Conor here: I’m not sure that the nebulous center wants to maintain the status quo aside from for themselves and the upward trajectory of their bank accounts They continually move rightwards in an effort to keep up with the right and please the plutocrats. And they certainly favor change in Gaza, Russia, and in other areas of the world.
Murphy’s opposition to workers controlling the means of production is also eyebrow-raising and dare I say, centrist-sounding. If the argument is for a better-performing, presumably democratic, government, what’s wrong with extending that to the workplace? An argument could also be made that worker control is one of the few ways to bring us back from the abyss that neoliberalism has led us to. The powers that be aren’t just going to reform and give us a better government out of the kindness of their hearts.
By Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of the Corporate Accountability Network. Originally published at Funding the Future.
Lots of politicians like to claim that they are in the centre of the political spectrum.
Some of them will say they’re centre right?
Some of them will say they’re centre left.
Some will just say they’re in the centre.
The fact is that as far as I can see, they’re all extremists, and that really worries me.
We have a political phenomenon now, which I am describing as extreme centrism, and extreme centrism is in fact what we used to call conservatism.
Extreme centrism is all about maintaining the status quo. It is managerialism by any other name. It is where politicians are saying, “Trust me, I’m a safe pair of hands because I will keep the ship steady.”
But the reality is that the ship is heading for the rocks.
That’s not just true in the UK. That’s true in the USA. That’s true in Europe, in many cases. We don’t need people with a steady hand on the tiller anymore. We need somebody who’s got the nouse to actually swing us hard to starboard, or port, if you would prefer and, by and large, I would because as I recall it, port is on the left. And the reason why we need somebody who’s going to swing us hard to port is that we need to change the way in which our societies are structured.
After 45 years of neoliberalism, more of the same is not going to deliver any benefit for us; more of the same is actually taking us to hell in a handcart.
We know that we are burning the planet.
We know that we are increasing wealth inequality.
We know that it is not producing benefits for society.
We know that we are not increasing the incomes of most people who are on average wages.
We know that we can’t tax those people more.
We know, as a consequence, we have to increase tax on the wealthy.
But the centrists, the extreme centrists, say we can’t do that.
We know that we have to transform, therefore, the way we manage the economy, if we are going to get a better outcome. And yet what these extreme centrists say is, “trust me, I’m going to do what we did before, and everything will be okay.”
It was Albert Einstein who was credited with saying that keeping on doing the same thing and hoping that the next time you do it, you might get a different outcome from the one you got before, which you didn’t like, is a definition of madness. And that is what the extreme centrists are trying to offer to us.
They are basically offering us a form of economic madness. Even though nothing works, they believe in delivering more of it.
My argument is we don’t need the extreme centre anymore, and I don’t care whether we’re talking about the centre right, the centre, or the centre left, they’re all pretty much identical because they’re all neoliberal politicians, and they’re all offering, with minor differences, the same prescription, which is, as I’ve already said, more of the same.
We want less of the same, and we want more of something different. And we are hearing that message from people in the UK and around the world. They’re saying, we’ve had enough of this failed system. We know it’s failed. Nothing works anymore, they’re saying. And that’s why they’re moving to the far-right, because it’s the only place where they seem to be able to find somebody who says it’s not working.
And because the far-right are the only people who are willing to say it’s not working, they’re picking up support, even though their prescription is, if anything, very much worse, and very much more dangerous than that which the extreme centrists are offering.
So what we need is a shift to the left.
I definitely do not mean a shift to the far-left.
We have a threat from the far-right in the UK. I have no desire to see a threat from the far-left.
I am not in any shape or form convinced that we need to have a government that is dedicated in this country to the ownership and control of all the means of production, for example, by the workers, whoever the workers might be, and however we might define them.
That is not necessary. We live in a mixed economy. We should have a mixed economy. People want to live in a mixed economy, but that doesn’t mean to say we have a non-performing government.
Over a decade ago, I wrote a book called The Courageous State. In that book, I argued that what we need are courageous politicians who actually believe that they’re elected to office to deliver for the well-being of the people of the country who have voted for them.
And a courageous politician says, I have an entitlement to make change. I have an entitlement to claim resources out of this economy because I believe they can be better used by the government than the market sector. I believe that we collectively can make better decisions than individuals can for themselves because we collectively can see the consequences of our actions in a way that individuals rarely can. We collectively can deliver for the communal well-being because there are some things which quite simply we can never deliver for ourselves.
For example, and it’s a very straightforward one, but it remains totally relevant, none of us can afford to have our own fire brigade. As a matter of fact, each of us owning a fire engine would be completely pointless. We can only provide an effective fire service if we do it communally.
