Page 75 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

on an updated version of the Durkhemian search for ‘organic solidarity’.
It would be extremist to argue that such reforms could have no positive
effect whatsoever in stabilizing contemporary society. But the question
would be, for how long? How meaningful would any such solidarity be
under the conditions of real existing monopoly capitalism in unrestricted
competition on the world market?
Will increased devolution of constitutional processes to the local level,
while leaving monopoly capital intact, not have the effect of revealing the
real political powerlessness of the local except over relatively secondary
issues? Will devolution not expose how concentrated and centralized real
power necessarily is in a society based on monopoly capitalism, much as
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was the case with state socialism? Will this not lead to an intensification
of cynicism and alienation and a further destabilization of society? Is it
not, in the end, an artful evasion of the difficult task of facing up to the
real issues of power and privilege which bedevil modern society? For
decades, the standard undergraduate criticism of functionalism and of
Durkheim’s thought has been that he attempts, unsuccessfully, to evade
the issues of real power and real conflicts in society and tries to paper
them over with a civic religion. The neo-functionalist orientation of
Giddens is open to a similar criticism.
Although not exclusively constitutional-political – for example, in
ideas such as the ‘baby bond’ and expanded universal early childhood
education – the approach is predominantly so. The reason for this is clear:
the essence of New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ is the rejection of traditional
social democratic approaches which attempt to curtail some of the rights
of monopoly capital in the economic and not just in the social sphere. The
rule under New Labour is that privatization must dominate and markets
must always prevail in the economy. Social reforms are to be sought, but
strictly within this framework. They must not encroach on the rights of
private monopoly capital in the economy. This means that any attempt at
old-style Keynesian social democratic redistributive demand management
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(‘tax and spend’) is out of the question. Although obviously influenced
deeply by the Eastern European economic and political reform struggles
from 1968, it is fundamentally different from the ‘Third Way’ approach of
‘plan and market’ developed by the Czech economist Ota Sik. 10 In fact,
it agrees with and has been deeply influenced by the conclusions arrived
at later by the Eastern European economists Kornai and Brus that the
‘plan and market’ compromise model simply does not work in practice. 11
It is either the full market or nothing.
Giddens argues that the new global economy has eroded (or is erod-
ing) the old solidarities of class and community in both developing and

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