: mass action, support within influential sections of the media, and an electoral presence for progressive ideas. No one of these elements on its own will have been responsible. This is surely a lesson for the future.

One issue that has come on to the public agenda more forcefully than at any recent election is the disproportionate power which the election system gives to a tiny, but relatively homogenous, section of the electorate: the swing voters of that imagined constituency ‘Middle England’. This is a very interesting development for those of us who have always argued in favour of the need to introduce proportional representation for the House of Commons. Traditionally this argument has been pitched in terms of the unfairness of vote share not being reflected in parliament. The argument that First-Past-the-Post allows one small section of the electorate to dominate the country, an argument predicated on the observation that the views of swing voters in marginal seats tend to be pretty homogenous whilst also being notoriously incoherent, has not played a very active role in debates on the issue in the past, but is one which could have a very broad appeal and prove generally persuasive. It is also closer to the argument which has never proved sufficiently attractive to the parliamentary Labour party, but which has always been the most concrete and political argument for PR in this country. That is the view that in the long-term PR is the only way to cement the progressive consensus which Blair et al have always talked about, marginalising both the Tories and the Daily Mail-readers of Middle England forever. Perhaps the threat which the Tories still pose in many Labour marginals will finally concentrate minds on this issue. We can only try to ensure that is does.

It’s worth thinking momentarily about the philosophical case for PR, or rather the case that is usually made against it. The argument that democracy depends on the sacred link between a single MP and his or her electors, and that the public prefers to vote for individuals rather than parties, is nonsense of a particularly revealing kind. It is based on a wholly individualistic conception of politics, or rather an individualistic conception of humanity which is simply anti-political in its implications. The myth that in voting for a politician we are voting for a personality is of a piece with the ideology of celebrity culture, which values trivial information about the private lives of the famous over any consideration of their views, values, or achievements. The fact is that in voting for a politician we can never be voting for anything as complex and multifarious as a person. In truth we are only ever voting for that person insofar as they are likely to act in the very limited sphere of representative politics. As such, the only issue that really matters about them is the political ideology to which they subscribe and the means by which they propose to implement it along with others who share it: in other words, the political party they belong to. We can never have a mature democracy as long as our electoral system fails to take account of this. The ideological individualism of the British liberal tradition is built into our electoral system, and it is no surprise that it historically tends to work in favour of the political projects of liberal capitalism over any others.

History demonstrates that this is the case. PR (along with prohibition of alcohol) was one of the key planks of Keir Hardie’s very first Labour manifesto. By the middle of the twentieth century it had dropped out of the frame, with historically catastrophic consequences. The Attlee government – by common consent the most successful social democratic government of a major Western power during that critical period in world history – lost the 1951 election despite polling more votes than the opposition and more than it had polled in 1945. Not only had that government succeeded in implementing the most dramatic reforms of the British state and British society that any 5-year period has seen, but in the process it had successfully won more support than it had enjoyed to begin with. Only the electoral system, and that appalling deference of the Labour hierarchy to British tradition which prevented any serious objection to the result being voiced, prevented the re-election of that government. Had things gone differently one can only guess as to the likely effect, but it is hardly beyond the bounds of reason to speculate that the UK in the 1950s, instead of being tortured by the death-pangs of the Empire, might well have become the largest and most confident of the emergent social democracies of Northern Europe. One can only imagine the global consequences if it had.

One of those consequences, which might still have come to pass had the 1974-9 Labour government had the foresight to reward the Liberals for their support by introducing PR, would have been that the UK would not have become the bridgehead for neo-liberalism in Europe. Indeed, a major manufacturing economy and a global military power, it could have been the strongest bulwark against it. The entire fate of the world might have been different. Instead, with the liberal social democratic majority split between the liberals, SDP, and Labour, Thatcher was able to demolish the post-war settlement and set the stage for its gradual dismantling across Europe and the world.

Could we really have a chance now, finally to persuade the Labour leadership to trade the prospect of one more term of majority government for a permanent left-of-centre coalition governing the world’s fourth largest economy? Probably not, but we have to try. In the end, it is the fact that the introduction of PR would inevitably mean that there would be fewer Labour MPs than there are now which has always proved the stumbling block to its implementation by a Labour government. However, at a moment when even many Labour MPs are disappointed and disheartened at how little a majority Labour government has been able to achieve and at how wide and deep disappointment with it runs amongst their own supporters, we may have a unique historic opportunity to press this case.

One issue which this new situation brings to the fore is the value of a strong progressive voice within the Labour Party, arguing for the progressive consensus as a more valuable goal than five more years of neo-liberalism casually mitigated by occasional concessions to the social democratic support-base of the government. As someone who quite recently scoffed at the naivety of any attempt to persuade the government to change direction, I have to say now that the project of Compass, the new pressure group aiming to co-ordinate the thinking left within the Labour party seems both timely and much needed. While it is clear that only mass pressure outside parliament and within the media will make any alternative future possible, such pressure will result in little more than further Labour marginals lost to the Tories, as despairing votes are cast for the Liberal Democrats and Greens, unless a strong voice can argue within Labour for an alternative, lending progressive Labour MPs the confidence to act on their convictions. Those of us who would hope for such an outcome, both inside and outside the party, should be prepared to give whatever support we can to such a project.