Johann Hari

I thought I’d offer a few reflections on the comments I’ve received about my piece on private tyrannies. (Thanks to everyone who comments on this site, by the way; the threads are often really informative and educative. I love reading them). I think these comments in particular actually have a lot to show us about the debate – how do we oppose tyranny? – that has dominated this blog and the divisions on the left over the past few years.

Let’s start with this basic point around which we should be able to build a consensus: All power exercised over an adult human being – whether it’s by the state, a corporation or anything else – should be accountable to that person in some clear way. Power without accountability is the root of all tyranny.

This shouldn’t be a left/right issue; all of us in democratic societies – whatever our views on social issues or whatever – should be able to oppose tyranny. We stand on a shared democratic ground; it is a moral duty for everybody to secure and then expand that ground. So do we?

Here's a shameful truth: All parts of the political spectrum have been selectively blind to at least a few tyrannies. Almst everybody has been prepared to consign some of their fellow human beings to a living hell at some point. We all know that some parts of the left were blind to pro-Soviet tyrannies for decades; some are blind to Islamofascist (or just plain anti-American) tyrannies now. It is to the credit of many conservative commentators – from Andrew Sullivan to Michael Gove – that they condemn these apologists.

Yet their condemnation of tyranny is only partial. It is only the left today – from George Monbiot to (yes) Noam Chomsky – that talks about the issue of private tyrannies - by which I mean those corporations which operate outside the boundaries of democratic structures.

Corporations have directly, blatantly subverted advanced democracies like the United States by buying public policy. This offence against democracy is not only tolerated by the American right; they actually cheerlead for it, and argue – preposterously – that capping massive corporate 'donations' to political parties is a restriction on free speech.

The global consequences of those private tyrannies unchecked by democratic governments are even worse. Let me give just one example among thousands. A handful of fantastically rich pharmaceutical companies are - right now - using unaccountable, undemocratic World Trade Organisation rules to prevent millions of dying black people from making the generic AIDS drugs that would save their lives.

This is absolutely not a matter of failing to give them the drugs, a lack of charity. No; Big Pharma is actually stopping them from making the drugs for themselves, and using state power that they have bribed and bought to do it. It is the prioritisation of the profits of a few very rich people over the lives of millions.

If this is not tyranny – condemning millions of people to a horrible premature death through political institutions completely unaccountable to them – what is? Yet I know of almost no figures on the right who condemn this tyranny; most actually support it.

One of the people who posted on this site illustrated neatly the complete blindness of the right to the question of private tyranny. Gary Gunnels says, “There is nothing more free or democratic than keeping government's paws away from the economic liberty of the individual.”

It’s a comment one often hears on the right. The only tyranny he can see is state tyranny. He simply doesn’t see the victims of private tyranny, like the people denied protease inhibitors in South Africa. Why, they are – on his model – simply enjoying freedom and democracy. And because dying black people don’t feature very often in a press owned by – you guessed it – corporations, he probably finds it dissonant and strange for somebody to talk about them as victims of private tyranny.

(And yes – as a side-note anticipating a possible objection to this point – of course these private tyrannies usually require the acquiescence of states. South Africa’s democratic government has been fighting – with the complete support of its people – against the WTO prohibitions, but the US and other leading states have been backing the pharmaceutical companies every step of the way. That is because their policies have been bought. It’s that simple. Look at the levels of financial donations from Big Pharma to the US Parties and give me another explanation for US policies. So private tyrannies become tyrannical by buying up some of the trade policies of democratic governments. Does that stop them being private tyrannies because they operate by piggy-backing on and manipulating state power? Of course not.)

I believe that the only way to counter both state and private tyranny is through social democracy. Social democracy is, broadly, the belief that markets are an essential tool for generating wealth, but they are only one part of the social mix among many. Alongside markets there should be a strong democratic state regulating markets and counteracting their most destructive effects by introducing, for example, environmental regulations and redistributive taxation to the poor.

This is hardly pie-in-the-leftist-sky: Britain was a social democratic state between Atlee and early Thatcher; it is (very) slowly becoming one again. Germany remains a social democratic state today, although it is finding it hard to remain one in a global system structured to reward extreme neoliberalism.

Gary Gunnels once again could not understand this case for social democracy. He thought I was saying that “capitalists are apparently just too stupid to understand leftists and collectivism generally.” Nowhere in the piece did I talk about ‘capitalists’; it’s interesting that he sees the right as synonymous with capitalism and the left as synonymous with its complete annihilation – as though the left consisted solely of closet supporters of Kim Jong Il. In fact, almost the entire left today believes in highly regulated capitalism, or social democracy.

Only a few people seem incapable of understanding this. They are the hard right like Gunnels and the hard left. I’m grateful for Raoul (who I like even though I disagree with great chunks of what he says) for pointing me in the Harry’s Place discussion thread towards the Medialens message board comments on this piece. (I stopped reading it back in the early summer because it wound me up too much).

I’m not surprised many of the Medialens posters couldn’t understand what I was saying; they seem to mostly consist of the remaining scraps of the left who believe not in highly regulated social democratic capitalism but in the destruction of markets entirely. Some, like Chomsky, believe in anarchism; others, like Pilger, believe in Castro-ite revolutionary socialism; some, like the Davids who run Medialens, seem to believe in a Buddhist-pacifist feudalism (so far as they reveal their politics at all).

Somebody called Eric at Medialens quotes my statement, "Corporations need to be put back into a social democratic cage, and fast." He then comments, “As though they've only just recently escaped, like tigers from a travelling circus? And what on earth is a social democratic cage? Utter bollocks masquerading as a contradiction in terms? I myself like dropping a tab every now and then, given the right conditions, but I certainly wouldn't buy any from this guy, he's f****d!”

Corporations operated within a democratic context in Britain – to give the example I know best because I live here – for many decades. They were reined in by a democratic state that was not afraid to regulate their labour, environmental and social excesses. Yes, they operated within “a social democratic cage”. (That’s what the phrase means, Eric).

Corporations behaved with utter contempt for human life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (just look at what the British East India Company did for evidence) but they were then – for a brief period – contained, at least in the domestic sphere, by our internal democracy. The market’s capacity to generate wealth – essential for a productive society – was therefore held in harmony with other social needs. The power of corporations was made legitimate, because they were accountable to a democratic government which was in turn accountable to us all.

Corporations have once again shaken free of this cage. As markets increasingly operate not at the level of the nation-state but at the level of the globe (a process with some positive consequences, by the way, as well as negative ones), it is very hard for nations to regulate them alone. We cannot go back to the old solutions at the level of the nation-state; corporations would simply withdraw to other, more bribeable and intimidatable states.

We need instead to construct a European and ultimately global social democratic cage to contain them. That doesn’t mean eliminating global markets; it means harnessing their best qualities while regulating their bad consequences.

When I hear people writing about “the death of the left” and saying the left has no mission but to acquiesce in US neoconservatism, I shudder. This is a clear mission for the left: opposing private tyranny through social democracy, and opposing state tyranny by advocating the overthrow of fascist dictators like Saddam.

A decent left should be opposed to both forms of tyranny. Now that would distinguish us from both the Islamofascist-loving Galloways and the corporation-loving neocons. That’s a left worth fighting for.