‘Solidarity has to come through class.” So insisted Rollie, a member of the audience in the latest of the Reith lectures, given this year by political scientist Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford, His four Reith lectures, entitled “Our Democratic Future”, explore, respectively, issues of democracy, security, solidarity – last week’s subject – and prosperity, the final lecture this week.
Ansell’s themes grapple with many of the most important political ailments that confront us today. At a time when there are demands for more technocratic solutions that place many social and economic issues outside of political contestation, or for more authoritarian forms of rule, his insistence on “the fundamental centrality of politics to achieving our collective goals” is welcome. But the lectures also feel at times as if they are sliding past the difficult issues. Rollie’s intervention hints at what is missing in the discussion.
Ansell’s talks broadly follow the outlines of his book Why Politics Fails, published earlier this year, at the heart of which is the claim that politics fails primarily because “everyone is selfish or at the very least self-interested”. The problems of politics arise because it is the arena in which “our individual self-interest and our collective goals clash”. A persistent refrain in the book is that “we only care about solidarity when we need it ourselves”.
Intriguingly, this theme of individual self-interest, so central to the book, is downplayed in the Reith lectures. When I asked Ansell about this, he suggested that the theme of self-interest is implicit in the lectures, but he also “wanted to tone down the polemics and start a conversation” and to “lean into a more optimistic tone”.
Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether the problem of contemporary politics really is that of too much selfishness? It’s true that self-interest can often clash with collective needs. Nimbyism is a salient example, part of the reason why Britain has such an appalling record when it comes to the building both of housing and infrastructure.
Yet in many ways what drives popular political disaffection today is not selfishness but its opposite: a sense that the bonds of community and collective life have ruptured. It’s an awareness nurtured by many factors: the intrusion of market forces into every nook and cranny of social life, leading to increasingly atomised, instrumentalised societies. The rise of identity politics, and the creation of more fragmented and parochial perceptions of belonging. The weakening of trade unions and other labour movement organisations and the decay of civil society, encountered in everything from the closing down of public spaces such as libraries and youth clubs to the decline of volunteering.
All this has transformed the ways in which people experience social belonging. The question many ask themselves today is not so much “in what kind of society do I want to live?” as “who are we?”. The two questions are, of course, intimately related, and any sense of social belonging must embed an answer to both. But the answer to “in what kind of society do I want to live?” has become shaped less by the values or institutions we want to establish than by the kind of people we imagine we are; and the answer to “who are we?” has become defined not so much by the kind of society we want to create than by the history and heritage to which supposedly we belong. The frameworks through which we make sense of the world are expressed as much through categories such as “Muslim” or “white” or “English” or “European” as they are by old-fashioned political labels like “liberal”, “conservative” or “socialist”.
The issue, in other words, is less a clash between self-interest and collective goals than changing perspectives about “who is one of us?”. Ansell recognises the significance of the shifting relationship between identity and solidarity in redefining conceptions of belonging. “Not everyone sees the same ‘us’,” as he puts it in Why Politics Fails. His answer is to foster a greater sense of national belonging that “can bind together different groups” and create a national politics that is “about an ‘us’, not an ‘us’ and a ‘them’”.
Yet it is not so straightforward. Nationalism and national identity are always double-edged. There are certain contexts in which a sense of national belonging is important. There are other contexts in which it can undermine solidarity, either by overplaying or underplaying perceptions of difference.
It can overplay differences when it comes, for instance, to the question of immigration, and so undermine solidarity with refugees. It can underplay differences by erasing internal divisions that are important, as in George Osborne’s defence of austerity as demonstrating that “we’re all in it together”, a phrase that conveniently overlooked the fact that poor people have borne the brunt of the government’s fiscal tightening.
All of which brings us back to Rollie’s claim that “solidarity has to come through class”. Why? Because, as he suggested, solidarity is a means of challenging power, and class is an expression of power relations. Those with power have myriad ways of imposing their will, from corporations driving down wages to politicians restricting the ability to protest. The only power possessed by workers lies in their capacity to act collectively.
Yet, strikingly, the question of class is almost invisible in both Why Politics Fails and in the Reith lectures. Ansell’s discussion of solidarity is largely confined to what he calls “the solidaristic state”: state-funded provision of welfare benefits and of services such as health and education. His defence of universal state provision is important in these days of austerity and cuts, and when the poor and benefit recipients are often stigmatised. But it is also a restricted vision of solidarity, and a constrained analysis of why contemporary politics has eroded many forms of solidarity.
Viewing solidarity primarily in terms of state assistance turns it into something imposed from top down rather than as something that bursts out from below, an expression of the agency of those without power challenging those in authority through grassroots organisation and politics. It is the erosion of such movements that has helped create the disaffection that Ansell addresses in the lectures.
The problem is not that “we only care about solidarity when we need it ourselves”. It is rather that the mechanisms through which we can collectively shape the world have broken down. If we are to make meaningful “the pursuit of collective goals”, the rebuilding of such forms of solidarity is an essential first step.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
