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 master of everything.

The title of Bukowski’s second novel is actually stolen property, pilfered by English, like so many others, from Latin. The implications are worth noting for a factotum is a “master of everything” and in the case of Henry Chinaski this means not just repairing bicycles and factory work, it means gambling, drinking and womanising. Just as Karl Marx viewed production as a sensuous human activity, as much a part of our species-being as it is our alienation, Bukowski seems to take a more literal line – he is production.

Henry Chinaski makes his way across the States often desperately penniless and drunk. He works any job he can find and hangs his hat wherever he can. We follow Hank as he sleeps on park benches and rides the rails from place to place. The only thing going for him, in the world of work, is the time he can afford to sell and the sweat he can shed for meagre wage-packets. Inevitably Chinaski is propelled forward by crises. He never seems to hold onto anything for too long, whether it’s jobs or a place to stay. In a society where everyone is supposed to be middle-class, or working to be, Bukowski writes about the gutter and for the gutter.

All in all, I found Factotum (1975) was a much more focused piece of work than Post Office (1971). What do I mean by this? It doesn’t wander too far from its themes. Perhaps because the latter was the first completed book it was inevitably going to encompass a lot. Both read as aimless, staggering odysseys through American society. But it’s Factotum which takes aim at work.

To the reader Bukowski levels his anti-work ethos and prods and pokes the assumptions we hold about work and its demands on us. At one point Bukowski writes: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” It’s a good question.

In one chapter Henry loses his job and pushes the boss to make sure that he gets his welfare payments. He speaks as ‘the working-man’ here, not the poet of skid-row. The moment fits well. After all Bukowski stands out from the petty-bourgeois universalism of American society, – pretentions to meritocracy, individual liberty, and even democracy – it’s all up for grabs in this world. Chinaski is in one way an exemplar of the Protestant work ethic. He proves his father wrong by being able to go from job to job. But the story is hardly an advertisement for the ‘American Dream’.

Of course, the narcissism of the dirty old man is on show in the work. He’s both proud of his life as a working-class Joe, but he’s also imbued with self-love over his knowledge of just how worthless it all is. He feels he has profound insights to offer. And even as Hank leads a meaningless life, as we all surely do, his prose makes it meaningful. This is the heart of the heartless world.

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. 

Self-Service is Disservice.

The predominance of so-called 'self-service' machines in supermarkets should worry those concerned by the depredations of the market. The 'self-service' machines turn us into unpaid employees for a Tesco, or a Morrison's, or a Sainsbury's, and even a wholesome Waitrose. The fact of the matter is that it is a service to Tesco, not ourselves, for the most part, to man the till in the place of a paid worker. It is another way in which the rinsing of people, as workers and consumers, to amass huge profits - and it means worse and worse working conditions and job prospects for vast numbers of people. With all that said, it is unavoidable given the pace at which we have to live, that we are going to avoid queuing for longer (unless we have a tobacco habit), and we can't find an exit point in waiting longer. Notice that the fetish of 'free-choice' actually offers little in the way of quality, and even less in the way of consultation.

Before we go any further I ought to do some throat-clearing: the kind of jobs available to people in supermarkets should be romanticised, they are not examples of fulfilling work by and large. Nevertheless, it has to be said that once such an area of job opportunities is closed off it will leave behind a section of people who had little other immediate option to working in a supermarket. The innovation of 'self-service' machines really allow businesses to discard labour in the endless attempt to pull in enough labour to squeeze dry, but not too much as it encumber the maximalisation of profits. Important aside: profits are by definition what is leftover after the cost of labour is taken into account, before that point its just revenue. The contradiction faced by businesses is in the need to scrap labour to save money, while at the same time drag in even more of it to keep up productivity. The workers are a burden, but at the same time they are invaluable to the economy, they are a cost to be cut, and the source of mountainous revenue.

