The Centrality of Class I - Exploitation

(This is part of the Introduction to Marxism series. See here.)

The most important reason that I think the contemporary left could do with more input from Marxism is that the contemporary left doesn't have nearly enough to say about class, whereas Marxism makes class central. Upon hearing this kind of statement people often worry, "What do you mean class is central? Are you saying that gender, race, and sexuality - for example - are any less important?" But that's to misunderstand what's meant by the centrality of class: it isn't that class matters more than gender, race, and so on. And it certainly isn't that class exploitation involves more suffering than sexual or racial oppression, as though some computer programmer in Woking had a better claim to be numbered amongst the wretched of the earth than a Saudi woman. No, the Marxist claim is that understanding class has a certain priority with respect to understanding over non-class oppressions; you understand a society in a particularly intimate way if you understand its class relations. This is important, of course, if you want to change society, and so class exploitation ought to be of interest not least if you want to fight sexism, racism, or homophobia.

The reason Marx thinks this was touched upon in the first post of this series, historical materialism: the way we reproduce ourselves as a species, that is, the way we produce the things we need, constrains the way we can organise society. And class quite simply is the general way we organise production socially, the way a society contains different groups who in different ways own or control the means to produce the things we need. From this it ought to be clear that class, for Marx, is not a matter of accent, or of what kind of sauce you put on your chips, or even of how much money you have. The question is simply: do you own the means to produce things for human need (beyond your own domestic needs)?

Before capitalism and in the early days of capitalism the answer to this question might well have required a little thought: perhaps you might have your own small-holding, but also work the local baron's land, or perhaps you might do piece-work for a local industrialist in your cottage. Under developed capitalism, however, things are much simpler: the vast majority of the population do not own factories, companies, sufficient shares or other accumulated wealth to be able to survive without working (or receiving state benefits in countries where these exist). Nor do they own land, or significant amounts of tools or resources. These people, most of us, the proletariat in Marx's language, must sell our capacity to work to others in order to survive. The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, own the means of production and lay claim to the profits made in their factories, farms, call centres, and computing labs.

Here's the rub: those profits, to which the bourgeoisie lays claim, result from the labour of the proletariat. Capitalism in other words is an exploitative system; to be a proletarian is to be exploited. Now, I have no intention of going into the details of Marx's theory of value and exploitation, mainly because this is an introduction, but also because it is laid out clearly in the first volume of Capital and explained well by David Harvey's free on-line course. Basically, though, the idea is that value is produced by human labour and that profits are surplus value, the value produced by labourers minus the value returned to them in the form of wages (which will need to be enough in the long-run to allow the workers to survive) and that required to keep firms ticking over in terms of plant, machinery, and so on (all of this being produced by another group of workers, working for another capitalist).

This has a number of consequences. Three seem to me particularly important for the current left:

Economic theory. Marx's account of exploitation is the cornerstone of his economic theory. A systematic grasp of economics is not a strong point on the left, and that is a failure of ours. Yet we have our own tradition of economic thought, and we should get better acquainted with it. Michael Roberts' blog is a good place to start.

Immiseration. It needn't be the case that workers are poor, and many are clearly not. There are all sorts of reasons for this. The exploitative nature of capitalist work, however, builds a tendency to make workers as poor as is compatible with them still working into the nature of production. The reason for this is quite simple: value that goes to workers as wages does not go to bosses as profit. Marx's theory allows us to link our proper outrage at sweatshops and zero-hours contracts to the functioning of the system.

Conflict. The fact that value that goes as wages can't go as profits and vice versa means that conflict is built into the capitalism system itself. My interests contradict my bosses' interests, and that is built into the way things are. Class struggle is not something dreamed up by hot-heads or preached by demagogues, it happens in every supermarket, workshop, and college every day of the year. Marxism is not about arguing for class war, it is about recognising that class war is already with us. Once we have done that, the next thing to recognise is that the only way to abolish class war is to win it, to do away with capitalism and with class-based society. I'll say more about how Marx thought that was possible in a later post.

There's a lot more that could and should be said about class and exploitation: what about the sizeable number of public sector workers in contemporary capitalist economies, where do they fit in? What about those members of the working class who are unemployed or undocumented? What about work done illegally? As I said above, though, this is supposed to be an introduction. With that in mind, one further comment - I suggested in the first post that Marx was a therapeutic thinker, whose work is best read as attacking illusions in our self-understanding which prevent us from being politically active or effective on behalf of the working class. One particularly pernicious illusion tells us that our employers provide us with work, that they are somehow doing us a favour by employing us, and that we should be grateful to them (politicians often talk of 'job creators'). Marx turns the picture upside down and the right way up, so that we can see clearly what is the case: it is not us who need the bourgeoisie, they need us. We could produce what the species need without people exploiting our labour for profit. The bourgeoisie could not profit without exploiting us.

If Marx by his writing has stopped one person being grateful to her boss, then his work was worthwhile.

We weren't supposed to be - twenty years of Different Class

"In the dark times 

Will there also be singing? 

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.” 

Brecht 

"We weren't supposed to be/ we learned too much at school/ now we can't help but see/ that the future that you've got mapped out is nothing much to shout about". Those words spoke to me, and continue to speak to me. I first heard them as one of the last students in England to get a full maintenance grant and go to university, the first in my family to do so. The others who bought Different Class were, in the main, from that same generation, one which even at the time had the tangible feel of existing at the end of something. The welfare state continued to be dismantled around us. For those on the political left there was precious little hope around; defeat continued to be multiplied upon defeat, a minor variation in theme being provided by the fact that, under the leadership of Tony Blair, some of those defeats were now internal to the Labour Party. Meanwhile, for those who hoped for from music both a relief from and a critique of reality the creeping success of Britpop already threatened to be its undoing. What had once told us about ourselves, consoling us for our failures, steeling us for our fights - rock music at its best, has the double-edged character Marx attributes to religion, both analegesic and expression of rage - was already fading into mood music for an age without hope, an age which didn't need consolation since its inhabitants were increasingly unlikely to do anything interesting enough to regret.

