The working-class and the left
It’s easy to write a post like this and invite a barrage of accusations of hypocrisy. I’ve always been open about my background. I’m middle-class, full-stop; when I was growing up, my mother lectured at Salford University, and my father worked in economic regeneration at Sheffield Council.
My family did go through “financial hardship” (for want of a better phrase) for a number of years when we were based in Sheffield; but I was too young to remember this, unlike my brothers who spent years having clothes bought from jumble sales. In any case, it was for very different reasons than the thousands of workers in that city thrown on the scrapheap by Thatcherism’s vandalism of British industry: my dad spent years as a full-time official of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, and fomenting revolution doesn’t pay the bills.
Like most middle-class people, I can only remember financial security, even when my dad lost his job with eight hundred others at the fag-end of Tory rule. Long before I was self-consciously political, I was aware of the contrast in my circumstances to those of most of the people I grew up with.
So let me phrase my argument like this. There are too many people like me on the left. Socialists, like myself, often talk about a crisis of working-class representation; but that’s a phrase, I would argue, that could equally be applied to the left.
It’s worth fleshing out what I think the left is for. In my view, its sole purpose is the emancipation of working-class people, and all else flows from that. That might seem a bit cocky, because the left predates the modern working-class by quite a few decades: it emerged as a force in the French Revolution, and referred to the radical delegates seated on the left of the Estates-General. But the left emerged as a mass force in the Industrial Revolution as the political wing of the working-class movement.
There are issues that the left must be at the forefront of championing: like equality for women and gays, or opposing war, for example. But these issues by themselves do not define us as ‘left-wing’, even if we have a left-wing take on them. A good liberal will support gay rights, and a maverick Tory like Simon Jenkins can oppose wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the fight for working-class representation and emancipation that makes us ‘the left’.
It’s an obvious point that the working-class has changed dramatically, and the left has to adapt to that. The fall of Western industrial capitalism took with it secure, unionised, skilled jobs, passed from generation to generation; and this ravaged communities in which the dock, the factory or the mine represented the beating heart. We’ve now got a new, growing ‘service-sector working class’ marked by job insecurity, relatively poor wages, high levels of part-time and temporary work, and very low levels of union membership. You cannot really have communities that are based around the supermarket or the call centre. We need a class politics relevant to today’s working-class.
But it is this ‘new’ working-class that is, all too often, missing in the ranks of the working-class. Public sector workers are often represented (and I can take as an example the Labour Representation Committee, on whose National Committee I serve) as indeed they should be as an important part of the working-class. But the 80% of workers who work in the private sector are, all too often, missing. This is in part because trade unionism has been driven out of most of the private sector: union density is now just 15%, compared to over half of the public sector.
It is crucial that the left is properly representative of the working-class it exists to, well, represent. If it fails to do so, it will be in no position to articulate the issues that are most important to its base. If I think of how much focus there is on issues such as Iraq (which I marched against repeatedly), in my view there is nowhere near as much attention to class issues such as housing, low pay, and working conditions. Our priorities are often wrong, and that has a lot to do with the social make-up of many of our activists.
The decline of class as the central focus of the left is, in part, a legacy of historical events. After the defeat of the Miners’ Strike – a tipping point for the British labour movement – history no longer seemed to be on the same side as the class struggle. But history was still blowing in the direction of radical causes such as gay rights and women’s liberation. Many of these causes became the preoccupation of left-wing activists, often with class stripped out.
Most newly radicalised activists today have no experience of a powerful labour movement, or of experiencing large numbers of workers involved in struggles. Little wonder that the idea of ‘class struggle’ seems, at best, abstract to many of them: a relic of an earlier age. That’s why ideas like generational conflict have filled the vacuum.
Ensuring that working-class people are properly represented in the left’s ranks won’t completely address these problems: but it will certainly help.
One of the most disturbing elements of the left’s retreat from class has been how the far-right has exploited it. The BNP – before its increasingly apparent (and welcome) implosion – was so successful because it offered reactionary solutions to working-class problems, often using perversions of old-fashioned community politics. As one BNP activist, Jonathan Bowden, taunted: “Labour’s treacherous lies and cardinal betrayal of the working classes is obvious to all. But the really good news is that the radical left have all but vanished from defending the working-classes.”
There has, recently, been a reawakening on the left about class. I don’t support the Blue Labour initiative – which I’ll go into soon – but I do welcome the fact it has opened up discussion about class.
