Ethical Socialism

Discussion

Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford:

"Ethical socialism does not subordinate the individual to the community; nor does it fabricate community where it does not exist. It is about the social connections between individuals, which shape both our psyche and our place in the order of things. It does not pitch the individual against society, but sees individuals as constituted in society. Society has its own kind of regularity, but it is nothing more than the relationships of individuals. There is no ‘I’ without first a ‘we’ that is historical and forged out of culture and society. We may no longer live in communities in which people share the same customs and culture, but the ideal of community remains as powerful as ever, because it is about the mutual nature of human relationships. We are a gregarious species and our brains and emotional life do not develop in isolation. Our interdependency is fundamental to our existence.

Ethical socialism addresses the material conditions which give form to individual being. It is a politics of equality founded in the belief that individuals are of equal worth and it is governed by the ethic of reciprocity: ‘do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you’. It recognises that the task of living necessitates interdependency with others, and that this interdependency leads to the question of equality and justice. Equality is the ethical core of justice. It is also the precondition for freedom. Not simply the negative freedom from the compulsion of others, or the freedom achieved through a fair distribution of resources, but a positive freedom toward self-fulfilment. As the nineteenth-century Idealist philosopher Thomas Green argues: ‘the feeling of oppression, which always goes along with the consciousness of unfulfilled possibilities, will always give meaning to the representation of the effort after any kind of self-improvement as a demand for “freedom”’.Justice requires not just a singular equality, but the pursuit of equalities around the different power relations of class, sexuality, race and gender. Each of these produces its own politics.

Ethical socialism alone is not sufficient to realise a new society. Its must animate radical change in the organisation of the economy and its relations of control and ownership.

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In the decade ahead new forms of production and consumption will continue to reshape society and social relationships. Technology is facilitating new cultural practices and at the same time opening up opportunities for capital to commodify them. New kinds of property and property relations are being created. Just as early industrial capitalism enclosed the commons of land and labour, so the ICT-driven post-industrial capitalism of today is enclosing the cultural and intellectual commons (both real and virtual), the commons of the human mind and body, and the commons of biological life. Government must take on a new strategic authority to check and contain the destructive impact of capitalism. At the same time it must act as a dynamic builder of the green industrial economy of the future, facilitating a new techno-economic paradigm across markets and sectors.

We need to develop a democratised, redistributive, social activist and intra-nation state, capable of regulating markets and asserting the public interest in the wider economy. Such a state will need to be decentralised and responsive to individual citizens and small businesses. The advocacy roles of civil society organisations, particularly the trade unions, need to be strengthened. We must make capitalism more accountable to workers and citizens through regulation, economic democracy and forms of common ownership. Markets need to be re-embedded in society, and an ethic of reciprocity re-established in their contractual affairs. The economy must work for the common good. Britain needs an epochal shift, away from the dominance of financial capital and towards a greater emphasis on production capital, to balance its economy and to spread wealth more evenly across the population. Banks as public utilities will need to play a major role in the coming green industrial revolution, by directing investment into new markets and into technological innovation and employment. In place of unfettered shareholder value, there needs to be a new relationship between finance and industry that fosters long-term investment and real improvements in productivity." (http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/articles/s44cruddasrutherford.pdf)