Different Class, which was released twenty years ago yesterday, captured this moment with a poignant beauty. Still to come were the betrayals of New Labour, the descent of popular culture into the blandishments of Coldplay and Jamie Oliver, the new puritanism, and the sheer accelerating bloody cruelty of a world unable to see virtues beyond the entrepreneurial. Ahead lay the institutionalised inability of rock music, with occasional honourable exception, to say anything remotely useful about anything whatsoever. It's kind of fitting that This Is Hardcore felt like the musical equivalent of waking up with a sore head.

Different Class observed this conjuncture sardonically, sometimes acerbic in its criticism ('you'll never understand/ how it feels to live your life/ with no meaning or control'), sometimes affectionate in its telling of ordinary lives and loves (Disco 2000). This latter aspect already set it apart for its humanity in a period when the done thing was to sing of being a rock and roll star, or at least to document the ordinary with a tone not innocent of mocking appropriation (thus, Blur's Parklife). And here's where the most striking thing about the album: at precisely a time when working class identity was being passed off as a fashion statement, whether worn authentically by Noel Gallagher or with the conviction of a hastily manfactured fake in Justine Frischmann's mockney drawl, Jarvis Cocker wrote about class. Mis-shapes told it like it was, with a gentle anger. Common People, a song which now reads like a prophecy of the hipster phenomenon, documented the frantic condescension of 90s Britain towards a fetished working class, and did so at a very personal level. So, for that matter, did I Spy, a song which is sick, in an older sense of the word than that now current amongst writers about music. Part of Jarvis' greatness as a songsmith is that he writes truthfully about the sordid. This is not a virtue that is obvious in the output of Travis. F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E combines this taste for the depraved with a real romance, a feat only Shane MacGowan amongst contemporary lyricists can carry off with equal profundity.

Romance, it should be said, is pervasive. Something Changed is a wonderful, touching, bucket of slush. Underwear charts the delicate, frightening, thrilling negotiations of romance. This is important, and not just because our capacity for love marks our humanity, for which reason every songwriter worth attending to has written about it. It also stops the, socially aware and, at least in a broad sense of the word, political Different Class from descending into preachiness. The world presented to us in the album is one in which politics is everywhere, but not everything is political. There is no succour to be had here for the kind of emotionally stunted leftist who wants to hear songs with titles such as 'fuck the Tories'. If Jarvis Cocker were to write a song about fucking Tories it would be in a rather different sense. This even-headedness is a necessary corrective to the idiotic idea that music can change the world, an error whose Blairite incarnation Pulp were later to pastiche with Cocaine Socialism. Leaving aside the politically paralysing nature of this delusion, it leads directly to the aesthetic horrors of Chumbawamba. Still worse, it leads to Bono.

Bono is a good topic on which to conclude a post on Halloween. We live, alas, in a world that is not safe from Bono. It is to just such a world that Different Class is the soundtrack.

 

Bashing the Bishops

If it is true, as I think, that the class struggle is the revolution - not just a means towards it, but the thing itself - and if it is true that the Christian gospel of love is incompatible with this, then quite evidently the Christian gospel is incompatible with revolutionary liberation: one of the few positions shared by the International Marxist Group, Mrs Thatcher and Joseph Stalin.

Thus the late Dominican friar and socialist Herbert McCabe sets up the position he will argue against in his wonderful essay 'The class struggle and Christian love' (published as part of his book God Matters). Of McCabe more later. For now we must turn our attention to less sublime intellects. I refer to the Archbishop of Canterbury who, along with his fellow Anglican hierarchs, has offered his lucky flock advice on the coming General Election.

The earnest, aphorism sodden, tract will not be remembered as a great moment in political thought, and I would not trouble you with it - dear readers - were it not for the following  passage, which a friend draws to my attention:

Parties of the extreme right and extreme left have sometimes sought to rekindle the language of class – but by trying to tap into class resentments rather than speaking of the warmer virtues of mutuality and solidarity. Stirring up resentment against some identifiable “other” always dehumanises some social group or people. Ethnic minorities, immigrants, welfare claimants, bankers and oligarchs – all have been called up as threats to some fictitious “us”. They become the hated “other” without whose presence among us all would be well. It is a deep irony that the whole political class is often regarded as an alien “other” by many sectors of the population.

Where to start? Well, I'm very much in favour of extremism, and to that extent thankful to their Lordships for putting it on the political map - the no doubt thousands upon thousands of eager readers who download  "Who is my neighbour?" from the internet will know that there is such a thing as extremism. Like the Tree of Knowledge it lurks beyond the bounds of the permissible and is therefore tantalising. For this publicity for my political creed, I am profoundly grateful to the authors. It is curious that people, who presumably subscribe (as indeed do I), a religion brimful of claims about the eschatological overthrow of the existing order should think extremism a bad thing; refusing to stay dead when the State have killed you is, by anybody's standards, fairly extreme. But we'll allow these matters to rest there.

I must confess to being confused about which parties of the extreme right are rekindling the language of class. I must further admit to being surprised that TUSC and/ or Left Unity are even on the radar. Although perhaps  Ed Miliband is the 'extreme leftist' foremost in the mitred minds; he did after all appeal to the transnational unity of the working class in his bid to persuade the Scots to stay in the Union. Clarification would be welcome, but never appears.

The action is elsewhere in any case: for we are bidden to think of the victims of the world. Those castigated and ignored; those persecuted, slandered, and outcast. To such the Kingdom belongs. Lest we not be able to identify these abandoned souls, a list is provided: "Ethnic minorities, immigrants, welfare claimants, bankers and oligarchs".

Yes, the oligarchs. Will nobody think of the oligarchs? In the spirit of this admirable solidarity, one assumes, all of that awkward stuff about the rich being put down from their seats will be excised from CofE bibles for the duration of the election season. Anyhow. 

It is all too easy, if fun, to mock this tripe; and it wouldn't matter too much were it not for the fact that the pious appeals for class peace find echoes far beyond the walls of Lambeth Palace. Many people who want the world to be a better place, many who hate capitalism, many even who would describe themselves as socialists draw the line at the language of class struggle. It all sounds rather violent, and isn't there something worrying about picking out one section of society and blaming them? Anyway, surely bankers aren't evil ? So, with variations, I've heard numerous thoroughly sincere and committed political activists, amongst others, argue.