There desperately needs to be a refocus on the left’s historic mission as the political wing of the working-class. And that comes back to working-class representation. It doesn’t mean purging people like me – I think we’ve still got a role to play – but we will never prosper as a genuine voice of working-class communities unless we reflect those we exist to represent.
And if we don’t do it – well, the new populist right are circling like vultures.
The main problem is that so much of the Lefts activities focus on discussion of obscure political points that are only known to those who went to university or have dedicated large amounts of time to politics. These discussions are, right now at least, mostly about what the ideal form of direct action is.
This means that the majority of the working class are first excluded from being consulted about what their preferred form of action is and then excluded from being involved in the action that has been decided. If we take action of our own and it does not fit with the Lefts plan it is instantly picked apart, if not outright condemned as a ‘distraction’ or ‘not the right way to go about things’. its all rather demoralizing.
am
April 28, 2011 at 12:31 pm
This post is a great admission of what i have thought for some time – namely that firstly the Left, and subsequently the wider Labour Movement has been largely ignoring us in the growing sectors of the working class.But class is not all that rigid if you grew up in the lower-middle, as I did. Due to various reasons, I have spent most of my life since school in the working class, generally on below the median wage, with little workplace control, and definitely no union representation. In the Hospitality trade, the scope for unionisation is very little indeed, blacklists still operate, and to get a reasonable paying job you have to toe the line…
Clem the Gem
April 28, 2011 at 12:46 pm
V good piece Owen, and really in line with my own thinking (and attempts at practice).
I think your point about the difficulty in establishing a sense of working class community around the call centre is an important one, and the key obstacle to re-establishment of working class identity for the 21st century.
Organisationally, the geographically rather than workplace-focused Trades Councils remain the best way of overcoming this problem, though their purpose has never clearly enough articulated, and of course the now-weakened link to the Labour Party is important (though not, I’d argue, the top priority). Re-energising my own local Trades Council is certainly high up my personal activism agenda at the moment (as well as documenting the experience), though it shouldn’t be seen as a total replacement for the hard graft needed to re-unionise the low wage private sector you rightly identify as the key lost battleground – it’s more an organisational support base from which to get on with this hard graft.
I think you also do well to identify the key strategic (though well-meaning) mistake of the labour movement in the late 70s/80s, influenced somewhat by post-modernist stuff then emerging about the end of class as an objective factor,, blah de blah.
paulinlancs
April 28, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Being middle class is not a problem – it is being middle class and failing to recognise there is a class issue in this country that is a problem.
The real difficulty is grasping the disadvantages heaped on people who are working class, who are poor.
If you can’t grasp the impact of insecurity and the power others have over your life because of that economic insecurity, an insecurity that is not temporary, the poor judgements of ability and behaviour, or morals instantly bestowed upon you as soon as you reveal your accent, your post code, your background, then you’ll never understand or admit there is such a thing as the working class.
I think you understand far better than many middle class young men.
Ellie
April 28, 2011 at 1:48 pm
I’m sure the irony you tacitly acknowledge will not be lost on many readers Owen.This is a debate of the left that has been going on for decades, in one form or another, e.g Lenin & Trotsky’s view of the Intelligensia & its really valuable that it continues, so thanks for your insights.I agree with your class-based analysis of the Left’s overriding function: the emancipation of the working class & ‘all else flows from that’; although you aren’t more explicit here, I take you to mean that via a socialist revolution the capitalist state in its entirety will be destroyed, class will be abolished & a democratic marxist society created. You raise an important point about non-unionised private sector workers. Their particular lack of representation on the left is a worry as in the past they would have been exposed to Trade Unions & had a chance to see at first hand the struggle of their class both in the workplace & in the community and the solutions to these problems that are achieved through collective action. So politicisation and developing class conciousness is missing today & we have a weakened ‘modern’ trade union movement that isn’t willing or able to aggressively recruit and educate workers. To my mind re-radicalising the unions as a vehicle for developing the kind of broad agenda you describe: housing, community cohesion, local environment – all not sexy but vital – is essential. You say in relation to the left & the working class, ‘it will be in no position to articulate the issues that are most important to its base’. I would turn this around and say that part of the journey to the emancipation of the working class is that the ‘base’is eventually able to articulate issues & solutions itself through the work of the left to the point where the ‘base’ is abolished along with all classes.Good stuff.
