Labour's adaptation to Thatcherism led to the proliferation of national mythologies, which the party leadership played no small part in popularising. These included most forcefully the idea that, whatever people told pollsters, they did not want to pay for a better funded public sector, or welfare state. They may be attracted to the abstract idea of superior public services, sentimentally attached to an outmoded form of social solidarity, but when in the ballot box they invariably sided with prudence and material self-interest. New Labour thoroughly embraced this false wisdom, and made the preservation of low taxes a cardinal principle. Once elected, amid a crisis in the public services and a general deterioration of Britain's economy and institutions, a constant circle to be squared for policymakers, especially in Brown's Treasury, was how to raise money without raising taxes, or at least without appearing to.

This led to, among other things, the fiscal calamity of the Private Finance Inititiative as a means of generating up-front revenue for new hospitals and schools without appearing to raise taxes. It also led to the culture of means-testing as an attempt to make spending constraints seem 'progressive'. The myth that the public had gone Thatcherite was obviously nonsensical. It wasn't reflected in opinion surveys, in voting patterns, or in other forms of political behaviour. New Labour's cleaving to Thatcherism cannot be seen as a reflection of what the public wants.

In The Meaning of David Cameron, I hypothesised that:

what happened to Labour was less an adjustment to psephological realities than an adjustment to socioeconomic realities. The Tories’ defeat of one union after another confirmed that capital’s power with respect to labour had increased, and that realistically it could also defeat any government that did not implement the fiscal, financial, and macroeconomic reforms that it supported, and which had been carefully elaborated in business-funded think-tanks as well as in the terror-state laboratories of Latin America. Labour thus set out to prove its credentials to businesses and the right-wing media, showing that it accepted every tenet of neoliberal doctrine even at the expense of offending or losing core voters. This culminated in New Labour’s grubby relationship with Rupert Murdoch, and Tony Blair’s crawling before the rich.

Recently, my attention was drawn to this elegant assessment of Thatcher's "Anglo-Poujadism", drawing on the Eurocommunism of Stuart Hall, the soft leftism of SDPer turned Liberal Democrat David Marquand, as well as a notable survey by the psephologist Ivor Crewe, co-author of a sympathetic review of the brief life of the SDP. It displays qualities that mark the author out as an intellectual heavyweight, a hard-hitting polemicist and a skilful prose stylist. Written in 1989, the review essay looks forward to Thatcherism becoming a "wasm", noting that for all the calamities that Thatcher had visited on the UK, she had not fundamentally shifted public opinion, which - on the NHS and welfare, for instance - had actually moved to the Left. Thatcher had won because of a divided opposition, not because of her own popularity. "The truth is that Mrs Thatcher holds power in spite of Thatcherism and not because of it." And in short order, when New Right ideology had exhausted itself in most of its host countries, people would look back and "wonder what all the fuss was about". This seems remarkably complacent in retrospect. And there is a tendency to revert to belabouring an Aunt Sally version of Thatcherism as, in a word, 18th Century economics and 19th Century politics, the better to exaggerate Labour's ideological distance from the Tories. Still, it is a robust defence of moderate social democracy as a popular and pragmatic electoral option.

The essayist, of course, was Gordon Brown. Little more than three years later, Brown et al were staring at the results of the 1992 general election in disbelief. The Tories had won a decent plurality, after poll leads at times giving Labour more than 50% of the vote, especially after the poll tax riots. The reasons for this electoral collapse really had little to do with clause 4, or the trade unions, or high taxes, or the working class, or with Neil Kinnock being a dreadful Welsh oik. In fact, the most extensive research showed that the biggest single factor in Labour's loss was still the division in the anti-Tory vote, specifically the fact that of those who defected from Labour to the SDP-Liberal Alliance between 1979 and 1983, the majority had broken for the long-term. They had broken with Labourism - not to Thatcherism, as I also note in my book, but to a centre-left politics that was more radical on 'social' and defence issues than on strictly class issues.

More fundamentally, as Paul Foot wrote at the time, electoral politics moves to the Left when the organised working class is strong, and notching up victories. The organised working class, though rumours of its death were exaggerated, was not strong, and hardly notching up victories to make up for the raw defeats of the 1980s. The only powerful social movement of the period was the anti-poll tax campaign, and it was one which Labour had done everything to stamp on. The involvement of Labour councils in aggressively prosecuting non-payers, for example, squandered any possibility that the party would make impressive gains on the basis of that.

