New Project: Notes from the Underclass

Hold onto your nuts, I have started a new blog on Medium called 'Notes from the Underclass'. Pretension and procrastination continue to be my main skills. I intend to rejuvenate this platform too, and generally refocus my efforts.

As I am unemployed for the time being, I thought I would blog about the arduous task of applying for universal credit and chart the process (which could take up to six weeks). I also intend to interview people who have been living on benefits for far longer than I have. The point being to get the insights of ordinary people completely overlooked, marginalised and vilified by the media and political class.

This is not meant to be a long-term project, as I intend to get hired soon, but it is meant to provide some illumination and humour on unemployment. It's not enough to be morose about the state of affairs in the world. Though it is certainly understandable.

Brexit as Class War

In the wake of Brexit, we were told the vote was a great revolt by the white working-class. We were told it was grounded in racist discontent with an out-of-touch metropolitan elite. The Leave vote was entirely composed of ill-educated, poor racists living anywhere between the progressive bastions of London and Scotland. It's worth asking what's wrong with this view.

Too much bile has been directed towards the working-class for voting the wrong way. It's as if europhilic liberals cannot bring themselves to look in the mirror and examine the Remain campaigns for any failing. And the EU is left beyond scrutiny. Instead the working-class is supposed to play the scapegoat for an incoherent and lacklustre campaign strategy.

There are no legitimate reasons to advocate Brexit, in this view, the vote is simply an expression of racism and ignorance. Importantly, the European political terrain is increasingly split between liberalism and nationalism with each side helping to constitute the other. This basic antagonism has dominated the entire EU debate and, in turn, shaped the way the working-class has been tarred by middle-class journalists.

My first reaction was to characterise Brexit as a "fuck you" vote. I still think it was, but not necessarily by people who have been left behind by globalisation. As Zoe Williams has pointed out, it was the Southern English middle-class that tipped the balance – not working-class Northerners. This should not be a surprise. Middle-class and elite votes play a major role in all elections, as they dominate the whole discourse, the media and political agenda.

No War Like Class War

By holding a vote, David Cameron hoped to resolve the tension within the ruling-class and his own party. He did not believe he could lose the referendum because he was so accustomed to winning on every occasion. There was no game plan for an exit. So when the men who had always won everything finally lost, they had no idea what to do – and they still don't. But this is not the fullest account of the character of the vote.

Although the ruling-class was thinking of its own interests, the middle-classes and the working poor were significant actors. The breakdown of the Leave vote in ABC terms of class, not necessarily the best analysis, it must be said, shows 10 million upper/middle-class votes and seven million working-class votes cast for Brexit. By contrast, the Remain vote was made up of 12 million upper/middle-class votes with around four million working-class votes.

Similarly, the base of UKIP is often wrongly described as working-class and eating into the Labour vote. Actually UKIP has primarily threatened the Conservative Party, and often overtook it in Labour constituencies because so few locals would vote Tory. The UKIP base is petty-bourgeois with some elements of the poor and the rich backing them. Nigel Farage may be the first ultra-rightist to lead a party based on a cross-class alliance.

So we find the narrative of a working-class revolt is somewhat inaccurate. As in most votes, the working-class was present, but key roles were played by elite interests and middle-class votes. This is not to diminish the role of the votes cast by working-class people. Certainly, the grievances of the working-class were a significant factor. But the fact that the Leave vote was a convergence of different class forces should not surprise us.

Likewise, the vote was not a case of total white flight, though it is mostly. Around 33% of Asian voters opted for Brexit, alongside 27% of black voters. Again, this is not to explain away the role of the racism. After all, you can still cast a vote to limit EU migration on the grounds that the system privileges EU nationals over migrants from other parts of the world. This is why multiculturalism did not prevent Birmingham from voting for exit.

In fact, Nigel Farage often made this Commonwealth argument against EU membership. The basic idea goes that the UK should become closer to its former colonies and not the small cluster of European states. This reveals more than a scintilla of colonial nostalgia is present in the kind of nationalism invoked by Brexit campaigners. The wish to "get my country back" can take a variety of forms. It harks back to a dead empire.

The Left and Brexit

Still, the key question for the Left is the role of the working-class. There are those on the radical Left, who made the progressive case for British withdrawal from the EU. Veteran agitators such as Tariq Ali and George Galloway rank in the Lexit camp. Many other socialists found themselves sympathetic to this argument thanks to the EU's austerity programme. Ultimately, the prospect of siding with Farage may have been too much to stomach.

Economist Paul Mason warned against a Lexit vote on pragmatic grounds: the timing was wrong, as the Left lacked a mass movement and leadership, to overhaul the status quo. One might wonder if the time is ever right. Others like John Pilger framed the Brexit vote as an "act of raw democracy" by millions of ordinary people. This repeats the idea that the working-class was in the driving seat and this vote was a "fuck you" to the ruling-class.

