The antidote is economic democracy.
It is common in Western discourse to claim there is a natural connection between capitalism and democracy. Sometimes the two concepts are virtually fused together. I always find this odd because I value democracy, but there is nothing democratic about capitalism.
Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect national leaders every few years, even if we acknowledge that this process is often corrupt and inadequate. But when it comes to the economy, the system of production — which affects our everyday lives and determines the shape and direction of our society — generally not even a pretence of democracy is allowed to enter.
Under capitalism, production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big financial firms, the large corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. They are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources, and what to do with the surplus we generate.
As far as capital is concerned, the purpose of production and surplus reinvestment is not to meet human needs, achieve social progress, or to realise democratically ratified objectives. The purpose is to maximise and accumulate profit and power — that is the overriding goal. These decisions are made in the narrow interests of the capitalist class. The workers — the people actually doing the production — rarely get any voice at all.
This arrangement is completely undemocratic. In fact, it is literally plutocracy. And when you govern a system like this, it leads to perverse outcomes. We end up with massive overproduction of damaging and less-necessary things like fossil fuels, SUVs and industrial beef (which are highly profitable to capital) but chronic underproduction of obviously necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and affordable housing (because these are less profitable to capital or not profitable at all).
The result is that despite having extraordinarily productive capacity, with extremely high levels of output to the point of blowing past planetary boundaries, we nonetheless fail to ensure that everyone has access to basic goods and services. In the United States, the richest country in the world, nearly half the population cannot afford healthcare; in the United Kingdom, 4.3 million children live in poverty; and in the European Union, 95 million people cannot afford decent housing and nutritious food. These are totally artificial scarcities.
It also bears noting that those who control production within this system then leverage their profits to manipulate national elections, through campaign finance and advertising, in support of politicians who will serve their interests. Or through ownership and control over media outlets. Democracy cannot function under these conditions. Indeed, a 2014 study found that the impact of this dynamic on political outcomes in the US means the country more closely resembles an oligarchy than a democracy.
A critic may retort that, leaving all of this aside, capitalism is democratic because every person gets to “vote with their dollars”. According to this argument, consumers get to determine the direction of the economy, which therefore ends up serving people’s needs in the most efficient possible way. But this argument does not hold water, for several reasons.
First, if dollars equal votes, then clearly some people have much more voting power than others. A single individual with a billion dollars would have more voting power than 66,000 workers earning the minimum wage. There is clearly nothing democratic about this. And it is all the more repugnant when we understand that those who hold dollars in excess of consumption requirements (in other words, the rich) are the ones who will have the power to invest in manipulating actual elections.
Second, even if we ignored this problem, the dollars of ordinary people do not equal votes, to the extent that you cannot buy things that are not being produced. We may want renewable energy, affordable housing, longer-lasting products, public transit and regenerative agriculture. But if these things are not being produced — because capital does not consider it profitable enough to do so — then no amount of waving our dollars is going to change that. If it did, then we would not suffer chronic deprivation of these things.
The reality is that capital does not allocate investment on the basis of what ordinary people actually need or want. It allocates investment to what is most profitable to capital, which may or may not align with human needs. Of course, for something to be profitable, there has to be some demand for it. Demand is a necessary but insufficient condition. But it is profitability, not demand, that determines investment. Capital determines production, and we only get to “vote” among the things that capital is willing to produce.
Ultimately, it is not a question of who has the power to consume, but who has the power to produce. Wealth represents not only power over consumption but, more importantly, command over the means of production. This includes command over our labour. Capital determines what we build and what we produce, and thus determines the shape and direction of our civilisation. If we do not have democratic control over production, then we can hardly say we live in a democracy.
None of this is inevitable. We can and should extend the concept of democracy into the economy. We know, empirically, that when people have democratic control over production — economic democracy — they are inclined to organise production more around meeting human needs, they manage resources more sustainably, and they distribute yields more fairly. Researchers have shown that if production were organised around these objectives, we could end deprivation and provide good lives for 8.5 billion people with less energy and resources than we presently use.