It is not the case that the prices of food have fallen since this innovation of the marketplace. Yet the liberal accounts of technological progress would have us believe that the betterment of life overall will come out of the liberating capacities of technology. Its a convenient viewpoint, for a liberal or even a Fabian, there is no need for radical change as the evolution of technology will gradually perfect us and perfect our society. If the 'self-service' machines are to be installed then the goods should be cheaper, and if not, then the employees of the supermarket should have a higher wage. Neither is the case. Not only do they take our money for over-priced products they make extra money by not hiring the staff to man the tills. It's yet another instance of the rationality of the market really amounting to irrationality. The business can depend on human beings to act against their own interests, to work for free, to buy over-priced garbage, and ultimately to contribute to the further enrichment of those layabouts convinced of their own brilliance - the crust of wealth hoarders.

Only under particular conditions would self-service actually be conducive to social betterment. The companies could probably be cooperatised, we could each be hired and have a slice of the profits if we are to be engaged in any meaningful kind of self-service. The right to work has to be enforced if there is to be full employment and equitable standards of living enabling each person to lead fulfilling lives instead of living to fulfill the lives of a tiny few. Under conditions of universality and mutuality these machines would be of better social use. It might actually free people from a mind dulling role standing by counters, leaving them to more authentic pursuits, and not just tossing them on the wayside to rot. Otherwise the machine is a bloody con, for consumers, and for workers. In the meantime one can hope that the managers will be replaced by machine innovation sooner rather than later. Now that would be progress of a kind.

A frank word about Immigration.

It is often the case that the cuts to public services are justified by the claim that the service is abused by immigrants. The claim most often made is that it is just the benefits are the reason that the ‘foreigners’ come here, they just want to leach off of the tax-payer and so on. It then follows that there should be cuts to benefits to deter immigrants, either to drive them into work or to stop the flow of immigrants totally. Benefit cuts will supposedly deter immigrants from settling here and pull the rug from under the feet of people already settled in the country, removing the safety net for the working-class as a whole. In the minds of many the ‘foreigner’ has two hands too many in the pot and this widespread perception (itself a product of a media campaign) the immigrant is left a vulnerable target. It doesn’t matter that out of the hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans who settled in Britain since 2004, only a few thousand have become benefit claimants. Similarly it has to be noted that only 2% of housing has gone to immigrants over the same time period.

The neoliberal model can push open borders on the grounds of free movement of labour and anti-racist individualism. The system requires an endless flow of desperate workers which can be exploited readily. Immigrants serve as a reserve army of labour which undermines the wages of ‘native’ workers. This holds down wages to ensure high profits for capitalists. In turn creates a division between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ workers which can be used to pit the working-class against itself. The ethnic tensions are a result of economic relations, out of this comes a nativist populism which can be used to attack the standard of living for both ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ workers. This is just another version of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, except it is ethnically charged to provoke nationalist sentiments among the self-identified ‘deserving’. This is to put aside the racism which emanates from the old colonial role of European nations, with Britain this takes the form of anti-black and anti-Asian sentiments typically. But let's focus on the economic foundation for a moment.

The system produces reserve armies of labour in the form of dole wastelands of unemployment and through the import of cheap ‘foreign’ labour. The contraction and expansion of the reserve armies of labour can undermine the wages of workers, even workers in trade unions. The need for a continuous flow of labour collides with the interests of the labour movement which in turn resorts to pitting relatively privileged workers against the unprotected worker. In short it’s a false hope that the limiting of immigration could reinstate the privileges of ‘native’ workers many of which have been decimated over the last 30 years. We should be careful not to sneer at working-class ‘bigotry’. The widespread support for an end to immigration entirely from the working-class will be pandered to when the economic system has gorged itself on cheap labour and can do without another injection for a while. The move by trade unions to protect the interests of the ‘native’ working-class is not entirely “irrational” and “racist”. But it is short-sighted.

It’s when the discourse descends into cleverly glossed language about the problems created by ‘cultural differences’ – e.g. that the Jews bring crime and disease as The Daily Mail once claimed – then it has sunk to xenophobic chauvinism. The same can be said of the calls for British withdrawal from the European Union and the whole debate over the EU in the UK. Withdrawal would only open up Britain to even more rapacious and destructive market forces. If it’s not Brussels it will be Washington! Economic integration actually may offer a solution. The answer could be multinational unions formed to transcend borders to protect the rights, freedoms and standard of living for ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ worker alike. This may be the only way to forge bonds of solidarity in the face of such division. We have to fight against the proto-fascist tendencies and nativist movements which seek to pit the working-class against itself. It can’t simply be that the best way to defend the working-class is to defend the free movement of labour under neoliberalism.

