Polly Toynbee's written a strong piece in the Guardian this morning, clearly inspired by her (reasonable) reaction to the royal wedding.
She concluded:
Few yet realise the scale of the conservative revolution in progress. Professors Peter Taylor-Gooby and Gerry Stoker have just revealed that by 2013 public spending will be a lower proportion of GDP in Britain than in the US. They write in the Political Quarterly: "A profound shift in our understanding of the role of the state and the nature of our welfare system is taking place without serious debate." Can that really be done without rebellion? That will be the test of what kind of nation we are.
Let's be clear: I don't think Polly is inciting riot. The Oxford dictionary defines rebellion as:
rebellion |riˈbelyən|
noun
an act of violent or open resistance to an established government or ruler : the authorities put down a rebellion by landless colonials | Simon de Montfort rose in rebellion. See note at uprising .
- the action or process of resisting authority, control, or convention : an act of teenage rebellion.
ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French, from Latin rebellio(n-), from rebellis (see rebel ).
And yes, we do need to resist authority right now.
But not for the sake of it. We need to do so because authority has been subverted. The authority we now have is actively seeking to destroy rights, and that is why it should be opposed. I haven't time to explore this in depth now, so let me borrow this instead, which seeks to explain the logic based on the work of Isaiah Berlin (and Kant, when you get back to basics):
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting – or the fact of acting – in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
The post war consensus was built on the basis of positive liberties. I am a positive libertarian on that basis, and proud to be so. Neo-liberalism and its vision of libertarianism is negative by this definition.
And what we're seeing is the state - the agency that should enforce positive libertarian rights - being used to reinforce the negative libertarian rights of few.
That's the core of this issue.
That's the core of Blue Labour too by the way - as I see it. The collective is positive.
The imposition of the individual over the collective - and the denial that the collective exists - as Thatcher suggested - is what is threatening our society, destroying trust, undermining democracy, increasing fear and seeking to destroy the well being of the majority in the interests of a minority.
That's what Polly is saying we need to rebel against. And she's right.
And let's not forget - it's a libertarian act to rebel for our collective rights. Positively libertarian. In itself a word the left need to reclaim - with precisely the connotation I put on it.
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Cheers Richard, I’m a big fan of Murray Rothbart and Ron Paul, but im very liberal in my views and I’ve been struggling to reconcile these beliefs, what you said made alot of sence. There is a beautiful logic to the libertarian belief….
Take it easy, your doing a great job!
Travis
Interesting piece. Do you mean positive liberties in the sense of e.g. the right to education, or the right to health, welfare etc? I think in that case, those ‘liberties’ if you define them as such need to be balanced with other negative liberties such as the right not to have one’s money taken away in tax – they need to be balanced as the only way of achieving such positive rights is through the infringement of negative ones. On your equation, the right balance would surely be whichever achieved the most liberty?
Also, libertarian is an interesting term. When people use that term, I think they are referring to what I consider the true meaning of the term liberal – as in the endorsement of negative liberties. ‘Libertarian’ I believe has crept over the Atlantic.
Mr Murphy,
The Left once did hold the name of libertarianism. But it was a school of thought far, far removed from the authoritarian, top down approach of your own leftism, or of most modern leftism. The original use of the term comes from the Anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque.
And in all honesty, I consider myself a left wing market anarchist in the tradition of Benjamin Tucker, and Kevin Carson; but I’d much rather the term was reclaimed by the modern followers of Bakunin and Kropotkin than by the modern day liberal left, who are outwardly Statist, and authoritarian.
The modern right-wing libertarians may not be libertarian., but please do not pretend you are either.
Agreed Richard.
If Blue Labour stick to what it’s proponents claim to stick to, as defined in the Hardtalk interview by Maurice Glassman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hiio5Xbp7U) and in the BBC radio documentary by the Analysis Program on, among other things, the intellectual roots of Blue Labour (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zlgdl), a renewed focus on positive liberty would seem to be the logical outcome.
