In my country, from the extreme right to the extreme left, all talk about strategies to reboot economic GROWTH. The unions want to maintain or increase salaries. The conservative party thinks (and probably correctly) that it can gain votes by promising no salary cuts to civil servants (in exchange of only 1 admission for every 5 retirements).

1 admission for every 5 retirements. Think about the impact of that in the quality of public services and unemployment. But it is seen as a good strategy...

And before somebody says that an alternative solution would be for the upper classes to contribute more, I say:

1. That battle seems to be lost (for now). The backup strategy seems to be the how to better share the crumbles. To avoid desperation of parts of the population.

2. Even if the battle is won in the future, I believe that the idea of making an effort (and being directly involved in) for the community is fundamental for any society based on solidarity.

As if free-market capitalism was intellectually robust!

The problem is not the lack of an equivalently robust alternative, but that the left fears, probably correctly, that the alternatives simply can't survive the media environment that exists. And/or they themselves don't want to pay the price of the alternatives. All politics is personal, and the personal cost in a world where ones  status is directly linked to ones material display is too high for most people.

our historical beliefs - e.g. a) ever eternal increase of purchasing power in a affluent society b) The atomization of relationships c) Conceiving Humans as anything more than consumers

These are all results that flow from making the society a function of the economy rather than insisting that the economy be a function of the society. In The Great Transformation Polanyi notes that successful resistance to these demands has, in the past, served to slow the process to a rate at which the social fabric can be preserved through the changes.

While Polanyi's work was published in 1944 it remains highly relevant and is an easy read. I guess lessons not learned often remain relevant.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

European Tribune - Insights from conservatives

At the suggestion of cutting salaries of 2500 Euros for 20% (Note: in a country where the minimum wage is 500!) in exchange for employing a proportional number of people (to cut unemployment), "left wing" people that I know get shocked at this suggestion.

It is not true that socialists didn't try to reduce the work week before they got a severe case of neoclassic fungal brain infection

And I don't think such a scheme is a reasonable on the union level. In a way that is already the implied quid for pro that German unions signed up for the last decade. Keep your job, work for less.
It lead to surging profits invested in bubbly financial gambles, huge imbalances in the Eurozone including exported unemployment and in extremis state sponsored consumption like the car exchange program.

Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt | The New York Review of Books

Many European countries have long practiced something resembling social democracy: but they have forgotten how to preach it. Social democrats today are defensive and apologetic. Critics who claim that the European model is too expensive or economically inefficient have been allowed to pass unchallenged. And yet, the welfare state is as popular as ever with its beneficiaries: nowhere in Europe is there a constituency for abolishing public health services, ending free or subsidized education, or reducing public provision of transport and other essential services.

I want to challenge conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic. To be sure, the target has softened considerably. In the early years of this century, the "Washington consensus" held the field. Everywhere you went there was an economist or "expert" expounding the virtues of deregulation, the minimal state, and low taxation. Anything, it seemed, that the public sector could do, private individuals could do better.

The Washington doctrine was everywhere greeted by ideological cheerleaders: from the profiteers of the "Irish miracle" (the property-bubble boom of the "Celtic Tiger") to the doctrinaire ultra-capitalists of former Communist Europe. Even "old Europeans" were swept up in the wake. The EU's free- market project (the so-called "Lisbon agenda"); the enthusiastic privatization plans of the French and German governments: all bore witness to what its French critics described as the new " pensée unique."

Today there has been a partial awakening. To avert national bankruptcies and wholesale banking collapse, governments and central bankers have performed remarkable policy reversals, liberally dispersing public money in pursuit of economic stability and taking failed companies into public control without a second thought. A striking number of free-market economists, worshipers at the feet of Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues, have lined up to don sackcloth and ashes and swear allegiance to the memory of John Maynard Keynes.

This is all very gratifying. But it hardly constitutes an intellectual revolution. Quite the contrary: as the response of the Obama administration suggests, the reversion to Keynesian economics is but a tactical retreat.

Jimmy Carter demonstrated the problem with telling the public unpalatable news. It is possible, I believe, to have a moral position without leading with the hair shirt. We still do, (just?), have the possibility of a sustainable future and the fact that we have been unable to convince the obtuse majority of the dangers of the path we are currently following does not mean we are exempt from the duty to continue to do and to attempt what IS possible. After all people of the age of the younger cohort on ET will potentially be around for another 50 to 60 years and it is impossible to say what kinds of societies the extremely complex world system will we have now will produce in even another twenty five years, which, optimistically , I could live to see.

Those with children and grandchildren often become more concerned with the world those children and grandchildren will inherit. This should be encouraged. Building a sustainable future IS a moral position. We do not have to know how quickly fossil fuels will be depleted or how high the seas will rise to advocate for the most sustainable future possible, especially when it is only a little more expensive than the least sustainable future possible. Nor would it be inherently repugnant to advocate for the most sustainable future with the highest possible standard of living. Better to fall short in attaining a desirable goal that CAN be sold to the public than to fail to sell the idea that we have to expect and settle for less.

The only thing we have to use less of is non-renewable resources. It is lack of vision that would condemn us to a markedly bleaker future. We have not seriously, as societies, attempted to find out how well we can live renewably. Advocating to find out IS a moral position.

