To most people reading thus far it will be apparent that my lasting attractions to the works of Habermas and Bhaskar suggests a sympathy with ‘left-of-centre’ thinking. After all, Habermas was once a Marxist, and Bhaskar remained one. Sketch 1 traced my ancestry and established that my parents, Ron and Margaret, were not politically motivated or electorally oriented. In terms of British parliamentary and local politics, each had at one election or another voted Conservative, Labour and Liberal. My own teenage mind and interests lay elsewhere: I have memories in my mid-teens of feeling sorry for Douglas Hume being regularly torn apart by Harold Wilson in the run up to the 1964 general election (handsomely won by Wilson). In short, I was disengaged. My few discussions with Ron, who was politically well informed if in no way evangelical, had not solicited any kind of stance or commitment. It was this ambivalent frame of mind that I transported to Surrey University in, of all years, 1968. I cannot say that my three years of undergraduate study altogether removed my ambivalence. Even the torrid happenings at LSE featuring Robin Blackburn and others, and more significantly in continental Europe, largely passed me by. But what did come to pass in that three-year sojourn paved the way for what were to prove incremental changes in my political outlook.
It is often claimed by right-of-centre enthusiasts that sociology attracts those inclined to radical socialist imaginings. This is not my experience or view. On the contrary, I suspect sociology, naturally and properly, tends to prompt a ‘rethink’ in its apprentices. This does not have to occur through introductions to Marxist theory. Often sufficient are either the macro-theories of other canonical thinkers like Weber or Durkheim, or the accumulated body of empirical research on the changing nature of British society; macro-theory invites the asking of questions that are new to many students, while familiarisation with multiple and varied research studies insist on an acceptance of the reality of system rationalisation and lifeworld colonisation (Habermas) or the constraints exercised on many, even most, citizens by imposing power 2 relations (Bhaskar). Of course, I encountered fellow students and students I have since taught myself who do not fit in with this characterisation: one Intercalated B.Sc student, president of his medical school’s Conservative Society, opted to take our course with the express intent of getting to know his enemy better.
In my case I benefitted from informal dialogues with my undergraduate peers at Surrey as well as from lectures, seminars and, above all, my reading, prescribed or otherwise. One mature student with views far more committed and organised than my own was Pete Kirby, a Marxist and a member of the Community Party. Finding myself in the same tutorial group as Pete, I was constantly challenged to clarify and develop my thinking. I had the benefit too of continuing discussions with Annette, whom I had got to know as a member of the same grouping and with whom I had begun to share my future. Thinking back more than half a century later, I am inclined to think that by the time I left Surrey University in 1971 I was at least primed to sidle leftwards. After my brief flirtation with philosophy, undertaking a Ph.D at Bedford College obliged me to revisit social and sociological theory, albeit often through the restricted lens of the health field. Sharing lecturing duties with Marxist activist and union rep David Blane at Charing Cross from 1972 to 1975, and, especially, teaching on the Intercalated B.Sc, further refined my sense of social order versus change. In all likelihood the years of transition from welfare state to financialised or rentier capitalism, culminating in the demise of the Wilson/Callaghan Labour governments in the second half of the 1970s and the election of Thatcher in 1979 added impetus to my changing views.
By the time I was systematically reading the original works of Bhaskar and Habermas I was identifying as strongly anti-Tory and already suspicious of the will or capability of the Labour Party to effect social structural change (for all that for want of an alternative I voted for them whenever an occasion presented itself). I stuck with Labour, although with diminishing enthusiasm, through the years of Kinnock’s abandonment of any pretensions to champion socialist policies, even sharing something of the enthusiasm greeting the landslide victory of Tony Blair in 1997. This at least marked the end of the Thatcher/Major years from 1979 to 1997. My relief-cum-hope, always carefully packaged, faded rapidly. The ‘third way’ of New Labour, articulated by leading sociologist Tony Giddens, betrayed just how far Labour’s slipping and sliding after the brutal treatment of Michael Foot in the 1983 general election had proceeded. The New Labour years of 1997-2010 showed a real intent to appease Murdoch and his acolytes and readers and to parade Labour’s compatibility with the more rapacious and unforgiving phase of capitalism that Thatcher had championed and helped fuel.
It is worth stressing that if one lived through the change from welfare state to rentier capitalism this disjunction was accompanied by a marked shift rightwards on the pollical spectrum. This was as apparent in the US as in the UK. The regimes of Clinton and Blair were significantly to the right of those of Kennedy/Johnson and of Wilson respectively. And then, under Blair, came 2003!