In the analysis program the Blue Labour group makes reference to the tradition of ‘Guild Socialism’ (in the Analysis program) which itself was proposed by giants like Bertrand Russell (in Proposed Roads to Freedom) and GDH Cole in the 1930s, and which Ed Miliband seems to be enamoured of, but which lost out to the Fabians in the early part of the 20th century. The roots of Guild Socialism in turn borrow from the enlightenment thought of people like Wilhelm Von Humboldt, and from the social libertarian thought of people like Peter Kropotkin and Proudhon. Social libertarian thought bridges the balance between individual and collective rights in a way which no other thought has, but has few examples of application (perhaps some parts of Spain in pre-civil war days in 1936 may be an example – as described in Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia).
If this influence affects Labour policy according to the spirit of Guild Socialism, then my optimism about the future of the UK economy, politics and society will have received a boost (always tempered by the exigencies of cynical politics of course). The problem will be to produce policies: though the living wage and reforms to corporate governance, as well as to the City, are steps that Maurice mentioned could be done and which have been applied elsewhere (Germany, Scandinavia etc).
We shall see.
It is disingenuous to mention guild socialism without mentioning its influence on Italian fascism.
It’s disingenuous to mention negative libertarianism without noting as, say Tony Judt does, that by destroying faith in the collective it creates a void that it is intended only fascism can fill
That’s the paradox of Hayek: so frightened of fascism he created the ideology for its recreation
There’s no such thing as ‘negative libertarianism’ – you’ve just made it up.
An interesting comment
If, of course, you deny that there is libertarianism then of course you can also say there is no such think as negative libertarianism
But if you think there is libertarianism then to deny me the right to describe, as Isaiah Berlin did, a certain identifiable element within that train of thought as negative is to simply seek to oppress me.
Which would either make you a very bad libertarian.
Or a hypocrite.
Or it would define your view of libertarianism somewhat negatively.
You choose which way you want to lose this argument.
In response to Trooper Thomson:
The philosophy that underpins Guild Socialism, as advocated by people like GDH Cole (who thought facism to be the greatest threat to democracy) is entirely antithetical and in opposition to fascism of any kind (authoritarian, right libertarian, corporatist ect). I therefore do not understand the purpose of your comment.
I take it that in fact your comment arises out of historical ignorance, or out of spite. Either way you are not contributing toward constructive debate – I also take it that you are simply not interested in the kind of profound discussion whereby you aknowledge others as human beings capable of reasoned thought and capable of empathy, and whereby you aknowledge that open debate can change people’s mind, if approached in a sensible and open way.
If you are willing and able to contribute, I will listen, if not, then arrivedeci.
What is this “collective”? What does it consist of, how is it defined, does it have interests and how do we establish them? What are its rights and what is the extent of its rights?
If you believe an individual can survive in isolation you can ask those questions
But since none ever has then they are irrelevant, as would be the believe you hold
And I won’t waste my time answering them
We could go into specific examples.
e.g.: is it morally justifiable that the right of an individual investment banker (Bob Diamond for example) should receive absurd sums of money for implementing risky investment practices which contributed toward the near bankruptcy of the entire British Banking industry, and whose irresponsibility is now being paid for by the British tax payer (the collective)?
Positive liberty would say that the individual (in this case investment bankers) is imposing his/her right to what they deem to be a ‘fair salary’ over what the collective (all tax payers) deem to be fair.
Negative liberty would leave this well alone, deeming it to be an inevitable outcome of the market, whereby talent is motivated by big pay packets so as to encourage strategies of informed risk so as to in turn maximise shareholder return. Whereas positive liberty would aim to redress the balance in favour of the ‘collective’ by adopting policies which would minimise the absurd risks taken by such individuals, by, for example, introducing democratic practices which determine, in conjunction with all those who work in that Bank, just how much an investment banker of this sort should receive. People like Bob Diamond are not neccessarily motivated by money (other factors intervene, such as the desire for power, respect, high levels of personal professionalism etc). If it were required that all companies adopt democratic practices in determining management, that is essentially saying that a majority (i.e. those who work in companies) should decide who manage them, rather than the carrot and the stick argument about how the market provides for incentives.