Well, yes. Class struggle isn't particularly nice. It would indeed be better if human beings lived alongside one another peaceful and united, were this presently possible. But here's the thing - capitalism is premised on conflicting classes (and for that matter on conflicting corporations and - as it progresses - on the bloody conflict of nation-states*). The form of society we inhabit is one in which the bulk of the population are devoid of the means to produce the goods necessary for their existence and are compelled therefore to work for others, who do own those means. There is, as an immediate consequence of this, a basic conflict of material interests between these two groups. That this is the case is a fact about our society, it is a fact that obtains independent of anyone deciding to dislike people in another class, independent of some group of conspirators sitting down and deciding to have a class struggle. This is why, amongst other reasons, the comparison between appeals to class and politics which demonises immigrants and welfare claimants is dishonest.

Nevertheless, the report is correct in at least one thing that it seems to imply. Bankers, oligarchs and the rest of the ruling class are generally not uniquely dreadful people. They no doubt love their families, help elderly people onto tube trains, listen to their friends' problems, and give money to charity. Conversely, some members of the working class are bastards. The point of class politics is not that of finding a moral scapegoat for society's ills. That is not to say there isn't an ethical imperative behind it. For the commodity trader who kissed his kids goodbye fondly before setting off to work, when he arrives at that work starves hundreds of other peoples' children with the click of a mouse. The CEO of the 'ethical' food chain, who prides herself on the work her business is doing with women's co-operatives in the developing world holds down the wages of her already hard-up staff to face down competitive pressure. The pensions of those of those staff lucky enough to have them are invested, amongst other things, in a firm that makes a good living supplying the bombs that rain down not far from some of those co-operatives. In these, and a myriad other ways, the lives of people who are in many senses morally unremarkable are tied up with carnage, oppression, forced starvation, and every other imaginable form of avoidable human misery. So talk of "dehumanisation" is profoundly applicable. It's just the dehumanisation is real rather than imaginary - the point is not, as Welby et. al. seem to think - that the cruel propaganda of extreme leftists dehumanises an otherwise saintly bourgeoisie. No, the dehumanisation is implicit in the very workings of capitalism itself. Real alienation, real constraints on human flourishing are necessarily features of the way we currently live as a species. The banker is dehumanised simply by being a banker. He is fortunate in being dehumanised in such a slight way; capital dehumanises many others in a quite literal sense, by robbing them of life.

This hellish reality deserves all the condemnation it can get. More than that, it needs to be done away with. Then we will be rid of class struggle. As McCabe put it, "the only way to win the class war is to win it".

And to do that one needs to choose sides. Failure to do so is simply to side with the currently dominant, exploitative side. That is the path the Church of England's leaders have chosen.



*An attentive reader adds: " conflict between people for work, within the working class itself."

Danczuk and the 'white working class'

New Left Project are running a series on race and class in Britain. It's deserving of a look. In particular, Jon Lawrence's piece, published today, Why the Working Class was never 'White', is excellent, and speaks to a particularly unhelpful idea that has currency in the labour movement. I quote the final paragraph:

The sooner we recognise that the ‘white working class’ is not a thing, but rather an unhelpful media construction which the left must eschew, the better. Not only does it deflect attention from the virulent racism in other parts of English society, but it reinforces the idea of working-class people as unchanging, anachronistic and ‘left behind’. The ‘racialisation’ of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of ‘class’ as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one, and it is profoundly unhelpful. It makes it all too easy for millions of people hit hardest by neo-liberal economics to be dismissed as somehow reaping what they deserve.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of Simon Danczuk. The voice of Labour's hard right in England, and a serial complainer - sadly against all the evidence - that the leadership don't say very much about immigration, Danczuk is also a self-proclaimed advocate for the working class and/ or 'ordinary people'. He considers himself to be part of the former, 'a working class MP'. It has to be said that, in spite of an impeccably proletarian background, his last job before entering parliament was as director and co-owner of a public affairs consultancy, but working class status is presumably supposed to be something like Catholic baptism, indelible.

The brand of populism Danczuk promotes combines a class rhetoric with a campaigning stance on tabloid-pleasing issues; he has been a prominent voice around the scandal of child sex abuse. A nostalgic, romantic, attachment to the constructed white working class of yesteryear co-exists in Danczuk's mind with an outright rejection of the kind of reformist mitigation of capitalism's worst excesses one might imagine to feature, 'Spirit of '45' style, in the narrative. The Blue Labour constituency, close to the Labour leadership, sell the purer product. For both, however, there is an old working class Labour following, which is understood as both racialised and racist. Until the 'legitimate' concerns of 'ordinary voters' are addressed, Labour will lose out to UKIP or abstention. There's an element of truth in this, as I've said before, but not in the way the purveyors of Hovis kitsch politics suppose.

How did this discourse come into its own? As Lawrence notes, it was the media and academics who constructed the white working class before it was seized on by politicians and entered into the nexus of cultural self-understanding. But an ideology must have some kind of purchase on truth, however perverse and one-sided, to get a grip on the hearts and minds of any significant number of people. Scientology is always likely to remain a niche pursuit. And the truth, of course, is that large numbers of working class people do feel left behind; large numbers of working class people do feel distant from a political elite. In both cases the feeling is entirely veridical: it's just that the 'white working class story' gets things wrong by supposing this estrangement has anything to do with skin colour.

Matters were not helped by the fact that there was a measure of social liberalism in the New Labour years - although not especially around the issue of immigration: increases in immigrant numbers resulted from the global economic and political context rather than the Blair-Brown governments, which were quite happy to leave asylum seekers languishing in detention centres, being a 'soft touch'. To the extent that a certain liberalism - over civil unions, for example - did co-exist, however, with the absence of any serious reformism in the socio-economic sphere, this helped to give rise to the 'Hampstead Heath politics' tale told by Danczuk. The concurrent demonisation of the working class, documented by Owen Jones and others, provided a context where it could be imagined that council estates were full of resentful xenophobes. Chavs were not only idle, they were racist. Think about how the average BNP supporter was imagined in the media - he or she had an Essex accent and probably the odd tatoo. She lived in a council flat, decked out with England flags. Polling data in fact suggests this character was far more likely to live in a relatively affluent suburb.

Danczuk is just taking the whole story full circle. Rather than turn up his nose in disgust at the reactionary proletarian of metropolitan imagining, he has set himself up as their champion. Much the same dynamic was at work around Emily Thornberry's forced resignation. The flag-waving cage fighter at the centre of that particular episode is a living caricature of the working class as projected from Westminster. Until a better class politics becomes articulate, expect to hear more about the white working class.