Decisions about what to produce and how to use our collective surplus should be democratically determined, rather than controlled by and for the interests of capitalists and the 1%. This can be achieved through universal public services and a public job guarantee (to ensure sufficient production of goods and services necessary for human well-being), democratic ownership of firms (such as in the case of Mondragon or Huawei), and a system of industrial policy, public finance and credit guidance (to ensure that investment and production aligns with democratically ratified objectives).
The path out of capitalism is economic democracy.
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Jason Hickel
Jason Hickel is an author and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is also a Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Rodney Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health. Jason's research focuses on political economy, inequality, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020), which was listed by the Financial Times and New Scientist as a book of the year.
Trade unions and progressive movements rightly demand better wages and working conditions for employees to improve society. But the question of what good work actually means is rarely asked. And how everyone can benefit from it.
“Good work” cannot be defined in abstract terms. But there are criteria that provide a framework. Work should provide useful goods and services that enable an acceptable standard of living for all. Degrading, unwanted activities should be reduced as much as possible. Production should also be organized in such a way that workers can identify with the output and it not destroys the environmental conditions we rely on.
Capitalism: No Good jobs?
It is easy to see that capitalist production, especially under the rule of globally operating corporations, runs counter to the concept of good work. Entrepreneurs and capital owners determine what jobs are available. They decide on the resources, work processes, and results.
In addition, production is by no means started in order to produce useful things, but rather to generate profits. Negative effects such as environmental destruction, poverty, social inequality, the promotion of conflicts and wars, etc. are constantly externalized. Workers are both a cost factor and a potential disruptive element that must be controlled.
Degraded to mere tools of production in capitalist enterprises, employees are constantly threatened by rationalization and “de-skilling”. This is because companies strive to minimize labor costs and enable flexible interchangeability in the battle for market share and returns.
Of course, there are still good jobs and satisfied employees in capitalist economies. But good work is a very scarce commodity in capitalist-organized production, if it can exist at all – according to the criteria mentioned above.
This is due to the fact that the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a small class structurally undermines democracy and thus the basic principle of good work, which should consist in the expansion of freedom, creativity, and self-determination of people.
More than Better Wages
Right from the beginning of industrial capitalism, there was therefore massive criticism of the specific organization of production. From Karl Marx to the “Lowell Mill Factory Girls” in the US to socialists such as Rosa Luxemburg, workers, activists, and social critics attacked the undermining of good work by capital-driven societies.
Anarchists and libertarian socialists simultaneously demanded that the means of production be placed in the hands of those who work in the factories. While in real existing socialism the means of production were monopolized by a party hierarchy and workplace co-determination, as practiced in some countries such as Germany, tended to paralyze workers’ control over production, the idea of workplace democracy remained alive in civil society.
There are also a number of examples where the idea of worker self-management has been put into practice, from cooperative movements and the market socialist model in Yugoslavia to companies that were run and/or managed by their employees, such as the “Fábricas Recuperadas” movement in Argentina in the early 2000s or the Mondragón corporation in Spain.
Give Society a Human Face Again
In addition, a more fundamental critique of the concept of work in industrial society developed, particularly in the post-war period. It was shaped by different currents that can be traced back to conservative, traditionalist, religious, or left-wing and progressive attitudes.
But they all share more or less the same assumption that production in an industrial society cannot create fulfilling work that is appropriate for human beings and a way of life that is compatible with social community and respect for nature.
On the contrary, it is argued that assembly lines, mines, a network of high-speed transport routes, artificial malls and shopping worlds are constantly destroying nature, craftsmanship, and rural activities, and thus, step by step, the basis of what constitutes good work and good life.
From critics of civilization such as Robert Jungk and Ivan Illich to the British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher and today’s post-growth movements, there are calls to free ourselves from the constraints of technology driven “higher, faster, further” in order to give society and the working environment a human face again.
So, in view of the devastation wrought by modern societies, do we need a major transformation away from industrialism in order to strive for a better, ideal working environment?
