The other word is aspiration. Doing the rounds on TV and in the papers, leadership hopefuls and newly elected MPs have been talking it up. This was the other great insight of Blairism, of understanding that where people are isn't always where they want to be. This, apparently, was a lesson unlearned during the last five years. It's not that the Labour manifesto failed to address aspiration, but rather the wrong aspirations. The worker on a zero hour contract aspires to regular hours. The problem is, she's not the one who votes whereas the archetypal hard=pressed business owner does. Millions of people are trapped in insecure tenancies, but their vote is nothing compared to actual and aspiring land lords. And on it goes. The problem here is if we chase the small c conservative aspirations as Blair did, we run the risk of destroying our party. We tip toward deficit determinism and accepting key tenets of the Tory manifesto, and we might lose tens of thousands of members and, crucially, our trade union life line. More balanced politics are required. As I've argued before, Labour has always been less a working class party and more a proletarian one. i.e. It has gathered in its ranks all stratas of a wide, variegated class that is compelled to work for a living. We and our movement are living proof that the aspirations of those at the bottom and those better off can be squared - not without tensions - in a common framework. Doing so and taking that programme to the country requires nous and political imagination, not lapsing into the comfort zones of the past.
Sunday 10 May 2015
On Centre Grounds and Aspirations
The other word is aspiration. Doing the rounds on TV and in the papers, leadership hopefuls and newly elected MPs have been talking it up. This was the other great insight of Blairism, of understanding that where people are isn't always where they want to be. This, apparently, was a lesson unlearned during the last five years. It's not that the Labour manifesto failed to address aspiration, but rather the wrong aspirations. The worker on a zero hour contract aspires to regular hours. The problem is, she's not the one who votes whereas the archetypal hard=pressed business owner does. Millions of people are trapped in insecure tenancies, but their vote is nothing compared to actual and aspiring land lords. And on it goes. The problem here is if we chase the small c conservative aspirations as Blair did, we run the risk of destroying our party. We tip toward deficit determinism and accepting key tenets of the Tory manifesto, and we might lose tens of thousands of members and, crucially, our trade union life line. More balanced politics are required. As I've argued before, Labour has always been less a working class party and more a proletarian one. i.e. It has gathered in its ranks all stratas of a wide, variegated class that is compelled to work for a living. We and our movement are living proof that the aspirations of those at the bottom and those better off can be squared - not without tensions - in a common framework. Doing so and taking that programme to the country requires nous and political imagination, not lapsing into the comfort zones of the past.
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4 comments:
Phil,
Surely its quite simple isn't it? marx did not talk about building Socialism on the basis of only appealing to the lumpen proletariat, or even a minority of workers, but of "winning the battle for democracy", i.e. winning over a large majority of the working-class, which itself constitutes the vast majority of society.
There is nothing wrong with appealing to "aspiration", Socialism is all about creating the conditions whereby such aspirations can be met for the vast majority, which as marx himself stated, DOES come from CREATING much more wealth, not from simply - and as he showed futilely - trying to redistribute the wealth that currently exists, as the Fabians sought to do.
There is in fact, a fairly straightforward way, for example, in which even the Tories could make a large chunk of their welfare cuts. Announce, a planned, and substantial rise in the Minimum Wage, to be implemented over the next five years, and a corresponding reduction of in-work benefits. That would mean all those small businesses that rely on low wages, would have to begin planning how to raise their productivity through innovation and investment, or go bust, and it would mean that capital would stop being encouraged into these zombie enterprises, and instead flow towards higher value, higher paying areas - that is how Singapore and other economies developed rapidly and pushed up living standards.
But, Labour could promote aspiration on our terms to appeal to workers, and sections of the middle class. We should emphasise that the real "functioning capitalists" are the production line managers, the people who are members of unions like MSF, not the coupon clippers who simply draw dividends and interest, or their representatives who flit from one Board of Directors to another in search of sinecures.
We should encourage the idea of aspiration to own and run your own business, and point out why that can only realistically be done on a collective basis, by workers establishing large co-operatives. We should encourage the aspiration for workers to have control over their pension funds, and be able to use them so as to further their role in society, and ability to create new wealth - indeed as happens at John Lewis.
We should encourage the aspiration not to be reliant on the capitalist state, but demand, therefore, that the huge funds that must have been built up by that state from a century of workers taxes and social insurance contributions, be handed over to them to be used for the development of their own co-operative property and organisations.
I have been thinking along those lines as well. We need to reclaim the notion of aspiration from those who think it equates to an extra sunny holiday every year.
I worked casual, cash in hand in the John Lewis restuarant kitchen, not a nice experience. (1990)
Aspiration is tea party shorthand for the undeserving and deserving poor. It is about looking down upon people as inferior, the winner and loser society. Marx and Engels always championed the unskilled worker above the highly skilled one, who they believed could be bought off.
Socialists can re-brand aspiration all they like but we need to demolish the old one first. And stand up for those who are implicitly attacked by the concept.
Socialism should not be a socialism for the highly skilled, which is what I see among many a so called Marxist. Some so called Marxists want to portray the unskilled as lumpen elements.
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