Labour's hegemonic paradox: which is the party of working people?

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It's easy to forget now, but during the last election, Miliband had the Tories worried. Fearing the Labour leaders slight move toward populism, putting inequality and the Tory millionaire government on the agenda, they did a clever bit of reframing. They started calling themselves the party of working people. This was a radical shift in language. It seemed to work. I talked to a number of working class voters - mostly men - in recent weeks who voted Tory in the election. More or less, they did so for perceived economic self interest. The economy appeared to be doing well, and they didn't want to risk a change to Labour. Traditional loyalty among working class voters to Labour no longer exists, each vote has to be won on merit.
Since Blair, a conventional wisdom has it that Labour must overtly and explicitly appeal to middle class southern voters, even at the cost of alienating some core working class supporters, in order to win elections. This appeared to work for Tony Blair, although at a cost - 4 million votes lost between 1997 and 2005. More were lost in 2010, when Brown went down to defeat on 29 percent of the vote.
Even more seriously, the strategy opened the way for the SNP to defeat and supplant Labour as the leading left-of-centre party in Scotland, while in England UKIP has picked up millions of votes from Labour. The Greens have also benefited from this centrist strategy.
The problem with first past the post is it encourages the main parties to imitate each other in order to woo swing voters. This auction for the centre denies the electorate a real choice. The Tories' new 'party of working people' presents a challenge to Labour, but also clearly shows that the political discourse has changed since the great crash of 2008. While previously issues of inequality and excess wealth concentration had been off the agenda, they were back with a vengeance. The Tories had to respond and they did.
But the Labour answer can't be to become the party of millionaires. Labour was born as the party of labour, the trade unions and the working class. It used to have clause four - the goal of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
In the past, it was possible for Labour to represent its base of working class voters, with a sizeable chunk of the middle class, including teachers and others in the public sector, toward a common goal of a democratic socialist society achieved by electoral means.
However, in the last three decades, de-industrialisation, the decline of organised labour, the end of communism and fragmentation of politics has made this a tougher proposition.
There was, of course, always a sizeable part of the working class who voted Tory and supported the established social hierarchy, the monarchy and the empire. This was because the Tory party, in Gramscian terms, had ideological hegemony over the nation. To paraphrase Marx's words, the ideas of the ruling class become the ruling ideas of a society, and those ideas are Tory.
After the fourth Labour defeat in 1992, Tony Blair decided to shift Labour to the centre ground - stop trying to shift Britain leftwards, and instead move to the pro-business 'centre'. That consensus held until the 2008 crash once again put capitalism's failings into bold relief - rising inequality, boom and bust, the destruction of well paying jobs.
The Blairites and their supporters in the media have attempted to turn the 2015 defeat into a call for a return to new Labour, but clearly this is a false solution, and will lead to a dead end. Without rehearsing all the reasons Labour lost, it is clear both the candidate and the offer were not strong enough to convince the majority of voters to change course so soon into a recovery from such a deep recession.
But most important of all, Labour wholly failed to effectively challenge the Tory narrative of the recession and deficit. They effectively blamed Labour for both, and avoided the taint that Tories too supported deregulation of banks that caused the crisis. Labour did not have the courage to admit that it was responsible for the neoliberal catastrophe of allowing the financial sector to become too big to fail.
Claiming that it was a 'global financial crisis' was, and is a cop out. Brown and Blair bought wholly into the idea of a 'new economy' based on financial services and free flow of capital with light touch regulation. Labour should admit this was a disaster - and propose a new financial system, using the publicly owned banks as German-style industrial banks, that support small and medium businesses, while moving to curb the behaviour of the financiers who asset strip great companies and will, inevitably, lead us into another crisis at some point in the near future.
An economy based on debt is one that will inevitably crash. Labour should relentlessly point to the record level of private debt in the economy and move the argument away from the government deficit - which is a red herring. It's the debt, stupid, not the deficit. The Tory chancellor has failed to rebalance the economy, and with Help to Buy and stamp duty reductions is preparing the ground for the next crisis. Labour need to understand this, stop following the media and Tory narrative on the deficit and start attacking this economic model built on low wages, too big to fail finance and ever increasing debt.
Unfortunately Balls and Miliband were timidly only tinkering with this model, and perversely relying on the economy not recovering to delivery them the keys to Numbers 10 and 11. This is a doomed strategy - if you need the economy to be tanking in order to win, you are in a kind of desperate doomsday scenario. The misery strategy failed. Capitalism always recovers - boom and bust - remember that Ed Balls as you nurse your coco.
What Labour lacks is a hegemonic strategy - in the sense understood by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci - a framing narrative that shows it can be the party for the vast majority, changing the values of the country to its values. The SNP has such a strategy in buckets, claiming for it the mantle of the cross-class progressive majority in Scotland.
Such a strategy is a tougher challenge in the Tory heartlands of southern England, but Labour has no choice but to try. It should push aggressively for a return to a low inequality, mixed economy, where monopolies like rail and energy - and even banks - are commonly owned, not in an old fashioned centralised way, but as modern socially responsible companies. Take the battle to the Tories, change the narrative, get out of this fatal, defensive, self-flaggelating mode.
Labour does best when working people are confident, as they were relatively in the 1940s, 1960s and 1970s. Conversely the party has found it harder in periods of recession and austerity, like the 1930s and 1980s.
Of course, if Labour can't find such a strategy and solve its hegemonic paradox - if they remain in thrall to the rightwing media and Tory framing of the debate, they will go into decline, and new political forces will seize that role.

