As I set out a while ago, racism, along with other forms of bigotry,
developed along with the early mercantilist forms of capitalism, so
as to reconcile its ideology of liberty and equality with its actual
practice of slavery. It avoided having to deal with facts, and today
what connects all of these Alt-Right conservatives is the same desire
to avoid dealing with facts, to instead present their own
“alternative facts”, as part of a “post-truth” environment,
or as Michael Gove put it during the referendum, a rejection of
“experts”.
So, Britain's problems, we are told, are caused by foreigners, be
they immigrants or EU Commissioners. Le Pen tells the same tale in
France, Trump in the US, and so on. For Putin, Erdogan or Netanyahu,
that narrative is easy to tell. It justifies Putin's military action
in Ukraine, Erdogan's actions against Kurds, inside and outside
Turkey's border, and it justifies Netanyahu's attacks on
Palestinians, the building of a wall and so on.
In Britain, UKIP and May claimed that Labour was out of touch with
workers, Trump made the same claim, in the US. Of course, in part,
the lie is always based on some kernel of truth. For thirty years,
Labour and Democrats were under the sway of conservative,
centre-ground ideas that focussed on the blowing up of asset price
bubbles that created the delusion of paper wealth, whilst real
productive wealth stagnated, papered over by an expansion of debt, a
consumption of capital, and an anaesthetisation of the pain of large
numbers left behind, by increasing doses of welfare. In the modern
world, the welfare state has replaced religion as the opium of the
people.
Its true, therefore, that the policies of the political centre –
essentially conservative policies implemented by centre-left and
centre-right parties within an overall social-democratic framework –
failed to address the question of real capital accumulation, which in
turn meant that as old industries disappeared, whilst labour was
simultaneously shaken out by rapid technological development, as intensive accumulation replaced extensive accumulation, large
sections of workers were displaced in concentrated geographical
areas.
In Britain, the concentrations were in coal mining districts, which
were also often accompanied by steel production, and in some cases
shipbuilding. Old industrial sites were levelled and replaced with
shiny new retail parks, which provided jobs for the wives and
children of the former male industrial workers, but they were much
lower paid jobs, much less secure jobs, as workers were employed on a
casual, often zero hours basis that made union organisation much more
difficult. And, as a result, these urban areas also deteriorated.
In the 1930's, large new council estates, and some new privately
rented housing was developed. But, in the 1980's, with the focus on
inflating house price bubbles, pursued by Thatcher, not only was new
council house building stopped, but existing council houses were sold
off, on the cheap, in the same way that other state assets were sold
off on the cheap. And, driven by the same economic delusion about
the expansion of paper wealth, Blair and Brown continued that process
in the late 90's and through to its inevitable consequence of the
financial meltdown of 2008.
The same process could be seen in the US, with the decay of the
rustbelt, but also in the same asset price bubbles, the sub-prime
crisis and so on.
That is the kernel of truth that the centre-ground parties, during
that period, effectively did abandon large sections of the
population, and settled for ameliorating their condition, with ever
larger doses of credit and welfare, financed out of the increasing
paper wealth of those sections of the population that appeared to
benefit from those astronomically inflated asset bubbles, which then
also found its inevitable limit, as the 2008 financial crisis
unfolded, and led to those same abandoned sections of the population
bearing the brunt of the insane policies of austerity that were
inflicted upon them. Countries such as Greece, Spain, Ireland and
Portugal were merely an expression of that on a grand scale.
It is also why those Blair-right politicians, and sections of the
media who recoil at Corbyn, or similarly at Syriza, Podemos, and even
Sanders, and hanker after a return of that kind of Labour Party, are
seriously deluded. It was those policies, over thirty years, that
created the problem. They are not now the solution. The experience
in the US was instructive. Bernie Sanders, and the large grass roots
movement behind him was an expression of the same phenomenon seen
with Corbyn in Britain, but which could be seen in different forms
with Syriza and Podemos, and has now been seen with Hamon in France.
But, the Democrats used their control of the party machinery to block
Sanders, in the same way that the Labour bureaucracy tried to do with
Corbyn, when they realised their mistake of allowing him on to the
ballot. The consequence in the US is now clear. All of that anger
and frustration at the experience of the last thirty years was
blocked from expressing itself as a vote for Sanders, and so,
instead, it either stayed away, or expressed itself in a vote for
Trump. The good news is that the organisation built up behind
Sanders, and from the Occupy Movement, is now expressing itself in a
ground war of outright opposition to Republican politicians, and
conservative Democrats, in every district across the country. There
is a lesson there for Labour in outright opposing Brexit rather than
the nonsense of supporting the reactionary policy of Brexit,
justified in weasel words about a “People's Brexit”, or some form
of Brexit-lite!
But, the fact that Clinton won a majority of the popular vote is also
to some extent besides the point here, because, as with Labour's vote
in Britain, it can pile up in those areas where workers feel they
have not done too badly – for example, in London – but stagnate
in those places like Stoke, where large numbers of workers feel like
they have been abandoned. However, the fact is that even on this
basis, the concept of some ill-defined, metropolitan elite, based in
London, being the determinant of Labour's politics in Britain, the
Democrats in the US, and so on is fallacious. The idea that workers
in Stoke are less concerned with issues of sexuality, gender
equality, the environment, human rights and so on than are workers or
the middle class in London is nonsensical.
It presumes that there are no LGBT workers, or a much smaller number
of them, in Stoke, than there are in London; that women workers face
less problems with job and pay equality, in Stoke, than in London;
that workers in Stoke, whose environment was blighted, by industry,
for decades, are less concerned with improving that environment than
workers in London. In fact, the concept of the so called
metropolitan elite signifies a total disdain and disrespect for the
workers of places like Stoke, by those that propose it, because it
suggests that they are in some way simply too ignorant, too
uncivilised to be concerned with any of these wider issues, relating
to the quality of their lives, beyond being simply drones destined to
work, eat, sleep and procreate for the benefit of their employers.
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