The more people are involved in choosing individuals who will determine whether or not their company will thrive, the more likely they will police that person to ensure they are doing everything they can to improve comany performance, the more likely the person that is chosen will feel a responsibility toward those that chose him/her to exercise authority. Accountability and responsibility are both strengthenes in favour of the collective, rather than in favour of individuals.
Enough of this nonsense about positive and negative liberty. Liberty has a fixed and settled meaning, and imposed collectivism is the very antithesis of Liberty.
Chris, thanks for your reply.
WRT your first paragraph, it seems unreasonable for me to reply, “no, someone shouldn’t be punished for wrongdoing”. I think you missed a step there, though – in that you haven’t shown Diamond did any wrongdoing that led to those consequence you describe. That aside:
I don’t understand why all tax payers should have a say, by virtue of being tax payers, in what the banker’s salary is, so I don’t understand why there is such an imposition. I don’t feel less free because Diamond received a large salary – broadly, I do sympathise with the view that it doesn’t seem right for people to be awarded bonuses for what we perceive to be failure, but I’m not sure why I have a say over contracts that I am not party to that don’t interfere with my freedom.
Do you think the interests of the banker’s colleagues, the bank’s shareholders, or the bank’s customers, are aligned with those of the taxpaying collective? ISTM that the millions of Barclays customers could move (or signal a move) to another bank if they were sufficiently unhappy with Diamond’s salary, and that might send a message about how unacceptable they find it. Where I’m going with this is that I think some “collectives” (eg all Barclays bank customers) already have some power without having to stretch philosophical jargon. If I was a Barclays customer I wouldn’t have a say in Diamond’s remuneration but I could signal my unhappiness with it by moving away. Customers could move to Svenska Handelsbanken or the Co-operative Bank, for example – (yes, I know it’s more difficult than that, but ISTM that one of the reasons why standards are low in banking (and in utilities) is customer inertia, people just are not sufficiently motivated to change and therefore there is little incentive from that direction for banks to improve.
(Similarly with Vodafone’s tax avoidance – I would love to know how many customers moved from Vodafone to another provider due to its tax arrangements. I suspect that, relative to the ‘fuss’ (for want of a better word), very few did.)
Richard, I don’t understand your response. My questions were genuine questions. You claim to want people to rebel for “collective rights”, so it seems a reasonable question to ask you what a collective is and what its rights are!
I’d love to say I can find a coherence to respond to in your comment
But I can’t
So I won’t
And I think my original observation stands
Richard, in retrospect my comment @4:52pm to Chris is a bit wordy and not particularly clear.
At the heart of my comment is my ‘thinking’ that we have “collectives” with de facto power simply because they consist of customers – Barclays customers, British Gas customers, Vodafone customers, Philip Green’s customers. ISTM sufficient numbers of Barclays customers could effect change in Barclays by moving or signalling their intention to move to another bank and their reason for doing so (e.g. “Diamond’s remuneration is too high”). Likewise for Vodafone and its tax arrangements, Philip Green and so on.
So in this sense there seems no need to invent a process whereby some other kind of collective (“all taxpayers”) is defined and given the right to interfere with a contract that it isn’t party to (e.g. Diamond’s contract with Barclays). I would much rather people vote with their feet / wallet – I would like to see such collectives attempt to effect change rather than just rely on such processes and, inevitably, politicians (who ISTM haven’t done a great job so far). Imagine if Barclays’ millions of customers said tomorrow to the bank, “we’re moving unless Diamond’s bonus is reduced”!
(” Barclays manages over 14 million savings accounts, 11 million current accounts,, 0.9 million mortgages and 11 million credit cards.” – Barclays)
In response to the questions posed by UK liberty:
1) You haven’t shown Diamond did any wrongdoing that led to those consequence you describe
If you read the US Financial Inquiry Commission’s book that details the causes that led to the financial crisis, one (among the many multifarious causes) were the perverse incentives given to investment bankers to invest in sub-prime mortgages that were essentially doomed from the start (e.g. selling $500,000 homes to Mexican gardeners who earned $14,000 at 0 down payment and with variable mortgage rates that would spring sky high two years from the signing of contracts). The more risky mortgages these investment bankers sold the more bonuses they received, the more they worsened the systemic impacts of the financial crisis when the bubble finally burst. I’ve discussed only the US so far, but my point is that risk was overpriced at a global level, leading to perverse bonus incentives whereby the underlying financial reality was ignored in favour of systemic risk, precisely because people like Bob Diamond had the incentive to look away from the reality. If you read the ‘Big Short’ (Michael Lewis) he demonstrates that many hedgefund managers made billions out of the collapse — and all they did was just analyse a small percentage of the subprimes being invested in and thought that it was a farce. This job should have been done by the individuals who invested and sold subprimes, but were not.