Not only is the working-class not in the driving seat, the sections of the poor which supported Brexit may well have done so out of nationalism. This does not mean there was no left-wing element in the Leave vote, though it is a fact that the Left was divided over the EU – which, at once, stands for freedom of movement and neoliberalism. Poor people fell on both sides of the debate too.

Yet the Lexit crowd wants to pretend that the working-class is vote was devoid of racism. This brings us to one of the classic fixations of the Left: if the working-class as a revolutionary agent, how is it that capitalism has not been overthrown? The easy answer is that it is deficient leadership on the part of trade unions and parties. While this may well be true, it does not rule out the possibility that the working-class is open to demobilisation, as well as reformist and reactionary politics.

If liberals are guilty of presupposing the inherent backwardness of the working-class, then a number of leftists can be criticised for claiming the working-class is inherently revolutionary or even communist already. The working-class has agency, and the potential for revolutionary agency, which means the choice is not between a unwashed xenophobic rabble and a red flag-waving proletariat.

Revolutionary Ideals

Obviously, class interests are not self-evident axioms. Classes are alive, they are not subject to test conditions, as they engage in the world and face changing social conditions. If working-class agency means anything, it means the ability to disagree and make independent choices. But this does not extend to the terms of the choice itself.

Even if the proletariat is not on the cusp of a great revolt, it is the Left that needs the working-class and, likewise, class politics is the only way forward for ordinary people. Left-wing ideals without class is a form of anti-politics. If a section of working people, or even a majority for that matter, are not mobilised by the Left, this would not vindicate those who say the poor are backward.

It is worth acknowledging that the main demand of Leave voters was national sovereignty, whereas immigration controls was a secondary concern. Not that this changes the fact that the dominant character of the vote was nationalist. Sovereignty is one of those few ambiguous demands backed by radical elements across the spectrum.

Nevertheless, the Left should not try to externalise racism from the working-class in a bid to save its own romantic view of the workers. The problem here is that it presupposes that the poor ought to have the right set of ideas in order for socialists to stand with them. In this sense, the constant yearning for a revolutionary agent collapses into its opposite.

This article was originally published at Souciant.

A Comrade Lost.

I'm sad to hear of Bob Crow's death. He was one of the last strong leaders of the labour movement left in this country. Crow fought valiantly for his members and the service we all rely on in London. We need more people like him and not less. He was never held back by the right-wing media smear campaign because he understood what it means to stand up for the interests of working-class people. Solidarity is not about altruism, it is about the rational pursuit of class interests. Sacrifices may be made collectively, and individually, in order to further a common end. In that sense Crow was an old-fashioned leftist in his affection and understanding of the common people and what is at stake in the age of austerity.

Unfortunately, many will welcome his death as good news, only to moan when tube fares rise and the standard of service declines. Even when the Oyster card is abolished so many will still not understand that if we have no organisations then we have no means to resist at all. Crow was hated precisely because people like him threaten the neoliberal agenda of stripping all public services to the bone to enrich a tiny elite.The Jubilee line was only extended to raise property values and procure enormous profits for speculators in the City. The tax-payer shelled out for that and the banks gobbled up the profits. It is capitalism which asks the poor to work for the benefit of the rich. Rational self-interest doesn't even come into the picture. 

Brand Obama - Four More Years.

As far as I can see there are a hand full of important reasons for Obama's victory that we should keep in mind. We should never kid ourselves that the US is a shining beacon of democracy atop a hill. In this election the American ruling-class had largely no reason to initiate a seat change. This was reflected by the pressure on the Republican Party to churn out a saleable extremist candidate, only to dress up 'moderate' Mitt as 'reactionnaire' Romney - it was a cop-out from the start. I think we'll probably find from analysis of the campaign funding that Obama had a lot more institutional capital behind, while irrational types like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers poured cash into Romney's doomed campaign. This may indicate that the composition of capital may be even more important than the actual concentration of wealth. Romney was chosen given his record for stable continuity and adaptability, if he lost it wasn't a big deal - the real opportunity for the GOP is 2016 and I suspect that is well understood in the belly of the Republican beast.

There is some evidence to suggest that voter-turnout was actually lower than in 2008, with a difference of maybe 10 million votes give or take. I suspect that the majority of voters were mobilised on the basis of cultural fears of either candidate, while the liberal vote went automatically for the Democrats and the rest stayed home. This is the standard culture war theory of American politics. It's possible that the Tea Party voters were even put-off by Romney, difficult to say at this point. It was a matter of continuity, of maintaining the status quo. Here we find the slim majority of votes converged with an enormous exercise of financial power on the part of the bourgeoisie to bloat Obama's campaign chest, thereby enabling him to reach as many voters as possible. The lesser evilism of Michael Moore and Bill Maher triumphed as there was no perceived left-wing alternative to Obama. But it was more about the defeat of the Right, it was a negative victory and not positive in other words. Putting aside cultural issues, there is the materialist issue of immigration.

