The most active remnants of the working class hard left (at least in the UK) is a tiny subculture of travellers and eco-protesters - the kinds of people who chain themselves to trees to stop a new road. When they're active they have a high media profile, but - apart from a few successes - their political effectiveness isn't high, because they target specific issues in a negative way rather than pushing a positive alternative. Also, that kind of rebellion can easily be dismissed as irritating and adolescent. It's noisy, and it's coming from outside of the mainstream by people who very deliberately don't fit it, and that makes it easy to dismiss it.
So I think a New Left has to co-opt the pseudo-authority of the Right. It has to wear a suit, it has to be respectable, and it has to be able to appear in the FT without creating cognitivive dissonance in the readership. It has to appear on mainstream news channels pushing hard left points - I'm not suggesting any compromises there - without looking anything like the old left. It has to be smart, confident, unflappable, relentless and utterly plausible and convincing.
The media, rather the shop floor, is the main battleground now. The way to reinvigorate the Left is to subtly storm the media so that Left values move into the mainstream without being sidelined as oppositional politics (with the implied frame that they're in opposition to the Right, which can easily present itself as the natural party of power.)
Because the media has more than one channel, the New Left has to have a presence in all of them. We've already talked about taking Being Green away from the allotment anoraks into the mainstream, and there has to be a lot more of that in every area.
The Right does this already. Big Brother isn't just a stupid show, it's a stupid show with a gladiatorial subtext which promotes ruthless competition and fuck-you values. People love it partly because it undermines Left-ish socialisation, which is seen as oppressive and limiting - goody-goody and PC and rather dull.
A smart move would be an alternative show which somehow promoted sane values without labouring the point or being earnestly PC about it.
You can't reach people by lecturing them. But you can reach them by being obviously more fun and entertaining than the alternative.
I hear all these people around talking about common working class people whose views politicians should be taking into account. I guess I'm out of touch, but does this working class still exist as an identifiable class, and are they still common?
The Guardian: Common ground (October 4, 2006)
Having lived for years on a council estate, middle-class academic Gillian Evans set out to discover what it means to be be white and working class - with surprising results ... I am not a complete outsider, but the anomaly of my status as a resident is pronounced: first, because I am, as Sharon continuously reminds me, "posh" and not "common" like her, and second, because my partner and the father of my children is black. The problem is that posh people don't live on council estates - they live in nice apartments and big houses - and Bermondsey people don't marry "blacks", especially not Nigerians. Being posh and finding myself living and raising my children on a council estate in south London - because I have none of the money that equates with the manners (and education) that distinguish posh from common people - I have been forced, over the years, to come to terms with what it means to go down in Britain's social hierarchy; to understand what it means to become working or lower class, or what Sharon calls common.
...
I am not a complete outsider, but the anomaly of my status as a resident is pronounced: first, because I am, as Sharon continuously reminds me, "posh" and not "common" like her, and second, because my partner and the father of my children is black. The problem is that posh people don't live on council estates - they live in nice apartments and big houses - and Bermondsey people don't marry "blacks", especially not Nigerians.
Being posh and finding myself living and raising my children on a council estate in south London - because I have none of the money that equates with the manners (and education) that distinguish posh from common people - I have been forced, over the years, to come to terms with what it means to go down in Britain's social hierarchy; to understand what it means to become working or lower class, or what Sharon calls common.
I wonder whether the working class had a class consciousness in the 19th century before people started theorising about it, or whether it was socialist activists preaching about the working class that conjured it into existence. If the latter, I suppose it's possible that class consciousness may be revived by political discourse. The problem is the opium of the people, which used to be religion and nowadays seems to be celebrity TV. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
I'm bringing the chart over from the other thread - is there a similar chart (or raw data) for income growth after social transfers? Note, however that an across-the-board 2% (+/- change) increase in income actually increases the Gini, because the wealthier 10% gets much more from their 2% increase than the second and thirds deciles. In fact, the larger the Gini, the more skewed to the lower end the percent income gains need to be in order to just maintain the Gini constant, let alone improve it.
And what this chart shows is that labour has benefitted the lover incomes relative to the disaster that was Tory rule. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
As long as manufacturing predominated, the unions were a really effective instrument for relating personal life problems to overarching political principles. But the decline of industry in the west has cut off a large portion of the "natural base" from serious, left-oriented political discourse. "Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease." - Kurt Vonnegut
Companies have been outsourcing like mad : whole services that were part of the big company, such as cleaners, cooks in the factory restaurant, etc... are now in other companies, and thus don't have access to the big unions. And services have lousy unionisation. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Nanne's point stands if the industrial workers' class consciousness was the cause, and not the effect, of socialist theorising. Otherwise, it might be possible for a new class consciousness to be intilled in the "lower" class.
Britain is really interesting to me, because class is very much in your face here. You can't escape it, and I think "common" people interiorise (and express externally) their class status as a sort of learned helplessness vis-a-vis the political process. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
Because the original Fabians were mostly middle/upper class they started to change the rules from the inside. Socialism is a somewhat watered down Marxism, and - in the traditional British way - this acted as a safety valve and may well have prevented a more explosive confrontation.