However, the right-wing faction in the leadership, including John Smith, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, took a different view. They seem to have concurred with The Sun on who had really won the election. Prosaically, the right-wing of big capital had, through the press, helped mobilise an electoral coalition comprising the petit-bourgeois bedrock, much of the 'skilled working class' and a significant minority of the professional middle class. That they had been able to do so showed that the organised working class as the basis for an electoral vehicle was finished. It showed that most people were too instinctively bigoted and conservative to vote for a real social democratic party. The Labour Right decided that it was time to radically overhaul the party's structures, attack the trade union link, and refashion the party into a much more middle class, business-friendly vehicle. Socialism in both its parliamentarist and Stalinist versions - not mutually exclusive, by the way - was out. Market liberalism was in. And that is exactly what Thatcher set out to accomplish. She had always said that her aim was to destroy socialism in Britain - by which she meant social democracy. Labour's capitulation, wholly unjustified on purely psephological grounds, falsified Brown's diagnosis that Thatcherism was a flash-in-the-pan aberration, consecrating it as political common sense. And so here we are.

PS: Sunny Hundal has written the first response to my article about the cuts yesterday. Further responses follow over the next few days, and my final rejoinder will be published on Monday.

Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman asks if this press release from the Institute of Economic Affairs calling, of all things, for the self-regulation of bankers and investors, is a parody. Or are they really free market 'fanatics'? In a word, yes. Yes, they are free market 'fanatics'. They more Hayekian than Hayek, staking out the hard neoliberal right in opposition to the ConDem government. But I think it's actually an example of something far worse. Why, after all, did the IEA ever exert any influence, and why would anyone listen to it now? Short answer: because the bankers have held on to their power. The pressures for a thorough reigning in and regulation of finance capital since the credit crunch began some three years ago have borne little fruit, while governments have felt compelled to orchestrate the largest bail-out of the banks in history. Even now, as austerity measures threaten the wider economy, the banks are baying for blood. And the ruling class shows no sign of having, or interest in pursuing, an alternative accumulation strategy to the one pursued for the last thirty years or so. Given this, the ability of finance capital to resist encroachments on its power is still redoubtable, and the ideological space for such rightist, free market polemics will remain wide open for as long as the ruling class finds it useful.

The New Left Project is hosting a week long debate on the cuts, and how the Left should respond. It opens with my article, adapting and expanding on some of the arguments from The Meaning of David Cameron, and is followed by ripostes on successive days from others on the liberal and socialist Left, such as Sunny Hundal and David Wearing. You can start with my article here, and keep track on the NLP website as subsequent articles are posted throughout the week:

This article takes the view that there is no urgent need to pay off Britain’s debts, and that the cuts agenda of the Conservative-Liberal coalition must be interpreted as being driven by the interests of the constituencies (large manufacture, service industries and high finance) that lie behind especially the Conservative Party leadership, as well as by the neoliberal doctrines that have enjoyed hegemony within the British state for a generation. The cuts agenda constitutes: 1) an attempt to cover the costs incurred by the economic crisis by redistributing wealth from the working class to the financial elite; 2) an attack on the remaining institutions of the post-war welfarist consensus; and 3) the further entrenchment of a profoundly anti-democratic praxis at the level of the state. Labour has been unable to offer an alternative to this, because it is committed to the same growth formula, if in a slightly altered admixture. But there is an urgent need for an alternative. The once-in-a-lifetime magnitude of the capitalist crisis, and the ambition of the ConDem agenda for welfare downsizing, demands a thoroughgoing attack on the politics and propaganda of the cuts. A proportionate response would involve breaking with neoliberal ideology, moving beyond the traditional policies of the trade union leadership, and forging unity in practise among those most affected by the cuts, and strategically best placed to resist them.

Btw, I am happy to announce that sales for The Meaning of David Cameron hit 545 in the first month in the UK alone. This, before a single review has appeared in the mainstream press, is rather good. But please bear in mind how desperately poor I am, and buy a few more copies, eh? And if you should feel moved to put some change in my cup (thanks again to those who have already), I promise to be good in future. That is all.

Obama and the Democrats are in trouble. Barring some unforeseeable development on a par with Katrina in terms of scale, the GOP is going to romp the mid-terms on a much reduced turn-out. The capitalist media will say that this is because of the Tea Party 'movement', or because the president moved too far to the left in a centre-right nation. Left-wing anger, and the disillusionment of working class constituencies previously supportive of Obama, will be ignored.

