Cruddas’s message is clear: the digital age is ours for the taking

Jon Cruddas’s wide-ranging speech to the RSA on Tuesday on a New Progressive Politics deserves some real attention by the Left.  For the first time in this Parliament a senior Labour figure has started to link the rapid advance of digital technology in recent years to Labour’s politics and emerging ideas around the economy, devolution, citizenship and statecraft.  Coming right at the start of a series of high-profile policy announcements, the way Cruddas frames Labour’s outlook is important:

“The disruption of technological change is greater than at any times since the industrial revolution. The institutions and solidarities workers created to defend themselves against the power of capital have disappeared or become outdated and ineffective. As such, social democracy has lost its social anchorage in the coalitions built up around the skilled working class.”

Adopting an unashamedly futurist stance, Cruddas’s central message is this:  the Labour Party is the product of industrial society, now at the start of the digital age we need to change.  Our economy is undergoing a fundamental change more disruptive than the Banking Crash, with far-wider consequences for society, jobs and politics. The values that created the Labour Party can help us now.

Cruddas is surely right to argue that many of the debates about how we change society for the better can’t realistically be framed by only referencing old social democratic policy solutions. While we are in an era where there’s less money for public services, the idea that the Left can discuss this without reference to the digital age is surely doomed to mediocrity or failure:

“The ideology and institutions of 70 years ago became the horizon of our ambition.  Confronted by Neo-Liberalism in the 1980s we sometimes just defended institutions and ideas that were offering diminishing returns. We became institutional conservatives defending the outdated.”

Just as the Labour Party was formed very much in response to the social and economic pressures of the industrial revolution, today the rapidly accelerating digital revolution is in the process of changing the traditional ways we interact, exchange goods and hold people to account.  Therefore a party that has labour in its name must understand and reflect on these new circumstances, not by revering policy solutions or institutions which gave us certainty in different times, but by considering how the very values which gave birth to them apply now and in the future.

Until this point, the Labour movement has been slow to grasp the impact and potential of digital innovation to express our values.  In part this has been because the Right have been very successful at framing the impact of digital change in neo-Thatcherite terms and with a strong narrative around individualism, deregulation and anti-statism. I also suspect the challenges of the digital age have been harder to frame for the Left.  To the authors of The Second Machine Age, the debate about the impact of the globalisation has, until now, obscured the very profound impact that technology has had on the economy. Could it be that the disruption of the 2000s, which are commonly ascribed to the results of post-Cold War globalisation, disguised the social impact of accelerating technological change?   If so, how do we now consider the organisation of the state, economy, and purposes of public goods such as education and welfare.  Moreover, how do we share the fruits enjoyed by small elites able to capture advantage early on?

Weaved through Cruddas’s speech is this: digital change is neither the sole preserve of the Right, nor technocrats and nor, for that matter, libertarians. It is what we make of it: the values of collaboration, cooperation, self-organisation inherent in Labour history are also the dominant dynamic of the digital age.

We build our future on these patterns of the past.  Labour’s traditions lie in the popular movements of collective self-help and improvement; the temperance societies, holiday clubs, cooperatives, and the trade unions.  Before we became a party of the state we were a movement developing leadership, organising people and creating power.  Why don’t we confront the future through these traditions?

This is an agenda of sharing power, not hoarding it – of decentralisation, community activism and extending accountability to the currently unaccountable in business and the media.  It is also about investment in technology, in skills and human capital as the digital age continues to profoundly change jobs and careers.

So, technology shouldn’t be considered just as a tool that has driven this disruption forwards, but as a force in its own right, particularly in a digital age that is reorganising, sometimes chaotically sometimes progressively, the way we do things – including our politics.

Theo Blackwell is Cabinet member for Finance and Technology Policy at Camden council and a Board member of Labour Digital