Defining coalition, defining class: the challenges and opportunities facing Labour (part 2 of 2)
Before Christmas, I suggested that Labour’s shift by towards a ‘class war’ narrative of the type that’s giving Peter Mandelson and Tom Harris the heebie jeebies should not simply be dismissed as the empty rhetoric of a party falling back on its core vote in desperation not to lose the election too badly.
However, I finished by saying that such a shift was not in itself enough, notwithstanding the odd policy on bankers’ bonuses move to reflect it, which are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things but enough to have John Rentoul and his ilk looking around for those forms they sent off for just in case.
A shift towards a loose ‘them vs. us’ narrative may shore up the ‘core vote’ in the short-term, as voters disillusioned with New Labour feel able to give the party the ‘one last chance’ that either their family traditions of voting Labour or their longstanding hatred of the Conservatives makes them hanker after secretly.
To create a more definitive shift back towards Labour, a temporary narrative showing up the Tories for what they are is insufficient, however effective in the short-term.
To create a definitive shift needs, appropriately enough, definition about what Labour can and should be about, and how that contrasts to what the Tories (and LibDems) are about.
And in the end, what must make Labour different can only be about one thing; it can only be about class.
This is ‘class’ as set out by EP Thompson, as quoted at the end of part 1, but bearing repetition:
Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book [The Making of English Working Class] to examine. There is, of course, a difference. “Working classes” is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes.
By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasize that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.
Quite simply, when Labour sets outs it’s’ them vs. us’ narrative, it needs to be clearer what the ‘them’ is. It should identify as its ‘core vote’, and sell the idea as a key aspect of its electoral strategy, not the working classes – that group defined culturally be traditions of location, dress, learned behaviours etc.- but the working class - the very much bigger section of the British population which sells its labour for a living and takes home no surplus value (or would do if it were afforded the opportunity to work).
Conversely, it will not be sufficient to do what new Labour under Blair did (though the extent to which he actually did so is disputed in part 1) to win in 1997: simply to sell Labour as a party acceptable to the middle classes, defined as a cultural category and ascribed consumerist aspirations to foreign holidays and Mondeo cars.
This redefining of what it is to be working class, this re-establishment of what should be Labour’s core vote will necessarily bring with it a shift towards what Thompson identifies as the other main fault – the identification of class not as a cultural entity, but as an economic relationship with another class – the class made up of the owners of capital and those at the heart of the capitalist state institutions who are there to promote the interests of capital.
In so doing, a new ‘them vs. us’ conception will be formed amongst the electorate, and policy will be driven by that new electoral mandate.
Here is not the place to set out the exact terms of that policy, not least because they are well-enough established, and I will content myself with copying over the general priority terms in which Dave sets them out (in his post on hunting which also seeks to capture issues around how class defined as cultural characteristics works against the objective interests of the working class):
- Lower taxes for the poor and middling; higher taxes for the wealthy and corporations.
- Better public services, with confident unions prepared to intervene on behalf of the public interest, rather than abandoning ‘public service’ to profiteers.
- Unions, organised nationally and internationally, with no State-enforced restrictions, that can fight for investment and better wages.
- Universal healthcare, universal and universally good quality education right up to third-level.
These are policy commitments which, if sold to a reconceptualized electorate, will appeal to and meet the interests of what we now conceive of as the ‘middle classes’; that is why, indeed, Dave uses the term ‘middling’. The challenge is to create an effective narrative to convey that reality.
Of course I am not suggesting that the Marxian language in which I set out the case above will be appropriate. Even the world ‘class’, especially as it is used in the term ‘class war’, has been so negatively loaded by the right with negative cultural and historical connotations that it is unlikely that it can be used with positive effect by the Left in the short term.
As Sunny has pointed out forcefully, the ‘register’ and type of language that we use is important (though he does so to suggest that Dave and I don’t understand the concept and that everything we ever write or do is by lengthy Marxian treatise).
Instead of terms like ‘class’ and ‘surplus value’ we will need to talk in terms of the powerful and the exploited, but the aim should be to redefine the argument in economic rather than cultural terms, and in so doing to create – to use Laclau and Mouffe’s useful heuristic – ‘political frontiers’ with and ‘discursive antagonisms’ towards the Conservatives and the interests they represent.
Will all this happen, or is it simply wishful thinking on my part? Well, of course it won’t happen in the way I set out, with a clear adoption by the Labour hierarchy of the rationale I set out above. Any moves towards it will be more as a result more of short-term electoral desperation than any new commitment to class politics, and of course New Labour’s lamentable recent record in some areas of social policy like benefits, means that for many of the electorate nothing Labour ever does or says will be trusted, and however much reality has become mixed with a New Labour myth.
But there are also opportunities.
