Richard Seymour has written an ambitious article on the real ideological agenda behind the Coalition’s cuts and why Labour has found it incredibly difficult to respond adequately.
I have some quibbles about how the past is represented. Briefly, I think that a fair bit of Labour party rhetoric and thinking around the economy did not keep pace with changing public attitudes. Without the Clause 4 changes, the party would still be fighting the battles of the 70s and 80s while Britain in the 90s had moved on.
A lot is to do with presentation. The Labour party realised by the 90s that its core constituency wasn’t large enough to win power and not enough people wanted to fight a class war. They had aspirations and saw themselves as middle class, not working class, despite what sociologists might say.
I say this not because I want to have an argument about history – I don’t – but because it matters when we discuss strategy to counter the Coalition’s deep cuts.
It goes without saying that Labour hasn’t acknowledged the intellectual crisis the financial crash has thrown it into. Even now, the Labour right is pathetically mumbling about how they need to regain their economic credibility by laying out a deficit reduction plan.
Say what you want about the Tories, at least they know how to push their economic and social agenda under fairly innocuous sounding rhetoric. They understand the importance of shifting the political spectrum, not just responding to it. In contrast, Labour MPs are still so shell-shocked from the 80s that the minute the Daily Mail screams ‘class war’, they back-track instantly.
So how should the left respond to the Coalition’s cuts?
There obviously needs to be an intellectual response. Most of this has already been provided by the likes of Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf and Danny Blanchflower. But there’s also a matter of how you frame the response. Simply saying ‘no cuts at all’ gets you into a debate about whether that’s a credible economic policy – it doesn’t put the Coalition on the defensive. My view is that a better response would be that ‘The Cuts Won’t Work’ – an approach pioneered by two activists who have set up a simple site to popularise a response (http://www.thecutswontwork.co.uk). Then we can get into a discussion about why the cuts won’t work and the impact they’ll have.
Then there is the need for a logistical response. People have to be informed of what’s going on, how the cuts will affect them and the damage it’s doing to the economy. They have to be angry enough to want to do something about it. They have to be empowered to take action and be given direction on how to get involved. They have to know what action is taking place locally and want to get involved in that.
The last is the strategic response, which overlaps with the previous one. The response to the cuts must be ‘people powered’ and not be a trade union led coalition. It has to be framed and developed as ordinary citizens trying to protect their local communities from this ideological assault. Otherwise the movement not only risks being caught in the sectarianism of the past, but will also be dismissed by the media and political classes as ‘vested interests’ that can be ignored.
Let’s go back to the point I made about Labour’s ‘modernisation’ programme. Labour’s constituency, and the people affected by these cuts, aren’t just the traditional working classes. In many cases, especially over the the schools and NHS programmes being unveiled, middle class families will be angry too.
We have to tap into that anger and bring those people into our coalition otherwise the Tories can easily dismiss us if we’re just talking to ourselves. If we do that, it can potentially, as Richard says, “create a crisis for the government that will throw wide open the debate about the real alternatives to the defunct policies of the last thirty years.”
If the left only manages to get some sections of the working class angry, then we won’t progress much further from where we already are.
The potential this crisis opens for us is vast. If we can work together and mobilise people, then we can not only put the Tories but also senior Labour MPs on the back-foot. We can change the economic narratives currently being discussed. We can change the way the financial system works. But for that to happen we have to carry as many people as possible with us.
Sunny Hundal is editor of Liberal Conspiracy and on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/sunny_hundal
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15 Comments on "We need to be strategic in opposing cuts"
By william, on 04 August 2010 - 17:07 |
The assumption that trade unionist = working class is an odd one here. Many of the unions affected by public sector cuts will be white collar ones - the NUT, PCS, UCU. So many of those nice middle class families Sunny Handal is concerned about would be involved anyway.
By charlesdance, on 04 August 2010 - 19:16 |
I suspect that the limited response to the cuts so far in terms of popular anger is a form of denial: people ‘know’ what is coming but hope it won’t affect them, also the level of depoliticisation over the last 30 or so years means that people don’t feel they have the weapons to fight with in terms of argument and organisation. Thankfully now there are political forces converging both nationally and locally, we on the left have to make sure we are as visible and militant as possible in standing up to the planned onslaught; to dismiss the trade unions in this regard would seem to me to be suicidal given that we urgently need to build as broad *and as powerful* a movement as possible.
By Tom Miller, on 04 August 2010 - 21:45 |
Doesn’t seem to me that Sunny is ‘dismissing’ anything. What he’s arguing for is what would in previous ages have been referred to as a ‘popular front’ - an alliance against the agenda of the right that crosses usual class and political boundaries.
