And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race - part I

The pervasive immaturity of the left is nowhere more evident than in the emotionally frigid aphorism "don't mourn, organise". In saying this I am criticising myself as much as anyone; I resorted to it during those endless hours last night. But mourn we must, mourn for those who have died alone and starving, for those who will yet die, for those who will be denied an education. We should mourn for the lost hope and the lost futures. Mourning is good, because it speaks of persisting humanity, as well as of the extent of our loss. Mourning is also productive, for it is very close to that precious emotion, anger. Nothing is more revealing of the class nature of our political system than the convention that those who have lost should be gracious in defeat, as though a contest for state power were a public school cricket match. Anger is the refusal to be polite, to let bygones to be bygones, and to wait five years. Anger is the recognition that the bastards who now have a parliamentary majority in this country are indeed bastards. If anyone doubts this last point, evidence will, alas, be forthcoming quickly enough.

We have to direct our anger. In order to do that we need to understand what just happened. I was disastrously wrong about the direction of the election campaign. In fairness to myself almost everybody was wrong, a notable exception being Richard Seymour here. I'll come back to his thoughts below. Meanwhile, less adept minds on the left are currently demanding PR. In itself this is a striking instance of the failure to grasp the immensity of what we're up against; as though a bit of tinkering with the electoral system will undo the pervasive social sadism about to be unleashed with renewed vigour. In any case, in an ironic disconfirmation of the traditional leftist objection that PR builds in a centrist majority, were seats distributed on the basis of share of the vote we'd be looking at a Tory-UKIP alliance. No doubt there is a certain type of liberal who, when confronted with the reality of this fact, is cretinous enough to insist that the outcome would be 'fairer'. There is no helping such people.

Something more fundamental expressed itself yesterday, not merely the idiosyncrasies of First Past the Post. This was about popularised reaction, hegemony, and the evolving politics of the Union. Understanding this, and grasping as a consequence the awfulness of the situation, is a first step to doing anything useful about our plight.


Scotland

Labour got slaughtered in Scotland, and deserved it. This is the simplest aspect of what happened last night. This was not the artefact of nationalist reaction. A good amount of the SNP's support came from a class based vote for a party standing on an anti-austerity ticket. Seats in the West of Scotland held on derisory turnouts by parachuted-in Blairites dripping with entitlement fell to the SNP, as people enthused by the referendum campaign went to the polls, sometimes for the first time in their lives.

We can admit this much without having any illusions about the nature of the SNP. It is a bourgeois nationalist party, with left elements, pushed to a social democratic programme by circumstance. Alliances with, and appeals to, the better elements of  the SNP have to be part of what the left does next, on both sides of the border. The longer run has to involve an alternative politics for Scotland, a project whose last flourishing was sacrificed to Tommy Sheridan's libido.

Anyway, I've written at some length about the emerging politics of Scotland on this blog before. So I leave this topic with possibly the best speech of last night from probably one of the best MPs now in Westminster:



Popular Austerity

If the overwhelmingly best thing that happened last night was the election of a nationalist party on the basis of a manifesto broadly akin to the kind of thing Roy Hattersley would have signed up to c. 1989, it must have been - to use a technical phrase - a fucking terrible night. And so it was.

Labour lost seats to the Tories outside London. Before the sneery London is more sophisticated/ intelligent/ generally all round intelligent and liberated brigade get over-excited about the relatively good results in the capital (which didn't extend to unseating the Tories' pantomime villain in a target marginal), let me put it on record that I put Labour's London gains down to the issue of house prices. Its a swing that speaks more of desperation than enthusiasm. Across the country, 33.9% of those registered didn't vote. That inevitably hit Labour more than the Tories. Cameron's party increased majorities in a swathe of seats. Already the various 'Why I voted Tory' surveys are showing clearly that those who decided to vote Tory at the last minute did so, in the main, because they trusted the governing party on the economy.

There is no reality-based way of making sense of this results that doesn't recognise that a significant section of the working class is committed to austerity. I say this because a damaging myth persists on the left, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary, which says that faced with cuts the working class will shift left. The opposite has been the case in the past five years. People want 'the economy' to be 'safe'. As, in a certain sense, it is:

Thatcher, of course, won popular working class support, and in so doing set in motion a hegemonic austerity project whose fruits we are now reaping. Council house sales were the most obvious sweetener under her governments; it may yet turn out that the promise of right-to-buy for housing association tenants was a cause of yesterday's Tory victory. More pertinently yet, she established with brilliant success an analogy between the national economy and a domestic budget in popular consciousness; 'Why don't you look at it as any housewife has to look at it?'



This, patently false, parallel already explains some of the appeal of the Tories' call for a balanced budget, and of the trust placed in the party. In isolation, however, it doesn't suffice. It's not as though the problem is simply that people have a number of wrong ideas about the macroeconomic facts, as if simply making A-level Economics compulsory would usher in a Labour victory. Popular austerity is as much a matter of the heart of the head. The left loves to talk of 'false consciousness'. In order to understand why voters opted for the Etonians against their own material interests, we need other categories, 'false emotions', 'false values', 'false aspirations'. From childhood onwards we now learn business studies, we are taught to view ourselves as entrepreneurs. Even the act of compiling a CV to apply for an oversubscribed minimum wage job is an act of personal entrepreneurship. If we fail, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We should be more competitive. Once considered a vice, competitiveness has become a virtue, again inculcated in the school system.

We are, then, to identify with those who cherish competition. Out go solidarity and collective solutions, in comes individual self-advancement. If the affective pull of the entrepreneurial dream weren't enough, there are financial disincentives to stepping out of line: student debt is now 40k-50k per. student, whilst mortgages burden those lucky enough to have them in the first place. Who'd go on strike, or get a reputation as a trouble-maker? Yet, there's apparently hope -- if we are all players in the game of life, we are tempted to believe that we might win. Thus the cultural politics of aspirational identification: perhaps if I vote like Richard Branson, perhaps one day I might be like him. Meanwhile property porn gives us a voyeuristic glance at lives beyond our purses and encourages us into the masochistic idiocy of treating our homes as assets. Who knows, one day we might be hit by the Mansion Tax?

It's entirely beside the point to object that none of this is rational. Of course it isn't, but then neither are we. We are complex, contradictory,  beings, often strangers to ourselves, half in control of emotions and desires which, far from being private, are precisely the point at which ideology grabs us by the throat. Austerity is written into our very being. Knowing a few more facts will not expel it. The only writer on the British activist left who in any way understands this is Richard Seymour. I urge you all to read his Against Austerity as a matter of urgency. In an odd way, the other group of people who understand the extent to which austerity as a project dominates working class life and thought are the Blairites. Their solution, of course, is to give the people what so many of them seem to want. Even in the narrow terms dictated by electoral politics, this approach is likely to fail. If Labour don't challenge the economic narrative offered by the Tories - as, indeed, the unlamented Ed Balls basically didn't - there is a real possibility people will opt for the real thing - as, indeed, they did.

Nor will the 'build an alternative' cheerleaders set things right by a few public meetings and a new electoral front. Our enemy is inside peoples heads and written in their hearts. The ghost of Margaret Thatcher has possessed the souls of millions. Exorcism, the construction of a counter-hegemony will take a generation and in order to succeed must be as all-pervading as the austerity project it seeks to displace.

We haven't even begun to realise the immensity of the task we face.


Coming next: English nationalism