Obama's dual constituency in the 2008 election comprised the majority of the working class, and the dominant fraction of big capital, particularly the finance, insurance and real estate industries (the rentiers in other words) who gave Obama $37.5m toward his campaign. In the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, the signs are that much of the working class component of that electoral coalition will fail to mobilise for the Democrats. This has already been foreshadowed in the Massachusetts by-election, where the core working class vote collapsed - and, of course, the media blamed it on Obama's excessive radicalism over healthcare, despite Massachusetts favouring socialised medicine by a wider margin than most states.

There will be almost no discussion this election as to what has been done, what has continued to be done, to the American working class. The generational stagnation and decline of working class incomes, and the stomach-wrenching fall [pdf] in the share of produced wealth going to the working class, has worsened under Obama's watch. In this recession, bosses have taken the opportunity afforded by the crisis to slash jobs and downsize in a way that is massively disproportionate to the impact the crisis has had on their profitability. David McNally reports:

The best description I have heard comes from an economist who I won't name for the moment because he's a real shithead. But he did nail this one when he said, "What the United States is experiencing is a statistical recovery and a human recession." That's precisely what's happened. A few statistical indicators have moved up, but for the vast majority of working class people, the recession continues.

If you add in the nearly 10 million who are involuntarily underemployed--they're taking part-time work because they can't find full-time work--you've got about 27 million people unemployed or underemployed in the U.S. economy right now. That translates into an unemployment rate of over 17 percent, and for Black and Latino workers, it's an unemployment rate of around 25 percent.

According to the Economist, one out of every six U.S. workers has taken a wage cut in this recession, and amazingly, four out of every 10 African Americans has experienced unemployment during this crisis. Looking at food stamps, an additional 37 million people went onto food stamps in the U.S. in 2009, and 40 percent of those recipients are working for a wage. They're not unemployed--they're simply the working poor that can't make ends meet.

As for the next statistic I'm going to give you, this one was so overwhelming that I did check it to be sure. Half of all U.S. children will now depend on food stamps at some point during their childhood, and the figure runs at 90 percent for African American kids. Imagine that--in the heartland of global capitalism.

The "new normal" is signposted by a catastrophic drop in income in the last year, and a long-term doubling in the ratio of "economically insecure" workers. This intensification of the rate of exploitation is a logical way for the ruling class to proceed, but it may not be good for the system as a whole. A section of the US ruling class is aware of the problem this poses for consumption, and therefore for the system's capacity to reproduce itself. Ben Bernanke argues in a speech published today that depressed wages and incomes, resulting in falling consumption and diminished revenues for local state budgets, is "weighing on economic activity". On that basis, he urges continued stimulus spending at federal and state levels.

In the coming elections, the GOP will naturally bluster about cutting spending, throwing red meat to this astroturf 'movement' they and their business allies have helped create. But few will buy this: the GOP co-engineered and voted for TARP, after all. And any stimulus spending they can attack is pittance compared to the truly astonishing transfer of wealth to the banks, which itself discloses the fatal dilemma posed by the current crisis. This transfer of wealth was not ostensibly just for the benefit of one sector of capital. The whole system in the neoliberal era has been financialised, so that manufacturing and service capital, along with a sector of the actually existing middle class, is substantially dependent on financial revenues. But that transfer really didn't rejuvenate the system, even though the attack on the working class has temporarily boosted profit margins. It just staved off the worst. And now the final act of the transfer, that being the cuts in social expenditure and privatization (the whole thing is an act of accumulation-by-dispossession), risks further slashing spending power and thereby prolonging and deepening the crisis.

However this conundrum is resolved, it will not be in the interests of the working class. David Harvey has written of how capitalists would usually rather retreat behind the flood barriers and watch everyone else get washed away in the deluge than sacrifice some of its wealth to boost consumption and save the system. Only under significant working class pressure do they ever take the latter option, and such pressure is not a significant factor in American political life at the moment. It is certainly not expressed in elections, as electoral insurgencies are very capably and swiftly stamped on by the Democratic Party machinery. The Democrats' hegemony on the working class vote (to the extent that workers vote) may have been eroding, but it has not been successfully challenged from the left since it was first consolidated in 1932. Only the Progressive Party came close, and they didn't come very close. Instead, most workers simply do not vote. It is also true that the Republicans have in the past taken an expanding layer of (esp. white) working class voters, partly on racist grounds as per the misnamed 'southern strategy'. But the main factor - as Kenworthy et al [pdf] have shown - is the disorganisation and de-unionisation of the working class since the 1970s, which led to millions of workers seeking individualist solutions to their material needs, sometimes identifying with a conservative agenda of low taxes as being more advantageous to their immediate economic wellbeing than social spending.

