After social democracy, what next?

On the hunt for [X]

Last summer I wrote an essay titled Goodbye social democracy. Hello [X]. It was an admittedly clickbait take on a complicated topic but the premise is one I believe in. The social democratic settlement wasn’t a timeless solution to the challenge of governing capitalism, it was a set of governing arrangements custom-built for the technological conditions of their time. So the task that falls to this generation is to construct a new settlement that works to the logic of digital capitalism. We need to find X.

At the end of the post I gestured in X’s direction by describing five shifts that are underway in public policy, some at the frontier and some more fully developed.

• Economics is starting to lose its trump status with the rise of disciplines like design
• Within economics, more heterodox approaches are being used to understand the digital economy, like behavioural economics and complexity science
• The state’s work is being organised in new ways, as summed up by the shift from waterfall to agile methods
• There’s a growing humility and a genuine appetite for co-design in public policy that feels different to the technocratic Whitehall-knows-best mindset that typified the 20th century state
• We’re seeing a push beyond the cold utilitarianism, and even the rule-based liberal egalitarianism, that framed much of 20th century political philosophy to conceive of social justice in warmer hues like relational equality, pride, and esteem

These shifts give a sense of where we’re headed but they’re pretty vague and they don’t exactly amount to a description of X. I’m also conscious that my views are changing; if I wrote the list today it would be different.

All of which is to say: I think this merits more attention. So over the next few months I’m going to embark on a more determined search for X. This will bridge into a new project I’ll talk more about soon; a more structured effort to describe a 21st century institutional settlement. For now, I thought it might be useful to evaluate our progress so far.

Starting out, but from where?

There’s an old joke about a tourist who’s lost in New York. They stop a passerby to ask ‘how do I get to Carnegie Hall?’ and the unhelpful response that comes back is: “First of all, don’t start from here.”

Whenever I hear this sentiment it reminds me of working in Number 10 in the late 2000s, at the tail end of the Brown government. One of the most common responses when we sought policy advice from departments or from the PM’s strategy unit was along the lines of: ‘if you want to do well in this policy area, don’t start from where the UK is today’. Eventually we developed our own saying in response: ‘we are where we are’.

When it comes to rebuilding the state for the 21st century, we are where we are. But where is that exactly? To gauge our progress, let’s divide the work into three steps:

1. Understand the new form of capitalism
2. Diagnose the problems/opportunities it gives rise to
3. Design an institutional response

If I was pushed to make a reductive assessment of our progress on these three fronts, I’d say it’s uneven, which I suspect is similar to how it felt around the late 19th century with respect to the development of social democracy.

First, when it comes to understanding today’s new form of capitalism, I think we have a pretty decent grasp. But I also think it’s telling that this understanding still comes mainly from the perspective of business/management strategy.

If you walk into any bookstore you’ll find shelves full of titles on the new practice of production and institutional forms that have emerged to make the most of digital technology. Most of these books sit in the genre of management writing so you need to push past lots of jargon about agile methods and the ‘platform play’ and the Spotify/Netflix model to find substance. But if you do, you’ll get a decent sense of the logic of a digital economy.

It’s useful, I think, to consider this literature analogous to Frederick Taylor’s work on scientific management in the 1890s and 1900s. Taylor was asking his generation’s version of the same question: how must we work if we’re to take full advantage of today’s frontier of technology? Or, as he put it at the time, what is the ‘one best way’?

Taylor’s work was one tributary in a whole river system of intellectual history concerning a new best way to do things. Another tributary was the radical innovation of the assembly line, which merged with Taylorism into the practice of mass production. This in turn combined with ideas about the new organisational form of the corporation, and together this all came to define what we might call the grammar of 20th century capitalism.

Today, we’re at an early stage grasping the grammar of digital capitalism. And it does feel telling that, to the extent that we have such an understanding, it still comes mainly from the management shelves of the bookshop. What we don’t yet have is a mature theoretical treatment of a digital economy/society from slower cadence disciplines like economics, philosophy, or political theory. Management writing gives us something to work from, but it’s really only a start.

What about the second step, understanding the social ramifications — and the opportunities — of digital capitalism? In this strand of work it feels like we’re less far along.

