Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
technocratic bank manager. Reducing politics to ways of spending money is the perfect way of draining it of ideas.
That doesn’t mean those ideas have actually disappeared. Politicians often talk about what they can ‘afford’. But that’s whitewash: it’s all about political choices. They can cut their fiscal cake as they wish, apportioning more funds to defence or education. And they can make their cake bigger by raising more taxes. The new realism in politics is just another way to portray subjective intentions as objectively inevitable. When the coalition government announced massive public-spending cuts to reduce Britain’s budget deficit, the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysed the proposals and showed that they would disproportionately affect the poor. I love these tell-tale glimpses of ideology that shine through the haze of rhetoric when the numbers are actually crunched. Economics is useful when it’s politically revealing.
Sure, there is a mash-up element to modern politics: it is possible to be both green and Tory. But no matter how many times I hear that Right and Left are over, I still have a clear sense of what they mean. The Right is about tradition, nationalism, free trade, a small state, individualism, family values, support for employers, and liberty over equality. The Left is about society, taxation, a big state, human rights, multiculturalism, support for workers, and equality over freedom.
But governments no longer articulate their project, and sweeping changes of national importance slip by while the media pick over minutiae, isolated incidents, fringe policy details. The public no longer joins the dots. Politics is fragmenting into ‘culture wars’, single-issue interest groups and identity allegiance. And although both Right and Left are in the ideological closet, one side is more frequently outed than the other. It’s the Right that has in recent years been identified as ideology-free. Conservatives criticise the progressive world view, but progressives nit-pick over technicalities. The Right is regarded as pragmatic and the Left as a dreamy luxury we can’t afford. But why isn’t the Right just as much of a luxury as the Left? Cutting rich people’s taxes is after all rather expensive.
What about capitalism, you may be thinking. Isn’t that the dominant ideology now? If so, what effect did the financial crash have on its pre-eminent status? Well, you might think that because it’s got an ‘ism’ on the end, capitalism would be regarded as a particular belief system. And it’s true that for an extraordinary moment in 2008, the financial system was indeed thrown into relief as a belief system, and a pretty eccentric one at that. Old-school ideology seemed to be making a comeback. Marx was cool again, and commentators dusted off their Keynes. For the first time in ages, there seemed to be alternatives, different isms to pitch, one against the other. But despite the fact that the entire world economy was on the brink of total meltdown, that window of ideas was only open for about three weeks. Then it was business as usual, the capitalist show was back on the road, and British bankers paid themselves £50 billion in bonuses in January 2010. Nobody came up with any viable alternative to free-market capitalism. In fact, it was more enthusiastically applied.
The reason why the crash came as such a shock to the Right, and why the Left still can’t come up with a different way of doing things, is that aside from that brief moment of crisis, capitalism succeeds in presenting itself as not a belief system at all. Even just uttering the word ‘capitalism’ marks you out as not only anti-capitalist, but also as living in a dream world. As with contemporary politics, capitalism is an ideology of no ideology. It purports to be about hard facts rather than belief. During a speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2008, News Corporation’s James Murdoch compared free-market economics to Darwinian evolution. The analogy pointed to an assumption that is everywhere. Capitalism is regarded, by its critics as much as by its proponents, as being as transparent and inevitable as a force of nature. So it’s become impossible to imagine any alternatives, because that would seem like finding an alternative to gravity. The crash was initially represented as a mortal blow to capitalism. But very quickly, influential commentators like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, started presenting it as simply the latest in a series of periodic collapses: part of capitalism’s natural, intrinsic fabric. Critique was contained. That explains why all the ‘lessons’ of the crash have been calls for more regulation: we cannot imagine different forces of nature, so all we can do is attempt to control their worst excesses. But the notion that free-market capitalism is a force of nature is a myth. It’s a system that is consciously chosen and artificially maintained. And we need to remember that in order to have any chance of imagining different ways of organising society.
How convenient for politicians, and political power in general, to avoid the messy business of laying oneself open to explicit discussion and democratic challenge. The refusal to take a position in today’s political culture – centrism, cross-party cooperation, the embrace of pragmatism, politics as economics, and the culture wars – all these developments provide fertile conditions for agendas to advance in secret. And this matters not only because elites are allowed to privately get their way, and not only because political culture is impoverished. It matters because the rejection of ideology is the rejection of idealism, of visions to improve our world.
I want the ideas that overtly set out the kind of world we’d like to live in to be regarded not as naïve and unworldly, but as the object of genuine choice and aspiration. My own ideological position, as you’ve probably gathered by now, is to the left of the main political parties. And it’s true that in the remainder of this book I will spend a fair amount of time targeting the illusions that deny and sustain inequality. But at the same time, I would love to see a world in which modern Conservatives and Republicans didn’t feel the need to be mealy-mouthed about their allegiance to proper, right-wing ideology. If the Left has given up on grand narratives, the Right has lost its nerve. It would be great if they ditched the tedious new waffle about ‘ethical’, ‘responsible’ or ‘philanthropic’ capitalism, ‘the green economy’, ‘social entrepreneurship’ and so on; if they dispensed with the Converse trainers and baseball caps and came out proud in their belief in capitalism with claws. To spend my time bashing the right-wing establishment would be to miss a trick, in any case. The illusions that shape our lives, after all, don’t only come from the neoliberal economics of the Chicago School; or from Enron, Halliburton and McDonald’s. They also come from the groovy, liberal world of Google, Apple and Whole Foods.
Long live ideology!
Go into a dark room on a bright day, cover a window with sheets of paper, and make a small hole in one of the sheets. Then turn around. On the opposite wall you will see a perfect image of the world outside – in full colour and movement – but upside down. That is the magical effect produced by the camera obscura, a device which was employed by the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the painters Vermeer and Canaletto, and which became a popular seaside tourist attraction in Victorian Britain. In 1845, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the device as a metaphor in a rather different context. They wrote that ‘In all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura.’ Most people, when asked, would say that the word ‘ideology’ means a set of overt political beliefs, like Communism, Marxism, or free-market economics. But here we’re starting to see a meaning of the word which is the very opposite of that: something much more contradictory, subtle, and even unconscious. Marx and Engels turned the meaning of the word on its head. What they were describing is the curious effect that this form of ideology produces, where reality is the opposite of what it appears to be. In this upside-down world, powerful elites project an inverted version of reality which serves to uphold their own interests: that success is always the product of hard work, for example, or that the American dream is within everyone’s reach. According to this alternative definition, ideology means saying one thing, and meaning the exact opposite. Producing the appearance of action, while doing nothing at all. Creating the cosmetic impression that everything is fine, when it is not. And pretending that partisan arguments are actually universal facts.
You don’t hear this meaning of the word ideology very often nowadays. But my claim is that it’s this version of ideology that now defines our age. At the end of the Cold War, politicians rejected big ideas, and as the new millennium approached, they were driven underground. We began to deny that our lives were shaped by these big ideas, and as a result we failed to recognise that we live in an age in which our agency is being discreetly stripped away. Only by recognising how the