Rebuilding Labour's Foundations
Resolidifying 1
Labourism is often denigrated or dismissed as a labour metaphysic that privileges working class voices over all other voices. I find that criticism a little rich within a culture in which the bourgeois voice predominates and in which there has been a concerted assault on working class life, culture, and concerns. Any privileging of the working class here stems from its social position in the process of production. To the extent that capital remains the dominant social force, then labour – whose exploitation is the origin of capital and which sustains capital – remains an obdurately relevant social force. I think labourism embodies values and practices which are far healthier than those which are prevalent in contemporary society. I, therefore, wish to write a few words in favour of a producer ethos and the culture and tradition of labourism, as something far healthier than the superficialities of the predominant consumerist and commercial culture.
I am aware of the dangers of speaking in the nostalgic voice, here. A nostalgic labourism can serve to conceal rather than reveal, to the detriment of the workers who had to undertake such work and still do. There is no virtue in work as such, work has to be worthy of being done and rewarded accordingly. To value and commemorate the men and women who engaged in such work over the years is neither to romanticize nor rationalize the kind of hard work that damages the health and shortens life-spans, the very opposite. Such work is not 'character-building,' it is life-impairing. My piece is concerned to value the workers, not the work.
At the same time, I do think that there has been a subordination of working class culture, and especially manual labour and physical skill, to bourgeois culture and a concomitant devaluation of labourism. This expresses the shift that has taken place from a producer to a consumer ethic. This cannot but have political consequences. Whilst recognizing the dangers of the nostalgic frame, it is worthwhile pondering answers to the questions put by Eric Hobsbawm in 1984:
'When the last men who have driven and cared for steam locomotives retire - it will not be long now — and when engine-drivers will be little different from tram-drivers, and sometimes quite superfluous, what will happen? What will our society be like without that large body of men who, in one way or another, had a sense of the dignity and self-respect of difficult, good, and socially useful manual work, which is also a sense of a society not governed by market-pricing and money: a society other than ours and potentially better? What will a country be like without the road to self-respect which skill with hand, eye and brain provide for men - and, one might add, women — who happen not to be good at passing examinations?'
E. J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984, pp. 271-2
I have seen such views dismissed on account of their expressing a slave mentality, of privileging the working class – and by implication its subaltern identity under an exploitative capital – over other social groups, and of rationalising work that is damaging to both person and planet. There is no virtue in work, such people say, and all unpleasant work should be automated to give human beings the time for leisure, free time to develop their many-sidedness. There is, of course, truth in this, and Marx himself argued some such thing. But he argued more than this. He first of all identified the working class as the universal class, the class whose exploitation is the source of capitalist domination of society, and hence whose self-emancipation would serve to bring about the emancipation of society as a whole. That's a privileging that is based on material force and structural capacity. Which other social group possesses this? Marx also argued that work would continue in a socialist society. His libertarian critics have condemned his views as 'productivist.' Such critics would appear to condemn all labour and production mediating between humanity and nature as productivist. It is difficult to know what kind of society they are proposing. There is no going back to a hunter-gatherer existence and such a thing is not desirable in any case. Marx's vision of a socialism of citizen-producers is far more realistic and far more desirable than notions of itinerant foragers.
It would take a while to unpack all of the criticisms made above, so I shall say concisely that I find the attitude such views express decadent. That said, I most certainly agree that the release of free time as a result of automation is a good idea, employing machines as energy slaves. But the creation and operation of such machines is all part of the labourist ethic and productive orientation to the world I am seeking to revalue. I call the view decadent to the extent that it equates, in the first instance, to a consumer ethos that is remote from the production of goods and serves. That criticism applies to those who have attained a degree of material comfort within capitalist society that enables them to criticise its economic reproduction. They are complicit only as consumers, not as producers, with their distancing from the process of production fostering the illusion that they are not responsible for its depredations. In the second instance, the view savours a great deal of the aristocratic ethic of ancient Greece, with all work considered to be lowly and contemptible, performed only by those who lack autonomy and hence who are denied the right to have a citizen voice.
This cannot but have political consequences that are debilitating in the short term and deleterious in the long. A tragic politics is opening up in which working class, abandoned by liberal parties hogging the left alternative in politics, are drifting rightwards and into the embrace of the neo-liberal parties with reactionary views which hog the conservative platform in politics. There seems to be no place on this terrain which addresses the core concerns of the working class, combining the socio-economic aspect – labourist, productivist – and the 'traditional' – the warm, affective ties, bonds, and solidarities of community. The terrain is wide open for a recovery of true socialism, one connected to the concerns of the 'common people.'
