Class war has made the headlines recently regarding electoral strategy. I have sympathy with what Paul has to say on the matter here. NL has a totally distorted understanding of ‘class war’ and a contradictory one at that because they have adhered to the ideology of neoliberalism. The Tories, according to Danny Blanchflower, will be waging economic class warfare but who paved the way for them? In reality, this is an attack on the global working class. Neoliberalism is class war personified. And that’s the thing with all these articles, what is meant by class? And more fundamentally class? That’s one of the reasons I agree with Paul’s post as he is right when he says:
The reason the working class got called the working class is that it was the class defined by its economic role in capitalist society, and its relationship to the bourgeoisie. The working class works and is exploited (or is part of the surplus army); the bourgeoisie owns.
Until the different between economic relationships and socio-cultural identification (and self-identification) is grasped properly by the Left, we’re not going to get that far.
And what precisely is NL’s election strategy, have they got one? It is all just empty rhetoric, gesture politics, Brown’s witterings about Cameron’s posh background. And undoubtedly there are divisions in NL. What a to-do! The problem is that NL has worshipped at the altar of neoliberalism for far far too long. Twelve years they had to implement redistributive and equitable policies that could have truly transformed society but they chose a very different political path. And NL are definitely part of the problem.
There’s a recession and unemployment…. and a crisis in capitalism? But as we have seen the FTSE 100 gaining strength. And as David Harvey eloquently argues:
What happened in the US was that 8 men gave us a 3 page document which pointed a gun at everybody and said ‘give us $700 billion or else’. This to me was like a financial coup, against the government and the population of the US. Which means you’re not going to come out of this crisis with a crisis of the capitalist class; you’re going to come out of this with a far greater consolidation of the capitalist class than there has been in the past. We’re going to end up with four or five major banking institutions in the United States and nothing else. Many on Wall Street are thriving right now. Lazard’s, because it specialises in mergers and acquisitions, is making megabucks. Some people are going to be burned, but overall it’s a massive consolidation of financial power. There’s a great line from Andrew Mellon (US banker, Secretary of the Treasury 1921-32), who said that in a crisis, assets return to their rightful owners. A financial crisis is a way of rationalising what is irrational – for example the immense crash in Asia in 1997-8 resulted in a new model of capitalist development. Disruptions lead to a reconfiguration, a new form of class power. It could go wrong, politically. The bank bailout has been fought over in the US Senate and elsewhere, so the political class may not easily go along – they can put up roadblocks but so far they have caved in and not nationalised the banks.
And as Naomi Klein succinctly argued: During boom times, it’s profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculativebubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalization for deep cuts to social programs, and for a renewed push to privatize what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly.
And that’s the crux of the problem, we face an uphill struggle because neoliberalism is the obstacle, this particular ideology of the global bourgeoisie has been the most resilient and viciously rampant. An ideology that they want to continue. How have the global bourgeoisie dealt with the ‘crisis’ is by attacking the poor, attacking the public sector and the welfare state with relentless savage vicious cold hearted cuts that will reverberate for generations…
Instead we have Brown mocking Cameron’s posh background. Indeed, that is not the strategy for winning back core voters. NL has to re-connect with its core voters by implementing policies that benefit working class people. And that means kill the beast of neoliberalism because it is integral to what NL is. And all this talk of class war is eye wash because what do people mean precisely? Hell, I wouldn’t mind seeing the storming of Buckingham Palace, the overthrow of the parasitical monarchy, redistribution of wealth and turning Kensington and Chelsea into a workers’ republic but that is more of a fantasy than a reality. NL had 12 years to prove their transformative worth but didn’t (except for a few sops here and there).
They coulda/shoulda. But didn’t.
