The Working Class & Leftist Delusion

 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
• http://www.leninology.co.uk/2010/10/working-class-tory-is-something-to-be.html
• Working Class Conservatives: A Theory of Political Deviance (1967), Frank Parkin
• Social Class in the 21^st Century (2015), Mike Savage
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/12/anti-welfare-rhetoric-families
• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9966722/Welfare-reform-Its-class-war-but-not-in-the-way-youd-expect.html
• 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

Corbyn, Donald Trump & Power in a Democracy

by Brian Bamford

IN the context of the forthcoming Presidential election in the USA it may be worth considering what Bertrand Russell has said in his essay 'Forms of Power'.

Russell writes 'Power may be defined as the production of intended effects', he determines different types of power:  'traditional' which gains respect due to custom; 'revolutionary' which depends upon a large group united by a creed, programme, or sentiment, such as Protestantism Communism, or desire for national independence; and 'naked power' which he sees as psychological and results from the power-loving impulses of individuals or groups, and wins from its subjects only submission through fear, not active co-operation. 

Russell goes on to distinguish differing categories of power such as 'hereditary power';  'Heredity power has given rise to our notion of a “gentleman”.'  Of this type of power Russell argues:  'This is a somewhat degenerate form of a conception which has a long history, from magic properties of chiefs, through the divinity of kings, to knightly chivalry and the blue-blooded aristocrat....  Where power is aristocratic rather than monarchical, the best manners include courteous behaviour towards equals as an addition to bland self-assertion in dealing with inferiors.'

In the U.S. case of Donald Trump; political power, in a democracy, tends to belong to men (and women) of a type which differs considerably from the aristocratic hereditary type.  As Russell says:  A politician like say for example Trump, 'if he is to succeed, must be able to win the confidence of his machine, and then to arose some degree of enthusiasm in a majority of the electorate.'

Clearly the qualities needed for these two stages on the road to power are by no means the same, and, as Russell states: 

'Candidates for the Presidency in the United States are not infrequently men (and perhaps soon women) who cannot stir the imagination of the general public, though they possess the art of ingratiating themselves with party managers.  Such men (and perhaps soon women) are, as a rule, defeated, but the party managers do not foresee this defeat.  Sometimes, however, the machine is able to secure the victory of a man (or even perhaps in this case a woman) without “magnetism”; in such cases, it dominates him (or her) after his election, and never achieves real power.'

Of course, as Russell observes, it is sometimes possible for a man (or perhaps, in the case a woman) 'to create his own machine;  Napoleon III, Mussolini, and Hitler are examples of this'.

In Donald Trump's current case it seems to me that if he is successful in gaining the presidency that though he presently doesn't yet fully control the machine that in the course of time he will seize control, in Hillary Clinton's case I think she is a good example of a machine woman. 

The astute reader will be aware of the curious UK situation of Jeremy Corbyn in this respect is in control of the party machine in so far as he helped to create the Momentum machine, but that he has been singularly unable to enthuse the other vital engine of the party and win over the parliamentary party.  However he proceeds from here, and I think Corbyn win be re-elected as leader of the Labour Party,  it looks like that the Labour Party will go into the next election like an aeroplane operating on one engine.  Aeroplanes can still fly on one engine!

World War I & the job of the historian

Adam Hochschild's interview with Stephen Jackson:              

Renowned author Adam Hochschild’s most recent work To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) presented a heartbreaking tale of the mass slaughter of the First World War and a sympathetic portrayal of those who opposed the conflict. In this Q&A, he gives his thoughts on the book and offers his perspective on the role of the publicly engaged historian. 

Stephen Jackson: What was it about the subject that inspired you to write it, and what would you argue was your most important contribution to the historical discussion on the First World War?

Adam Hochschild: I’ve always been deeply fascinated by those who resisted the First World War, ever since I read a biography of Bertrand Russell as a teenager, and then later Sheila Rowbotham’s work on Alice Wheeldon. To have had the courage to speak out so boldly when there was such jingoism in the air deeply impressed me.  I also found a very strong echo in those times of something I had been deeply involved in:  the movement against the Vietnam War here in the United States.  Then, too, a war divided members of families from each other; hence I was intrigued to see the divided families of Britain in 1914–1918, and used that as a narrative structure for my book.  In the Vietnam era, too, we had an epidemic of government spying on citizens—when much later, using the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get the records of surveillance on me by the FBI, CIA and military intelligence, they amounted to more than 100 pages – and I was a very small fish in that movement.  Hence it fascinated me to read the government surveillance records from Scotland Yard and military intelligence on the UK dissenters of 1914–1918.  I felt I was seeing at work the same mindset as that of the FBI agents who reported on me.

