We made a decision at the beginning of August to cease the publication of new material and intended to put together a summary of the political situation as it stands, as well as the opportunities and constraints ahead. This hasn’t happened for a number of reasons, so please accept this explanation by way of a substitute.

The small group of us who contributed to Left Luggage got together earlier this summer to assess what we had achieved in the four months the site had been running, and where to go in future. We felt we had produced some valuable, well-written and common-sense content and had built a (very) small niche for ourselves within the Left “blogosphere”, had accumulated a small following of regular readers and comment-posters, and had established some tentative links with activists involved in other blogs and groups. We also had articles published elsewhere on sites like ZNet and Dissident Voice that allowed us to reach a wider audience.

However, we recognised some limitations to the project that called into question whether its continuation was worthwhile. These were primarily:

1) The amount of time and energy needed for a small number of people to maintain a regular supply of high-quality content (many of our pieces have been lengthy compared to other blogs). Clearly we have limited time outside of work and we therefore felt that in the long term this could compromise the local political initiatives the group is involved with individually, simply because of the time we were tending to devote to Left Luggage. Obviously this would contradict the key strategic direction we have been advocating. In addition, one of the two editors of the site is planning to launch a new project with young people in London this autumn, which will even further squeeze the time available to update Left Lugagge.

2) While we had established a regular readership of about 100 unique users per day, we seemed to have plateaued despite some peaks when we had content posted on other website or articles of especial interest to a wider readership. Most of the people posting on the website seemed to be (largely) receptive to what we have been argued; they were generally broadly in accord with our analysis of the Left, its limitations and key elements of a future strategy. Therefore, if we were mainly reaching the same people using similar same arguments, with which they generally agreed, it raised the question as to how much use Left Luggage could be in promoting this perspective.

3) Additionally, we felt at the risk of repeating ourselves. In the 75 articles we have published since March, we have covered a lot of ground and an enormous variety of issues. But fundamentally we are addressing ourselves to the same cluster of problems and proposing a modest set of strategic solutions. From the beginning we set ourselves the task of covering a specific central issue: why is the Left so weak and out of touch with the vast majority of working class people. We never sought to cover every international or even national issue, and do not propose to offer a detailed political theory, just some simple strategic points.

That we had a limited reception on the Left as a whole is not surprising for a small blog updated only a few times a week. What we also noticed was that there are really a very limited number of avenues for open, non-partisan discussion on the Left. When you consider specifically strategic issues, the number shrinks even further. There is virtually nowhere where the Left engages in self-critical strategic discussion. That this is the case says volumes about where the Left is and why for the short-term it will remain stranded in a quagmire of irrelevance.

But the tasks for the Left remain as ever: speaking to the concerns of working class people; proving itself to be the best fighters for the immediate interests of that class; engaging in long-term political work to rebuild working class self-organisation and political culture. Simple as these tasks may be, we unfortunately see no advancement among the Left as a whole towards the adoption of such an approach. As such, there can surely be little hope that the British Left is going to step out of the wings and into centre-stage.

For readers who have come to this blog late, we would like to point out some articles that we believe have particular value: on the Left’s general malaise; our approach to crime and anti-social behaviour; the fetishising of international movements; on young people under neo-liberalism; on the imoportance of culture in class analysis, and another article on the same topic; and on anti-fascism.

For regular readers of Left Luggage, all that remains is to thank you wholeheartedly for taking an interest in the blog and for contributing to discussions here, which have been very productive and useful. Thank you once again.

There’s now a podcast of an interview with Mark Jones, who initiated the group, online here and it is interesting to hear of the challenges this group has faced setting up, the issues it is attempting to tackle, and how it plans to go about this.

Mark mentions the lack of any form of self-organisation in the area previously, a situation replicated in many areas of the country and one that the Left could be focusing on addressing. We wish Mark and the group much success. The long-term political dividends of this kind of work – if initiated on a wide scale – should be obvious.

It’s a curious strategy considering how ineffective it has shown itself to be in lifting the Left from the margins politically or bridging the gulf with the vast majority of working class people. Yet it is still pursued. The reasons for this failure to take questions of strategy seriously are not immediately obvious, but there seems to be a fundamental distinction between those who view political work as a matter of “intervening” and those who view “building” as the key task. This is something we hope to explore in another post soon.

One thing that’s clear is that “building” takes as it starting point what has been described as “the politics of everyday life”: political work that does not necessarily take on an explicitly political form, but is interested in winning trust, building political culture, community, and organisation. In other words, tasks that are totally appropriate for a defensive posture that recognises the current state of play. This is long, hard work. But we on Left Luggage have argued consistently that it is the only way forward. A comment on yesterday’s post summed this up well, arguing that to build working class politics it is really only “the long game or nothing”:

the left might accept that you cannot parachute into working class areas and expect instant credibility, particularly if the comrades you are sending in are people who have actually don’t have a clue about life in these areas.

Perfectly timed for this discussion is news of the Independent Working Class Association’s under-12s football tournament held in Oxford. The event sounds like a fantastic day, with about 250 people turning up including coaches from Swansea and London. It is just one of many forms of community engagement the IWCA has initiated in the city:

The IWCA in Oxford has, in its short history, managed to organise events such as a Saturday morning Children’s Cinema Club, a SATs booster course for school children and numerous community away-days — on top of it’s many political activities.

The article also points out that even until quite recently the Labour Party itself had established social and cultural links in working class communities:

But even as recently as the mid-1990’s, Labour still had social and cultural links with working class communities in places such as Oxford through it’s Labour social clubs and their affiliated sporting associations.

Such forms of organisation once formed part of the bedrock of the labour movement but they have withered and died in most places. There are important lessons for the Left, which for far too long has eschewed such everyday activity in favour of “interventions” that do nothing to establish deep roots or organisation in working class communities.

In the immediate term the steering committee appointed a working group that will report back in September. Its remit is to come up with an alternative name and a basic programmatic document that can be added to later. In addition, another union besides the RMT will be present at the September meeting and committee members will be talking to the leaderships of a further four unions about their participation.

According to the report, there seem to be some good things coming out of this initiative. One of those is the mooted discussions with four more unions about participation in the platform. If that were to occur, it would no doubt mark a significant moment in terms of the historic political/economic division of labour within the labour movement. Also, there seems to be some hints of recognition of making links with localised campaigns and small community-oriented parties:

Dave [Nellist, Socialist Party councillor in Coventry] also said he would like to see the coalition sit down with localised defenders of public services who already have some representation – people like Wigan’s Community Action Party and the Socialist Peoples Party in Barrow. But they’re only going to come on board any sort of left formation if they feel they have a say in its development.

As has been argued on Left Luggage, the number of community action groups has swelled enormously in the last ten years – charting the decline of the Labour Party as an organisation with a grassroots presence – and although many campaigns are formally apolitical, they articulate many of the values and ideas the Left should be championing.

There are a number of problems with No2EU 2.0 already on the horizon, however. One of these is the question of internal democracy, which was raised the first time around, and it remains to be seen how this will be resolved. The basic progamme itself is being decided by the steering committee and apparently the Communist Party is pushing for the broad People’s Charter to form its foundation.

The larger question – and probably the biggest problem – was apparently raised by one comrade at the regional meeting. That is, the platform is explicitly focused on the next General Election when “millions of voters will be afloat thanks to the collapse of Labour’s electoral support”.  In his report, A Very Public Sociologist says: “If we are to claim some of that and start building a mass alternative we have to get out into communities with our socialist message now.”

Unfortunatley, this is to vastly underestimate the scale of the challenge facing the Left. No2EU was put together at a late stage and had no roots in working class communities. It got a derisory vote in the Euro elections. The fact that it was so late in forming was one of the main explanations given by its supporters for this failure. Yet now we have No2EU 2.0 with scarcely four months more in which to bed in before being put to the electorate in June 2010 at the earliest. So at the most optimistic estimate, with the steering committee’s “working group” reporting back in September, we can expect this Left alternative to be whipped up just nine months before the election.

Every attempt to form a Left platform in recent years seems to be characterised by two things: (1) a focus on elections and chasing Labour’s vote; (2) no serious pause to consider long-term strategy. This leads to a vicious cycle of initiatives being established in haste aimed at an upcoming election, failure, and demoralisation.

The scale of the challenge facing the Left is such that it will need years of serious political work in working class communities to even consider mounting a less than appalling General Election showing. One has to wonder at the purpose of even standing in the election, which will no doubt prove a hugely costly affair with lost deposits all round. A year hence we will no doubt be asking the same question: where now for the Left? As one representative at the meeting put it:

Dave Church of Walsall Democratic Labour Party argued we were in danger of going around in a circle if we just chase after elections. We need to be more consistent and seek roots in our communities.

But they have also been appropriated and often stripped of their class content by the liberal academy which seem to forget Gramsci was a founder member and later leader of the communist party in Italy and that this was the context of his thought. In the 1970s and 1980s the so-called “Eurocommunists” used Gramsci to justify a retreat from social struggle. His work was latterly taken up by academics involved in “discourse analysis” who, although they found regrettable the “economistic residue” of privileging the role of class in his analysis, nevertheless took up his ideas now stripped of this archaic content.

This could happen partly due to the mystifying nature of his most important work, The Prison Notebooks, written in a coded style while his was imprisoned by Mussolini, but it is also due to the power of his thought. Yet precisely because Gramsci in his notebooks written between 1929 and 1935 is reflecting on a period of utter defeat for the Left, with the triumph of fascism and the destruction of the communist party, he is useful for us today. Clearly we are not in a period of defeat in any way comparable to the moment in which Gramsci was writing. But nevertheless, the Left in Britain finds itself at low ebb historically, with its political forces small, its influence low, and its ideas marginalized.

On Left Luggage we try to avoid straying into too theoretical territory, trying to stick to straightforward analysis, strategic questions and “common sense”. Therefore, we will only summarize a selection of key points that can be found in Gramsci’s thought, focusing on what we might effectively call counterhegemony i.e. the most urgent task from the Left’s point of view today.