2) I don’t understand why all tax payers should have a say, by virtue of being tax payers, in what the banker’s salary is
In keeping with the above: in this sense the ‘tax payer’ lost out his access to public services, because the Government had to bail out Banks that used risky investment strategies by individuals who were not policed: that is to say that the freedom of the individual investment banker to do whatever they wanted to at a financial level was prioritised over the access right of ordinary tax payers who might have need of public services. A minority right of a powerful sector of society is prioritised over the freedom (rights) of others to access public services. Since there are more taxpayers in need of public services than there are investment bankers, when you bail out Banks and make tax payers in need of public services pay, you are essentially conceding that investment bankers have had more freedom to wreck the system than they should have been allowed, and yet they are not the ones to be punished. That is to say that you’ve favoured individual rights over collective rights (on an empirical basis)
3) Do you think the interests of the banker’s colleagues, the bank’s shareholders, or the bank’s customers, are aligned with those of the taxpaying collective
Yes: in this case shareholders, customers and tax payers can be denoted as a collective, because their interests coincide and because their rights have been threatened by a numerically small number of people.
4) one of the reasons why standards are low in banking (and in utilities) is customer inertia, people just are not sufficiently motivated to change and therefore there is little incentive from that direction for banks to improve.
There’s a more profound answer to this, which is the problem at the heart of the neo-classical economist’s assumption about human nature: that we are self-interested rational creatures who can assimilate vast amounts of information and make decisions on a purely self-interested and rational basis without regard for others. What you call customer inertia I call impossible assumption, because people are just not like this. The financial crisis points this out beautifully because it demonstrates that people make decisions on the basis of a whole series of irrational mindsets — like following what others do out of irrational exuberance. This assumption also forms the basis for conceiving rights as tools that should maximise the capacity for these self-interested, rational creatures to do what they do. It is an assumption that has no conception of the ‘collective’ (in any sense of the word). Whereas collective rights acknowledge that there are things that go beyond individuals concerns — that there are social concerns that can be grouped together under a common rubric and which a numerically significant number of people would consider meaningful. Of course collective rights can conflict with each other (but this is another problem).
Chris, thank you for the reading recommendations – I will check them out (I enjoyed The New New Thing).
We may be talking at cross-purposes to some extent: I am trying to address what happens after the event (Diamond’s bonus in a time of austerity and perceived bank failures and taxpayer bailout), I don’t expect average bank customers to be aware of the intricacies of investment banking, hedge funds, shorting etc in order to mitigate risk beforehand (ISTM the job of mitigating risk beforehand is for regulators, not Mexican gardeners).
I agree that people in RL aren’t as you describe the economist’s assumption, but ISTM we have enough intelligence and information (particularly with the likes of moneysupermarket.com) to change bank accounts (and God help us if we don’t). ISTM there is a less profound and more accurate answer than yours, which is “people just aren’t sufficiently motivated to switch”. That is, no matter how angry people profess to be, on balance they are just not bothered enough.
“Six out of ten adults have never switched their current account according to research from Alliance & Leicester and 84% said they have no plans in doing so over the next twelve months. There are 54 million current accounts in the UK, making them big business for the banks: the banks know that once they’ve got your custom, you aren’t likely to move elsewhere which means they can get away with offering uncompetitive deals.” – moneysupermarket.com
What I hope is that sufficient numbers of customers signal intentions to move that the banks buck up their ideas. Now, if bank customers are so limited they can’t effect such limited change as signalling disapproval of their bank’s practices by switching to alternative banks, ISTM this calls into question the notion of the “collective” (all taxpayers) being able to effect change.
