Let's be honest, the debate on progressive character of Conservatism assumes that we know what it is to be progressive and we are trying to judge if the Tories might possibly, just possibly, fit the bill. I guess that for most Guardian readers, to be progressive is to be left wing and to be left wing is to be committed to the state rather than the market. By virtue of this definition, progressive Conservatism is a contradiction in terms.

Much of our contemporary debate is conducted around the idea that the market and the state are fervent political opponents, with the good guys playing for the state and the bastards for the market. But of course, as recent events have more than amply demonstrated, the state and the market are far more intertwined than one might suspect. Indeed in their current guise and their contemporary formulation, it is not clear that progressive opinion should endorse either the market or the state. Both seem to support each other's monopoly interest and both disempower and destroy civil society. After all, New Labour's surveillance and audit state sits all too easy with a neoliberal endorsement of market appropriation. The idea that state and market are opposed seems on the face of it to be a completely spurious belief. After all, the triumph of laissez-faire economics could only be achieved by the vigorous and concerted action of the state. For it was only the state that had the power to dismantle all pre-existing social forms of exchange, modes that offered a far greater potential to increase the prosperity and stability of all. For example, it is a truism of economic history that outside of free ports, no country has ever successfully developed without protecting itself against the market. Moreover, state welfarism, often cited as the greatest achievement of the postwar left, is little more than an official acceptance that the majority will never own and that most will not even earn sufficient income from the labour they do perform to sustain themselves or their families.

One is reminded of Hiliare Belloc's thesis that the predominant social structure of the future would be that of The Servile State – where the state would accept that monopoly capitalism could not be challenged and the best that could be attained would be a subsistence level of indentured servitude for the majority of the population. It is hard not to see some merit in this account – a moneyed bureaucratic oligarchy moves seamlessly from state to market and back again, while the rest of us survive as best we can on wages supplemented by private credit or increasing state subsidy (and after all, what else are tax credits?). So conceived, the leftwing claim as to the moral superiority of the state is reliant on the very thing it decries: the capitalist market, since higher state benefits only increases our reliance on the monopoly market and the dependence of those who live on the taxes and benefits accrued from its operation. Witness, for example, Labour's fawning subservience to the City – for, indifferent to the needs of a balanced economy and reluctant to encourage the widening of ownership beyond the model of mortgaged housing stock, it encourages rampant speculative growth for the few in order that the supplicant class, which is an increasing many, can receive the tender mercies and meagre benefits of state bureaucracy.

posted by speakingcorpse : 10/15/2008 09:52:00 AM