Monday, April 02, 2012
The privatization of the NHS posted by Richard Seymour
My latest for ABC Australia:The rich want healthcare. Believe them about this. They want hospitals, doctor's practices, insurance, patient care, pharmaceutical provision, all of it.Last year, four out of the 10 most profitable industries in the US were healthcare-related. This was due to the fact that these industries were providing services rather than more tangible products, thus keeping overheads low, and the fact that the services were, in the sickly phrase of Forbes magazine, "need-to-have". That is, compulsory. Need to have, or you'll die.This is why healthcare is such a prized asset for businesses, and why they are desperate to crack open health sectors globally. And it is one reason why the British coalition government is undertaking the most fundamental demolition job on the National Health Service since its foundation in 1948.
Labels: capitalism, health care, neoliberalism, new labour, NHS, privatisation, tories
Friday, March 30, 2012
Galloway wins posted by Richard Seymour
Labels: anti-cuts, anticapitalism, austerity, ed miliband, george galloway, new labour, socialism, socialist strategy, tories, working class
Thursday, March 29, 2012
A short history of privatization in the UK posted by Richard Seymour
My latest in The Guardian explains the course of privatization over the last thirty years or so:Royal Mail is being auctioned, and not necessarily to the highest bidder (and stamp prices are going up). The London fire brigade is outsourcing 999 calls to a firm called Capita, at the behest of the oleaginous chair of the capital's fire authority, Brian Coleman. Multinationals are circling hungrily around NHS hospitals. Schools are already beginning to turn a profit. In the technocratic nomenclature of the IMF, this would be called a "structural adjustment programme", but that doesn't really capture the sweeping scale of the transformation. We can see this through a potted history of privatisation in the UK...
Labels: accumulation-by-dispossession, austerity, capitalism, education, fire brigade, neoliberalism, new labour, NHS, privatisation, public services, royal mail, tories
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
Monday, September 12, 2011
Hackgate and the British ruling class posted by Richard Seymour
Explaining the Murdoch scandal and what it reveals about the British ruling class:Soon, anyone who had ever had their picture taken with Murdoch was disowning him and the whole clan. Murdoch's friendship had dropped in value quicker than Colonel Gaddafi's. His clout within the government dried up instantly, and his bid to takeover BSkyB collapsed. Newscorp shed a number of senior executives, then shed its most profitable UK newspaper, as News of the World was closed in disgrace. It made sense to close the paper, once the scandal was revealed: its turn to such corrupt methods reflected the desperate need to stay ahead in a newspaper market where profit rates were tumbling. Deprived of the competitive edge that such illegal behaviour produced, and with a 'toxic' brand, the paper could only be dead weight thereafter. The cosy relationship that News International executives had always enjoyed with Scotland Yard also rapidly became toxic, costing a number of senior officials their jobs, ultimately including Sir Paul Stephenson, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It emerged that five officers alone had received bribes from News of the World totalling 100,000 pounds, with payments routinely being made to officers in exchange for information. In short, what seems to be emerging is a criminal enterprise reaching into not only the top of News of the World, not only the highest echelons of Newscorp, but actually the highest levels of the British state.Yet, it isn't enough to call it a criminal enterprise. When politicians and flaks dined with the Murdochs, when police wined News of the World executives, they were acting as a class. In what way?...
Labels: capitalism, hackgate, media, new labour, news of the world, propaganda, ruling class, rupert murdoch, tories
Friday, July 22, 2011
Ruling Britannia II posted by Richard Seymour
Labels: capitalist ideology, media, metropolitian police, new labour, police brutality, propaganda, ruling class, rupert murdoch, tories
Thursday, July 07, 2011
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
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Austerity and the crisis of the political establishment posted by Richard Seymour
Me in The Guardian on the crisis of the established parties in Europe and the US:...What is happening? The short answer is "austerity". Mass dissatisfaction with the major parties is tied to pessimism about the economy, and a view that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Living standards are sliding in all of the core capitalist economies, but most of all in those countries where austerity has been most advanced – Greece and Ireland. There is a bipartisan consensus in most of these nations' parliaments in favour of some form of austerity politics, despite its unpopularity.One might expect social democratic parties to take a different approach, to mobilise their constituencies around a defence of public services and social security. But their long years of complicity in managing neoliberalism means they are unable to think of an alternative to spending cuts. In opposition, they offer gradual and responsible austerity, but they still mean to cut, and cut deep. In government, the emphasis shifts from gradual to deep. This inability to pose the alternative is what leaves Miliband and his shadow cabinet floundering....
Labels: austerity, capitalism, liberals, neoliberalism, new labour, ruling class, tories
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Class and common sense posted by Richard Seymour
It is axiomatic that public attitudes are complex, with clusters of seemingly contradictory attitudes expressed on the same subject. The most recent social attitudes survey (British Social Attitudes, 27th report) confirms this with its mixed bag of results giving socialists reasons to cheer and mourn. But this is banal, what we would expect. The question is in what overall direction does the balance of these composite attitudes tend; in what direction is the trend over time? The authors of the survey find that on such matters as welfare, poverty and wealth redistribution the public has shifted to the right and ascribe this to New Labour's tenure in office. Most interesting for my purposes, though, are the findings on the 'race to the top'. These findings disclose a set of attitudes which in the relevant ideological struggles would tend to favour the right. They find that most people think of themselves as upwardly mobile, and believe that 'meritocratic' factors such as "hard work" are the most decisive in determining one's success (as compared with 'ascriptive' factors such as class, or race).
When you consider that this is not merely debatable but absurd, that hard work is very far from being a more important factor in success than class background (or race, gender, etc), it becomes apparent just how much ideological ground work has had to be done to construct this 'common sense' worldview, and how much the constituents of this 'common sense' had to compete with and displace every day experience. Of course, there are classically reformist attitudes expressed in there, with majorities feeling that the rich are paid too highly (even if they underestimate just how much the rich are paid). This is why, when an actual tax increase on the rich is proposed and implemented (the 50p rate), it is widely popular. But this is still in a context in which only a minority explicitly support redistributionist policies, and in which the tax was represented not as redistribution but purely as 'fairness' - as in the rich paying a 'fair share' of the burden of the recession. A more serious objection, perhaps, is that the answers to such questions would likely reflect aspiration, or self-justification, rather than literal truth-claims. People say 'hard work' got them where they are, or will get them where they want to be, because it seems to validate their efforts. To say otherwise seems disempowering. They don't literally believe such things. Yet, this is precisely the point. If people find validation in rightist nostrums, then to an extent they have come to inhabit the values of the right. In the same way, there are all sorts of reasons why someone might say "we are too soft on crime", but such utterances necessarily belong to the symbolic territory of reactionary-authoritarianism, and the person reproducing them is treading that territory.