1. Hegemony: Gramsci’s great innovation was in developing the concept of hegemony. Reacting to both the objective political situation in Italy at the end of the 1920s and the economism of the Second International, whose dominant current argued proletarian revolution was inevitable due to the development of contradictions within capitalism. It is clear from Gramsci’s writings that hegemony involves something more than mere political ascendency. He says of the Jacobins of revolutionary France:

“…not only did they organize a bourgeois government, i.e. make the bourgeoisie the dominant class- they did more. They created the bourgeois State, made the bourgeoisie into the leading, hegemonic class of the nation, in other words gave the new State a permanent basis and created the compact modern French nation.”[1]

Thus we can see that hegemony really entails both political dominance and the shaping of the ideological structure and the production of what Gramsci calls “common sense” by a particular class.

2. Moral and Intellectual leadership: In expounding this notion of hegemony, Gramsci makes a clear distinction between intellectual and moral leadership and political leadership. In fact he makes clear that a “hegemonic bloc” leading at this intellectual and moral level is a necessary precursor to attaining political leadership:

“…a class is dominant in two ways, i.e. ‘leading’ and ‘dominant’. It leads the classes which are its allies, and dominates those which are its enemies. Therefore, even before attaining power a class can (and must) ‘lead’; when it is in power it becomes dominant, but continues to ‘lead’ as well…there can and must be a ‘political hegemony’ even before the attainment of governmental power, and one should not count solely on the power and material force which such a position gives in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony.”[2]

And:

“A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it formally in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well.”[3]

3.  The cultural aspect: The previous quotation should make it clear that Gramsci does not see social change as a simply matter of one class attaining dominance over another. In fact, Gramsci constantly lays stress on how one of the major tasks facing a “subaltern group” in attaining hegemony is the winning over of other social formations which it will lead through the reshaping of the ideological field. This involves the effective creation of a revolutionary subject, a “collective man”. It is also interesting to note that Gramsci stresses the importance of language and the formation of a shared culture as a precursor to creating such a unity:

From this one can deduce the importance of the ‘cultural aspect’, even in practical (collective) activity. An historical act can only be performed by ‘collective man’, and this presupposes the attainment of a ‘cultural-social’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world […] Since this is the way things happen, great importance is assumed by the general question of language, that is, the question of collectively attaining a single cultural “climate”.[4]

4. Building the new from the old: A point which leads on from this is that Gramsci does not envisage “collective man” as sweeping away all former ideologies. Rather, it is clear that challenging groups must transform the existing ideological terrain to craft a new world-view built on the “hegemonic principle” of the “fundamental class”.

5. Acquiring autonomy: The creation of such a collective subject – united around a common culture and language (meant in the sense of discourse) – leads to a two-stage process for Gramsci, whereby attaining autonomy as a collective actor and gaining support from allied groups are vital phases. In discussing the Italian state, he says:

“In order to become a State, they had to subordinate or eliminate the former and win the active or passive assent of the latter. A study of how these innovatory forces developed, from subaltern groups to hegemonic and dominant groups, must therefore seek out and identify the phases through which they acquired: 1. Autonomy vis-à-vis the enemies they had to defeat, and 2. support from the groups which actively or passively assisted them; for this entire process was historically necessary before they could unite in the form of a State.”[5]

6. Ideology as a terrain of struggle: Gramsci breaks with the idea of “class ideology” in the sense of a ruling class ideology imposing its ideas on other classes and society at large. He argues explicitly against forms of reductive Marxist thought that propose either the notion of “false consciousness” or the idea that ideology is merely an element of the superstructure determined by the economic base of society.

Gramsci conceives of ideology much more in the sense of “the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc”[6] thus it cannot be conceived of purely in the sense of ideological domination. This being the case, he argues that many elements of ideology in a given society are in a sense value-free and are given content by being articulated in a particular way by a certain “fundamental class” around a “hegemonic principle”. He seems to suggest such a principle is based upon a value-system intrinsically related to the central role of the (hence) “fundamental class” in the relations of production.

7. Ideology as a material force: Gramsci stresses the material nature of ideology. He sees how ideas are manifested always in social practice and the apparatus of the state and formations of “civil society”. Quoting Marx approvingly, Gramsci says:

“It is worth recalling the frequent affirmation made by Marx on the ‘solidity of popular beliefs’ as a necessary element of a specific situation. Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant.”[7]

The use of Gramsci today

There are a number of important stresses in Gramsci’s thought that the Left would be well to take heed of today. In all of these elements, it becomes clear that ideology is a field of struggle in which some of our most important battles are waged. But this does not mean simply a retreat to ideas alone. It means refashioning existing ideas in society through social practice, crafting a shared language, and building a common culture that has the potential to lead other social groups through its reshaping of the elements of the dominant ideology.

These are not merely abstract points of theory; they have a practical application to our everyday practice. We have to recognize the centrality of relating to the working class as it is, not as we wish it to be. That means analyzing the current ideologies that are dominant and not dismissing them merely as “ruling class ideas” but seeking to transform them through practice. Gramsci also indicates the need to talk in the language – in the sense of discourse – of working class people, rather than engaging in the kind of campaigns and struggles that have little relevance to people’s everyday lives.

The final central point is the need to be in a position of moral and intellectual leadership, which can only be accomplished by creating a common culture. This implies the need for the long-term hard-work of building at community level, challenging existing ideologies through practice and forming new social institutions. This is the opposite of the “interventions” approach of many Left groups that does not have a long-term vision and views particular struggles instrumentally.

Notes:

1. Antonio Gramsci, 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence & Wishart: London, p. 79
2. Ibid. p. f57
3. Ibid., pp. 57-8
4. Ibid., p. 349
5. Ibid., p. 53
6. Ibid., p. 377
7. Ibid., p. 377

He relates his analysis to the Independent Working Class Association’s identification of a “lumpen attitude”, highlighted in a previous piece on Left Luggage, that is ultimately counter to working class values and destructive to communities. The writer correctly argues that the Left as a whole needs to recognise such attitudes and behaviour as something that needs to be countered:

It doesn’t do the left any good to pretend that the attitudes of a significant section of the school population stink.  The constant invokation of ‘rights’ and selfish disregard for anyone else (be they other pupils or teachers) is prevalent in many classrooms.  As is the baiting of teachers, who have little real power over pupils.[...]

The lumpen attitude, as identified by the IWCA, of ‘venal and brazen opportunism’ and the decline of working class ideals, is undoubtedly as a result of the atomisation and decline in traditional working class organisations and institutions. This has in turn led to a decline in the working class values identified in the quote above, to which I would add the spirit of self and collective improvement. This does seem to have been a significant factor behind the escalation of problems in the classroom over the last 30 years.

Much of the Left might find fault with this analysis, given the strong tendency to romanticise an idealised “working class” while largely remaining distanced from it. Even if such a heretical notion were permitted, the solutions offered would not doubt be along the lines of: “Unless we abolish capitalism…”, merely reinforcing the Left’s impotence as regards practical politics in the here and now. V&A attempts to bridge this gap by suggesting a “twin-track approach”:

The solution is to acknowledge that these problems cannot be dealt with in schools, but only by a fundamental change in society involving a radicalisation of the working class. There is no solution under capitalism. What seems most effective is a twin-track approach of building opposition to capitalism while pursuing policies within a classroom or school that ensure that the needs of the majority are not hampered or denied by the behaviour and actions of a minority.

It needs to be acknowledged that workers and their families demand fairness, the cause of which doesn’t seem to be furthered by doing little to sort out problems in the classroom (and the problem’s parents) or be seen to be actively rewarding bad behaviour with trips and one-to-one attention. Defending this makes the Left look ridiculous, and can only benefit the Right

V&A raises some very important aspects of this question here, especially that such problems cannot be dealt with in schools but are determined by trends in society at large and therefore it is changes in this arena – most importantly “a radicalisation of the working class” – that can tackle these issues. But he doesn’t really seem to bridge the gap just mentioned.

He correctly identifies anti-social behaviour and the “lumpen attitude” identified by the IWCA – similar to what we have elsewhere described as Thatcherite values that have had a wider influence – as something the Left needs to counter. What’s more the Left needs to resist this practically, rather than just telling people such problems are impossible to solve under capitalism (and therefore that they have to live with them, since capitalism shows few signs of collapsing any time soon).

In this case at least, however, it is possible to argue that there is a solution – or at least possible improvements to the situation – under the present economic system, since V&A himself suggests there has been an “escalation of problems” over the last 30 years. Thus it might be the case that a “single-track” approach – getting on with practical work that embodies the Left’s values and furthers its objectives – can be pursued in many cases.

This does not been sidelining radicalism, but it means refocusing attention on practical issues and providing solutions alongside the long-term work of trying to build community values, solidarity and political culture. In reality this in itself is far more radical – and effective, especially in a time when defensive formations are the order of the day – than the political impotence that comes with not going beyond identifying capitalism as the culprit behind social problems.

A first point to note is that the post’s author Andy Newman doesn’t quite fix on what precisely he is discussing, shifting from assessing the “anti-war movement” to an “appraisal of the Stop the War Coalition”, to “the Stop the War movement”. These are not synonymous; almost anyone involved in activism around the Iraq war will recognise these mean different things; many people I know from local groups truly resented the STWC for its centralism, its lack of democracy, and its London-centric nature.

Nevertheless, the thrust of Newman’s argument is precisely the structural problems of the STWC, largely its non-demoncratic nature and the dominance of the SWP, meant that local groups split into either those that operated as “SWP fronts” and followed the line decided by STWC centrally, or they became less political local coalitions that – because of the non-democratic nature of the STWC, largely ignored its edicts:

The result was that the Stop the War Coalition became a relatively ossified national organisation, that often viewed the local groups as being suspiciously off message (the local groups tended to be more politically conservative, but imaginative in practice than the national leadership). This also meant that the debate that needed to be held about strategy never happened.

