GEOFF HODGSON has been a member of the Socialists and several other far-left groups. He was active in the early days of the Conference of Socialist Economists.
More recently he stood as an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate for Labour. He now plays a leading role in the Labour Coordinating Committee ramoured to tutor Neil Kinnock in economics.
JOHN HARRISON reviews his latest book, The Democratic I STARTED this book journey through the Midlands, hopag it would innoculate me against the borrors of the industrial graveyards rattling past the bour later, I was wishing I'd brought Agatha Christie.
disagreements prompt such a morbid response. chuckled with admiration at Kitching's Re-thinking Socialism and I would give Crossland's The Future Socialism the Booker Prize day. Nor was it Marxism (with capital Ark, as Dury might say). This is the first time Geoff has explicity abandoned The Creed.
I've outgrown knee-jerk reactions.
No. The real culprit was Kinnockspeech: old ideas regurgitated in prose style edge. The sub-title — a new look at lanning, markets and power - must contravene the Trades Descriptions Act.
Enough self-analysis. What does abe book say? Well, it beats me. Every statement is stitched up qualifications to straight-jacket any Bormal brain.
The general drift something like this. A brapch of the thought police, popularly the Wrong. Question Brigade, shunted debate about the kind of society we want off into a rusty siding. Counterposing markets central planning is silly. both.
Nutters The New Right are nutters who expect too much from markets. Marxists are mirror-image loonies who expect too much from planning.
organise distribute products in more ways than one. Enter the 'impurity principle' tbeoretical star of the book (I vote for Jack Nicholson in the movie.) This screaming banality is justified by a quick run through civilisation and its deviations (Roman empire Stalin) and a theoretical aside on cybernetics.
The way out of this cul-de-sac is sign-posted especified). The notion cconomic crisis renders capitalism and democracy increasingly incompatible (the best idea Benn ever borrowed) is naive. Democracy and BigC interact is a more complex fashion *elucidated via the cliché metaphor of stormy love affair). So socialism and democracy are separable, though equally Cue for a fashionable left shopping list. Greenham and Citizen Ken: of coarse. Gay rights: by all means. Nationalisation of the beights: well... that denends. stuff of which dream made.
This may be unfair, but I doubt it. I've waded through the book twice and the index is useless). Anyway, let's assume I've got the general idea, Gavin But I think my teeth on in enough run known as We need published at £3.50 see what we can make of it.
Hodgson All caricaturing their ideas and that drink?)
Joe Captain Birds tion job.
(distance that Pinkos that markets organise all human 'anarcho-capitalist' commanding tickets cost-effective body conscripts).
relations The Democratic Economy is a Pelican Original, sit back, pour ourselves a drink, and makes some correct criticism of the New Right whilst both letting them off the hook. (See why we need His good criticisms concern the limits of markets. Some of us enter Sainsbury's with a better American Express rating than others. Nobody's kids would buy fish finger junkies if Eye had never marketed the product and so on. It is a decent, if fairly standard, demoliThe caricature is an archetypal New Righter, supposedly convinced are the best way to activity. Now, nuts do abound. Milton Friedman's son, David — who styles himself as advocates private armies and legal systems. His father lobbied against the draft in the vietnam war economic weory sug gests that career sadists achieve more counts than do But, honestly, Geoff, how many Righters really want all sexual regulated by the market? Even J. Edgar Hoover once uniquely privileged instituthe prevention of coerMonetarism is similarly just a England of the state, '•.. it would have been impossible nuttees view. demand down- these days.
Winter alia, 'The suggests, outlines of strong intermediate allowed Well, So much for the New Right. What of the way forward? I doubt if Geoff and i alter much about ine kind o society we want to live in. I certainly agree that markets have a place under socialism. as do co-ops and ołnel forms of economic Rival political parties must be free to slug it out. I also buy his powerful defence of utopianism. To dismiss questions about the nittygritty of socialism by snide references to 'blue-print deviationism' is tantaamnesia (remember Stalin?).
The question is how can we get there — a trickier exercise than planning my train journey. One issue is the compatability of capitalism and democracy. Geoff is agnostic - anything might happen. I am not. I believe that existing democratic gains are increasingly incompatible needs and will face greer mod age and sociali Battles socialism will become less and less separable. Slippery democracy, and other working class economic effects for capital, the net result of which is unpredictable. The argument is an extension of one once made by Bob Rowthorn - that UK had grown faster (since this would have forced firms to innovate always hurt capital economically. The When it can no longer afford those concessions it atchange. Here I find Geoff very ship thodox Marxist talk of socialism be ing about the dominance in political and economic power of the majority, the working class' is 'a worthy objec'hopelessly inadequate' and to reject 'the worker-centred fatalism of the Mostly he refers to 'progressive forces'. Certainly, he fails a number of litmus-tests of support for the organised labour movement, saying of free collective bargaining, for ex. ample, that 'arguably it has done little to enhance the power or influence of the working class as a whole'.
Centrist Hodgson is clearer on state power. He rejects any notion of proletarian, as opposed to bourgeois, democracy on the slanderous grounds that supporters of the former are inevitably hostile to one-person, one vote national • On a • more uowu to carl level, he opposes any fundamental reorganisation of the repressive arms preferring a system of police and military monitoring comI take a more traditional So I suspect, do most picket The cover blurb concludes: "impurity principle", he means that some sort of pluralist economy is inevitable: far from being a centrist, however, he radical decentralisation worker participation as the surest safeguard of political democracy, with emphasis on autonomy for individual and community alike.' yes. Probably. Or something like that. Apart from that bit about not being a centrist,
Half an lamented - in a thinly veiled attack on the pinkos of the Republican administration that 'unfortunately, we of the FBI are not empowered to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy. unless they have somehow interfered with interstate commerce'. "political decisions because they hoe Righters claim imposed by arbitrary coalitions of 'interest groups'. Hodgson accepts this smokescreen as naivelv as those parents who believe their kids are only smoking giant roll-ups.. New Right In fact, the New Right has nothing against politicisation as such. "Taking the state off our backs' is the last thing on its mind, as any NUM picket knows all too well. It fêtes those special never are ps at the cocos powerful. cannot stomach is the labour movement and the reforms it has wrested Hayek, the only really bright and up-front theoretician the New Right has, pulls no punches:
Public policy concerning labour unions has, in little more than a century, moved from one extreme to the other. From a state in which little the unions could do was legal if they were not prohibited altogether, now reached a state where they have tions to which the general rules of law do not apply. They have become the government signally fail in their prime cion and violence ... the whole basis of our free society is gravely threatenabhor ed by the powers arrogated by the (A Tiger by the Tail, pp. 66-68)
Snide device for marketing deflation. Surprisingly Bank recently admitted as much: to intitiate (Thatcher's policies - JH) with a familiar 'Keynesian' exposition about managing wards, ... But this would have meant disclosing objectives for, output and employment. This would have been a very hazardous exercise, and the objectives would either have been unacceptable to public opinion or inadequate to ensure a substantial reduction in the rate of intlation, or both. Use targets, for money supply and governauthorities to stand back from output and employment as such.. (Quarterly Bulletin, June 1983, p. 207)
Socialist Action 8 June 1984