A Battle For Life, For Existence, For Everything

Aditya Chakrabortty writes:

At least now you know who to blame. Since Brexit and especially after Donald Trump, the quack analysts have been out in force, holding aloft their quack explanations.

It is apparently all the fault of the white working classes. 

They got left behind and cast aside in the past two decades of globalisation – now they’re making the rest of us pay. 

Like all good quack analysis, it is instantly digestible, it makes little demands of its audience: no scouring of footnotes nor leafing through history. 

It is toxically simple. 

Never mind actual facts – such as the ones that prove Asian and black people are around twice as likely to be unemployed as white people. 

Never mind that such quackery, while pretending to be rooted in economics, merely turns the “white working class” into just another branch of identity politics. 

Never mind that it muddies the debate (the Le Pen dynasty and the millionaire Nigel Farage somehow turn out to be the real victims in all this) and trivialises the very people to whom the quack is pretending to genuflect.

Poor sods: unlike the rest of us, they just couldn’t keep up.

However seductive this is as explanation, as analysis it’s off economically and it’s off politically because it misses the point.

The Trump vote contained rednecks and inhabitants of the rust belt, just as south Wales and Sunderland turned out for Brexit – but in neither case was that the whole story. 

It also seeks to turn a larger and wider economic process into a smaller and more trivial culture war. 

It pits the middle classes against the working classes, and the poor whites against the poor blacks.

All the while, since 2008 the single biggest economic story across Britain and the US and other rich countries has been achingly slow growth and austerity for the masses, alongside state-subsidised riches for the very wealthiest. 

Put bluntly, if you think that what has happened to the advanced countries’ working classes – how over four decades they have sunk from semi-prosperity into pauperism – was a one-off event driven by the magical, unanswerable forces of globalisation, then you’ve missed the point. 

This is a process that’s swallowing up the middle classes too.

Indeed, it’s happening now. 

And the political implications will, I think, make Trump come to seem as benevolent as a greasepaint baddie at a Christmas panto. 

In Britain, it wasn’t globalisation that shunted the rail and telecoms and gas engineers and their colleagues on to private employers and then into thousands upon thousands of layoffs. 

It wasn’t globalisation that prompted Thatcher’s scorched-earth economics that saw the loss of one in five of all manufacturing jobs within just 18 months in the early 80s. 

All this happened in the decade running up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whatever Theresa May says, it had less to do with globalisation than Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher and their hardline neoliberal friends.

As for the liberals who are today pointing at an atlas and shrugging for the cameras, back then their parents were probably writing letters to the Times about the need for greater economic efficiency.

Among the modern-day equivalents, you might include the appalling pay and conditions for care workers – driven not by foreign competition but by the demand of the private-equity firms running these businesses to make as much of a margin as possible.

The only thing that’s globalised here is the tax affairs of the finance shops running the show.

This isn’t about the advent of China, nor has it been driven by migrant labour.

It’s about a capitalism run wild that tramples over skills and people and isn’t tempered by regulations, by unions, or by politics.

Ah, you might say. Ah. But that’s the working classes, priced out by the markets.

Wrong.

It’s about choices made by politicians – and they’re coming for the white collars, too.

Consider what’s happening right now in the era of austerity.

Since David Cameron moved into Downing Street in 2010, the government has scrapped 80,000 civil service jobs.

Let that number sink in: it amounts to the shutdown of 20 Port Talbot steelworks, and it has gone barely covered.

If in next week’s autumn statement, chancellor Philip Hammond presses on with George Osborne’s cuts, a further 100,000 civil servants will lose their jobs by 2020.

Add to them the other public sector staff laid off this decade: the librarians, the town hall clerks.

Consider the deprofessionalisation going on right now in our schools, so that nearly half of all teachers are planning to leave.

Think about the middle classes working for the private sector and the impossible targets they have to follow just so their bosses and shareholders can enjoy the dividends.

This isn’t globalisation: this is Big Finance and its copyists, trampling over workers, families, communities.

What’s left for such workers is the same as their blue-collar counterparts: lower wages, precarious work and a lot of borrowing.

It’s already happening: 17 million British adults have less than £100 in savings.

By some odd social symmetry, just over 17 million Britons voted in June to leave the EU.

Strip away professional protections and you unleash what, 170 years ago, Engels called “the battle of all against all”.

In The Condition of the Working Class in England, he wrote of how “a battle for life, for existence, for everything, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes.

“The power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other.”

I think we’re already there, except this time you can substitute the weavers for the Uber drivers, the hourly paid university lecturers, even the freelance journalists.

Then paint in impossible house prices and rising fuel costs.

And remember that behind Engels’s characterisation was another wealthy elite.

The answer isn’t further to isolate one tribe as having special attributes that need to be mollified or tamed.

It’s to look at the process that isolated them economically and politically and to be aware that we are on the verge of doing the same.

If the rich countries are only now dealing with the electoral fallout of a socioeconomic process that began 40 years ago, then ask yourself: what does a Marine Le Pen for the middle classes look like?