You have nothing to lose but your van

Phraow. Look at him. He's a real man. Not like Ed Miliband.

Well, if nothing else, Britain now has its very own version of Joe the Plumber. Dan the Van, the emblematic man (and, really, notice he's a man - a manly man at that) on the street. He'd be the man on the Clapham omnibus, were it not for the fact that he has a van, and therefore doesn't need to get the bus. But not just any old man, oh no. He's a common-or-garden salt of the earth working class man. And if you diss Dan, and don't you dare diss Dan, you hate the working class. You're a snob. And probably a member of the metropolitan elite. So don't diss Dan, OK?

There is, of course, a metropolitan elite in Britain. It does indeed make up the social base of New Labour, whose rejection of its core electorate partially explains the exit of a minority of that electorate to UKIP.  Emily Thornberry, a decent soft-left sort from a working class background, isn't really part of it. But then car salesman Dan isn't really part of the working class on any reasonable definition either. Core reality isn't important here. This is about narrative.

Richard Seymour here is good on the details of the class issue here; and this blogpost, which I promoted yesterday, is definitely worth a read. I'd just like to make one observation - the reason the forces around the Labour leadership have been so rattled by Vangate is that Thornberry's tweet upsets their preferred class narrative. This issues from the bowels of Blue Labour, and finds expression in the whole One Nation brand. It surfaced around the debate on Scottish independence, is a nationalistic ally orientated, culturally homogenising story about what it is to be working class. It is deeply reactionary in content, and its effect can only be to cede political terrain which UKIP will work more effectively than Labour.

And Ed Miliband's wedded to it. We're screwed.

The working class is better together, the British state isn't

I've already explained why I support a 'yes' vote tomorrow here and here.

A brief post, then, merely to deride the last desperate recourse of the red-tinged wing of Better Together. It is about class unity. Don't divide Britain and Scotland! That will divide the working class. So say the dimmer recesses of ultra-leftism, and, um, Ed Miliband.

The thought that working class solidarity can, and does, cross borders doesn't occur. Nor does the thought that, if solidarity stops at borders then - given global capitalism - we are all well and truly fucked. Already.

Look, however, it the version of 'working class' identity that is being offered by, at least, the Labour leadership. It is a distinctly Blue Labour vision of a class whose solidarity stops at national borders (there, is, for instance, no question of solidarity with undocumented workers). Wrapped in the Union Jack and nostalgic talk of togetherness and community, like some kind of past-it mod revival, the proponents of this view lecture a 'yes' movement that has been marked by left-wing politics and internationalism about the dangers of nationalism from a position of British chauvinism. Their picture of the working class belongs in a living museum. Let's put it out of its misery, and breathe life into the real thing.

The Mill

I kind of liked the series of The Mill that finished airing last Sunday. Based around the life of a textile mill at Cheshire in the late 1830s and early 1840s, this dealt with the peak in Chartist activity around the petition of 1842, and participation of mill workers in the General Strike of that year. This was presented sympathetically (if anything, a little too sympathetically - would that all members of the ruling class were classic villains, and all union supporters basically solid people), and with a good understanding of the underlying politics. It doesn't represent a high point of writing, it was frequently predictable, and often unhelpfully sentimental. Nevertheless, it's good that stuff like this is being made.

However, the sadness is that it is perfectly safe to approach Britain's most radical mass working class movement through the lens of historical drama. The past, with its funny costumes and improbable background music, is a foreign country that can be served up in commodified dollops without there being much danger of many viewers' attitudes towards their own situation being changed. For sure, we might admire the passion, the commitment, the values of a revolutionary in a drama series, but the feelings thus stirred are easily packaged up and consigned to the domain of nostalgia - oh for the days when people believed in something.

The challenge is to provide a way of approaching radical history that presents it as part of an unfinished story in which we ourselves participate.

Scottish Independence : Yes (with no illusions) (ii)

Neither party in last night's depressing exercise in presidential politics should convince anyone. Nor should anyone interested in the politics of human emancipation cast their vote on the basis of which of two white male bourgeois politicians performed better in an overgrown student debate in front of the TV cameras. So let's proceed to ignore Messrs Darling and Salmond. The point is to bring about a world where our collective life involves more than sitting in front of one box before deciding which vote to cast into another.

The immediate issue facing Scotland's electorate is not, of course, whether they prefer Darling or Salmond, New Labour or the SNP, but whether they want Scotland to be politically independent. I argued last time why I don't buy arguments commonly advanced on the Labour Left in favour of a 'no' vote. Now I want to consider reasons to support a 'yes' vote.

National liberation

A standard move in the Scottish (and Welsh) Labour circles is to criticise nationalism - possibly with a hint that it promotes anti-English 'racism' (note to self: do future post on why it is simply not possible to be a racist, as opposed to rude/ dickish/ unpleasant, to someone in Britain on the basis of their Englishness). Here's one recent case in point on Left Foot Forward.

The first point to make here is that support for independence is not the same thing as nationalism. The second is that there is a clear and obvious difference between subaltern nationalisms and the nationalisms of world imperial powers, such as England/ the UK, has been. To fail to recognise this is to fail to recognise asymmetries of power and domination, a failure which should prove fatal for left-wing politics.  And there is a strong case that Scotland stands in need of national liberation. Scotland continues as an politico-economic periphery to the UK, frequently subjected to Tory governments for which its populace did not vote. Anti-Scots racism is more common throughout Britain than many care to admit.

That's the present. Nor do I think the past is irrelevant to the argument here - that we should 'move on' from the past, rather than - say - redeem it, is a liberal commonplace that betrays the emotionally dessicated humanity from which a lot of what passes for politics proceeds. I'm reminded of Walter Benjamin's words about being 'nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.' It is OK to vote 'yes' on behalf of those cleared from their land by English aristocrats, those sent from the Isles to the Somme, the schoolchildren caned for speaking Gaelic. Of course, the story of national oppression and human exploitation of which these are part also includes the stories of immigrants from every corner of the earth - the half-starved Irish immigrant, the Bangladeshi seprated from family by immigration laws. And it is a more compelling story for that reason.




Trident

Probably quite a good indicator of the aforementioned national oppression is the fact that the Westminster government uses Scotland as a storehouse for its weapons of mass destruction. It is is everyone's interests, throughout Scotland, throughout Britain, throughout the world, that the Trident programme is upset. Voting 'yes' is an excellent way to achieve this.