This is a pretty fair outline and serves to highlight how non-democratic organisations like the STWC (whose annual “conference” is almost entirely a parade of Left celebrity speeches and the election of the national officers by a single-slate system) are hindered operationally by their very structure. Rather than centralisation making decision-making more effective, it actually hinders it, especially in a context without the disciplinary mechanisms to ensure “centralism”.

What Newman doesn’t mention, and we would also highlight, is an element of the dynamics at the local level. That is, what was the relationship between anti-war activists and their locality? What were the demographics of the groups? How well placed were activists to mobilise more deeply in their local communities? How was anti-war activism linked to other community campaigns and organising?

As coincidence would have it, today I chanced upon some notes I made nearly five years ago reflecting on my experience in the anti-war movement when I was a student, which partly spurred this post. They’re a little rough and refer only to events in my local area around 2002-3. It’s a pretty lamentable story on reflection and I hope readers will forgive the naivity shown and recognise the crucial lessons learned:

We managed to bring out record numbers at meeting after event after demonstration. But a feeling lingered that there was a layer of people we were missing. So the anti-war group made a decision that because the scale of opposition was becoming so massive it would be useful to form sub-groups in communities across the town.

Being an active member of the group required a lot of time and effort. And there were sure to be people who, for whatever reason, felt they could not give such a level of commitment. But they still might be inclined to do a certain level of activity – leafleting their street, getting neighbours and fellow workers to come on the demonstration, or attending smaller area meetings. This would get them involved. A community strategy would also enable the anti-war group to reach people directly and on a more personal level than it could otherwise hope to.

Successful sub-groups were set up in the a couple of places. On a demonstration just before the war, hundreds of residents took part from these relatively small areas. Inspired by their initial success, my housemates and I decided to set up a sub-group in our own community. We booked a local church hall for a meeting, distributed a leaflet to every house in the area, and then waited. But no one from the area turned up. Not at our first meeting, or second, or third. We wound up the group after that.

So why was the response so terrible in our area compared to other places where sub-groups were launched? A number of reasons spring to mind. The social breakdown of these areas is very different. Our area was very much a working class community, overwhelmingly composed of council and housing association housing, whereas the other two areas are predominantly middle-class and included many students. That’s not to say working class people were more supportive of the war (in fact, opinion polls showed the opposite). It’s fair to say that the anti-war movement largely, and certainly in this town, had a middle-class character. For instance, time and again, the large working class areas of the town were missed out on mass leaflet drops, even though they constituted the largest proportion of the town’s population.

We were not established activists in the area, and because we were students we were automatically out of step with the rest of the community. There were real problems of crime, anti-social behaviour and drugs around the area at that time; all that was obvious. Working class people in the area had probably never had contact with a left-wing group until our leaflet dropped onto the mat, apart from maybe a Socialist Alliance flyer at election time. It is likely that no leftist group had shown any inclination to fight for the community’s interests. And our lealfet said nothing about the multitude of problems having a serious effect on their quality of life. So it’s unsurprising that no one in the area responded or paid our efforts the slightest respect.

This is not to say the war was not an issue for people in the area, but that left-wing activists need to fight for working class people’s interests consistently and on the most pressing issues. Only then, in the long term, could we have achieved success in our local anti-war organising efforts. Community politics is a serious business: building respect, confidence and support is a long and arduous process, but there are no short cuts.

We were blinded to this fact and were met with a deserving response.

In the post in question we tried to delineate two definitions of class, one based on a structural economic analysis (a broad definition) an one based on social or cultural criteria (a narrow definition). The point seems obvious to us. However, we can understand that many on the Left will recoil at such an argument. I had a debate recently with a friend who argued university lecturers were very bit as working class as factory workers. True in one sense, as we admitted. Yet to be blinded to the very obvious differences between these two groups of workers is to be blinded by one’s own ideology.

At its heart this is a strategic point. It is obvious that those on the Left are constantly having to make decisions about what issues to take up, what tactics to adopt, who they attempt to reach and how. Much of this is automatic and, one might say, unconscious; poeple do what is “common sense”. Equally, much of this, particularly in the far-left parties, takes the form of commands from above. Regardless, the point still stands.

Obviously there are an infinite number of possible options facing Left activists in making these decisions. Even more obvious is the fact that some actions (and slogans, arguments, issues etc.) will resonate more with ordinary people than others, some will be better at mobilising, some will be more effective in their goals etc.

Our argument is essentially culture plays a central role in defining what is “common sense”  to different people. It would not be unfair to say that the Left pretty much has its own subculture that is reproduced by its members. It is also true to say that the social class demographic of the Left as a whole is not representative of either the population at large nor working class people.

If one takes account of culture and how ideas about what seems “natural” are formed, it becomes clear that an economic account of class is too crude a tool; even if the university lecturer and the factory worker have a similar position in the relations of production, this does not mean their ideas, experiences, culture etc. will be identical. Such an understanding, while valuable, needs to be supplemented by an understanding of social class and the role this plays in making choices. This affects the Left all the way down the line strategically.

Blogger Vengeance and Fashion makes the point well that the Left needs to engage the working class where it is, rather than where we wish it would be. He is referring the “ultra-Left” groups and the tendency to prioritise theory over action, and also the danger of action for action’s sake. But the point applies equally to the Left’s attitude towards “intervening” in struggles with its own ideas of the important issues facing working class people, rather than attempting the long hard task of understanding and building from where things stand:

More than anything, we need to open our ears and listen not just to other Leftists, but other workers, who often have a complex set of views that don’t fit into a box.  Once we’ve listened, then we can make our comments, dealing with their concerns and interests, and broadening it out to the big picture, hopefully setting them on the way to looking at the system itself as a problem.

Criticisms, comments and stinging ripostes are, as always, very welcome.

“Electoral fronts are not enough”

First up is Kofi Kyerewaa writing at The Commune on the notion of “no platform”. No doubt the tack of the article was inspired by the Unite Against Fascism (UAF) action outside the Palace of Westminster that saw BNP leader Nick Griffin’s press conference curtailed under a hail of eggs, placards and chants of “Nazi scum, off our streets”, along with the potential prosecution of the party by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Kyerewaa places the origin of “no platform” with National Union of Students’ policy of the early 1990s, a point those with a history in the militant anti-fascist movement might resist. He argues strongly that the Left should oppose attempts to encourage forms of state action against the BNP:

Electoral victories for the BNP shows that it isn’t working. Such adherence to the principle of being willing to physically fight but not ideologically fight the BNP is absurd when they are close to controlling councils and have elected members of the European Parliament. The BNP are not going to be banned. Neither should we clamour for it: fascist ideas are not defeated by state diktat.

Though the idea that the Left as a whole is currently willing to “physically fight” the far-right is rather odd (and it would be a ridiculous strategy if it were the case), we must take the point that we need to combat the far-right ideologically and in practice. At present although the Left is willing to do the former (contra what Kyerewaa suggests) the problem is that the Left is stymied by its strategies and priorities. Ideology is inherently related to action and it is on both fronts that the Left is weak. Kyerewaa ably stresses this point, and proposes some attractive solutions that have long been avoided:

When socialists are campaigning on bread and butter issues like council housing or unemployment, working class people are dealt out rhetoric and propagandistic activity rather than mutual aid and support. The hard-left’s love-hate affair with the Labour Party has crippled it in acting independently on delivering social solutions. The BNP have been growing steadily in councillors, a prelude of bigger electoral gains, because they canvass through door-knocking much more than the radical left. Electoral fronts are not enough: we need a political project that is long-term in thinking and is relentless in building a constituency in communities and not just in remote trade union bureaucrats’ offices. [...]

Working people will only trust a political party that not only offers real change to the status quo, but appears to know how to do it. This is why community organising is so important

He goes on to say that this explains the relative success of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) compared to its counterparts south of the border. While this is perhaps true, and we don’t know enough about the details of the political work of each, the SSP has only had moderate success and cannot be taken as a simple template.

“The BNP vote was based on real racist hatred”

Next up is a more problematic article by Denis Fernando, of the Lesbian and Gay Coalition Against Racism, which was posted on the Socialist Unity blog. At first, the argument seems to have potential. Fernando argues: “The anti-fascist movement must review its strategy to deal with the increased fascist threat. There have been many debates in recent years and reality has now put them to the test.” We can concur with that. Fernando, however, goes on to say:

A united strategy, which brings together all these social forces and challenges the racist myths which are the cutting edge of the BNP, is the key to success. [...] The anti-fascist movement’s strategy must be based on what works. Not wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds of trade union funds on a strategy that divides and weakens the anti-fascist majority.

In the abstract, unity makes sense. But what it amounts to in practise, as we recently outlined, is the unity of those with the greatest interest in opposing the BNP and those who are most passionately opposed, which has usually amounted to those supporting the Labour Party whether explicitly or implicitly. The outcome of this mode of thinking finds expression in Fernando’s diagnosis of the reasons for the BNP’s rise:

The BNP vote was based on real racist hatred as shown in the yougov poll for Channel 4 on the European elections.

By claiming support for the far-right is simply driven by racism Fernando effectively avoids the necessary examination of the genuine social dynamics behind BNP support. While it’s true that BNP voters tend to be more racist than the average voter, they also tend to be massively more alienated on a whole host of social measures, as we showed recently using the same polling data [pdf] quoted by Fernando. Of course racism is part of it, but it is by no means all of it.

Such an analysis leads naturally to the failing strategies we have already seen and that Fernando claims he wants to transcend. How do you combat a vote based on racism? You target non-racist voters to support established parties. What such a perspective avoids is the need to establish a political alternative to the BNP seeking to address the concerns of working class people.