The main problem for the American working class is not a lack of class consciousness. It is the weight of the accumulated outcomes of successive class struggles over several generations. At each phase, workplace organisation has been smashed, left-wing political movements broken up and the remnants coopted. Chris Hedges argues that America needs a few good communists, and he's right. But a few won't cut it, and they won't be sufficient unless there's a movement of working class militants they can relate to. What do I mean by 'militants'? Well, a militant is a worker who has experience of dealing with management, who has learned how to stand up to them and how to protect her rights as well as those of her co-workers, and who has learned the need for a strategy, for planning, for meetings, for leafleting and so on. There are such people in America, but there aren't enough of them, because the strength of the ruling class has hitherto been such that being a militant, or being organised politically in any way, can be unrewarding and often downright hazardous. However, if this crisis continues to see a weakening in the global power and cohesiveness of the US ruling class there will be opportunities for a renaissance in the labour movement. Every US worker should be praying for the fall of the empire, and the opportunities it will bring. And then the conversation will change, and we won't be hearing about how Obama, the president of Goldman Sachs, is too left-wing for such a conservative country.

I just wanted to express some satisfaction at this:

This is part of a long term trend, and the collapse of the Liberals has been the silver lining around the dark cloud of this administration. They are the weak link in a coalition with the approval of about 40% of voters. As pollsters have pointed out, the fact that the government has the approval of less people than would vote for the constituent parties is in stark contrast to the approval rates for New Labour for most of its first term, which remained well above the number of people who would actually vote for the party.

Prior to the election, I wrote:

Given the prevailing ideological disorientation, the absence of mass resistance to the recession, the hatred for the bankers, the contempt for the MPs who like big expense accounts and are on sale to American lobbyists, and the utter alienation from the main parties - well, given all this, a space is naturally opening for an 'honest broker' who can appear to transcend the "special interests" and efficiently manage our way through the present crisis. The trouble is, whoever governs for the next five years is about to watch that space disappear.

The Liberals' participation in what is openly a radical rightist attack on the welfare state has completely undermined their position as an 'honest broker', far more rapidly than the social polarisation produced by the cuts might have done had they not been part of the coalition. Much as I understand why some people were tempted by the Liberals before the 2010 election (less so why some thought the Liberals would complete some half-finished bourgeois revolution, Charter 88-style), I take sincere pleasure in their self-destruction.

Nina Power applies the scalpel of socialist feminist critique to the Right to Work campaign in today's Guardian. This is most welcome, because the campaign against the cuts, and against unemployment, should be the topic of urgent debate in the press - which otherwise shows little interest in the concerns of the working class. (Ask yourself this: all newspapers have a 'business' section, overwhelmingly concerned with the doings of chief executives, financiers and multinationals, so why is there no labour section?) Power's basic point is that the slogan 'Right to Work' is problematic because of the way in which it suggests that access to waged labour is itself a sufficient solution, and secondly because of certain connotations that it may have in participating in a discourse that elevates work to "the ultimate mark of a man or, in more recent decades, a woman too."

Indeed, while I don't completely agree with Power's analysis, there's a real problem here. We have a Tory government that is determined to cut the welfare state, slashing benefits, driving more and more of the disabled off benefits. (On this latter, see Christopher Read's disturbing article for the New Left Project). One of the ways in which this is justified is by means of a moralistic, coercive appeal to work as the alternative to poverty and 'dependency culture'. Work, in this reactionary trope, confers dignity and respectability. Indeed, it is put to us that if we truly respect our elders, we have to find a way to 'allow' older people to stay on in work for a few more years before claiming their pension entitlement, even as youth unemployment soars, and even if this means millions of people die before seeing a single penny of their deferred wages.

To the extent that asserting a 'right to work' could be seen as colluding in this idea, I can see the virtue of Power's alternative 'refusal to work': the right to be lazy, as Lafargue put it. A central component of socialism in its marxist variant is the drive to reduce the burden of compulsory labour on people, using productivity gains to shorten people's working lives and elongate their living hours. Concretely, in the context of a recession with mass unemployment, we can see how this might translate into a real demand: share the work around more equitably, give us a shorter working week with no loss of pay.