Ireland

Britain's still got part of Ireland in its murky hands. The resulting partition messes with Irish politics on both sides of the border. Scotland leaving the union will weaken the union overall, and given the significance of Scottish identity for unionist ideology in the north of Ireland, could be quite significant there.


Class

Workers, as the old slogan has it, have no country. Actually, the old slogan has it that working men have no country, which should be a warning to us that the hard work to be done here lies at the intersections. Whilst it is perfectly true that working class interests are international, it is equally true that those interests, as they find expression here and now, are mediated by, and distorted by, national politics.

Take Scotland. A significant proportion of the working class vote for the SNP. As a consequence of this, along with the comparative strength of old-style social democracy, the SNP pitches itself left-of-Labour. This in spite of the fact that the SNP is a coalition, many of whose members have interests deeply divergent from those of working people, and support political agendas far to the right of Labour. I merely name Brian Souter at this point.

This is to say that the SNP is a classic populist bourgeois nationalist party. And many Scottish workers are tied to it. This provides a case study in support of a general principle: once a national question has been raised, socialists should support its resolution in order to fracture bourgeois nationalist movements and reintroduce class politics. The current SNP wouldn't survive in an independent Scotland - no doubt something called the SNP would survive, like some kind of albannaich  Fianna Fáil. But the coalition of party activists and voters currently grouped around the bundle of charisma and dialectic precision that is Alex Salmond will not survive in the absence of a live national question. We can expect a split to the left, and a regrouping with unions, people from Left groups, and some Labour people. In other words, something looking like a workers party. Ensuring this would need to be a priority for socialists in a newly independent Scotland.

So there you have it, far from being a vote for the SNP, a vote for independence is a vote to split the SNP along class lines. Something we should all support.

Scottish Independence : Yes (with no illusions) (i)

This is a two-part piece, a polemic,  on why socialists should support a 'yes' vote in Scotland in September. It does not aim to convince people in general to line up behind independence; as it happens I don't think any argument to this effect is possible. There is no such thing as 'people in general'; interests and opinions diverge widely. The kind of reasons that might convince famous homophobe and millionaire Brian Souter to put his not inconsiderable assets behind the 'yes' campaign are very different from those that will be considered here. We'll return to Souter in due course.

This piece is also written by a Labour Party member. It is striking that, whilst the Scottish Left outside Labour has pretty solidly positioned itself in support of independence, the Labour 'Yes' camp is small. If anything this is more true on the Labour Left than for the Scottish Party in general. The balance of pieces in Labour Briefing, for instance, has clearly been pro-union. I dissent from this majority view, although there will be reason to pause and consider why it is the majority view.

At no point do I intend to argue that Scottish independence will transform Scottish society, or British society, beyond recognition, that it will herald in socialism, that it will safeguard the welfare state, or anything else. Over a century ago, in the context of the (still unfinished) Irish struggle for independence, James Connolly penned the purple passage,

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

What was true of Ireland then, is true of Scotland now. Political independence will not disentangle Scotland economically from British capitalism, still less from capitalism in general. A good proportion of the country's land would still be owned by English aristocrats and London-based financial institutions the day after a 'yes' vote (and a miserably small proportion of it owned by anyone other than super-rich individuals and institutions) . Regardless of the outcomes of wranglings over currency, whether or not an independent Scotland remained in sterling, its currency would at least be pegged to sterling (and, if nominally independent, vulnerable to speculative attack on this basis) leaving its government a limited amount of wiggle-room with respect to Westminster's economic policy. For the foreseeable future, "Westminster's economic policy" means austerity. As, to pre-empt it being mooted, does "Frankfurt's economic policy".

But the fact that a brand new world isn't at stake in this referendum doesn't mean that nothing is at stake. And I support a 'yes' vote.

Bad Reasons to Oppose Independence

Let's start by dismissing some very bad reasons to oppose independence. One, often repeated, is that Scotland leaving the UK would leave the rest of the Union doomed to perpetual Tory government. This is simply not true. As this blog showed some time ago, here.

Even worse, and frequently heard on the Labour Left, is an appeal to class unity. "The British working class should fight British capitalism together". The problem here is at least two-fold. First, if the existence of state borders renders impossible working class unity against capital then, faced with global capitalism, we might as well all give up and go home now. Second, the idea that all struggles against non class oppression should take a definite back seat to the class struggle is the worst kind of retrograde workerism. It is not even good class politics, since it fails to recognise the intersection between class exploitation and national, gender, racial etc. oppression. All too recently the British Left has seen the horrors that result from suggesting that feminism should take a back seat in socialist politics. Neither should national liberation movements be shelved until the important business of class struggle has been completed.

A less well-defined Labour unionist tribalism is more common than explicit class politics. This has been cynically exploited by the Party machine up north. It is certainly the case, although to a lesser extent than during the heyday of New Labour's Scottish PLP base, that the Labour leadership benefits from unionism in terms of intra-Party power. However, grassroots support for a 'no' vote can't simply be attributed to top-down manipulation - real, and sometimes comical, though that is. It is inevitable that if Labour activists get used on a day-to-day basis to electoral campaigns in which a significant opponent, often the main opponent, is a nationalist party, there will be a tendency for their politics to take on a unionist colouring. The kind of caricaturing and nurturing of a developed dislike which follows on from any kind of persistent political campaign will be directed at the SNP, and via them to nationalism, and to support for independence (these not being quite the same thing). Nothing short of a deliberate injection of politics will halt this slide into unreflective unionism.

To be continued...

Beyond the margins

I have not read Laurie Penny's latest book. This blogpost needs to start with that disclaimer. Nor do I have any interest in giving succour to the Penny-bashing industry. I was, however, intrigued by this review of Unspeakable Things.

This passage in particular captures well the attitude of much of the new Left:

...Her constituency, she says, is the underclass – gay and transgender people, goths, sex workers, rioters, anarchists – arguably the people with the most to lose from the neoliberalist (sic) agenda. 