(I must say I’m surprised that the UK Uncut website does not suggest considering switching bank accounts or not shopping at Top Shop – perhaps the contributors think it is obvious and does not need to be said?)
@ ukliberty:
Thanks for the reply. We are thus agreed on the causes and on how this relates to collective and individual freedoms.
On your last point: “Now, if bank customers are so limited they can’t effect such limited change as signalling disapproval of their bank’s practices by switching to alternative banks, ISTM this calls into question the notion of the “collective” (all taxpayers) being able to effect change.”
I’m in absolute agreement that customers have the information and tools needed to make informed decisions about Bank account choices, and i’m all for promoting those sorts of tools and for greater access to information in order to facilitate that informed choice. The point is that when one considers the kinds of choices that individual customers have to make everyday across the entire economy, then one realises the sheer scale and complexity of the ethical questions that arise. Everytime one goes supermarket shopping, pays one’s utility bills, makes a choice on what type of transport to use, buy commodities, invests, makes financial decisions, wears clothes, one is expected to be ‘motivated’ to:
1) Discover the variety of choices available with respect to the particular consumer market one is momentarily involved in (this already favours market participants who have easier acces to customer atention because of their financial clout).
2) Discover the variety of criticisms aimed at each of the providers involved in that particular niche market. (Take the example of choosing a sandwhich: this process involves knowing the ethical, and economic reputation of the providers of each food item that compose the sandwhich; knowing the ethical and economic reputation of each provider sourcing of each item that is not food – packaging and transport for example).
3) Verify the veracity of the each of the claims laid out against each one of those agents.
4) Weigh up the benefits of each claim and make an informed decision based on this exhaustive research.
Then consider how these 4 steps would dramatically shape your life if you really implemented them with regard to every decision that you make which is in anyway economic in nature. I submit to you that you would not have the time neither the inclination to follow these four steps, because if you were to truly enact these steps other areas of your life would irrevocably suffer (your social and family life, your work life, your private time and so on). You may have time to inform yourself on one or two specific economic areas and then make an informed choice, but that leaves behind the remaining 80-70% of choices which you make according to informed guesses.
This is a common theme among neo-liberal acolytes who promote greater ‘transparency’, greater ‘access to information’, because it focuses on individual choices. And increasingly the role of the state in this context is being replaced by legislation which focuses on individual choices, restricting the role of the state as a mediator and ‘guide’ in this process.
The problem is that this approaches the problem of ‘monitoring’ the market from an impossible perspective (as described above). But equally a ‘centralised’ pool of information provided by the state to facilitate customer choice is equally prone to massive error.
What left libertarians posit is that problems such as these can be resolved by not focusing so much on what individual customers can do to better ‘police’ market providers (though this strategy can also be used), but what reforms can be done to improve self policing on the part of market providers without imposing the centralised state into such affairs. One simple mechanism is to introduce more democratic involvement of a greater number of people within the structures that market providers have (i.e. democratising corporate governance), so that more people have a stake in the role of providers, providing incentives for sustainablity, rather than providing incentives for risk taking. And this is where the idea of ‘collective rights’ comes in, because in order to do this you have to identify specific ‘collectives’ (i.e. all employees that work in the financial sector) and develop rights which promote and facilitate their involvement – greater democracy at the work place for example. You do this so that you have a realistic balance between what the individual customer can do and what market providers can do in order to facilitate customer choice without rendering that process time consuming and complex.
That is a short
“But if you think there is libertarianism then to deny me the right to describe, as Isaiah Berlin did, a certain identifiable element within that train of thought as negative is to simply seek to oppress me.”
Leaving aside the split infinitive, I’m not denying you anything, I’m just telling you you’re wrong. To think that this indicates some kind of failing in my libertarian ethos only proves how little you know of the subject.
I’ve never met anyone who called themself a ‘negative libertarian’. The term’s only purpose is to allow you to call yourself a ‘positive libertarian’ when there are already plenty of terms that describe your political and economic views.