The same is true for education and healthcare, and so many other things, including housing, when access to housing has been denied to so many because of the consequences of neoliberal economics, which is that house prices have gone out of reach.
So we have to act together. And when I say I want a government that is left of centre, what I mean is a government who believes that they have the right to deliver for this collective whole, whilst leaving people sufficient resource, of course, to do what they need for themselves.
This isn’t a struggle between the two. There isn’t a tension, necessarily. There’s only a symbiotic system of creation, which we can put into place by joining together the best of the state and the best of the private sector and the best of our individual creativity.
The extreme centrist doesn’t understand that. The extreme centrist wants to carry on with the belief that the market is the only way to meet our needs, and it isn’t. And that’s why extreme centrists are so dangerous.
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Richard Murphy says: “And a courageous politician says, I have an entitlement to make change. I have an entitlement to claim resources out of this economy because I believe they can be better used by the government than the market sector.”
How I wish he had said “And a courageous politician says, ‘The people who voted me into office EMPOWERED me to make change. This government is EMPOWERED to claim CERTAIN resources out of this economy because THE PEOPLE I REPRESENT BELIEVE THOSE RESOURCES can be better used by the government FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL, than BY the market sector FOR THE BENEFIT OF A FEW.”
Yes Carla, Empowerment, if not OBLIGATION.
Yanis Varufakis has a TED Talk where he opines that Capitalists have disempowered Demoracracy to the extent that politicians no longer serve the ‘Demos’, but in their stead the captains of industry as proponents of neoliberalism.
‘POSH’ – Port Out, Starboard Home. That’s how a ‘Centerist’ traveled from The Liver(pool) to Staten Island and back, once upon a time (cynical me).
I can imagine a substantial adjustment upwards could be made to the influence of the workers (as producers of capital) by political reform, but what to do about the financiers who have the most control? I don’t imagiine any ‘revolution’ that would hamper their overwhelming capacities to serve their own interests. After all, finance recognises no borders as constraints, unlike real (productive, as opposed to extractive) industry, most usualy.
You can’t say that when you are bought and sold by political donations. You can’t say that and get covered by a media outlet owned by an oligarch. And you can’t say any of that out loud unless you are independently wealthy, because you will never work in the US again.
The battle is over for anything resembling the left in the US. People are too atomized, and worried about their house values and keeping their jobs to give a shit. I will participate in a general strike if Fain’s long term plan comes to fruition, but like the mass Iraq protests I don’t think it will change much. Sorry, I gotta go check how my 401k is doing..
Murphy is talking about the UK. The American system of unlimited political bribery doesn’t operate there. If bribes explain why Labour under Blair turned to Thatcherism, which we now call centrism, then UK pols are unbelievably cheap (they actually are) but that’s not the whole story. Aureline has discussed this history at length on his blog and sees a different set of motives, that I partly accept. But that’s all history.
Looking forwards, the situation in many The West countries is that their set of cartel parties, i.e. the presentable, salonfähig establishment parties, are all neoliberal and have been for years and as a result lost electoral support and are facing a growing crisis of legitimacy, as Murphy correctly describes. Starmer, Merz, and Macron govern with astonishingly low levels of popular support. What are the alternatives for voters? Thanks to decades of a very effective combination of cooption and subversion, the left is gone. Alternatively, on the right, there are nationalist conservative populist parties. Note how these parties are actually useful to the centrist cartels, by giving them some voter appeal because “at least we’re not them!” (I admit, in 2016 I held my nose voted Clinton because Trump) and by giving the cartel centrists cover to move further right (e.g. immigration). Where and when nationalist populists are elected they seem usually to move towards the center.
So the center itself keeps moving right, the nationalist populists turn out to present no real threat to neoliberalism, and the crisis of legitimacy grows. What’s a pinko like me to do?
I think the European elites are in a way longer in tooth because of the historical experience of a well structured and defended hierarchy, which persists in Europe like an amputated limb, which the present elites want in fact to regrow.
That it is less the case in US, Canada, Australian, and New Zeeland.
But I am curious about the trajectories emerging in Russia and China
Not lend the system any legitimacy or support by voting for the duopoly, would be my suggestion.
.Tom points out that Murphy is in the UK and writing about their system which does not have the kind of literal wholesale politics we do and says “Starmer, Merz, and Macron govern with astonishingly low levels of popular support. What are the alternatives for voters? Thanks to decades of a very effective combination of cooption and subversion, the left is gone. Alternatively, on the right, there are nationalist conservative populist parties. Note how these parties are actually useful to the centrist cartels, by giving them some voter appeal because “at least we’re not them!”