So, what does it mean when majorities inhabit this ideology of 'meritocracy', even with qualms? First of all, we are speaking here of a 'common sense', that is a "mass popular philosophy", consisting largely of ways of seeing that are 'traditional' rather than 'organic': people believe it because it is something that people have believed for some time; because people with authority say it is true; because one's peers have born witness to it; because it makes a certain sense of one's efforts; because in the past such beliefs have served 'people like us' well. Not all of these are bad reasons to believe a thing. Common sense is ideological, and ideologies, as Gramsci said, "'organize' human masses, they form the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.". Common sense has an "imperative character", producing "norms of conduct", and is thus formative of the political situations we struggle in. We operate on common sense, some of whose constituents are progressive - "The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over" - as part of our efforts to develop a new 'good sense'.
The meritocratic 'common sense' is one which we, of course, have to work on. It contains certain tensions, and the reality will never live up to its ideal. So we may occasionally attack layabout Lords and monarchs, 'funemployed' rich kids, and so on, as such things defy the common sense that one does and should get ahead through 'hard work'. Yet we mainly have to work against it. For to believe that, even if one is not well off, then with sufficient hard work one can be, is to believe something about the market, about the creation of wealth and about the relative abilities of one's fellow human beings. It is to believe that market distribution is broadly reflective of effort, that wealth is mainly accumulated by those who contribute the most (thus chairmen work harder than cleaners), and people are naturally very unequal in their abilities. If you believe the system itself is basically meritocratic, even with some significant problems in need of reform, this introduces a bias in your thinking that may lead you to resent scapegoated minorities such as Muslims, single mothers, the unemployed, immigrants and others who appear (because the popular press says so) to get more help than you do, thus partially explaining your failure to enjoy more success than you have. It would also lead you to think that those who do not work are 'cheating' - if they only worked hard, they could get ahead, but instead they choose to waste idle hours while draining taxpayers' money. The bottom 20% of households with no one in employment, no car, no mortgaged property, no savings, etc., are thus pathologised as 'shameless' (tm) wasters, redeemable if at all through missionary work, or police intervention. This is not say that majorities hold the ideas I have outlined as potential corollaries of the meritocratic credo - but significant minorities appear to, and they do so in spite of their basic absurdity and apparent contradiction with other ideas that the same people say they hold.
The 'Chavs' phenomenon condenses many of the themes of this savage creed. It charges poor people with getting ideas above their station, with being feckless and irresponsible with money, tasteless, stupid, drunk, thuggish, and barbaric. In the guise of lewd satire, celeb-bashing and tart social commentary, it gives us a hit of class hatred. It references, and caricatures, the outward signs of social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, bad education and so on, but does so in the manner of a taxonomising anthropologist or zoologist, naturalising these very signs as qualities of a particular social sub-species: here a 'pramface', there a 'Croydon facelift', and mark the Burberry and inauthentic branded wear. The 'chav' is a folk devil, the quasi-satirical subject of the last decade's repeated moral panics about the 'underclass': nightmare neighbours, feral youths, ASBO kids, and so on. It is the byproduct of a neoliberalised social democracy which, in its acceptance of 'free markets', low taxes, and the language of meritocracy, was unable to directly challenge the growing inequality that, as a consequence of the unimpeded operations of the market, reached new peaks under New Labour. And it was under New Labour, rather than under Thatcher or Major, that the meritocratic 'common sense' was effectively popularised. It was New Labour that shifted the ideological terrain to the right, arguing for right-wing ideas and communicating them far more effectively to popular audiences than the Tories ever could.
Labels: 'chav', class, class struggle, common sense, gramsci, hegemony, meritocracy, neoliberalism, new labour, reactionaries, tories, working class
Not saving the Liberals posted by Richard Seymour
I would guess he rightly judges Labour's position, which is that the last thing they want at this point is political power. The Blairites are convinced that they would have to implement the same cuts as the Tories are doing, (ex-chairman Peter Watts has even bizarrely claimed that opposing cuts is hurting Labour), and that it would be much easier to allow them to get on with it. The Labour soft left doesn't yet have a coherent alternative, or at least not one they're able to articulate or willing to fight for. Neither side really wants to re-open an old civil war, though the Right are better placed to wage it if it comes. So, they are sitting it out, passively awaiting the Tory meltdown and their dream ticket in 2015. Their strategy would involve striking the correct poses in the face of catastrophe, while nonetheless doing little to prevent it. (Dan does not say, but we should note, that this has significant consequences for the conduct of the labour movement's resistance to austerity. If the trade union leadership subordinates its actions to the objective of getting 'their' party in government, then that most certainly entails an attempt to keep the lid on militancy).
Where I think Hind is wrong is in assuming that the Sage of Twickenham is some sort of radical liberal, a Yellow Booker rather than an Orange Booker, who could reconstitute the Lib Dems as some sort of progressive force. The source of this bafflingly, stunningly ridiculous idea is probably Vince Cable himself. Cable has been laundering himself as the 'left' conscience of the coalition for some time, though he has always been a continental 'economic liberal', a privatizing free marketeer, and a primary founder of the 'Orange Book' tendency. He has recently described himself as a 'social democrat', in an interview in which he seemed to vaguely rebuke the finance-led cuts strategy that he has participated in, with some qualms. But by his own account you can't believe a word the man says. More fundamentally, to attempt a rescue of the Liberals as a potentially reformist agency is to miss what is happening here. Dan fears that if the Liberals are wiped out, there will be some horrible stalemate, in which the Tories and Labour compete over an ever diminishing space in the middle ground, prosecuting the same basic neoliberal policies while the balance shifts periodically between social liberalism and authoritarianism. But if enough Liberal MPs can be tempted to break from the Orange Book freaks, then Liberalism can be reconstituted along '1908' lines, and electoral competitive pressures could still force the major parties to adopt beneficial reforms. Hence, save the Liberals.