Industrial vs. Agrarian Society
The undesirable developments of capitalist industrialization are certainly obvious. They have exacerbated crises that today threaten the survival of the species. However, “saving” our way out of the social and ecological crisis through industrial contraction or overcoming it in a post-industrial society is misleading.
The climate and global poverty crisis can only be solved through technological solutions within the framework of industrial society. The global energy question will by no means disappear in a post-industrial world, even if demand in industrialized countries and among the wealthy must be reduced, in some cases significantly.
Furthermore, capitalist exploitation and destruction on the one hand and technological progress and industrialization on the other have historically gone hand in hand. But they are not two sides of the same coin.
Technology is more or less neutral. It depends on how it is used. Its character changes depending on the social institutions in which it is embedded. But this also applies to other forms of civilization, such as agrarian societies, which have produced some of the most repressive systems.
Three Arguments
There are a number of frequently cited arguments put forward by industry skeptics and critics of growth to prove that there is no alternative to the exit of industrial society or its decline if we want to enable good work and good life. Three of these are:
1. Industrial production creates degrading working conditions and an increasing number of “superfluous people.”
2. Technological progress and industrialization are not neutral. Their destructive dynamics are ultimately uncontrollable.
3. An acceptable standard of living for all is not or no longer achievable industrially due to planetary boundaries.
The question is, however, whether these arguments are convincing. Is it really true that degrading industrial work, destructive progress, and planetary boundaries make it necessary to reorient society away from industry? Is this the only way to achieve good work? Let’s take a look at the arguments.
Modern Workplaces
In every society, there is work that is uncreative, stressful, or unwanted, not just in an industrial society. But an advanced technological society has the means to reduce many of these activities.
It is true, however, that capitalist industrialization created hellish working conditions that robbed workers of their skills. The reasons for this, however, do not lie in technological progress or industrial production. On the contrary, it was the prevention or misdirection of industrial development that degraded workers.
A look back at the history of automation shows that its introduction was deliberately designed against the needs of the workers. It led to the “de-skilling” of workers, as David F. Noble impressively shows in his 1984 study “Forces of Production”.
Today, most assembly line work can be done by robots with sophisticated sensors, at least theoretically. This would be a welcome relief for workers from mindless tasks. They could turn to other, more creative work. Artificial intelligence could also be used in this way.
Certainly, industrial corporations continue to pursue other goals. But here, too, it is not robots that are laying off workers, degrading them, and making them superfluous.
Farming and craftsmanship are often held up as examples of authentic and fulfilling work. But that’s not because there are fewer types of farming and craftsmanship that are stressful, unhealthy, and mindless – cotton pickers in India know all about it.
The constraints are enormous in some cases, at least in their pre-industrial, non-automated form. Self-sufficiency in agrarian societies is usually a lonely and harsh struggle for survival. Free time, education, cooperation, and exchange across local boundaries are the exception.
The Blocked Industrialization
The same applies to the technical and industrial progress as a whole. Here, too, it can be shown that the destructive effects are by no means a direct consequence of technology and mass production.
Take the engine of industrialization, fossil fuel energy production. In itself, this is a good thing. It enabled machines to be operated, which relieved the burden on people. It made mass electricity generation possible and set locomotives, cars, and trams in motion.
Many useful things have come out of it. But the negative effects were obvious from the start.
Air pollution from coal burning in city centers, and later lead-containing exhaust fumes from car traffic, caused serious, often fatal respiratory diseases in humans and serious damage to the environment. Today, the burning of coal, gas, and oil in the wake of the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity.
However, this devastation is not a natural consequence of industrialization. Air pollution could have been reduced and prevented from the outset. Air purification technologies (first used in stone processing) and filters were already available in the 19th century.
Throughout the course of industrialization and up until the 1970s, little or no value was placed on human health and environmental protection. This was not due to energy technologies, but to companies, investors, and the political class.
In addition, a better and cheaper alternative to fossil fuels has been available for decades: renewable energies. Countries could have switched to generating electricity from solar, wind, water and geothermal energy long ago if powerful economic and political interest groups had not prevented or slowed down the transition.