Now, I would want to quibble with this reckoning of late capitalism's worst victims. I severely doubt that anyone ever finished a sixteen hour shift in a Chinese factory only to sigh "well at least I'm not a goth anarchist, that would be really terrible". But what is striking is the gap between this view, that sees the margins as the most politically fertile site, and the view of a Marx, who viewed socialism as "the movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority". Marx was, on this as on much else, correct. Any socialism which does not arise from, and engage with, a social majority will end in either failure or tyranny. The 20th century gave us plenty of experience of both.

To say this is not for one moment to downplay the role of marginalised groups and cultures in the formation of a viable Left. As I see it, though, the role of socialist politics is to forge bonds of solidarity between these groups and a movement of the immense majority (not least, of course, because the groups are not disjoint: some workers are LGBT etc.). The margins are not a great place to be. They are, well, marginal. In fact, one of the worst features of capitalist patriarchy is its continual creation of margins, of new ways of excluding people.

All of which, given capitalism, is a roundabout way of urging that we don't ignore class. The working class, in all its diversity, fragmentation, and recomposition, remains the only collective agent with both the potential strength and the interest to move humanity beyond capitalism. Much though it might be easier to win a collective of student activists over to anti-capitalism, the task that matters is winning over the people on the tube, most of whom are not signed up leftists, and many of whom are not really that marginal. All of this requires patient, hard work, and isn't the least bit exciting or sexy.

Anyway, here's Herbert Marcuse on the old new Left. The first time as tragedy:

Neither London nor Brussels

Since Margaret Thatcher shuffled off to the great free market in the sky it seems a credible guess that Nick Clegg is the least popular politician in Britain. Therefore, to state what should be blindingly obvious, there is no achievement in winning a public debate against him. In the face of all the 'UKIP comes of age' hype to which we've been subjected since Clegg and Farage locked horns on Wednesday, it needs to be stressed that the public considering that you've won against Clegg in debate is only a victory in the fashion that being voted a better GP than Harold Shipman would be.

On UKIP I have nothing really to say. The best analysis I have seen came last year from Lenin, and I refer the inquisitive reader to him. I think Miliband is pretty stupid to call for him to be excluded from leaders' debates. These debates are a depressing marker of a descent into presidential politics, so I really shouldn't care too much about what happens at them, but there we are.

What I do care about is the lack of any serious Left voice over the EU. What we witnessed the other evening was an internal row within British Capital. To over-simplify a little, Clegg (and 'progressive' opinion more generally, including the Labour front-bench) speaks for an alliance between those elements of the bourgeoisie proper whose profit depends on access to European market, Farage for more Atlantic-orientated Capital and those parts of the petty bourgeoisie who can't be tempted into the Brussels club by Guardianista noises about the bright new international peaceable future.

The section of the population who don't find representation in this otherwise admirably inclusive dichotomy are the vast majority - those dependent on wages to survive. Confusion abounds in this area, it is not unusual to hear people claiming the Social Charter (the role of which as a kind of insurance policy for competing national Capitals deserves more analysis anyway) as a great victory for workers handed them by the EU, in spite of it having nothing to do with that institution, instead being a treaty of the distinct Council of Europe. Less obviously inaccurate advocacy of the EU as good for workers has a more delusional character. Billy Hayes here seems to think that neoliberal policy is accidental to the developed EU, as though sufficient will-power on the part of social democratic parties could bring about some kind of continent-wide analogue of the post-war consensus. He's not the first person to suggest this, the only problem being that the institutions he envisages being claimed for Beveridge and Keynes were set up precisely to drive a stake through the heart of those thinkers.

A Left voice on the EU is lacking. We have to start saying loudly, more clearly, and less nationalistically (*cough* No2EU), that neither Clegg nor Farage have anything to offer the workers of Europe. The EU as a project serves to sustain profit, not the workers who produce those profits. Even moderate ameliorative measures are ruled out of court by EU legislation - in particular, any government seeking to reverse privatisation would find itself severely constrained. The Eurozone crises following the crash of 2007-8, with austerity imposed centrally on the poorer periphery of the Union, give a taste of the direction in which further integration on the EU model leads. Workers nowhere in Europe have a long-term material interest in the EU, nor in any country's continued membership of it.

A socialist and internationalist alternative is needed - that much is just a trite slogan, but true in spite of that. At no time since the 1975 referendum has advocacy of any such alternative been weaker in Britain. Given that the EU as an issue is likely to dominate increasingly in coming years, this should concern us.

Payday Loans

I wrote this a while back. Still seems relevant in the light of the Archbishop of Canterbury having appointed a failed financial capitalist to push forward competing with Wonga on the basis of unpaid labour...

Payday loans are big news. July's announcement by the Archbishop of Canterbury that he wanted to 'put them out of business' by supporting a network of credit unions follows prolonged scrutiny from politicians and campaigning groups. Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy, in particular, has been prominent in opposing the high-interest, short-term, lenders she calls 'legal loan sharks', and has pressed for tighter regulation of the industry.

Socialists should care about payday loans. Not only do they have a severe and negative impact on some of the most financially vulnerable people in society; the growth of the industry also reveals a lot about contemporary British capitalism.

Supplied by firms such as Wonga and Money Shop, and most often taken out for very short periods ('until payday'), payday loans are unsecured and have extremely high interest rates. Some loans with Wonga have an APR of 4500%, and Which? calculate the average cost of payday loans as being £25 for every £100 borrowed per. month. Exploitative in themselves, these rates can trap people in debt and hardship if the loans are not paid off quickly – and 70% of those who use payday lenders have rolled their loan over at least once.

Payday loans are used to pay for the necessities of life. 78% of loans are used to pay for basics: food, household bills, or housing payments. Very often payday loans are used as overdraft substitutes by people denied credit by banks. People do not put themselves in this situation lightly, in spite of the patronising talk of 'financial illiteracy' from some charities. The context within which this dependence on expensive credit has come about is one of low wages, reduced benefits, and expensive housing.

Everybody needs to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their dependants. If wages, supplemented by in-work benefits, don't provide the means to do this, people will rely on credit. Last month the TUC reported that UK real wages had been falling for 40 months. Combined with high underemployment – around 10% of UK workers according to the UK Labour Force Survey – and the financial insecurity created by short-term and zero-hours contracts, the result is a situation ripe for exploitation by lenders. Add to this the Coalition's sustained attack on in-work benefits, and the sky high cost of housing, especially in London, and it is fair to describe the UK as suffering from a crisis of working-class income.