The problems with this are various - we shall leave aside the disparity between ambitious ends and inauspicious means - but perhaps a good starting point is to look at the current electoral realignments. The haemhorrage of the Liberal vote in England, and the surge for the SNP in Scotland should be considered as parallel elements of the same process. This is not the first time we've seen such sudden, sharp alterations in political composition - consider the rise of the SDP after 1981 and the concomitant contraction of Labourism. It is the sort of realignment that Gramsci spoke of, regarding a period of 'organic crisis': "At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression ... [this] occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity." (Emphasis added) A logical result is "the passage of the troop of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class" at a speed "almost like lightning in comparison with periods of calm". ('Hegemony, The State & Civil Society').
The point here would be that the current recomposition of the electorate looks epochal rather than merely conjunctural to me. This does not mean it is irreversible, but that political solutions based on reversing such trends are conservative and perhaps oriented toward situations that are no longer pertinent. The Liberals' capacity to operate as a sort of surrogate social democracy reached its high point (and what a thrilling zenith that was) in 2005, oweing to the war, Blair's unpopularity, and a load of festering discontents over 'New Labour'. The war isn't over, but it's ceased to be foregrounded at the ballot-box; Blair is gone; and 'New Labour' has lost control of the Labour Party to a union-backed candidate. In the meantime, the Liberals had experienced an internal putsch against the mildly social democratic Charles Kennedy by the Orange Bookers. This process was mandated by the party faithful. In 2011, the Liberals are part of a privatizing, cutting, war cabinet, and show no signs of wishing to be anything but the Whigs to Cameron's Peelites. Beg their MPs, send them letters, petition and doortep them... but with their polling average at 10%, their leader a national hate figure unable to visit a daycare centre without being picketed, and their party mauled in local elections, is there any sign of anyone listening? The great majority of them have already voted for the cuts; they made their decision, knowing what to expect. And it isn't because they're masochistic - it's because they believe that if they hold on until 2015, growth will have resumed, people will feel prosperous, and the electorate will duly reward them.
This brings me to my next point, which bears on the sort of pressure that would be required to compel MPs to shift their position. Parliamentarians, as we have come to know, are effectively insulated from popular pressure by the institutions they work in. The ancient caricature of politicians chasing every vote, greasily promising all things to all people, vacillating to appease a mercurial popular will, doesn't even raise a smirk these days. Political careerism in this era means, above all, clinging doggedly to unpopular orthodoxy ('principle') and representing it as the only game in town ('realism'). Yes, they still worry about losing their seats, but as long as the general wipeout isn't too severe, then the effective ones can always be looked after. Since the Liberals are betting on a revival by the end of this five-year term, and since they almost all accept the argument in favour of cuts, they will calculate that pissing off millions of voters is a short-term risk they can afford to take. They certainly won't be inclined to take seriously the threat that the local anti-cuts committee will turf them out of office. Unless.
The only kind of pressure that could, for example, turn 38 cuts-supporting Liberals into anti-cuts radicals is the kind of disruption that would worry their bosses, and their bosses' bosses. We're not talking about protests, riots, occupying public or commercial facilities, or even big one day strikes. They've planned for that. They're ready to police it. We're talking about a fundamental, enduring and self-perpetuating realignment of leftist, labour and oppositional forces, their emergence as a militant political alliance such that capital began to worry for its ability to maintain control without making serious concessions, and such that the long-term viability of the parties making up the coalition was under threat. The coalition is, yes, highly unstable, fragile, comprising antagonistic components... but its breakdown would not have to work to the benefit of the anti-cuts Left. It could just as easily permit a re-polarisation of the Tory bloc, with perhaps some new Liberal allies incorporated, to the Right. Only if there were an anti-cuts campaign whose 'message' is being communicated with compelling force, and that campaign had something to do with the breakdown, would it benefit the Left. Yet, it is precisely such mobilisation that would hasten the contraction of the centre ground and thus help reduce the popular basis for Liberalism. It seems to me that at this moment in history, the destruction of the Liberals would be an aspect of our advance; and that to attempt to rescue them, even on a radical basis, even through threats and protest, would be a detour down an historical cul de sac.
Labels: austerity, class struggle, cuts, gramsci, hegemony, lib dems, liberals, neoliberalism, new labour, toriehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs
Monday, May 16, 2011
The Tories and the NHS posted by Richard Seymour
"If we stay as we are, the NHS will need £130bn a year by 2015 – meaning a potential funding gap of £20bn."The question is, what are we going to do about that? Ignore it? No – because we'd see a crisis of funding in the NHS, over-crowded wards and fewer treatments. Borrow more so we can chuck more money at it? No – because we can't afford to.
"Ask people to start paying at the point of delivery for it? No – because, as I said, the NHS must always be free to those who need it. There's only one option we've got, and that is to change and modernise the NHS to make it more efficient and more effective and, above all, more focused on prevention, on health not just sickness.
...when I think about what our NHS will look like in five years' time, I don't picture some space age institution, a million miles away from what we have now. Let me make clear: there will be no privatisation, there will be no cherry-picking from private providers, there will be no new up front costs people have to pay to get care."
This is obviously disingenuous. There will be privatization, and it will not make the service more efficient, either in terms of cost or patient outcomes. And the claim that this new system will look anything like the one we have now is a ham-fisted insult to reason. But the Tories are not seriously attacking the 'common sense' of the NHS. At the level of discourse, they are not making any inroads whatever into the principle of a taxpayer-funded, free national healthcare system. They dare not even try. Instead, they depend on a manouevre pioneered by Thatcher, that of exploiting a crisis of underfunding to argue for the reforms they want to see, which are then coded in apparently neutral, anaesthetizing phrases: not privatization - good heavens no! - efficiency. This is Stuart Hall writing back in 1988:
Mrs Thatcher has personally taken charge of the crisis - always an ominous sign. 'The impression which the prime minister was trying to create was that she was pleased that talk of crisis by the opposition and health professionals had opened up the NHS to her radicalism. Her spokesmen countered the impression of government panic by stressing that she was "seizing the tide of public perception"' (The Guardian Jan 27). The talk is now exclusively about 'alternative ways of funding' (which every post-Thatcherite child of nine knows is a code-phrase for the massive expansion of private medicine and privatisation within the NHS) and 'breaking the barriers to greater efficiency' (which we know is a codephrase for destroying COHSE and NUPE).
