LENIN'S TOMB

Friday, June 29, 2012

Racial formation in Britain posted by Richard Seymour

The concept of 'racial formation' was coined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in what is really - despite its avowed distance from marxism - a Gramscian enterprise. Although the authors focus on somatic racism, their arguments are relevant here. Defining race as "a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies" (and, one would add, cultures defined in a univocal, essentialist manner), they described racial formations as:

"the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. Our attempt to elaborate a theory of racial formation will proceed in two steps ... [W]e argue that racial formation is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized. Next we link racial formation to the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled. ... From a racial formation perspective, race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation."

The work of cultural and ideological representation is done by 'racial projects'. A racial project "is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines". Racial formation, then, is a conjunction of these various racial projects with the social structures (labour market hierarchies, criminal justice, educational selection etc) on which they act.

It was not long after the reality television show Make Bradford British was aired that George Galloway swept the bye-election in Bradford West by an overwhelming margin. This victory was a long overdue rebuttal to the idea that the problems and aspirations of poor, working class areas like Bradford can be reduced to 'race'. But the primary interpreters of the result in the media didn't see it that way. For them, it could only be more proof of just how potent 'race' is as a determinant factor in people's behaviour. 'They voted the dreadful man Galloway in: Islam is more powerful than we thought.' This is linked to two types of racial project, which I think are the dominant types in relation to British Muslims, and British Asians more generally.

The first is actually that produced in the Make Bradford British programme. The title of the show connoted a racist precept - that is, an idea of Britishness as something that is disturbed by the presence of 'foreigners', racial Others. The producers would claim, I imagine, that this is to misunderstand their goal; that their idea of Britishness is one of mutual tolerance, multiculturalism and respect, which extremists 'on both sides' would tend to threaten. Such, indeed, appears to be the surface premise: the idea of bringing together diverse Bradfordians, from the racist copper, to the devout Muslim, and every shade of racist and racial subject in between, under the same roof. And tolerance is not the most repugnant of misanthropic virtues, particularly when it is invoked as a shield against oppression. However, whether the producers claim to have been aware of this or not, the very idea that Bradford needs to be made British is connotatively linked to an idea of British nationality as 'white'. And the way in which tolerance is linked to this notion discloses the racist logic of tolerance in this case.

If the explicit assumption is that 'divisions' arise from a lack of intimacy between different groups, the implicit assumption is that before the 'foreigners' there was a relatively stable British identity, which can only be restored through the domestication of these interlopers. In this project, multiculturalism is explicitly embraced, even if the submerged logic tends toward integrationism; likewise, the projected resolution is consensual, organised around the sharing of experience and views, even if the hidden logic points to the need for coercive programme of 'British values'. The meaning of race disclosed here is purely discursive; it has no positive reality either as a somatic fact or as a social structure, even if at root there may be 'legitimate grievances' which are crudely taken to be erroneously understood in the language of race. This is a liberal, managerial racial project. And I will leave it here, because this one is dying.

The second type appears in David Starkey's comments on the recent case of a gang of British men, of Pakistani origin, who were convicted of grooming children. Starkey argued that this was a reflection of values inculcated in "the foothills of the Punjab or wherever", that it was a case of men who had never been taught that using girls in this way was inherently wrong, and who needed to be "inculcated in the British way of doing things". (Yes, Britain, where children are happily unmolested except by foreigners with different ways to our own.) Don't imagine that Starkey represents an insubstantial minority. At the Times debate where he made these comments, and where Starkey was expertly trolled by Laurie Penny who called him out as a racist bigot, there was clearly a fairly substantial sentiment in favour of Starkey. His supporters on this occasion included the dim libertarian ex-RCPer Claire Fox, who dubbed Penny a disgrace to women and the Left for not joining the kulturkampf against those whom tabloids have dubbed "Asian sex monsters".

In fact, anyone who has followed the coverage knows that Starkey is not in this case pushing at the boundaries of acceptable discourse. People like former Labour MP Ann Cryer, who began campaigning over 'Asian sex gangs' in 2000, are complaining that the police wouldn't take the problem seriously due to 'political correctness'. (In fact, the trial seems to have disclosed that the girls were not taken seriously in their complaints because they were poor, from broken homes or care, and would not be considered credible before a court: an old story about misogyny, not political correctness). Starkey's comments, malicious as they are, are in concert with the dominant tone of the media's coverage.

So, using the idiom of culture and nebulous 'values' (because apparently you have to subscribe to a nationally specific yet extremely vague set of 'values' to know that it is wrong to use children for sex), this project specifically rejects multiculturalism and the rhetoric of tolerance. The explicit logic is coercive and punitive, not consensual. Increasingly, since the 'profile' of the 'Pakistani street groomer' is being developed by police and popularised by the mass media, this means racial profiling and extended state surveillance and intervention into the lives of one million Britons. But again, there is a slightly deeper logic in the call for an enforced pedagogy in the "British way of doing things". For the suspects in Rochdale were all, bar one, born, raised and socialised in the United Kingdom. Their life experiences, education and work were not those that one would receive in "the foothills of Punjab". Therefore the assumption that their 'values' would reflect those of the Punjab, leaving aside the scandalous way in which those 'values' are being depicted, tends to shade into outright biological racism. Otherwise, it segues into a cultural essentialism so deterministic that it makes no difference. Social structure appears here only as an appurtenance of race. And the implication of such a stance is that even assimilation is not possible, that coexistence is only possible at great distance.

So, here a set of antagonisms prevalent throughout the social formation - those engendered by patriarchy, poverty, the social care system, the depletion of public resources, policing, and the precarious existence of working class girls arising in that context - has been represented and signified through the bodies of 'Asian men' or 'Pakistani men' to create a racial meaning and struggle for a particular kind of racial solution. This brings us to the role of racial formation in hegemonic practices. Hegemony is not typically a state sustained over a long period of time, but rather a state which is constantly worked toward and worked on. It signifies not a normal condition of rule, but an exceptional state of dominance in which a class or class fraction has assembled a broad social alliance along multiple axes of class, oppression and identity, behind a certain historical mission. It involves not just the transformation of the 'common sense', as it were, but also the profound reorganisation of political violence and terror.