It’s not to say that the free movement of people is wrong in itself, rather the particular mode of immigration under conditions of exploitation has a significant downside. It is worth noting that the individual migrant would still be restrained by conditions of subjection, so it could hardly be described as ‘free’ in that sense. We would only describe the working-class as free with reference to negative liberty, the freedom from various forms of constraint. It’s clear that the main reason so many Africans try to get across to Spain or Italy on rafts is that the state of affairs in Africa has been horrendous for a very long time. Only to be captured by the Spanish police or navy and sometimes even killed by Italian fishermen. Similarly we find that the people fleeing genocide in Sudan to Israel have been met with appalling racism, there were race riots in Tel Aviv a couple of months ago and the Likudnik Miri Regev said that the blacks are a “cancer” on the Jewish state.

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".

The Debt of Self-Made Men.

An American Mythology.

It was an interesting sight earlier this year to see Newt Gingrich rail against the "vulture capitalism" of Mitt Romney. The insinuation is that the Massachusetts moderate was in on gobbling up the profits gained out of laying-off thousands of American workers in the 1980s. It was a welcome criticism frankly. But it was also bizarre to hear this coming from a prominent conservative Republican. A Democrat could not take such a stance on a Republican opponent and be left standing without being dubbed a 'socialist'. Certainly the Republicans do not oppose such rapacious market forces that allowed Romney to enrich himself. Not just because the notion of a free-market is what flows through the veins of American conservatism. But it has to be stressed that each of the candidates for the nomination are essentially parasites. And this is actually representative of the primary constituents of the Republican Party - specifically, the filthy rich.

You have to remember that the United States of America would not exist if it weren't for a process of genocide, slavery and war which laid the groundwork for capitalism. The apologists of the free-market paint a picture of a society of self-owning individuals who earn in proportion to their own merits. So the capitalists are the people who have risen to the top of the system through their own efforts. This is a picture which conveniently excludes a lot of history. The system of private property was established through theft and violence. This is what the supposed market society of meritorious men is built upon. The legitimate right to property is predicated on an illegitimate and immoral act. No account of the exchange and accumulation of private property can justify the transformation of what was unowned into what can be owned. If the system was established through theft, rape and murder how can decent conduct justify that system later on?

The expropriation of the commons laid the ground for the accumulation of wealth. The workers are the creators of wealth which is then expropriated through the capitalist system, accumulated in far fewer hands and concentrated in property. This is the process which enriched Mitt Romney and has been defended by every Republican and Democratic administration. The average worker is effectively rinsed dry by these people over the course of a life time spent slaving away at work. It is in the workplace where they slave away to amass the revenue which will eventually compose the profits for the boss and the wages of the workers. This is exploitation at the fundamental level, the workers toil so that the bosses don't have to. You'll find this demystifies the notion of 'job creation' that politicians often talk about, really the word they're looking for is 'profits'. The worker will be lucky to hold onto something worth saving as they are rinsed further through passive consumerism.

You will know the justifications for all of this off by heart. You might tell yourself that this is just the way the world works, it's human nature. Supposedly, after thousands of years we discover our nature is best expressed in a system we've only just discovered in the last 200 years. You will tell yourself that if the poor didn't have to work then they wouldn't. If this were true, as Karl Marx would remind us, "bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work." The workers must work for a wage, so that the rich don't have to. Capitalism requires poverty then, not to make sure people work hard but to keep one class working for the gain of another class. The system is indebted to feudalism and slavery, which provided the material conditions for its prosperity. Even if the capitalists are 'self-made' the end of capitalism and class are still justified.

What the Schmoo?

I'm going to start with a story which was told by the American cartoonist Al Capp. The story is about a creature called the Schmoo. The Schmoo was 10 inches high and something like a pear in shape and a beautiful creamy white in colour, it had no arms, tiny feet and big whiskers under it's nose. The Schmoo had only one desire, to serve the needs of human beings and it was well-equipped to do so. Its skin could be made into any kind of fabric. Its flesh was edible. Its dead body could go brick-hard and be used for building. And its whiskers, well its whiskers had more uses than you can imagine. If you looked at a Schmoo with real hunger in your eye it dropped dead in rapture because you wanted it, after first cooking itself into your favourite flavour.