Post-Miliband meltdown, the Blairites are back

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Charles Clarke, Alan Johnson, all the Blairites are hitting the airwaves saying Miliband's 'left wing' platform is what lost it for Labour and saying they need to go back to 'aspirational' new Labour. Who can argue with aspiration? Everyone wants a good life, obviously. But aspiration under Blair and Cameron is code for a false either-or - that solidarity (collectively ensuring everyone has access to the essential elements of a good life - education, healthcare, a home) is anathema to economic success. You can't have both. We've been told that for 35 years and looking at the electoral map today, it appears that most of England agrees.
But really, was that it? It could simply be that Miliband comes over like a north London policy wonk with no connection to the real world - and he fatally refused the hand of the only ally who could have helped him into Downing St - Nicola Sturgeon. Labour was arrogant enough to think it could win alone - and have nothing to do with the other progressive parties.
Miliband's narrative was feeble and unclear for so long - even the Mansion Tax was a Lib Dem policy, not exactly nationalisation of the commanding heights. In fact if he had come out for rail and energy nationalisation, rather than the feeble price freeze, he might have sounded like he had a coherent policy for returning to a mixed economy and breaking with neoliberalism.
It's obvious that aside from Brighton, left wing voters are no more than 10% of the country (or 5% if you exclude SNP Scots). Left-wing candidates scored almost nothing.
But a lot of how you win people over to more social-democratic policies is framing. In Scotland, SNP speaks the language of social democracy and won 50% of the vote.
Saying you will build social housing and regulate private rents is not incompatible with 'aspiration' - it's for aspiration (not to hand all your money over to rapacious landlords), for everyone, not just the middle class. It's saying that everyone should have the elements of a decent life. After all, the Tories have no problem subsidising the rich: housing benefit is a massive taxpayer subsidy to landlords, as is low wages and zero hours - its 'taxpayers' subsidising big business.
Miliband (or whoever replaces him) could have said it's time to stop wasting billions of 'your hard earned money' on subsidies to business and landlords and instead bring in a living wage and fix the housing market - and cut those rich people benefits. Flip the Tory welfare scrounger language on its head. He never articulated that because Labour is forever terrified of being portrayed as 'left wing.' The Blairite view is based on four Labour election defeats from 1979-92: they concluded that you can't change the right-wing narrative, so you must mirror it and sneak in your policies under the radar. But that policy has major drawbacks - it ultimately feeds right-wing ideological domination (as well as leaving the economic model mostly untouched, which came a cropper in 2008 with the financial crash). It's tough accepting that you live in a right-wing country, but if an opposition can link personal interests with a wider narrative of social solidarity, it can win millions of votes - just look at Scotland. May be the Labour party should throw the leadership election wide open - come on Nicola!

The QT election debate - Poor Ed's final trip

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Poor Ed Miliband, being harangued and bullied by some pretty unpleasant members of a 'representative' audience. He stood there, slightly rabbit in headlights, before launching into his creepy crawly 'what's your name' I'm-a-man-of-the-people routine.
Come on, Ed. This American style coaching - looking mad-eyed into the TV camera, walking up close to the audience like a preacher in the Deep South, rather than a British politician in dire need of some likability.
I felt sorry for him. I don't like bullying. Minutes before a confident, smooth-talking David Cameron was able to hammer home the Tory message of cutting the deficit and making sure all you hard-faced hard-working voters don't let those horrible scroungers get any more of your hard-earned cash. They lapped it up.

Miliband didn't do himself any favours. When it came to coalition talk, he just claimed that he would not negotiate on his manifesto and never do a deal with the SNP. The audience weren't buying it. One guy said, "have you thought how much more respect you would get from this audience if you were honest about what deals you will make after the election?' Miliband just carried on lying regardless.