John Snowdon @jksnowdon
April 28, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Great stuff, though I think a slightly stronger case could be made for including issues such as feminism and LGBTIQ rights as part of the left’s natural concerns on the basis that people from minority groups are overrepresented in the socially and economically underprivileged parts of society.
andygodfrey
April 28, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Owen, the complaint isn’t a new one. Its causes and possible solutions would be. I agree with John Snowdon, above, in thinking that a lack of coherent class identity is the central problem. This is why framing the left’s true battle becomes all the more difficult — who are the mythical working class? They certainly can’t be identified by the incidental cultural markers the last generation used as reference points.
Barney
April 28, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Great post Owen. I think that the distinction between private and public life is important here. Increasingly, in modernity, politics is being pushed out of the public sphere and into the private sphere of economic relations.
This, it seems to me, is what happened in 1984/5, when Thatcher crushed the unions and decimated the public, political life of Northern communities.
What we need then, is a revival of the public sphere, because it is through this sphere that working class men (like my dad) received their education in life and politics.
James Armstrong
April 29, 2011 at 2:19 am
The working class need to feel that the Labour Party are on their side. There was a strong belief amongst many sections of the white working class at the last election that the Labour Party didn’t represent their interests, didn’t understand their problems and were more interested in pandering to the liberal, metropolitan elite. If Labour want to be the party of the working classes, they need to stop supporting every cause that the liberal elite find trendy, because it is seriously off putting for the working classes, who find it a struggle to survive every day and live in grinding poverty. Why should issues like feminism or quotas for ethnic minorities take precedence over job security, strong, settled communities, good accommodation etc? The answer is it shouldn’t.
If Labour don’t start to talk the language of the working classes, they will never win their support back.
SR819
April 29, 2011 at 9:07 am
Owen, are you also of the opinion that Labour is the only solution but just happens to have it all wrong at the minute?
Barney Carroll
April 29, 2011 at 9:16 am
“Why should issues like feminism or quotas for ethnic minorities take precedence over job security, strong, settled communities, good accommodation etc?”
Why do you see these as two different things?
andygodfrey
April 29, 2011 at 10:55 am
I’m not saying they have to be mutually exclusive, just that New Labour seemed to focus far too much on the aforementioned issues, ignoring bread and butter problems like social housing, community cohesion, economic security and immigration. John Denham admitted it in a report early in 2010, when he implicitly accepted that Labour focused too heavily on ethnicity and forgot about class, when it was looking at educational achievement, social mobility etc.
For example, in education there shouldn’t really be any concern about South Asian students in education, who are doing comfortably well and are set up with right qualifications to do well in life. This is in contrast to many white, working class students, who leave with no qualifications, and then struggle to get a well paying job because most require qualifications at least up-to GCSE level.
But there was a tendency amongst New Labour to focus on how to achieve equal outcomes with regards to ethnicity, completely ignoring that the group suffering most were the WWC students. This is an example of what I meant in my post above.
If Labour are to reconnect with the working classes, I have to say that some of the concerns of middle class Islington liberals have to be set to one side, because the issues they care about aren’t, to put it bluntly, the issues that are most important to the working man in this country.
This is why I am interested in the Blue Labour movement. I think people like Cruddas (who admitted that immigration was used as a 21st century incomes policy to depress wages) and Lord Glasman have been coming out with some good ideas to reinvigorate the party. Whether you like it or not, many working class people thought that the Labour Party became the party that pandered to immigrants, and to ensure this impression is defeated, Labour need to have a serious debate on issues like immigration, identity, culture etc.
SR819
April 29, 2011 at 11:42 am
It’s an utter myth that ‘immigration depresses wages’ and I’m fucking sick of hearing it. BOSSES depress wages. Neoliberal economics desires high rates of unemployment (not a larger population) so it can offer work at a bare minimum of renumeration and security. It happens in countries with hardly any immmigration, countries with high levels of immigration, and countries that babble on about immigration while encouraging business practices that ruthlessly exploit illegal immigrants. End of.
Also, if you want Labour to become a ‘white identity’ movement, obviously their shameless baiting of Muslims and Afro-Carribean youth wasn’t floating your boat enough. Where I live ie. England the working class is composed of white, Asian, black, men, women, gays – ie. the British population. If ‘white working class’ boys are leaving school without qualifications, it has sweet F.A. to do with any non-whites attending the same school.