There is no need here to delve too deeply into the false prospectus deployed to justify the illegal excursion into Iraq. None of the alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were found, or indeed existed (but the Iraqi oil fields certainly did). I well recall the mass demonstration in London on 15 February 2003, coordinated with protests in over 600 cities globally. Estimates have put participation worldwide between eight and eleven million. Rome saw around three million, Madrid one a half million. The numbers in London were inevitably disputed: the police suggested 750 thousand, the BBC around one million, and the organisers three million. The Scamblers were well represented, with Sasha, Rebecca and Miranda joining Annette and I, and with Nikki unable to attend but with us in spirit. It was, I recall, a chilly day as we arrived at Waterloo Station and made for the Embankment. Hundreds of coaches from more than 250 cities and towns across the country discharged their heterogeneous cargoes of protesters. Euan Ferguson from the Observer recorded representations, among others, from the ‘Eton George Orwell Society’, ‘Archeologists Against War’, ‘Walthamstow Catholic Church’, ‘Swaffam Women’s Choir’ and ‘Notts Country Supporters Say Make Love Not War (and a home win against Bristol would be nice)’. All Met leave had been cancelled. By the time we reached Hyde Park we were too late to hear the likes of Tony Benn, George Galloway, Charles Kennedy, Bianca Jagger and Harold Pinter, so we did what Scamblers do and found a cafe.
Reflecting on this phenomenological experience of principled comradeship, I would make three observations. First, it failed. Blair’s right-hand man, Campbell, later suggested in his ‘Diaries’ that Blair wavered. Maybe, but I suspect not. Second, as Tariq Ali and others maintained, its subtext or tacit purpose – to mobilise and engage people – likely paid dividends. Old Emory University friend Terry Boswell once purported to show empirically that such protests and rebellions tend to be cumulative and are sometimes catalysts for future change. And third, we Scamblers took encouragement from our participation. In one poll for the Guardian, 6% of people claimed that someone from their household went on the march or had intended to, which translates into 1.25 million households and fits in with the estimates of circa two million attenders (assuming that more than one person could come from each household). I felt then as I feel now that the Iraq ‘adventure’ epitomised Blair’s premiership and his behaviour since. Together with George W Bush, he should in my opinion be charged with war crimes. The ‘collateral damage’ consequent on the invasion of Iraq is immeasurable.
I don’t think the events of 15 February 2003 hastened my identification with socialism, but it may well have consolidated it. I was by then already espousing the GBH and had indicated its compatibility with a neo-Marxist theory of society. Was I by then, and am I now, a Marxist? Well, a socialist and neo-Marxist in any event (if the reader will for the moment excuse the ambivalence and contestability of these terms). I would firmly maintain that the writings of Marx, despite their dating back more than century and a half, remain the essential starting point for building a convincing contemporary sociological theory of modern society and social change. I was also edging towards espousing the view that sociology is properly a normative social science, of which more later. Regrettable though Habermas’ departure form Marxist thinking might be, he appended something worthwhile in examining and retheorising the evolution and ongoing tension between communicative and strategic action. Bhasker, for his part, sought actively to advance critical realism as a vital under-labouring philosophy for a Marxism fit for the twenty-first century.
But I was at the same time very aware that any commitment to a neo-Marxist sociology must be answerable to internal and external critique and to empirical research. Moreover, non-Marxist thinkers undeniably have much to offer. In the next sketch I consider the works of Margaret (‘Maggie’) Archer, whose work on internal conversations and reflexivity I have already alluded to; she remains a thinker much influenced by Roy Bhaskar but her theoretical allegiances differ in important respects from mine. As my writings on social phenomena like health inequalities proceeded, I was to make good use of Maggie’s writings. My more general point here, however, travels beyond the advocacy of an open mind fit for the study of an open society. Nor am I merely drawing attention once again to the extensive overlaps in theoretical treatises, extending to numerous reinventions of the wheel. Sociological theories are only exceptionally proved or disproved. On occasion they might receive a degree of corroboration or even be ‘falsified’, to borrow Karl Popper’s concept. Typically, however, there is a discernible fissure, even a gulf, between a theory in sociology and the data available to confront it. The literature on health inequalities is a case I point. As I have argued previously, most of the data cited in this field is quantitative and social-epidemiological in nature. To put it crudely, it trades in statistical correlations and offers a best guess at causation. Further, this guesswork stops at the experience of events, rendered more or less accessible for analysis via their reduction to variables. It is not that this research is without return, far from it. Moreover, there is a growing body of qualitative and ethnographic research to factor in. But what I have argued is that the bulk of this research, quantitative and qualitative, testifies to the existence of real social structures. Indeed, these structures must exist given the consistent and enduring results of otherwise limited empirical investigations. By the early noughties I was going further and claiming that it must be real relations of class that are pivotal, and I was explicitly commending a neo-Marxist understanding of class relations, one fit for use in the twentieth-first century UK and elsewhere. I had confessed my commitment to a ‘Marxian’ analysis and a concomitant politics.