George is 36. He works for Hackney council as a welfare
rights adviser. Before that he had a job with the Labour Research Department;
and before that he was doing a doctoral degree (in urban sociology) at the LSE.
He did his first degree at the University of Essex. It was there he met his
wife. Sue, who is now a teacher. At the time, he was in the International
Marxist Group and she was an anarchist. They used to argue about Kronstadt
before making love, and were involved in a lot of demonstrations and sit-ins.
Things quietened down a bit when they moved to London in
1971: but George stayed with the IMG for another five years, still convinced
that the British revolution was imminent. Sue continued to see herself as an
anarchist, but mixed increasingly in women's movement circles. She enjoyed the
consciousness-raising. In 1976 George resigned from the IMG over what he
considered a deviationist turn from the class. He was unattached for a while,
then joined the Labour Party when he and Sue moved out of their housing
association place in Stoke Newington and into a flat in Islington which Sue had
bought with some money from her grandmother.
Inside the Labour Party, George made swift progress. He soon
found himself on the General Management Committee of the constituency party,
and within two years lie was membership secretary. He became a stalwart of the
Campaign for Labour Party Democracy; as a delegate at conference he made many
an impassioned plea for constitutional reform. After the election defeat of May
1979 his efforts redoubled. He was heavily involved in the manoeuvring behind
the scenes at the 1981 constitutional conference at Wembley, spent long hours
on the Benn deputy leadership campaign, and worked hard for a Labour victory in
the 1981 GLC elections. (He had been approached about the possibility of
standing for a GLC seat but he decided against it).
Meanwhile, Sue was beginning to feel isolated in her
feminist group. She started going to Big Flame meetings but that didn't seem to
make much difference. Next she got interested in the Communist Party, but they seemed slightly old-fashioned. And then,
after the Beyond the Fragments conference in Leeds, she swallowed her pride and
joined George in the Labour Party. Somewhat to her surprise she took to it like
a duck to water; the women she met through it were just her sort of person.
There were even a couple of teachers with whom she set up a “Women in education” discussion group.
And so to the present. Despite the poor showing of the
Labour party in the 1983 general election, George and Sue are happier than they
have been for a long time. They have active social lives with their political
friends; they know everybody worth knowing in the 1ittle world of GLC
committees and north London “radical socialist boroughs”. At home they spend
their leisure hours reading Marxism Today and London Labour Briefing, or
relaxing in front of Channel Four. They feel that they are doing their bit in
the struggle for socialism – indeed, they feel they are leading the struggle
for socialism. Of course, there is still a long way to go. After all; the
vicious lies of the Evening Standard might just result in Ken and the comrades being defeated in 1985, to say nothing of the threats to abolish the GLC in the Tory manifesto. But until then everything is on course for the New Jerusalem.
+++
As you may have gathered, George and Sue are fictional characters.
Any resemblance to real people and events in their story is not, however,
entirely coincidental. George and Sue are typical members of the social group that
now dominates the left political agenda in Britain. They are highly educated
people, radicalised in their student days, whose main hobby for more than a
decade has been politics. They began their political careers on the far left
outside the Labour Party, but with the passage of time more or less willingly
joined its left wing. And they are reliant upon the welfare bureaucracies – within
which they occupy high-status managerial, professional or semi-professional
positions – for employment.
What are we to make of them? There are some who see the
growing predominance of people like George and Sue within the Labour Party (and
to a lesser extent the trade unions) as indicative of nothing more than the
shift from blue-collar to white-collar employment in the British economy. That
such a shift has occurred is certainly true; anyone who sees the modern
working-class as composed mainly of horny-handed manual workers needs new
spectacles.
But it is not particularly relevant here. The Georges and
Sues are formally white-collar workers, insofar as they sell their labour power
for a wage and have no other significant source of income. They are, however,
no ordinary white-collar workers. Unlike the average clerk or typist they are
order-givers rather than order-takers. Their jobs often have professional or
semi-professional career structures, in that entry is restricted to those
deemed to hold relevant qualifications, and their job security is much greater
than for most workers. Their culture, too, is not that of most workers: people
like George and Sue are in certain crucial respects members of the middle class.