Certainly, there are technologies that have no useful purpose. Artillery, atomic bombs, etc. are among them. Given the risks and better alternatives, nuclear power plants are not an acceptable form of energy production for many people.
But in the end, it is the use that counts, and the social organization of production and life that determines the means. Societies should therefore find ways to use the best available technologies for common good purposes.
Limits
But is an acceptable standard of living for all even industrially feasible given the planetary limits?
“Acceptable standard of living” is, of course, a relative term. Acceptable means something different to a Western European or North American than it does to someone in Mozambique or a family in a crisis region.
The United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) is not an ideal measure of living standards, but it does provide a point of reference. The HDI shows that economic development correlates with life expectancy and quality of life.
According to this, the average Norwegian, German or US American enjoys a high level of material security, even though the neoliberal shift since the 1970s has led to increasingly unequal distribution of resources in industrialized nations, in some cases to a drastic extent.
The relatively high standard of living in rich countries applies to food, housing, medical and emergency care, cities and infrastructure, nature conservation and environmental protection, social institutions, education and schools, working conditions, leisure time, mobility, etc. This results in a wide range of opportunities and freedoms for individuals and society as a whole. It does not guarantee happiness per se, but all of these things are certainly not detrimental to life satisfaction, civil society, and political culture.
However, according to these criteria, the majority of the world’s population is far from enjoying an adequate standard of living. Often, even basic needs are not met.
In countries without an own industrial core, families live in extremely precarious, sometimes catastrophic conditions. Many are exposed to hunger and poverty without any protection. Most have no adequate access to electricity, health care, social services, functioning infrastructure, and administration.
Behind the misery lies a fundamental lack of industrialization in the “hungry states”. As the German economist Friedrich List concisely put it in the 19th century, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans had the “ladder kicked away” from under them, the ladder on which Europeans and Americans climbed to industrial and economic heights. Advanced economies such as Egypt and India were held back by colonial powers and then exploited.
Enough Green Energy
But can we still afford an acceptable standard of living for everyone, including the poor parts of the world – after all, this would mean billions of people consuming significantly more? Isn’t an industrial society for everyone ecologically destructive and incompatible with sustainability? Don’t climate change and raw material shortages show that we in the rich countries are living beyond our means and have now reached a limit that forces us to choose a different path?
It is true that capitalist industrialization has damaged the environment in many ways. A radical industrial, and above all energy, transformation is therefore necessary, which, had it not been repeatedly blocked, would not be such an urgent issue today. It is also true that there are a number of possibilities in the industrialized countries that actually exist to get rid of “ballast”, as growth critics like Tim Jackson demand.
But industrial contraction or a post-industrial society are not the solution. Even if industrialized countries were to reduce demand and living standards by 50 percent over the next twenty years, that would not solve the climate problem.
The regression would cause an economic and global catastrophe with unforeseeable consequences. Only technologies such as the rapid expansion of alternative energies and a greenhouse gas neutral infrastructure can slow down the climate crisis. What we really need is a Green New Deal, as economist Robert Pollin suggests, that would also create millions of good jobs for the working class.
Industrialized countries will certainly have to temporarily reduce demand over the next two decades in order to prevent dangerous global warming and give developing countries the necessary leeway for restructuring. In the long term, however, there is no shortage of renewable energies for creating a generally acceptable standard of living under industrial conditions. It is merely a question of political will and implementation, not technical feasibility.
After all, the neo-Malthusian catastrophe, according to which not everyone on earth can achieve an acceptable standard of living because we do not have two planets, is not a law of nature. Resources can be conserved and recycled using green energy. To achieve prosperity for all, we therefore do not need endless growth, which is truly an absurd idea on a finite planet, but rather endless inventive spirit.
When Does Industry Make Sense?
However, this does not mean industrializing and digitizing everything without rhyme or reason. No one would want to defend the existing agricultural industry against sustainable agriculture, for example.