There is a tell-tale dimension of this Rochdale case referred to by Judith Orr here, which is the introduction of a racialised neologism in the context of moral panic. In Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall et al described the origins of the term 'mugging', which was introduced in the British popular press from the United States in 1971-2 to refer to an apparently new criminal menace which was strongly associated with young black men. In the period 1972-3, there appeared in the press to be a 'mugging epidemic', connotatively linked to the 'ghetto', the black criminal 'underworld', etc etc. There was, then as now, a totemic case, that of the violent robbery of a man in Handsworth, Birmingham. 'Mugging' was not a specific crime, but rather linked a number of types of criminal action to a set of racial connotations. The media led with this, arguing that the police and courts were overwhelmed with this new type of crime, which was not new, and not significantly increasing in frequency. And this provided the imaginary material for the New Right's articulation of an authoritarian-populist agenda.

So today we have the invention of this term "street grooming" or "on-street grooming", which does not signify a specific criminal offence, but which is laden with racial connotation as it is used almost exclusively in association with sex crimes committed by 'Asian men'. That's why statistics on this are so difficult to obtain and unreliable: the police actually arrest, charge and prosecute people accused of 'street-grooming' under a wide variety of offenses. The main way in which newspaper reports get round this is to look at police figures to do with the detection and prosecution of extended gangs involved in sex with children. This, they say, shows a greatly disproportionate cohort of men of Pakistani origin. This is very much like the case of 'honour crimes', which reclassify existing crimes according to a racialised code. Thus, according to this logic, you'll probably find that the overwhelming majority of honour crimes are committed by Muslim men, because you've re-defined the crime (say, the murder of family members) in such a way as to focus on one aspect of it, and thereby ignore most of it. The same is true of the 'grooming' panic, which seems to be a stronger candidate for a racialised moral panic, where the resonant racist imagery of brown-skinned men preying on white girls offers a very potent way of turning the real experiences of exploitation and abuse into a language of authoritarian racist crackdown.

It is also connotatively linked to the ongoing mythos of British decline, something which reactionaries date to Indian independence and the arrival of Windrush. In the context of real declines (in relative income, living standards, social services, employment, job security, infrastructure, pensions, etc.) and amid a turbulent and seemingly endless crisis, there is more than enough material, already saturated with racial meanings, to make this articulation work. This would be linked to a project of British revivalism, already in the works: the 1945 reenactment society has been doing its best drape everything both literally and figuratively in the Union Jack, even as the union threatens to come apart. It would obviously be linked to a belligerent europhobia, particularly as the EU looks like its leadership is barely capable of survival. It would ally, as its pivotal class alliance, the most 'eurosceptic' and hyper-Atlanticist sectors of the bourgeoisie, over-represented in the ownership of the media, with the most nationalistic sectors of the petty bourgeoisie.

Yet, for all its resemblances to early Thatcherism, it would have to be different in several particulars. Neither the individualist rebellion against the nanny state or union bosses, nor the aspirational politics sharp-eyed and ruthless social climbing, has escaped the crisis without some stigma. If such a project were to reach into the working class, its material substratum could not be a promise of rewards unleashed by financialisation and good pay for loyal, skilled, non-militant workers. Rather, it would seem to call for a certain paternalistic turn - which is by no means incompatible with privatization and an increase in the rate of exploitation. It would demand carefully targeted material concessions through the state, perhaps coupled with a punitive strike against those on the wrong side of respectability, such as single mothers and immigrants. If and when David Cameron is deposed from the Right, I would strongly expect the putsch to be organised around these sorts of policy thematics, and it would be tailed relentlessly by 'Blue Labour'.

However, although within a racial formation a single racial project tends to be dominant, it is not exclusively or necessarily so. The task of the Left is to link a politics of militant racial egalitarianism to the language of everyday experience. This becomes much easier in the context of rising class and social struggles in which the appeal for unity has a clear experiential basis. We can see from the example of antifascist organisation how the activation of concrete forms of multiracial unity can pose a different meaning of race. We also saw how anti-racism formed the dominant culture of the antiwar movement, despite a reasonably large antiwar sentiment on the Right, and provided a counterpoint to the demonisation of Muslims. So, if the dominance of a given racial project is decided by the types of situation that are popularly understood as 'racial', and if the Right tends to have the whip hand here, there are clearly resources on this front for counter-hegemonic mobilisation.

Labels: gramsci, hegemony, left, multiculturalism, multiculture, racial formation, racism, reactionaries, socialism, thatcherism

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Is racism hardwired into the Daily Mail brain? posted by Richard Seymour

Scientists say, yes (according to my latest Guardian piece):

The Daily Mail has bad news for "right-thinking" people everywhere: Racism is "hardwired" into the human brain. Even well-meaning progressives "make unconscious decisions based on a person's race". It is inescapable.

The one small hitch in this story is adverted to in that shopworn phrase "scientists say". A discordant note should always sound in the reader's mind when a journalist opens an article with this assurance. For, in point of fact, scientists don't say.

Labels: capitalist ideology, daily mail, evolutionary psychology, ideology, media, racism, reactionaries

Thursday, March 29, 2012

The sinister magic of Boris Johnson posted by Richard Seymour

My article for Open Democracy on Boris Johnson and London's mayoral contest:

In 2008, the outer ring of rich suburbs in the capital turned out en masse to elect Boris Johnson as their mayor. These suburbs, ripe in the spring air with the whiff of barbecues and bigotry, knew what they wanted. A mayor who would cut all the trendy programmes, put the frighteners on young thugs, sock it to the unions and practice a suitable ambiguity toward London’s unsettling multiculture...

Labels: boris johnson, ken livingstone, london, mayor, neoliberalism, reactionaries, sociopaths, thatcherism, tories, trade unions

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Labour's strategy of right-wing populism posted by Richard Seymour

"...More specifically, the tenor of his latest intervention fits into a wider Labour strategy of articulating a politics of the "squeezed middle". In Miliband's bland cadences, this sounds anodyne. But, in fact, it is a strategy taken over directly from rightwing populism. To understand this, one need only revisit the rightist backlash against social democracy and New Deal liberalism. This had a racist component, visible in the seemingly evanescent campaigns of Enoch Powell and George Wallace. But race wasn't all there was to it, and the techniques of populist mobilisation continued to be deployed long after these two had passed into obscurity.
"Rightwing populism is not merely transparently "representative": rather it seeks to create the division that it articulates. Societies divided along multiple lines are simplified into a dichotomy between "the people" and its other. The working class is redivided into the hard-working taxpayer and the slothful undeserving poor, with the former subsumed into the "people", the latter into its other. The people are then construed as a "middle" whose sovereignty has been abused by bureaucrats, tax-avoiding plutocrats, criminals, protesters and clamourous minorities alike. Thus, Wallace complained that "middle America" was squeezed between the "silk-stocking crowd" and the poor and criminal.
"The "middle", thus defined, is a depthless discursive entity: "the people" supposedly bracketed by the term share little by way of work, culture, housing, education or daily experience. They are united only by what they oppose. Nonetheless, this type of appeal would underpin Ronald Reagan's attempt to forge a Republican majority. In the same way, Powellism would pass into mainstream politics in the form of Thatcherism, which championed a squeezed "middle England" of hard workers against a bossy state and the grasping poor: a form of politics characterised by Stuart Hall as "authoritarian populism". Since then, capturing the "centre ground" has often meant genuflecting to an incorrigibly reactionary "middle"..."