So, here's where Power's argument becomes problematic. A central campaigning demand of 'Right to Work' is a 35 hour week with no loss of pay, as affirmed at the 2010 conference. This is not especially radical. The New Economic Foundation goes farther, demanding a 21 hour working week, spread over four days. But given that the average working week in the UK is the longest in Europe at some 41.4 hours, and given that the average worker in the UK performs two months of unpaid overtime each year, a compulsory 35 hour week would be a good start, and constitute a relief for millions of workers. It would, in the marxist lexicon, reduce the rate of exploitation, as well as giving people more leisure time and reducing the demonstrably adverse effects of over-work - the physiological effects described by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in The Spirit Level, and the psychological effects described by Oliver James in Affluenza.

The Federation of European Employers, of course, sees things differently. They believe that regulations and social benefits, giving people the right to holidays and sick leave for example, is costing EU businesses too much, and they want to see such entitlements removed so that more time is spent at work and thus more surplus extracted. The CBI, for its part, is committed to maintaining high working hours and its successful lobbying to maintain Britain's opt out of the EU Working Time directive is one of the politico-legal bases for Britain's over-long working week and high rates of exploitation and inequality. So, the Right to Work campaign positions it against the employers, the government, and their moralising drive to force people to work more. We are for the right to work - for access to waged labour - but we are also for the right to work less for the same wage. That can't be accomplished unless the work is shared more equitably, and unless unemployment is systematically attacked.

The demand for the right to work is also a demand to end the ruling class policy of maintaining a certain rate of unemployment (typically 5% in growth periods) to weaken the bargaining power of labour, reduce wage claims and thus supposedly control inflation. It's a demand, tacitly, to increase the share of the social product going to labour. This is important because, as Power points out, the mass entry of women into the workforce in the last forty years or so has coincided with wage stagnation and attacks on welfare, such that the amount of work being done by men and women has increased while the share of the social product going to labour has diminished. New Labour's adaptation to neoliberalism meant that Gordon Brown embraced a definition of 'full employment' as the maximum employment that will place no upward pressure on inflation. That has actually involved consistently high rates of unemployment and is thus inconsistent with the right to work. This means that women in particular are suffering: with the dual burden of domestic and workplace labour increasing the total amount of work performed by women, both the social wage and the market wage have stagnated or declined for millions. Defending the right to work is therefore an important weapon in defending the income of workers, especially the most precariously employed, lowest paid women workers.

Now the Tories' attack on welfare will adversely effect women in two ways. It will drive up unemployment by relieving hundreds of thousands of public sector workers - disproportionately female - of their jobs. It will also reduce help for working mothers and children, further depress the social wage, and make it less easy for mothers to seek paid work. That's why they're pushing the 'family' agenda, as if restoring Victorian patriarchal values will sweep up the social mess created by these cuts. This is why a defence of the welfare state is an essential component of Right to Work's strategy, and is also a vital element of women's liberation.

Lastly, do we need a new slogan to escape the pharisaical connotations alluded to above? I don't know that we do. The right to work is not coextensive with the obligation to work. On the contrary, asserting the right to work is essential for the purpose of reducing the amount of work that people have to do, and increasing the share of the social product they receive for their labour. It is also synonymous with defending the welfare state, so that unwaged work is paid in some sense. It does not entail "working even harder for less so that those at the top can keep more" - quite the reverse. Most importantly, I think, the slogan cuts through the hypocrisy of the Tory cuts agenda. As much as they bluster about the redeeming powers of waged work, they are engaged in a programme that systematically attacks the right to work which we defiantly assert. What we need, I daresay, is not a new slogan, but a militant application of the current slogan. There lies the real basis for a movement to liberate ourselves from the burden of compulsory, soul-destroying, exploitative labour.

A milestone in labour struggles and women's liberation, a 1968 strike by machinists at Ford Dagenham, is to be turned into a film. The strike fed into the National Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal Rights, and resulted in a series of similar struggles across British industry, driving up womens' representation in trade unions. It also forced the Labour government to launch an investigation into Ford's practises by employment secretary Jack Scamp, ultimately resulting in the Equal Pay Act of 1970, one of the signal successes of British feminism. For all that the legislation failed to eradicate the yawning pay gap between male and female workers, it did provide the legal basis for a series of struggles that improved the situation of women. This should be a welcome addition to the spate of British films about working class struggle 'back then', from Brassed Off to the Full Monty - great as these films are, there's usually an antiquarian feel about them, as if class struggle is a sort of museum piece rather than an enduring reality. As Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon write in Looking at Class, while films focused on working class issues in the Sixties were filled with anger and hope, emphasising the prospect of coming changes, even the more light-hearted films about the working class since the 1990s, as well as the grittier fare such as Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, are incredibly pessimistic, depicting a world of disintegration and individual survival against the odds through tenacity and humour.