Well, since they multiplied rapidly there were plenty of Schmoos for everybody and they even looked good in the environment. Almost everyone approved of the Schmoos. But some people weren't keen on them. The rich capitalists hated the Schmoos. Since Schmoos provided everything people needed nobody had to work for capitalists anymore because nobody needed to make the wages to buy the things capitalists sold. So as the Schmoos spread across the face of America the capitalists began to lose their position and their power. And this made them take drastic action. They got the government to tell the people that the Schmoo was un-American, the Schmoo was causing chaos undermining the social order, people weren't turning up for work and they weren't going to the department stores to buy anything.

Well the government propaganda convinced the people and the President ordered the FBI to gather the Schmoos and gun them down.

          GA Cohen, Against Capitalism

The "Scourge" of Single-Mums.

I am one of the generation deemed scum by so many newspapers and reactionary fuck-pigs. It is a generation raised by women without the hand of a man to slap them around and all the while these women - designated simply as 'single mums' - are faced with a torrent of misogyny and bad faith from a narrative of the gutters. Incidentally the attitude of many single-mothers is not one of entitlement, but of guilt, shame and self-loathing. The narrative of the right-wing media has been that the person on benefits is a parasite on the successful and hard-working, that the families which survive on the crumbs of the state are the froth of the scum which has been amassed at the very bottom of society. These people choose not to work in order to get a free ride on the backs of 'real' workers. Notice there is no mention of the severe lack of jobs in our society, the lack of opportunities, the pervasive inequality and the absence of any policy to create jobs.

One major cultural change which has been accomplished by the Feminist movement of the 1970s is the sense that women have a lot to be angry about and should be angry. We live in a time of the 'token woman' and the widespread dissemination of feminist ideas, at least at the level of a kind of Barbie Doll feminism, whilst the conditions of women's lives worsen and everywhere there seems to be a backlash against the steps forward made in the past. The women who have to raise children on benefits are often treated with scorn and even from working-class people, who are jeered on by middle-class journalists and newspaper editors. The explicit attitude of the gutter press to women is anti-feminist, it is almost as if woman is the guilt of man realised and only if he can cleanse himself of his "dirty desires" can woman cease to exist. We have only to glance at these papers to catch the orgy of misogyny in full motion, where a life on benefits is a 'choice' undertaken by the exploding numbers of women who don't think being a housewife is "rewarding".

The fact that the media is a business for which the aim is to maximise profit by driving down costs and stimulating advertising revenue. Let alone that the media is dominated by middle-class white men and has been for decades. The superfluous population are a cost to be minimised. So the press run endless stories about women living in houses worth millions on housing benefit and child-benefit, as if these crumbs are equal to a house in London that they don't even own. Incidentally housing prices have been inflated in London as council housing has been decimated and the economy has been finance-driven. The average age of the single-mum is 37 and 55% of single-mums had their children within marriage. 33% suffer from disabilities and illnesses while 34% of their children are disabled. No wonder there are working-class people cheering on the government as job centres are set a minimum target of chucking three people a week off of benefits. The disabled are a prime target because they won't kick up a fuss. But neither would most single-mums, the attitude pervasive amongst the superfluous population is apathetic parody of the stiff-upper lip.

As David Cameron rants about "runaway dads" he supports policies which make it more costly for women to pursue them for financial support. The blame is still fundamentally pinned on the woman for opening her legs and seducing the man who just can't help himself. Naturally Melanie Phillips responded by fanning the flames of misogyny and tells us that it is not the father who is the problem it is the single-mum who is just trying get by. Even though it will be single-mums who will be hit the hardest by benefit cuts, losing a month's income every year and three times as much as a childless couple. At the same time, single women will lose a little less than a single-parent on benefits due to the tax and welfare changes. Even though around a quarter of children live in single-parent households, and a high number of them do so below the poverty-line. The statistics will tell you that these children will go onto do badly in school, suffer poor health and may even fall into long-term unemployment themselves.