I think the argument for one makes sense.
By Sunny H, on 05 August 2010 - 01:31 |
The assumption that trade unionist = working class is an odd one here
Where do I make that assumption?
I hope not - because my point is we need to involve every member of society, TU members or not, WC people and MC people etc
By Chrys, on 05 August 2010 - 03:20 |
“...Without the Clause 4 changes, the party would still be fighting the battles of the 70s and 80s while Britain in the 90s had moved on.”
And now it is right back again in a class war. A real class war, exemplified by the ‘cuts’ , waged by the rich against the poor. Which requires, by way of response, precisely the principles which Clause 4 suggested: the primacy of people over profits and the necessity to disarm the ruling class by taking the means of production etc into society’s power.
Sunny writes as if socialist ideas were a matter of fashion which had sadly outlived their allotted season, rather than considered responses to the propensity of capitalists to create crises and attempt to escape them by crushing the living standards (not to mention aspirations) of the masses.
By Steve L, on 05 August 2010 - 12:58 |
Isn’t a ‘popular front’ approach exactly what Richard Seymour was advocating? I can’t see much substantive difference between the two, except perhaps Sunny’s apparent reluctance to have anything to do with unions.
It seems to me obvious that any large scale organised response will need resources, established networks and organising experience. Where do these things already exist, in organisations that still directly represent 25% of the workforce nationally, and around 40% in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In the unions. What other set of organisations has the same vast numbers of members? Certainly not any political party.
And as pointed out above, many of these union members are ‘middle class’ - who will soon be learning first hand just how hollow that term is when applied to proletarianised white collar and ‘professional’ labour. No arguments about history here, but I’ll just point out that what the Labour leadership believed in the 90s and what was actually the case are not necessarily the same. And now the condems are pulling the rug out from under millions of the ‘aspirational middle class’, who will find out that they are, after all, only a few salary cheques away from having nothing. And let’s not forget that over half the population still identify themselves as working class, in spite of 3 decades of attempts to instil a sense of self loathing in those who aren’t lucky enough to escape onto the upwardly mobile escalator.
No doubt the bureaucratic and conservative nature of unions will be pointed out - something I wouldn’t disagree with at all (as a former NALGO/Unison shop steward), but that misses the basic point that a truly broad based movement, if it were to gain any momentum, would potentially transform the actors who participated in it, including unions.
Perhaps then we could start to see a return to the idea of unions having a broader social role beyond simply wage bargaining for their members, and perhaps involvement in real broad-based campaigns could stimulate union membership and re-activate grassroots structures to shift power away from the bureaucracies - and generate some much needed wider solidarity, as unions’ involvement in really broad based struggles could begin to transform their image as irrelevant sectional interest group - carefully cultivated and promoted by ‘new’ Labour and the other mainstream parties.
A further point from Sunny’s own analysis - who is better placed than the unions to take the lead in detailing the cuts and their effect? I’m assuming he knows that the TUC is already doing this at the Cuts Watch site.
I completely agree that what we need is a movement, not simply a ‘campaign’, that should be as broad based and inclusive as possible, but I think that to dismiss the role of unions in this not as leading and controlling, but certainly as central, is a strange and counter-productive stance.
By Chris Read, on 05 August 2010 - 13:42 |
I don’t think Sunny is dismissing the importance of socialist ideas or suggesting that they are just a pomo fashion. Rather he’s saying that we need to accept that the truth and validity of socialist ideas are not enough just on their own to win power in practice. Sunny is right to say that the majority of British people are not up for the kind of class war we’d all like to see (sadly) - so we need to frame the debate as ‘normal, everyday people’ and their communities versus elite interests. I think TU’s are going to be very important in this but if it’s just TU’s vs. the cuts, it might not be enough. Richard’s article seemed to point to creating a party to the left of Labour - I wonder what effect PR would have on that? (not that the Tories are likely to give the Lib Dems anything on that front).
By Tom D, on 06 August 2010 - 06:45 |
“Most of this has already been provided by the likes of Paul Kruman, Martin Wolf and Danny Blanchflower. But there’s also a matter of how you frame the response. Simply saying ‘no cuts at all’ gets you into a debate about whether that’s a credible economic policy – it doesn’t put the Coalition on the defensive.”
There’s a tension here. If these economists are right, cuts are not necessary, even from a capitalist point of view - they are positively counterproductive, because they risk destroying aggregate demand - and are not in themselves credible. If there’s to be an intellectual response, it needs specific grounding. There may be a risk that conceding the necessity of cuts now - there will be reduced social consumption in the long run, inevitably - is intellectually unnecessary and strategically dangerous.