It was as if he was saying to Scottish voters, I dare you to vote SNP. Go on. To English voters, he desperately wanted them to believe he was as much an English nationalist as any of them. The art of politics seems to come down to who can lie with a straight face. The more Miliband-Balls say they won't truck with the nationalists, the more it feels like the loser in Monopoly kicking over the table. If you're going to take all the money (votes), I won't give you the pleasure of winning. They seem to think that the SNP will simply be forced to back a Labour government - a minority, weak government, on current polling - from the sidelines. They could, as others have said, just abstain and watch Labour crumble.
But as one audience member in QT said, what about the voters? If voters don't want to give either party a majority, that means you should listen to them. They don't want a single party dictatorship. Listen to them. They've had tweedledum tweedledee for decades. They want something new. Just holding your hands over your ears and going 'la la la la la' is not going to change that.
At the end of Miliband's 28 minutes, we were none the wiser. He made a few noises about standing up for working people against non-doms and big corporations, but it rang a bit hollow. You can't just declare class war if there is no one standing behind you (although at least he does now have his new mate Russell Brand backing him), nothing in your armoury.
The small businesswoman didn't look that impressed. He should have just been a lot tougher on these critics - voters can be wrong, and they can just be deep down, rightwing Tories and there is little point in trying to win them over - just demolish them so your supporters can see that you know how to fight. But Miliband doesn't have the killer instinct. He doesn't even seem to have all the arguments.
He should remind people that zero hours contracts, low wages and sky-high rents are all subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of pounds. That's ordinary people's money being funnelled to business and landlords because they are exploiting people with low wages and high rents.
After getting a couple of laughs - more than Cameron - at the end Miliband tripped as he left the stage. What a symbolic exit. I felt sorry for him but more than anything I felt like the election was already over. I'm going to hold out for some small victories - the decapitation of Nick Clegg, a thumping majority for Caroline Lucas. But when I looked at that "representative audience" it felt like they wanted something right-wing, hard, Tory-like. And as they say, the people get the government they deserve. And the Scots will just have to wait for the next referendum to leave us to it.

How to lose an election in the last 2 weeks of the campaign

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Answer: do what Labour is doing. Attack the SNP, and go round shouting how you won't make any deals with them because they are such separatist nationalist b******ds. Balls's "absolute 100 per cent total firewall" between Labour and the SNP is the most stupid statement he has made in some time. Doesn't Labour see this is a Tory trap to make them distance themselves from the SNP, and refuse to be part of a progressive coalition or agreement. The left social-democratic voters across the UK include SNP voters - SNP voters have abandoned Labour for being too right wing and Westminster focused. Labour, as a Westminster establishment party, don't want a coalition with any of the new progressive forces Green, SNP, Plaid - they want to jump into bed with Nick Clegg's Lib Dems - that's their comfort zone, where nothing will change. That is how to demobilise that left-of-centre anti-Tory vote. Go on, throw the election! I hope I am wrong but this right-wing narrative can only increase the Tory vote. What a pathetic excuse for a strategy.

Marx and Soviet anti-fascism – a tenuous link

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The Soviet role in the war was unique and heroic, but the ‘socialism’ it built bares little relation to Marx’s revolutionary ideas, says Joe Gill 

On the 132nd anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, communists and marxists commemorated the great thinker's contribution to social ideas and for a new society in various ways.

Some gathered at his grave and drew a link between his life's works and the struggle against fascism that ended in a costly victory in 1945, led by the Soviet Union, which paid a terrible price in millions of lives to defeat nazism.

But in reading the Morning Star's editorial on the day, I had a terrible sinking feeling. The leader stated that only one of those states fighting the nazis was socialist: the USSR. It continued: “The Britain that fought the genocidal racist regime in Germany itself ruled a vast empire and treated many of the peoples it kept prisoner as subhumans."

While this was undoubtedly true, it can, in some ways, also be said of Stalin's Soviet Union - officially according to its 1936 constitution, the Soviet Union upheld the highest democratic ideals. In reality by the late 30s, it was a dictatorship in which neither the working class or any other class enjoyed full democratic and social rights.

This was discovered by visiting delegations of trade unionists, who were shocked at working conditions in factories, and was recognised by the writer of the introduction to the 1948 centenary edition of the Communist Manifesto published by the US communist party, which contrasted the ideals of Marx with the realities of the Soviet Union in which basic human rights were lacking.

 The editorial paints a picture of the battle against fascism that upholds the Soviet Union as a model of socialism that directly inherited the ideas of Karl Marx. This is profoundly misleading. Marx, as a synthesiser and revolutioniser of the ideas of English political economy, French socialism and German philosophy, did not envisage, nor would have uncritically approved of the USSR under Stalin (I suspect he would have hated it).

 It is true that the anti-fascist alliance was a triumph that also, via the victories of the Red Army, introduced millions of workers to the ideas of socialism. But the post-war division of Europe did not fulfil those dreams. The carve-up created a series of satellite states that built a deficient model of socialism.

