Labour’s failure to win
this election is saddening and disheartening for many people. There is a lot of
fear that Corbyn’s loss, and the fact it has been thoroughly personalised by
the media and political classes (and in the minds of the electorate), will mean
the Labour party will move to the right. The fact that the ‘centre ground’ completely
collapsed, having no impact at all, will have of course escaped mainstream
pundits. The worry is, however, that Labour lost because the ‘northern
heartlands’ of working-class voters switched to Tory. This is shocking. But it
is important to remember that this has been long in the making. Working-class
voters have been betrayed by Labour for decades, not least of which, in the
final assessment, by Tony Blair, who the middle-class centrists are now fondly reminiscing
about and calling for a reversion to. (Remember that right-wing Democrats did
the same with George W. Bush after Republicans elected Trump as their nominee.
They have long since lost any conception of relativity in the political
universe.) The Brexit foundering, caused
by the Labour Right’s squealing to adopt a ‘remain’ position, is the primary
reason that has cost them the election in these seats. But as for socialists, there
are deep problems that our movement must face if it really seeks to win back
the working-class voters it has failed to appeal to for decades.
I have been saying, for at
least the last four years, that the major problem the left has to deal with is
articulating a clear class programme to those who need it most and avoiding the
trappings of identity politics and ‘culturalism’ (which I have written extensively
about elsewhere on my blog), because not only are identity politics and culturalism
deeply divisive, the working classes in large part do not care about it as it
has no material effect on their lives. The ‘intersectionalists’ cooped up in
the hollow bastions of postmodern universities have absolutely no concept of
the survivalist mentality of the working class in many of their increasingly
deprived neighbourhoods, and how issues of representation and morality in
popular culture and politics are so far from important to them that they simply
are not worth discussing. It is not that people don’t care about these issues;
they are simply not priorities for people outside urban, university-educated
areas where people also can ‘do it tough’. The real cultural divide has escaped
the rubbish that the increasingly cemented academic/professional culturalists
have come up with in their endless speculative mythopoeia that utilises a bizarre
confluence of racist philosophers such as Heidegger, combined with a ‘liberalised’
racial essentialism, and irrationalist ideas about culture taken from mystical
and pseudo-spiritualist woo and largely ethereal, dematerialised conceptions of
colonisation and ‘indigeneity’. The real divide in terms of culture that the
left has so far failed to exploit is between urban and rural. The urban middle and
working classes quite simply do not speak the same political language as the
rural working classes.
Meanwhile, leftists
continually discredit themselves by making up narratives that simply do not
stick to cover over these patently obvious points. ‘The working class are
racist and are voting in line with an imperialist/racist colour line that has been
held throughout history’ is the most abysmal and stupefying one that is
commonly repeated by academic and cultural leftists. Not only is it politically
paralysing and unsympathetic, but also just fundamentally wrong because it has
emphatically not been held throughout history – only the mythical history the
culturalists have been attempting to rewrite. As Andrew Sayer writes, “The poor
are not clamouring for poverty to be legitimised or valued. They want to escape
or abolish their class position rather than affirm it. At the same time, they
do not merely want more material wealth, but recognition and respect as well,
in terms of their moral worth, and perhaps for certain aspects of their culture.
Class antagonisms are therefore about more than distribution of income and
material goods, but they involve a different kind of recognition from that
highlighted in identity politics, one that is as old as inequality itself.” I
have added emphasis to the word ‘culture’ because what is meant here is not the
ethnicity-laden definition used by academic culturalists. Rather it is the habitus
of rural and working life, too often wrongly stigmatised by today’s prejudiced urban
sociologists as ‘toxically’ masculine, racist and backward.
This authentic celebration
of working life in the rural or quasi-suburban towns and country areas
populated by working-class people is, at the same time, a difficult thing, and
necessary but not sufficient. What is also necessary is a deep understanding of
just how the economy has changed over the past 30 years by what is often called
‘neoliberalism’. Leftists have done their homework on housing and know that an
economy based on property is parasitic, and have done an excellent job in explaining
this to people. However, the problem is that this too is more commonly an urban
issue, and although this is a commendable and well-researched start, we should
be thinking more broadly than this. One of the most important books on
political economy that leftists should read is David Harvey’s The Condition
of Postmodernity. If one reads the sections purely on economics, they will be
astounded at how many of the claims still hold up today in the actions of so
many governments around the world. This claim, in particular, bears important
resonance for us today (p. 185-186):
“It was primarily through spatial
and temporal displacement that the Fordist regime of accumulation resolved
the overaccumulation problem during the lost postwar boom. The crisis of
Fordism can to some degree be interpreted, therefore, as a running out of those
options to handle the overaccumulation problem. Temporal displacement was piling
debt upon debt to the point where the only viable government strategy was to
monetize it away. This was done, in effect, by printing so much money as to
trigger an inflationary surge, which radically reduced the real value of past
debts (the thousand dollars borrowed ten years ago has little value after a
phase of high inflation). Turnover time could not easily be accelerated without
destroying the value of fixed capital assets. New geographical centres of
accumulation – the US South and West, Western Europe and Japan, and then a
range of newly-industrialising countries – were created. As these Fordist
production systems came to maturity, they became new and often highly
competitive centres of overaccumulation. Spatial competition intensified
between geographically distinct Fordist systems, with the most efficient regimes
(such as the Japanese) and lower labour-cost regimes (such as those found in
third-world countries where notions of a social contract with labour were
either lacking or weakly enforced) driving other centres into paroxysms of
devaluation through deindustrialisation. Spatial competition intensified,
particularly after 1973, as the capacity to resolve the overaccumulation
problem through geographical displacement ran out. The crisis of Fordism
was, therefore, as much of a geographical and geopolitical crisis as it was a
crisis of indebtedness, class struggle, or corporate stagnation within any particular
nation state. It was simply that the mechanisms evolved for controlling crisis
tendencies were finally overwhelmed by the power of the underlying
contradictions of capitalism.”