On the upside, in the last few years we’ve seen the first serious mainstream treatments of the social malaise of digital capitalism, with a leading example being Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. There are also whole sub-genres of writing on the social problems that seem to characterise a digital age — the implications of automation for jobs, studies of algorithmic bias, or books about digital burnout and mental ill-health. Pioneering journalists are also reporting from the digital frontier; see, for example, writing from Sarah O’Connor or James Bloodworth exploring work in a digital age.

It’s also noticeable that, in the last decade, the word capitalism itself has re-entered public debate. This is a sure sign that the thing is changing and is therefore returning to salience. It’s as if we live in a village that sits on the back of a dragon that hibernates for decades at a time. It’s only when the scales start to shift ominously that people become obsessed with dragon studies again.

As we might expect, the most lively debates about the changing nature of capitalism seem to be happening on the left, particularly among Marxian or critical theorists. There’s a slew of books about what the system is turning into; is it platform capitalism or addiction capitalism or even post-capitalism, and what might that mean for socialism? On the right, intriguingly, the intellectual response seems a bit all over the place. It ranges from burn-it-down populism on the one hand to lie-back-and-float-downstream techno-utopianism on the other. And in the middle, meanwhile, it passes through a reform-it-to-save-it exploration of capitalism’s woes at publications like the FT and Economist.

When you step back, this all really just feels like a sign that it’s still early days in our diagnostic work. Compare the above, for example, to the fairly comprehensive diagnostic of the failures of capitalism that was eventually developed by late 19th century social reformers in America. Or compare it to early 20th century work from British reformers like the Webbs or Rowntree. When it comes to diagnosing the social ills of digital capitalism, we have a long way to go.

What about the third step in the process, designing a new set of governing arrangements for a digital age?

It’s tempting to say we’re nowhere on this front but I think that would be too strong. It feels more accurate to say we have masses of material to work with but that we haven’t yet made sense of this material or been able to organise it into a coherent proposition or movement.

In fact, one of the main things that prompted me to write End State was the sheer abundance of new policy thinking that’s out there today. I kept hearing people talk as if policy-making was barren but as far as I could tell we were living through a renaissance in new policy ideas.

I guess it’s true that if you’re immersed in the incrementalism of Whitehall policy debates, or if you spend your time doomscroling the grimness of retail politics, things feel at best intellectually sparse and at worst tragically unserious and/or dog whistley. But you don’t have to venture far beyond the clearing of mainstream policy debate and you’ll find so many green shoots you can barely move. There are frontline innovators who have spent decades running experiments in new models of service provision; designers and digital teams rethinking the methods by which policy work is done; radical spaces like Newspeak House or Dark Matter Labs that sit at the hot intersect of politics and technology; and even in the heart of the state there are pockets of bold reform in places like the CMA or FCA or DCMS. One of the nicest things since writing End State has been the number of messages I’ve received from people working in government, often in mid-level/Deputy Director roles, who felt the book spoke directly to their efforts to reconceive today’s policy settlement. Their messages felt almost furtive, as if they wanted to say ‘I’m on board’, even if the system around them was resisting.

So if there’s so much good work being done to rethink our policy settlement, what’s missing? I increasingly think that what we need is a better sense of how it all fits together. It feels as if we have a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle with some tantalisingly vivid pieces but we don’t have a box with a helpful picture on the lid. Maybe, in other words, what we’re missing is an ism.

A sense of where we are

One of my favourite books is a profile of the basketball player Bill Bradley by the American non-fiction writer John McPhee. It’s a study in the grace of sport when it’s played well and it’s also an argument for why greatness in sport often comes when you practice so much that you develop an instinctive sense of your position on the field of play.

There’s this wonderful moment in the book when McPhee is talking with Bradley about his craft. They’re standing on a basketball court and to demonstrate his point Bradley suddenly takes the ball he’s holding and, without breaking eye contact with McPhee, throws it backwards over his shoulder and it sails clean through the hoop. McPhee is stunned and no doubt suspects a fluke, so he collects the ball and hands it back to Bradley who does the same thing again without missing a beat. When you master your craft, Bradley says calmly, “you develop a sense of where you are.”