“That is the job of politicians”

The Channel 4 YouGov poll has generated plenty of mileage for those who pursue such a strategy. Searchlight pursues more nuanced line by emphasising the fact that economic and political concerns form an important part of BNP support. Nick Lowles, of Searchlight, says:

It is an increasingly hard and loyal vote which is based on political and economic insecurities and moulded by deep-rooted racial prejudice. [...] The BNP [...] is the voice of a section of the white working class, particularly in those areas of traditional industry that have experienced the greatest economic and social upheaval over the past twenty years.

At the same time, however, Lowles rejects the notion that anti-fascists can engage in any form of positive political action whatsoever, arguing that this should be left to the mainstream parties:

We can mobilise the anti-BNP vote and even sometimes suppress the pro-BNP vote but we cannot build houses and reduce waiting lists; we cannot prevent undercutting of wages and the abuse of migrant workers. Local anti-fascist movements cannot get resources into communities, often the poorest, dealing with extraordinary levels of migration. That is the job of politicians and political parties.

The end result of such logic is shown when Lowles, incredibly, finds hope in the fact that “many of those equally disillusioned with the political process did not vote BNP but stayed at home”. This amounts to a form of political abstentionism and neglect. It underlines the fact that anti-fascism tied to the Labour Party is, in the final analysis, unable to meet the political challenges raised by the BNP’s rise.

“Build a broad anti-fascist movement”

Unite Against Fascism (UAF) pursue a broadly similar line in a policy document published this week. It contains all the usual lines of mainstream anti-fascism, arguing the BNP are attempting to pose as a “respectable” party, that they will “worm their way into the media establishment” etc. It also argues, misreading the same YouGov polling data, that BNP voters are “working class Tories” and don’t have genuine economic concerns (based on the fact that other issues top their lists of concerns).

Thus it says: “It is this com­bination of racism and resentment that drives them into the arms of the BNP, rather than notions of a multicultural elite betraying the ‘white working class’.” The fact that these two statements are quite compatible does not seem to have occurred to UAF. In any case, what’s the solution?

The urgent task is to build a broad anti-fascist movement with deep roots in working class areas, ethnic minority com­munities, LGBT organisations and the trade union movement. And it means building an active mass movement, one that is capable of mobilising for both elections and demonstrations against the BNP. Fascist parties are not simply electoral or­ganisations, so anti-fascists cannot be either. Fascist parties are not simply racist propagandists, so anti-fascists cannot re­strict themselves to anti-racist propaganda.

In terms of practical action, UAF plans to hold a national conference and a demonstration outside the BNP’s annual rally in rural Derbyshire next month. Unfortunately, this “analysis document” skimps on an examination of UAF strategy: this is simply more of the same. Both Searchlight and UAF touch on some of the critical issues that now need to be at the heart of an effective anti-fascist campaign, but neither takes the quantumn leap needed to reorientate themselves to those ends.

“A racism of desperation”

To finish on a more useful note, Dave Osler gives a far better analysis of reasons for the BNP’s growing support than the two leading anti-fascist groups. He starkly sets out the challenge facing anti-fascists and the Left:

This is instead a racism rooted in the collapse of social housing, a racism born of the disappearance of blue collar employment and grassroots trade union organisation, a racism of benefit cuts, a racism centred on the perception that nobody in a position of authority really gives a shit. You might even want to call it a racism of desperation.

Please tell us the main aims of Youth Fight for Jobs and how it is seeking to achieve those aims?

The Youth Fight for Jobs campaign was launched in January 2009. As we saw it, youth unemployment was set to continue rising, with the situation of mass youth unemployment becoming the norm for a whole number of years. Not only that, but the main parliamentary parties were still committed to an agenda of privatising and attacks on the working class. Education privatisation and a lack of decent services were also set to be a feature of young peoples future. After a general election university fees will almost certainly be raised, cutting out many working class youth from education. So the campaign was launched, not only to combat youth unemployment, but also to fight for a future for young people. So the headline aims of the campaign are for the right to a decent job with a living wage, for apprenticeships with jobs at the end, and against university fees. There is also a broader set of demands that appear on the website and on the leaflets.

Those aims can only be achieved through mass action of young people and workers. Labour, the Tories or the Lib Dems will not introduce these measures if just asked for it. It will be a question of building a mass movement in order to make it clear that this is what the majority of people want. I think the example of the French youth movement against the CPE is the best recent example of how that strategy can win victories, but also the anti-poll tax campaign in the early nineties, the school student strikes in the mid eighties in Britain, but also in france and spain. These show very clearly that it is possible to fight and to win.

YFfJ seems to be a campaign with very ambitious goals. What would constitute a success for the campaign?

This campaign is going to be around as long as mass youth unemployment is! I think there are a number of battles which will take place over specific issues. In September, many universities and colleges face savage cuts in their budgets, with whole courses going in a lot of cases. In addition, tens of thousands of young people will be excluded from university because of a government miscalculation. In January, the government are introducing compulsory working for some unemployed young people – there will have to be a battle to ensure that young people are not used to drive down workers wages and conditions. There is clearly going to be a massive battle over pay in the public sector. I’ve already mentioned the prospect of university fees going up as well. I think that activists from the campaign will be involved in all of these struggles, and clearly a victory on any of them would be a success. Local groups are getting together and forming demands locally for the campaign on the question of youth unemployment and lack of opportunities in those areas as well. But those examples are defending young people and workers from attacks on our present conditions. The stated aim of the campaign is to win a decent future for young people, and we will fight until we achieve it.

There is also a question over whether capitalism can achieve our demands. From the point of view of those in power, the vastly wealthy ruling class, unemployment is good as competition for jobs can help drive down wages. The recent news that ‘bonuses are back’ shows just how little the rich have had to pay for the present crisis. But for a programme of socially useful job creation, to end unemployment and provide decent jobs and education for young people, and the population as a whole, would take a massive struggle. I think that some of the demands can be won under capitalism. After all, the NHS and other reforms were won on the basis of a mass movement. But I also think that there’s a fundamental divide in society between the interests of the tiny rich elite and of the mass of the population. If capitalism cannot afford to implement and maintain a decent future for young people, I think young people can’t afford capitalism.

What is YFFJ’s strategy? Who are you seeking to recruit to the campaign; what tactics do you intend to use; who exactly are you trying to influence and why?

The aim of the campaign is to build a mass movement, and to reach out and involve young people in the campaign and in political activity. It should involve all young people; workers, unemployed, school, college and university students, white, black, Asian, migrant, LGBT, etc. Young people from a middle class background will also be affected by the crisis and hit by unemployment, the YFfJ campaign is as much for them as it is for working class youth.

We have especially made an appeal to the trade union movement to get involved in the campaign. I think that the unions have huge potential power in society. The RMT union has been able to win and maintain relatively good working conditions for tube drivers and other staff on the London underground, through a fighting union policy, including strike action to defend those conditions. Building links, supporting workers in struggle is vital to the success of the campaign.

I also think that youth fight for jobs could play a role in supporting young people organising in the workplace. The vast majority of young people are not unionised, or in workplaces organised in the unions. If we were approached by a group of young people wanting to organise a trade union, and to fight for better conditions, the campaign would offer them every assistance in that fight.

But there’s also a need for a generalised struggle. A victory for workers in one workplace is inspirational, and can inspire others to take action. Already this year we have seen victories at Linemar, Visteon and Lindsey Oil Refinery. I think that the campaign should help to get the word out about these victories and explain their significance to young people especially. But this is a campaign for all youth, for a decent future. So we will campaign in the local areas, in the workplaces, but also link that up to a national fight back. The present fortnight of action is a good example. Areas are organising demonstrations, lobbies, pickets, gigs, protests, stalls, meetings, etc. Some are highlighting local issues, but it is part of an action that is taking place around the country, linking it to the struggle nationwide.

These general demands are demands that we place on the government. This government had the power to introduce university fees, we say it should use that power to scrap them. Margaret Thatcher’s government scrapped the Youth Training Schemes, which seems to me to be what the ‘future jobs’ fund is based on. A minimum wage has been introduced, we argue that it should be set a level that allows people to live a decent life. But New Labour and the Tories are parties in the pockets of the rich. It will only be through the pressure of a mass campaign that they would acquiesce to these demands. But for example with the minimum wage, even at the present low level there are exemptions and evasions galore. Only an active workers movement can maintain decent conditions at work and in education.

Working class young people in the UK seem to be quite depoliticised, and there is little evidence to suggest that they are attracted to progressive or socialist politics. What are the chances of the campaign gaining recruits amongst working class youth? Is there a danger that this campaign will attract mainly middle class students, and will therefore reflect middle class rather than working class concerns?

I think the question puts a bit of a false split between the interests of working class and middle class youth. What are the interests of middle class youth? The right to go to university? I think everyone should be able to attend university, and free education would enable more youth from working class backgrounds to go to university, as well as ease the pressure on those from slightly better off backgrounds.

Of course, we want the campaign to involve young workers as well as those in education. I think that it is a positive sign that the majority of the youth fight for jobs steering committee are not in full time education, ie that they are either at work or looking for a job.

But it is a question that we will have to deal with. The fact that there have not been successful mass movements of youth in our generation does weigh heavily on young people, and their confidence to get involved in struggle. But there have been times that we have been close. Tony Blair thought seriously about resignation during the initial protests against the Iraq war. The government was very nearly defeated on the issue of top-up fees. We have to learn the lessons of those movements and ensure that those mistakes are not repeated.

But beneath the surface, there is definitely anger at the conditions young people are faced with. There have been a number of instances of school student walk outs, against academies, threats to education and staff cuts. University students have also been campaigning against cuts, something that is likely to increase during the next academic year. And, on picket lines with a young workforce and a fighting union, such as the PCS in the public sector, young people are playing an increasingly important role.

Whoever wins the next general election is not going to halt attacks on young people. The Tories are already boasting about the scale of cuts they will make! It will become increasingly clear to young people that they have no choice but to fight. I think that this campaign will have a big role to play in assisting that process.