I wonder, though, what manner of depiction it will be when the producer renders the subjects thus: "I was fascinated by their story, and what struck me in particular was how innocent and unpoliticised they were. All they wanted was a fair deal. It was common sense rather than any kind of axe to grind." This may be a tactical statement, intended to soften the film's edges, but it's also a commonplace form of revisionism of the kind that mainstream culture often performs on formerly untouchable subjects to render them safe - think of the folk myths about Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela. Think of how posterity condescends to them, erasing as much of their relevance for today's struggles as possible. Or worse, how they're held up as self-sufficient agents of change through moral persuasion, as if they did not operate in a milieu of communism, revolutionary movements, labour militancy, global anti-imperialist struggles, and so on, as if they were not themselves convoked by grass roots agencies that have all but been forgotten.

The women were not 'innocent', as this interview with strike committee leader Rose Boland confirms. They were class militants, and they were part of a labour movement that, through the involvement of socialist women, had started to take the issue of women's oppression seriously. The equal pay that the women were demanding had long been part of the TUC's agenda, and its 1963 congress had pushed for the next Labour government, which was elected the following year, to make equal pay a requirement in law. This was followed by an Industrial Charter for Women drawn up by the TUC's Women's Advisory Committee. This is not to say that the extant left and the labour movement was already totally PC and feminist, and that the women were pushing at an open door - far from it. The strike was also part of a rising wave of women's struggles, which had started to make an impact on the male-dominated labour movement, and was registering in some sections of the revolutionary left. It is appropriate to acknowledge that of the Trotskyist organisations the IS (forerunner of the SWP) did not respond to the women's movement as quickly as it might have done. Calls for involvement in the liberation movement were fiercely resisted at first, according to Martin Shaw, who was a prominent member at the time. (Ian Birchall's response to Shaw, disputing many of his claims, can be read here). It was IS women, coordinating among themselves, who effected a volte face that grew in pace as Seventies militancy escalated. In fact, it is fair to say that in the far left as a whole, women's liberation opened up a whole series of cultural battles on the family, homosexuality, children's rights, and so on. Struggles like the Dagenham machinists' strike, and the movement of which it was a part, had a profoundly civilising influence on the British left, and eventally on much of British society as a whole.

The background of the struggle in Ford is that the company's accumulation strategy produced some of the sharpest industrial conflicts in British labour history, and galvanised a militant shop stewards movement that was at the centre of the most radicalised sectors of the organised labour movement. In its three big plants at Halewood, Dagenham and Swansea, the company acknowledged the trade unions, and it would negotiate over pay, but it was adamant that it would not negotiate over tasks and workload - the assertion of management's right to manage was a centrepiece of Ford's strategy. The trade union leadership, for its part, was happy to go along with the Ford management, agreeing that shop stewards should not interfere in matters liable to have an impact on any productivity deal. So, the struggles that took place were often over precisely the issue of the authority of line managers and bosses. The revolutionary left paid especial heed to such struggles because they were more than "DIY reformism", more than bread-and-butter fights. They seemed to point toward the emergence of an agency that challenged the owners' right to dispose of the means of production as they saw fit. The Ford bosses in Detroit were worried sick about what they saw as the "British disease" of constant industrial conflict such that, in 1972, the company announced plans to build a plant in Franco's Spain, where strikes were largely banned and labour costs systematically repressed.

At the same time, the company pursued a systematically discriminatory policy in pay. Gender management - like race management in Detroit - was an effective way of stratifying and dividing the workforce and extracting more surplus from them. This was accomplished through a grading system that ensured that while one in four male workers were on the slightly higher 'C' grade (for 'skilled' workers), only in four hundred women were. The vast majority of women workers, despite performing the same basic tasks as their male counterparts, were deemed by Ford to be 'unskilled'. Such gradings, as Jack Scamp's court of inquiry pointed out, were 'systematic' without being 'scientific'. They relied to a considerable extent on the subjective judgment of assessors who toured the plants interviewing workers and making on the spot assessments as to what grade women should be on. The women largely worked as sewing machinists, making the car seat covers. Largely because it was seen as a woman's job, it was automatically treated as unskilled. Most of the women were therefore on the lower 'B' grade of pay, but even here they were actually getting paid only 85% of the full 'B' grade wage.