There is an irony in the obscene lies of the Right against single-mothers on benefits. The term "proletariat" is derived from the Latin for "offspring" which refers 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. What society demanded from them was not production but reproduction. The proletariat started life among those outside the labour process and not from within it. Though the labour these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. We live in a world in which the typical proletarian is a woman, as we can see in sweatshops and agricultural labour. After the decline of heavy industry it was women who staffed the huge expansion in shop and clerical work. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world the industrial working-class were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. In other words the majority of the workforce was female in the 19th Century.

The picture we all carry in our heads of the working-class is of the blue-collar brawny male off to toil away in a factory with lunchbox in hand. But the working-class is not defined by manual labour. The working-class includes anyone who is forced to rent their labour power to capital, languishes under its oppressive disciplines and have little control over the means of production. Thus Karl Marx ranked commercial workers along with industrial workers and refused to identify the proletariat with just "productive" workers, in the sense of those workers who churn out commodities in exchange for a wage. The unemployed are not part of a so-called "under-class" but are actually central to the working-class. The way unemployed women in particular are regularly singled out by the reactionary media along the usual misogynistic lines is the essence of class warfare. This is how the important role of child benefit has been jettisoned over the years, it is not even seen as an investment anymore by the elites and the commentariat.

Hacked Off!

"The journalist's 'lack of convictions', the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification." - Georg Lukács

The love affair between Rupert Murdoch and the Establishment may have finally come to an end, or at least it has been derailed by the people of this country and not it's owners. Rupert Murdoch walked away from his bid to takeover BSkyB just before it faced a vote in Parliament which would have no doubt opposed News International. Though it would have been interesting to see who exactly stands by Murdoch after all of this. It has been quite a journey, just last week Rupert Murdoch was standing by Rebekah Brooks and he has just nudged her off of the cliff. The difference is that The News of the World is now gone after 168 years, 43 of which have been spent in the claws of Murdoch - at least until it is relaunched as The Sun on Sunday. As I'd like to see burning mountains of The Times and The Sun in the streets of London I have to admit that this is a damn good day. It is even possible that the damage done to News International is enough for yet more closures, this could be the beginning of the end for Murdoch's "animal spirit".

It was clear that the Murdoch press has been out of control for quite some time. The public was disgusted when it turned out that the paper had hacked the phones of a murdered teenage girl, to the extent of actually deleting voice mails in order to receive even more voice mails. This functioned to give the illusion that the girl might be alive to her family. Then it turned out that these journalists also hacked the phones of war widows and the victims of 7/7. Now there is even word of hacking the phones of 9/11 victims. The criminal conspiracy went as far as bribing police officers and even enveloped the Conservative Party as Andy Coulson made the jump from tabloid fuck-monkey to public relations fuck-monkey. But this is not an entirely new dimension to the drama of Murdoch-Tory relations. Let's not forget what happened in Wapping back in 1986 when the collusion between the Conservative government and the Metropolitan police with Rupert Murdoch left the print unions smashed. It was also The Sun that led the media campaign against the Miners in '84 to '85.

In 1988 The News of the World was one of the tabloids that hounded the gay chat-show host Russell Harty and upped the ante as Harty lay dying in a hospital bed from hepatitis. Journalists from all of the tabloids even posed as junior doctors to get a hold of Harty's medical notes and photographers rented a flat just opposite Harty's hotel room. Alan Bennett later said, at Harty's funeral, that "The gutter press finished him." There was an immediate reaction from Murdoch's attack dogs, specifically in The Sun, "Stress did not kill Russell Harty. The truth is that he died from a sexually transmitted disease. the press didn't give it to him. He caught it from his own choice. And by paying young rent boys he broke the law. Some - like ageing bachelor Mr Bennett - can see no harm in that. He has no family. But what if it had been YOUR son Harty had bedded?" It was that same red-top that claimed in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster that fans robbed the dead and pissed on "brave cops". Murdoch made Kelvin MacKenzie apologise through his teeth for that one.