To be addressed properly this crisis needs tackling at the roots. Credit unions, praiseworthy in themselves, are not a panacea, and the suggestion that they are in a position to force payday lenders out of business is naïve in the extreme. Still less is an emphasis on 'financial literacy' the way forward. There is, of course, nothing wrong with helping people manage their money, and some people from all backgrounds have problems with personal finances. However, the suggestion that there is a systematic problem with lower income peoples' money management is simply a moralising attempt to blame people for their own poverty.

Regulation of payday lenders should not be ruled out by the Left. We do, though, need to be careful. Horrific though this is, people depend here-and-now on these loans to feed themselves. We have to be very careful that we don't give our backing to piecemeal reforms which deny them even this opportunity.

The real solution is to address the crisis of income which allows payday lenders to flourish. We need real action on wages; we should support the Living Wage for all workers, and give our backing to struggles for higher wages in our workplaces and localities. We should push for the reversal of the Government's attack on the welfare state, and for the extension of more generous benefits, guaranteeing everyone a decent level of income. We should act on housing: arguing for rent controls, the building of council houses, and measures to stop the escalation of house prices. And, above all, we should call into question the capitalist system which allows the parasites of Wonga to grow fat on the desperation of others.

The Analysis of Blairism (i) - A Class Project

Long Post warning

A couple of days ago I had things to say about the position of the Left in the Labour Party, and this got me thinking about Blairism. It seems to me that we can't understand where we're at properly unless we begin to understand what happened to Labour under the Blair leadership, and how Blair's project continues to work itself out in the present day Labour Party, especially as we approach March's special Conference and possible modification of the Party's relationship to the trade unions.

I want to understand these things better. So I'm going to think out loud, or at least begin to think out loud, in a series of three posts on Blairism, of which this is the first. I've been helped a lot by Graham Bash and Andrew Fisher's excellent little book on the history of the Labour Party, as well as by (Ralph) Miliband and Cliff/ Gluckstein (oh for the blissful days when SWPers wrote useful things).

One response, which is pretty common on the Labour Left, to the phenomenon of Blairism is to deny that there is any such thing. To be sure, the Blair (and subsequently Brown) governments betrayed the hopes invested in them by many Labour voters and did lots of bad things. But this is hardly unparallelled; to a greater or lesser extent the same can be said of every Labour government. Nor is it even clear that Blair's governments were uniquely bad: privatising air traffic control may be deplorable, but it's not obviously worse than supporting the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And before there was Iraq, there was Vietnam.

If Blairism is to be considered interesting, and of enduring significance for labour movement politics, there has to be more to it than a succession of right-wing policy moves, however individually distasteful. I think that there is something more; I think that Blairism can be understood as a move to decisively reorientate Labour's class representative role. In outline, I believe that Blairism ought to be regarded as an attempt (by no means exhausted) to reconstitute Labour as a party of 'progressive' European-orientated capital.

Labour and Reform

It's something of an old Trot commonplace that Labour is a 'bourgeois workers party'. Being an old Trot commonplace is not incompatible with being true, and this is a case in point. British Labourism is a curious affair. On the one hand, we have a party with a solid working class base, born (in Nye Bevan's words) "from the bowels of the TUC", and over which the trade unions can exercise a degree of influence. Yet, on the other hand, we have a party wedded to the norms of the liberal state, to a divide between the economic and the political (to such an extent that, for the greater part of the Party's history - until the Bennite reforms of the early 80s - the PLP was completely independent of the wider movement), and to the class compromise that all of this entailed. The outcome of these tensions, present from the beginning, is that Labour has functioned to represent the working class politically within capitalism. Labour's existence both encourages class politics and tends to place limits on the imagined scope of those politics. The Party has both delivered historic reforms that have transformed the lives of working class people and, in the very act of doing so, bound them more closely to a system that survives by exploiting them.

All of this is workable for as long as Labour governments can deliver reforms benefiting the working class, thereby justifying their continued existence to their core electorate and the union bureaucracies. A standard narrative, widely believed on Left and Right, holds that Labour governments can no longer do this. In Cliff and Gluckstein's neat phrase Labour now has to offer "reformism without the possibility of reforms". The point of inflexion here is usually seen as the crisis of the mid 1970s, associated with the OPEC price shocks and culminating in Britain with the IMF bail-out of the Callaghan government and the resulting implementation of austerity measures. Before things got to that point, in 1976, Callaghan himself sounded the death-knell for the 'Keynesian'* macroeconomics that had been the power-house of post-war reformsim

we used to think you could just spend your way out of recession... I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked... by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment.

Shifting Phillips curves were the order of the day in the world of economic ideas. And in the hard cold world of institutional reality, new ties appeared for the hands of reformist governments. The Bretton Woods framework, which had provided a secure international context for the British post-war settlement, ended in 1971 when the US terminated the convertibility of the dollar into gold. The UK's 1973 membership of the Common Market, confirmed by the 'yes' victory in the 1975 referendum, tied UK policy-makers to a "free market economics" and posed long term problems for public ownership (particularly in terms of  reversing privatisations). The growth of transnational corporations seemed to pose problems for planning - left economist Stuart Holland's 1975 The Socialist Challenge expressed well the nature of this concern in the labour movement; he spoke of a 'mesoeonomic' sector of corporations interposed between government policymaking and the desired effects in working peoples' lives.  In the next decade, the Thatcher governments' deregulation of finance and foreign exchange foreclosed further on the options for a future Labour government.

An undoubted result of all this is that Labour governments can no longer run reformism after the exact model of the post-war consensus. I am not myself convinced that reformism as such is not longer possible. The relative continued effectiveness, and undoubted effect, of macroeconomic policy, particularly evident since the 2008 crisis, surely places a question mark over some of the more extreme claims about governmental impotence. But that isn't what matters here: what matters is a widespread collapse of belief in reformism since the mid-1970s. This was summed up quite nicely by Tony Benn in his 1981  Arguments for Democracy: the post-war consensus was spent, the options facing the British electorate were "monetarism, corporatism, and democratic socialism".

Shifting the focus from the national polity to the labour movement, it looked like the reformist project's day had passed. The contradictions of Labourism needed to resolve themselves. Labour could no longer represent the working class within capitalism by offering reforms. It had to either become a socialist party, or else - in the language of two decades later - a party of business.