This is the backdrop, the
setting, to the ‘new terrain of politics’ mapped out by the ‘Rust Belt’ in the
United States and the ‘northern heartlands’ in the UK. For the uninitiated, ‘Fordism’
is the highly industrialised post-World War Two phase of capitalism where
assembly-line production was proliferated in the economic ‘centres’ of the
world. The economy was kept afloat by what is often called a ‘virtuous circle’
of mass production and mass consumption. Production declined with the 1973 OPEC
oil crisis and other spikes in raw commodity prices for industrial companies. This
set off a policy programme of inflation, to reduce the value of currency, only this
didn’t work as such strategies relied on capital ‘moving’ to less competitive
areas and building new economies of scale. Capital was still moving in the
early 1970s to countries such as Portugal, the former Yugoslavia, Israel, South
Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Mexico and to some extent India through relocation,
but these economies were too weak to assist the dominant economies of that time
in overcoming their growing trade deficits. Profit stalls, growth stalls, the
balance of payments in the centre turn negative, and thus inflation actually begins
to worsen a national economy’s performance. The fallout from such a marked
balance of payments crisis is deindustrialisation, from which the ubiquity of
free trade agreements has not saved the economies of the ‘centre’ countries.
The bourgeois interpretation
of this remapping of class alliances portrays deindustrialisation as a cultural
event. Indeed, it is in part a cultural event, but one that has a class basis
to it. Yet this was not, and today certainly is not, how it is popularly
portrayed. And who do we have to blame for this? The cultural politics of the
New Left might be a start, but in my view that is wrong-footed: New Left organisations
at the very least had roots in working-class communities and institutional
structures of the left. However, the postmodernist shift in political economy,
with such concepts as the ‘post-industrial society’ characterised by a
disappearance of class allegiances, is definitely to blame. This belief powered
Blairism and New Labour, and was of course a self-fulfilling prophecy. Labour’s
betrayal of the working classes meant, lo and behold, working-class people
stopped trusting in and voting Labour. That is all it takes for class alliances
to break when interpreted in this sense, and deindustrialisation was the
catalyst. Of course, this naïve story was exacerbated in its stupidity by the
cultural left, who assumed that without class in the picture, a ‘left-wing’ or ‘progressive’
battle could be fought on the grounds of identity politics, essentially foreclosing
the pursuit of popular appeal and limiting support to minority groups and other
interested parties. For a long time this liberal wing essentially grafted
itself onto New Labour and, for a time, working-class people supported this.
But this mode of politics was never sustainable. One of the most shocking
results, in my observation, of this decade is the embourgeoisement and stultification
of what were once celebrated as the ‘new social movements’.
An example of one of the
social movements that has suffered greatly over this decade is feminism. I
would take the controversial step of saying that feminism has exhausted its
political capital as a social movement and an ideological force, in the Western
world. This should not be taken as saying there are no gender issues left in
the Western world to deal with, but rather that the ‘feminist movement’ is no
longer a viable vehicle to use to resolve those issues. Over the last ten
years, feminism has undergone a large-scale professionalisation and
corporatisation. It is no longer synonymous with the goals of the left to be a ‘feminist’,
but rather to be a Sheryl Sandberg type, where women ‘lean in’, passively
listen, vote with their feet on issues in the world of popular culture and
commerce, smash ‘glass ceilings’. At the same time, there has been an
unnecessary, shameful and embarrassing split on the question of transgender
rights. Professional feminists who support transgender rights have used a lot
of arguments against their detractors, but rarely have I seen them refer to the
most basic, which is an analogised version of gay rights arguments: transgender
people are human beings and there is no harm in recognising this human part of
themselves. The existence of this ‘debate’ has further delegimitised feminism. This
is notwithstanding the fact that academic feminism, pursued in disciplines such
as the philosophy of science, has done nothing but damage to those fields as
they have amplified idealist and irrationalist ideas about the world and how we
make sense of it, that the wider cultural left often accepts as their ideological
progenitor – standpoint theory being the most prominent example. On these
questions, academic feminists, often with a liberal politics in tow, have made
no attempt to respond to developments in ontology and epistemology, instead continuing
with tired and deeply anti-solidaristic dogma. Socialism and feminism have long
since decoupled, and this is no longer the case of which ‘wave’ of feminism we
subscribe to or the battle between ‘liberal feminism’ and ‘socialist feminism’.
Many of the particularist principles of socialist feminism have long since
become irrelevant as they overlap with the achievements of liberal feminism.
What has not been dealt with, in large part, can be dealt with as part of a
universalist working-class movement. What is additionally outrageous is that Western
feminists have too often been silent, ignorant, or (in the case of those who
take up a reactionary culturalist worldview) even been apologists for the same
problems women and people with marginalised gender identities face in the non-Western
world.
The fact that Corbynism
was ‘socialist’ did not detract from the fact that such a brand of leftism is
perceived as wholly urban and too greatly influenced by the liberal left.
Indeed, the Blairite faction is a ‘liberal left’ without the left part. The liberal
left has done nothing for working-class neighbourhoods and likely never will. The
question however is whether the socialist left can begin to appeal to them, and
how, given that we seem to have lost our ability to do so.