...
the balance of ideological advantage slowly turns Thatcherism's way, because the specific issue of the NHS is secured for the Right by a deeper set of articulations which the Left has not begun to shift. These include such propositions as: the public sector is bureaucratic and inefficient; the private sector is efficient and gives 'value-for-money'; efficiency is inextricably linked with 'competition' and 'market forces'; the 'dependency culture' makes growing demands on the state - unless ruthlessly disciplined - a 'bottomless pit' (the spectre of the endlessly desiring consumer); public sector institutions, protected by public sector unions, are always 'overmanned' (sic).; 'freedom' would be enhanced by giving the money back to the punters and letting them choose the form and level of health care they want; if there is money to spare, it is the direct result of Thatcherite 'prosperity'; and so on.
...
We may have to acknowledge that there is often a rational core to Thatcherism's critique, which reflects some real substantive issues, which Thatcherism did not create but addresses in its own way. And since, in this sense, we both inhabit the same world, the Left will have to address them too. However, squaring up to them means confronting some extremely awkward issues. One example is the fiscal crisis of the welfare state - the ever-rising relative costs in the NHS as the average age of the population rises, medical technology leaps ahead, health needs diversify, the awareness of environmental factors and preventive medicine deepens and the patterns of disease shift. The fiscal crisis of the welfare state is not simply a Thatcherite plot, though of course Thatcherism exaggerates it for its own political ends.
The Left's answer is that there is more to spend if we choose; and this is certainly correct, given Britain's pitiful comparative showing in terms of the proportion of GDP spent on health amongst the industrialised countries. But only up to a point. At the end of this road, there are limits, which are not those set by Thatcherism's artificial 'cap' on spending but those limits set by the productivity of the economy itself. What the Right argues is that, once this limit is reached (even at the USA's 10.7% rather than the UK's miserable 5.9%) there is then not much to choose between rationing by price (which they would prefer) and rationing by queue (which is what has been going on in the NHS for decades). Naturally, they prefer rationing by price, since it increases the incentive to the patient to save on costs and puts pressure on the 'health market' to become more efficient.
...
simply 'spending more on the NHS' comes up against the barrier of the failure of the Left so far to elaborate a strategy for an expanding economy. On the other hand, where it hits the road block of the unpopularity of higher taxation in the form of that entrenched figure (which, at the moment, belongs exclusively to the Right) - the 'sovereign taxpayer'. Thatcherism is also held in place by this ideological figure of 'economic man', the measure of all things, who only understands cash-in-hand, readies-in-the-pocket, and who apparently never gets ill, doesn't need his streets cleaned or his children educated or to breathe oxygen occasionally. Clearly, the NHS issue cannot be won in terms of the NHS alone. If Thatcherism wins the argument about 'wealth creation', 'prosperity' and 'taxpayer freedom', it will, sooner or later, win the argument about privatising the NHS.
Now, it so happens that Hall exaggerated the popular appeal of Thatcherism, and over-estimated their ability to erode public support for socialised health care - but discount for it and the same issue looms before us. Look at that last sentence from Hall again. If the Tories win the wider argument about austerity, they may not win the argument for privatising the NHS, but they will certainly make their case for this vandalism more plausible. The austerity narrative says that the state has over-extended itself and must contract to a more manageable scale; that the productive capacities of the economy are being over-burdened by the high taxation needed to support the welfare state; that prosperity can only be restored if business is allowed to get on with investing under relaxed conditions (albeit with some safety barriers built in to the financial sector in a vain attempt to protect the system from its instability). Naturally, therefore, "we can't afford" to pay for the NHS. The obvious lessons are that the Left, to counter this, has to have an alternative growth strategy, and; this has to be elaborated in an unabashedly ideological way, because what is at stake isn't just a bureaucratic-managerial matter of efficiency but rather of the priorities and direction of the whole society. I think there may be some in the Labour leadership who understand this, but they are no more able to act on this understanding than Gordon Brown was capable of being the 'secret socialist' of reactionary nightmare and centre-left masturbation fantasy.
Labels: coalition, counter-hegemony, david cameron, hegemony, labour, neoliberalism, new labour, NHS, socialism, thatcherism, the meaning of david cameron, tories
Monday, May 02, 2011
A Note on New Labour and trasformismo posted by Richard Seymour
Recently, proceeding through a catalogue of Gramscian writing on New Labour, I found a few pieces which might help update the picture. One was by Hall ('New Labour’s Double-shuffle', The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 27:319–335, 2005), another by Will Leggett ('Prince of Modernisers: Gramsci, New Labour and the meaning of modernity', in Mark McNally & John Schwarzmantel, eds, Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and resistance, Routledge, 2009). Both read New Labour as a particular hegemonic project operating within neoliberalism, but with a specific accent that distinguishes it from simple re-heated Thatcherism. This accent derives from the specific social basis of New Labour as "a social democratic government trying to govern in a neo-liberal direction, while maintaining its traditional working-class and public sector middle-class support". New Labour is a "hybrid regime" comprising a dominant neoliberal strand and a subordinate social democratic strand, and the latter is constantly being "transformed" into the former (Hall).
The New Labour vanguard had been forged in conjuncturally specific circumstances, but its import was epochal. So, while New Labour represented an adaptation to a profound, organic, long-term shift in the global patterns of capital accumulation, the agency within Labourism that forced this adaptation through was cultivated in the 'party modernization' process of the 1980s which was ideologically signposted by the sociological arguments progenerated by Marxism Today - ironically, as Leggett points out, the very current of analysis with which Hall was closely associated. This analysis held that the processes at work in contemporary capitalism were rendering traditional forms of social democratic collectivism obsolete. Labourism had to respond to this fact if it was to win another election. Hall was not one of those who uncritically celebrated this situation - far from it, in fact - but the 'New Times' orthodoxy played a key role in justifying Kinnock's purges of the Left, and his rightist lurches. From this tendency emerged some of New Labour's organic intellectuals, such as Geoff Mulgan. 'Third Way' politics is unthinkable without this prior ideological ground-work.
So, what did the Third Way seek to do? A key term in Hall's critique of Third Way politics is 'transformism' (trasformismo), a concept which operates at a certain level of abstraction while retaining a certain concreteness. That is to say, it is a highly descriptive term, referring to a technique of governance employed by the centre during and after the Italian Risorgimento, in which radical-popular social goals are incorporated and 'transformed' by the political centre, enabling a bourgeois hegemonic bloc to carry through a 'passive revolution' without empowering subaltern classes. Yet, it can be abstracted to a limited extent, deployed - with due care - to other situations. In the case of New Labour, transformism takes the form of "a long-term strategy" to transform "social democracy into a particular variant of free-market neo-liberalism". (Hall) This entails efforts to "co-opt, fragment, and dilute oppositional
actors and demands" (Leggett) This can be seen discursively in the energetic New Labour attempts to cast their agenda in terms of the legacy of the Attlee government, the 'socialism' of Richard Crossman, etc. NHS privatization reforms are, pace Blair, "firmly within Labour’s historic battle for social justice", fully consistent with Bevan's original agenda. If this looks like evasive double-talk, it's because it is: spin is not incidental to the New Labour project, but actually central to its hegemonic operations.
