Ideology hasn't gone away

Tweet

 

Something that this blog has touched on from time to time is the idea that ideology is no longer relevant, or that we live in some sort of ‘post-ideological’ world, as I’ve seen some politicians describe it. It isn’t true. Different ideological perspectives haven’t gone away at all; they are just not represented in the main political parties, and don’t form part of mainstream political debate. The two main UK parties have both bought in to the same ideology, and argument between them is more about whether, and to what extent, the effects of their common ideology should be mitigated than about whether the underlying tenets of that ideology should be challenged and debated. This article on Nation.Cymru a couple of days ago referred to the same issue, albeit that it wasn’t always clear about the distinction between principles and ideas on the one hand and underlying ideology on the other.

It isn’t easy to try and sum up an ideology in a few words for the purposes of a short blog post, but if I had to pick out some of the key elements of the capitalist ideology which constrains mainstream political debate in the UK, I would pick the following four points:

1.    Competition (between individuals, organisations, and states) is generally to be preferred over co-operation,

2.    The objective of the economy is the generation and accumulation of wealth, and the purpose of the state is to facilitate that aim,

3.    Success, whether for an individual, an organisation, or a state, is measured in terms of the amount of wealth accumulated, and

4.    The role of citizens is to serve the economy and the state in the generation and accumulation of wealth.

The difference between Labour and Tory isn’t about any of those underlying beliefs, it is about the detail of policy resulting from them – Labour want to make the distribution of the accumulated wealth a little less unfair, and want to help the least privileged to be better able to compete with others and to fulfil their allotted role in the economy. These may be worthy aims, but they don’t represent an ideological difference. They might argue that small, gradual, and incremental changes are all that’s possible in current circumstances, and making small improvements to people’s lives is worthwhile in itself. I don’t totally disagree with that: for the disadvantaged, even a small improvement is better than nothing. There is, though, no reframing of how things could be; no great vision for a better world. The difference is between sects within an ideology rather than between different ideological perspectives.

One alternative ideological perspective would be to re-write points 1 to 4 above as follows:

1.    Co-operation (between individuals, organisations, and states) is generally to be preferred over competition,

2.    The objective of the economy is to secure the fulfilment and happiness of the population, and the purpose of the state is to facilitate that aim,

3.    Success, whether for an individual, an organisation, or a state, is measured in terms of the extent to which people are happy and able to lead fulfilled lives,

4.    The role of the economy and the state is to serve citizens in the achievement of the above.

It would be silly, of course, to ignore the role of ‘wealth’ in its widest sense in enabling the alternative view. Money may not buy happiness, but its absence is a sure-fire way of making people unhappy. But the policy differences stemming from the second perspective are much more significant than a little bit of redistribution here, and a bit of extra help there. An education system aimed at developing people’s potential, and at having a well-educated population as a goal in itself, rather than a population only trained to do the work required is one. An understanding that ‘wealth’ ultimately boils down to ‘access to resources’, and that a resource-constrained world needs to agree on how to share those resources fairly for the benefit of all is another.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that we can get from where we are to where we could be overnight, although we certainly won’t get there by not trying. But the alternative vision isn’t even being presented; those for whom ‘there is no alternative’, to coin a phrase, have successfully closed the Overton window to a narrow interdenominational debate with the constraints of their own ideology. It doesn’t have to be that way.