This is just the tip of the ice-berg. In the US the Mephistopheles found Roger Ailes to run Fox News as the propaganda wing of the Republican Party. It was Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater who designed the campaign ads for George HW Bush in 1988, the basic message of which was "Vote for George HW Bush or a Black man might rape your girlfriend." So we should not be surprised to find a disgusting band of reactionaries at Fox News, where Glenn Beck was taken off the air because of the huge losses in advertising revenue and a fall in ratings. Now Mr Ailes is bracing himself in case the FBI discovers News Corp has hacked the phones of 9/11 victims and then it will be game over for Fox News. Why the hell did it take the phone-hacking of a dead girl to make us angry about Rupert Murdoch? The man controls around 40% of British media and we only cared once he crossed a clear ethical line. The BBC and the Labour Party are as much at fault here as the Conservative Party. The party-line is still that the system is sound in spite of a few excessive elements, e.g. The News of the World.

Now we can read The Sun and it's reaction to the words of Gordon Brown, if we could tear our eyes away from the delicious news that Rupert Murdoch backed out of the takeover bid to avoid the humiliation of a landslide vote against him in Parliament. It's important to remember that if the scandal had never erupted you could guarantee that the Conservatives and the Labour Party would currently be singing "Hey big spender!" to Rupert Murdoch. No doubt David Cameron and Ed Miliband would have danced around in suspenders and basques for the old dog. Whenever we see Tony Benn today we forget about the media campaign against him led by the Murdoch red-tops to label him as a "loon", going as far as actually putting words in the mouth of a prominent American psychiatrist to try and make out that Benn was mentally unstable. The press went through Benn's rubbish and he was aware that his phone was being tapped, by who we do not know specifically. Murdoch played the exact same tune with Neil Kinnock, who was well to the Right of Tony Benn.

As Conrad Black has pointed out, Rupert Murdoch has no loyalty except to his company and he has betrayed every political leader who ever helped him. The only exceptions to the only is Ronald Reagan and possibly Tony Blair. As Murdoch seeks to rid the world of dignity and respectable institutions out of a so-called "anti-elitism" he kisses the arses of the Chinese Communists. All the while News International runs on a reactionary populist platform in Britain and on a commonsensical conservatism in America. The way he sees public entertainment and civic values is similar to the depiction of both in The Simpsons: all politicians are crooks while the masses are an ignorant lumpenproletariat. The irony being that this man climbed in bed with the police and the political class, whilst railing against them and supposedly 'supporting' the working-classes against the corrupt elite. The liberal commentariat has turned the narrative around and now we find it is those noble journalists who are speaking truth to power once more.

Whether or not the Labour Party has slashed off all remnants of the impact Murdoch has had on the Party is another matter. Ed Miliband has led the way on the motion to ask the Mephistopheles to reconsider the bid, a motion not so hardline as it would seem and just a week ago Miliband was calling for Rebekah Brooks to think about quitting. I bet that one had the Murdoch empire trembling in it's wake. Now that the 'evil ginger' has finally resigned we should keep in mind it was Murdoch who gave her the boot and not Miliband. The same goes for Les Hinton, who has worked with Murdoch for 52years and used to lead the British wing of News Corp before Rebekah Brooks succeeded him. These are "professional" not "personal" moves on the part of Rupert Murdoch to insulate himself and News Corp from the scandal. The basic complaint of the government is that the red-top went too far and that there is a need for discipline and responsibility to be instilled. A radical change in the mainstream media is unimaginable, we just want The News of the World without the phone-hacking of dead children and in that sense we want the sleaze of the tabloids without the sleaze.

We find ourselves embedded in ideology when Miliband calls this a great victory for "people up and down the country", a platitude if there ever was one, we should reject this liberal reduction of the situation to the glorious struggle of the little guy and the investigative journalist against a corrupt media corporation. The adversarial self-image which the BBC holds so dearly to whilst fawning to power and all opposition is conveniently absent from the discussion. There is no alternative to cuts and we can tell because the BBC refuses to air the alternatives! Except when the alternatives can be easily dismissed as 'lunacy'. We should have no illusions, the disgusting 'aberrations' of News International are being rooted out by the system as a form of corruption and no one in their right mind would defend the phone-hacking of dead people. This will not change the fact that the political system is broken, it has been reduced to a form of management in which the 'rabble' of special individuals consent to passivity in the midst of mindless chatter from the middle-class liberals at the BBC.