The antagonism within New Labour, between its neoliberal leadership and the basis in organised labour, is what explains the tendency to resort to vacillating jargon, queen among whose cynosures is 'pragmatism':
"The key thing to say about New Labour is that its so-called ‘pragmatism’ is the English face it is obliged to wear in order to ‘govern’ in one set of interests while maintaining electoral support in another. It isn’t fundamentally pragmatic, any more than Thatcherism was—which doesn’t mean that it isn’t constantly making things up on the run. In relation to the NHS, Mrs. Thatcher too was pragmatic in the short run (‘‘The NHS is safe in our hands!’’), yet strategically an anti-pragmatist (the internal market). As with the miners, she knew when to withdraw in order to fight again, more effectively, another day. Pragmatism is the crafty, incremental implementation of a strategic programme—being flexible about the way you push it through, giving ground when the opposition is hot, tactically revising your formulations when necessary (having given us ‘the enabling state’ and the celebration of ‘risk,’ the distinguished Third Way guru, Anthony Giddens (2002), now effortlessly slips us on to the forgotten problem of equality (!!) and ‘the ensuring state’—as more businesses absolve themselves of their pensions obligations). Pragmatism requires modestly shifting the emphases to catch the current political wind, saying what will keep traditional ‘heartland’ supporters happy (‘‘It can come across a bit technocratic, a bit managerial’’—the P.M.), whilst always returning to an inflexible ideological baseline (‘‘. . . the fundamental direction in which we are leading the country is correct’’—the P.M.)." (Hall)
Pragmatism, alongside 'modernisation', served to give the impression that New Labour policy nostrums were natural, uncontestable, and inevitable, though they were none of these things. These were hegemonic strategies, designed to give moral and intellectual leadership, and fundamentally alter the 'common sense' of political discourse, rationalising production and producing a new 'collective man' (cf, 'Americanism and Fordism'). This new 'collective man' is "not to expect handouts from the state, but is to be flexible, hard-working, entrepreneurial and a good consumer: a citizen-consumer". (Leggett) Labour could have won an election and governed as a moderately left-of-centre reformist party, but the Blairites were intent on fighting within public opinion, particularly within Labour's base, for their social agenda, which centrally involved turning social justice, poverty-reduction and public service delivery - traditional social democratic concerns - into aspects of neoliberal governance. For that reason, the 'activist state' - involving not Keynesian corporatism, but rather a plethora of marketised institutions that deliberately blurred the boundaries between the state and civil society - was crucial to the New Labour lexicon.
But New Labour's transformism would not have been effective at a discursive level of it weren't for occasional concessions to progressive, democratising values at the level of policy. These included the minimum wage, the devolution of powers, the working families' tax credit, some limited trade union rights, the human rights act, increased maternity leave, and - importantly - the expansion of public services through the very neoliberal means that it sought to normalise in the terrain of social democracy. Without these sorts of measures, the efforts at transforming social democracy into neoliberalism - which, recall, depended on coopting, fragmenting and diluting oppositional actors and demands - would not have been as effective as they were. Such measures disoriented and disorganised opposition, allowing the "fundamental direction" to remain untouched.
The remaining question is exactly how much success New Labour enjoyed in this hegemonic mission. It has been noted by pollsters that the experience of New Labour government moved the electorate to the right on a whole series of social questions, on egalitarianism, wealth redistribution, welfare, and - not the least of these - nationality, immigration and citizenship. The limits of this shift, however, are clear when it comes to popular attitudes regarding the core institutions of social democracy which New Labour sought to fundamentally restructure. Privatization did not become more popular with the electorate, and the Left organised some decent, effective public campaigns on this issue, around the railways, the tube, housing and hospitals. New Labour worked most effectively here where it divided and coopted the opposition. Pro-imperialist ideology, and support for the thermonuclear-tipped Anglo-American alliance that was central to New Labour's mission, sharply declined. Any Labour leader who advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1980s would have been crucified; today, he might be feted by a decent majority of the electorate. Dirigiste sentiments seem to have remained relatively stable among Labour voters, probably increasing as a result of the crisis. Most importantly, New Labour's electoral viability, and thus its ability to make its programme effective, is at rock bottom. Labour might be able to win another election as New Labour, but this would only be effective for as long as no strong opposition emerged. It certainly couldn't work in Scotland or Wales, where alternative reformists forces are already able to run rings around any Labour leadership that disappoints its base.
An emerging trend in New Labour thinking that is not quite Blairism, and doesn't entirely pivot on the moral and political individualism typical of the latter at its apex, is this 'Blue Labour' trend. Its key spokesperson, Lord Maurice Glasman, is a student of Karl Polanyi, and among its supporters are communitarians like Jon Cruddas. It remains, for that, a trend within New Labour, supported by pro-market ultras like James Purnell, which aims at upholding the basic New Labour assault on traditional social democratic collectivism: the language of mutualism, for example, provides a way of doing so without departing from neoliberal nostrums, and indeed any trend that comes from within New Labour will uphold a variant of neoliberalism. (Here I can't assent to Leggett's suggestion that New Labour possesses the intellectual resources to provide an alternative to neoliberalism). In an era when the majority are expected to accept severe reductions in their living standards, the figure of the acquisitive, self-interested individual that motivated Blairite transformism is no longer adequate or even minimally realistic. Instead, we are required to do more with less, to be self-sacrificing for what is ostensibly the greater good, to hold society together even while the mechanisms of social solidarity are de-funded and eviscerated. Hence, any potentially hegemonic formation within New Labour would have to proffer some 'Third Way' between atomised individualism and social democratic collectivism. It would have to go further, however, as it could not secure consent for a modified austerity project without offering some targeted concessions and relief, and without some modest encroachments on the wealth of the richest. Yet, to even state this is to underline just how weak and unstable such a project would be, how much more obvious its antagonisms would be, and how much less efficient its hegemonic operations would be as a result.
