Red Pepper launched in 1994, the year Tony Blair became Labour leader. It was also a moment that marked the end of a process that had begun in the late 1960s: the transition from a ‘Fordist’ to a ‘post-Fordist’ economy.
‘Fordism’ was the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s term for the new type of capitalist society he saw emerging in 1930s America, wherein millions of workers were subject to the discipline of the assembly line but living standards rose as industrialisation progressed. Drawing on Gramsci in the 1970s and 80s, radical economists such as Michel Aglietta and Robin Murray argued that Fordism constituted a distinct ‘regime of accumulation’: a particular way of organising capitalist production that handed considerable power to governments, manufacturers and unions.
As Gramsci had anticipated, this produced a post-war society characterised by unprecedented affluence for ordinary people but also by a strong tendency towards conformism and hierarchy. In a country such as Britain, women, youth, queer people and immigrants were all expected to know their place.
The ‘post-Fordism’ that such thinkers saw emerging in the 1980s marked the shift to an economy organised around retail and services. In the post-Fordist world, everyone would be encouraged to express their individuality but mostly by way of purchases: from fashion to real estate, people would define themselves through buying stuff more than through work or politics.
Deindustrialisation went hand-in-hand with the growth of a sophisticated consumer economy and an increasingly tolerant and pluralistic culture. But this growing cultural diversity also came alongside a general weakening of bonds of solidarity. For New Labour, in this world there could be no viable form of socialism.
New epoch
Since then, a new and distinctive form of capitalism has emerged that shares some features of post-Fordism but differs from it radically in other ways. It was Robin Murray who first suggested to me that since around 2005 we had left post-Fordism for ‘the era of platforms’. In our recent book Hegemony Now, Alex Williams and I have suggested that what Nick Srnicek has called ‘platform capitalism’ should be understood as a distinct new regime of accumulation. Ours is an epoch in which the leading institutions of global capitalism are no longer banks and private equity funds, but the big tech companies with their vast monopoly platforms: Google, Amazon, Meta and so on.
While many of the challenges facing the 1990s left have only intensified, online communication has at least made possible mass collective movements of a kind that seemed to have completely disappeared in the 1990s and 2000s. The environmental, anti-globalisation and anti-war movements of that period never achieved the levels of mobilisation we have seen for progressive politics since 2015 (despite one brief day of extraordinary mass protest against the invasion of Iraq in 2003). Collective politics is back, even if it is more fluid and volatile than ever.
The danger of far-right propaganda is more acute but so is our capacity to reach millions with our own ideas
At the same time, we’re all becoming increasingly aware of the damage being done to people’s mental health by social media platforms that have been designed to be harmful but profitable. When app designers deliberately imitate addictive gambling technologies, seeking to maximise ‘user engagement’, governments simply encourage them.
The latest wave of AI hype from Silicon Valley has included frankly absurd claims about the likelihood of large language models (essentially glorified search engines) being close to achieving sentience, but little mainstream reporting ever questions such assertions. These are striking examples of how far Silicon Valley firms now set the global agenda for business, media and the political class.
Different challenges
The major challenges for today’s left are not wholly novel, any more than capitalism itself. But they take on different forms in this new context. The vast concentrations of power now represented by global tech can clearly only be countered by political strategies that can harness the creative power of devolved networks and the special capacities of governments: ‘in and against the state’. The danger of far-right propaganda is more acute than ever, but so is our capacity to reach millions with our own ideas.
There has never been a greater need for creative independent media platforms and publications, open to new thinking and informed by radical principles, that can address contemporary issues from socialist, green, feminist, anti-racist and libertarian perspectives. What we need is news, analysis and commentary from a non-sectarian and radically democratic perspective, taking an approach that can grasp the novelty of new developments without succumbing to the millenarian optimism of Silicon Valley boosters or the crippling pessimism of ‘techno-doomers’.
Despite its dangers and disasters, the online world has become one in which ideas around intersectionality, anti-colonialism and ecology continue to synthesise with libertarian socialism in new and productive ways. Over the past 30 years, Red Pepper has persisted as a crucial node in the networks making this possible. Long may it continue.