Much has been made of the changing ethnic makeup of America, specifically the burgeoning Latino-American population. It's even been predicted that the US will not be a majority white country in a matter of decades. It's worth noting that the impact this could have on the Republican Party, given that it's share of the Hispanic vote collapsed from 44% for Bush in 2004 to 27% in 2012. It was partly due to Romney's own inconsistency, his warming to the most reactionary positions on abortion and homosexuality could not reconcile the Catholic vote given his endorsement of racist policies on Mexican immigration. These votes eventually went to the Obama campaign. Bush had managed to appeal to a broad Catholic base with socially conservative positions on gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research. Notably Bush maintained a moderate position on immigration and even produced an absurd campaign ad in which he claimed to be proud of his 'Latino heritage'. So we've seen that this contradiction might only be resolved by burning a policy plank or two.

 

It remains to be seen whether or not the GOP will moderate it's positions in order to appeal to a much wider base. It's plausible that the Republicans will get crazier and crazier as their voters get whiter. But it is also possible that they will have to concede ground in order to gain greater influence. After all that is the major priority of the Party's primary constituent, namely the American bourgeoisie. This is an instance of the capitalist system undermining it's own interests ultimately. It was the US that has enforced an appalling economic programme on Mexico and Latin America, that has led to Hispanics migrating north just to earn a mediocre living. The militarisation of the border offers only a way to temporarily mobilise a shrinking white voter-base, but the question of Latin-American voter-base still looms large. It's out of the realm of the possible for the Republicans to seek to improve the economic conditions in Mexico in order to limit immigration. The same goes for the prospect of a unionisation of Mexican immigrants.

 

In either case these measures would improve the living standards of Latin-Americans, yet it's also the case that the rising number of Latinos may be inevitable. To put it briefly, America will be skin deep for many years to come. I digress, I've already noted that it was the logic of the lesser evil that was behind a great deal of left-wing support for Obama, but there's another angle here. The late Alexander Cockburn argued in 2010 that Obama may actually be more susceptible to left-wing pressure than Clinton, so the problem is that there's not much of a Left left in America to push the Democrats around. There may be some hope in the charged discourse we now live with thanks to Occupy Wall Street. For a long time it looked as though the era of a lively culture of organised and disciplined politics is dead in the US. We should not kid ourselves that with Occupy Wall Street this era will be reborn. We might hope that the discourse has been impregnated with a certain potential. Though there needs to be something more than a lively grass-roots base to win this thing.

Multiple Reagasms.

For a great number of self-proclaimed conservatives Ronald Reagan was a man of great moral integrity. Yet the facts tell a story of a washed up B-movie actor who, while in office, actively vandalised the American economy for the rich to pig-out on the eviscerated entrails of civil society. It wasn't the birth of laissez-faire capitalism out of the death of New Deal liberalism, rather it was accumulation by dispossession. Reaganism only represented a shift in fiscal policy: tax-cuts for the rich combined with greater subsidies for the rich. The covert war that the US had waged against Latin America was stepped up a knotch, leaving tens of thousands of civilians dead. This was at the same time that the US government refused to withdraw support from the Apartheid regime in South Africa and placed Nelson Mandela on the terrorist list where he sat until a couple of years ago. The casual criminality of the US government reached new heights under Ronald Reagan, not least with the convenient failure to impose basic laws to protect workers, which consequently led to a massive increase in illegal firings. It got to the point that the administration was condemned by the UN for the "unlawful use of force" - meaning international terrorism.

Now Seth Rosenfeld exposes Reagan's past as a stoole pigeon in the FBI's McCarthyite campaigns against Hollywood and later the counter-revolution against student radicals and the free-speech movement of the 1960s. As an actor Ronnie was an informer, he snooped on his fellow actors and infiltrated groups that the FBI suspected of "subversive activities". The Hollywood Independent Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions was one such group that the FBI had Reagan infiltrate. It was a very broad-based group with many people of different political views and when Reagan proposed a resolution to repudiate Communism it divided the Committee. At the behest of the FBI Reagan went on to drive a wedge in other groups through similar propositions. This included the American Veterans Committee. He also stole the minutes of group meetings, only for the minutes to find themselves in FBI archives. As President of the Screen Actors Guild Reagan acted to oppose a strike of set-builders for the reason that he believed the Communists were behind the strike.

