[Thread] Fantastic article by professor Steve Hall on the liberal degeneration of the British left: academia.edu/40925533/Back_…
1/ Research reveals the drift of former Labour voters towards the right. Many more who still vote Labour hold a centre-right position that supports the failing neolib project, and, given Labour’s commitment to Remain, others have grudgingly thrown their support behind Tories.
2/ Taken together, the political groups that span the spectrum from centre-right to far right, when combined with understandably cynical non-voters, constitute in key constituencies a powerful force that is likely to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour from achieving an overall majority.
3/ We could be entering an era in which what we now know as the left must undergo a fundamental rethink or die out as an electoral force, leaving the liberal centre to fight it out with an increasingly radical right. It is time for the left to abandon dogma and complacency.
4/ In the social sciences, we have seen the return of incredibly naïve accounts of media effects that, put simply, suggest that the media equip people with their attitudes and beliefs in a direct and unfiltered manner.
5/ The reality of everyday life has yet again been dismissed as a formative context by the liberal left as we follow the standard convention of focusing solely on mass-mediated ‘narratives’ and ‘discourses’.
6/ Rather than attempting to explain why many ordinary people support Brexit and call for tighter immigration, and how such views may relate to their day-to-day experiences, we are left only with the timeless critique of the Tory press and their malign myths and stereotypes.
7/ The working-class people we interviewed were not immersed in traditional far-right tropes. One finding stood out – over and above their racism and deep fear of radical Islam, the principal target of their ire was what they understood as the middle-class liberal left.
8/ We found that where our interviewees’ distaste for Islam was nuanced, their hatred for self-styled middle-class ‘progressives’ was pure and untrammelled. Since 2016 this hatred has been intensified by the tendency of middle-class liberals to pour scorn on Brexit voters.
9/ The liberal left has been on the run from deep political intervention in the economy for decades, but without some degree of regulatory control in the field of political economy the liberal left can do little about the class divide in a time of austerity and econ insecurity.
10/ The Labour Party has recently adopted what it calls its ‘fiscal credibility rule’, which limits the government’s use of its own currency as public investment by ‘closing down’ the deficit every five years. Consequently, it accepts the basic structure of neoliberal capitalism.
11/ This abandonment of political economy and shift into the cultural dimension is the terminal point of what we might call the cultural current of liberal ‘progressivism’.
12/ [Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century] progressive liberal spent the bulk of their time attacking work, religion, nation, regional identity, law, family, marriage, folk music, patriarchy, heterosexuality, parochialism, and of course latterly racism.
13/ This combination of targets clumsily lumped together the obviously regressive and prejudicial with the working class’s sole sources of comfort and identity, and did not elicit much support from everyday people.
14/ The post-war ‘new left’ was a continuation of this elite control framed in a revised vision chastened by the horrors of Stalinism. … The new left was born out of fear, loathing, guilt and liberal progressive opportunism.
15/ Following Crosland’s (1956) elevation of liberal cultural values above basic working-class economic interests such as jobs, healthcare and pensions, the British left began the process of shedding any working-class influence it might have incorporated in the post-war era.
16/ Figures such as Deleuze and Foucault [led to] post-structuralism, an essentially post-political culture in which the focus shifted entirely from class and political economy to an assortment of victim groups identified by the liberal middle class as worthy of emancipation.
17/ By the 1980s the very idea of politically organised socioeconomic reordering became anathema on the liberalised left as neoliberalism embarked on its journey towards largely unchecked economic globalisation and financialisation.
18/ Politics in general became something else – post-structural identity politics disembedded from any project of deep political intervention aimed at democratising and perhaps transcending a capitalist economic system.
19/ Identity politics is an endlessly proliferating and unwinnable zero-sum game. Where once the left tried to organize class struggle out of disorganised conflict, identity politics marginalises class struggle and revives disorganised conflict in its most virulent form.
20/ The future appears as a kaleidoscope of proliferating identitarian struggles on as many cultural fronts as we can imagine into being, which act together to constantly displace the possibility of a common political objective with an expanding vision of progress.
21/ This process, carried out by dogmatic and exclusionary new leftists, was always a central goal for those who created and drove the neoliberal project. The ideological connections that exist between the liberal left and the neoliberal right are right there in front of us.
22/ The left pushed identitarian progress for minorities into the foreground and economic security for the majority into the background.
23/ The left’s progressive activists could not accept the fact that the British working class – a multi-ethnic group throughout the industrial era – was predominantly culturally conservative, a sentiment rather than an analysis expressed by the reductionist term ‘Labourism’.
24/ Yet, given the right circumstances for which the left should spend all its time and effort preparing, an electorally significant majority of the working class has proven itself to be susceptible to quite radical socioeconomic proposals.
25/ Convincing an electoral majority in the grip of post-crash austerity that a progressive economic project based on public control of finance and investment is feasible would have been possible in an ambience of shared interests – prosperity, security, sustainability and so on.
26/ Instead the self-styled progressive liberal left attacked the full spectrum of traditional institutions, beliefs, values and identities, justifying their symbolic violence with the grossly simplified sub-Gramscian claim that they ‘culturally reproduce’ the capitalist system.
27/ Is this social conservatism simply a receptacle for ignorance, prejudice and capitalist reproduction? Or did it contain and reproduce ethical principles and institutions that could be reclaimed, redirected and applied to a new socioeconomic project?
28/ Are racism and sexism best approached amid insecurity and constant attacks on the person and his cultural heritage?
29/ Are crude and hostile reductionist shaming concepts such as ‘whiteness’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ likely to persuade people to abandon their identities and change their minds when there is no clear shared objective, only a vision of the future from which they have been erased?
30/ Is it a good idea to preach about the need to transcend consumerism and industrialism without being crystal clear and seeming to really care where alternative jobs and livelihoods might come from?
31/ Is it a good idea for the left to continue attacking the past and the present – with its ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’ – without giving people a clue what a future with them in it might look like?
32/ Overall, the history of the British left is a history of working-class exclusion and domination by fearful yet opportunistic liberal reformers. The working class was starved of the ability to develop an autonomous narrative to inform their politics.
33/ Alienated from popular consciousness and experiences, Britain’s liberal left, comprised of individuals processed through dogmatic liberal educational programmes and fed divisive id politics, is unlikely to win the day, even at a time when neoliberalism is in terminal decline.
[END OF THREAD]
Sorry @winlow_s, I hand't noticed you had co-authored the article with Steve!
