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Peter Critchley

Reclaiming and Re-Grounding Socialism

Updated: Apr 14, 2023

“I remember when we had: a working NHS, free university education, public libraries; an integrated railway service; subsidised railway fares. We had these things, they were normal. And they were taken away from us by the same people who are now calling such things impossible.”

  • Joanne Harris


I fought privatisation and liberalisation tooth and nail all through the 1980s; I saw Blair and Brown's Labour carry the economic neoliberal agenda on, hand-in-hand with globalisation. And in my economic masters at Keele University I argued that the corporatisation of public business and social provision lay behind it all. At a time when these issues should be being contested, the Social Left has been sliced and diced out of existence, class and capital have been scotomized, and what's left of the Left has become a luxury belief class, promoting liberal politics on identities and borders they suffer neither the costs nor the consequences of. The Cultural Left is Corporate Left, extending and entrenching the corporate form in teeth of the opposition of 'ordinary' people. It's a new class war. And it is the end of socialism.


The public square is dominated by people from the same backgrounds, sharing the same views, a large and vocal minority detached from 'ordinary' people. That detachment is a threat to democracy. The contempt for 'ordinary' people is palpable. The technocratic mentality is stalking society from within. The old elite won their power through money; the new elite is openly counter-cultural, taking minority positions on social and national identity, dividing people and destroying cohesion. If you can define yourself as a victim or define yourself as an ally of victims, perpetuating these narratives, then you are a high status individual. The new class has a new language. If you know all the language, white guilt, white privilege, cis and heteronormative. If you can demonstrate to members of the new elites that you are part of this new religion, then you are going to demonstrate that you are a high status individual. But white working class, culturally conservative people who haven't gone to university, those who took the route of apprenticeships, trades, and training - people who are against liberalisation and hypper-globalisation - are people who hold a set of values that put them on the wrong side of the dominant culture. That's the majority of people. Yet the key social and cultural institutions are dominated by the new elite class. People are looking at the dominant institutions and are seeing that not only do those institutions not represent them or express their views and values, but that these institutions are looking down on us as ignorant, feckless, uneducated, bigoted 'gammons' and 'karens' and the rest of it. This is wrong in every sense of the word wrong. Working class people are being vilified and demonized by counter-cultural members of a new elite class concerned to advance and entrench it's own power and privilege. It is the middle class that has deliberately sought to slice and dice human beings up around identity, divide people against one another, destroy the grounds for unity and solidarity, supplanting justice with victimhood and grievance, bringing with it an utterly baneful victimhood hierarchy and grievance and grudge politics. These people have destroyed socialism far more effectively than conservatives ever could.

And as a member of the much abused white working class I'm calling this new class war out. And, as someone who tore through academia, earning three degrees with the highest highest marks, I'm not remotely impressed by the claims of people to constitute some educated intellectual elite. This has nothing to do with intellect and knowledge, it's politics, and a very nasty class politics to boot.

The Cultural Left is no Left at all - it is the cultural wing of the economic neoliberalism that uprooted the socio-economic fabric in the 1980s and 1990s, a continuation in cultural form of the liberalisation, globalisation, and corporatisation of the 1990s. I could end by saying that the contemporary Left is too stupid to see this, but that underestimates what's going on here: that contemporary Left is not socialist, has no loyalty to socialist principles and no connection to the people who make, move, build, and grow things. So it is pointless pointing out the hypocrisy. Take a look at how many people who claim to be progressive work for NGOs and not-for-profit and philanthropic organisations. Progressivism has been taken over top to bottom by the technocratic mentality. They are globalists and see the world in terms of 'networks of experts,' which is to say, people like themselves advancing ends they agree with. They are expert by way of nothing than their own class interest. And that runs directly against the working class. No one should be surprised by the systematic abuse that has been directed against working class people and working class communities. It is class war from above, launched from within dominant cultural institutions, on the part of a new cultural class that owes its power and privilege to the new social relations, and which is insulated from the costs and consequences the principles it promotes, costs and consequences born by working people. Sadly, the environmental movement has been sucked up into the same class politics, environmentalists are just too 'clever' and self-righteous about ends to be able to see it.

Who has the resources and capacity to push technologies to the scale required by extensive and expensive climate programmes? If you can think of an answer other than the corporations I'm all ears.


Beneath a veil of silence, a hugely dramatic and powerful episode of financial repression is ongoing. We have been living through the biggest transfer of wealth in history. It is telling that the new cultural Left is silent on this.




This piece concludes:-

'We must also provide relief to that part of society which is least well equipped to handle these financially turbulent times. Those in the bottom half of income and wealth distribution are bystanders in the great balance-sheet reshuffle. They hold few, if any, financial assets and pay relatively little tax. They have lived the drama of Covid and its aftermath as a shock to jobs and a cost of living crisis. Unlike bondholders or investors, their interests are not represented by lobbyists. Their households are not too big to fail.

But if those who run the system imagine they can be ignored, that they are not systemically important, those elites should not be surprised by the strike waves and populist backlash coming their way.'


We? I have absolutely no faith whatsoever in that "we," given that are the architects and engineers of the corporatisation of public business in the first place. It all sounds like the old "give them reform from above or they'll give you revolution from below" reformism write large on a global scale. These elites don't give a damn. It's a new class war, and the people who make, move, build, and grow things are to be ordered and organised from above, and the 'useless eaters' shown the door. I'm just interested in how much the so-called Left is in on it.



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