Mark Fisher’s Futurist Labour Vision
Under Ed Miliband’s leadership, Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert wrote Reclaiming Modernity, which urged Labour to fight the neoliberal domination of workers’ lives, resist Britain’s endless marketisation — and harness the technological ambitions of the young century.
In 2014, Mark Fisher and I wrote a 12,000-word pamphlet called Reclaim Modernity: Beyond Markets, Beyond Machines. This paper was published by Compass, a progressive think tank and lobby group. Tribune has asked me to write something about the genesis, contents, and implications of the pamphlet, so I’ll do my best here to explain where it came from and what it did.
Mark and I had known each other slightly since the 1990s, but we became friends in 2009, shortly before the publication of his Capitalist Realism. He had never been involved in organised politics but had been radicalised by his experiences as a teacher and by reading people like Frederic Jameson. I had been involved in different strands of left politics since I was a kid, including being a lifelong Labour member, although I was never much of an organiser.
By 2010 we were both semi-active politically, while also trying to carve out public space for our ideas. Mark joined Labour around then and did some local campaigning, while I was still doing the kind of thing I’d always done: convening public events to try to bring together activists and intellectuals; occasionally attending protests like Climate Camp; sometimes attending local party meetings, where I would carp ineffectually about the centrist politics of the leadership.
The election of a Conservative-led government in 2010, for the first time since 1992, had a radicalising effect on many of the younger people who were reading Mark’s blogs, with a number of them becoming disillusioned with forms of ultra-radicalism that never actually got anywhere. At the same time, there was a growing consensus among even relatively ‘moderate’ Labour members and supporters that Blairism had been a dead end, and that some kind of radical break with neoliberalism was needed.
I was spending a lot of time writing for and speaking to audiences on the ‘soft left’, trying to persuade middle-class social democrats that there was now no chance of winning even minor reforms without some militant confrontation with capital. I was pessimistic about the willingness of Ed Miliband, who followed Gordon Brown as Labour leader, to lead any such fight. But Mark kept pointing out that even if this were true, the mere fact that Ed had been elected as leader ahead of his Blairite brother David was historically significant; it indicated that Labour was still capable of moving leftward. We encouraged each other in the view that Labour was an important arena of struggle, though never the only one.
A Productive Direction
Reclaim Modernity came out of these conversations and activities, aiming to provide a coherent alternative to other tendencies trying to win influence within Ed Miliband’s Labour. Specifically, it was a reaction to the Blue Labour project, which held that Labour should try to win support for a social democratic politics by pointing out that it was neoliberalism and unfettered globalisation that had undermined so many valued social democratic institutions and social features: from family life to national identity. The idea was that there was no necessary contradiction between supporting these institutions and advocating for ‘faith, flag, and family’. Well, it was obvious where that was likely to end up.
The title was a reference to the fact that many Labour thinkers seemed simply to accept the basic claim made by centrist politicians: that neoliberalism and globalisation are irreversible features of the modern world. Under these circumstances, they tend to argue, there are some positive changes that we can embrace culturally, such as sexual liberation and a growing cosmopolitanism; but there’s no way to reverse the trend towards massive inequality. To the Blairs and Obamas of the world, there is only one way of being modern, and what it looks like is Britain and the United States in the early twenty-first century.
By contrast, we argued that the Left has only ever succeeded when it has proposed its own vision of modernity, embracing the radical potential in new technologies, new forms of organisation, and new cultural tendencies. This isn’t a question of thinking that all change is good, but of seeking to identify and amplify the radical potential in such new developments, while preventing capitalists from reaping all the benefits of social, technological, and cultural change. We also argued that the yearning for the 1940s and 1950s which characterised so many social attitudes at the time shouldn’t be interpreted as a general nostalgia — instead, we argued that people were longing for a historical moment when it felt like working people, and especially young people, had a future worth looking forward to.
The programme we argued for sought to harness the potential of cutting-edge technologies — social media platforms, artificial intelligence, etc. — to create a more democratic, dynamic society, rather than one weighed down by state bureaucracy or corporate profit-seeking. Much of our argument revolved around the critique of neoliberal managerialism: we argued that despite promising to liberate people from the negative excesses of the post-war state, neoliberalism had produced an apparatus of surveillance, micromanagement, and endless auditing that simply made people miserable. This was a theme of Mark’s Capitalist Realism, and it was something that I had been interested in since reading John Clarke and Janet Newman’s The Managerial State in the 1990s and working on a book with Tim Bewes called Cultural Capitalism.
Our argument in Reclaim Modernity was that Thatcher and her successors had co-opted a valid democratic critique of the post-war state — which was often paternalistic and authoritarian — to legitimate the neoliberal assault on public services. So we argued that the Left should not simply call for a return to pre-Thatcherite forms of government, instead proposing a public sector that was expansive, enabling, and democratic. At the time, there had been considerable interest in policy-making circles in the idea of service users and providers ‘co-producing’ services. We argued that this was a good direction to go in, but to follow through on its logic would mean arguing for a genuine democratisation of schools and hospitals, having them run by patients, carers, teachers, and students working together. We were conscious that much of this had been proposed by radical leftists as early as the 1940s, and we made that clear in the pamphlet.
And, of course, we thought a Labour government should sponsor, along with a massive drive to raise union density, a vast expansion of the cooperative sector, as well as moves towards democracy in actual workplaces. We were conscious that to everyone outside the far left, a lot of this could sound completely utopian, so we were careful to argue that in fact this was simply the participatory, egalitarian logic of ‘Web 2.0’ being extended into public life.
One of the most prescient points Blue Labour was responding to was the generalised feeling that society no longer shared any cohesive social values; our response was that the problem was real, but would never be solved by any reactionary pivot to the past. Instead, we had to find ways to genuinely democratise the production and distribution of knowledge and redevelop shared social values: we argued that students should be involved with designing their curricula, there should be democratic participation in the management of institutions like the BBC, and the role of managers in institutions like universities should be re-imagined so they would become facilitators of creativity — like a band manager — rather than as the disciplinarians neoliberalism had turned them into. In addition to all this, we argued for a general reduction in workloads, for a ‘citizen’s income’ (that is, universal basic income), and for major democratic reform of political institutions.
Lessons for the Future
The pamphlet came out too late to have much impact on Miliband’s leadership and — sadly — too early to have much on Corbyn’s. It certainly anticipated some of the most dynamic thinking that went into Labour’s 2017 and 2019 manifestoes, but our emphasis on the crisis of representative democracy and the unpopularity of neoliberal bureaucracy never formed any part of Labour’s rhetoric in subsequent years. A handful of MPs and future MPs were very sympathetic, and our thinking was implicitly very close to that of people like John McDonnell.
However, there was ultimately little interest from the leadership in the kind of radically democratic programme that we put forward. But that’s the risk that anyone making that kind of intervention has to run: you’ll usually fail to have much impact, but you never know who you are going to influence. I quite often hear from people who have gone on to be important to our movement that the pamphlet had a positive influence on them. Reclaim Modernity appeared in the context of a party moving leftwards. That isn’t where we are now, but in other ways we have a far healthier left media ecosystem than we had then, and it’s actually easier now than it was then to circulate and discuss ideas like the ones we were developing.
Sooner or later, the Left both inside and outside Labour is going to have to regroup, as it always does. For this to happen, we will need substantial discussions about what we think is going on and what we think could be done about it. We will need some shared analysis and a shared programme to build our collective demands. In trying to supply those things, Reclaim Modernity at least remains an example of the kind of work that has to take place periodically, even if only one attempt out of many is ever likely to be successful.