Reagan even had the FBI open a file on an actress who questioned his position on blacklisting alleged leftist radicals. In 1966 Ronald Reagan railed against the Free-Speech movement in California. He began "There is a leadership gap in Sacramento, a morality and decency gap," before sliming against Berkeley as a home for 'beatniks', 'radicals' and what he described as 'filthy speech' advocates. Reagan went on to spew yet more disdain on "the so-called free-speech advocates," who for him "have no appreciation for freedom" instead he thought it more important to rein them in for 'violating' law and order. Apparently the Berkeley campus had become a rallying point for 'Communists' and 'sexual misconduct' by then. To stamp out the left-wing intellectuals Reagan went on to call for the investigation of academics and demanded that the professors sign a code of conduct. He was bashing the student movement and academic Left to undermine Democrat Pat Brown. As Governor of California Reagan maintained good relations with the FBI and procured secret briefings on protests.


The Governor's office was not just interested in information on left-wing students and academics, even liberal intellectuals and Berkeley's Chancellor Clark Kerr. The right-wing campaign eventually forced Kerr out of office, it was coincidental that Kerr had been a great administrator of public education. Under Clark Kerr the university had opened its doors to thousands of people who would have ordinarily not gone on to higher education. He crafted the master-plan for higher education for this purpose. The institution became one of the most successful public universities in history. It was a model that was emulated around the country and the world. Kerr lifted the ban against socialist speakers on the campus on the grounds that the students should be made 'safe' for ideas rather than making ideas 'safe' for students. Later Kerr was not so active in crushing the Free-Speech movement, yet he was not a supporter - he was attacked by the Left and the Right.

The student movement viewed Clark Kerr as an enemy because he refused to lift bans prohibiting  activists from handing out Civil Rights leaflets on campus. Yet at the same time J Edgar Hoover and Reagan were convinced Clark Kerr was a menace because he wasn't acting to break the back of the student radicals. The FBI used background investigations as a pretext to destroy Kerr and relied on false accusations to do so. It was only Pat Brown who protected Clark Kerr from this campaign. Once the FBI had a friend in office, it was easy to force Kerr out. Unsurprisingly Reagan launched a campaign to smash public education in California and imposed tuition fees on the University of California. This was only the beginning of the New Right's counter-revolution. Rosenfeld was most shocked that the FBI was so active in the use of the exceptional laws of wartime against civilians, particularly students and academia. But it should be remembered that the US has much worse incidents of repression in its history.


At the same time that the FBI was acting to destroy Clark Kerr and backing Reagan's bid for Governorship the Bureau was running COINTELPRO. The target of the operations included the Socialist Workers Party, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. It went from surveillance and attempts at subversion to outright assassination. The Black Panther organiser Fred Hampton was murdered Gestapo style by the Chicago Police in collusion with the FBI. This was exposed around the same time as Watergate and yet it is virtually unkown by comparison. The mainstream liberal commentariat was far more concerned by the sight of Richard Nixon trying to destroy the Democratic Party than an active campaign by the Establishment against Civil Rights and the New Left. COINTELPRO went as far back as Eisenhower and ran right up until Nixon. This shouldn't really surprise anyone. The FBI was founded during Wilson's Red Scare, a shameful period in America's history, as a national political police force to crush dissent.

Working-Class Heroism.

The trade union model has long tended towards reformism in its place within the capitalist system as a dependent. The union depends for its existence on the business class in it's role as the private owner of the means of production. Typically trade unions are content with the protection and promotion of working conditions, pensions, pay and so on. The labour movement on it's own is not an agent of revolutionary change for the simple reason it has a vested interest in the system. The labour movement is unlikely to overthrow the system or even try to take over the managerial duties to rearrange the workplace in a democratic form for workers’ control. The unions may even tend to dampen down radical currents by winning concessions from the capitalists. The great victories of the 20th Century came about partly as a way of "buying-off" socialism. The system has to survive for trade unions to remain necessary for empowerment of the working-class within its chains.

The preference is for a social democratic capitalism complete with strong welfare state institutions over the laissez-faire alternative of unfettered markets. In the 1980s right-wing administrations in the US and Britain staged a series of ram-raid attacks on the labour movement and the industries they sought to defend. The reactionaries succeeded in defeating the major unions and wiped out domestic industries such as cars and coal. The neoliberal turn has virtually destroyed the culture of solidarity in the working-class. In the aftermath the only union strongholds serve as defenders of the privileges of an almost ‘aristocratic’ layer in the working-class - what Žižek calls the ‘salaried bourgeoisie’. In Britain this recently took the form of defending the pensions of doctors and other public sector workers. This in turn creates the division between people who have no security because of the devastation of the last 30 years and the people who have managed to hold onto a raft. It’s the old division between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor.