By Richard Seymour, on 06 August 2010 - 16:59 |
“The assumption that trade unionist = working class is an odd one here. Many of the unions affected by public sector cuts will be white collar ones - the NUT, PCS, UCU.”
This involves assumptions about class that are long outdated, and just don’t work. Class does not correspond to the colour of one’s working clothes, a lifestyle or even necessarily an income (though in fact most civil servants earn less than the average salary: http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/news_and_events/facts-about-civil-and-public-services/index.cfm#2). Being a teacher, a lecturer or a civil servant does not automatically make one middle class. These occupations have been drastically ‘proletarianised’ in recent decades, in the sense that they have experienced a loss of autonomy and social power, are increasingly de-professionalised and de-skilled, subject to more and more surveillance and discipline, less secure in their jobs, etc. This process is in itself one reason why ‘white collar’ trade unions are often taking the lead in militancy. If by working class one simply refers to a layer of people who sell their ability to work on the labour market, but who do not share in profits, and do not exert authority over other workers, then the trade unions are largely, in fact overwhelmingly, the organised expression of the working class in this society.
By Alex Snowdon, on 06 August 2010 - 19:26 |
I disagree with Sunny’s downplaying of the trade unions. The unions, at national and local levels, have a central role to play in anti-cuts campaigning. One important reason is their potential - through strike action - for hitting the government hard and thus doing a great deal to turn the tide against the ConDem coalition.
At the same time, we shouldn’t wait for strikes - or rely solely on the unions to campaign for us. It’s good that a number of senior union figures are signatories to the statement, calling for a mass coalition of resistance, published on the Guardian site this week. It’s important that they are part of a longer list with a good range of names. The unions need to be linked to other forces to have maximum impact. The conference on 27 November - announced alnog with the statement - is one part of that process of developing serious coalitions.
By william, on 07 August 2010 - 00:59 |
Of course Richard Seymour is right if one is talking about a structural definition of class. The de-skilling, de-professionalization he describes is real. But I don’t see why we should abandon 50 years of analysis of class as a culture, and its importance to political mobilisation.
Labour historians have spent decades debating the attachment of sections of British proletarians to (at various times) Methodism, liberalism and Toryism. The trade unions owe their origin not to those proletarianised by the first wave of industrialisation, but to those artisans who fought for their rights and recognition as skilled labour.The trade unions never had hegemony over those who literally sold their labour power to the market. They don’t in the present day either.
Structural position does not automatically correspond to identification with a class. I know many teachers and lecturers who are totally against the de-skilling and exploitative nature of their workplaces. They will be mobilising against the coming cuts. But they would not describe themselves as working class, and their pupils would mock them if they did.
And despite Richard’s comment that class is not defined by dress, could I point out that one of Eric Hobsbawm’s most famous essays revolves around the adoption of the cloth cap as a universal marker of working class consciousness (‘The Making of the Working Class, 1870-1914’) – just as the sans-culottes were defined by their abandonment of breeches.
By Kevin Blowe, on 09 August 2010 - 21:51 |
Sunny argues that “the response to the cuts must be ‘people powered’ and not be a trade union led coalition” so that any anti-cuts coalition is not “dismissed by the media and political classes as ‘vested interests’” It’s an argument based on an assumption that the judgment about success or failure will be made exclusively by the press and political classes, which is not one I shared. We either stop cuts from happening or we don’t – whether we run a good campaign is secondary.
I would argue that one of the fundamental lessons of the last decade’s anti-war movement is that pleading with the powerful to change decisions that they are ideologically committed to simply doesn’t work. Neither the majority of the press nor the political classes were prepared to be convinced by the massive opposition to the war in Iraq and even a million plus people on the streets of London caused nothing but a minor wobble in Whitehall. That doesn’t mean huge numbers of people, middle-class as well as working-class, supporting a campaign against cuts isn’t important, but in an article arguing for the need to be strategic, Sunny seems to be saying that the central plank of a campaign should involve telling the government something it simply isn’t interested in listening to. What is missing is how they might be forced to listen if and when lobbying proves unsuccessful.
On the role of the unions, I have few illusions that most trade union leaders, especially the head of my own union Unite, will be prepared to go beyond polite opposition unless there is considerable pressure from within their own ranks. Unlike a ‘people powered’ campaign that tries to distance itself from the unions, however, such pressure is at least possible within the structures that the union movement provides. A successful campaign against cuts has the potential to make bureaucrats like Derek Simpson feel very uncomfortable, driving them towards positions that they would normally never dream of adopting – including industrial action. That’s why, despite Sunny’s concern about how union involvement might be perceived, it is impossible to ignore the central role that organised labour must have in any anti-cuts campaign.