 

I’m by no means the first person to write about those brave British dissenters.  I certainly hope my book, and those of others, helps put them in the foreground as we remember the war. Paradoxically, most people today would agree that the First World War remade the world for the worse in almost every conceivable way, yet all our traditional ways of remembering it – parades, monuments, museums, military cemeteries – celebrate those who fought and not those who refused to fight.

 

Stephen Jackson: In the years since the publication of the work, what sort of feedback from the scholarly community and the general public did you receive?  How do you think that contemporary events, especially a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, shaped the response to your work?

Adam Hochschild:  I’ve always believed that you can write for a general audience and at the same time meet the highest scholarly standards for accuracy and the documenting of sources. This book got good reviews and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; at the same time many university history departments have been kind to me.  I was writer-in-residence at the history department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst this past spring and will be doing a speaking tour of some half dozen campuses in the US and Europe this fall, talking about the war.

 

I’ve also heard from several descendants of people mentioned in the book – one of the great pleasures of writing history, I’ve found.  And sometimes, unexpectedly, I’ve heard from other people as well who are connected to this patch of history.  After the book came out, an American mining company official whom I’d met a few years before in a godforsaken village in eastern Congo, wrote me that in 1917 his grandfather, a conscientious objector, had been hanged in effigy in his home town in Iowa.

 

And yes, I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show what tragic mistakes one can make by not studying history more closely.  How similar the illusion of President George W. Bush when he landed on that aircraft carrier in 2003 in front of the sign 'Mission Accomplished' to the illusion of Kaiser Wilhelm II when he told his troops in August, 1914:  'You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees.'

 

Stephen Jackson: This year marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.  What do you think is or should be the place of conscientious objectors and leftist anti-war activists in the public memory of World War I?

Adam Hochschild: None of these people were perfect, but on the central issue of their time, they were essentially right, and should be honored.  Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the war to die – 5 years ago, at 111 – said it best: the war 'was not worth it.  It was not worth one life, let alone all the millions.'

 

Stephen Jackson: How can scholars teaching undergraduate or graduate courses in British History or Modern European History incorporate non-traditional themes such as anti-war activism into lessons on the Great War?

Adam Hochschild: There are rich primary sources: the writings and speeches of outspoken war opponents, like Bertrand Russell and E.D. Morel in Britain, or Jane Addams and Eugene V. Debs in the United States.  Periodicals that these anti-war movements published. Letters and memoirs by war resisters who went to prison, not just in the U.S. and Britain, but in other countries as well. I hope someone is thinking of pulling a collection of material like this together into a reader!  And there are fine secondary sources as well. That list could be a long one, but I’ll just mention Jo Vellacott’s Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War, a careful, well-written book I learned a lot from.

 

Stephen Jackson: The 19^th century German historian Leopold von Ranke famously said historians can 'merely tell how it really was,' and should not judge the past nor attempt to give moral guidance for the present.   To End All Wars, and your work more generally, compellingly does just that. How would you describe your underlying philosophy for writing history?  What role do you think that the historian — as an historian — should play in engaging in contemporary political and ethical discussions?

Adam Hochschild:  Well, I’m certain in favor of telling it how it was – and with the highest possible standards of accuracy. In real life, seldom are one’s heroes totally heroic or one’s villains totally villainous.  In To End All Wars, for instance, the fiery pacifist Charlotte Despard had a kind of knee-jerk far-left reaction to everything that would have made her difficult to talk to, although I agree with her about the war.  But her brother, Field Marshal Sir John French, though he exemplified the worst type of unthinking generalship in the field, seems to have been a warm-hearted person of great charm whom it would have been delightful to spend an evening with. One should enjoy such paradoxes and not try to deny them.

 

But beyond that, I think sometimes an historian can provide something that’s relevant to contemporary political discussions without having to hit people over the head with it. In my book, for example, I don’t talk about the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.  But whenever I give a talk about the First World War, the first question anybody asks is:  do you see an analogy?