I was intrigued to learn that Julie Burchill started to follow me on Twitter. It took me by surprise. I don't do much on there except post on Dante and Llandudno Ladies football team. But I have a certain affinity with Julie and so followed her back. She's a working class woman who writes like a dream, or nightmare if you are on the receiving end. She cuts through the nonsense of contemporary politics, and in her new article challenges the constant portrayal of the working class as feckless, stupid, bigoted, racist, and phobic in every respect. This needs to be done on a daily basis. The working class has been abused for far too long. She knows this for what it is - the old middle class sport of despising, devaluing, and dehumanising the working class for all the right reasons, in order to make the mean, spiteful, vindictive, divisive, and hypocritical look far more enlightened, progressive, and nice than they actually are. This has needed saying for a long time now. This new cultural class is mean, spiteful, vindictive, divisive, and hypocritical to its miserable core.
"Smearing working-class people as racist is a sick joke. Black and white Brits have been friends, lovers, partners and neighbours for generations. It is the elites who are obsessed with race and division." Julie Burchill is right - it is the cultural elites, bourgeois to their rotten core, that took the decision to slice and dice human beings up according to identity, to parcel up humanity within a grievance hierarchy, and turn people against one another on the basis of favoured and preferred victims. The Left in politics is organised around universality and solidarity. The worst thing that the Left could have done, intellectually and politically, is to have sliced and diced humanity up according to irremediable identities – that's precisely what the cultural Left did. One could almost come to the conclusion that the educated bourgeois cultural elite that now predominates in cultural instititions is perfectly at home with the new phase of capitalist development, eating up a world that has been made plastic, malleable, and manipulable. And the rest of us ae expected to sit in silence as 'ordinary' people are abused on a routine and systematic. As an 'ordinary' person, I'm not too ordinary. I went from the building sites to academia, and more than held my own in that environment. I saw these educated elites and how they work in academia. I thought them to be power-crazed intolerant totalitarian bigots then, and see that's precisely how they behave now they have become culturally dominant. They are people whose incoherent and meaningless language was designed to destroy standards checking the truth claims of all, so as to leave the space clear for the reimposition of unity on purely arbitrary foundations - theirs. As a member of the working class I might be many things, but one thing I'm not is stupid, certainly not in comparison with these people. Our meetings were always ones of stony silence expressing a mutual contempt - we both knew each other to be the enemy. They won the culture war and now have a free hand to call the working class anything they like in order to entrench and extend their power. I called them out at the time, swam against the tide, but never took a backstep intellectually or politically. I was never remotely impressed by them, either intellectually or politically, and never intimidated. I hope the working class recovers its voice and its confidence after decades of being subjected first to concerted economic and political assault and now cultural assault. Because this mediated world needs to come back to sanity and senses quick smart.
The British working class is what real anti-racism looks like It is the elites who are obsessed with race and division. https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/04/02/the-british-working-class-is-what-real-anti-racism-looks-like/ As for Burchill's article, it's true. It's the middle classes that have hardly mixed, that live in seclusion with all the 'nice' people of their own kind. The working class kids went to school, especially in London, with all nationalities, lived in the same neighborhood with all kinds. Different skin colour isn't new to working class community and isn't some kind of novelty. This is purely the invention of the middle class. Pondering the Communist Party of Britain statement against gender ideology this week, I'm hoping that the Left is finally waking up the fact that identity/grievance politics is as incompatible with socialism as it is with freedom. I've been fighting a long, lonely war on this since the late 1980s and, by this stage, am inclined to give up the Left or any kind of politics in this terrain as beyond redemption. The greatest task of the age is to get back in touch with the human roots that feed politics, restore the social and moral conditions for doing politics well, and to cleave to reality against those who took the anti-realist route. Proud to be an essentialist. There were precious few of us who were brave enough to take that stand in the 1990s. We were insulated against the inanities and insanities that went viral in the decades after.
Here is what is really going on - the cultural Left is dominated by educated bourgeois people who possess a degree of material comfort, evem considerable affluence. These people can afford to advance principles at a safe distance from their costs and consequences. It is the working class, bounded in place, who bear the brunt of others virtue signalling. For a long time now, the working class seeking to protest the downside of liberalisation and globalisation have been labelled 'ist' and 'phobic' in some way. I'm hoping that those days are about to end. If there is a future, it lies with the proles.
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