I like reading about our historic efforts to adapt to a changing economy because it gives us a sense of where we are. Take the 1890s as an example, which I often think of as the decade most analogous to the 2020s. Capitalism was starting to change due to new practices of production enabled by electricity. Taylor was giving evangelical talks to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and sparking fiery debates in the American Machinist and being dismissed as a crank. It was still more than a decade until the weekend when Charles Sorensen, asked to think big by his boss Henry Ford, rigged up a sliding chassis system in an empty factory, unleashing the smooth flowing revolution of the assembly line. And there were nascent diagnoses of the ills that seemed to flow from the changing character of capitalism, from monopoly power to concerns about monotony at work and working hours.

Also, what was starting to form, through the confluence of various intellectual tributaries, was an ism. Or rather some isms. Because when progressivism took shape in the US it had a different tone and priorities to British schools of thought like Fabianism. And together this all came to define the contours of the social democratic settlement.

It’s also interesting to study the method by which these isms were developed and refined. For one thing, there wasn’t a plan; it was more organic than that. Progressivism wasn’t a manifesto with an author, although lots of people tried to write one. Notice also how these earlier generations of reformers worked in mixed materials. Sure, their isms were built from ideas communicated in books and essays and pamphlets. But there was also art and architecture and there were practical experiments in utopian living. The work was also done on many levels of abstraction at the same time. Some reformers worked on new economic and philosophical foundations fit for a twentieth century economy while others got their hands dirty setting up new organisations and services to help people. In this DIY fashion, parts of the new social settlement often formed first in civil society before later being codified by the state.

The isms were also, intentionally or not, adaptable. They were shaped and then reshaped and then later hardened in the heat of pluralistic debate. They changed as political coalitions shifted and as public attitudes moved on and as politicians tested the boundaries of what was possible.

I’m not saying that these methods were particularly intentional; it’s not as if there was a plan not to plan. But the methods also weren’t a coincidence. Society was dealing with a complex systems change, so it had to be this way.

As we do analogous work today, building governing arrangements for the internet-age, I find that this historical context helps to define the work to be done.

• First, we need to mature our understanding of digital capitalism by going deeper than those business strategy books, making full use of disciplines like economics, philosophy, and sociology.
• Second, we need to deepen our understanding of the ills and opportunities that arise from a digital economy, pushing beyond all those instinctive luddite reactions like ‘social media is killing our kids’ and ‘AI will take all our jobs’ to develop a more thoughtful and rounded diagnosis.
• Third, when it comes to our institutional response, yes we need new policy thinking; we need, for example, to design a new competition regime that works for digital markets. But we also need to do more describing to make sense of the organic and loose knit responses that are already emerging.

In fact, when it comes to this last strand, the word I like best is ‘curate’. We need to identify the emerging parts of a new institutional settlement; the mindsets, policy ideas, experiments, and methods that feel like they might be part of X. We need to see what those parts have in common to sharpen our sense of their essence. We need to organise the parts so that we can see how they complement each other. And we need to make sense of them as a collection, writing the blurb for the exhibition entrance that gives the whole thing coherence. And maybe, at the end, we can round it off with a name above the door — an x’ism.

If we can curate this well I think it might be useful on several fronts. It could help, for example, to galvanise reformers, showing how their work — which, after all, is lonely and tiring — is part of something bigger. I also think skillful curation could make it easier for others — cultural commentators and journalists, for example — to interpret and critique the emerging policy response to digital capitalism, which is important because critiques are a part of the process by which we test and refine our thinking.

This is all really just a shameless teaser for my upcoming project but it’s also an invitation, since the project will be open and collaborative, to get involved if you’d like to. I should also add that End State is out in paperback on 5 May and you can pre-order here if you haven’t read it already. It tells the big optimistic story of why this work matters and why — if we put our shoulders to it, but only if we put our shoulders to it — we’ll get there in the end.

This post is part of a year-long series exploring how we govern the future. To read along, you can follow me on Medium here or support the project for £3 a month on Substack here. For the big story behind all this, from Victorian sewers to digital dragons, you can buy my book End State.