This issue of pay 'grading' was not separate from the issue of managers' right to manage, but integral to it, since managers insisted on controlling and determining job profiles in every detail: the workload, the range of tasks, and the pay grade associated with it. While an overall pay settlement, based on a productivity agreement, was usually negotiated between trade union leaders and managers, this always included a clause that it was for managers to shift workers' around between posts and jobs as they saw fit, to allocate tasks, and introduce labour-saving devices where it would boost profitability. That invariably produced a clash between the common sense of workers, who knew their jobs inside out and who understood the rationale of their tasks better than management, and the impositions of the bosses whose systematic-but-not-scientific evaluations were increasingly segmenting tasks in a way that was discriminatory. In fact, alongside the standard use of gender management, the bosses were finding ways to re-grade old jobs, and to create new ones with less prestige and lower pay. Management sought to impose agreements that would divide workers in different plants and roles, so that Halewood workers would gain where Dagenham workers losts, while small part sprayers would lose where sprayers in other parts of the plant would gain. Some workers were experiencing lay-off and deliberate de-skilling while other workers appeared, if only temporarily, to have it easier. These divisions were encouraged to the maximum by bosses, the better to undermine collective militancy, increase productivity and drive down wage costs - to increase the rate of exploitation, in other words.

In the late 1960s, a series of strikes broke out led by women, first at Halewood and then in Dagenham. These were driven by the same issues that had provoked militancy in male-dominated sectors of the plants - workload, managerial infringement, and job grading, and discriminatory practises. But axis of womens' oppression intersecting with the class conflict added fire to the struggle, and gave a pulse of new energy to the rest of the workforce. Huw Beynon, whose Working for Ford is a classic of industrial sociology, reports that these strikes had a "cathartic" effect on the men in the factories. Though they spoke in a macho and often sexist idiom, and though they were socialised in a patriarchal society that wanted them to hate women, and patronise them, they were gaining respect for their female counterparts. At least the women were having a go, they said. "These women are the only men in the plant," they said. "These tarts have taught us a lesson," they said. "We ought to go down there and shout a big fucking 'thank you'." Subsequent militancy, including sophisticated campaigns for parity in pay among all workers in the industry, owed a huge debt to the women's struggles.

The women at Dagenham didn't win the 'C' grade that they were entitled to, however. The Labour government was determined to contain the rising arc of industrial militancy. Maintaining profitability and growth was central to their ability to deliver reforms, and they were determined to resituate the role of trade unions in British society so that workers could not so easily push up labour costs. The In Place of Strife bill introduced by Barbara Castle as secretary of state for employment and productivity, with the support of the Conservative opposition, had been promulgated to thwart sudden shop steward militancy by forcing secret ballots, a 'cooling off' period, and collective bargaining with legally binding results. The bill failed because of opposition from the trade unions, the Labour NEC, a significant chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and even Labour right-wingers like Jim Callaghan, who opposed state regulation of the unions on ideological grounds. This was an opening shot in the collapse of the post-war consensus, and ultimately the Thatcherites would succeed where the Wilson government failed.

In the meantime, the Dagenham machinists' three week dispute was a signal example of the kind of militancy that the government was determined to contain. Ford needed the workers they discriminated against - you can't sell cars without seat covers - but it was markedly bad at containing militancy. So, Castle intervened. The strike committee were invited to have tea in Whitehall, and they put their demands. The meeting ended with the women accepting 100% of the 'B' grade to be phased in over two years, with a promise of a court of inquiry and an Equal Pay bill that would criminalise separate pay grades for women. This ended an explicit gender bar in pay, but also left in place the most invidious form of discrimination in which womens' work was graded as 'unskilled'.

Note that no work, and no worker, is actually 'unskilled'. Skill in the sense used in industrial relations is a social category - it reflects more on the position of the worker within the labour system than it does on the workers' abilities or even necessarily her tasks. The process of 'de-skilling' labour that I mentioned earlier is a really a process of demotion within the labour system, intended to increase the extraction of surplus. The Scamp-led court of inquiry's verdict that pay grading was highly subjective is crucial here. The determination that womens' work was unskilled was driven by the company's need to contain pay claims, and buttressed by prejudicial assumptions about female labour. So it remains today. Job profiles are still highly gendered, and pay and prestige still attaches more to 'male' labour than it does to 'female' labour. Increasingly, as the service economy has grown, women have been pushed into roles where most of the work emphasises emotional labour, which is often a priori classified as 'unskilled' (though this is notably less true of the more macho 'sales' end of emotional labour). And so the same struggles go on, from a higher plateau.