The tube unions are the last bastion of working-class power left in this country and this is precisely the reason that the forces of reaction are out to destroy them. The widespread perception is that the tube unions are simply out to protect their privileges, which the rest of the working-class goes without. This is part of the death of the culture of solidarity and the devastation that the working-class has endured. But it isn't totally untrue of the tube workers. The strikes aren't, at the immediate level, about the preservation of the welfare state let alone any socialist dreams of overthrowing capitalism. The rest of the working-class can see this and are willing to support right-wing politicians to blow Bob Crow out of the water for the inconvenience he has caused them. Of course, this is a part of the very process of neoliberalisation which pits the working-class against itself in its bid to eviscerate the cultural solidarity. We are reduced to resentful individuals in this way, distant from one another and looking out for who's getting a better deal than us.

No longer is the trade union simply an instrument of workers’ power even as it was in the days when Arthur Scargill fought valiantly against Thatcher’s policy of mass-unemployment and deindustrialisation. It might seem that the working-class movement is totally finished because it has been de-industrialised and, at this point, unions have been reduced to xenophobic suspicions of anymore ‘foreign rivals’ coming over here. This isn’t to say that the deindustrialisation of the North was fine and that we should oppose the efforts of the fragments leftover of organised labour. Rather it should demonstrate the urgent need to reconstruct the working-class movement in a much more radical form. It's fine to propose unionisation of workers on a European scale. It would be wrong to confine the prospects of unionisation not just to the nation-state but to the traditional industries that have been wiped out. The unionisation of the indebted could serve as the means to undermine the power of the financial institutions.

Take a look at some of the stats. The household debt in Britain is set to rise from £1,560 billion to £2,126 billion in this time of austerity. I would assume there is something similar going on with household debts around the world given the attempts of government to patch up the system as it is. Household debt in the US was at 115% in 2011 down from 135% in 2008, the dip is probably the result of the crisis. In the years of the bubble, 2000 to 2007, households doubled their debt to almost $14 trillion while personal consumption shot up by 44% from $7 trillion to nearly $10 trillion. Over a period of 5 years American households ringed $2.3 trillion of home equity loans and cash-out refinancing from their homes. That's an injection of nearly $500 billion into the economy every year. So you can see why Obama's so-called "stimulus package" was a cop-out, $787 billion for 2 years doesn't cut it! Especially when it's left to the sort of self-glorified bureaucrats who would rather cut than spend.

There is actually an opportunity in this. It might seem that the working-class movement is finished because it has been de-industrialised and, at this point, unions have been reduced to xenophobic suspicions of anymore foreign rivals coming over here. That extends to the opposition of trade unions to European integration, these are supposed to be organisations that are internationalist. It's fine to propose unionisation of workers on a European scale. We're wrong to confine the prospects of unionisation to traditional industries that have been wiped out. The formation of debtors into unions on a cross-continent scale could potentially give the working-class a way to yank at the banks. A straight refusal by the majority of people with debts to make the payments unless the rates of interest are cut could work. It could also be a way to wipe away household debt altogether. This isn't to say that the capitalist system could not incorporate this into it, it could do easily, but it is a starting point in accordance with conditions which are radically different to the 20th Century.

Making the Possible impossible.

 

It’s nearly two years after the student protests shook the country, particularly the capital. This was a rare moment where the toy-box politics of the universities converged with the national politics of the time. For once the politics of the student body were a part of the politics of the body national. The hung result of the General Election had produced a coalition government formed by a political class that could not regroup in the midst of mass disillusionment with New Labour. Even after 13 years of Labour the Conservatives couldn’t forge a majority in Parliament and only succeeded in increasing their vote by 3% in 5 years. The indignity for David Cameron of standing in a bed factory to talk about ‘change’ wasn’t enough. The coalition deal proved that the progressive smorgasbord of the Liberal Democrats was a ploy of a party that had never expected to be in government. The promise of an end to tuition fees was quickly scrapped by Liberal Democrats who demonstrated that they are no better than yellow Tories.

The student protests that swept across the country in November 2010 were bigger than the student protests of 1968. It began with small gestures by activists. In one outing less than 30 people turned up at Lib Dem HQ shouting through loudhailers only to provoke the locals into shouting “This is a residential area!” out of their windows. The smirking police officers at the scene made for positive contrast to the officers who led a charge of horses on students at Parliament Square in cold December. Not to forget the officers who dragged Jody McIntyre from his wheelchair and put Alfie Meadows in hospital with brain damage. The schismatic burst of sectarianism came in the aftermath of the demonstration organised by the NUS. Over 50,000 students turned out to march past Parliament and listen to speeches by activists. Then the rage boiled over and Conservative Party HQ ended up being smashed up and occupied as the police kettled the crowd around the building. The dividing point for a great many opened up that night with the clash between Aaron Porter and Clare Solomon on Newsnight. There was an immediate collision on camera for the student movement.

