Extracts from a long piece by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian:
Socialism is a great product. When will the left give it the hard sell?
It’s a perplexing question: why has so little changed since 2008? If your recall is a little hazy, 2008 was the year the world woke up to a banking crisis of epic proportions, a crisis borne of blind faith in market wisdom and an utter lack of public oversight. But in a bizarre twist, the parties who benefited from the bust were the conservatives (the people who glibly told voters it was all the government’s fault) and the xenophobes (who blamed it all on terrorists and immigrants, who steal our jobs yet are too lazy to work).
So why isn’t the left coming up with some real alternatives? There are volumes to be written about this conundrum, but I’d like to venture one simple explanation: the eternal return of underdog socialism.
It’s an international phenomenon, observable among legions of leftwing thinkers and movements, from trade unions to political parties, from columnists to professors. The world view of the underdog socialist is encapsulated in the notion that the establishment has mastered the game of reason, judgment and statistics, leaving the left with emotion. Its heart is in the right place. The underdog socialist always has his or her back against the wall. Warily they watch the neoliberals, the multinationals and the Eurocrats advance, but can’t bring themselves to do much more than whimper: “Come on guys, do we have to?”
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The underdog socialist has a surfeit of compassion and finds prevailing policies deeply unfair – seeing the achievements of the 20th century crumbling to dust, and rushing in to salvage what he can. But when push comes to shove, the underdog socialist caves in to the arguments of the opposition, always accepting the premise upon which the debate takes place. “National debt is out of control, but we can make more programmes income-dependent … Fighting poverty is terribly expensive, but it’s part of being a civilised nation … Taxes are high – but each according to his ability.”
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But the underdog socialists’ biggest problem isn’t that they are wrong. They are not. Their biggest problem is that they’re dull. Dull as a doorknob. They’ve got no story to tell; nor even the language to convey it in. Having arrived at the conclusion that politics is a mere matter of identity, they have chosen an arena in which they will lose every time.
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What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress. By that I don’t mean a narrative that only excites a few hipsters who get their kicks philosophising about “postcapitalism” after reading some deadly dull tome. The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes cliches seem abstruse. If you can’t explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent 12-year-old, it’s probably your own fault. What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people. It all starts with reclaiming the language of progress.
Plenty to disagree with perhaps, but plenty to ponder too. Go read the whole thing in The Guardian.
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