Labels: capitalism, gramsci, hegemony, labour, neoliberalism, new labour, social democracy, socialism, transformism, trasformismo
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
The English ideology IV: 'British Values' posted by Richard Seymour
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20171113054906im_/http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AE87O_M8xqc/TbicEt2eUCI/AAAAAAAADB4/wqBZ2KMQQDo/s320/Steve-Bell-30.03.11-001.jpg)
“Qualities of creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history.”
It would be tempting, but mistaken, to characterise this rhetorical soufflé as meaninglessly pneumatic. It is easy to point out that ‘tolerance, openness and adaptability’ are complex attributes that don’t attach themselves to nation-states much less to just one nation-state, while ideas of ‘work and fair play’ mean different things to a postal worker, Jamie Oliver, a GP, Prince Charles, a call centre worker or a self-employed plumber. This is not the point. Blair’s tribute is a meaningful construction, but its meaning works through allusion and condensation. It indirectly mentions the material modes of existence of polyglot social layers, retaining its ability to do so precisely through its indirectness. It thus universalises (within its parochial national purview) experiences which have a particular social origin.
For example, the appeal to “strong communities and families” most directly touches on the experiences and aspirations of those inhabiting small towns, villages, and enclosed urban spaces. There, the very compactness of social organisation, the miniature scale of societies contained therein, and the spatial allotments of wealth and status within them, create highly localised identities – this street, that estate, our household. In the posh, prim looking terraces populated by small families, often with both parents in full-time, ‘skilled’ employment, and Neighbourhood Watch schemes on the go, the strong community and family is a by-word for the social facts – interpreted as cultural, behavioural qualities – which seem to set them apart from the sink estates. ‘Race’ penetrates this psychic terrain in complex ways, inasmuch as the social facts adduced above can be seen by some as traits of a possessive ‘whiteness’, so that this respectable looking little street with its white families and smug lower middle class conservatism, can be opposed to that dirty little conurbation at the other end of town where Asian or black citizens live with disproportionately high levels of unemployment, poverty and crime. Such social facts give the appeal to ‘strong communities and families’ a charge that it lacks in the flux of big metropolitan areas where people are as likely to live alone, communally, or with lodgers or friends, as they are to inhabit a traditional nuclear family unit, and where the delineations of race, ethnicity and culture constantly give way to hybridity.
And yet, few who have grown up in nurturing families would object to the idea of ‘strong families’. Even with all their usual patriarchal tyrannies and exploitation (there will be parents reading this who treat their kids as a source of bonded labour – their punishment awaits in the maelstrom of adolescent rebellion), functional families seem to be a source of security, love, mutual care and, not insignificantly, economies-of-scale. It is not strictly relevant here whether this perception is even accurate. The point is that it resonates with widespread experience. Similarly, the community is just that loose company of friends, acquaintances, busybodies, and helpful, moronic or batty individuals that one has known on one’s estate, terrace or flat block. Few would reject the idea that such communities are a ‘good thing’, needing strengthening. As the BBC frequently reminds us, “everybody needs good neighbours”. Strong communities and strong families can be claimed as ‘British values’ not because the UK is distinguished by such aspirations, but because only a minority are likely to object to them.
Politically, New Labour mobilised such ideas in support of a variety of objectives – providing tax credits to working families, coercing single mothers to seek waged labour, imposing curfews and ASBOs on working class children, installing CCTV on estates, boosting two-parent families, and so on. This brew of modest social democracy and strident social authoritarianism is hardly unobjectionable, or lacking in opponents. But it is embedded in a hegemonic language whose ideologemes, originating largely in the experiences of the lower middle class, were universalised and could thus provide a normative basis for such policies. Yet, this is no explanation in itself as to why such affirmations should be drafted in support of a notion like ‘British values’, or why politicians felt compelled at the turn of the millennium to assert the existence of this elusive creature, even as the irresistible winds of ‘globalization’ were supposedly laying waste to passé conceits such as nations.
For, if the tempo and urgency of such attempted interpellations – ‘Britain needs YOU’ – escalated in the poisonous atmosphere of the ‘war on terror’, the ‘Britishness’ bug was doing the rounds in Westminster well before the évènement of 9/11 and its ensuing wars. To answer this question is to say something about the “unique island ... history” that Tony Blair adverted to, particularly the shift from colonial white world supremacy to a defensive white nationalism signposted by Powell and Thatcher, the breakdown of racial comity in some former industrial redoubts, the state of British social democracy in the wearied, cautious, conservative dog end of the twentieth century, and the caesarist mode of the British executive under Blair.
I shall restrict myself here to the following observations about that. National identity, as with other identities, is relational, dependent on its situation vis-a-vis Others. Britishness was historically defined first in its imperial capacity, as the union between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland in 1707 provided the consolidated strategic base from which two aggressive colonial powers could make an undivided bid for world power. Together, Perfidious Albion and Imperial Caledonia set out to create a new world order. Linda Colley makes the case that British identity was decisively formed through Britain’s imperialist extensions into the Americas, Africa and South Asia, and its encounters with various Others. Imperialism obviously does not represent itself as predation, but rather as a wider moral and social mission which should engage the whole of the society, direct its overall efforts, orient its sense of identity. So, performances of Britishness took place in relation to the Indian, the Chinese, the African, and the Arab. Britishness was also, for as long as Ireland was seen as a property of the British crown, bound up with Protestant chauvinism, which provided much of the working class base of support for imperialism and Toryism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the latter half of the 20th Century, Britishness was reproduced through constant, historically disembodied 'memory' of World War II. Yet as that cachet lost its persuasive power amid colonial retreat and relative decline, a newer sense of Britishness emerged through Powellism and the search for a culturally pure, white Britishness. Britishness thus shifted from its orientation toward a global white world supremacism to a defensive white nationalism.
In the Thatcher era, a brief festival of British revivalism harnessed the remaining energy behind this decaying idea on a series of spectacles from the royal wedding to the Falklands jubilee. These dramas of rebirth and tradition helped to congeal the policy mix of Thatcherism - White Brittania was defended through immigration controls, Ruled Brittania through intensified policing and public order crackdowns, Ruling Brittania through imperial reassertions and Atlanticist hyper-globalization. But by the end of the 1980s, the potency of this revival had been discharged. Partly, this was because the class alliance that made Thatcherism viable was breaking up under the weight of Thatcherism's social consequences. Partly it was because the world order was changing as the Cold War ended, and the Tory base divided over Britain's future global orientation - toward Europe, entrenched Atlanticism, or toward a garrisoned island-state? This was not something on which the manufacturers, financiers, and small traders who made up the Tory base could agree on. Obviously, 'Islam' comes into this, having played an important in British Aryan identity in the colonial era, both explaining anti-colonial revolts as 'native fanaticism' and justifying their suppression. For contemporary purposes, 'Islam' begins to become relevant to the formation of an anxious-aggressive 'Britishness' at the tail end of the 1980s, as 'black' political identities begin to break down into localised constituents and Thatcherite 'Britishness' is increasingly exhausted.