And this is different from the US, uhm, how? With the cumulative addition of billions of dollars, how come we only bought the same death of the left the Brits achieved so much more cheaply?
See also the rebranded conservatism of Ezra Klein’s Abundance agenda. They can’t stop themselves from trying to move right as an alternative to actual reform.
Abundance: all we need to do is get rid of those pesky regulations and the rising tide will automatically lift all boats. In other words, it’s the Reagan Revolution all over again! The Abundantistas fail to see, however, that the only thing proved by their circling back around to the deregulation miracle elixir is they have not learned one single thing in over four decades.
The Bolseviks started loosing when they gutted the local soviets, established in cities and factories throughout the land and which represented the true democratic voices in all former Czarist territories.
Labels, labels, labels! Far right , far left etc etc. What I think is being advocated here is a return to Industrial Capitalism rather than ‘liberal’ Financial Capitalism.
‘Far right’ Russian and ‘Communist’ China are following more or less the Industrial Capitalism model now. Public ownership ownership of health, education, utilities and crucially BANKING.
This last one makes them enemies of the Financial Capitalist West.
Does the author realise this? Has he read Hudson? Would he advocate public ownership of banking? If not then his ‘remedy’ will be more of the same.
Very well said, JW.
“Public ownership ownership of health, education, utilities and crucially BANKING.”
The basic rule is as follows: check what happens when an organization (mostly a firm, but could be a non-profit association) goes bankrupt.
If the state (in whatever form) must immediately intervene to prop it up and prevent it from stopping the production of its goods or services, then it means that the organization in question is not allowed to fold.
But going bankrupt is an absolutely normal process in a capitalist, market-oriented system. It is even a healthy one — that gets rid of inefficient, ineptly managed organizations, those that do not innovate, take excessive risks, etc.
But if an organization is not allowed to undergo the normal, healthy processes of a market-oriented economy, then it means it does not belong to the private sector.
And hence it must be a department or agency of the state; if it already is, it must not be privatized; if it is not, then it must nationalized — and that includes all “too big to fail” banks, all “strategic enterprises”, all “providers of critical infrastructure”, all those “ensuring the sovereignty of the country”, all “irreplaceable providers of services to the society”.
But of course, this is exactly the opposite of what the extreme centre, the right wing, the pasokified left wing, and the extreme-right “populists” advocate.
Extreme centrists really do exist, but are actually mostly growth oriented capitalists.
However, they accept a mixed economy, though one driven more by monetary than fiscal objectives.
They can be either socially conservative or liberal but are rigid in their opinion set.
Murphy’s quote that ” the extreme centrist wants to carry on with the belief that the market is the only way to meet our needs ” is a complete misreading of the political spectrum.
These are the central tenets of both the Chicago and Austrian Schools, and far right ‘libertarians’, including the Heritage Foundation.
If these can now be identified as ‘centrist’, then the Overton window has shifted a helluva long way to the right, and round the corner.
Murphy is firmly against capital wealth taxes and LVT – so in favour of taxing revenues but is evidently against redistribution, so against reduction of the present extreme hierarchy of inequality.
He is, indeed, also against worker control/ownership of production outside a limited range of nationalised infrastructure monopolies.
He is strongly against the jobs guarantee that typifies most supporters, and the initiators, of MMT.
He tends to be against participatory and direct democracy, supporting instead, stong representative central government.
Murphy himself ticks a large swathe of those boxes of a militant liberal / extreme centrist.
He often tends to a rigidity of strongly expressed opinion, and is dismissive of other points of view – so is much more polemicist than considered analyst these days.
This is certainly one of his less coherent pieces.
That is a pity, as militant centrism, often misleadingly identified as the ‘liberal consensus’, does contribute to the current problems of lack of a broader representative political spectrum, and the subject deserves consideration.
I think that is a mischaracterisation of his position as I understand it.
He is against wealth taxes but only because of the difficulty in identifying and valuing wealth. For instance, how much is a painting worth?
He is very definitely for redistribution and consistently highlights how the rich in the UK are taxed at rates far below the poor, and has proposed many options for taxing the wealthy more, and then using that to fund tax cuts or support for the less wealthy.
He believes in a mixed economy – for example, water and rail, health and education are definitely in his view (as I understand it) appropriate for national ownership. A factory making toasters is definitely for a “capitalist” to own, or perhaps a John Lewis style partnership.
I prefer “radical centrists” but anything which exposes the endemic conservatism of “the Uniparty” in its defense of the status quo is welcome.
A rambling piece of centrist polemic. What causes ‘extreme centrism’ is not discussed, which is the role of money in politics
No mention of politicians serving paymasters rather then the electorate
No mention of how the rich can be taxed when they have bought the politicians to change the legislation so that they DON’T get taxed
This is the state of academia – empty noise with no substance
What is this ‘extreme left’ of which he is so afraid? No attempt to explain what it might be other than a hit that it has been out of circulation for more than a generation.
