British political tribes are stabilising

With the anticipated anticlimactic confirmation of 'Jeremy' on Saturday, (the Jeremiad?), it seems that British politics has at last settled into a stable configuration. But what is it?

I wish I could see one of those tribal maps marketeers and demographers like so much, but absent that, here's my common-sense guess as to affiliations and voting numbers for the British electorate. From political left to right:

1. Left middle-class activists + political far-left, the Corbynistas: (less than a million)
2. Metropolitan BBC/Guardian Labour, the Tristram Hunt left: (some millions)
3. Working-class socialists and trades unionists, Daily Mirror readers: (some millions)
4. Metropolitan liberal Conservatives, Cameron/Osborne types: (some millions)
5. 'Provincial middle-class' and working-class Conservatives: (many millions)
6. Working-class socially-conservative 'Old' Labour: (many millions)
7. Right wing fundamentalists such as hard-core UKIP: (less than a million).

The two mass-blocs are emboldened - notice they are both centre-right.

Labour Party capture by the Corbynistas has left both group 2, the Labour metro-liberals and groups 3 and 6, old-school working-class Labour voters, adrift and partyless.

I'm not sure any political tendency properly addresses the concerns of the old-school socialist and trades-unionist working-class Labour voters, (group 3), who have tended to tribally vote Labour, come what may. But this bloc is in any case in terminal decline.

On the liberal centre/centre-left, who now speaks for groups 2 and 4, the Guardian/BBC Labour left and the liberal, public school wing of the Conservatives? Institutional and tribal inertia makes it extremely difficult to establish a unitary party to address this bloc, despite much press speculation. The Liberal-Democrats are too despised, and projects outside the big two of Labour and Conservative have historically been doomed.

Meanwhile on the socially-conservative right, UKIP had a real chance to expand out from group 7, the 'right wing fundamentalists', to go after sections of the ex-Labour working class, but they have been way too disorganised. Instead, Theresa May moved adroitly to position the Tories towards conservative sections of that electorate. UKIP has thus been neatly marginalised.

Since we seem to have arrived at some measure of voting bloc stability, it seems inevitable that after some period - despite the difficulties - a new centre-left party will emerge (2, 3, 4) to confront Theresa May's forthcoming centre-right coalition (5, 6), with both UKIP and the Corbynistas marginalised.

---

Some Corbynista fellow-travellers believe that Momentum movement politics will 're-found' the Labour Party - a dynamic new membership allowing the Labour Party to reclaim those centre-left millions. Dr Phil Burton-Cartledge is a case in point.

However, Corbynism seems almost designed to make that impossible through its obsessional focus on SJW-style activism, lack of interest in parliamentarism, obscure to non-existent political programme, unpopular pacifism, anti-westernism .. and so on.

"What Is Orthodox Marxism?"

Amazon link

I first wrestled with "History and Class Consciousness" in my early twenties; it remains my favourite book of Marxist theory.

Georg Lukács was

"... a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also the philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

"As a literary critic Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).

"Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed to both support Stalinism as the embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism."

This morning I re-read "What Is Orthodox Marxism?", the first essay in the collection - and marvelled at the abstraction, erudition and sophistication of Lukács's thought.

It's slightly jolting to be reminded of just how conceptually deep Marxist theory actually is - not that you would know it from most professed 'Marxists'.

I considered writing a summary but found Phil Burton-Cartledge had done the job already- and much more diligently.

One feels that criticising Lukács without having immersed oneself in decades of study of the Western Marxism tradition would be like an arts journalist debating General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory with Stephen Hawking as a self-presumed equal (although that's happened).

Look, I buy into all this totality stuff, I like dialectical materialism and can accept that 'the proletariat is at one and the same time the subject and object of its own knowledge'. But once we've done all that, destroyed capitalism and removed capitalist reification and alienation, what next? Lukács sees the full liberation of mankind.

For me, on a bad day, it's dramatically relaxed selection.