The disadvantages are obvious. Huge monocultures, artificial fertilizers, chemicals and manure on fields, unacceptable factory farming, the dangerous use of antibiotics, and highly concentrated seed, chemical, and food corporations have severely damaged the environment and rural life and pose enormous risks such as pandemics.
But it is only an industrial society that has made it possible to establish sustainable agriculture under conditions that allow for an acceptable standard of living and free from the constraints and limitations of agrarian societies.
So when we talk about good work, we should ask ourselves how we can loosen and finally disconnect industrial societies from their capitalist constraints in order to enable a good life for all. A sensible way forward would be to progressively use the available technologies for the benefit of society. They could bring about better quality of work, more control and self-management of workers in companies, thereby strengthening the position of the workforce vis-à-vis management.
In any case, unions should fight back when new technologies are used to degrade workers with bullshit jobs and ever-increasing surveillance. Ultimately, it is a political struggle over the use of technology that is as old as industrial capitalism itself, as exemplified by the machine breakers (“Luddites”) in the 19th century.
It goes without saying that an army of robots and AI servers in the hands of corporations, investors, and a global business class without adequate public control does not serve the people or improve the workplace, to the contrary. But as said, machines, cars, information technologies, and automated mass production are not the problem. Industrial society is not a dead end from which we must free ourselves.
Rather, it is better suited than other forms of civilization to promote freedom and creativity, i.e. good work and good life for everyone. This is true even, or perhaps especially, in a world where technology can replace many mindless jobs.
Principles Not Personalities
Traditionally, left politics have been based on collective action to challenge, and if possible, transcend structural injustice and systemic inequality. On this count, working class left politics stands in stark contrast to middle class liberalism, which has always understood progress in terms of individualism and upward class mobility; progress is that which extends opportunities for individual advancement. No less than the Harvard Law Review describes this approach in terms of ‘trading action for access.’ Corporate capture of western institutions under neoliberalism only accelerates this process.
As a substitute for intersectional class analysis and critical thinking, so impoverished are bourgeois identity politics that even the Harvard Law Review recognises their limitations. Amidst the corporate capture of politics, captured and corproatised intellectuals try to resolve the contradictions between corporate monopoly and individual rights and responsibilities by rolling corporate hierarchy turds in egalitarianism and inclusion glitter, per the project of ‘trading action for access.’ Providing opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds to become part of the exploiting elite of course does nothing to mitigate their exploitativeness—almost by design.
The combination of corporate capture and the willingness of middle class opportunists to substitute access for action, has been disastrous for movement politics. A great example of the problems that arise where left politics are confused with middle class liberalism is the concept of ‘kiararchy,’ where intersectional class analysis is mimicked by a sort of ‘oppression olympics’ where an individual’s merit as a political actor is based on membership of often multiple oppressed demographics—on identity, in other words, rather than actions, or values lived in them.
Essentialist liberal identity politics are useful for individual advancement, not least where corporate class hierarchies can enjoy the appearance of egalitarianism by offering opportunities for diverse individuals to participate in class exploitation. An eco-technocracy of black, disabled lesbians looks better than an eco-technocracy of white, able-bodied males, but remains an eco-technocracy; the root cause of global warming in an endless-growth economy trying to operate on a finite planet remains untouched. Carbon emissions continue to rise. Politics of personality replaces politics of principle; merit is defined by willingness to conform, to prove that one is willing to enable the corporate status quo and is thus deserving, and to uphold class hierarchy generally, rather than strength of one’s ideas and our ability to live values.
Liberal identity politics are also useful for electoral politics, where the ability to sell an image is often critical for candidates mostly indistinguishable otherwise as members of ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ factions of the one pro-big business party. We remember Bob Hawke fondly because he drank beer, and forget that he introduced neoliberal cult economics, the three-mines policy, suppressed wage growth for a decade via the Accord, and spied for the US. Joh Bijelke-Peterson was a fascist, but he was known as a personality. Julia Gilard was seen as a staunch defender of women, especially in talking back to Tony Abbott in federal parliament, but reduced the cutoff age for parenting payments to 8 and removed Australia from the migration zone for purposes of our responsibilites under international refugee conventions. Mainstream rememberings retain the personalities, not the lack of principle.