Labels: austerity, ed miliband, labour, neoliberalism, new labour, populism, reactionaries, welfare

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Tories, Europe and political animals who cannot be domesticated. posted by Richard Seymour

I've been away, so neglected to post this article up:

There were merry guffaws when former British prime minister John Major incautiously referred to three cabinet members as 'bastards'.
This was in 1993, when European economic and monetary union was nearing the completion of its first stage. Right-wing Conservative MPs were then in rebellion over the Maastricht Treaty, which ratified the European Union. The weakness and division of the parliamentary party was obvious. With a majority of only 18 MPs, 22 backbenchers voted against the government.
Party whips were unable to contain the revolt with their usual mix of threats and rewards, because the rebels were confident that Major's leadership would not last long and that it would fall to them to save the Conservative Party. In that, they had the blessing of former leader Margaret Thatcher. Though the right reclaimed the leadership after 1997, they could not win an election. It fell to David Cameron, standing as a socially liberal 'One Nation' Conservative, to take the Tories out of the hard right ghetto.
Fast-forward to 2011, and Cameron's prospects look bleak. The backbench rebellion that took place in October was not over an outstanding Treaty issue. Its source was a parliamentary motion for a referendum over membership of the European Union, pushed by a number of right-wing MPs. These MPs must have known there was no prospect, even if a motion was carried, of Britain being withdrawn from the EU. The Tories' business allies would be the first to scream blue murder if this were on the cards. They can only have intended to hurt their leadership.

Labels: atlanticism, capitalism, eu, europe, petit bourgeoisie, reactionaries, ruling class, tories

Friday, October 07, 2011

Liberals and reactionaries posted by Richard Seymour

Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (Verso, 2011), and Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011)

I was speaking alongside Domenico Losurdo and Robin Blackburn at a launch event for the former's book at King's College some while ago. Losurdos' latest, Liberalism: A Counter-History, is an investigation into the limits and exclusions of liberalism. A salient point, which marks the beginning of one of his inquiries, is the fact that the three bourgeois revolutions conducted in the name of liberty and equality, were followed by a staggering increase in the global slave trade.

Three interesting problems arose in this discussion. The first is that it is a mainstay of marxist accounts of liberalism, and certainly central to C B Macpherson's analysis, that the core of it is property rights. This is not Losurdo's position, exactly. When a questioner from the floor asked about this question of property rights, he argued that what defined liberalism was not property, but the logic of exclusion. He mentioned the example of Palestinians who were expropriated at every opportunity by Israelis in the name of certain liberal values. And indeed the tension in Losurdo's narrative centres on how far liberalism can be made to expand on its revolutionary promise.

I still think that property is central here. For a start, the expropriation of the Palestinians doesn't disturb the principle of property rights. Property rights have always been structured in such a way as to allow white Europeans to expropriate non-white non-Europeans, from Locke to Vattel onward. After Katrina, the property rights of working class Americans, especially African Americans, were cancelled by fiat - but this didn't disturb the basic politico-legal order of property rights. In fact, I would bet on the idea that the state authorities and companies who carried out this expropriation worked very hard on devising a legal justification for this theft. Moreover, it is the nature of capitalist property relations, to which liberalism is committed, that builds exclusions into liberalism. The second difficulty concerned the distinction that Losurdo wished to draw between radicals and liberals, which is not always a stable boundary - for example, William Lloyd Garrison took liberalism to its most radical conclusions in opposition to racial slavery, the colonization of Indian land, and the oppression of women, but he by no means departed from liberalism (indeed, he refused the term 'wage slavery', supported capitalist 'free labour' and tended to be suspicious of unionism).

The third, related issue arose over the question of what, or who, counts as a liberal. Losurdo argues the case in his opening chapter for seeing the pro-slavery statesman John Calhoun as a liberal. Robin Blackburn disputed this, arguing that it involved far too expansive a definition of liberalism - Calhoun, he said, is a conservative. Blackburn's concern was that Losurdo was risking a sectarian position, failing to acknowledge and that this wasn't resolved by cordoning off some liberals as 'radicals'. Jennifer Pitts' recent review in the TLS takes this criticism much further, and in a much more hostile direction. What I would say is that, taken as a whole, Losurdo's book is more appreciative of liberalism's merits than might appear to be the case from some of the tendentious readings - which, in a counter-history, has some validity. His conclusions are not indiscriminately hostile.

Part of the problem here is that conservatism in its modern sense takes its cue from liberalism. Burke drew from Smith, almost all US conservatives draw from Locke, and modern conservatives are almost all influenced by classical liberalism. So, if Calhoun himself based his arguments on liberal precepts, which he certainly did, does this mean he is a liberal? There is also a deeper theoretical issue when discussing people like Calhoun. Antebellum slavery, some would argue, was a non-capitalist formation. That's a core part of Charles Post's argument in The American Road to Capitalism, written from a 'political marxist' perspective: that the US before the civil war was based on a combination of different modes of production - slavery, petty commodity production, mercantile capital, etc. The interaction between these different productive forms drove the expansionism of both north and south, eventually leading to Civil War. (Some of these arguments were debated on a recent Facebook thread and recorded by Louis Proyect). John Ashworth's classic two-volume marxist history, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, makes the argument that southern political thought was largely pre-capitalist, drawing on classical republican ideologies because they happened to be conducive to the preservation of slave relations. Indeed, he maintains, the Democratic Party when it first emerged was anticapitalist - 'Jacksonian Democracy', based centrally on the valorisation of the white, freeholding farmer, could challenge the power of the banks and commerce in the name of agrarian interests while also being profoundly opposed to strong state intervention in the economy. So, was John Calhoun a liberal, because of his strong individualism and hostility to the over-concentration of central authority, or did liberalism merely provide part of the vocabulary for the defence of conservative interests?

