by Andrew Wallace
LEFTISM
gets itself into bogged down into certain delusional mythologies, one
of which concerns the romanticisation of the working work, the heroic
proletarian toilers and tillers of the earth, preordained
by Marxist gospel to act as the historical revolutionary agent to
overthrow capitalism. Marx had been pretty disparaging about peasants
and 'rural idiocy', instead he and his
fellow 19th century socialists felt that a newly emergent class of
industrial labourers would shape up as the critical agents of modernity.
Alas
some 140 years after Marx's death the working classes across the globe
remain as distant from this pre-ordained enterprise as they ever were.
Indeed it seems quite the converse; the working class as hitherto
constituted has played a most passive if indeed not reactionary role.
Leftist
pretensions to scientific rigour can no longer disguise the romantic
fallacy and cognitive bias of 'The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed'.
As Bertrand Russell tartly observed 'Marx was the Wordsworth of the
proletariat; its Freud is still to come."
David Selbourne has dissected this fallacious intellectual
cul-de-sac as:
'prodigies of useless intellectual labour, whose largely metaphysical character is determined
by the metaphysical nature of the problems to which they seek a
solution At the lowest political level, however masked by intellectual
sophistication, they can descend to disappointed abuse of the working
class for having failed to live up to middle-class
socialist expectation. Theories, as we have seen, of 'consumerism', of
the 'deferential' working class, of the 'long catalepsy' of the British
working-class movement, of a class consciousness 'subordinate' in its
very 'texture' to the 'hegemony of the bourgeois',
all have silently inscribed within them the figure of a politically
defective proletarian who is the obverse of the archetypally active
class hero of socialist romance, first cousin to Dyden's noble savage.'
A
truth which can still barely be alighted upon in progressive circles,
'socialism' is a not a product of the working class worldview, instead
it
is a quixotic interloper of sorts, a radical import of déclassé
intellectuals who had reason to take issue with the corrosive workings
and hardships of industrial capitalism. The wage labourers of course
bore the brunt of the exploitative economics that coerced
them to work in the most degrading of conditions and had active
interests in agitating for improvements in their lot. However
'labourism' isn't 'socialism', whereby the former is to be realised in
seeking redress to particular grievances and privations rather
than the latter politically undefined and radical goal of usurping the
settlement of the day. Conservatism presented itself in the passivity of
the general population and the consequent isolation and containment of
dangerous radicals and agitators who threatened
to bring anarchy to social order.
Marxism
has had the unenviable task of confronting this conspicuous turd in a
swimming pool with a battery of impressive rationalisations. Chief
amongst these is the infamous idea of false consciousness which has
been taken as an unfortunate slur on character in the same way ignorance
as a descriptor is taken as an insult even though a concise definition
isn't morally pejorative.
Marxists
have also proved adept at accounting for a multitude of countervailing
tendencies that militate against economic immiseration, such as the
co-opting of 'bourgeois' sociology's 'embourgeoisment thesis' of middle
class expansion, thereby muddying the waters of class conflict via a
bought off 'aristocracy of labour'.
Leftist
intellectuals then have erred in projecting a radical telos onto the
working class arena, ignoring the utilitarian and individualistic basis
to labour politics and the voluntarist and anti-statist ethos that
marked these communities. They have also been oblivious to the deep
structural incorporation of working class material resources into the
capitalist system through mortgage and hire purchase.
However
other sociologists have attempted to sidestep the theoretical travails
of working class conservatism and the 'deviant' class voter by pointing
out the not unsurprising reality of hegemony by way of the deep state ancien regime
of a living museum pageantry (monarchy, parliament, church, armed
forces, public schools, civil service, BBC) which naturally defaults us
all to the dominant culture.
Ironically this confinement to functionalist observation and impotent
commentary rather nullifies Marx's famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach which
implored for more action and less philosophical windbaggery!
It's the culture, stupid
The
class voting sociology (Marxism ‘lite’) of the post war years is now
having to contend with the other belated but uncontroversial driver of
voting
behaviour - culture! As analysists are now recognising, voters are
motivated by cultural issues which may not easily be subsumed within an
economic paradigm and furthermore may actually be oppositional to the
traditional material class interests. Bourdieu's
ideas on social and cultural capital have helped to redress the balance
by giving due prominence to education and the cognitive repertoire that
help to constitute social class in the modern era.
Many
left revisionists had already discerned that traditional class based
politics were becoming problematic with declining working class vote
share
from the 1960s onwards alongside a new counter cultural zeitgeist. With
deindustrialisation poised to pulp much of manufacturing and decimate
organised labour, Hobsbawm and Gorz wrote in unflinching terms of the
likely recalibration of socialist politics.