The 2009 budget contained a number of attacks on working class people, including cuts in public spending and some regressive tax rises, but the media focus was on the rise in the top rate of tax to 50%. This illustrates how little power the left has to influence the media agenda at the moment. Given this climate, do you think YFfJ will be able to influence the media agenda and public opinion?

The media is owned by the likes of Murdoch and other big businessmen. The recent slander against the RMT strike in London shows clearly which side most of the media is on. Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers campaign against Tommy Sheridan in Scotland shows how friendly they are to the left!

But given that, I think youth fight for jobs has had some good media coverage so far. We have been covered by Sky News, the Sun, the Mirror, the Sunday Times, Channel 4 news amongst others, as well as a fair bit of local and regional coverage. If we’re organising sizable protests, then it can be possible to get some coverage. Though having said that, my local newspaper gave our youth fight for jobs demonstration half the coverage it did to a story about cats, so you still have to question their priorities!

But I think that the main way that the campaign will get its message across will be to organise events, get people along, and be a visible and campaigning organisation. It will be the situation that capitalism puts workers and young people in that will push people towards our campaign, rather than relying on the media alone.

According to the Youth Fight for Jobs website, your demonstrations during the G20 summit attracted around 600 people in total, and an activist sympathetic to the campaign said in a comment on our website that about 200 people attended the main march through East London. Compared to the demonstrations in the City, and given the number of unemployed young people in East London, these are very small numbers. Was this disappointing? Why do you think the City demonstrations attracted far more people?

Just on the contradiction in figures, the police estimate was 400 on the demonstration, so I would have said that 600 throughout the course of the day (some people joined and left etc) is a fair estimate.

They are small numbers compared to the task that the campaign has set itself, but I actually think it was an excellent start to the campaign. Given that we had been going for only a few months beforehand, a turnout of 600 was a very positive start to the campaign. It has given us a solid base to build our campaign from there on in. I think undoubtedly we could have picked up more young people along the route of the march had we been given permission to go though more busy areas – along Mile End Road, Cold Harbour Lane etc. As it was it was tough negotiations with the police and we were relatively happy with what we got – it was the only demonstration to get permission to march that day. However, to get this meant that we had to change the starting point in the last 10 days before the demonstration, and despite our efforts some people may well have gone to the old starting point and not seen our supporters who were redirecting people.

I think the issues that we were talking about, the need for the start to a mass campaign, was something new on the scene. We are going to have to win people to the ideas of the campaign, and as I’ve said earlier encourage people to get involved in politics and protest, show people the point. In some ways, the protests at the city were of a different kind – they were a chance for people to show their anger at the finance system, at environmental destruction, at war, but without a commitment to a general programme and strategy. We should also point out the role of the media in hyping up those protests, the coverage that Youth Fight for Jobs got in comparison to the city protests was virtually nil. All the coverage mentioned earlier has been since the G20.

But we were very pleased with the march the G20, the numbers of young people who got involved in that and are now active in building the campaign, the level of trade union support and speakers, and the traditions of the working class that we were alluding to all clearly set out what the campaign was all about.

The Socialist Party is heavily involved in running youth fight for jobs. In the past, many campaigns run by Left parties came to be seen as front groups that prioritised gaining new recruits over building the campaign. Isn’t YFfJ just another front group?

Youth Fight for Jobs is definitely not a front group. It is a broad organisation, involving young people from different political backgrounds. It has the support of three national trade unions – RMT, PCS and CWU – as well as many local trade union branches and community campaigns. We have a democratically elected steering committee involving representatives from the affiliated trade unions and from local groups. Personally, I am a member of the Socialist Party, and the Socialist Party is a supporting organisation, amongst others.

In fact ‘fronts’ has never been a tactic actively pursued by the Socialist Party. If you look at the Shop Stewards Network, the Socialist Party participates in it and plays an important role – but so do others that the Socialist Party works alongside of. In Scotland, the Socialist Party’s sister organisation is involved in Solidarity together with Tommy Sheridan and others on the Left. As Militant, before we changed our name to the Socialist Party, we were involved in the anti-poll tax unions and the Liverpool Labour council, both genuine campaigning bodies with different ideological trends involved, but both led mass campaigns that led to some victories.

Socialist Party members are participating in Youth Fight for Jobs as a genuine campaign. The record of the Socialist Party makes that clear. I think as part of the course of the campaign, our members role as part of the campaign in encouraging genuine debate and discussion and reaching out to involve as many young people as possible will show that yet again.

How broad based is Youth Fight for Jobs? All organisations that are listed on your website as formally supporting the campaign are linked to the Socialist Party. Are other groups involved?

Youth Fight for Jobs has the backing of three national trade unions, which is a vital basis of support for the campaign, and one that we want to broaden. This is in addition to a whole number of local branches, trade union campaigners, and activists and local campaigns.

Members of a number of political organisations that have not pledged formal support have attended our launch conference, moved amendments at the conference, spoke, as well as attended other protests and meetings and activities organised by the campaign. As I’ve said, the campaign is a democratic one, pretty much the only people who we would not allow to join are fascists and scabs.

But the main base of support that we want to involve is the unorganised mass of young people, the 850,000 unemployed under-25s, the millions of school, college and university students, the overwhelming majority of youth who are on low pay, on temporary contracts, up to their eyes in debt, unable to move out from their parents, not in a trade union. It will be by reaching out to those that we build a genuine campaign.

The agenda for your conference on 9 May appears to have a similar format to Stop the War Coalition conferences – lots of speeches by high profile leftwing opinion leaders, but not much opportunity for activists and ordinary members to make suggestions and contribute to debate. Don’t you risk alienating activists with such a strategy?

If we had unlimited funds, my preference would be to have a two day conference with more time for discussion on the issues, I think that that would be better for the campaign and activists would hopefully get more out of it, and more chance to discuss with each other. However, the campaign is relatively new, and short of funds. As it was, the conference cost youth fight for jobs nearly £2,000. There is also the question of time taken out of workers weekends, or holiday that people have to take to attend events as well.

So the conference was a result of trying to make the best use of limited time. And I’m quite pleased to say that we did have a number of speakers, people involved in campaigns and struggles, including activists from the campaign. But there was also some time for discussion in the morning, lots of discussion in the smaller sessions in the afternoon, and also a serious debate about the motions in the afternoon. I don’t think that anyone who had something to say would have gone unheard. It is not ideal to be squeezed for time, but I think that the conference was good given that factor.

What is the structure of the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign? how are decisions made and what mechanisms are there for ordinary members to get their views across?

To get in contact with myself or Sean Figg is fairly easy, just use the contact details on the website! A steering committee was elected at the conference, and members can raise ideas with its members as well. It’s this body that acts as the national leadership. Local groups have the power to recall the steering committee, call an emergency conference etc should they wish. It is the conference that takes the major decisions for the campaign, and if there was to be a major change for the campaign I think it would be necessary to call a conference to democratically discuss it, if at all possible. The aim is as much as possible to allow the campaign to be led by ordinary members. These structures are fairly basic of course, but the campaign is fairly new – it has only had formal membership for less than 2 months! As the campaign develops we will definitely look at developing more structures where necessary.

To an extent we agree with this economically-based definition of class, which stresses workers’ place in the structure of the economy as being the crucial variant that both provides the material interest in and the strategic location for an overthrow of existing social relations. On the other hand, if we confine ourselves to an economic definition of class we exclude important elements of power and culture without which we can easily become strategically hamstrung.

We have argued previously that the Left in Britain is currently dominated by middle class people. What do we mean by this, why is is significant, and how?

One measure of the social class of the British Left would be to examine the social and occupational backgrounds of activists. Dealing with generalities is unavoidable here, but we would argue it is patently the case that middle class people (on this definition) predominate. While many on the Left baulk at the measure, the standard sociological grading of class – using the ABC1 C2DE system – provides a useful measure. It is obvious that for much of the Left, sets B and C1 are vastly over-represented. It is impossible not to generalise, but think of teachers, administrators in the public sector, university lecturers, and students from parents in such occupations. This is purely anecdotal, and many people may disagree. But studies have also shown that so-called “new social movements”, issue-based campaigns such as peace and environmental movements, are dominated by socially middle class people.

Why is this significant? Well, if we acknowledge there is more to people’s ideas and ideologies than simply their relationship to the means of production, we have to start to take account of culture as an important variable. On a simple level, the point is obvious: people with different life experiences will have a different conception of the world, different assumptions and expectations about what is normal, desirable, or possible. We would recognise this intuitively when comparing, say, someone educated at a public school with wealthy parents with someone from a comprehensive school with working class parents. But we fail to recognise less glaring differences between middle class and working class people. So social class creates gaps that are perfectly bridgeable, but nonetheless need to be recognised.

But social class affects priorities and interests, too. Large-scale studies in both France and Britain have shown a remarkably close relationship between social class and cultural taste, such that interests and likings pretty exactly track class. That is not to say this is predetermined, but over a wide field the differences are significant. And there’s the rub. One glance at the priorities of the Left (again, to generalise horribly), what is spoken and written about, demonstrates a remarkable bias towards issues and campaigns that are divorced from the everyday concerns of working class people in Britain.

As we have stated previously, there is an overwhelming emphasis on international movements and events. One needn’t spend time measuring column inches to acknowledge the amount of coverage of, for example, Palestine hugely dwarfs anything written about housing, crime or education. The enormous coverage of the recent protests in Iran compared to the scant focus on the Lindsey oil refinery strikes, which at their height had about 10,000 workers taking illegal solidarity action, is yet more evidence of this trend.

How to account for this? We would argue the overwhelming predominance of international issues (and the slant on national issues) on the Left’s agenda reflects the cultural interests of the Left’s socially middle class base. This is self-reinforcing in that a lot of Left recruitment is targeted at students, who are more likely to be from middle class backgrounds (although this has decreased slightly in recent years) and are also more likely (perhaps even more likely than socially middle class workers) to be interested in such issues.