No real explanation of his ‘extreme centrism’ which is otherwise known as oligarchical neoliberalism, so he didn’t need to invent his own phrase for it anyway.
He needs to study something while he is at university, other than accounting which has been proven in various studies to produce right wing destructive people lacking empathy
Richard Murphy is an emeritus professor, so no longer in paid academia.
I’d agree that much of academia, especially in political economy, is dire these days.
Academics writing books often seem to struggle with seeing the wood for the trees.
His specialism was tax accountancy, and he has also been a selective advocate for some elements of MMT but then fell out with Bill Mitchell and Warren Mosler, both original proponents.
Apparently he was also active in the UK Green New Deal group, though that rarely shows as he only ever mentions climate change and sustainable development on a superficial level.
His new retirement role is as a political Youtuber, publishing several daily pieces, with raw material often drawn from Guardian or FT columnists.
He is also planning a new book, which I believe he himself has described as being polemical rather than academic.
As the volume of his online posts has increased, many unscripted, so perhaps inevitably rambling, then I think there has been an equivalent drop in quality.
This is a great pity as the niche he was very well informed on and previously occupied – on fair taxation and government budgeting – has been widened into personal interests like ultra-processed foods and he now comments on both Russian and US politics, and is especially anti Trump, (but also very much anti the UK Labour government.)…
Whether he is better informed on any of these topics than you or I (at least I studied the Soviet Union at Uni) is probably a moot point.
And yet there is no mention of public financing of the election process. We are developing a general awareness that the political parties are controlled by the donor class and that is the cornerstone of our current problems. The donor class has been able to buy the political parties and thus the political/governmental system because of the requirement that prospective politicians raise mind boggling amounts of money. You cannot honestly blame the politicians for the current mess. We will not be able to effectively reform the elective process is the near term. But we must begin now to realize that moving in this direction by establishing opinions and values, and by developing proposed public financing strategies. This includes addressing the rotten corruption of the current political system and its enablers.
Also we must address the propagandistic ideology of capitalism. Of course we live in a country with a mixed economy, not one that is correctly or productively described as capitalistic. This is a problem because we do live in a country with a hegemonic social/political ideology of capitalism. The capitalistic ideology, state briefly, encourages and enables a system of social values that are excessively and destructively materialistic, competitive, and individualistic. As referred to by Murphy in his example of the fire department, our civilization is truthfully built on cooperation, creativity, construction, and caring about our fellow man. That is simply the truth. The capitalistic ideology is a sales pitch for capitalists, not for capitalism. This argument suggests an ongoing requirement for wealth redistribution from the top down.
I was writing my comment when idlekeod was posting. Good comment by idlkeod.
Someone always has an idea for a better way to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. the descent from the peak of empire is a one way trip. Enjoy the ride.
I note that how the centralists operate is remarkably similar to how lawless fascists operated in the past. A disregard for laws unless it suits them or they can weaponize the it use against opponents and a tendency to make rules up as they go along. Take a look at how the centralist EU runs things and tell me that it is not so.
Better that we call them “extreme centralizers”, noting that the Western centralization of power has not been so much to the formal State, as to über-rich, neo-monarchist, neo-fascist Lords of War. Certainly it has been a decentralization of power from “We the People”.
We may need a different definition of extremist.
From a more philosophical angle, one could argue that all of us, no matter what our politics, tend to primarily think and act from the largely unstated assumption that “Reason is a scout for the passions.” (See Hume and Hobbes and much of contemporary neuroscience research).
Behind such passion is the emotional impulse that drives the necessity of not only winning but of also destroying the enemy–hence the brilliance of the Nazi opportunist Carl Schmitt when he defined politics as having little to do with the role of the state and much more to do with the intensity of the conflict between “friend and enemy.”
The far right, right, center, progressive left, and far left all firmly believe in stoking this intensity (which is extremely powerful in everyone (including myself) and may just be a primary factor on why we all seem to partially enjoy the journey to general and self-destruction.
Is this sense of emotional political urgency a form of delusion or maybe an accurate capturing of the nature of our political existence?
“Centrism typically refers to itself as the ‘rational middle’ but really it’s a fringe movement trying to defend the economic preferences of the 1%.”
—Waleed Shahid, Justice Democrats Communications Director on MSNBC, 2019, with Chris Hayes, excerpted on David Dole’s The Rational National here
There was, I recall, an interesting account of “centrism” in NC a year or so ago.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/populism-and-state-power.html