Towards the end of January this year, just a few days before Andy Burnham was blocked from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election, my Constituency Labour Party debated a motion which concluded by urging all members “to unite behind the leadership that the voters have chosen”.
At the time the motion was discussed, I can recall objecting to the implicit equivalence it entailed between “unity” and “leadership”, which seemed to insinuate an authoritarian attitude to party management. I was suspicious, I said, of the extent to which appeals to party unity can function as a means to smother legitimate dissent, conjuring a moralised image of togetherness that projects the jealous rage of the superego towards any individual who dares to break ranks.
I suggested that we relate the question of unity instead to democratic participation and “Labour values” – a euphemism for the party’s fissiparous ethical tradition – and the motion was accordingly amended by a senior councillor, who also pointed out that voters do not technically “choose” their leader.
Starmer’s leadership style
Appeals to unite behind Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party rang increasingly hollow, and the NEC would surely have spared the party a measure of embarrassment had they not taken the obtuse decision to block Andy Burnham’s route back to Parliament earlier this year.
Starmer repeatedly asserted his leadership style through heavy-handed disciplinary action, suspending or deselecting MPs and sitting councillors as though his political credibility depended on his ability to contain and suppress the Labour left, with its dangerous breaches of economic orthodoxy and solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Rather than pushing disgruntled “factions” into rival parties, we urgently need to traverse the reductive fantasy of unity as a hierarchically determined expression of collective resolve, a ruthlessly stratified image of “us”, and imagine instead more reflexive forms of political culture, rooted in intellectual honesty and democratic pluralism. Before the 1990s, as David Edgerton has quipped, the Labour Party was a vehicle for both protest and power.
Evan Durbin’s political psychology
In searching for a language of democratic pluralism appropriate to the ethical traditions of the Labour movement, I’ve been revisiting the pioneering writings of the mid-twentieth-century economist and Labour MP, Evan Durbin, including his widely overlooked collaborations with the psychoanalyst John Bowlby.
In The Politics of Democratic Socialism (1940), Durbin urges politicians to “look through the psychological microscope” provided by psychoanalysis, so that the institutions of party and government “dissolve into a thousand fragments of personal ambition and patriotism, of secret love and hatred, unconscious purpose and need”.
Notwithstanding the kaleidoscopic variety of human motivation, Durbin locates a continuous division and polarity within the human heart “between the desire to co-operate with, and the desire to destroy, each other”.
The democratic “attitude of mind and heart”, which he associates (in a rather patriotic fashion) with English parliamentarianism, entails a respect for the rights of others, a desire to seek agreement through discussion, and a willingness to compromise. But this relatively cooperative attitude is “rendered impossible”, he says, “by a high degree of internal aggressive tension”, of the kind perpetuated by persecutory repression and denial.
The emotional roots of democracy
Durbin’s political psychology is reminiscent of the opposition between the “democratic” and “fascist state of mind” in the writings of the contemporary British psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas, for whom the possibility of moral judgement depends on the freedom of opposition within the self and across the wider political landscape.
Durbin himself emphasises the “emotional rather than intellectual” roots of democracy as “fundamentally a consequence of psychological health and the absence of neurosis”. But if the existence (and ongoing condition) of a given democracy expresses the emotional “health” of its citizens, the democratic method of “persuasion and compromise” also supports the psychological flexibility necessary for mutual learning and growth.
“A large part of social behaviour, and therefore of history,” as Durbin writes, “can be understood by an examination of the circumstances favouring the dominance” of cooperative or aggressive impulses. Democracy favours cooperation, but it is also permanently vulnerable to the “insanity” of group aggression, sanctioned by fascist regimes as an intoxicating release from the chronic insecurities of capitalist societies: no democracy, Durbin argues, without socialism.
In the face of the Second World War, Durbin even observes that aggression can become “so over-riding… once it has begun that it not only overflows all reasonable boundaries of selfishness but utterly destroys the object for which the struggle began”, swallowing the world in a suicidal despair.
Dispossession and the common good
Consistent with his analysis of the exhilarating power of aggression in public life, Durbin describes a “universal tendency” in party politics “to attribute evil to some person or group of persons”, such as the opposition. “Every evil is loaded upon political opponents”, he says, so that each side can imagine themselves as possessing the moral ideal, in order to justify their aggressive reprisals. One of the main reasons for aggressiveness, says Durbin, is fundamentally “possessiveness”, extending R.H. Tawney’s critique of the “acquisitive society” to the jealous psychodynamics of zero-sum conflict.
Andy Burnham has repeatedly called for a less combative, more cooperative political culture rooted in the dispossession of central government. Instead of using centralised powers to suppress critical autonomy, we should nurture our underdeveloped capacity for cooperation and reasonable debate, even, as Burnham has provocatively suggested, to the point of scrapping the whipping system.
“Unity”, says Durbin, “is founded upon trust and is nourished by compromise.” Akin to the bond of friendship between equals, it “follows after the expression of aggression in harmless forms”, and “springs from goodwill and the recognition of a common good”. Rejecting the “sham” and “superficial” unity of authoritarian dictatorships, Durbin calls for a renewed willingness to cooperate democratically without compromising on a socialist vision of the common good.
A final thought: this “common good”, as Durbin says, must reach beyond “the limits of a racial, or a geographic, or a social group”: no “unity”, then, without universality.
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Tom Fielder is an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. He has a PhD in Psychosocial Studies and is co-editor of Psychoanalysis and Fascism: A Reader (forthcoming). He is political education co-ordinator for the Greenwich & Woolwich CLP, and is seeking to develop a vision of local politics on his Substack: Field Notes Labour.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