The British Labourist tradition had always incorporated the pro-empire Left, represented signally in the Fabians, and in the post-war period had developed a pronounced Atlanticist strain, which favoured managing imperial decline through the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. If Labour had a pacifist, internationalist tradition, it also boasted a monotonous parade of establishment sycophants, imperialists, race-baiters and opportunistic patriots. New Labour comprised in essence an alliance with Whiggish Liberals and social conservatives. Its turn of the millenium attempt to reflate and re-define 'Britishness' derived more from the managerial, Whiggish ideas dominating British social democracy at the depleted, dog end of the twentieth century than with major global antagonisms. The Blair administration attempted to pioneer a centre-left nationalism that would provide a basis for social cohesion (if necessary, helped along by social authoritarianism), a mobilising discourse for social reform, a competitive rationale for social democratic acquiescence to 'globalization' (Britain must punch above its weight), and a hegemonic doctrine underpinning Blair's autocratic executive style.
These ingredients were already evident in the 1997 election campaign, but Blair's caesarist moment came with the Kosovo war, through which he proved his mettle not as a daffy airhead 'Bambi' figure, but as a hardened ideological warrior, someone capable of whipping public opinion into line. Following this venture, which won him many ecstatic plaudits from journalists and the political establishment, he began to articulate more clearly his brochure for Britishness based on international competitiveness and military assertion. Following the riots in north-eastern towns and cities in 2001, New Labour ratcheted up those aspects of its Britishness agenda concerned with social cohesion, scapegoating Asian minorities for allegedly failing to integrate. Minorities were ordered to internalise a 'core of Britishness', which meant being politically compliant, quietist, lawful and generally effacing those culturally specific excesses that supposedly made them unacceptable to their white counterparts. But as of 9/11, Britishness was destined to have its run in with 'Islam'.
From the Rushdie affair onward, 'Islam' became an object of official ideological interrogation, as the media increasingly devoted attention to 'Islam' as a security threat, a source of political instability, and particularly a menace to the nation's values. In relation to the 'war on terror', Britishness was aggrandised through the constant belabouring, surveillance, harassment and outright repression of Muslims, even as the British state itself underwent dramatic changes, and its constituents loosened in centrifugal fashion. 'Islam' is seen as at one and the same time, too radical and too rooted; a source of instability and of exaggerated, embarrassing cohesion; revolutionary and reactionary; a politicised religion, or a pseudo-religious politics; a de-nationalised revolutionary creed, or a smug, conservative, violent upholder of 'family values' in their worst sense. Its very ability to be represented in such a shape-shifting manner makes it the ideal foe, the perfect foil for Britishness. This 'Islam' can accumulate enemies on the Left as well as the Right, among secular liberals as well as religious conservatives, among feminists as well as patriarchs. Through negative contrast, it gives 'Britishness' a force and attraction that it would otherwise lack. 'Britishness', thus defined through the encounter with 'Islam', has been routinely performed routinely by squaddies in Afghanistan, as well as by police squads, and belligerent journalists, for almost a decade now.
So, where do we stand today? The Cameron executive is, like its caricature in Steve Bell cartoons featuring the Prime Minister suited in a pink condom, slippery, soft-edged, and impossible to pin down. It lacks definition. Sitting at the apex of a weak, fractious neo-Thatcherite government, slowly pulling apart over the unlikely issue of AV, Number Ten seeks to re-deploy the elements of 'Britishness' through renewed imperial bloodletting, more tough talk about immigrants, and of course an incredible amount of bullshit and insincere sentimentality over the royal wedding. But, as polling data has more or less consistently shown, there's little enthusiasm for more war, and this one doesn't have a narrative capable of engaging 'British' sentiments even if the nation's imperial appetites hadn't been exhausted by the alliance with Bourbon Bush. And while the media, police and local councils will probably succeed in cutting out most expressions of republicanism on the day, the royal wedding is a topic of satire or bored indifference for most. Only the immigrant-baiting, which is a divisive issue for the coalition, actually seems capable of summoning the requisite temper, and even there the evidence is mixed. Yes, polls do show that the constant propaganda about immigrants and minorities has a pronounced effect on popular attitudes, and encourages a vicious minority to engage in racist violence. But on the other hand, there's no sign that talking a lot about immigration makes the Tories popular - far from it, in fact. There seems to be no doubt that a re-organised 'Britishness' could potentially provide a rightist counterpoint to social struggles against austerity, but the present signs are that 'British values' have lost touch with some of the material bases that gave them their peculiar charge and universal validity.
Labels: 'british values', british empire, british imperialism, britishness, islamophobia, new labour, racism, tories
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The English ideology III: the 'white working class' posted by Richard Seymour
Of course, Glasman does not mean to target the EDL and its thousands of supporters with this intervention. He means to mobilise the ideologeme of 'the white working class' as a sort of puppet boxer with which to belabour the left in the party. As he complains: "working-class men can't really speak at Labour party meetings about what causes them grief, concerns about their family, concerns about immigration, love of country, without being falsely stereotyped as sexist, racist, nationalist". As you will see if you peruse that link, Glasman uses 'working class' to describe any silly idea that he likes the sound of, particularly if - as will usually be the case - it is a right-wing idea. Don Paskini rightly points out that this latest is a libel on the working class, the vast majority of whom detest the EDL. But that's almost to miss the point. Of course Glasman is mobilising a (deeply patronising) image of "working class men" to hammer the anti-racists and feminists in the Labour Party. But V N Volosinov argued that the word is the most sensitive index of social change, and we should be very attentive to the changes that such terminological nuances advert to. There's something very important going on when the Labour Right, which worked so hard to end the class war, are anxious to be seen and heard evoking class.