This vexed question, of the relationship between liberalism and conservatism, receives a sustained treatment in Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind. I have written a review of this for future publication, so I will make no detailed attempt to summarise its arguments here. Suffice to say that, for the purposes of this discussion, there is no doubt for Robin that Calhoun is a conservative. But what does being a conservative entail, then? The image of conservatism as anti-modern, traditionalist, evincing a preference for the familiar and for gradual evolution, is one that he, like Ted Honderich, C B Macpherson and others before him, disputes. The original conservatives - Hobbes, Burke, Maistre - are contemptuous of tradition, largely because of its inability to meet the challenge of revolution. What they are conserving is not a traditional order (as mentioned, Burke was already a free market capitalist), but hierarchy, dominance, unfreedom: they are reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries. To be effective counter-revolutionaries, conservatives must incorporate the ideas and tactics of the enemy. They must speak in the language of the people, "make privilege popular", "transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses".

Conservatism is thus not distinguished by its ideas which, with the enormous exception of race, it largely borrows from elsewhere, nor by its tactics, but by its praxis. It would follow that it is not Calhoun's republican, pre-capitalist 'states rights' ideology that makes him a conservative, any more than his defence of private property makes him a liberal. It is his attempt to arouse the South in response to the abolitionist danger, his attempt to conserve hierarchy against mass democracy, that makes him a conservative. Liberals, you may say, have also been known to defend hierarchy and racial supremacy. This is true, but liberalism does not pivot on the defence of hierarchies and domination; that is precisely why it devises 'exclusion clauses'. Indeed, it is because of liberalism's much vaunted commitment to humanitarian and egalitarian values that 'the liberal defence of murder' is a hypocritical ideology, riven with tensions that aren't usually present in the rightist equivalent.

Labels: capitalism, class, conservatism, counter-revolution, liberal imperialism, liberals, racism, reactionaries, reactionary subjectivity, the liberal defence of murder

Monday, September 26, 2011

Review of 'Chavs' by Owen Jones posted by Richard Seymour

Guest post by Callum:

Since its publication earlier this year, Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class seems to have caught the mood. Longlisted for the Guardian first book award, the book has gained positive write-ups in publications as diverse as the New York Times and Socialist Review. Media interest in the book and its author spiked in the aftermath of the riots, taken by the Right to be the surest sign yet of the existence of a pre-social class beyond all redemption. Jones’ front-row seat to David Starkey’s meltdown on Newsnight was one unfortunate outcome of the increased demand for his insight.

The thesis of the book is one readers of the Tomb will be familiar with and sympathetic to. It goes something like this: on the back of its institutions and communities being decimated by 30 years of neo-liberal class warfare, the working class has been turned into an object of ridicule for Britain’s triumphant rulers. The vision of working class life dominant among political and cultural elites is of a thick, violent, criminal, over-sexed and proto-fascist rump whose �?social problems’ are all of their own making. Robbed of the collective identity and sense of power that came with a strong trade union and Labour movement, the working class has been rendered defenceless to an onslaught launched by a media and political establishment dominated by the well-heeled.

The first reaction provoked by the book is one of anger. The author does an excellent job of building up evidence of the class bigotry that infects British public life. Given the invidious task of wading through the shit emanating from a variety of sources, from the detestable website ChavTowns, to the editorial pages of our newspapers, both broadsheet and tabloid, Jones convincingly demonstrates the hatred and bile that poor people have been on the end of in the last decade or so. Careful not to let his study become an account of �?cultural oppression’, the author is always quick to relate his vignettes of mockery to political and economic processes. In a public discourse desperate to convince itself of the reality of Blair’s feted �?meritocracy’, the poor had to be made responsible for their own poverty. The figure of the chav rump helped to feed the lie that �?we’re all middle class’ and justify the gradual elimination of working class voices from the political debate.

Chavs is at its strongest when debunking this myth of the middle-class majority. While honest about the real damage and social disarticulation caused by the collapse of industry in some areas of the country, it paints a picture of a working class that has been transformed rather than abolished. Jones points out the grim reality of the �?weightless economy’ for tens of millions of working class people. Whereas jobs in traditional industries were relatively well-paid, secure and high-status, the labour market that has replaced them is largely filled with badly paid, unsecure and low-status jobs in retail and �?customer service’. The trade unions have struggled to reproduce the strength they had in the �?old’ industries in the call centres and supermarkets that employ millions of working class people. This has had the effect of a creating a class that “objectively” is as numerous and economically vital as ever but “subjectively” experiences the world as a collection of isolated fragments, with no way to express politically its common interests. Chavs paints a picture of a working class that has been dislocated from its traditional strongholds in the trade union and socialist movement and is sorely lacking political representation.

This political weakness, Owen claims, lies at the heart of the cultural beating the working class has taken. In earlier days, our rulers were afraid of the �?resolute mass brandishing red flags and carrying dog-eared copies of the Communist Manifesto’ and this sense of working class power was reflected in relatively favourable, if patronizing, depictions of working class life in popular entertainment. With the trade unions smashed (one issue I had with the book is that it tends to slightly exaggerate the scale of the defeat of the trade unions) and the Labour Party reduced to a neo-liberal husk, ruling class fear of the proletarian mass has given way to derision.

The problem of working class representation is central to the book’s political message. While the author is no doubt correct to emphasize the effects New Labour’s dismissive attitude to the party’s working class supporters, to have the question of �?representation’ as the main focus seems to miss the point somewhat. Jones, a left-wing member of the Labour Party, seems at certain points to assign the working class a purely passive role in its potential re-awakening. He appears to see the working class as an abused �?constituency’ of potential Labour voters who need to be mobilized by the right messaging and policy portfolio.

Those of us from a different socialist tradition would instead stress that a new working class movement with a strong sense of collective interest and identity can only emerge through a process of class struggle. Simply waiting, as Chavs sometimes seems to suggest we ought to, for some Labour MPs (or even Ed Miliband) to break ranks with the neo-liberal orthodoxy and speak about working class life is, to put it comradely, not sufficient as a political strategy. The strikes proposed for November 30^th could be set in motion a process in which the question of working class representation is posed concretely. If so, our political horizons will hopefully extend beyond putting pressure on E. Miliband to release some conciliatory press statements

In a chapter of the book entitled �?Backlash’, Jones broaches the subject of the recent return of class into the political debate in the form of reactionary invocations of the so-called �?white working class’. Again, regular readers of this blog will be aware of the debates surrounding this term. At this point, the author seems to lose some of the admirable single-mindedness that marks the rest of the argument. On the one hand, he gives short-shrift to the idea that the so-called �?white working class’ are a bunch of drink-fuelled bigots who are just gullible fodder for fascist snake-oil salesmen. The working class, as he points out, is multiracial and multicultural. In a trip to Dagenham, a BNP stronghold before they were wiped out at the last election, the author meets anti-racist campaigners and ordinary locals disgusted with the fascist presence in the borough. He also meets worried locals airing what we have come to know as �?legitimate grievances’ about the effects of immigration on the social housing stock in particular. (Jones points out that non-British nationals occupied just 5 percent of the council houses in the borough).