And yet they are members of the Labour Party – traditionally
the party of the working class. They are, moreover, in positions of power
within the Labour Party: in many local LPs people like George and Sue hold all
the key posts. What is more, they have reached such positions of power not as a
result of working class deference in the face of apparent expertise – as the
middle-class socialists of a previous era did – but by gaining majorities at
the “grass roots” of the Labour Party, often against the wishes of working-class
members, and often in an extremely manipulative way.
It is not how the people like George and Sue did all this
that is really at issue. The membership of the Labour Party has been declining
steadily for years: in Glasgow, for example, it is estimated that there are now
only 50 or 60 paid up members in each constituency (outside one with a Labour
club), most of whom are inactive. The reasons for this decline are varied. On
one hand, since the late 1950s television broadcasts have replaced door-knocking
canvassing as the main means of electoral campaigning, local Labour parties
have increasingly lost touch with the people they once would have recruited as
the need for a mass campaigning party has receded. This tendency has been
particularly marked in “safe” Labour areas.
+++
More importantly, working class commitment to Labour has
steadily disintegrated since 1945. The traditional working-class community
that formed the social base for Labour's support has been
dispersed, by consumerism, by rehousing (ironically, often initiated by Labour
politicians), and the changing character of work. Finally, many once staunch
Labour Party members have been irrevocably alienated by their experience of
Labour in office. The stultifying bureaucracy of the welfare state, the corrupt
machine politics of Labour town halls, the stark capitalist reality of having
the state as an employer, wage control – all have encouraged the flight of the
working class from the Labour Party.
The results of this decline in Labour Party membership are
obvious: it became very easy for a small number of people to take over a local
LP, particularly if they were adept at political manipulation and were prepared
to put a lot of work into committees. And that is precisely what the Georges and
Sues have done -with the unintended and ironic effect of further alienating
working-class Labour members. Why, though, have they done it?
If you ask them, their answer will be simple: they have
taken over the Labour Party because they believe passionately in the
desirability of “socialist policies”. And indeed there is no reason to doubt
the sincerity of their commitment to what they see as socialism. But what the
new middle-class left sees as socialism is not just a heady ideal. If you look
at the content of their ideology and practice, you find it very much in tune
with their economic self-interest.
This becomes particularly apparent in areas where the new
middle class left have come to control local government. “Socialist policies”
in such areas have been characterised by the creation of a multitude of
committees and grant-aided autonomous bodies which are supposed to monitor and
control the police, work against racial and sexual discrimination, encourage
the development of cooperatives , stimulate “people's culture”, attempt to
decentralise the functions of local government, and so forth. This is not the
place to attempt a full-blown critique of such innovations; it suffices to say
that the majority have failed even in their limited (and in many ways
unsocialist) avowed aims, largely because they have not had the support of
ordinary people. What they have succeeded in doing is providing highly paid
employment for scores of middle-class leftists. One does not have to be a cynic
to suggest that the main beneficiaries of “socialist policies” in local
government have been those employed to manage their implementation, and that
the middle-class left's pursuit of “socialist policies” is at root a pursuit of
class interests that have little to do with the class interests of the majority
of ordinary people.
As yet, however, only a small – though growing – number of
the Georges and Sues are employed in the jobs created by left local government.
Far more work in the more traditional welfare state, as social workers,
teachers, college lecturers, administrators, and so on. Unsurprisingly, with
their jobs under threat from central government cuts, they have campaigned
vigorously against attempts to prune the welfare state.
+++
Up to a point, of course, there is no conflict between their
defence of welfare expenditure and the interests of the wider population. Cuts
in the welfare budget mean cuts in services for ordinary people, as well as
fewer jobs for social workers, teachers and administrators. Nevertheless, there
is no necessary link between preserving welfare expenditure and preserving
services: much welfare expenditure acts only to sustain a parasitic
bureaucracy. What is more, the “services” provided by the welfare state are in
many cases as much means of social control as they are beneficial to ordinary
people.
Yet we hear no substantive criticism of welfarism from the
new middle-class left. Rather, they give us the uncritical “fight the cuts”
slogans, and a vision of the future in which the welfare state takes control of
every aspect of our everyday lives. Once again, it does not seem cynical to
suggest that we are witnessing the pursuit of a class interest under the banner
of “socialism” that has nothing to do with the interests of the working class.
The generation of 1968 has, it seems, grown up to be part of the problem rather
than part of the solution.
