Political science "Overton window": on education and agitation [Archive]

Die Neue Zeit

29th March 2012, 02:17

A few days ago I read some news article mentioning an Overton window, so I went to Wikipedia and checked this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

At any given moment, the “window” includes a range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too “extreme” or outside the mainstream to gain or keep public office. Overton arranged the spectrum on a vertical axis of “more free” and “less free” in regard to government intervention. When the window moves or expands, ideas can accordingly become more or less politically acceptable. The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:

Unthinkable
Radical
Acceptable
Sensible
Popular
Policy

The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public so that the window either “moves” or expands to encompass them. Opponents of current policies, or similar ones currently within the window, likewise seek to convince people that these should be considered unacceptable.

Other formulations of the process created after Overton's death add the concept of moving the window, such as deliberately promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas, with the intention of making the current fringe ideas acceptable by comparison. The "door-in-the-face" technique of persuasion is a similar concept.

I find this very informative in light of some spontaneist, ad hoc-ist, ultra-left discussion in the Politics forum deriding the notion of political "preaching" in any way, shape, or form.

Die Neue Zeit

4th May 2012, 04:12

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=912

Illusion

My response (‘One fight, inside and out’, April 12) to Dave Vincent on the Labour Party (Letters, April 5) has called forth two letters on the other extreme of the argument (April 19), arguing for - at a minimum - more emphasis on socialists working in the Labour Party than my article proposed. Kevin Hind’s and Arthur Bough’s arguments are, however, very different. I don’t have time to write a full article this week, so I respond by letter to comrade Hind this week and will respond to comrade Bough next week.

A small factual point is that Kevin Hind mentions the Independent Working Class Association as having “built solid working class support from the bottom up”. In reality, the website of the IWCA in Oxford, where the organisation has had elected councillors, has not been updated since 2010 and no IWCA candidates are standing in this week’s local elections. The IWCA’s ‘non-socialist’ and ‘bottom-up’ model proves to have produced ephemeral results. The organisation’s national website (www.iwca.info) has been sporadically updated since 2010, but in essence with the sort of grand-theoretical commentary and argument small left groups commonly do. We in the Weekly Worker do this sort of work, too, and I do not mean to denigrate it: it is just that it provides more evidence of the failure of the IWCA project to produce something beyond the usual sort of left group.

Comrade Hind argues for two critical traditional claims of the Labour left. The first is that “To gain these concessions from the bourgeoisie, Labour must actually be in power either at local or national level - and preferably the latter. Therefore, any action which undermines the ability of Labour to gain power can also be seen legitimately as a shot in the foot for the working class and the left as a whole.”

The second is that “It should also be remembered that MPs’ voting records do not necessarily reveal an MP’s true views on legislation. Some Labour MPs are better described as ‘pragmatic Blairites’ - as opposed to ‘ideological Blairites’ - in the sense that they may not support the New Labour neoliberal agenda wholeheartedly, but are willing to go along with it for political purposes. Would it not be better for Labour left and left-of-Labour activists to simply pile pressure on vulnerable MPs rather than reject them as being lost causes?”

The first point is the fundamental one. It is simply not true that concessions can only be won if you form a government. Take, for a single example, the legalisation of trade unions: delivered initially in 1871 by a Liberal government. The 1871 act was overturned by an “ardent Tory” (his own words) judge, J Brett; then reinstated by a Tory government in 1875. There are numerous others more recently.

The converse of this is that if, in opposition, you adapt yourself to the currently dominant ideas in order to achieve office, in office you will have to implement the dominant ideas, and any concessions will be both timid and secretive: the character of Gordon Brown’s very limited improvements to welfare under New Labour. In contrast, Tory oppositions seek to shift the political agenda in their favour from opposition. The result is a ‘ratchet effect’ in which politics can only move to the right: the post-1975 Wilson-Callaghan government leads to Thatcherism, the Blair-Brown government to the Con-Dems’ plans to reverse 1945 by privatising or ‘charityfying’ education and health.

Hence, what is needed and is missing in the labour movement is an active intervention to attempt to shift the political agenda in the interests of the working class - conducted from opposition.

It follows that the second point is almost the reverse of what is needed. ‘Ideological Blairites’ might be persuaded by the course of events that they are wrong. But ‘pragmatic Blairites’ censor themselves (and seek to censor everyone else) for reasons that are at bottom careerist. No doubt some ‘ideological Blairites’ ought to be in the Tory Party and will in due course find their way there. But the ‘pragmatic Blairites’ (and their equivalents in the far left) are the real poison which blocks any attempt to shift the agenda to the left and hence allows the Tories and their backers to say to the working class: ‘What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is also mine.’

This, in turn, is also part of why what is right now needed is a minority communist party which has a serious attitude to the Labour Party and left-right fights in it - not merely Marxists working as individuals in the Labour Party. Labour has always been prone to equivalents of ‘pragmatic Blairism’ (Lib-Labism, and so on), but always used to have outriders to its left working to shift the political agenda. Unfortunately, the Morning Star is too subservient to the trade union bureaucracy to do so, and the groups of Trotskyist origin are currently both too fragmented and too much committed either to the illusion of creating a ‘new old Labour Party,’ or to ‘direct actionism’ without much politics.

Mike Macnair