It is true the Left should be internationalist. It should also be strong and deeply-rooted in working class communities. Unfortunately the latter two precede the former and at present it is neither. It seems like the Left is currently in a vicious circle, with a middle class base producing middle class priorities and maintaining the gulf with the vast majority of working class people. How to bridge this gulf is the real question.

The main hope must be for a turn by the Left towards the politics of everyday life to address those concerns that carry meaning for people beyond the Left milieu. There have been some promising initiatives in recent years from a variety of small groups such as the Independent Working Class Association and Liberty & Solidarity, among others. There has also been a wellspring of locally-focussed, sometimes slightly apolitical, community groups addressing such issues. Perhaps the energy can come from these quarters to break the vicious circle of Left irrelevance.

There are differences in the strategic approaches of Searchlight and Unite Against Fascism, but in the past, mainstream anti-BNP campaigns have shared a number of features. What are these features, and are they still intact following the Euro elections?

1) “Denying them the respectability they crave.”

This element of the strategy is aimed at those who might be tempted to vote BNP – presumably those on low incomes, who hold hardline anti-immigration views and who are disenchanted with establishment politics. The goal is to put off potential BNP voters by creating the impression that the Party is ”beyond the pale” of what is respectable. Elements of this strategy include emphasising the “Nazi” pedigree of certain BNP leaders, listing BNP members’ criminal convictions and arguing that they’re somehow trying to “take advantage” of the democratic process in order to undermine it. To the degree this tactic is successful, it has the useful side effect of legitimising arguments for legal restrictions on the BNP. If they are not a “normal” political party, there is no reason to extend to them the rights enjoyed by other parties. This argument for legal restrictions is often referred to as the “No Platform” argument (although militant anti-fascists might protest that ”no platform” means something quite different).

In the case of UAF, all three elements of this strategy appear to have survivived the Euro election car crash in tact, judging from the interview SWP and UAF leader Martin Smith gave to Channel 4 News. Searchlight, however, seems to have abandoned this strategy on the grounds that the BNP has already achieved respectablity. The organisation’s founder, Nick Lowles, admitted:

We also have to accept that the political landscape has shifted. Searchlight comes from a proud tradition of No Platform, a belief that fascism should not be allowed to air its politics of hate publicly. We have always opposed legitimising fascism through public debate and where fascists try to incite hatred within communities through provocative marches and actions, we have backed mobilisations against them.

While I still adhere to this in principle I also believe that we have to accept a new reality. Firstly the BNP has MEPs and whether we like it or not Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons will appear more regularly on television. No platform agreements between political parties were already breaking down before the election, with only Labour holding to them, and this process is likely to quicken now.

Although Searchlight seem to have quietly shelved “No Platform”, there is no sign that UAF will do the same. The group’s main constituent organisation – the Socialist Workers’ Party – hinted at its intentions with a passage in its open letter to the Left:

The Nazis’ success will encourage those within the BNP urging a “return to the streets”.

This would mean marches targeting multiracial areas and increased racist attacks. We need to be ready to mobilise to stop that occurring.

The BNP’s “real aim” (so the SWP story goes) is not to win elections, but to use street violence to foment racial tension. Therefore, it should be treated as a Nazi criminal conspiracy rather than a political party. Tactics appropriate for dealing with a rival party (refuting your opponent’s arguments and trying to convince people of your own worldview and arguments) are pointless because they do nothing to stop the BNP achieving its real aims. Instead, our focus should be on the street-level activities of the far right. Its public marches should be robustly countered with “shows of force” that will demoralise the fascists. A glance at UAF’s “events” page shows how the group’s activities revolve almost entirely around demonstrations and rallies.

It is easy to see how this narrative aids SWP recruitment. It offers impressionable middle class students the prospect of regular, high adrenaline confrontations with the fascists, rather than the less glamourous task of tackling the BNP politically in working class communities where they are successful.

It goes without saying that these tactics, and the view of the BNP that underpins them, are completely wrong-headed and indeed counter-productive. But since they are so useful as recruitment tools for the SWP, and as a way of side-stepping the challenge of opposing the BNP politically, they will probably be around for some time to come.

2) “…to unite the broadest possible spectrum of society to counter this threat.”

The above is from the “about us” section of the UAF website. To unite the overwhelming majority who are not attracted to the BNP seems uncontroversial. As we’ve noted previously, research indicates that the BNP is so disliked by a large majority of the population that even those who share many of the Party’s views on policy are put off from voting for it. However, there are a number of problems with the way “broad-based anti-fascism” works in practice.

Firstly, opening up anti-fascist campaigns to “all those opposed to the BNP” in reality means “those with the greatest interest in opposing the BNP, and those who are most passionately opposed.” Politically, this means Labour, who risks losing some of its core supporters to the BNP. Socially, it means liberal sections of the white middle class as well as politically organised groups of black and Asian people.

One way of drawing on the support of such groups is to “swamp” the BNP vote in elections by maximising the turnout among people certain not to vote BNP. This was the strategy used on the Isle of Dogs, after the election of BNP councillor Derek Beacon in 1993. The following year Beacon’s vote rose – but not as much as the anti-BNP vote, as Asian voters turned out in large numbers.

Another manifestation of this tactic is the use of large anti-fascist carnivals. UAF organised a Love Music Hate Racism carnival in Victoria Park, Hackney, days before the Mayoral and Greater London Assembly elections in 2008. The 60000-strong audience was young, ethnically mixed, and very unlikely to vote BNP. Four days later, the BNP won its first seat on the GLA thanks to thousands of votes from white working class people in Barking, Dagenham and Havering.

Clearly, the drawback to this approach is that it makes no attempt to engage with the growing minority who do support the BNP. It also guarantees that anti-fascist campaigns are organised and staffed by people with no connections to the communities where the BNP are winning votes. Groups of young, middle class students knocking on doors in post-industrial Northern towns are unlikely to have a positive impact, and may well reinforce the perception among potential BNP voters that anti-fascists are social and cultural outsiders. As Searchlight now admits:

Class politics exists but not as we once knew it. The Labour Party, in line with many other centre-left parties across western European and Scandinavia, draws the bulk of its support from the middle class, public sector workers and minority communities, especially in the big cities. The BNP, on the other hand, is the voice of a section of the white working class, particularly in those areas of traditional industry that have experienced the greatest economic and social upheaval over the past twenty years.

Nick Lowles now advocates that anti-BNP campaigners “build alliances within the community” rather than bus in liberals from elsewhere. Indeed, since 2005, when the BNP got 19% of the vote in Barking and Dagenham at the General Election, Searchlight has talked about the need for anti-BNP campaigners to match the concern the Party shows for local “bread and butter” issues. And yet elsewhere on Searchlight’s website, we see evidence that they intend to persist with attempts to mobilise the anti-BNP majority. They urge readers to sign a petition stating that the BNP “does not represent them”. This can only be a tool to mobilise those who strongly oppose the BNP, since it cannot hope to have any impact on those who are tempted to vote for the Party.

One reason Searchlight is unlikely ever to  fully embrace an anti-fascism rooted in working class community politics is that it has consistently refused to advocate support for any other party than Labour. In order to gain the trust of working class people, a local anti-BNP campaign would have to tackle the problems local people felt were most pressing. This, in turn, would involve opposition to the Labour Party, which in most far-right growth areas is blamed for contributing to many of these same social problems.

3) Taking the politics out of anti-fascism.

Perhaps the most significant defect of mainstream anti-fascism is the way it refuses to take on the BNP politically. Due to the need to maintain support from across the political spectrum, the politics of mainstream anti-fascism is defined by what it is opposed to, rather than what it supports. In practice this means anti-racism or simply anti-”extremism”. Such a stance inevitably becomes a defence of the liberal democratic status quo. The Commune recently reported on a TV appearance by UAF’s Weyman Bennett, in which he criticised the BNP on the grounds it would not be able to “restore the system to equilibrium” following the recession. 

The SWP leaders who back UAF would argue they support a “twin track” strategy – campaigning against fascism through single issue anti-BNP groups, and providing an alternative to the establishment parties through their political work. The counter-argument is that by joining UAF or Searchlight campaigns, socialists are spending valuable time that could be devoted to patiently building support for a progressive working class alternative.

Since without single-issue anti-BNP campaigns both Searchlight and UAF would be out of business, we can expect them to continue to make the argument for the “twin track” strategy. Searchlight are at pains to insist on such an approach in a recent article:

The BNP success has led some to argue that we need to politicise anti-fascism, even to offer a political alternative to the BNP. While there are clearly public policy failings and a democratic deficit, it is not our job to fill this void. We must leave that to the political parties, old or new.

To justify this position, Searchlight refers to a YouGov poll that shows BNP voters have much more reactionary views on race and immigration than the average voter. These results show that while a Left alternative to the BNP might “might peel off some BNP supporters who feel economically marginalised, it will not in itself address the strongly held racist views of many BNP voters”, argues Lowles. These must be countered through specifically anti-racist campaigns that “dispel racist myths”.

What the YouGov survey results actually seem to show is that BNP voters are disproportionately working class, feel particularly hostile towards the political establishment and articulate their social grievances in terms of race. As Searchlight acknowledges, reactionary views on race have become so embedded that they are part of the culture in some working class communities. Roger Hewitt’s excellent study Routes of Racism showed how this process happens. He found that racist views among young people in South East London were sustained through a worldview that saw white working class people as victims of unfair treatment. He argued that the way to deal with this kind of “social racism” was to disrupt the “route” these racist views took. In practical terms, this meant tackling the causes of peoples’ grievances and helping to construct non-racist explanations for unfairness.

This is not simply a matter of chanting “unemployment and inflation are not caused by immigration/ bullshit, come off it/ the enemy is profit!” as the SWP are wont to. It will involve painstaking community work, and it must involve concessions to the way people in areas at risk to the BNP see the world. More urgently, it will require socialists to leave the safe world of liberal anti-fascism and begin to put down roots in working class communities.

