The Threat From Extreme Centrists

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.