The financial crisis has created a greater macro- economic literacy amongst the electorate, and the work that the newly founded New Political Economy Network of biggish centre-left hitters, while its main focus will be on exposing the plain stupidity in the Tories’ plans, may in so doing create a space in which to put forward a case for a renewed electoral focus on how Labour DOES have an objectively different constituency of interest.
In addition, as Stephanie Flanders has pointed out in her most recent post, the period before the election is quite likely to be marked by some large bond market/credit rating event around our sovereign debt, and while the Tories will play that for all it is worth as a sign of Labour’s economic imprudence, Labour should be able to portray any large upswing in yield curves and/or credit rating downgrading as an attempt by the forces of capitalism (and Conservatism) effectively to disenfranchise the electorate and impose a government committed ideologically, and supported in this commitment by the major financial institutions, to the further exploitation of the working class.
In short, I remain hopeful about the coming election, and of course I remain, contra Robert, convinced that it really DOES matter who wins it, not simply because what the Tories promise to do to us is so awful.
Rather, I remain hopeful that the recent adoption by Labour of a new, electorally popular adversarial narrative will, if reinforced both conceptually and rhetorically in the coming months, and then in the next year or two, and if taking place concurrently with a grassroots takeover of the party’s institutions, may in fact create a Labour party, in power, which swings to the left and is glad of it - a Labour party which no longer needs the likes of Peter Mandelson, or tolerates the likes of Tom Harris.
We have a slight problem with the adversarial strategy, in that there are people at the top of the party who either don’t share our analysis of where power is located, or do share our view but are on the side of the powerful.
Nonetheless, there’s some potential for campaigning that makes use of the notions that people have about the Tories (party of the rich, for the rich, etc. not on the side of ordinary people) and also the ideas we have about ourselves – our own aspirations, not only as individuals (and certainly not only as selfish individuals) but for our families and communities, and for society in general.
What we might see is a realignment around those who oppose the Tory (for which we can also read: capitalist) solutions to the economic crisis – so, for example, the tensions surrounding post-election position of the lib-dems, etc.
Would be interested to know what you make of Will Straw’s analysis. It seems to me that there’s more than a hint of trying to reconnect with core voters *and* woo people back from the liberals, quite possibly including social democrats within the liberals
James @1
Thanks for this comment.
I acknowledge that the leadership remains the key problem, and elsewhere I’ve written quite a bit about how the grassroots might go about forcing the hand of the leaderhip(and then changing it). But the fact is that even the current leadership has been forced by circumstance to adopt a more ‘core vote’ rhetoric, and this creates some opportunities of the type I’ve tried to set out above, and which you acknowledge as ‘campaigning opportunity’.
It also, incidentally, provides some provisional support for the idea that the left within the Labour party remains best places to effect useful reform. Would the Labour party have changed tack in the way it has done if it had not continued to have a leftwing rump within the party able to set out a return to ‘class war’ rhetoric as an option?
Yes, we need a ‘re-alignment’, but my main contention here is that if we don’t realign around a new definition of what our core vote actually is and should be – set in economic terms of what it is to be working class rather than cultural terms of working class(es) and middle class(es), then I think we only get so far.
What I shouls have spent longer on in the (quite hurriedly written) OP is that we could usefully do with challenging the whole conception of ‘middle class’ in the first instance, as it is meaningless in Marxian terms (cf. the quite different original meaning of bourgeoisie to which it became a synonym) and is a discursive devise used by capitalism to divide the working class in one type of work and another type in another, to the extent that a strike at BA, for example, is conceived of in different terms by the media from, say, a strike at an oil refinery. I’m not suggesting, of course, that the successful challenging of a whole socially embedded liguistic pattern of self-definition is feasible before May 2010!
In the same vein, I think Will Straw’s analysis is useful and well written as far as it goes, but it stops short of a redefinition of what a ‘core vote’ might be. I thinkl Don Paskini gets much closer to this than Will, though he doesn’t make it explicit (that wasn’t his agenda, mind).
I’m all for bringing in LibDems to the party, as there are some in there who ‘get’ class better than many in Labour though I think their move to the libDems was a mistake, as long as that doesn’t simply mean the beginning of the formation of a grand,. short-term, value-free grand coalition falling into the same traps as before.
The ‘coalition’ that needs forming is not between parties, but between ‘cultural classes’, around a renewed idea of class solidarity based on a fresh consciousness of economic relationships in the 21st century (including an understanding of the role of international finance in creating parameters for state action and control). That idea around a new coalition was in fact behind the title of the two part piece, though I drifted away from it when battering it out.
Paul, I can agree with virtually all of that. However, I think you mistake the nature of the ‘change in tack’ by Labour’s leadership. Certainly it has got nothing to do with the grassroots membership, which is, as it has been these many years, still disorganised, cut off from real influence or structural power within the Party.
