View source for Nature of the State after the Meltdown of Neoliberalism



=Source=

* '''Article: Neal Lawson. Labour needs to think more carefully about the nature of the state. From: Labour's Future. Soundings Journal & Open Left. Lawrence Wishart, 2010'''

URL = http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/Labour%27s%20Future%20(Final).pdf 

=Discussion=


Neal Lawson:

"As the government increasingly
failed to intervene to manage the economy, there was a
proportionately greater need to manage the consequences of free
markets. If the economy was not to be regulated, then people would
have to be. In part this was needed to deliver social order amongst
those whose lives didn’t benefit from globalisation. But it also
served as a rationalisation for the government’s political existence.
People were being regulated by the state: look at us, we are being
tough on people because we are no longer tough on profits. This is
what led to the rise in the prison population, ASBOs, the
surveillance state and the rest.

But as well as this growth in authoritarian management and
greater centralisation, the nature of the state was also changed
through the government’s drive towards the marketisation of the
public sector, in its efforts to drive up performance in the global
economic war of all against all. In this climate good initiatives such
as the New Deal and Sure Start gradually lost their radical intent of
local participation and became tools of a centralised state operating
to meet the demands of global competitiveness.

The prospect of a Big Society, following on the heels of Labour’s
unpopular take on state interventionism, is now jeopardising the
very existence of an activist state. And Labour has no one to blame
but itself for this major threat to the state.

Instead of maintaining its benign view of the state, Labour has to
quickly develop a much healthier and more sceptical view. The state
is a contradictory entity. It can be a force for good and bad, as it
reflects the wider forces and power relationships in society. It is
neither the executive committee of the bourgeoisie nor a hollow
entity that Labour can inhabit and use at its will.



The start of a new left project for a new state has to determine
two things: what the state should and should not do, and how it
should operate. The left has to develop a better understanding of
which state functions are critical for a politics of greater equality,
sustainability and democracy, and which functions would be better
carried out by civil society or individuals. That is where the Big
Society is onto something. The state does crowd out. It does make
us dependent and powerless. The left was stronger when it relied
on a range of autonomous, civil-society, none-state organisations
such as mutuals, friendly societies and trade unions. But the state is
also a crucial means of ensuring a degree of protection for all
citizens through universal guarantees, and facilitating
redistribution in the interests of greater equality. This is why the
Cameron project is clever – under the banner of offering autonomy
it can much more easily roll back the frontiers of the state, which as
the Tories know is a key institution in building the good society.
And this remains a central project of the right – to undermine
collectivist forms of social and economic provision. They have
already begun to residualise formally universal benefits via means
testing – a classic tactic for reducing support for public services.
This is in many ways a much more serious threat than Thatcherism
ever posed; it is more subtle and a less obviously direct attack on
the functions of the state.


The struggle over the coming years over public services will be
critical. Though the state has unpopular aspects, and sometimes
seeks too much control over individuals’ lives, it remains critical to
the survival of a humane society. Only massive state intervention
kept the lights on during the crash; only the state can act as a vehicle
for redistribution through taxes and benefit payments; only the state
can provide the level of investment needed for research into
sustainability and alternative sources of energy; only the state can
build the houses our communities need so desperately. We should
be much more critical of the state, but equally we should not let the
right detach us from its crucial functions.


Once we have a better idea of what the state should do, we will
be able to think more creatively about how it should operate. After
1945 the state was run as a bureaucracy, and from the 1980s
onwards it became a mix between centralism and the market. We
need to supersede both the bureaucratic state model and the market
state and put the emphasis instead on the establishment of a
democratic state; one that is made responsive and accountable
through democratic engagement, and through people having a voice
rather than expressing themselves only through exit or loyalty. It
should be ‘our state’, doing things with us and not just to us. From
the parliamentary executive down to the local GP, we need
innovative ways of holding power in check, with the greatest
possible number of people determining the rules about how the
state operates and in whose favour. This includes a much greater
role for workers and users of state services in the co-production of
those services.

We are opposed to state fundamentalism as well as market
fundamentalism. There is now much thinking and work to be done
to get our relationship to the state right. In and against the state
remains just about the best strategy."
(http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/Labour%27s%20Future%20(Final).pdf)


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