The National Shop Stewards Network was set up to attempt to reverse this decline, and to build links between trade union activists in different industries. NSSN is now three years old, and had its third annual conference last Saturday. While there is no formal membership structure at present, the conference was open to unpaid shop stewards from any union in Britain. Full time union officials could attend in an “observer” capacity only.

The conference was more of a rally than a policy-making forum, but it was one of the better rallies I have attended. In the morning we heard some rousing speeches from Keith Gibson and Owen Morris – both members of the victorious Lindsey Oil Refinery Strike Committee. Gibson explained how stewards used mobile phone networks and held mass meetings every morning to communicate with members. Morris was at pains to defend the action Lindsey workers took in February over the use of non-union foreign contractors. He said:

My members might be working in Aberdeen one week and Cornwall the next. According to our national agreement, no matter where they’re working they get paid £14 per hour plus expenses, plus bonuses, plus lunch. Companies have been using Polish workers and paying them £4 per hour. We, as working class people, can’t accept that.

Also on the platform was newly elected Socialist Party MEP Joe Higgins. He gave inspiring accounts of community campaigns that built public support for the SP in Dublin, including the campaign against water charges in the mid-90s and the exposure of the shocking treatment of Turkish migrant workers by Turkish multinational GAMA in 2005.

After lunch there was a choice of workshops on different topics related to trade union struggles. I attended the talk on the crisis in the Post Office. Activists seemed united in seeing the national office of their union – the CWU – as an obstacle to their attempts to organise resistance.

The day ended with a closing rally, the highlight of which was an address by the RMT rep for the London Underground cleaners, Clara Osagiede, who recounted the successful campaign to get cleaners the London Living Wage. Pretty much the last act of the conference was to elect a steering committee of 50 shop stewards to decide policy for the organisation.

The event was impressively non-sectarian, on the whole. Although the influence of the Socialist Party was clearly in evidence in the choice of platform speakers, many of the afternoon workshops were run by Socialist Workers Party members like Weyman Bennett and Paul Garraway. Interestingly, the SWP did not have the organised presence (paper sellers, stalls etc) that we have come to expect at left wing events over the years. Perhaps they were keeping a low profile following the fall-out from their open letter to the Left.

To have a conference of 300 of the best and most militant union reps in the country, to share ideas and experiences, is a major achievement in itself. Even in the short term, the network could help to inspire confidence in union reps (like myself) whose workplaces do not have a strong history of militancy.

Nevertheless, I left the conference with a couple of questions. There are several different directions I could forsee the NSSN taking. Will it remain merely a forum for discussion, or will it become a more active presence in trade union struggles? Strategies for shop stewards to build a culture of resistance in their workplaces, recruit or simply communicate with their members could be developed and implemented by reps in different industries.  The network could even formally embrace demands such as those of sacked Visteon Belfast convenor John McGuire: for union executives to be elected annually at mass meetings, and to receive the average industrial wage.

No doubt the newly elected steering committee will address these issues, but a large national gathering could have been an opportunity to discuss different proposals publicly with reps from all areas of industry.

Despite my reservations, the conference was an uplifting experience, and a reason to be hopeful in an otherwise unpromising industrial climate.

Judging by the responses to the Socialist Workers’ Party’s open letter to the Left, the first question is unlikely to be answered in the affirmative.

Unlike the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – who responded immediately by requesting talks with the SWP over the creation of a Left coalition – the Socialist Party probably feels it is in a position of strength vis-a-vis other Left groups at the moment. As one of the players in No2EU, the SP has formed links with the RMT, and hopes to be part of an platform involving Crow’s union at the next General Election. On the industrial front, the SP plays a central role in the National Shops Stewards Network, which held a sucessful conference at the weekend. Leading shop stewards in the high profile union victories at Enfield,  Swansea and Lindsey were all SP members.

Confidence shines through in the SP’s reply, but so does its distaste for the SWP’s previous conduct. The first section of the reply is spent addressing the SWP’s failure to acknowledge the formation of No2EU (mentioned only twice in Socialist Worker). “To try to ignore the existence of an initiative as significant as No2EU undermines your stated aim of opening a discussion on creating an electoral alternative for the general election”, it says, before concluding:

Unfortunately, we believe that your brushing aside of No2EU is an indication that your methods have not changed. You claim that: “Unity is not a luxury. It is a necessity” but as a party you have never been prepared to countenance working together with others in an honest and open fashion unless you hold the reins; hence your wrecking of the Socialist Alliance and your splitting from Respect. Far from playing a positive role, your approach has actually complicated and delayed steps towards a new mass workers’ party in England and Wales.

On the threat from the BNP, referred to many times in the SWP letter, the SP reply pointedly states: “the BNP will not be undermined just by campaigns denouncing them as Nazis”. This is surely a reference to the tactics of the SWP-lead Unite Against Fascism.

Although it is less strident in its tone, the reply from libertarian communist group The Commune makes some similar points to the SP’s message. The Commune seeks an assurance that its members will not have to go through the same experience that many of them did with the Socialist Alliance: “to have a project we have built tossed aside when the leading faction finds something more interesting to do.”

Significantly, The Commune goes beyond the SP in questioning the fundamental organising strategies of the far Left:

We also want to be clear that when we talk about left unity, we do not mean simply left unity at elections, or anti-fascist mobilisations.  What we are talking about, what we all need to talk about, is deep, thoroughgoing political work in communities, in which socialists join together locally, with trade unionists, community campaigners and across the political boundaries of the existing groups.

The Commune advocates coaltions and alliances on a local basis, and a commitment to the “sort of work that can be done to build community and workers’ resistance at a local level, not only in the next year, but in the next decade.”

Solidarity, the splinter from the Scottish Socialist Party lead by Tommy Sheridan, has put out its own assessment of the situation, which includes a call for Left unity. Their limited proposal for the Left to ”unify in a temporary electoral pact or coalition” (in time for the Glasgow North East by election caused by the resignation of Michael Martin) does not mention the SWP. Solidarity argues that, rather than construct some new Scottish version of the Socialist Alliance, the Left should support “candidates that may be acceptable to all the different groups on the left whether they be a trade unionist, a community activist or a well known local campaigner.”

It seems, therefore, that the major factions on the British Left, while all expressing a desire for “unity”, have very different ideas about the way forward. Prospects for an all-encompassing broad left front seem remote.

How much support would such a platform receive in a national election? One thing the SWP got right in their letter is that the Euro elections were a disaster for the Left. But how much of this is down to strategic errors from Left groups, and how much can be attributed to a conservative public mood?

As we wrote last week, the authors of a major report on attitudes to inequality concluded that there was broad acceptance of the capitalist system. Some disagreed with this interpretation of the findings. Directionless Bones developed our argument that the report showed the need for the Left to adjust its language, arguing that socialists should propose a form of economic organisation where production is owned by workers and remuneration decided by workers’ councils. This suggestion, the author argues, is likely to receive more support from workers’ than a call for immediate abolition of wages and equality of consumption.

The post is rescued from the realms of abstract theoretical debate with a passage discussing the short term tactical lessons of the report’s insights:

[I]t is possibly politically counter-productive to be seen as advocating on behalf of ‘the poor’, or to identify ‘working class’ with ‘low-income’ (as many people habitually do). Most people do not identify with ‘the poor’, even when they are – and in the terms of standard class analysis it’s not even true that the poor are the revolutionary candidate. Rather, it’s the ‘working class’ – i.e. people who get paid a wage for doing productive work, which is a large majority of the population. Socialists should aim to present socialism as these people running things for themselves, and getting rid of ‘the top’.

A post from Le Samovar also endorses our argument that the report is not such bad news for the Left, but that we need to change our language to focus more on “fairness and freedom” than equality as such. Le Samovar relates these ideas to Michael Albert’s prescriptions on parecon, which seem to allow for a degree of “fair inequality”.

My friend lives in back-to-back terrace house in a northern town. A few months ago, a young couple with a child moved in next door. At first there were a few minor problems: rubbish left piled up in the shared back yard, the dogs defecating in his garden and their owners not clearing the mess up. But the young man would take care of these things when asked.

Soon, though, the young man had left the scene, and was replaced by the comings-and-goings of numerous young men calling at the house at all hours. Problems intensified: more and more rubbish, then setting fire to the rubbish, a succession of loud parties until the earlier hours, drunk poeple spilling out of the house in the earlier hours, loud arguments, drug use, and the (now noticeably emaciated) dogs let out to roam the streets.

The response from the authorities has been negligible. The fire brigade wasn’t interested in the cause of the fire, the police didn’t follow-up on the matter as promised after sending a PCSO round, the council say they can’t remove the rubbish, and the RSPCA say they can’t do anything about the dogs unless they’re being “mistreated”.

Meanwhile, my friend has visited some his neighbours who are all equally sick of what has been going on. But all of them are too fearful to take action, either by contacting the authorities or doing anything else. It seems the young woman is notorious in the town and is well known to the police and many local people.

In essence this reads like the kind of “neighbours from hell” story you might find in right-wing tabloids like the Daily Mail or the Express. But that does not mean we should automatically discount it; there are real and serious issues here that those on the Left need to consider. So how would we approach this? I would argue two responses are most common:

1) Social liberalism: this approach typifies the instinctive response of many leftists when confronted with such a scenario. They would take a social-structural angle. In this frame, the perpetrators become the victims. Social forces that lead to this kind of behaviour take centre stage: for example, poverty, lack of educational and employment opportunities, criminalisation of young people by society, and a lack of provision for young people e.g. youth clubs. A corrolary of this view is frequently to play down the extent of the problem, for example arguing it has been “whipped up” or exaggerated by the media or politicians.

2) Reductive Marxism: this approach is less common than (1) and contains a more complex but ultimately abstract analysis. It tends to point to the characteristics of capitalism: class society, alienation, and the need for a “reserve army of labour”, for example, as being at the root of anti-social behaviour (and other phenomenon). Some on the Left might baulk at the idea that this is reductive, as it expresses underlying truths. But it leaves so much out that it is of little value to addressing the immediate question.

