This blog address three issues that I think have attracted too little attention in sociological and political circles. The first involves the tension between Habermas’ ‘communicative’ and ‘strategic action’. Academic sociologists tend to be professionally socialised into an engagement with communicative action, or discussions and writings that look to produce evidence en route to a rational consensus. The seminar is often held to edge close to meeting these conditions (for all that lecturers under pressure or faltering can – and doubtless do – fall back on strategic interventions to regain control!). My promotion of concepts of ‘foresight’ and ‘action sociologies to complement Michael Burrawoy’s well-known four types of sociology (professional, policy, critical and public) affords a direct challenge to a stance anchored solely in communicative action. My foresight sociology refers to the study of ‘alternate futures’, or better ways of organising our institutions and affairs; and action sociology refers to a purposeful willingness to make sociological theory and research count in the wider community. I have argued that if sociologists are to resist the neglect, dismissal or downright public rejection of theories or research dominant political agents find awkward or inconvenient, then they should challenge them and engage in open debate and dissent, which is inevitably to entertain strategic rather than communicative action. This then is the first tension I note here: that between a scientific attempt to understand and explain social phenomena rooted in communicative action, and a contesting of the calculated undermining of sociological findings via strategic action. Habermas’ own life represented an awkward straddling of communicative and strategic action, as new accounts of his engagement as a public intellectual in Germany testify.
A convenient text for the second issue can be found in James Macintyre’s new biography of Gordon Brown (Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose). Macintyre quotes Brown’s reflection on his Ph.D/early book on James Maxton (p.31): ‘the real message of my book was that to hold to an ideological purity, at the cost of political impotence, served no one.’ He added: ‘there have been left-of-centre politicians who have espoused socialism but failed to meet the test of credibility. There have been those who have presented themselves as credible by abandoning socialism. The real challenge of left-of-centre politics is to be a socialist and at the same time credible.’ While I agree with those who respond by arguing that Brown’s search for a ‘middle way’ while in an uneasy combination with Blair ultimately delivered a neo-Thatcherite centre-right ‘New Labour’ government, his posing of this challenge – achieving a workable manifesto and agenda combining principle and credibility – remains pertinent. To be clear, Brown maintains that he ‘did what he could’ within the constraints of the position in which he found himself, and was responsible for most of New Labour’s worthwhile policies; but for all that his involvement between 1997 and 2010 left virtually all of Thatcher’s dire reforms intact. This was all a long way from any ‘credible socialist principles’. And under the leadership of Starmer, Labour’s unapologetic Tory, it has all got a lot worse!
So, how to find an equation that satisfies the criteria of both principle and credibility? Brown’s dilemma remains. It is a question I pose from much further left on the political spectrum. Under Corbyn, the Labour manifesto in 2017 should be read as socialist reformism and as opening up the possibility of a significant policy shift. The leaked manifesto was demonstrably popular with the electorate, but the combined machinations of pro-capitalist ‘corporate agents’, the mass media and the PLP had little difficulty in outmanoeuvring Corbyn’s uncomfortable – or insufficiently strategic – leadership team. What price principle versus credibility here?
Consider next the painful caesarean birth of Your Party. What of principle versus credibility here? I have made my own position on an appropriate principle-based policy platform clear, and I delivered it early but unanswered to Corbyn. The relentless focus should have been on half a dozen ‘basic’ class-informed policies to counter the ongoing, indeed worsening, cost-of-living crisis, directly addressing the likes of jobs, housing, health, welfare and social care. In other words, the emphasis should have been on a ‘highest common denominator’ policy package focused on the most urgent problems facing working-class families and those in increasing discomfort in the newly ‘squeezed middle classes’. This was the approach adopted by the Chartists when they first came together: it was designed to mobilise large numbers, to get people on board through a combination of principle and credibility.
Contrast with the painful and protracted birth of Your Party. Corbyn and those around him dallied while potential supporters waited with growing impatience. Then a frustrated Sultana entered the fray like a wrecking ball and things began increasingly to fall apart. My concern here is not to decide on either faction but to address the principle/credibility dilemma. My position is that too much credibility was lost with an overly doctrinal emphasis on socialist – and a few other – principles. To be clear, I am entirely supportive of ‘socialist’ principles, if not of Sultana’s ‘non-socialist’ signing up to the trans activist claim that trans women ‘are’ women; but – Brown’s point – facilitating and organising a mass movement requires a credible appeal. Sultana’s unilateral commitment on behalf of Your Party to the likes of trans activist rights and leaving NATO was in my mind foolish. Your Party should have stuck with a basic programme of socialist-leaning reforms: phase 1 towards a progressively more explicit and forthright phase 2.
There is another and third issue arising here. Have the enough of the several socialist factions in Britain, some of them currently struggling to coalesce around Your Party, thought through and planned for: (i) how most effectively to mass mobilise people around socialist principles, which necessarily involves (ii) how to respond when attempts to do just this are inevitably countered by class-driven pro-capitalist corporate agents – in my writings manifest by a conjunction of global ‘capital monopolists’ and national political elites – backed up by the law, the police and the army. Of course some have, most surely in the Marxist camp. But the potentials for mass mobilisation remain slight indeed, notwithstanding the blatant extent of class-driven and class-experienced austerity, low pay, homelessness, hardship, distress and even premature death. We await what I have called a trigger event. But are socialists ready to respond? Maybe the general catalyst for mass resistance will be the self-destructive character of an increasingly rapacious – and imploding – rentier capitalism and a generalised drift to war in pursuit of profit?
Where do Burawoy’s four any my two additional sociologies sit here?