Lord Glasman and Cruddas are bigoted, opportunistic morons who wouldn’t know a working class person if they farted in their face. You use Murdoch cliches like ‘Islington liberals’ while parroting crap from LSE professors and upper-middle class chancers. They’re peddling drivel about Labour losing over immigration and some bollocks about Christian identity. As if a massive jump in unemployment, the housing bubble and a concentrated effort by the press to destroy Brown had nothing to with it. I’ve yet to meet anyone working class under 65 who gives much of a shit about Christianity. And as for immigration, that seems to be an obsession of the skilled lower-middle class who tend to avoid any contact with anyone non-white and regard homosexuality as a perversion. Bigotry is ignorance. The working class is not an ethnic monoploly. If it troubles you so that Asian graduates are competing for the same job, drown your ‘cultural’ (what culture? X-Factor, footy and Coldplay?) sorrows with the EDL. I’m sure they won’t bother you with anything ‘trendy’ like thinking.
W.Kasper
April 29, 2011 at 8:57 pm
So you lump the whole Left together to make some sweeping generalisations. I’m in the Socialist Party and don’t recognise your accusations at all. We’ve always based our politics and activity on the working class. Be more specific – who exactly are you talking about?
Doug
April 29, 2011 at 1:02 pm
I have no intention to “drown my sorrows” with the EDL, as I have and want nothing to do with them. The issues I raised in the previous post are valid. The writer of the blog himself had a piece on OpenDemocracy quoting a study that shows how a 10% increase in immigration hurts the wages of unskilled workers by 5%.
Moreover, how can you reconcile the fact that there was significant concern over immigration at the last general election? It was a topic at all three leader’s debates, all the leaders were quizzed on it by voters (including the infamous incident with Mrs Duffy)
I watched a lot of footage of the election, and one of the common themes was the number of construction workers complaining about how their wages had taken a beaten because of migrant labour. You can’t just ignore these concerns, because if you do, the Labour Party will never be taken seriously amongst the working class.
And in any case, the issue of immigration is not purely about economics. In fact, an article by a couple of politics lecturers on Left Foot Forward expressed their belief that there are larger issues that need to be confronted.
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/04/getting-to-the-roots-of-far-right-xenophobia/
“The point is that citizens feel a strong emotional attachment to the national community, and a sense that its unity is under threat lies at the root of their hostility to immigrants and minority groups, and by extension support for the far right.”
Cruddas is not a bigot, he’s the only one in the Labour Party who can see the wood for the trees, and is willing to have a debate on immigration, culture, patriotism, identity, race etc. As the article above says, the working classes’ anxiety towards immigration is based more on cultural than economic factors in many ways.
Labour’s response to this was to parrot the line about multiculturalism being a good thing, how immigrants have enriched our society and so on. They took the working classes as being backward, ignorant parochial bigots, when they were the ones who had to suffer from mass immigration and its negative effects on the quality of life, job security etc. Unless Labour engage with the WWCs (like Cruddas does) they will not win their support back.
SR819
April 30, 2011 at 8:50 am
If newspapers scream ‘IMMIGRANTS’ from every other front page, or party leaders (all so corrupt and inept that none a ctually won the election) want to appease the newspapers (every other statement they make) doesn’t make it true. Ideology isn’t a reflection of truth – it’s a way of manufacturing it.
There were huge surges in wages and standards of living between the 50s and late 70s. There was also a surge in immigration. This didn’t stop certain politicians playing the race/immigration card time and time again, notably those who wanted to curb wages and worker’s rights. In this I would include Blair, who made little effort to improve working conditions or housing. That immigrants are blamed for this is just an obscene lie. The whole ‘white working class’ meme is patronising gibberish to distract from their own negligence of concrete economic policies regarding inequality. If every single immigrant was ‘sent home’ tomorrow, you’d probably find your wages depressed anyway.
Labour hasn’t represented the working class for some time – they’re a neoliberal party terrified of what the right-wing press has to say about them. Immigrant-baiting plays as well with Sun readers as much as it does the Telegraph. If they dared to criticise landlords, CEOS or even ‘small businessmen’ they’d be forced to issue apologies within days. It’s shadowboxing, and none the less dangerous for it. Exhibit A being your own ignorant attitudes. You do sound like the EDL, not least because you define yourself as ‘white’ before anything else. If Labour want to appeal to such tabloid ignorance, they can say goodbye to another loyal constituency – but at least they can make you feel good about being ‘white’ eh?
Left politics isn’t a heritage industry, and patriotism is the politics of fools and criminals. And again, if you can offer me concrete examples of ‘our culture’ that needs defending above all else, I’d like to hear it. I doubt you attend C of E every Sunday or eagerly attend Shakespeare festivals. If you mean ‘mam and dad had it better’, that’s not ‘culture’ but nostalgia – always a substitute for history and economic nous.
W.Kasper
April 30, 2011 at 11:10 am
BTW – Where’s the statistics on blacks and Asians who deserted Labour in droves since 1997, for those wee matters like… ooh… murdering about a million Muslims to profit a handful of people, reviving sus laws and giving the police near-military powers, a structurally racist housing policy (the housing bubble benefitted the white upper-middle class, and few others), school segregation, a piss-poor minimum wage and prohibitively expensive tuition fees?
No, not much of that when supposed ‘intellectuals’ think the burning issues are churches hardly anyone attends, industrial nostalgia and hogwash about St. George’s day. White, black, brown or yellow – the working class are all ‘in it together’. It’s a ruling class agenda to pretend otherwise. I’m sure the boss is laughing all the way to the bank while the misinformed and bigoted sit round blaming their neighbours.
W.Kasper
May 1, 2011 at 3:40 am
Well bigots we may be, all in it together are we really.
Robert
May 1, 2011 at 10:21 am
Hi Owen,
I’d be fascinated to hear what your idea of ‘the emancipation of working class people,’ – what your ideal society – would look like in practice.
Does it, for example, mean a society which no longer has class distinctions?
Or does it mean a society in which class distinctions remain important, but in which working class people are richer?
(Or, of course, something else?)
Asher Dresner
May 3, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Thoughtful post, Owen,
I think in the decline of the British Left you have to factor the fall of the Soviet Union, etc
“Most newly radicalised activists today have no experience of a powerful labour movement, or of experiencing large numbers of workers involved in struggles. “, solid point.
Good analysis on the Far right.
modernityblog
May 11, 2011 at 12:55 am
“This is in part because trade unionism has been driven out of most of the private sector”. No it hasn’t. The craft based jobs trade unionism originated in no longer exist is all, while trade unions, the left, socialist thinkers and what not didn’t take the rise of the service economy seriously until it was too late (give or take say a Clive Jenkins or two).
Your post harks back to some golden werkin’ class age that never existed and never will, one where having eaten bread and dripping in childhood conveys moral authority more than it does clogged arteries.
You also state “You cannot really have communities that are based around the supermarket or the call centre” – fair enuff, but until you do you’ll never have “a class politics relevant to today’s working-class”.
Oh and the 80% in the private sector quote is open to debate. One, its 78% and two that’s to exclude the the growing numbers working in the private sector for the state.
martin
May 30, 2011 at 1:05 pm
Those who claim the working classes no longer exist are not without motive, they are in the process of rewriting 20th century history in which the working classes played such an important role and to ensure it is not repeated.
More here
http://is.gd/uMRskg
Mick Hall
June 1, 2011 at 11:09 am
[...] with about 9,000 students. As far as I recall, only three or four of us went to Oxford (although, see here before I’m accused of being a working-class hero, which I’m [...]
Why We Shouldn’t Abolish Oxbridge
June 1, 2011 at 4:49 pm
What a heap of crap.
All this article tells me is that Left Wing politics in this country are led by jumpt up middle class numpties who know fuck all about the working class or their needs.
Why do these Trotskyites feel the need to worship the murderer of Kronstadt?
If you want more working class participation in Oxbridge, there is a simple solution.
First, accept that some people are, by their natures more suited to an accademic career than others.
Then learn to identify these people at as early an age as possible.
Thirdly, give them an education suitable to their needs, if necessary, away from their less accademic compatriots.
We used to have a system of schools like that within the State sector that regularly provided up to 65% of the Oxbridge intake. They were called Grammar Schools.
The mess we have in state education now is the result of over 50 years of well meaning Socialist meddling and social engineering.
I do hope you are proud of what you have created.
Bob of Bonsall
June 3, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Good post for the lost part. Weak link would be the failure to note how far the Trot and third worldist lefts cheering of immigration, EU, and anti racism’ etc has meant a turn away from the majority working class, who remain stubbornly white, low paid, and scared for the future.
Michael Brennan
June 12, 2011 at 3:50 pm
[...] with about 9,000 students. As far as I recall, only three or four of us went to Oxford (although, see here before I’m accused of being a working-class hero, which I’m [...]
The Samosa » Archive » Abolish Oxbridge
January 23, 2012 at 4:23 pm
[...] the 21st century? I owe it to myself one day to provide an answer to that question. As Owen Jones has argued over at his blog: There are issues that the left must be at the forefront of championing: like [...]
‘I am NOT SOCIALIST’: Obama, ‘Liberals’ and the Socialist Tradition | Notes from a Discrete Continent
January 24, 2012 at 12:16 am