What follows from either approach – and they are frequently combined – is essentially political paralysis. If we explain such behaviour purely by reference to social or economic structures, we leave ourselves without a conception of how to address such problems. It’s another case of “after the revolution…” Some might be fine with this, feeling that it is not a job for the Left to take up such causes; we should leave such crusades to the right-wing press.

Unfortunately, such an attitude can only leave the Left further adrift from ordinary people it seeks to represent. Not only does it clash with how most people would view the situation, it also leaves the Left ineffective and politically impotent, provides no (practical) solutions to some of the most immediate concerns for ordinary people, and does nothing to resist the atomization of working class communities that can only lead to further political defeat. Four aspects seem pertinent here:

First, there is the issue of personal responsibility. Any stress on this aspect is in direct opposition to the typical responses outlined, but it is crucial to really understanding such an issue. It’s right that in a sense the perpetrators can be seen as victims. But not everyone makes such choices, even where they have faced similar life experiences; people choose to act in certain ways. The Left is not wont to talk about “responsibility”. While liberalism talks mostly in terms of rights, socialists should also talk about responsibility. We do this happily enough in the context of strikes and other forms of collective action and we should equally apply this to the communities we live in.

Second, in this case at least, there is the lamentable failure of the authorities to act. This is a target no one on the Left should feel hesitant to tackle. The lack of resources and effort to address such problems is a common feature of working class communitites. Even basic services such as rubbish collection and street cleaning are sometimes biased in favour of middle class areas where residents are often more organised in lobbying their local councils.

Third, there is the hugely destructive effect such behaviour has on the communities in which it takes place. One of the biggest problems in the case above was the fear local people felt to confront the couple. To some extent this expresses the atomisation of that particular community, something that is widely replicated elsewhere, but it also perpetuates these divisions and means local people are less likely to work together on other problems. Ultimately this leads to collective quiescense and political defeat; something the Left should be resisting as a priority.

Fouth, and finally, it should be obvious that in such cases there is the possibility of overcoming the atomization of communities through collective action around such problems. In this case, dozens of local people were experiencing the same issues, but were largely isolated from each other. It’s not difficult to see that this scenario contains a contradiction that can readily be transcended. This does not mean vigilantism, as some would suggest is inevitable. Bringing people together to discuss the issue is a starting point. Then there is a whole range of options open: from speaking collectively to the troublesome neighbours, to pressuring the authorities on certain points, or finding other ways to show that the community as a whole finds such behaviour unacceptable.

So, the answers to my initial questions are: (a) Does the Left have any adequate answers to anti-social behaviour? No, with some minor exceptions. (b) And does it need to? Yes.

How to develop these “adequate answers” should be an urgent task for the Left if it seeks to embed itself in working class communities and bridge the gulf Left Luggage has so frequently pointed to. The observations in this article are little more than a starting point.

Another good examination of similar themes is provided in a previous article on Left Luggage discussing the Left’s approach to crime and a bold article by the Independent Working Class Association (with a useful comments thread) on crime, the “underclass”, and working class culture. They argue:

It needs to be recognised that these lumpen elements represent a grouping that is quite separate from, and actively hostile to, the interests and well-being of the working class proper.

Their analysis will be heretical, and probably distasteful, to many on the Left. Nevertheless, is is worth taking seriously the IWCA’s arguments as valuable contributions to important and rarely discussed questions regarding the Left’s strategy.

Unions have also won assurances that thousands of contract workers at power plants, refineries and gas terminals across Britain who also walked out in sympathy will not be victimised for their actions.

The proposed deal will be put to workers on Monday and while we haven’t seen the finer details, this appears to be a massive victory for the workers and a humbling climbdown by Total. The two-week long wildcat strike at Lindsey alone is estimated to have cost Total €100m (£85m) and, according to the company, “had put major investment into the building of its HDS-3 desulphurisation unit at risk.

Additionally, as Left Luggage has previously written, the initial laying-off of 51 workers seemed a clear-cut attempt by Total to force out militant workers and to kill-off the solidarity strike as an effective tool, possibly by deliberately provoking a walkout. Gregor Gall has pointed out that Total seemed to have selected for redundancy those workers who played a key role in the February strikes over the use of sub-contractors bringing in foreign workforces. Apparently, bosses at the site said the 51 workers would not be redepolyed because they were “an unruly workforce who had taken part in unofficial disputes and who won’t work weekends.” Phil Davies, GMB National Secretary, said: “This is a clear case of victimisation on a par with the notorious industry blacklists.”

Right now, this looks like a huge victory for the Lindsey workers. What’s more it demonstrates once again – to workers at Lindsey, the others sites that took action, and to the wider labour movement – the effectiveness of solidarity strikes and the use of flying pickets. Both very important lessons.

Some of the workers have now lost two weeks wages through the solidarity strike, and contributions to the hardship fund are still necessary.

The headline findings might be taken to support the suggestion that there is negligible support for the world view and policy proposals of the Left. This was certainly the conclusion of the Guardian, which chose to concentrate on the fact that 69% of respondents said they believed that there were plenty of opportunities for economic advancement, for those willing to take them. Other findings that many on the Left might find depressing include the widespread assumption that benefit claimants will not go on to make a positive contribution to society (p25) and the fatalistic attitude that inequalities are “inevitable in a market economy” (p47).

All of this underlines the challenges faced by the Left in attempting to convince the public of their position. David Osler made this point in a post on the JRF report:

All of this represents a major problem for any left that is actually interested in expanding it base. Capitalism – and the inequality it creates – continue to enjoy moral legitimacy in the eyes of an overwhelming majority.

While the unfolding recession has generated popular outrage aimed against those at the apex of the banking system, clearly general purpose ‘tax the rich’ fat cat-bashing will most of the time have little purchase.

I’m not suggesting any retreat whatsoever from the underlying principles involved. No socialism worthy of the name can be anything but redistributive in nature. But we need to come up with a more effective way of selling the message to the public, and sooner rather than later at that.

If we look at the report in a little more detail, however, we might find more reasons to be hopeful than either The Guardian or Osler. It is certainly true that the report found high levels of support for the concept of “fair inequality” – that differences in wealth were justified as long as those who had more deserved their wealth. There was only minority support, the report found, for “abstract notions of equality” (p43).

But we shouldn’t make the jump, as Osler does, to concluding that capitalism has “moral legitimacy” in the eyes of the public. In fact, the report found a great deal of anger directed towards the “super rich”, with footballers (96%), bankers (87%) and lawyers (70%) thought to be massively overpaid. Remarkably (given the opposition of the Conservative Party as well several widely read newspapers), 80% of respondents said they supported Labour’s tax rise for those earning over £150,000, with only 5% opposed to the measure. Nearly two thirds agreed with the statement that “The Government should take action through tax and benefits to reduce the gap in incomes between the richest and the poorest” (p36). A significant minority (39%) expressed support for a maximum wage, while a massive majority (81%) favoured an increase in the minimum wage (p37).

How is it possible to square negative attitudes towards benefit claimants and ambivalance about “abstract” arguments for economic equality with anger about the rich and support for a more progressive tax system? The authors of the report found that peoples’ objections to both the “super-wealthy” and “welfare scroungers” were overwhelmingly based on the perception that neither contributed or sacrificed enough to deserve the rewards they were seen to get (p19).

The report found widespread and vehement opposition to the “traditional free market vision” that overall increases in material wealth justify a decrease in overall quality of life (p45). The majority of respondents were prepared to embrace all manner of egalitarian measures – not for their own sake, but because they were seen as creating a more cohesive society built on better values than those that underpin neoliberal capitalism (p46).

Liberals like the JRF and The Guardian presumably saw the report’s findings as negative because they unearthed little evidence of sympathetic attitudes to “the poor”. People seemed far more concerned about the gap between the “middle” (where most respondents subjectively positioned themselves) and the “top” than they were about the gap between the top and the bottom (p12). There was nevertheless a great deal of support for measures to help those on low incomes who were in work, and an even greater amount of support for carers with children (p37).

These attitudes again seem to be motivated by perceptions of which groups are “hard working” and “deserving” of financial reward (needless to say, participants always place themselves in this category). This suggests that socialists would be better advised to argue for remuneration in accordance with sacrifice and contribution than to make appeals, such the Leon Kuhn poster used by the Left List at the last London elections, to “help the poor”, .

It is in a sense reassuring that people seem to see capitalism as damaging to the whole of society, rather than just those at the “bottom”. Far from seeing capitalism as “morally legitimate”, people seem to object strongly to the values of a system that distributes unfair financial rewards and destroys social solidarity. There seems to be a “gap in the market” for socialists to offer an alternative value system to that underpinning the current system.

The perception that “anyone can make it if they try hard enough” is problematic for those trying to highlight structural inequalities, but this should not imply an assumption that society is “fair”. 55% agreed with the statement “Many people are disadvantaged because of their background, and have to work much harder than others of equal basic talent to overcome the obstacles they face” (p24). Insistence that individuals can overcome disadvantage is very different from a denial that disadvantage exists. Socialists should have no objection to arguing that Britain is not fair, but that hard work and sacrifice can reap rewards. As a teacher, I stress to my students that they have to work harder than middle class students if they want to achieve success.

Of course, politics is not solely about ideas; organisation is also crucial. Groups who are rooted in working class communities can convince people of the value of their beliefs through action, as well as through the force of argument. It is also true that socialists are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to ideological warfare, given the array of forces ranged against us.

Nevertheless, it is crucial for us to develop “counter-ideologies” in opposition to the dominant belief systems. Ideologies are only likely to be successful if they pin themselves on existing commonsense notions. The report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests that, despite the absence of socialist ideas in mainstream media and politics, people intuitively support ideas such as rewarding those who make sacrifices for others. We should take encouragement from studies like this, but should be prepared to adapt the language we speak when it conflicts with widely held notions.