At this point however, the book veers into uncertainty. A discussion of the problem of fascism in economically depressed boroughs of London quickly morphs into a rather lazy attack on the contemporary political Left. The BNP’s support, the book suggests, results from a successful strategy of �?community politics’ that the Left could learn from. BNP action on issues like �?litter’ and �?anti-social behaviour’ gave them a root in working class communities in which the political Left is largely missing. While the far-right were listening to the concerns of local working class people, the Left is charged with retreating into �?identity politics’ and being more interested in �?manning a stall about Gaza outside a university campus’ than in the “bread-and-butter” issues.[1]

Jones admits that things like war and widespread Islamophobia are important issues, and points out for instance that opposition to the war in Afghanistan in higher among poorer people, but, he says, the �?problem comes with the priority given by the left to international issues’. Many working-class people care about these issues but not �?above housing and jobs’. In other words, we can talk about what is going on in Helmand province or the treatment of the Palestinians but only after Mrs. Smith down the road has had her leaky drainpipe fixed.

No doubt to some readers Owen’s position will strike a chord, and maybe even come off as reassuringly “practically-minded” to others. Socialism focussed on local issues perhaps sounds “authentic” compared to abstract denunciations of crimes going on far away. Unfortunately, as soon as one interrogates this separation of bread-and-butter “class” issues from “international” issues, it becomes clear that there is nothing to it.

Take the issue of war: I do not want to be silly and make the clichéd polemical points, but they seem necessary. Firstly, it is an army disproportionately drawn from working class communities that is fighting and dying in the British state’s wars. I don’t suppose that there is an issue more �?bread-and-butter’ for working class people than whether their sons and daughters should risk be risking their lives in ridiculous imperialist adventures. (I say this as someone whose cousin is currently posted in Afghanistan). Secondly, the argument that the billions spent bombing other countries could have been spent more productively on public services here is the most simple and easily understandable argument in the world to make to ordinary people. It also happens to be true.

More fundamentally, however, you cannot separate these issues because the political and cultural conditions created by a decade of war directly feed into the anxiety and division that prevent the emergence of working class unity. As Jones himself admits in the book, there is a connection between the traction gained by Islamophobia in this country and the fact that Britain is ostensibly fighting �?Islamic fundamentalism’ abroad. In this sense, it is just not practical to say that we can sideline the “international” issues until we have a new class politics. Rather, a new class politics is only possible if it has a critique of Britain’s imperial ambitions at its centre. Sacrificing the construction of an anti-war movement in an effort to found a new class politics makes both things less likely.

One other major weakness with the book lies with its sheepishness when it came to identifying the class enemy, so to speak. We get much talk of elite politicians and journalists and the �?middle classes’ and so on, but we get almost no mention of capitalists. The book’s index contains precisely zero entries for �?capitalism’ or �?capitalist’. (It also contains very little mention of socialism, except to slag off existing groups). You could pass this off as a meaningless terminological difference. It is clear where the author’s political allegiances lie.

It must be true, however, that if the left is to direct the anger created by the crisis and now austerity at those responsible, we are going to want to know who they are and give them a name. It could of course be �?politicians’ or the �?middle classes’, but unfortunately these categories are too diverse to form a stable enough referent for an oppositional political movement. It is also clear that having �?politicians’ as such as a political enemy can quickly detour in a reactionary direction. The movement of the �?indignant’ in Spain seem to have progressed slightly and has spoken of the �?system’ as the enemy, but even this misses something. The value of the term capitalist is that it gets to the root of the division in our society – between those who own and tell others what to do and those who do not own and must take orders from others.

These political differences aside, I would recommend Chavs to readers. The enthusiasm with which the book has been greeted reflects, I think, a desire to put to bed the obscurantism of the New Labour era on the question of class. In an age when the working class is rendered either invisible or is invoked only as a repository of an ugly ressentiment, the book reminds us of the potential political and economic power that exists largely untapped in British society. While I think the solutions to the current state of class politics offered by Chavs are limited, the author ought to be thanked for creating a space in which discussion of this topic is again possible.

[1] As a side note, I have always been slightly puzzled by the claim that the far-right talks about �?bread-and-butter’ issues that the Left ignores. At a time when the Left and the trade unions are mounting a campaign against the biggest assault on working class interests and communities in a generation, what is the main issue for the so-called �?populist’ far-right? Whether Nando’s chicken is Halal.

Labels: 'chav', class struggle, labour, labour left, neoliberalism, reactionaries, ruling class, tories, trade unions, working class

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The sadistic state posted by Richard Seymour

The supererogatory nature of many of these sentences, related - often very distantly related - to the riots, is eye-catching. Here we have a 22 year old woman locked up for six months for intention to steal. Here a couple of young man, 20 and 22, are locked up for four years for allegedly inciting riotous conduct on their Facebook pages, even though not a single incident could be said to have resulted from their behaviour. Here a 17 year old boy is given community service, a curfew and banned from social media sites for a joke on Facebook. These are in addition to the recent cases of a mother of two in Manchester being jailed for receiving looted shorts, a young man getting six months for stealing £3.50 worth of water, and another young man who will probably go to jail for stealing two scoops of ice cream. There will be more, no doubt. The logic of such harsh sentencing is disclosed in the homilies of judges:

Sitting at Manchester Crown Court, sentencing Judge Andrew Gilbart QC said: "I have no doubt at all that the principal purpose is that the courts should show that outbursts of criminal behaviour like this will be and must be met with sentences longer than they would be if the offences had been committed in isolation.
"For those reasons I consider that the sentencing guidelines for specific offences are of much less weight in the context of the current case, and can properly be departed from." [Emphasis added]

This isn't just one magistrate's view. It's being rolled out across the country:

Camberwell magistrate Novello Noades let slip that courts were ordered to send all rioters and looters to jail.
Court clerk Claire Luxford said “guidance” had gone out “saying that when sentencing guidelines were written no one envisaged events like these—and therefore they do not apply”.
This has meant harsh sentences for crimes normally considered minor.