The re-emergence of feminist agitation in the UK, the packed conventions of the London Feminist Network, the Reclaim the Night marches, a reviving feminist literature that is seeing liberals like Natasha Walter become radicalised, the campaigns against sexual objectification and violence against women with the Million Women Rise marches in the capital, thus forms a vanguard, an avant-garde, of the coming class confrontation. It will be disproportionately female workers in the public sector who will be out on the picket lines in the coming months and years. On the fortieth anniversary of the Equal Pay act, it is fitting that the beginnings of resistance to the long misogynist backlash should also be a frontline in the nascent resurgence of working class struggle.

Interesting to see that Will Hutton regards the BBC as a paternalist safeguard against 'mob rule', or rather against "populist government by the mob". He really takes seriously the idea that advertising-driven broadcasters merely give people what they want, and that to do so is dangerous. To give people what they ask for is to invite a debasement of public life, a degeneration of culture and - ironically - a degradation of democracy.

I don't much care for Hutton's Eurocentric liberalism, and no more do I like his oligarchic conception of 'democracy'. It's more than apparent that, like most of his cohorts in the liberal commentariat, he doesn't at all like democracy in the sense of popular rule. To blame corporate reaction of the kind vended by Fox et al on this specious notion of the "mob" is to buy into one of the most culturally pervasive, and pernicious, conceptions of popular rule.

Literal expressions of contempt for the masses tend to stick in the public throat. People don't like it. It works better as caricature and satire. In American pop culture, this is usually expressed in cartoon form. In The Simpsons, a constant mainstay is the hysterical, shrieking, irrational crowd, inflamed with murderous rage, galvanised by some moral panic or other. Pitchforks and flaming torches appear out of nowhere, looting begins spontaneously, anarchy in its basest form prevails. In South Park, they literally mutter "rabble, rabble, rabble" as they lead their charge, addressing hysterical demands to some political or corporate authority (who, however venal, comes across as a paragon of Enlightenment against the hateful mob).

In Futurama, the mob is, even more advantageously, a race of robots with hard-wired mechanisms. In one episode, 'Mom', the chief executive of 'Momcorp' that mass produces robots, has pre-programmed her product with a 'rebel' instruction. When she presses a button, they rise up and conquer earth, mimicking the lingua franca of protests and revolution while, as one character says, "making civilization collapse". The robots chant in binary: "Hey hey, ho ho, 100110...". A robot greetings card speaks in mutilated marxism to "comrade Bender", urging him to "take to the streets" and loot. (Later, as the "revolution" unfolds with the anti-human massacres and mayhem, and civilizational collapse, Bender is turned into a counter-revolutionary when he learns that "Liquor is the opiate of the human bourgeoisie ... In the glorious worker robot paradise, there will be no liquor. Only efficient synthetic fuels.") Thus, in what has to be considered the more critical, liberal end of mainstream American cultural production, the spectre of the "populist rule of the mob" is rendered as a chimerical mash-up of capitalist communism.

It's all the same. "Mom" is a Machiavellan power-maximiser, where in her guise as an arch-capitalist or a revolutionary demagogue. The masses are a stupid, baying insta-mob, incapable of rational, collective deliberation, whether they're spouting ignorant bigotry ("they took our jobs!") or snippets of de-sequentialised pseudo-marxist rhetoric. Populism in this sense is a political fable about the irrationality of crowds, and the impossibility of reasoned collective decision-making. That there are and have been mobs does not alter the fact that this cultural motif is a fabulation. It has nothing to do with the real historical processes in which murderous mobs - say, pogromists - have been galvanised. The 'mob' of popular culture is an Aunt Sally, and it is surely of some significance that this 'mob' is with few exceptions the only way in which masses appear as an agency in said culture. Contempt for the 'populist mob' really expresses hatred for democracy.

Capital represents itself to us principally through its advertising. Its presence is rendered in strictly non-materialist terms. Idealist, magical, or even downright theological thinking is at the heart of capitalist ideology - Smith's 'hidden hand', the religious mandate for 'improvement' of the earth in Lockean property theory, the 'reward-for-abstinence' theory of profits, and the 'golden egg' theory of investments and savings. So when capital represents itself to us, it is not as a set of material processes but as a benign Geist, a bearer of anthropomorphically enlarged humane values, an atmosphere of well-being, etc.. This study of turn-of-the-century corporate advertising and the ideological landscapes created by capital, devised by the author of this marxist analysis of Mork & Mindy, describes the self-representation strategies of capital as follows: