TIG of the dump

This is a post about The Independent Group.

My reading about the (now ancient - 1998) dispute between Ellen Meiksins Wood and Nicos Poulantzas as to the status of white-collar ‘new professionals’ has been educational.

Poulantzas argued that these gentrified yuppies: hipsters, lawyers, journalists, media people, architects, lecturers - bubble people par excellence - were not part of the working class at all, they were the new petty-bourgeoisie. They had a distinctive class interest (they were unproductive workers in Marxist terms) and exhibited a contingent relationship with the proletarian class struggle.

Woods observed acidly that in every case we're talking about people who have been dispossessed of means of production, people who need to sell their labour power to survive. Look, they're workers!

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So how come they look so different to the traditional blue-collar manual working class? Our middle-class workers are educated, articulate, individualistic and, where active, fervent on identity issues. Class thoughts never enter their heads. They are post-class.

As always we have to look at the specific evolution of capitalism, particularly over the last decade or so, to understand the real situation here.

The traditional surplus-value-producing working class is, to our surprise, still with us: in car plants, mines, docks, transport, construction and a thousand subcontractors. They have no voice in the media and are rarely seen there, but they haven’t gone away. Instead, a decade of steady but anaemic growth has rendered them apathetically, resentfully quiescent.

The great four-decade expansion of automation, financialisation and globalisation has dramatically expanded the number of jobs in the circulation of capital (sales, marketing, advertising, PR, media), in financial services and for the state. Most of these workers are not directly involved in the production of surplus value per se; they skim the value produced by other workers as Woods reminds us. Yet workers they are, nonetheless. Their jobs are less obviously ‘working for the Man’ - in fact they can offer significant opportunities for autonomy and creativity -  and they are sometimes quite well paid (although by no means always - a source of anger).

It is easy to see why Poulantzas saw this working class fraction as petty-bourgeois. They tend to see themselves as floating free of the production processes of the economy, part of the general cultural superstructure. They internalise the dominant ideology of bourgeois liberalism (not an pejorative term at all here; descriptive) and push it to its pure extremes.

The result is the cult of social-justice, its contours carefully, albeit subconsciously, edited for consistency with the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Everyone talks about material inequality (those huge ratios) yet no-one seriously agitates to do anything about it - it's an abstraction; transgender equality, however, is a cause to die for

No-one talks about class. Even the existence of classes in the context of economic dominance is denied; class is conceded to be at most a cultural signifier, subordinate to intersectional identity.

This sociological fractioning is prevalent across the advanced capitalist countries. All that has changed in recent years is that continuing anaemic growth - which does not offer advancement prospects to either the blue- or white-collar fractions of the working class - has led to mounting (though inchoate) discontent and new mobilisations on the streets.

The traditional blue-collar working class is resentful and votes for Brexit or Trump - the conservative, anti-elite populists. The white-collar working class votes for Sanders or Corbyn - the progressive (in cultural terms) populists. The real political expression of the über-elites, the Osborne-Obama-Macron-Merkel axis, has hit the buffers and is failing to attract support outside those closest to the coat-tails of the international elites, Davos Man and assorted wannabes.

It's a problem.

In UK terms, we see the Tory’s Theresa May defiantly holding a course designed to appeal to the domestic, anti-globalist fraction of the UK national bourgeoisie plus a fraction of the English blue-collar working class abandoned by Labour; we see Labour’s Corbyn and Momentum hoovering up the embittered white-collar workers (together with some petty-bourgeois forces, for sure, students and the artisan self-employed) who want to complete the bourgeois revolution to the max and advance their own prospects.

And then there is The Independent Group, that remnant from the Blairite-Cameron glory days, wondering if there is a social base for its nostalgic brand of neoliberal 'revival'.

I suspect not.

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Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times this morning was talking-up a party representing his own preferences: Blue Labour (and Red Tory). That would be the current Social-Democratic Party.

In common with most people, I had thought the SDP had finally died back in 1990.

I can see why Rod kind of likes this ghost of times past, but the SDP (now) is destined to be even more ineffectual than TIG. It presents a brand of one-nation Labourism/Toryism which articulated the narrative of 1950s ascendant national capitalism, but which is completely inapplicable to the current period of neoliberal decay.

It's a dated answer to a question which has not yet been put.

I'm with David

Daniel Finkelstein has this interesting comment piece in The Times today.

"When some years ago David Owen, one of the SDP’s founders, sent me an early draft of his memoirs, I understood for the first time that he had seen the SDP as essentially doomed — certainly in deep trouble — before I even joined it at the beginning of 1982. What had doomed it, in his view, was the decision to form a tight alliance with the Liberal Party.

"Owen’s conception of the SDP, which was formed in 1981, is that it would be a tough-minded, hawkish party of the left. It would appeal to an aspirational working class, particularly in the north, who had tired of bureaucratic socialism and saw the point of Margaret Thatcher, but were not Tories.

"When the future Labour foreign secretary was a student working on a building site he had been struck by the reaction of his fellow workers to the Suez crisis. It had been instinctively nationalist, uninterested in political protocol, and robust. It was these people he wanted the SDP to appeal to.

"Roy Jenkins, former Labour chancellor but also biographer of the Liberal prime minister HH Asquith, wanted a centre party that reflected his own liberal instinct. This would be a southern party of the middle class, disdainful of Thatcher, fastidious rather than bulldog-like on international issues, avowedly centrist.

"Everything about this Jenkins view — the electoral relationship with the Liberals in particular, but also the claret-drinking image — drove Owen crazy. But for all that he later did to shape the party, Owen was right that by 1982 Jenkins had won the battle. The SDP would be a liberal party. It lost almost all its northern and working-class seats, was not able to compete in the south because the Liberal Party took all the best constituencies, and ended up being swallowed up by its partner.

"Owen and Jenkins were rowing over whether liberalism and being a Labour moderate or even a centrist were the same thing. Jenkins felt that practically and philosophically they were. Owen felt that practically and philosophically they were not."

No-one in the current leadership cadre of the Labour Party, neither left, centrist or right, espouses David Owen's political views - with the possible exception of John Mann.

And so they will not reconnect with their millions-strong working class roots.

If Theresa May can find a way to overcome the respectable working class's tribal anti-Toryism, Labour are electoral toast till the end of time.

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Blue Labour website and Wikipedia article.