Judges throwing aside the guidelines and handing people ridiculously punitive sentences for petty or non-offences is a recipe for appeals. There will at the very least be plenty of work for defence lawyers. But that's not the point. Sentencing is only the logical terminus of a process that is off the leash. Think of the police who made the initial arrests, and pressed charges. Think of the prosecutor's office who approved the charges. Think of the police who charged two young men for organising a water fight in Colchester using their Blackberries, and then let the media know that they were doing this. The criminal justice system is engaged in a demonstration of the state's ability to control the territory, because that very ability is just what has recently been in doubt. The moral and ideological pedagogy behind this disciplining and consumption of bodies teaches us that the party of order is in control, because its claim to rule hinges considerably on its ability to rule. This is, of course, the hallmark of a very brittle social order.

Labels: austerity, british state, criminal justice, metropolitan police, police, racism, reactionaries, riots, tories, tottenham

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Starkey staring racist posted by Richard Seymour

I will have little to add to the commentary about David Starkey's racist outburst on television last night. By all accounts - watch it below, if you must satisfy your curiosity - Starkey began by vindicating Enoch Powell, then alleged that 'whites' had become 'black' (ie internalised 'black culture' which he claimed was violent - this is the social image that the idiotologeme of 'chavs' has been about progenerating), then launched into an imitation of West Indian patois. Starkey is a seasoned 'contrarian', which is to say a slightly better groomed version of a shock jock, whose vulgar, diminutive provocations on race have thrilled television and radio producers for years. He has now taken his carefully developed media persona, and concentrated it in a single, kamikaze attack on the country's hysterical psyche. This he was allowed to do at great, uninterrupted length, while talking over his opponents in a haughty, aggressive fashion. Good old BBC. As a result, the happiest person in Britain today is Nick Griffin, BNP leader, who suggested on his Twitter account that Starkey could be an honorary gold star member of the fascist party.

The plaudits of fascists and racists, as well as the tortuous apologias of well-wishers, are predictable. But this raises the question of what Starkey was trying to do. Clearly, he earnestly expressed his own views as a High Tory historian with a monarchist, nationalist bent. Yet, he evidently went farther than the political establishment, including the mainstream right, is prepared to go at the moment, and may well have gambled with his future television career. In fact, there would be a strong case for his being arrested and charged with incitement to racial hatred. There are two answers that make sense. The first is that is that the entire aggressively offensive performance was a calculated attempt to injure and smear the targets of its racialised invective. It was malice. And it was intended that racists should enjoy this degradation, uttered with relish as it was. The second is that the presentation, in its deliberately excessive way, invited the disgust and disorientation of the audience, such that, amid a generalised moral panic, he would recalibrate the scales of what is publicly acceptable in a radical way. The pathfinders of the racist right often seek the "chorus of execration", as Powell put it, revelling in the temporary ex-communication, enjoying the ambiguous status of the heretic and the prophetic. This is both because they expect to be vindicated, and because they can enjoy the spectacle of their execrators making use of the space of relative 'respectability' that their provocation has created.

Labels: bnp, islamophobia, multiculturalism, racism, racists, reactionaries, riots, tories, tottenham

Thursday, August 11, 2011

The Tories are weak - and they know it posted by Richard Seymour

Look at this debate between Harriet Harman and Michael Gove:

Gove's bulge-eyed incredulity gives the game away. He knows he's weak on the cuts, and Harman knows it too. They're both playing the game, pretending there's absolutely no connection between the riots and the Tories' attacks on working class communities. But it's a common sense out there that there is such a connection. And Harman is quite intelligently playing on that without admitting it (she can't possibly, or the media will eat her alive). But this should tell you something: when the smoke clears, and the rubble is swept away, when the siege mentality erodes and the hysteria fades, when the plastic bullets and water cannons are slipped into the figurative back pocket of the police for future use against protesters, one thing that will become patently obvious is the inadequacies of this government and it's complete lack of legitimacy. Yes, these riots have opened up a pathway for reactionaries and racists of all stripes. But the government certainly won't come out of this debacle looking good.

Labels: austerity, cuts, racism, reactionaries, riots, tories, tottenham

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

"Shoot on sight" posted by Richard Seymour

Tory MEP Roger Helmer's preferred option for dealing with riots:

I told you the Right were going mental.

Labels: austerity, martial law, metropolitan police, reactionaries, riots, tories, tottenham

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Ruling Britannia III posted by Richard Seymour

This is the delayed final part in a series of posts on the ruling class and the Murdoch scandal. The first two are here and here. Just to summarise the arguments thus far. In the first post, we said that the Murdoch empire should be understood in terms of ruling class power. Classes, we argued, should be analysed not in terms of status, rank or even income flows, but in terms of their role in the reproduction of the system. The capitalist class is that class which reproduces capitalism by investing its money in labour and technology in order to produce commodities for exchange on the market and in the process extract surplus value (profit). But that class only becomes a ruling class when it rules politically, that is when it colonises the state - when the state acts as a capitalist state. So far so good. But the Murdoch empire comprises a special kind of class power, because of its role in ideological reproduction. So, the relationships between the Murdochs, the Tories, the Labour Right and other leading media people - especially, we are now discovering, senior figures in the BBC - express the political-ideological dominance of the ruling class.

In the second post, we developed the argument about the colonisation of the state, with the example of how the British state was permeated with the ordinances necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist class after the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688. Every office, instrument and law of the state thereafter was developed under bourgeois rule: the state came to concentrate and concretise the political and ideological relations already present in capitalist relations of production. The police's role in such a capitalist state would therefore be to uphold an appropriate politico-legal order suitable for the reproduction of capitalism. This role was not just repressive, but ideological - even in their most directly repressive capacity they contribute to the reproduction of the dominant ideologies. Because of this, the relationship between the police and the reactionary press made perfect sense, formalising an already implicit structural co-dependence - one expressed the political-ideological dominance of the ruling class, the other concretised it. That said, I now want to move to a slightly more detailed argument about the media's role and the position of the Murdoch clan within British capitalism.

First of all, the media. We are speaking of a capitalist media not in the sense in which it was understood in the 19th Century, but in the sense of a mass media which has been closely bound up in its historical emergence with the spread of capitalist markets, imperialism and the spread of nation-states. The mass media comprises networks of vast corporations interlocked in various ways with other corporations and the imperialist states. That is, it is the media appropriate to the phase of what is sometimes called 'monopoly capitalism'. The Chomsky/Herman 'propaganda model', which applies to precisely this phase of the development of the capitalist media, is a superior theoretical vehicle that accounts for the ways in which these structures work to produce a series of 'filters' which ensure that the media communicates an image of the world congruent with the interests of capital. In my opinion, the theory is best at describing the realities of the US media, and its predictive accuracy is at its peak when the subject is imperialism. It is also best at capturing how the elite media works - that is, newspapers produced for wealthy and powerful audiences, such as the New York Times. It describes well how limits set by various determining factors such as ownership, sponsorship, government, advertising, flack and so on ensure that lively and intellectually stimulating debates occur in the media "within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus". And journalists go along with this largely due to their socialisation and the habits built into gathering and reporting the news.