The ‘space’ for Labour’s rhetorical manoeuverings exists because Labour is still conceived of – even by the bastard leadership – as the ‘left’ party, the ‘people’s’ party etc. This state of affairs isn’t dependent upon what shade of red its members consider themselves; even were the LRC defeated and expelled, the history of the Party leaves this door open.
Plus, the shift has been rather necessitated by the continuing failure to hold on to centrist territory when competing with the Conservative Party.
Rhetoric from the Left is about all there is remaining to the leadership; it’s certainly not a result of the remaining socialist trends in the Party. I’m prepared to be corrected on that, of course, but I really don’t see the connection between the remaining Left members, and the current rhetorical switch.
Let us not forget that it is the rich that have started this adversarial policy.
Dave @2: If you take me as suggesting that the grassroots has any influence on the leadership currenlty, then I have expressed myself badly, and such expression is out of keeping with much of what I’ve written here before. I agree that the change in tack, now being re-challenged by Jowell/Straw/Mandelson etc, is more to do with the external environment than anything within the party, but I do think that there may be people within the party (Balls?) who have been quicker to recognise the opportunities afforded by the changed environment (hatred to bankers etc) and have used the old Brown/Blair power-struggle fault lines to articulate it in a way Brown could grasp it. I’d even include the efforts of Compass in that,though the leadership would never acknowledge such an influence even if it sensed it – it’s more likely to be a process of osmosis than any deliberate opening up of policy communication channels etc..
Ian @4: I agree, though it has done so under a veneer of consenus/’common sense’ politics and using a rhetoric of the ‘middle-class(es)’ which is open to challenge from a new (renewed) paradigm of class analysis and consciousness.
In the end, this is second guessing of course, and fairly irrelevant to the task of the left. The key point is that, whatever the casue of the slight change in rhetoric, there is something for the left to hold onto and exploit in the ways I have suggested.
Paul, I think the change in tack reflects an all-too-obvious weakness of the Tories at present. We needn’t expect the articulation of class in the broad sense of people who must work for a living to be able to pick up on the Tories’ weaknesses.
Though Will Straw isn’t explicit in where the core vote is located, it seems to me that it depends upon policies more than anything – substance over style. And the concerns about “class war” seem to be focused on the Cameron definition of Brown’s jibe. The point was actually a good one about priorities…
James @6
I agree that in order to win this time Labour needs only to pick up on the Tories’ key weakness – its very real and its very ‘saleable’ tag as the party of the rich few. My point though is that we should aspire to more than simply beating the Tories by exploiting their weakness, and that we can only do that by redefining our core constituency and them working through the grassroots of the party to form a new ‘class coalition’.
Sorry, you’ve lost me with Will Straw. Are we talking about same article? I’m referring to his Faban piece. Not trying to avoid issue here – just looking for clarity before I respond.
As regards the definition of ‘class war’, I agree (and say in the OP that the term has been wholly appropriated and given wholly negative connotations by the right. It is not, though, a term the left needs. (Again, i’m not sure I’ve got your point here, but I am a bit slow on the uptake sometimes.)
The blurb from the document “The Choice for Britain”…
“The choice facing the British people at the coming election will be as stark as 1945 and 1997. It will be a battle over who is best placed to give people greater control over their lives – and whether the post-recession future is one where we grow together rather than apart.
“Cutting back indiscriminately is not the answer. In a fast-paced world, people want to be anchored with real choices over their housing, their schools and hospitals, their local services, and their democracy – instead of being cut adrift. They know that a new partnership between citizen and state is the way of the future, rather than sink or swim.” [http://www.labourspace.com/thechoice]
There is the potential to reassess existing policies in the light of stated goals, within the terms of this discourse.
One phrase used in the document reminded me of ongoing debates in the Americas about enhancing popular sovereignty over that of either capital or the state:
“At the centre of our strategy is the idea of a new partnership between active citizens and the active state based on a modern ethic of mutual responsibility and fairness. We are going beyond an old-style paternalistic ethos to create an
empowering state, working with people to meet their aspirations for fairness, prosperity and security.”
Note the “aspirations for fairness” bit
As for the “new partnership between active citizens and active state” that seems – in light of the actual results and policies of Labour – to be just a nicer worded way of advocating Tory government 2.0 speak.
As much as this all sounds wonderful in theory, do you have any evidence that such a strategy would actually work?
What, you mean Cameron’s “post-bureaucratic age” meme? Yes, it could be that.
But in light of the revival of industrial policy – albeit borne of necessity – and bailout demands from manufacturing capital (the Corus boss, despite being about to close a plant in Redcar, is begging for government subsidies) it seems like there’s space to contest this territory for socialist policies to benefit working people.
The reason why I mentioned the debates in the Americas is because precisely this relationship is taking place in some countries – workers’ self-activity in the form of cooperatives, etc., being either tolerated or facilitated by those in and against the capitalist state.