In my last post I suggested that the New Democratic Party of Canada and its ilk are not unprincipled as many on the left suggest but instead have ideologically changed over the past generation and a half. For some, the knowledge that former social democratic parties, Third Way parties like the NDP are no longer socialist in character is sufficient. But I think that we need to go further to understand our present predicament. As we can now understand that these parties are here to actively stymie efforts to redistribute wealth or arrest the extinction event, it is important to comprehend and anticipate their actions, not so that we can work in concert with them but so as to prepare ourselves for their next move against us.
In my previous entry, I noted that we could adduce some of their priorities from their policy decisions. For instance, unlike twentieth-century social democrats who liked to socialize areas of the economy vulnerable to monopolization, modern Third Wayers believe that regulated monopolies and oligopolies are good ways to deliver things like railways and mass transit.
Another principle we can adduce from observation is a strong belief in meritocracy; we see this both within organizations supportive of these parties, in these parties themselves and encouraged within the state whenever these parties form government. This is because Third Way parties and their allies are not just vehicles for ideology or personal ambition; they are a larger project of class formation and class representation. And the specific meritocratic ideology they express and meritocratic practices they enact are of a piece with this.
A significant labour trend in small-p politics over the past generation and a half has been the increasing professionalization of the top tier of the non-profit activist sector. Today, most activism is directed not through democratic, volunteer-run locally-based cells of large organizations or through local independent activist organizations but instead through large, professionalized organizations managed and run by an emerging managerial class. The complex and strategic tasks of activism are not carried out in the non-monetized time of volunteers but in the monetized time of this emerging class. Similar to the original theory behind the post-Independence US military in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, part of this professional class’s skill set is the effective management of non- and partly-monetized labour so as to integrate or at least distract individuals wishing to engage as volunteers or members.
A similar trend has been taking place at universities as classroom teaching has shifted from a task primarily carried out by tenured and tenure-track faculty to one carried out primarily by temporary workers operating on four-month “hire at will” contracts without seniority rights or benefits. Because of the lack of continuity or stability in this growing part of the precariat, the work of producing a coherent curriculum or learning experience still falls to tenured faculty except that they are now expected to carry this task out not as instructors but as managers of instructors. The tenured professoriate has transformed from high-wage frontline workers into a new managerial class.
These two emerging groups are increasingly seamless with older professional formations, namely, what Vladimir Lenin termed “the labour aristocracy,” a permanent professional class of white collar managers running trade union pension funds, real estate portfolios, professionalized negotiating teams and a host of other duties. These individuals typically monopolize elected offices in unions, using the resources of incumbency in tandem with biased voting systems; or they occupy permanent unelected positions alongside elected ones, in which their position is understood to have been derived not from the democratic will of the members but from one’s professional qualifications to manage pensions, run real estate portfolios, etc.
The fourth group that intersects with these is the largest and most venerable, career civil servants, especially those working in the policy field. It is important to remember that in states like Canada, public policy is developed in two entirely separate streams: (a) inside political parties that choose leaders, field candidates, run on platforms and appoint cabinet ministers if they win and (b) inside the “policy” branches of the civil service in which a nominally non-partisan group of civil servants design policies based on a loose liberal utilitarian ideology. Many on the front lines in the civil service are engaged in micro-policy construction and many imagine their career as an ascent towards increasingly policy-oriented jobs walled-off from the direct delivery of government services.
These professional groups have increasingly converged to the point where one may move among them fairly effortlessly. In academic administration, professors increasingly work alongside individuals with MBAs and graduate “leadership” degrees or some go on to obtain similar credentials through Executive MBA programs. Once one has entered this class formation, one might find oneself the executive director of a Third Way party one year, an academic administrator the next, managing a trade union’s membership consultation process the next and then taking on a chief of staff, director of communications or deputy minister position for a Third Way government in the event of an election win. Perhaps, after the government’s defeat, one might take on a position at a management consulting, communications or government relations firm and then be hired as a contractor by one’s former colleagues at the university or union.