That model lasted 40 years – and required the intervention of Soviet troops on two occasions to suppress rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslavakia - before collapsing under a weight of economic and political stagnation. It is difficult to argue that this version of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the one that Marx had in mind.

For the sake of left unity and progress in Britain we should not resurrect false utopias but stick to analysing the complex reality of 20th century history, in which the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, represented an iron wall against nazism, but ultimately also a negative example (we can cite the prevalent use of terror, cult of personality, forced collectivisation, slave labour, national chauvinism) that held back socialist advance and distorted the states that were created in its mirror image.

We are still living out the legacy of that inheritance in terms of negative views of socialism, that are not simply the result of anti-communist propaganda. Of course, there are examples from the era that we can uphold as better versions of the model. Yugoslavia, Cuba and Vietnam, as independent revolutions with their own national and social base, were able to circumvent the worst excesses of bureaucratic dictatorship and imbue the construction of socialism with more humanity. The Chinese revolution, under Mao, exhibited examples of the best and worst.

 But it is in new thinking and participatory models of socialism and democracy along the lines attempted today in Latin America, that hope lies, and perhaps here in Europe too in the coming years.

Bring on the Green surge

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Despite the best efforts of Labour, Ukip and the Lib Dems to turn fire on Cameron over his election debate call to include the Greens, it is their own opportunism, as much as Cameron's, that has been exposed. Regardless of Cameron's reasons for demanding that the Greens get their seat in the debates, he is right and the other parties are wrong. In fact Ofcom and the broadcasters have done the Green Party a massive favour by trying to exclude them - even if they were a 'minor' party before, claiming that today after their membership eclipsed both LDs and Ukip, is untenable.< The massive Green membership surge is a direct response from ordinary people to the attempt by the broadcasters and mainstream parties to exclude the Greens. People can smell a rat - a poll showed 79 per cent wanted the Greens included in the debate. Rightly they want to hear all views including those that present a real alternative, rather than just various shades of neoliberalism (which under Balls and Miliband, is what we are being offered by Labour). This is the start of the English phase of the surge of anti-Westminster parties that began in Scotland. Until now voters have been told that Ukip is the only anti-Establishment party south of the border, but the very fact of exclusion from TV debates is backfiring spectacularly as people realise that the Up Theres don't want us Down Here to hear the alternatives. They are terrified that the debate could lead to a Green equivalent of Cleggmania, which followed the 2010 debates and catapulted the Lib Dems into government (where they sold us out). It's a nightmare for the quartet of neoliberal parties that the left-wing Greens could in anyway become kingmakers after the poll and, further ahead, become a new radical left of centre party in England. And it's fantastic that so many people are committed to real change! People on the left should support this progressive trend in our otherwise pretty dismal political scene. Truth is, Labour will only do anything radical if they are compelled to by other political forces, which could include the SNP and the Green Party. I look forward to some pretty tough negotiations after May 10 over the future of the Trident missile programme, which could help bury this massive white elephant. Bring it on.

Hope and change and all that

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I've been around long enough to see the miners strike, the 80s riots, Wapping, the poll tax, the post-communism lull of the mid-90s, the first Reclaim the Streets May Day protests of 99 and 2000, and then the dark days after 9/11. A decade later to feel the thrill of the student and march for alternative protests in 2010-11. Despite everything, I've never felt more optimistic. Its true the movement for change is stratified between educated, more middle class activists and those who are masked up or just surviving. The unions have never been more left, but their power is finite. And yet, there are grounds for unity across a broad range of movements in a way there hasn't been in the past. All the old schisms don't matter anymore.
The most important thing to recognise is that neoliberalism is crumbling, the ideological hegemony is breaking down. After that goes legitimacy. Once legitimacy begins to crack - see the US after Ferguson and Eric Garner, or the UK now with politics in the gutter - change becomes possible, as well as reaction. We must look for ruling class splits, the decline of hegemonic institutions like the Tories, and the fracturing of imedia's hold over people.
The problems are piling up. The danger is like 2008, when the world teetered, the absence of organised anti-capitalist movements meant nothing happened and the elite reorganised.
They've got no answers. The alternatives have already been proposed. All it takes is a Podemos type movement to begin to present an organised alternative. If anyone of these movements can get a taste of power, and then hold on to it, as has happened in Latin America, a new world will open up. Will it come to Britain? It could. There's more up for grabs than at any time since 1979 when neoliberalism triumphed. Some kind of socialism or revolutionary democracy needs to be rehabilitated so people can believe in an alternative. Out of that comes hope.
The Arab spring shows what can happen when a revolution fails to decide on - or achieve - its goals. Reaction. That is the warning. But revolutions are like earthquakes - first the main shock, then the after shock. The after shock of 2008-11 has yet to come.