Labour's Problems with "Working People"

For several years now Keir Starmer has defined his project in terms of serving "working people". It's as well used as "tough choices", and is just as irritating. And so, amid speculation that Rachel Reeves is about to u-turn on the manifesto pledge not to levy new taxes on working people, the thorny question of who counts as working people was an inevitable obsession for the press pack. Take Laura Kuenssberg for example. Well known for concentrating on political fripperies, she wasted half of her interview with Bridget Phillipson this Sunday asking asking questions about what a working person was.

Let's clear this up for the performatively stupid. What Labour is really talking about is unearned income, which was already clear back in June. That is income from dividends, capital gains/share transactions, high value property sales, and rents. As sundry members of the government have tried arguing, working people are, shockingly, people who have to go out to work. Albeit mixed in with ad hoc digressions that includes people who can't simply write a cheque to get them out of trouble. Cue the tedious merry go round of offended landlords, business owners, and so on all claiming the mantle of horny-handed sons of toil.

For Marxists, class is simple and complex. Simple, because it's about one's relation to the means of production. The majority of working age people have to sell their labour power in return for a wage or salary, and the vanishingly tiny minority live off the proceeds of capital. Complex, because there are huge disparities within the proletarian class in terms of income, autonomy at work, and powers invested in their roles at work. And this is before you get to the myriad of contradictory locations, and the not negligible numbers of self-employed and small business people that comprise the work force. Class is never as neat as the categories used to describe and explain it. Class is a process, it's always in movement, but we can identify and consider occupational strata, age cohorts, and those so-called edge cases where income from work is supplemented by the profits extracted from the labour of others. We have to do this if we're in the business of building a politics that can challenge the supremacy of capital, and supplant it. It enables us to get a handle on who might be supportive of this struggle, and who are likely to resist and cling to the bosses to the last.

But for mainstream politicians, their attempts at defining class has a different purpose. Politics has to create a subject. I.e. Who is it that politics is addressing? It can be an amorphously rendered nation (as per conservatism) or "the people", as favoured by populist politics. While Labour has its roots in the workers' movement, it has long been the contention of Labourism as a whole that it must appeal to the electorate at large and avoid the "sectionalism" of being seen as a working class concern. On the left, this has manifested itself as ethical socialism and moralism. On the right, it's been a faddy procession of different categories. In both instances the consequence is the liquidation of class as a meaningful political category.

The trick Labour and other mainstream politicians have to pull off is to create a subject without mobilising one. It has to be broad to the point of being almost meaningless, but definable so the electorate - as consumers of political product - can identify themselves with them. Hence a formulation like working people. Anyone and everyone is a 'working person', and those who are not are either retired and have done their bit (not that this protects you from Labour's attacks), or are the undeserving poor who need to feel the the lash of hard discipline. In her article for The Sun this Sunday, Reeves aligns 'working people' with "families" and "strivers", call backs to fuzzy categories like 'hard-working families' and George Osborne's 'the strivers vs the skivers'. And while we're here, Nick Clegg's old favourite: "alarm clock Britain" fits as well. They are woolly and wide open, but again have that edge that can be turned against the imagined idle other to support punitive policies and authoritarian welfarism.

The reason why Labour have got into choppy waters over this is because the media have called them on their bullshit. And the media has done this because it's hyper class conscious. The headlines roar about Labour's war on Middle England and billionaires fleeing the country are hysterical considering how Labour's taxes on unearned income are incredibly modest. The point, for the satraps of the ruling class is these measures visiblise the lynchpin of bourgeois power. British capital is notoriously short-termist, but large sections definitely are not when it comes to the stability of class relations. Having already faced political shocks from the brief interlude where the left took over Labour, to the fact a mass street movement emerged unexpectedly to oppose Britain's involvement in the massacre of Palestinians and had an impact on the general election results, and how a lot of bosses are still nervy about the challenge to workplace discipline thanks to Covid, they are worried where this very slight challenge to unearned income might end up. And, as a result, the press attacks on Labour are ramping up. It's therefore reasonable to suppose that getting into muddles about definitions of working people and all the other recent difficulties might be mere warm ups for the roastings to come.

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