Recently, there was a very useful analysis of the BNP and the 'white working class' by James Rhodes in the Sociology journal. It took issue with the idea, circulated by politicians and journalists alike, that the BNP's support comes from the most deprived among whites. In this respect, he points out that while the BNP have made real inroads into working class areas, there is no natural affinity between the BNP and white workers, and nor is it the poorest they appeal to. The two class fractions most likely to be represented among BNP supporters are 'skilled workers', and the lower middle class. The journalistic accounts are led astray by the 'ecological fallacy' - that is, if BNP voters can be found in a known industrial heartland, then they must be the traditional supporters of Labourism. In fact, Rhodes points out, the BNP support is typically found in the poshest areas of these towns and cities, a fact that has a huge impact on far right politics. BNP supporters and members tend to articulate their sense of class location indirectly, by reference to locality. Their scale is extremely small, as they tend to focus on this street, that area, etc. They are "rooted" and small town, rather than metropolitan; parochial rather than urbane. So, interviews with fascist voters and activists disclose that struggles over resources and entitlements are refracted through particular geographical references - ie, that street is filled with poor people who behave like animals, and the council throws all the money at them; while this street is respectable and well-maintained but gets nothing. Through such spatial distinctions, they carve out a moral and cultural economy, based on authenticity and respectability.
Authenticity merely consists in 'being from here', not merely being British and white, but being of this particular small community. Try leafleting in a BNP target area and one of the challenges that fascist sympathisers are likely to throw at you (assuming they aren't numerous enough to kick your head in) is that you're not from the area. Respectability consists of two intersecting aspects: employment, in which one can be said to be contributing something to the pot deserving of entitlement to services and funding; and conformity to certain social mores, in which one can be said to be integrated. The fascists and their supporters view the poorest of the working class with utter horror and disdain, as being almost as bad as immigrants. For them, 'welfare dependency' is an utter scandal, allowing people to be lazy and parasitic without ever contributing to society. They do not favour more money being spent on poorer areas, even if they do happen to be 'white', and in general don't support big state expenditure. They believe that only a sturdy police intervention can stop poor whites "from behaving how they've always behaved" and compel them to integrate and contribute, while "Asians" and "Muslims" can never be integrated as they aren't authentically "from here".
Of course, those BNP supporters who are themselves dependent on benefits must have their own way of asserting their respectability, and thus entitlement, within the context of fascist ideology. And they stake their claim principally on the fact of their being British and white: "locals first" as they are wont to say. But this merely defers an antagonism within the fascist constituencies - between, if you like, the petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarian elements - over entitlement to resources. And moreover, it's an antagonism where the latter are at a decided disadvantage, since fascist ideology, as is made abundantly plain in the newspapers, magazines and pamphlets of fascists, does hold the unemployed, the poor and the disabled in particularly low regard. Indeed, far from channelling the latent fears and resentments of the 'white working class', it's clear that the far right trade on a language very different from that of class, and mobilise an unstable alliance of localised constituencies often on the basis of hostility to much of the working class. Recall that Nick Griffin dubbed the people of the East End "stupid" and "decadent". This is because they comprise just those sectors of the working class - who are representative of the majority - who are either poor, 'unskilled', black, gay, leftist, culturally liberal, or in some other way not the right side of 'whiteness', of 'Britishness'. One thing James Rhodes' article doesn't discuss is the fascists' relationship to trade unionism. Perhaps this is because it's too obvious, but it's worth just saying that the BNP's long history of hostility to working class militancy has included their participation in major scabbing operations during the Miners' Strike, during which epic battle they called for the army to be deployed against striking workers.
If it is striking just how closely the apparition of 'working class' authenticity invoked by the Labour Right resembles the notion of 'white' respectability circulated by fascists, this is because there are elements of the petty bourgeois weltanschauung which have resonate with other social experiences, and which the Thatcherites in both the Conservative and Labour parties worked so hard to univeralise. The fact that some in the Labour Right want to go farther in this direction, trying to construct an electoral bloc by pandering to the most backward elements in society, who would never vote Labour anyway, is not the issue here. Rather, it is the fact that they have felt the need to do so using the language of class in a racialised way. They could just stick with standard Poujadist talk about 'ordinary decent people', 'the little man in the street' and so on, but they feel compelled to phrase it in 'class' terms that the far right are actually less comfortable with using, even if 'class' is heavily racialised.
It could be argued that this is a hegemonic operation within Labourism. The evisceration of several of Labour's working class 'heartlands' throughout the 2000s as a result of New Labour's commitment to warmongering, privatization and aggressive social authoritarianism has cost the party 5 million mainly working class votes. The pseudo-explanation, the way this can be incorporated without anything too significant having to change, is that the 'white working class' became fed up with immigration and in a world of increasing insecurity, become ever more committed to the security blankets of nation and ethnic identity, which politicians did not sufficiently articulate. This manouevering has been going on since Blair went and it became clear that Brown would not stay on for long. As the bye-election losses piled up, the Right leaked to the papers that Harriet Harman was responsible, the weasely line being that "we've got a problem with white working class males, and Harriet Harman wants to pass a Bill to help the gays, blacks and women!" But the losses still came, even harder when Labour tacked to the right on immigration and criminal justice. Labour voters didn't respond well to this sort of campaigning and boycotted the election. But it didn't matter, just as it doesn't matter now that Blue Labour or whatever it is called tomorrow won't actually win back all of those lost voters - they already know this perfectly well. Revulsion against the Tories will, they are betting, throw an election victory their way soon. The 'Blue Labour' stuff will, if anything, lessen the scale of any comeback. But the narrative provides a seemingly compelling reason why the Left, who would naturally be expected to make some small advances in the case of a big social struggle against austerity, must be kept out of the way, disenfranchised and neutralised at all costs. This also explains the tendency among the Labour Right (and centre) to favour reforms which either demote the trade unions within Labour, or give votes to largely passive groups outwith the party. But the language of class also provides a raiment of insurgency to what is actually a continuity exercise, a matey populist facade for an elitist politics. By adding the word 'white', moreover, the 'working class' becomes de-odorised, neutralised, cleansed of menacing cadences of militancy and leftism. It becomes an object of pathos and melancholia, inherently reactionary, and typified by the middle aged white male emoting about family and country, and probably organising one of the mythical millions of street parties to erupt in spontaneous planned celebration over the royal wedding next week. This sort of 'working class' is tame, dull, conformist, and deferential, but also vicious, sadistic, and vindictive. It is in this, and so many other ways, the ideal alibi for the Blairites. The actual working class will be a more fissile, combustible and less manageable matter in the coming months and years.
Labels: bnp, bnp scum, britishness, english defence league, englishness, fascism, islamophobia, labour, new labour, reactionaries, socialism