I am concerned to resist the conflation of socialism with a decadent liberalism. The age has been characterised by a shift from a producer ethic to a consumer ethic, with a concomitant denigration of work and the working class voice. It is in this context that socialism has come to be detached from its working class roots and made the playing of leftish liberals and libertarians concerned with issues of culture, rights, and identities, and issues. I have no issue with such things here, supporting some very strongly, having been a green and environmental campaigner since the 1980s. But I have throughout that same period seen an increasing detachment from immediate working class concerns. I do object very strongly to certain right-wing voices in the US, who I see posting on social media the meme: 'socialists want everything you have except your job.' Something has gone seriously wrong somewhere for socialism to come to be portrayed in such a manner. Somewhere, socialism has dissolved into a liberal leftist politics that has little if any relation to production and socio-economic issues and has thereby lost all touch with 'ordinary' people. As a result, the impression has grown that socialism is all about free gifts and that socialists are work-shy. This is wrong, and profoundly so. In fact, it is an inversion of the truth. The socialist critique targets precisely the parasitism of the capital system and the way it exploits labour and nature as free gifts, pursuing exchange value at the expense of use value. The tragedy is that leftist politics has come to be colonised by bourgeois modes of thought and action and, as a result, has succumbed to the decadent liberalism of a society that is parasitic on the capital system it purports to criticize. This takes the form of a vapid centrism in which 'moderates' function as a licensed left opposition. It's no alternative, and 'ordinary' people, despised when they are not being ignored, know it and are drifting away. Likewise with respect to the self-styled radicals and rebels who focus their politics on pressing various issues against those 'in power.' Such people show little interest in contesting with those 'in power' to reclaim power and restitute it to the social body by way of transformation, in fulfilment of the original promise of working class socialism.
Whether liberals are hypocrites or not is not my concern, but they are decidedly not socialists. Socialists do not shy away from work and from the field of production and labour, quite the contrary. Production and labour are the key mediating terms between humanity and nature, establishing the conditions of human satisfaction and fulfilment. Putting that mediated relation on a healthy basis is the key to a flourishing existence. This entails a productive orientation to the world, as against a consumptive one. Consumption was once considered a deadly disease; it still is. There has been a switch in recent decades from production to consumption, and the effects are apparent. I am a socialist precisely because I seek to realize a society in which that labour which is worthy of being valued and rewarded comes to be properly valued and rewarded, and that labour which impairs and inhibits the human ontology and the natural ecology is not done at all.
There is a need to cut to the human roots that feed politics. There has been a concerted assault on working class culture, politics, and people in recent decades. This assault has been inherently political, stemming from the days when the organised working class had the temerity to fight back against capitalist power and aggression from the late 1960s. The defeat of socialism and the shackling of the trade unions has led to a crisis in the agencies of labour. The split between the political and economic wings of labourism resulted in a public voice that spoke less and less for the core socio-economic concerns of working people. As the years have passed I have seen enthusiasm for Labour and what passes for leftist politics fade away. Working class people are abandoning a politics that they see as having abandoned them. There are political reasons for this, but there are cultural shifts, too.
I see many 'ordinary' people drifting away from what's left of the left, the lifeblood of socialism seeping away with them. It's not that people are against discrete issues, identities, rights, etc., but that they want a politics that is centred on core issues and 'gut' concerns, the things which arise from within life's necessities, bread and butter issues which strike people in the gut, and not ephemera. We need to take politics back to the things that move and motivate 'ordinary' folk in their daily lives and communities. A politics that does that will be rewarded with a landslide, because this social system is empty and its emptiness is palpable.
I know this simply from talking to people in my own community. Working in the community, door to door, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, face to face, I live outside of a political and intellectual bubble. Rather than talk politics with people, I listen to their concerns, hear how they express themselves and on what issues. I lend them a pair of ears and let them talk. I have born witness to the assault on labourism from without and the dissolution of labourism from within, seeing working class culture succumb to the fragmentation and atomisation of wider bourgeois society. I saw precious little defence of this culture from the agencies of its labour representation. I saw little being done by way of socialisation. Instead, those self-same agencies joined in the assault, as if embarrassed by the association with the working class and afraid of all notions of class, lest it raise politically awkward issues of power, control, and resources. The presumption of that retreat was that we are all bourgeois now. Not so.
I have seen 'ordinary' working class people not simply abandoned, neglected, and ignored but actively mocked and abused as feckless, stupid, ignorant, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic. The working class has been treated as a coconut shy, a target to hit whilst advancing the issue or identity of the day (which, far from being the voice of the marginalised, has been every day).
It doesn't surprise me that working class people are drifting away. The only surprise is that it has taken them so long to get the message that their supposed representatives consider them deplorable and despicable. But such is the nature of loyalty and solidarity, virtues which are now rapidly disappearing in an increasingly atomised everyday existence and which need to be called back and solidified. The disconnect between 'ordinary' working class people and liberal-leftist politics is great and growing and, in the end, through continued provocation, will lead to an outright breach. Having made these points many times over the years and having been ignored just as many times, I have had to conclude that liberal-leftist politics is not left at all, only a safe, surrogate, licensed left which serves to give the electorate the pretence of voting between distinct alternatives. I have also concluded that such a politics – and the 'centrist' and 'moderate' part of the electorate it appeals to - doesn't give a damn about the working class. 'Ordinary' people will drift away to who knows where and may never return. Solidarity and loyalty forged over generations will be broken, with the result that all will be atomistic matter to be taken and flogged on the global market.
All I can say to progressive friends is that you are losing or have lost 'ordinary' people, if you ever had them, and that without them your plans and ideals are idle and idealistic, lacking the social and structural means of realization. You may think you can go it alone, but you cannot. The progressive cause is draining social and democratic content for the very reason that its terms, values, and concerns bear less and less relation to those of the working class. The Blair-Brown government was Tory-lite (and actually not that lite in the way it aggressively pushed the neo-liberal agenda further). Then came the Conservative dominated coalition, followed by the disastrous May government, all on the back of an austerity caused by financial liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s, which Labour furthered rather than countered. There ought to have been a massive labourist backlash. There ought to have been a socialist day of reckoning for the free-riders and libertarians. There wasn't. Those who insist that it is working class stupidity to blame need to take a long, hard look at the years and years of neglect and abandonment and abuse of working class people. But I don't see progressives being too inclined to listen and learn, for the reason that there seems to be a deep split in concerns and priorities.
Once loyalty and solidarity forged over years of struggle and experience come to be weakened and broken, they will not be restored easily, if at all. Here is my advice, based on working within the community and speaking to and engaging with 'ordinary' people week after week, year after year – re-connect, speak the language, address the concerns of 'ordinary' people, focus more on issues at the core of everyday social life, 'gut' issues, the issues that move people deep from within and which they talk about on the doorstep, and focus less on – and cease being fixated by - the fringe issues which concern rights, identities, and campaigns that are removed from socio-economic realities, and which take those realities – and their class roots - for granted. It is indicative of the liberal-left's inattentiveness here that these core issues – law and order, community, patriotism, security, immigration, multi-culturalism, the family, traditional values - have come to be identified as conservative. Some views on these issues are Conservative, but to vacate this terrain is to concede it to conservatism. These issues are things of concern to millions of 'ordinary' people. If you dismiss them as right-wing and ignore them, then don't be surprised if working class people abandon what is left of the left for the right, for want of anywhere else to go.
Of course, LGBT rights, climate change, and such like are important, but they do not define the left whatsoever. The values of the left are universal; lose that universality and there is no left. It's been lost, and it's been lost in the heartland, in the core, in the dissolution of labourism. The liberal-left is about an ideological and political correctness on the issues it obsesses about, the extreme left remains dogmatic and sectarian and off-putting, only valuing that section of the working class that identifies as socialist. The working class who fall outside of either out of concern with issues of place dismissed as chavs and 'cloth cap Tories' and worse. Many will go to the right because there is nowhere else for them to go. They know they are despised by what is presented as the liberal-left alternative.
We are now witnessing the bourgeois taking leftist terms such as 'system change' and perverting them to their own ends, which results in a system preservation. So presumptuous are they of their right and privilege that they are not even aware that they are doing it. They engage in protest and civil disobedience and style themselves 'rebels.' This is bourgeois reformism on steroids and it has squat to do with socialism and the working class experience. It is as safe as houses. I condemn it not because it is radical and rebellious but because it is the opposite – basically a long, loud plea for the state to live up to the reformist delusions of the past.