Keir Starmer’s phoney social democracy Capitalism will never be compassionate

A number of people are uncertain about whether the new Labour government is socialist or not, including those in the new Labour government. Keir Starmer called himself a socialist during the campaign, while Rachel Reeves refused the title. As for Tony Blair, even as a social democrat he stayed mostly in the closet, trying to keep the markets sweet by behaving as though he wasn’t one. Other Labour leaders have called themselves socialists to curry favour with their rank and file; but it’s generally understood that “socialist” is code for social democrat, and won’t provoke the displeasure of the Masters of the Universe. It’s fine to be a socialist as long as you aren’t actually one.

Social democracy has ended up as a compassionate form of capitalism. The problem with compassionate capitalism, however, as with seat belts or Save the Children, is that it’s hard to find anyone who’s against it. Campaigns for bleeding the workforce dry or shackling them to their benches don’t go down well with the electorate. The father of English liberalism, John Locke, believed that three-year-olds should be put to work in factories, but today this wouldn’t be acceptable, even in Tunbridge Wells. Even Left-wingers would prefer the present system to behave as humanely as possible as long as it is in business. Those ultra-Leftists who abstain from supporting humane reforms because it helps to prop up capitalism were accused by Lenin of being afflicted by an infantile disorder, and most of them would seem to have died out as a result of it. In that sense, the choice between reform and revolution is spurious. In fact, social democracy started life in the late 19th century as a current within the revolutionary socialist movement, agreeing with its aims but arguing that they could be achieved by reformist means. 

The other problem with tender-hearted capitalism is that tenderness of heart is bound to be in short supply by the very nature of the system. In the end, human welfare is likely to play second fiddle to the profit motive. And there will be plenty of brutal, barbarous capitalists as well. Social democracy is the faith that capitalism and human well-being can be reconciled; but if it comes to a choice between them, the market generally dictates that you sacrifice well-being to the demands of capital.

The compassionate bit in the phrase “compassionate capitalism” means that this keeps you awake at night. But it doesn’t mean you don’t do it. “We put the welfare of our workers/the safety of our passengers/the satisfaction of our customers first.” No you don’t. That’s a blatant lie. You put your shareholders first and hope that this proves compatible with the welfare, safety and satisfaction of others. Some of the time it does and some of the time it doesn’t. It depends on economic factors which are for the most part beyond your control. Social democracy is plagued by the paradox that to avert the harshest effects of capitalism, it needs that system to thrive. The question is not whether Starmer is a social democrat, but whether capitalism will allow him to be one by generating that magical entity known as growth. In this respect, being a social democrat is not like being a baptist or a vegan.

A quick definition of a socialist, as opposed to a social democrat, is anyone Starmer throws out of the Labour Party. This isn’t to say that socialists and social democrats don’t share some common ground. Both object to a society in which some people carry £16,000 Hermes Birkin crocodile handbags while others grub in garbage bins. The difference is that socialists think such inequalities are as natural to market societies as tattoos are to David Beckham, while social democrats hope they can be ironed out without too much upheaval. In this, they are at one with the Right, though not in their belief in a modest amount of public ownership, their less indulgent attitude to the well-off and their enthusiasm for the public sector.  

Another way of putting the point is to say that Right-wingers believe in chronicles, while Left-wingers believe in narratives. A chronicle is a record which places items side by side without grasping them as interrelated (“The Queen died, then the King died”), while a narrative explores causal connections (“The King died because the Queen died”). That there are rich folk and also poor folk is a chronicle; that there are rich people because there are poor people, and vice versa (by and large, broadly speaking), is a narrative. Right-wingers tend to believe that there are beggars and billionaires in the same sense that there are diabetics and non-diabetics, rather than in the sense that there are murderers and murderees. 

The social democratic faith that gross inequalities might gradually be eroded is pathetically dewy-eyed. These inequalities have now plunged to abyssal depths, as Marx predicted they would in The Communist Manifesto. So has the gulf between private wealth and public squalor. Some schools have fencing instructors while others have holes in the roof. There are hospitals which serve boeuf bourguignon for lunch and others outside which patients lie for hours in ambulances.

The solution to inequality isn’t that we should all wear navy overalls, receive an exactly equal amount of pay, and report the slightest hint of idiosyncrasy in our neighbours to the authorities. One thinker who rejected this dreary vision was Karl Marx. In his view, it is the commodity form, not socialism, which reduces things to a dead level. Marx was opposed to equality of income because it ignored the concrete differences between individuals, not least their different needs. Equality doesn’t mean that we should all be treated the same, but that everyone’s diverse needs should be equally attended to. Equality isn’t a property people have, like their weight or height or skin colour, but a way of dealing with them in all their unique particularity.

Social democrats tend to believe that things are fundamentally moving in the right direction. There are problems, to be sure, some of them fairly sizeable, but with sufficient determination we can sort them out. There are patches of horror and inhumanity in an otherwise satisfactory social landscape. Socialists wonder if people like this have either taken leave of their senses or simply don’t read the newspapers. It’s not that socialists are nihilists or defeatists; on the contrary, they hold that a transformed world is a realistic proposition. It is just that such change must be achieved against the grain of the world as we have it, which is far from being an auspicious place: the modern era has witnessed some magnificent advances in humanitarian values, but at present they are forced to co-exist with genocide, destitution, the spread of authoritarianism, the rise of the far-Right, the threat of nuclear annihilation and the growing possibility of climate catastrophe.

The true fantasists, then, are not wild-eyed anarchists or harebrained utopianists but those in sober suits for whom radical change is either unnecessary or beyond our capacity, an outlook of which past history is a living disproval. More particularly, it is the dreamers for whom a world groaning in agony can be reformed by a modest wealth tax or a spot of nationalisation. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin observed that revolution is not a runaway train but the application of the emergency brake. The argument that matters now is between those who think that the brake on climate disaster can be thrown while maintaining current property relations, and those who regard this as a potentially lethal form of nostalgia. As Naomi Klein puts it in Doppelganger, the alternative to getting rid of those who put their profits above the survival of humanity is “effectively deciding to let continents where ‘inferior races’ reside burn and drown because… the alternative interrupts the flow of limitless accumulation”. In this crucial clash of views, social democrats would seem to be on the wrong side.

When I was a student, I spent a summer vacation working as a warehouseman at a branch of M&S. There was a large chart on the wall of the canteen, inscribed with graphs in various colours, and I asked a fellow warehouseman, Henry, what it all meant. He explained that the different graphs represented the monthly sales of our store compared to other branches of M&S, and that the point of this was to encourage some amicable competition between these various groups of workers. All those who worked in my branch were aware that, despite this esprit de corps, they could be fired or have their wages slashed at any time, and most of them recognised that the main point of the amicable competition was to create the right psychological climate for pumping more profit out of them. They were expected to identify with a company that they knew was in no sense their own. Henry and I stared in silence at the chart for a while, and then he spoke. “It’s all phoney, isn’t it?”