As Irene Silverblatt and Michel Foucault explain, one of the important features of modernity is the rise of a bureaucratic class, a portion of the bourgeoisie who understand that their right to make and enforce the rules of our society comes not from popular acclaim or heredity but instead of specialized knowledge. In this way, Silverblatt argues that the Spanish Inquisition was the first modern bureaucratic institution because the inquisitors understood their power and legitimacy as arising from their possession of knowledge, not from episcopacy or the throne. Inquisitors were policy-makers, analysts and investigators; torture was to be used sparingly, rationally and privately to produce the information necessary to legitimate punishment.
I want to suggest that those who think the NDP is not class-based or class-conscious party are dead wrong. It is simply that the NDP, like other Third Way parties, has changed which class it primarily represents. Today, the party is the class consciousness, i.e. the culture, ethics and interests of the bureaucratic class. This class rotates effortlessly among the private, non-profit and public sectors, technocrats who justify their power by constantly claiming to be producing new knowledge.
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With this understanding, all kinds of peculiar things about the BC NDP suddenly become explicable. Despite nomination meetings and leadership races being the main source of a party’s new members, the NDP has found them increasingly threatening and sought to shut them down by charging exorbitant fees to seek a nomination and then disqualifying large portions of candidates during a completely opaque process called “vetting” where head office staff determine whether a candidate would be a liability during a general election. Essentially, seeking an NDP candidate nomination is increasingly indistinguishable from a job interview for a technocratic position. This does not arise from some kind of internal corruption.
The reverse is true. The old NDP, the party that saw itself as representing the working class believed that the more working people who showed up to support a candidate, the more legitimate said candidate would be. But in progressive, technocratic thought, choosing someone who is more popular over someone who is more qualified is corruption, an affront to one’s values that esteem professional achievement and mastery of bureaucratic processes over simple popularity. It is out of a desire for purity, not expediency that becoming an NDP candidate has become about exhibiting success in a bureaucratic system and then demonstrating those skills by navigating the party’s own bureaucracy.
And, of course it goes without saying that any person of the appropriate class, provided they exhibit that class’s values of restraint and sobriety in their personal life, should have the requisite four- or five-figure vetting fee handily available at their financial institution.
Many were baffled that, when the party took power, it conducted no purge of the senior civil service to remove supporters of the BC Liberal Party and replace them with New Democrats. But from the perspective of those controlling the party, the ranks of the senior civil service more closely resembled them than did the members of their own party because despite the NDP’s best efforts, party membership rolls remain full of working people, grassroots activists, the un- and under-employed. In other words, the BC Liberal Party’s civil service seemed far more comprehensible and trustworthy than the party’s rank-and-file members.
And one must imagine the reverse was also true, that the senior civil service recognized and welcomed a new set of bosses who acted and felt more like equals than superiors, who embodied the cultural values of their class more precisely. No more being subordinated by indecorous rubes cum mob bosses like Rich Coleman or greasy hucksters like Mark Marissen, this new crew of putative bosses could be collaborators, allies and peers. Now, they would be treated with equality, with respect.
That is why the safest thing to do with a government decision is to create an “authority,” an unelected body of technocrats who make policy and govern at longer and longer arm’s length from the state. The health authorities and transportation authorities of BC were not created by Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberals; they were created by Mike Harcourt’s NDP. And why bring our ferries and our railroads back under public ownership? As regulated monopolies, they too can operate at a safe remove from democratic authority, guided by the same bureaucratic class.
This is why one must be so very careful in mitigating the savagery of the housing crisis without harming one’s artisanal landlording or intergenerational wealth transfer. That is why the province’s climate change plan is simply the declaration that, in the future, everyone will be made to have the kind of car members of this class already possess or aspire to own, either that or relinquish their class position by ceasing to drive.
The dream, then, of this class, expressed through its party, is the total convergence of the two branches of policy-making I set out above. Policy is not to be made by the rabble at conventions. And it is not in the party platform, which is simply a tool to obtain votes. Policy is the zeitgeist of the bureaucratic class, expressed in meetings of Harvard School of Business Executive MBAs at meetings of the board of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, commissioned in reports by KPMG, emanating from elite off-the-books “brainstorming sessions” at the Progress Summit, arising from playful speculation, soaking in the Hollyhock Institute hot tub or expressed in a UBC political science PhD thesis on “innovation in government.” It is immanent, throughout the system.
The former Marxists of the NDP envisage not “the withering of the state,” but the withering of the party. There is no confrontation between our government and the bureaucratic capitalist state. There is only a much-anticipated and tearful reunion.
