I was reading Comment is Free today, and clicked through to this interview with possible-Labour-leadership-candidate David Miliband. The man has never really registered on my radar as anything other than one of these "PPE" boys (that's 'Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford', to the uninitiated), born to manage the under-lettered. But then I'm a bit of a spare-time policy wonk myself, I write about a bit, so I shouldn't have been surprised to read this passage:
Across a range of policy areas, people would no longer be "spectators" of government but "players" in it, whether it was the business of recycling waste or taking part in the local fight against crime. "The notion that the country that succeeds will be the country of players not spectators is a very powerful notion. The audience has gone to the stage," he says.
This follows on from a bit of neat historical periodisation of different attitudes towards personal agency:
The 1950s, he says, were the "I need" era when people required state help with housing, education and health. Then came the 1980s, the "I want era" when everyone yearned for material wealth.
Today he says, we are in the "I can" era, where government and the people - liberated and better informed by new technology yet still wanting the reassurance of involvement in community causes - can and must work together to solve the challenges of a "chaotic" world.
Mr Miliband says that governments cannot succeed without the help of those they serve. Yes, they have a vital role (such as in setting overall environmental targets) but in a new age of instant communications and global challenges merely imposing solutions on a population that demands choices won't work. "It is new politics," he says. "It is a big idea".
I'm going to try and write something for Comment Is Free over the next couple of days on this - play theory is quite in vogue at the moment, with Adam Curtis's The Trap (currently showing on BBC2) having it in for game theory, big-time.
But in the meantime, I was even moved to write Miliband an e-mail (courtesy of TheyWorkForYou), which I include below:
Dear David Miliband
Noted [your comments from the Telegraph]. I quite agree, well done, in tune with the times. (My books and blogs have been talking about this for the last several years). Though I'm full steam for Scottish independence as a barrier to Trident, and thus implacably opposed to your party's advance in Scotland, it would be nice if this much more interactionist and reciprocal vision of governance became part of your UK election campaign - though I fear that Gordon Brown is far too Fordist and communitarian to cope with the emergent energy of a players-led politics.
I wonder if you've read Robert Wright's Non-Zero: the logic of human destiny, which puts the notion of 'player-citizens' as the outcome of a much longer duration of social evolution. And although the anti-capitalism will scare the socks off you, I think the Italian Autonomist Paulo Virno describes the basic social dynamics that are encouraging these much more autonomous and involved player-citizens:
Migrants, precarious workers of every kind, border-laborers between employment and unemployment, seasonal employees at McDonald’s, customer support representatives on chat lines, researchers and information experts: all these people are, in their full value, the “general intellect” of which Marx speaks. That general intellect (knowledge, the subjective spirit of initiative, invention-power) that is at once the main productive force of post-Fordist capitalism and the material basis for bringing an end to commodity society and to the state as a sinister “monopoly of political decisions.” At the end of the nineteenth century, typographers, tanners, textile workers—in sum, the members of the numerous trade associations—discovered what united them: being, all, abstract expenditure of psychophysic energy, labor in general.
Today, a multitude of “social individuals”—who grow prouder of their unrepeatable singularity the more they correlate to each other in a dense web of cooperative interaction—recognize themselves as the general intellect of society. The “general intellect”—“the thinking that desires and the desire that thinks,” to employ Aristotle’s beautiful expression—shows its political face with the reasonable demand of a universal basic income and with the refusal of any copyright on products of that common resource that is the human mind.
We are left with the thorniest of problems: how to organize a plurality of “social individuals” that, at the moment, seems fragmented, constitutionally exposed to blackmail—in short, unorganizable? Mass intellectuality finds it hard to reverse its own productive power into political power.
The first question on the agenda is that of the forms of struggle. Whoever believes that identifying the modalities of struggle (such as the strike, sabotage, and so on) is only a technical problem, a simple corollary of a political program, is stupid.
On the contrary, the discussion of forms of struggle is the most intricate, real benchmark of any political theory with a certain spirit. Entrepreneurialism, shared knowledge, the ability to relate and interact: these “professional gifts” of the post-Fordist multitude must become terrible instruments of pressure."
'Terrible instruments of pressure', or - if you drop the Leninism - a properly enabling and participatory state, deploying some of the measures you suggest in the Telegraph article.
Will be watching over the border with interest.
best wishes
PK
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