These kinds of personality-driven politics are accelerated by social media. Internet punditry is all about images and appearance; Russell Brand is just asking questions while he accumulates internet followers until he converts to Christianity and is arrested on charges of rape and sexual assault. Nominally progressive Instagram pundits pander to audiences with rage-bait over extreme examples of discrimination or prejudice that belie everyday structural violence too normal and banal to be memeable. The right for social justice and equality becomes a struggle to have the most followers; the substitution of access and opportunity for action on structural injustice reduces the cause of egalitarianism to a popularity contest.
The popularity contest thus becomes the forum amongst respectable opinion for resolving complex social issues. The fairness of a status quo where action on root causes is traded away for access to upward class mobilty and diverse middle classes is assumed; equality is no longer understood in terms of structural fairness, but opportunities to participate in a structure that is only ever becoming more unfair. Justice is understood in terms of providing and withholding opportunities for upward mobility, depending on one’s capacity to be deserving through conformity and servility. The popularity contest based on personalities rather than principles gets around challenging issues of social and historical root causes by determining right and wrong through trials by internet, performative games of ‘purge the weakest link,’ and aggressive ostracism and shunning.
Purging and aggressive, active shunning of ‘wreckers’ allows moral entrepreneurs to build their (Russell) brand without needing to navigate ethical complexity or nuance, grey area between black and whites, the humanity of the undeserving and difficult to understand, or to live values. Responsibility for the failure of mainstream politics to meaningfully address the structural injustices whose root causes it habitually spurns is laid at the feet of doubters and nonconformists; the underlying assumption that the generalised crisis of neoliberal capitalism is the fault of wreckers and saboteurs, and not the structural contradictions and violence of neoliberal capitalism, ensures that the upward mobility of middle class liberal individualists remains sacred, and is protected.
The purging of wreckers also ensures the values of the political mainstream are upheld, even as they are only asserted in speech, in opposition to some demonised Other, some wrecker or renegade. Meanwhile, the values lived by liberal puritans in actual practise typically approximate the opposite of those they allege in speech. The apostles of liberal personality politics thus render themselves cause and cure of the same problem, while problematising the same mentality in their conservative opponents. Class struggle is hard and demands the ability to cooperate with people we might not necessarily want to have a beer with. It demands principled action and the capacity to live by the same principles we apply to others. Liberal identity politics are easy, and require only that we remain silent in the face of the production of wreckers and deviants on which the regime of access to, or denial of access to, upward mobility seems to turn.
These easy personality politics and their contruction of virtue through exclusion also have the effect of diminishing social debate, our understanding of social issues and our understanding of ourselves and each other. They reduce debate to issues of personal morality. The mentality that equality depends on opportunity rather than structural fairness opens the door for silencing of dissenting or critical perspectives by attacking the person expressing them; the cause of egalitarianism and social justice now depends on the just-world fallacy to explain that criticism of class hierarchy, opportunism and careerism is actually just an attitude problem on the part of the critic. Undeserving nonconformity means that the end justifies the means; pack violence against the undeserving nonconformist and wrecker is now legitimate to protect access to upward class mobility, or egalitarianism.
Under these conditions, the pursuit of progress is reduced to humourless neopuritan stormtroopers lurking around like thieves in the night, sifting through poetry to find the prose, to cut life stories to pieces and produce the philosophy of might makes right from whatever unfavourable fragments they find useful. The cause of freedom and equality demands making political causes out of interpersonal conflict; the cause of social justice becomes a reason to sift through your garbage like the other thought police. The fight you had with your flatmate back in 2002 becomes a reason to exclude and shun you. Errors of judgement become ill intent and patterns of behaviour that makes working class leftists unfortunate enough to be in the orbit of middle class liberals worse than Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate. Unpopularity becomes a reasonable excuse to problematise reactions to disrespect and launch pileons, pack mobbings and perpetrate wrongs in the name of ending them.