The division is an old open wound between liberals and radicals over the politics of conviction and of responsibility. The Leninist acceptance of violence and its consequences at odds with the liberal call for a hero with a beautiful soul to save the day. This sunk to its lowest level in toy-box form, impotent posturing versus self-applauding passivity. The conservative response to the shattered glass of Millbank was in the same mode as Roger Scruton’s reaction to the events of ’68 in Paris: “I suddenly realized I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans... That's when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.” Most students decided to push on, it was clear that there were serious gains to be made from a constructive unity to regroup after Millbank. In the end the proposals were passed through Parliament by a little more than 20 votes while there were 20,000 people outside protesting. It was befitting that the kettled students were led across the bridge, welcomed by the counter-terrorism unit before being let out in spurts – the possible had become impossible.

The fact that the student protests of 2010 were bigger than those of ’68 is really a testament to just how small Britain’s student movement was in 1968. Unlike the French we’re not so much haunted by the spirit of ’68 as trapped by the chaos of a passive existence. Too often it seems that the British love business as usual too much to confront the Establishment. Sometimes it’s even a problem for us to even engage with the problematic question, thus the paucity of the Anglo-Saxon mind in its aversion to theory and preference for practice above all. This is even the case with the Establishment as the Coalition has no theory to justify its cuts agenda only an appeal to pragmatism – the view is that if we cut our way through this deficit then we will hasten the return to boom times. Fortunately there are times when the desire for business as usual converges with the forces of progress that open up a space for change. The realm of the possible can be widened by this process, but it can also be narrowed as we have seen over the last 30 years.

The General Election of 1979 solidified the road that Britain would be pushed down in the next decade. The preconditions for Thatcherism were actually laid with the IMF bailout of 1976 and the cuts stipulated in the deal. The class interests of the elite clustered around the Conservatives had converged with the crises of the 1970s in the opening of an opportunity to erode the old institutions of social democracy. This amounted to the mass-privatisation of public assets to ensure a profit for the private sector and a policy of mass-unemployment through the deindustrialisation of the North. The aim was theruination of the trade unions and the end of the post-war settlement that had brought unprecedented rates of growth and development.The average rate of growth in the 1960s went from 3% to 4% and the average rate by the 1980s was 2%. But the golden age of capitalism that stretched from 1945 to 1975 was itself a product of a convergence of interest. The space opened for the welfare state after the war because the British ruling-class needed a way to secure its interests in an increasingly uncertain world.

Today it is unthinkable to go back on the road that we embarked upon in the late 70s. In classic Anglo-Saxon style there is no theoretical justification, only the gloss of economic pragmatism. This was the case with the tuition fee hike and if we prod deeper we find that there is no economic justification for fees at all. The truth is that the costs of higher education only add up to a minuscule amount in public spending – less than 1% of GDP to be exact. Yet the politicians dare not make the case on political grounds, there is no ideology and no alternative apparently. The coordinates of the possible are now so narrow that it is unbelievable that the rate of tax on the highest earners was over 90% in the 1950s. The idea of free education is now increasingly absurd, at least when it comes to higher education. The student protests were an attempt to hold onto what was left of the system that had been established decades before and vandalised in recent years. The aims of the students ranged from a progressive graduate tax to a free university system, placing them firmly within the social democratic consensus after WW2.

Debtors of the World, Unite!

With City Hall in the hands of Boris Johnson, an anti-political clown if there ever was one, it would seem that the intransigence with which the state opposes the demands of trade unions. There has been talk for a while now of taking the workforce out of the tube completely, replacing them with automated machines. It would be a popular move in the London City-State, where any kind of inconvenience equates to an outright assault on one's basic liberty. The tube unions are the last bastion of working-class power left in this country and this is precisely the reason that the forces of reaction are out to destroy them. No doubt it's part of the same process that has rolled back the state in public services and even more so today. After all the tube is mostly to get people out there to be rinsed at work and in the shops, think surplus value. Thatcher could only dream of doing what Cameron is doing today. The Tories themselves have been caught saying this, though we all know it.

The Tories handed over a lot of public money to banks from 1992 onwards as part of the Public-Private Partnership, which sold-off public aid and gave greater power to bankers. As Michael Hudson wrote "The financial giveaway had the effect of increasing prices for basic infrastructure services by building in heavy financial fees – guaranteed for the banks, who lent the money that banks and property owners used to pay in taxes in more progressive times." The theory goes that the banks will create jobs as they invest the funds in British infrastructure, specifically public transport, but it was really a way for real estate speculators to get even richer. The extension of the Jubilee Line to Canary Wharf cost £3.5 billion as it raised property values along the route by £13 billion. The public investment in transport could pay for itself simply with a tax on the higher rent-of-location and the site value. But the government would rather the banks rake in the cash.