Perhaps we can at least agree on this: the basic principle of any coalition should be that those most affected by cuts lead the campaign to oppose them. At a local level, that would involve local campaigns making these decisions – in middle class areas as well as working class ones. But at a national level, in what I hope will be a bottom-up campaign, it would mean an general agreement that those less affected by cuts agree to refrain from imposing their own concerns, although important, on the direction of opposition to cuts, doing so in the name of solidarity.
Putting aside simple self-interest to defend those with the most to lose from the age of austerity that Cameron and Clegg have planned for us should be something we can all support, shouldn’t it?
By Sunny H, on 10 August 2010 - 12:17 |
. We either stop cuts from happening or we don’t – whether we run a good campaign is secondary.
I don’t buy this at all. If we want to save people’s jobs and stop the wrecking of communities - then it has to be a good campaign. Otherwise it’s just the left showing how weak they’ve become.
Sunny seems to be saying that the central plank of a campaign should involve telling the government something it simply isn’t interested in listening to. What is missing is how they might be forced to listen if and when lobbying proves unsuccessful.
I’m already assuming they don’t want to listen. But I’m pointing out that if you want to force them to listen you’ll have to involve the middle classes.
You seem to think that running a ‘good campaign’ is secondary and yet by magic you’ll be able to force the Tories to respond to the campaign if it’s filled by the people we already expect to be out on the street.
and lastly:
A successful campaign against cuts has the potential to make bureaucrats like Derek Simpson feel very uncomfortable
Think you have it the wrong way around. The big unions are probably happy to fight against the cuts. But they’re also keen aware that they’re no longer as powerful. And that if they try and run this, it will blow up in acrimony like Put People First did.
See the article on LC by Nigel Stanley from the TUC.
By Kevin Blowe, on 10 August 2010 - 20:30 |
Oh come on Sunny, I’m obviously not arguing that we should organise a ‘bad’ campaign whilst simultaneously saying we should fight to win – I’m arguing that the judgement about whether an anti-cuts campaign is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ shouldn’t be made by the press or the political classes. You know that full well. Don’t set up straw men to knock down, it’s not helpful.
As for “assuming they don’t want to listen”, you’ve argued that the campaign should focus on the theme of ‘the cuts won’t work’, but I’m saying that the Tories in particular (the Lib Dems less so, I accept) see cuts as intrinsically worthwhile in themselves, rather than because of their individual utility.
I’ve acknowledged that it is important to gain the support of the middle-class (reread the second paragraph of my comment again if you missed it) but the question is not simply one of involvement, but direction and leadership. I’ve tried to suggest a way forward in proposing that “the basic principle of any coalition should be that those most affected by cuts lead the campaign to oppose them” through “local campaigns making these decisions – in middle class areas as well as working class ones”.
That would certainly provide make for an inclusive campaign – bit it’s a argument you have chosen to ignore. You’ve also completely ignored the suggestion we adopt what should be a fundamental socialist value – that “putting aside simple self-interest to defend those with the most to lose… should be something we can all support.”
As for the notion that the “big unions are probably happy to fight against the cuts” – well perhaps we have a different perspective on what ‘fight’ means in practice. And perhaps we have a completely different experience of what union bureaucrats will – or more often won’t – be prepared to do unless they are pushed.
By Sunny H, on 10 August 2010 - 22:48 |
I’m arguing that the judgement about whether an anti-cuts campaign is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ shouldn’t be made by the press or the political classes.
Ok, but then what criteria are you judging it by? Unless the political and media classes are afraid - they won’t change policy. If they ignore it and the cuts continue - how successful are you going to be?
but I’m saying that the Tories in particular (the Lib Dems less so, I accept) see cuts as intrinsically worthwhile in themselves, rather than because of their individual utility.
I’m sure they do - but that is not a position the public will accept. And that’s why we have to lure them into stating that position.
If your argument is simply that ‘we don’t want any cuts at all’ - they have an easy riposte to that, which won’t lose them any votes because they simply blame Labour for their actions.
And perhaps we have a completely different experience of what union bureaucrats will – or more often won’t – be prepared to do unless they are pushed.
Maybe. But we plan to push ahead with or without union support. I don’t want to exclude them, but I don’t want them to take over it either. So this isn’t something we disagree on.
You’ve also completely ignored the suggestion we adopt what should be a fundamental socialist value – that
I’ve not denied it because it goes without saying. I’m not sure what you’re trying to say in this point.