Under these conditions, the only possibility left for egalitarianism and social justice is self-censorship, lest we are proven guily of deviance through association with amoral wreckers and saboteurs—unpersons in their demonic evil as a matter of defintion. Accusation is as good as guilt. There is no open space for new ideas to come through; it is almost as though our rendering of ourselves cause and cure of the same problem is actually about silencing unwanted ideas we are unable to counter or better, and fact we prefer not to know. In the face of not wanting to be wrong, of wanting to salvage our image and our personal superiority, the option left is to attack the messenger. As we burn the Cassandras, brides of Lucifer and heretics who want only to wreck the path to egalitarianism and upward class mobility, might not only equals right—it also equals Left.
Paradoxically then maybe, assassinating Cassandras inevitably diminishes perpetrators, as well as the Cassandras personality politics are weaponised against. Behind our masks of respectable propriety and civility, we resemble the pious and moralistic tory hypocrites we nominally oppose. In our diminishment, our theory and practise falls below the standards of, for example, Alcoholics Anonymous, whose ethic of ‘principles before personalities’ reflects a level of self-restraint and impartiality largely foreign to respectable progressives. The ‘principles before personalities’ ethic is based on the AA understanding that, if a comrade needs help and asks for it, we help them, no matter what personal feelings are involved in our relationship. In nominally left milieus, by contrast, one can often only dream of such openness, much less a comparable level of solidarity towards comrades.
In looking into the AA ‘principles before personalities’ ethic, we find further that, from an organisational perspective, AA adopts this ethic on grounds that ‘everyone has a role to play, and that all roles are honoured and respected,’ that ‘People get stronger when groups emphasise and respect an individuals strengths when working towards a common aim.’ As they tell things, AA ‘practise honesty, humility, compassion, tolerance, and patience with everyone, whether we like them or not . . . putting principles before personalities teaches us to treat everyone equally.’ Members of AA themselves point out the critical importance of this ethic to their capacity to recover; without the ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ ethic nominally associated with Christianity, but observed more often in the breach, the willing participant in recovery from alcoholism is given space to come to terms with their past, make amends and find better ways of relating to themselves and others. Without this freedom to err, the errant has no hope of recovery, the problem continues to fester, and nothing changes.
This fact begs the question as to the relevance of the ‘principles before personalities’ ethic for nominally progressive milieus that never change or evolve ideas, and don’t change anything, but are themselves changed as a result of their abandonment of principle for opportunity. In applying this ethic to the politics of freedom and social justce, the necessity of the freedom to err begs the question as to whether its denial in the name of protecting upward mobility is not actually counterproductive. Permitting the freedom to err, in a way that does not automatically conflate conflict with abuse, or being criticised with being attacked, may not be so emotionally gratifying, but it may increase our understanding of one another, ourselves, and our capacity to work cooperatively . Demonising ‘wreckers,’ nonconformists and doubters, policing morality to attack messengers when we don’t like the message, and using shame to silence after problematising reactions to disrespect and abuse, are all ways of using conflict as an opportunity for moral grandstanding and exercising control, but they also guarantee stagnation, intellectual serility, and political inertia.
This personality politics-driven approach argubly also ensures no one will want to admit to wrongdoing, if critics, nonconformists and dissenters are going to be held wholly responsible for conflict when it takes two to tango. Denial of the freedom to err to those with whom we find ourselves in conflict further ensures we cut off avenues for processing negative feelings generally, begging the question as to how much of our own attitude is a root cause of vicious cycles of conflict. Regression to ‘sympathy for me, punishment for thee’ might make conflict go away in the short term, especially if we hide behind cliquesm ingroups and tribes in so doing, but it never solves the underlying reasons for conflict in the first place, e.g. selfishness and controlling behaviour. It never helps in resolving differences without resorting to the demonising and purging of those who refuse to fall into line with selfish individualism. Outside of the just-world fallacies of liberal individualists, these are the actual root causes of a world that is anything but just, much less the root of conflict between the selfish and the cooperative. They also help to account for why the politics of personality has left us without politics of principle.
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