Resolving the Contradictions? Benn, the SDP, and Kinnock

An increasingly militant constituency Left in the early 1980s favoured the socialist route. For the Bennites this meant not only socialist policies - Labour Conferences had been voting for these for a good few years - but structural reform of the Labour Party to favour the implementation of these policies when Labour was in government. Thus democratisation of the manifesto, mandatory reselection of MPs and similar measures became priorities. Trade union influence on Labour politics increased, for example with the introduction of an electoral college for leadership elections (a measure which also sounded the death toll for a key feature of traditional Labourism, the independence of the PLP). In other ways, boundaries prescribed by Labourism were transgressed, for instance by policy proposals advocating roles for trade unions in industrial management. None the less, the 1980s Left had no intention of weakening the link between Labour and the unions; to that extent the Party's heritage as a trade union party was unthreatened.

One might have expected a threat to come from the Party's Right. If they offered no policies which union leaderships could sell their members - and recall that this was a period of intense pessimism about the possibility of reforms - wasn't there a possibility that unions could become a thorn in the Party's side? As it happened, there was no real antagonism between unions and the rightward drifting parliamentary Party during the Kinnock years. Partly this was because the most right-wing elements of Labour had exited to the SDP, partly because the overwhelming priority was the defeat of Thatcher and Labour (however bad) provided the only electoral hope here, partly because the union movement was - as unemployment increased, the sectoral balance of the UK economy shifted, and especially after the defeat of the 1984-5 miners' strike - on the back foot, and under right-wing leadership, and partly because unions were an important source of finance for the Labour Party.

Whilst the union link remained intact, the Kinnock years did witness a clearing of the ground for a later rightward shift away from traditional Labourism. Left-wing policies adopted during the 70s and 80s were quietly abandoned, and the possibility of a leftward break was weakened by the defeat of Bennism, the anti-Militant purges, and the failure of the leadership to support the GLC and other local government struggles. Of more enduring importance, as the leadership took on board fashionable sociological claims about the changing nature of its working class support, its basis for appeal to that support changed, becoming less collective, and more directed at atomised self-interest, adopting rather than challenging key ideological tropes of the Thatcher era. As Benn's diaries describe a seminar presentation as reporting a survey of Labour voters, "it's nice to have a social conscience, but your family comes first".

In all of this the Kinnock years served as a kind of John the Baptist, a forerunner for the Blairite messiah.

A saviour from on high. Blair and Blairism


The tragically cut-short leadership of John Smith provided a temporary respite for Labourism, whilst the Tories sunk under internal divisions and the ERM fiasco. Then things changed.

The fundamentals of Labourism remained unchallenged at the start of the Blair era. The union link was unbroken and, however weakened Party demoracy might have felt, the labour movement was still capable of translating demands into policy - hence genuinely welcome policies of the Blair governments, such as the minimum wage and the restoration of trade union rights at GCHQ - as well as of applying brakes on excessive rightward drift. Yet there was a malaise in the air. Labour had lost four successive general elections, and for all its compromises was beginning to look like a party of perpetual opposition.

At the same time, by the early to mid 1990s, the role of the Tories as the unrivalled political representatives of British capital was looking shaky. Divided on Europe, but increasingly shifting in a Eurosceptic direction, the appeal of the Conservatives to capital focused on EU markets was limited. Moreover, a basic contradiction in the Tories' relationship to the capitalist class reared its head. Capitalism brings its wake relentless social change - "all that is solid melts into air". It has embarrassingly slight intrinsic respect for hierarchy, it cares little for morality and order beyond their capacity to secure profit. Family structures, national boundaries, ethnic identities - all are up for negotiation as eagle-eyed entrepreneurs seek out the next market. Since the 1960s, even as the industrial world had been opened up more completely to the ravages of capital, attitudes had grown more liberal on a range of issues: homosexuality, the family, race and racism, sex and sexism. And a good proportion of the bourgeoisie took this shift in attitudes on board, to a greater or lesser extent. Meanwhile they were represented politically in the UK by the historic party of order, the party of Section 28 and 'Hang Nelson Mandela' t-shirts, the Party which one of their own ministers termed 'the nasty party'.

Wasn't their room for a more modern, more progressive, more pro-European party of capital? Enter Tony Blair. Speaking to the FT in early 1997, Blair said (quoted in Bash/ Fisher),

I want a situation more like the Democrats and Republicans in the US. People don't even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business party. They should not be asking that question about New Labour.

New Labour courted business, and its flirtations were well received, with high profile donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. The gory details of the romance are well documented in Dave Osler's book. At the time, the long-term prospect of a New Labour lacking financial dependence on the unions seemed real. New Labour's policies remained a matter of negotiation between the representation of labour and of capital, I've already mentioned a couple of significant pre-existing labour movement policies that were implemented. Yet there was a definite shift in political economy towards acceptance of neo-liberalism. The rewriting of Clause IV had a symbolic importance here. Meanwhile the relationship between the PLP and the widered movement was negotiated. Party democracy withered (in rather the same way that plants wither after being sprayed with weedkiller), National Policy Forums were introduced, Conference decisions on policy routinely ignored, and candidate selections fixed. Blairism exerted itself as a force through organisations like Progress. Meanwhile, front bench spokespeople appealed over the heads of the movement, to individual electors, understood as consumers. This was the age of political advertising and 'spin'.

In all these ways there was a shift away from Labour even attempting to represent the working class, in however a mediated fashion, and towards it being simply another party of capital, offering itself to the electorate periodically as perhaps the least-worst alternative. Voices around Progress were quite clear that they would like to make the break with Labourism permanent and institutional, eyeing up the union link. Others, prior to the May 1997 landslide which rendered the question irrelevant, mooted working with, or forming coalitions with, the Liberal Democrats, another move which would have undermined the relationship between a Labour government and the labour movement.

Neither of these attacks on Labourism came to pass, and Blair is now redirecting his messianic energies beyond the bounds of the Labour Party, setting himself the modest task of bringing peace between the worlds' religions.  Yet the Blairite assault on Labourism is still warm. Coalition with the Lib Dems remains a live possibility after the next election. And, of course, the union link is a live topic, discussion of which is due to come to a head this March.

And that will be the subject of my next post in this series.



 *It's not really fair to Keynes to attribute to him the view that you could "just spend your way out of recession" but that's another post for a special type of geek.