The fundamental ethic of our new economy must be sustainability

By Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford

In the wake of the financial crash, the left has to create a new model of the individual living in society. But what now is the ethical relationship of individuals to one another and to society?

The centre left has to refashion a politics that values the social goods that give meaning to people’s lives: home, family, friendships, good work, locality, and communities of belonging, imaginary or otherwise. In our affirmation of ordinary everyday life we can rediscover the common good. This understanding of the interdependency of individuals, and acknowledgment of the social nature of individual life, recognises that people increasingly see themselves as individuals, and seek individual fulfilment, but also understands that individuality can only flourish in a social environment. And this way of looking at the relationship between society and the individual – which is part of a long tradition on the left – is helpful to us now in rethinking these relationships.

Leonard Hobhouse, a leading New Liberal thinker, wrote in Social Evolution and Political Theory:

“Society exists in individuals. When all the generations through which its unity subsists are counted in, its life is their life, and nothing outside their life”

Like Marx, for whom the individual was a category of relations, Hobhouse described ‘man’ as “the meeting point of a great number of social relations”. He argued that a progressive movement must have an ethical ideal. One element of this ideal must be liberty, but it must find a synthesis with equality, “since it stands for the truth that there is a common humanity deeper than all our superficial distinctions.” For Hobhouse, social progress is the development of a society in which “the best life of each man is, and is felt to be, bound up with the best life of his fellow-citizens”.

New Liberal thinkers such as Hobhouse were the pioneers of the British tradition of ethical socialism, which addresses the material conditions which give form to individual being. It is a politics of equality founded in the belief that individuals are of equal worth and it is governed by the ethic of reciprocity: do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you. It recognises that the task of living necessitates inter-dependency with others, and that this inter-dependency leads to the question of equality and justice.

Equality is the ethical core of justice. It is also the precondition for freedom. Not simply the negative freedom from the compulsion of others, or the freedom achieved through a fair distribution of resources, but a positive freedom toward self-fulfilment.

Ethical socialism must animate radical change in the organisation of the economy and its relations of control and ownership. Alongside a critique of the current financial system and its structuring effects on our lives, we need to think about the economy from the perspective of human needs. Britain has to make the transition from casino capitalism to a low-carbon, more equitable and balanced form of economic development.

The transition demands an economics whose principles are sustainable wealth creation, durability, recycling, cultural inventiveness, equality and human flourishing. The fundamental logic of this new economy must be ecological sustainability.

Climate change, peak oil and the need for energy and food security are all core green issues that will lie at its heart. Social movements, single issue campaigns and civil society organisations will be essential to this process, but they are not enough. A plural politics of alliances capable of achieving transformative economic and political change requires a theoretical and philosophical grounding and coherence. Only by developing our traditions of socialism and social liberalism, in conversation with newer traditions, particularly green politics and a politics that recognises cultural difference, will we be able to build a new hegemonic politics.

The coming election is the endgame of an old era. Whether Labour remains in government or returns to opposition, we need a fundamental re-assessment of its identity. Nothing is guaranteed, but the opportunities for a more ethical politics and economy are real. In the years ahead, the goals of a centre left are a strong, responsive and plural democracy, a restoration of trust and reciprocity in public life, and an ethical and ecologically sustainable economy for social justice and equality.

The unabridged version of this article is published in Soundings issue 44, Spring 2010.

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