Yet, there are limits to the model's applicability. Colin Sparks, in a recent scholarly review of the propaganda model, elaborated some of these, which I'll very roughly outline: 1) it overstates the degree of unity among the elites, and understates the presence of serious strategic disunity in the ruling class, as manifested in the capitalist media; 2) its focus on the US leads it to ignore the fact that capitalist democracy can permit (depending the relations of class forces that obtain in the democracy in question) mass media outlets to be owned by popular mass parties, or at least subject to far more popular pressure than is the case with the New York Times - and even within the US, eg, the interests of labour obtain more headway in the mass media than would be anticipated by the model; 3) the focus on the elite media results in the underdevelopment of an important argument, namely what results from the fact that most of the media is not directed at elites but at popular audiences. In his interview with Andrew Marr, Chomsky insisted that the press sells privileged audiences to advertisers, but this isn't strictly so in the case of most of the media. Therefore, the content must be capable of appealing to popular audiences, seeming plausible to them, tapping into their interests, and so on. This can be done in a relatively reactionary or progressive way, but it makes a difference that it must be done. This is a point that is generally true of ruling ideologies - they must plausibly incorporate some popular themes and aspirations, otherwise they won't be ruling ideologies.; 4) the focus on the US leads to insufficient emphasis on two features common in Europe - i) public service broadcasting, which permits the possibility of a limited range of diversity not anticipated by the model (here I disagree with Sparks, or at least with his analysis of the BBC's coverage, but the point that public broadcasting is under-theorised in treatments of the model is correct), and ii) the greater degree of competition among newspapers in European countries, where the local monopolies which obtain in the US are rare. This produces a degree of partisanship and social stratification among the readers of newspapers, with again some limited but genuine divergences; 5) one of the features identified by the model - 'source dependence', in which hard-pressed journalists come to depend on certain sources, and thus on their perspectives - also permits for the expression of some limited popular input, but more importantly of substantial strategic disagreements among the ruling class.; 6) the model correctly anticipates that socialization in the mass media largely produces submissive journalists, but understates the antagonisms that exist within the media and which are capable of disrupting this process - the majority of journalists are not the professionalised middle class folks whom one sees being interviewed on ITN, but exploited wage workers. Submissiveness has been produced as much by defeats inflicted on those wage workers (notably, by Murdoch in the UK) as by socialization. Strikes, news blackouts, print stoppages and various forms of subversion and disruption were a far more regular feature in the UK media in the 1980s than today.

Those criticisms are intended to leave the core of the propaganda model intact while adjusting some of its outer belt of explanatory claims to better account for some of the evidence. But I think they do more than simply rectify some shortcomings in a classic, superior model of media analysis. They offer a way into the subject of the specificity of Murdoch's power. While the propaganda model focuses on similarities of structure and output within the industry, Sparks' criticisms advert to important distinctions. Murdoch began his UK newspaper career by acquiring two newspapers intended for the popular end of the market: The News of the World (1968) and The Sun (1969). The latter had been the trade union-owned Daily Herald, and was not a tabloid - until Murdoch purchased it and saved on printing costs by turning it into one, which enabled him to print it with the same machine that turned out the News of the World. Murdoch's strategy was very simple: he delivered content that would attract popular audiences not by attending to their interests but through sensationalism, sports and entertainment. The later alliance with Margaret Thatcher, which reflected Murdoch's long-standing views, followed after Murdoch had already built up a consumer base and after it had become clear that there was a popular base for Thatcherism. He radically restructured the whole production model for his newspapers, making them cheaper and more efficient to produce, significantly by defeating trade unions. (One of the reasons he was able to acquire the Sunday Times was that its then owner was sick of constant industrial action). He bought up newspapers that were losing money or otherwise in parlous condition, expanding through 'horizontal integration' and mergers, and later expanded into broadcasting with the initially low-key Fox Broadcasting Company. Again, before there was the infamous radical right Fox News that we know today, the company had to spend years assiduously cultivating a consumer base with genuinely popular material such as The Simpsons. And Murdoch sought to go further, expanding into the production not only of media content such as television and newspapers, but also the hardware - the channels, the cables, the cinemas, the sattelites, etc - that facilitated the delivery of that content. He has expanded across the Atlantic, into the US, and then across the Pacific, into China.

So, what you have here is a business empire with a genuinely global reach, and sufficient turnover and profit to leave Murdoch one of the richest men on the planet, worth over $7bn (well, until recently). It is in some respects an exemplary case of ruling class power, but it's also a special case. Because the business empire is bound up with a set of strategic orientations and ideological perspectives that set Murdoch in opposition not only to much of his popular consumer base, but also to sections of the ruling class. Murdoch's opposition to European monetary integration, for example, is aberrant as far as the British capitalist class is concerned. He has much more in common on this issue with petty bourgeois producers and traders than with most big businessmen and women. Yet, Murdoch undoubtedly had some influence in restraining British entry into the eurozone, not least because of his ability to prepare the ideological terrain by ensuring that his newspapers pursue a fairly inflexible line on the issues closest to his heart. In this respect, he made the Tory hard right seem much stronger than they would otherwise have been, articulating their themes of hyper-Atlanticism, aggressive 'globalization' and so on, on a daily basis. (Perhaps this explains their delusional belief that they alone could recuperate the Conservative Party after the Major interregnum). Now, this is real power. That such power has been expressed in a network of corrupt and often criminal relationships is not an incidental fact, but it is a consequential fact. The relationships sustained by the Murdoch family and businesses extend, as we know, along a number of radial axes connecting it to the government and the Labour Right, the police, senior members of the judiciary (including Lord Leveson, the man the government has appointed to lead the inquiry into phone hacking), the BBC, networks of private investigators and quite possibly intelligence. These resulted from his cynical, ruthless and - in a certain light - impressive accumulation of capitalist class power. But they were also made possible because of certain features of the UK political and media scene which he successfully exploited: the fact of a relatively competitive media market in which popular audiences are both significant and polarise; the emergence of a reactionary Thatcherite bloc in the mid-1970s; the subsequent arrival of a vehemently anti-union government that energetically supported employers wishing to break the power of organised labour; the resulting capitulation of social democracy, and the bipartisan assurance of loose media regulation.