During the Thatcherite counter-revolution the original working classes were soundly thrashed and encouraged to become ambitious.
So what we have now is a cultural mix where the new working classes - office drones, freelancers, micro-entrepreneurs - see themselves as middle class. In reality they're exploited ruthlessly, and because they're fragmented they have no political or financial leverage.
They're also conditioned to play the game from birth by a constant media barrage As a result they're magnificently compliant, believing absolutely that you have to work hard (and play hard) to get ahead and that being 'aspirational' - as my magazine editors colleagues like to say - is the best of all possible values.
The true middle classes remain the traditional professionals - doctors, lawyers, and corporate accountants. They've mostly kept their place in the scheme of things, and so - with the possible exception of doctors - are unlikely to make too much noise.
There are people who still do manual work. Often they're immigrants. But even if they weren't, no one pays much attention to them any more.
A lot of the violence direct at immigrants isn't racist, it's classist. They're threatening because they're outside of the game and they remind people that there is a game, and not even their aspirational values can protect them from its ravages.
It's much easier to kick them than to accept that aspirational reality isn't as rosy as it's made out to be.
The corollary of all this is that class solidarity is almost irrelevant now as a concept. So this is yet another reason to re-take the media. The compliant working class does what it's told to by PR people and ad managers. Getting them to behave and think differently can only be done by co-opting those channels and subtly changing their message.
The problem really seems to be the "white collar working class", which given the categories with which we operate, seems like a contradiction. The idea that "white collar = middle class" is what needs to be fought.
But the problem is also the reality TV fairytale whereby one can go from rags to riches simply by being in Big Brother or some talent show for a few weeks.
All that people want to do is wait tables in hopes that someone from show business will discover them, like that waitress from London who was taken to stars at a recent film festival and is now (I think) going to release a CD.
It's Cinderella all over again. Back to pre-industrial folk tales about princes and princesses "mistakenly" raised among the common folk. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
This is dereliction for a social democrat, who is supposed to care most about those who have the least. But NuLabour is no longer really a social democratic party (others can tell more).
The thing is, the bottom 5% or the bottom 10%, or even the bottom 20% is a small group that is not organised and very hard to organise as they no longer work as masses in factory halls, but are spread as cashiers in Tesco, garbage collectors and security personel in tube stations (when they can find employment). You can screw them over if this benefits the rest, especially if you are in a first past the post system like Britain, France or the US. Tony Blair won three elections doing just that.
The middle class (or maybe a better term, the leisure class) is the majority of the voters. Working class interests have become or are fast becoming special interests.
I guess most of us would agree that a just society is one in which the worst off are off best. But to put that into political practice we have to find a way to co-opt the interests of the working class while focusing at least as much on the interests of everyone up to the upper middle class. Otherwise we'll just be building a permanent minority.
Doesn't the Hartz IV Plan also mean that the SPD is no longer Social Democrat either? Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
With regard to the SPD, they have at least started fighting the good fight on the minimum wage. They made some very minor steps to enlarging the minimum wage settlement to additional sectors, but Müntefering (on TV) said that no more than that can be done with the CDU/CSU. He also said that the SPD wouldn't break up the coalition, but indicated that they would campaign on this theme in the next general elections. I think they're veering left a little under pressure from the unions and the Linke.
LOL! Excellent. Reminds me to remember the cost of elections in the US. But i'm sure that kicker Beckham would approve. Skennah Kowa
The UK should get a tricameral legislature: a House of Commons, a House of Posh, and a House of Peers. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
(Have you seen Country Life? No one can understand Britain without buying a copy.)
You can find it on sale almost everywhere.
(My Dutch father read the thing for years)
Sounds like the bimbos they use to advertise "conservative T-shirts" in the US right blogosphere.
My Dutch father read the thing for years
What are you doing on ET, you class traitor?
By the way, apparently a lot of Dutch are snapping up refurbished farms in Southern Bohemia for very cheap, and they say that they keep their purchases secret back home because they don't want to appear too aristocratic to their neighbours (as these farm houses are actually rather large). Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
My father is a middle class wannabee English aristocrat. Aside of not (yet) driving a jag, he takes it quite seriously. Wears barbour, has stuffed animals in the house, owns a small piece of farmland, the works. Nothing against him, though.
The Dutch generally have the motto "just act normal, you'll be crazy enough". There is some conspicuous consumption, but you don't want to stick out too much from those who surround you (my parents don't really stick out that far as they live in a middle class village). There will be envy and bad talk.
It was an acronym written in the passenger manifest of ships travelling to India and the rest of Asia. Those passengers with more money were able to claim cabins on the shadow side of the ship in both directions. You can't be me, I'm taken
If the Purser, or whoever administered the manifest, received a 'bung' or bribe, to facilitate the allotment of cabins, it would have been unlikely to be written in plain English, but in a code that underlings would understand. I have no evidence for this. But I think it is still plausible. You can't be me, I'm taken