As Chomsky has pointed out when politicians prefer to talk about 'jobs' than even utter the filthy word 'profits'. The allies of the super-rich then moved to sell-off British Rail and saw to it that the railways carry an over-flowing gravy train for the wealthy. It is standard practice in a privatisation for the state to make sure the buyers are well served with comfy pillows stuffed with the taxes of working-class people. Last year that blond gannet Richard Branson gobbled up £18 million of tax-payer's money as the system underwent a multi-billion state upgrade. The privatisation opened up a space for private ownership safeguarded by public investment and, even as standards of service have slipped, there has been no attempt to re-nationalise the railways. The government contributes £4.6 billion to the railways as the private sector pays just £459 million into the set-up, most of which goes towards stock rather than anything in the real world.

Since the 70s we have seen a process of de-industrialisation and financialisation. Thatcher sold-off an awful lot of things and broke the backs of major unions as part of a policy that amounted to the destruction of entire industries. Production was taken abroad where there was a ready workforce desperate enough to work for a $1 a day or whatever. The businesses of the country began invest overseas and import much more from abroad. The back of the industrial working-class was smashed in the 1980s leading to a massive unemployment level. So the threat of unions to the power of the wealthy had been significantly diminished. The people were left in a position where they could easily be squeezed dry by businesses, working-class people suffered some of the biggest wage-cuts in 1990. You would've thought that this would've held down the ability of people to spend, spend, spend. But a lot of credit had been freed up as the constraints that had kept banks in check were removed.

The shock of the assault on the living-standards of the working-class left them in an increasingly dependent position on debt. To make up for the loss in wages people turned to their credit cards, there was a much greater need for loans and mortgages than ever before. This is the basis of the explosion of household debts in the last 30 years. A lot of these debts are concentrated in housing markets because the system is pushed to find profitable investments in order to grow. We're talking about a minimum of 3% compound growth. The desperation to find new investment opportunities for over a trillion dollars has led to greater investment in the control of assets. We might want to think that the banks take unused funds from our bank accounts and use them to help some family to buy a home somewhere. Instead, what we've seen is the emergence of a huge property bubble and the concentration of enormous sums to feather the nests of a very few.

The banking system is built on the knowledge that not everyone will come into the bank and want every last penny of their money. Of course, when a run on the bank happens it's newsworthy for this reason - remember Northern Rock. The odds are calculated in the favour of greater lending and accumulation. The presupposition is that there being enough money to keep the bank going, so that there is enough there for people to pay the bills and put food on the table. The tendency here is to lend out more and more money to accumulate in order to cover itself. This is how the system pushes itself at the ground level. Everyone knows that banks aren't what they used to be. There used to be a time when the pound sterling was symbolic of a pound of silver somewhere. Now that's gone with the advent of fiat currency much to the chagrin of nostalgic right-wingers. It's much more important that the financialisation of the economy has made financial crises likely.

The household debt in Britain is set to rise from £1,560 billion to £2,126 billion in this time of austerity. I would assume there is something similar going on with household debts around the world given the attempts of government to patch up the system as it is. Household debt in the US was at 115% in 2011 down from 135% in 2008, the dip is probably the result of the crisis. In the years of the bubble, 2000 to 2007, households doubled their debt to almost $14 trillion while personal consumption shot up by 44% from $7 trillion to nearly $10 trillion. Over a period of 5 years American households ringed $2.3 trillion of home equity loans and cash-out refinancing from their homes. That's an injection of nearly $500 billion into the economy every year. So you can see why Obama's so-called "stimulus package" was a cop-out, $787 billion for 2 years doesn't cut it! Especially when it's left to the sort of self-glorified bureaucrats who would rather cut than spend.

There is actually an opportunity in this. It might seem that the working-class movement is finished because it has been de-industrialised and, at this point, unions have been reduced to xenophobic suspicions of anymore foreign rivals coming over here. That extends to the opposition of trade unions to European integration, these are supposed to be organisations that are internationalist. It's fine to propose unionisation of workers on a European scale. We're wrong to confine the prospects of unionisation to traditional industries that have been wiped out. Follow the money, grab the vampire by the balls before you drive in the stake! The formation of debtors into unions on a cross-continent scale could potentially give the working-class a way to yank at the banks. A straight refusal by the majority of people with debts to make the payments unless the rates of interest are cut could work. It could also be a way to repudiate the debts altogether.

There are flaws here, but it is a way forward. It would definitely need to be well organised and coordinated to ensure that it was a mass-scale action that would have an impact. Generally the major flaw of the trade union is that the relationship between capital and wage labour can be taken for granted. The priority is to improve the conditions for workers within that relationship, which is fine but the relationship is the fundamental problem. The capitalists have the upper-hand to the workers in this relationship, so victories can only be temporary. It's true that the debtor union would only be active in pushing for a better deal for people who need to fall back on credit cards, loans and so on. But it's striking at the centre of the system and we forget that banking is actually more susceptible to social democratic compromise than labour-intensive industry was. If the bankers think they have to pay-off socialism that's exactly what they'll do.

Womb Wars.

Since the beginning of 2012 we have heard the usual blather about welfare 'reform' (a most dodgy word in political language) with the defenders of family values reserving a particularly cold place for single-mums. The Conservative Party have pushed for a cap housing benefit at £26,000 on commonsense grounds of "fairness". Of course, this isn't nearly enough for the gutter-press which would like to see the whole benefits system scrapped followed by the swift return of workhouses. It would hit large families hardest even if they have managed to find cheap housing outside of London. There are now pushes in Newham to boot the poor out of London altogether. Clearly the London City-State is just for the ultra-rich to swan around in limousines. The next kick was to single-mothers in a bid to make them pay for trying to get child support from their former partners.

Even though it makes far more sense to cap private rents in London, at least in the short-term, as everyone knows that the rent is too damn high! Of course it isn't enough to cap rents, there needs to be serious public investment in affordable housing. And yet the Conservatives have no time for this discussion. It's just assumed that the problem is that they haven't gone far enough. But there's plenty of ink and phlegm to be wasted on calls for an end to dependency culture. There's even been time to entertain nonsense about morality legislation. We've seen Nadine Dorries, that arch-custodian of the sacred foetus, go after sex education in the wake of failure on her campaign to sledgehammer the right to choose. This is the politics of reaction at work again, it has nothing to do with any moral values. Whenever politicians talk of 'family' you should expect an attack on women to follow.

This is where class and sex converge, where feminism and leftism are conjoined at the hip. Everyone knows the word "proletariat", but not every rascal with a Marxian phrase book know that the term is derivative of the Latin for "offspring". Terry Eagleton reminds us that it referred to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children. Society demanded reproduction, not production from these women. The proletariat was originally outside the workplace, not within it, just like the single-mother living on benefits. But the work these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. The average worker is a woman in the world today, as it was in the days of Marx and Engels when Britain was the workshop of the world.

As the workers' movement suffers in this time of regression, so do women. We can see this in America. The Georgia House has passed a 'foetal pain' bill that stipulates women must continue to carry to term a stillborn baby as pigs and cows do. The lot who think its proper that a women should die in back-alley abortion clinics to save a foetus have seen victories recently with 'Let woman die' bills. There are businesses spying on potential employees and judge them in accordance with their use of birth-control. This is the nation partly founded by Aaron Burr who hung a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in his office and insisted that his daughter be educated at the same standard as a man. And we expect this of women for no reward. It's not like we recognise motherhood as work, so many of us don't think the raising of children has any worth at all that we support cuts to child benefit. It's just something women do for free, like a lot of wonderful things.

We've seen people like Rick Santorum pop up, an Opus Dei Republican who believes that life begins at erection. The sort of lunatic who is opposed to abortion in cases of rape. This comes from a man with no kind of social conscience at all. He wants to legislate what consenting adults do in the bedroom. The state can intrude into that area, but not emancipate individuals from wage labour. Santorum's rotten mind fixated on the rigidity of hierarchy and the strength of authority. It is no coincidence that Santorum's politics consist of a return to theoconservative values with the state as a nanny for the rich, a bludgeon of the poor and of the foreign. It isn't coincidental, the opposition to the vital freedom, for women, over their rate of reproduction fits neatly into this platform of sadism. It's about making sin fun again for a privileged few in a way.

As noted by Peter Singer if abortion was illegal then it would be poor women who die from botched abortions in droves whereas well-off women can travel to another country in search of the treatment. Think of the number of people who travel to Switzerland in order to commit suicide. Clearly, the value of life only applies to some in the world of Nadine Dorries. The sacred foetus trumps mummy almost every time I'm afraid to say. Of course, when mummy can fly out to another country and hire a doctor to perform the procedure without a coat-hanger then a blind eye will be turned. Furthermore, as women gain greater control over their lives economically then they're less likely to get pregnant. In a society where there are greater opportunities, better education and better pay for women there will be less children born but there will be less abortions too. Primates like Mr Santorum are unable to see this, men like this have no right to claim to be "pro-life".