The weakening or reversal of Murdoch's power would not, of course, alter the fundamental structure of the media. But it would remove or attenuate an orientation of power that is full of danger and hardship for popular forces - one that reinforces every vile prejudice, every base social aspiration, and every axis of oppression in that society. It would weaken the radical right in the UK not just for now, but possibly for a generation. And it would also reconfigure the industry, certainly in the UK, in a direction more favourable to popular forces, and certainly more favourable to the organisation of workers in the industry. The Murdoch scandal has gone out of the headlines temporarily. But keep a close eye on it - there's more detail coming out every day, more potential for criminal investigations on both sides of the pond, more material for the prosecution, and more reason to deny the company the very lucrative broadcasting licenses that it has so far seemed destined to retain. The Tories may be trying to close ranks around Cameron, but he is exposed. James Murdoch likewise. The traditional role of a government inquiry is to slow things down to a manageable speed, take public issues off the boil, and kill controversy with officialdom. But there is enough combustible material here that any such effort may well blow up in their faces

If you liked this series, please consider putting something in the tip jar. Thank you.

Labels: british capitalism, chomsky, david cameron, media, propaganda, reactionaries, ruling class, rupert murdoch, tories

Thursday, July 07, 2011

News of the World is dead posted by Richard Seymour

The news is that the News of the World is going to close down, according to James Murdoch:

"Having consulted senior colleagues, I have decided that we must take further decisive action with respect to the paper. This Sunday will be the last issue of the News of the World."

This is presumably to protect Murdoch's acquisition of BSKYB, so that should be where the pressure is applied next. The news organisation that owned NotW should not be allowed to own and operate a major television service in this country.

A few additional points. First, there is a rumour going round that this merely represents a rebranding exercise, and that the Murdoch empire had merely intended to rebrand NotW as the 'Sunday Sun'. This isn't plausible. First of all, the announcement cited from News International makes it clear that they intended to keep both papers. They are very different in content and style, and NotW had a much broader readership. In fact, NOTW was more widely read and bought than any other UK newspaper. That is a very profitable brand that Murdoch must have been very reluctant to give up. Second, I don't know what the NUJ will have to say about the journalists' jobs, but the present indications are that they will be re-employed within News International. I don't know how implicated journos at News of the World have been, but I would bet most of them are victims in this - in which case, they should be part of a drive by journalists to change the culture within News International completely. Third, there should be people behind bars over this. Those people shouldn't include Tommy Sheridan who, however reckless his initial decision to prosecute, was certainly done over by the combined efforts of News of the World and the police, whose cosy relationship is beginning to be disclosed. We should be pressing for a major investigation into police corruption, and for the prosecution of all involved in this scandal - hacks, cops, editors, owners, anyone else implicated.

Labels: media, propaganda, reactionaries, rupert murdoch, sky, tabloid frenzy

Patriotism - a dead-end solution to a non-problem posted by Richard Seymour

In which I micturate all over a couple of Blue Labourites from a great height:

Don’t open the door, and definitely don’t answer the phone: it’s probably someone trying to sell you some �?new patriotism’.

Its salespeople are Labour politicians. Its purpose is to enable Labour to �?re-connect’ with lost voters. This disconnect is summarised by Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford thus:

“Labour is in a dangerous situation. Who listens to it today? When the crash came in 2008, the left thought its time had come. We were wrong. There is no liberal progressive majority in England or in any other nation of the UK. Across Europe, orthodox social democracy has been beaten.

“Labour is out of touch with the majority of people in this country. The left wants the New Labourites to admit they were wrong about Iraq, welfare reform, flexible labour markets. They did not understand the destructive capacity of neoliberal capitalism. But what did we on the left get wrong? Did we listen to people on crime, did we hear the widespread anger about a culture of entitlement and about immigration? Labour’s way back into power will mean navigating our way through these issues.”

This requires some unpacking...

Labels: blue labour, conservatism, immigration, labour, multiculturalism, multiculture, new labour, racism, reactionaries, socialism, welfare

Thursday, June 16, 2011

The taxpayer posted by Richard Seymour

One of the advantages of CiF is that in the comments section you get to see the shibboleths of reaction condensed, vocalised, lyricised, even screamed in block capitals and exclamation points. One of the talking points that always come up whenever you discuss public sector workers is "the taxpayer". The sovereign taxpayer. The over-burdened, pushed-beyond-the-point-of-reason taxpayer, to be precise. It goes roughly like this:

You public sector workers always have your hand out. You get better pay than the rest of us, and you have generous gold-plated pensions. When anyone tries to take the slightest of your privileges away, you throw your toys out of the pram and go on strike. But I am not prepared to pay for your perky lifestyle any more. What we can't afford, you can't have. The taxpayer subsidises you to 100%, and the taxpayer isn't going to go on supporting your selfish, I'm-alright-jack lifestyles. A bit of hardship would do you lazy jobsworths some good. Market discipline. Let's see you and your red friends get by like the rest of us, uncoddled by the state and your friends in the meeja-hideen... (etc etc).

You think I'm exaggerating, don't you? Well, the point is how "the taxpayer" is invoked here as a relevant political category. You'll notice that, implicit in this is a suggestion that there are people who aren't taxpayers. But public sector workers pay taxes, not only on their income but on consumption. In fact, there is no one who doesn't pay taxes. The unemployed pay tax. Children pay tax. Prisoners pay tax. Even the homeless pay tax. To speak of "the taxpayer" is in this sense meaningless, since it includes everyone. And self-evidently, not everyone shares the political attitudes expressed by "the taxpayer" above. The question of what "the taxpayer" is willing to pay for is a political question, depending on who the taxpayer is, and what other social categories and classes s/he identifies as. But implicit in this is the idea that the taxpayer is supporting a public sector which is purely parasitic. Public sector workers are "subsidised" by "the taxpayer"; as if, in addition to not paying taxes, they add no value to the economy. "The taxpayer" is thus, by definition, always over-taxed (even if there are quite a few who are under-taxed). The subject-position expressed in this figure of "the taxpayer" is that of a lower middle class trader, shopkeeper or white van man, anxious to hold on to his wad and not pay for anything he isn't getting.

ps: It occurs to me that I've missed the most obvious point here. It's not just the penny-pinching petty bourgeoisie that "the taxpayer" identifies with. The whole point is that you're supposed to think of yourself as the employer in this situation. You're being asked to identify with the bosses.

Labels: austerity, conservatism, public sector workers, public spending, reactionaries, taxation, taxpayer, thatcherism, tories