Gorz talked of moving away from class politics in favour of the 'new
social movements'. This turn to identity and culture politics followed
in the wake of disenchantment with the 'backward' working class. However
such doubling down on the new politics exacerbated
the cultural and intellectual chasm between the liberal campus radicals
and the more socially conservative blue collar workers, leading to a
further breakdown of the previous broad based social alliances between
the classes.
Working class Hobbesian attitudes to the Welfare State
Fern
Brady writing for The Guardian was taken aback by the distinctive
authoritarian attitudes towards benefit claimants, particularly the
unemployed
and disabled. Those without obvious physical markers of disability were
often the target of an inglorious brutalism unveiled in her
interviewees who amply demonstrated
(an)
'internalised...Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality, wanting
benefits for themselves but resenting anyone else getting
a handout...it went in a circle, anger constantly directed at other
victims of the coalition government's Welfare Reform
Act instead of the politicians and policymakers responsible.'
Houtman
et al drawing on Bourdieu’s work discerned the recourse to a
'deserving/undeserving' criteria in relationship to limited
social capital and associated authoritarian attitudes which also were
marked by penalising attitudes for 'out-groups' and fringe communities.
So
ought we really to be surprised at this abundance of working class
authoritarianism? Again Selbourne is illuminative on precisely
this point:
‘...any
form of illiberalism in the human-as worker can come to be discounted
or recycled as an aberration from
the norm of a supposedly instinctive or class, predilection for
progressive, fraternal and democratic solutions to social and economic
problems. That history does not reveal the latter unequivocally, to put
it mildly, is inconvenient. Indeed, illiberalism
is as much an ideological choice of direction as any other and more
explicable, in conditions of insecurity or fear of unemployment, than
many’
In
critically disabusing leftism of its ludicrous 'salt of the earth'
workerism, it is not my intention to deny the very real and toxic nature
of capitalism and I continue to
desire even if without much hope that a saner politics emerge to reign
in the excesses of our times. However we need to face up to the
increasing intellectual bankruptcy of the left. We are now very much at
the whims of the political right who continue to
exploit the post liberal environment in their canny take on working
class sensitivities. 'White van conservatism' and Boris's new 'Workers'
Party' are set to run the show into the distant future.
I have drawn on the following essays/books/articles during the writing of this article:
-
The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, (1937) Bertrand Russell
-
Against Socialist Illusion (1985), David Selbourne
-
Working Class Conservatives: A Theory of Political Deviance (1967), Frank Parkin
-
Social Class in the 21st Century (2015), Mike Savage
-
Farewell to the Leftist Working Class (2008), Houtman, Achterberg & Derks
-
The Forward March of Labour Halted? (1978) Eric Hobsbawm
-
Farewell to the Working Class (1980), Andre Gorz
-
National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (2018), Matthew Goodwin
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1 comment:
I think both Wallace and David Selbourne would do well to read Orwell's 'Politics and the English language'. Much of what Wallace has written here along with the quotes from Selbourne, would be barely comprehensible to most people. It is pretentious academic verbiage that doesn't illuminate at all.
The cloth cap Tory or the Tory in clogs, is a well known archetype within the English working class and I meet them frequently. We've always known there were plenty of Tory voters who lived in council houses and why do you think the Irish socialist, Robert Tressell called his famous book the 'Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist'? You can't read Tressell's book without being fully aware that his socialist character, Owen, (Tressell himself), is largely contemptuous of many of his fellow workers for their political ignorance and apathy, their conservative outlook and the fact that they acquiesce, in their own exploitation.
It is often said of the book that you can identify many of the characters with people you know and that is perfectly true. The same arguments that you find Tressell's working men having between themselves, you can still hear played out to this very day.
However, it would be a great mistake to tar all the working class with the same brush as middle-class academics, who write about them,are inclined to do. Anyone who has been involved in English left politics, will know, that most of the participants are middle-class university types, the sort who make up the bulk of the Labour Party membership today.
Yet, the people who most influenced me politically, were not academics like Dave Selbourne, who I knew as a student, but ordinary working-class people, like the anarchist copytaker, Jim Pinkerton, from Ashton-under-Lyne and the opera buff, Jack Macpherson, who lived in a council house with his wife Margaret, in Dukinfield. Both these men were representative of what I would call, the class conscious working-class, politically savvy, as well as highly cultured.
I think Brexit is a big mistake, for a variety of reasons, and though it seems to have politicised many working class people, who previously may have been indifferent or apathetic to politics and felt powerless, I suspect it will be economically damaging to many of the Brexiteers in the long run. Yet, one can't deny, that with Brexit, the worm has turned; the working-class voter has found a voice and far from feeling impotent and powerless as they used to do, they now know they have some influence and can make a difference. Now the genie is out of the bottle it might be difficult to put it back.
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