In Defence of the Welfare Queen.

As always the reactionary press are full to the brim with hateful tales about the women who "choose" to be jobless and claim the plentiful benefits offered to single-mums by squeezing out as many babies. This "lifestyle choice" is a favourite topic at The Daily Mail where the job description of a journalist amounts to sucking on the end of a sewer pipe whilst saluting the Führer. In the run-up to the General Election of 2010 the right-wing media repeatedly pinned failure on New Labour and attributed a policy of encouraging young mothers not to bother with work and to remain unmarried. It is an easy job for journalists and it pays off, there is plenty of advertising revenue for a paper which doesn't raise difficult questions about the powerful and instead takes to bashing the poor. Baiting working-people against the so-called benefits culture is easy because the unemployed are not politically active and have no one who represents their interests to defend them.

The wider insinuation is that New Labour sunk the country into debt by giving too much to people on benefits. This is a complete falsehood and it is amazing that such a lie can be pandered by the media after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the recession that sent tax-revenues into decline so public spending became unsustainable. As for benefits, it was New Labour that hired an investment banker called David Freud to overlook welfare benefits and pensions in 2007, with the specific aim of cutting benefits. The banker recommended that we replace all of the crumbs - housing benefit, incapacity benefit, disability allowance etc. - with a single and means-tested payment designed to 'incentivise' work. Then the Conservatives came along in 2010 to drive the plan through Parliament and slash £18 billion from benefits in the meantime. Before New Labour was given the boot David Freud also laid out plans to do away with incapacity benefit in favour of a temporary scheme which "compels" recipients into the workforce.

The underlying assumption of cutting benefits to drive single-mothers into work is that children-rearing isn't work. It's just something that women do for free, like a lot of things. The effects of driving single-mothers into the workforce in this way are quite interesting. Jobs for people who have been unemployed generally require subsidies in order to guarantee that the firms will take them on. We can see this in Britain where David Cameron has cut national insurance, which he deemed a "jobs tax", in order to create jobs for the long-term unemployed. Effectively the cut in national insurance is a subsidy to firms that take on the long-term unemployed, which has the potential to lower wages across the workforce and further undermine trade unions. So single-mothers shouldn't be raising their children and living off of "handouts" instead these women should be coerced into work so that you can be paid even less. You'll never read that in The Daily Mail, where the most basic level of moral decency is also conspicuously absent.

According to one study, which was no doubt distorted by The Daily Mail in the usual manner, the average single-mother is on around £3,546 a year in benefits. That amounts to £74,466 for 21 years, about £74 a week which is less than a day's work at minimum wage. At the same time it should be noted that it costs on average around £200,000 to raise a child to that age in this country. There is little to no mention that the amount of benefit fraud costs around £500 million to £1.5 billion a year, with estimates of over-payments ranging to around £3 billion a year. So it is clear that it will be the disabled, the mentally ill and people on very low incomes who will be hit by the benefit cuts. These aren't the "welfare queens" that the Republicans have slammed for nearly 50 years, these are the people who are set to be forced off of benefits after the Coalition has stipulated that each job centre has to sanction 3 people a week. A sanction cuts off the benefits from the recipient for a period up to 6 months.

The only permissible issue to debate is to what extent child benefit is necessary. Most recently the debate over benefits was whether it was right of David Cameron to cut child benefit for wealthier families. The presupposition that a little over £20 a week more per child is enough to raise a child remains constant, along with the suggestion that the women who have raise children on benefits are simply "whores" who have chosen to live off of your money and not go to work. Notice the other presupposition: there are jobs for women which pay enough to raise a child on. These are the laws of the commentariat in it's eager campaign to pit the working-class against itself and even at the BBC we find the question is limited to "Should we be paying people to have children?" All the while the gutter press act as if contraception and personal responsibility are the answer, in other words no benefits for anyone, no free child-care and no doubt contraceptives shouldn't be handed out for free. Notice that this level of 'personal responsibility' is only expected of the poorest of the poor.