Likewise, it is conservative to maintain rule of law in our societies and that is manifestly failing due to the disproportionate power and influence of the very wealthy. Better to advocate for enforcement of the law on the grounds that the alternative is either anarchy or dictatorship and succeed than to argue that it is only fair that the wealthy be taxed and their power diminished on grounds of fairness. We can make a good argument that THERE IS NO ACCEPTABLE ALTERNATIVE TO THE RULE OF LAW.

Current events provide ample arguments that there are no good alternatives to rule of law and that, at the highest levels of our society, behavior has become so lawless that the norms of our society preclude lawful behavior in many areas of business and government, per Gresham's Law. And it is not as though this lawlessness is producing a stable, growing economy. Allowing our societies to be run by pirates is inherently wasteful and indulgent of the excesses of the piratical elites. Stopping that lawless squandering of precious resources and the resultant blighting of lives IS a moral position.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

European Tribune - Insights from conservatives

The vacuum is not intellectual, it is moral: The modern left is mostly concerned with giving more access to consumer goods to the supposedly "have-nots". Considering the standard of living in Europe, I speculate that most of the Euro middle classes have more consuming goods than the fair share that can be possible distributed with resources of Earth divided by 7 Billion.

There is an intellectual and moral problem that makes the left loose elections: the acceptance of sacrificing some as unemployed to the angry god of markets and the lack of an economic narrative confronting this practise. As long as the left refuses to use the state as employer of last resort, the existence of a large unemployed group will be used as an argument against the position of the employed as well as a starting point for various campaigns against the lazy poor.

I agree that the living-standard of Europe is unsustainable, and I think that radical change is needed. But I do not think this is why the left is losing elections. The idea of down-sizing is not that popular.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

how we envision the good life. it needn't be defined by wastefulness or gadgets or keeping up with the joneses. it doesn't even have to be hard to attain, if defined right.

most of our waste is done at the top, anyway, so redistributing the crumbs doesn't really deal with the problem. what is needed in a combination of levelling, and then a rethinking of life for us peons as well so that the good life works for most people, and is not dependent upon overconsumption of scarce or shrinking resources.

not rocket science, really. it's a matter of how to force those changes through a system that doesn't want to.

Hilarious.

  I applaud your posting and raising such an important set of issues as you have in this thread.  

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge

  I agree that the contemporary Left (like the Right, by the way) is suffering from a moral bankruptcy or, as you put it, a "vacuum" but I don't see how that could happen without, at the same time, there aslo being something of an intellectual vacuum, too.

  As I see the problem, unlike Toby Young, the Left had both intellect and morals (of a sort, at least), and gradually abandoned them, such as they were in favor of what amounted to the sole principle of being constantly on-the-make, with the only allowed principle being that of crass expediency.  This is how I think of the disaster known as "New Labour" and the nightmare years of government administered by Tony Blair and his morally-bankrupt crowd.

   I don't know what Mr. Young's politics are but from the sound of his article it seems to me that he's recommending that the Labour party, in order to save itself and return to vote-winning, should take steps concerning its policies on immigration control which make the Labour party more like the Conservative party.  How convenient--in case Mr. Young is in fact a Tory--to recommend that the opposition party save itself by refashioning itself to be more like its own political opponents.

   Better still, why not just give up, throw it in and have just one party, the Conservative party, with competing factions within--a red-in-tooth-and-claw ultra-ultra-ultra extreme-right-wing conservative faction and other factions, the merely ultra-extreme-right-wing in opposition.  Then Thatcher-like candidates can oppose even harder-core, harder-line ultra-Thatcher candidates, etc.

   I can find other explanations for the perceived voting trends toward the Right.  People, having been brutalized and terrified by political, social and economic policies which were perhaps designed and intended to brutalize and terrify them, policies  akin to putting someone in a box and then gradually shrinking it on him.

   So, Mr. Young counsels,

   "What the Left needs is an intellectual colossus, someone capable of articulating a vision that re-unites the liberal intelligentsia with the traditional working class and persuades them to put the interests of the collective - whether the nation state or something larger and more abstract - before those of their family and their tribe. Ultimately, the reason for the left's political failure is the intellectual vacuum at the heart of the Left-wing project, the absence of an intellectually robust alternative to free-market capitalism."

 and warns that, unless the Left does so,

  "In the meantime, Right-wing and nationalist parties will keep on making gains at the Left's expense."

   But there are entirely worthy alternatives to what Young very disingenuously refers to as "the absence of an intellectually robust alternative to free-market capitalism"---implying at the same time that free-market capitalism as we've known it now for some forty years has given us something other than a stunning series of disasters which have only recently been capped by the still-smarting market debâcle of 2009.  The trouble, I fear, is that Young and his crowd want nothing to do with helping along the very robust alternatives to his ideas of free-market capitalism.  

   His essay puts me in mind of a concentration-camp Kommandant who, surveying the crowded and miserable lot of the prison population, criticizes and deplores the prisoners' shocking morals and selfish behavior, their greedy, cut-throat attempts to stay alive by selling each other out, as he, the Kommandant, orders further cuts in the prisoners' food and clothing rations and demanding from them longer, harsher enforced labor.

 

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge