Stumbling and Mumbling

Playing the victim

Here are four recent developments:

 - The University of Leicester is sacking academics because they are doing research in critical management studies. The Tories, however, are silent on this whilst at the same time condemning a handful of students who are unsuccessfully campaigning to get Eric Kaufman sacked from Birkbeck. They tolerate actual violations of academic freedom whilst deploring attempted ones.

 - Laurence Fox calls for the Leicester City players who carried a Palestinian flag after the FA Cup final to be hounded out.

 - Matthew Offord MP demands that the BBC not broadcast an edition of Desert Island Discs because of Alexei Sayle’s ant-Zionism.

 - Several people complained to the police about a tweet from an SNP councillor about the Eurovision song contest.

These are all examples of how the right (and bosses) are opposed to free speech. And of course there are countless other examples of Tory hostility to freedom such as their harsh immigration controls, clampdown on protests and erection of trade barriers within the UK.

And yet these attacks upon freedom come from people who claim to be champions of free speech and protectors of academic freedom. They present themselves as victims of repression, beleaguered by “wokesters”, “not allowed to say that these days”, and subject to no-platforming. Oliver Dowden, for example, recently whined about a “cancel culture whereby a small but vocal group of people claim to have the monopoly on virtue, and seek to bully those who dare to disagree.” In this, way, as Will Davies said:

 A reader of the Times or the Daily Mail can convince themselves that they are a marginalised minority.

It’s not just in the context of free speech that the right makes this pretence. They also claim to be victims of “EU bullies”.

This is strange. Traditionally, political movements and politicians have wanted to project power: think of things as otherwise diverse as the Nuremberg rallies; Thatcher rejoicing in the nickname “the iron lady”; the classical Marxian hope that the working class would grow strong enough to overthrow capitalism; Black Power; gay pride; Blair and Brown’s endless talk of “strong leadership”; or leftists boasting of the number of people on large demos. What we have here is the exact opposite – a claim to weakness by those who in fact are in power.  We have Harry Flashmans masquerading as Tom Brown.

What’s going on here?

In part, it’s that old saying: “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” As Dawn Foster says, the right think free speech means the right not to be criticized. They are perturbed to find previously marginalized people and perspectives challenging their own viewpoint and their historical myths.

More troubling for them is the sense that these challenges are the shape of things to come. The right’s voting base is greying and dying whilst the future will be that of immaterial workers and graduates sympathetic to socialism; Tories are less rooted in statecraft and with the elite than they used to be; and the party has lost serious intellectual foundations (Thatcher had Popper, Hayek and Friedman: who has Johnson got?). Of course, there right are in power now, but this power is brittle.

And its pretence of victimhood serves to shore up such power. It effaces inequalities. Men can pretend they are oppressed by feminism and white people by “critical race studies”, thereby denying the realities of gender and racial inequality. 

And, of course, class inequality. The idea that privileged people are being bullied by wokesters and eurocrats has allowed public schoolboys like Johnson and Farage to pretend to be men of the people – even though the latter is so weird he doesn’t listen to music or watch TV. The revolt against elites has merely facilitated the rise of another elite.

The art of bourgeois politics has of course always been to hide the true nature of inequality. What is remarkable is just how many ways those in power have of performing this trick.

Starmer, skill and luck

Why is Sir Keir Starmer making such a mess of being Labour leader? A good perspective on this comes from a 2006 article (pdf) in the Harvard Business Review by Boris Groysberg and colleagues: I fear most journalists and Labour activists have overlooked this because the HBR is too left-wing for them.

They looked at what happened when senior managers at General Electric became CEOs of other companies. And they found that bosses with similarly impressive CVs had hugely different performances in their new firms. This, they say, is because what matters is not so much the individual boss’s skills but the match between those skills and the job requirements. So if for example a cost-cutter took over a firm whose priority was to grow rapidly, he failed, whereas he succeeded if he took over a firm that needed to cuts costs in order to undercut its competitors.

Starmer’s problem is that whilst there was a good match between his skills and the job requirements of being Director of Public Prosecutions, there is a less good match between them and what it takes to be a good Labour leader. As DPP one can occasionally get away with dumping blame upon an underling, but this is harder for a Labour leader especially when those underlings have a significant powerbase and mandate of their own. More importantly, a DPP needs mainly to just keep the organization running. He doesn’t need a vision with which to inspire waverers. But a Labour leader certainly does. To use Groysberg’s framing, moving from being DPP to Labour leader is like moving from running a monopolistic utility to a growth company needing to catch customers’ attention in a competitive environment. It’s no surprise that a man can succeed at one but fail at the other.

Of course, there’s nothing at all unusual in a man being a good fit in one job and a bad one in another. It is the story of many football managers: Jose Mourinho was a great fit with Chelsea at least in his first spell there but not so much at Sp*rs, for example. Many successful businessmen who go into politics have mediocre careers. And countless men are geniuses in one field but fools in others: think of Bobby Fischer, William Shockley, James Watson, Richard Dawkins…

You might object here that this assessment of Starmer is founded upon hindsight.

Damn right it is. And that’s the point. We often cannot tell in advance who will be the best fit for the job – which is why so many hiring decisions go wrong. As William Goldman famously and rightly said, nobody knows anything.

We should therefore change our frame. Success can be the product not of skill and intention but of the luck of being the right person in the right place at the right time. Think of politics and indeed business as being like natural selection: randomish chances spring up – particular individuals, companies or strategies – and the environment selects for and against these. For example, whilst they were MPs it was not at all obvious that Boris Johnson would make a more successful Prime Minister than Theresa May – which is why Tories voted her leader in 2015. But he has, because the environment has selected for his mix of strengths and weaknesses whilst it selected against hers. (Whether this will remain the case is, of course, another matter.) To take another example, John Denham says the Tories have “managed extraordinarily well to appeal to English-identifying voters". He's right. But Tory appeals to nationalism failed abysmally in the late 90s and 00s, so why are they succeeding now? Could it be because the environment that once selected against such appeals now select for them? 

People are, however, terrible at distinguishing between luck and skill. The most striking evidence for this comes from experiments by Nattavudh Powdthavee and Yohanes Riyanto. They got students in Singapore and Thailand to bet upon tosses of a fair coin and found that they were willing to pay to back the bet of students who had correctly called previous tosses. “An average person is often happy to pay for what could only be described as transparently useless advice” they concluded. Startling as it seems, this has been corroborated by other experiments.

And people make this error even when they have real money at stake. Investors around the world (pdf) lose money because they buy unit trusts that have performed well for a few months, failing to see that short-term returns are largely due to luck.  They “confuse risk taking with skill” says Christoph Merkle. They “lose money because they buy unit trusts after short periods of good performance, failing to see that this can be due to dumb luck rather than to fund managers’ skill” say Andrew Clare and Nick Motson at Cass Business School.

Most fund managers are not skilful – but some get selected for by the luck of the environment. Maybe the same is true of politicians. And Starmer is being selected against and Johnson for – at least for now.

You might think that my depiction of success as owing more to luck than skill is a leftist mindset. But the left has a long (and I think ignoble and ineffective) habit of ignoring this principle and instead looking for heroes – from Napoleon through Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara to Hugo Chavez. But there are no heroes, and even if there were we would lack the talent to find them.  

Markets & the right

Samuel Gregg reminds us of an important fact about rightist thinking – that the right has always been ambivalent about markets.

This is as true in the UK as in the US. We saw this, for example, in the 19^th century when the Tories split up over the abolition of the corn laws and when Thomas Carlyle damned economics as the “dismal science” for wanting to abolish slavery. We saw it too in Roger Scruton’s mixed feelings about Thatcher:

She leaned too readily on market economics, and ignored the deeper roots of conservatism in the theory and practice of civil society.

And we see it today in the Tories imposing trade barriers not just between the UK and EU but even within the UK. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this is John Redwood’s seamless move from ardent Thatcherite to supporter of autarky.

All this poses the question, though: why is it now that the right is moving away from free market thinking rather than twenty or thirty years ago?

The answer, I suspect, lies in part in the one thing that conservative thinking has always been consistent about – its concern to protect private sector hierarchies. As Corey Robin says:

The priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power.

And here’s the thing. Free markets sometimes help maintain these regimes but sometimes threaten them. In the 80s and 90s, markets helped to entrench capitalist power, because deindustrialization and globalization helped to weaken the power of organized labour. (This isn’t to say that the decline of unions was purely due to market forces: the coppers at Orgreave were agents of the state.) In these circumstances, the right discovers a love of markets.

At other times, though, markets disrupt hierarchies. The free trade espoused by Smith and Ricardo was bad for landlords: Smith was, in his day, a heterodox economist. 

What we’re seeing today is a reversion to those times. Markets now are a danger to the existing order, in three different senses.

First, some employers are befuddled by the unusual sight of localized labour shortages. Obviously, Econ101 says the answer to this is to raise wages – which some are loath to do. The notion that market forces might actually work to workers’ advantage rather than capitalists’ is an unfamiliar and disturbing one.

Secondly, in a free market employers can hire whom they want – which means immigration. A market society is a cosmopolitan society. Rightists who feel awkward about hearing foreign languages don’t want that*.

And thirdly British capitalism is now to a large extent a rentier economy, as Brett Christophers has shown. A genuinely free market, however, would undermine this. Freer copyright laws would curb intellectual property rents; ending banks’ implicit subsidy and encouraging competition would cut financiers’ rents (pdf); more competitive government tendering could reduce what Christophers calls contract and infrastructure rents; and shifting taxes from income to land value would end landlords’ power to expropriate for themselves the positive externality of improvements to local areas. In ways such as these, introducing more market forces would undermine actually-existing capitalism.

It’s no accident, therefore, that the right should now be falling out of love with free markets – because these are no longer a way of preserving the existing order. You cannot tell intellectual history purely through the lens of ideas. Material interests matter, and it is these that are turning the right away from markets.

If this sounds conspiratorial, it shouldn’t. Think of politics as being a little like natural selection. Policies and ideas arise if not as random mutations then at least sometimes wholly or partly independently of material interests. But the environment then selects which ones survive or thrive – and a key part of the environment is class interests. The Tories good fortune has been to find a way which reconciles voters’ longstanding hostility to free markets with both their own interests, their love of order and inequality and electoral success.

My story here is not just about the right, however. There’s a message for technocrats. They tend to see markets as a mere engineering problem: sometimes they work well and sometimes they need fixing. Maybe this would be true in an ideal society. But we don’t live in such a society. Instead, we have a class-divided one in which capitalists and rentiers have the whip hand – and that hand determines when and how markets get to work.

And there are points here for the left. The powerful sections of the right are no longer free marketeers. Pretending that they are is a tactical error, which fails to see that one of the Tories’ great strengths is its ability to change. Also, if markets can be a threat to actually-existing capitalism, perhaps many leftists should rethink their instinctive antipathy to them.

* No. Immigration does not reduce natives' wages (except very slightly for a minority).

Class

There’s much talk, some sensible and some less so, that the Labour party has lost touch with the working class. Khalid Mahmood for example complains that the party is “doing better among rich urban liberals and young university graduates than it is amongst the most important part of its traditional electoral coalition, the working-class.”

Of course, you can use words to mean whatever you want them to, but to those of us in the Marxian tradition, such a complaint makes no sense because of how we define “working class”.

For us, being working class is not about your lifestyle or background but about economic relationships. If you don’t own (significant) means of production and must sell your labour-power, you are working class. By this definition, young graduates and people drinking fancy coffees in That London are just as working class as an older manual worker in Hartlepool. Ponces are just as working class as racists. 

Nor is class simply a matter of income. An employee on a high wage is working class whereas a self-employed person on a lower income is not: s/he is a petty bourgeois in Marx’s words.

Being a worker matters in capitalism because it is a source of unfreedom and alienation. The unfreedom might be merely (!)  a matter of having to spend time doing something you’d rather not, or it could mean suffering tyranny and degradation. The alienation comes from the fact that our work is a way not of realizing our nature but rather is foreign to us.

On both counts, graduate jobs can be as bad as manual labour. One feature of recent years has been that professional jobs have seen more onerous hours, less autonomy and more precarity - which is one reason why such workers have become less likely to vote Tory . And bullshit jobs are experienced as pointless and alienating whilst some manual work can be a source of pride. 

And on both counts, we can't really speak of retired people as working class. If they don't need to work (and increasing numbers of over-65s in recent years have had to) they are free from the unfreedom and alienation that is the plight of the working class. 

Of course, members of the working class differ in their individual bargaining power and many can use this power to claim a share of profits. This does not alter the fact that they are working class: their share of the pie is conditional upon them selling their labour-power*.

From this perspective, the working class comprises much more than older, white less educated people. Migrants, ethnic minorities and LGBTQIA people are just as working class too. What matters is whether one must sell one’s labour power. This simple fact unites people with otherwise very different experiences and viewpoints.

There working class have never been an homogenous mass. Labour’s old Clause IV, written in 1917 by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, spoke of “workers by hand or by brain” precisely because it saw a commonality between manual and non-manual work. That was right, just as today the working class can be in the material or immaterial economy. 

Of course, Marxists have always known that class in this objective sense differs from how people feel. As Erik Olin Wright said, "it’s never been true that class, by itself, explains consciousness". It often takes redundancy or a bad boss for people to learn what class they are in. Ash Sarkar is right:

How people perceive their own class has little to do with the economic base. As the oft-quoted Stuart Hall once said, “politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.”

You might object that by this definition almost everybody is working class.

This isn’t quite true: I’m not as I can afford to live off my capital and am working only to retain optionality. Insofar as it is, however, this a feature not a bug.

For one thing, it vindicates Marx’s prediction that the working class would grow:

The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat…Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

And for another thing, the fact that so many people are working class means that class politics can be a source of unity and solidarity. As Janan Ganesh – no Marxist he – has written, the class divide:

feels less fraught than the rifts over race, gender and sexuality that make up what we know, for want of a better euphemism, as identity politics. It is a matter of numbers. A crude campaign against the one per cent would put, at least in theory, all other Americans on the same side.

Which brings us to the point. There are powerful reasons why the right and their quislings want to deny this perspective on class. They want to distract us from the fact that the economy and society is structured around ownership and that what you own determines what power you have. They also want to divide and rule. The more people are divided between towns and cities, graduates and non-graduates, leavers and remainers, black and white, trans and cis, and so on and on and on, the less likely they are to realize how much they have in common.

Of course, bourgeois politics has always been pulling these tricks, and one way of doing so has been to pretend that class is just another lifestyle rather than a manifestation of economic structure. What is remarkable is that such tricks are as successful today as they always have been.

* A more awkward type for Marxists is what Wright (whose work I commend) called “contradictory class locations (pdf).” Bosses and investment bankers, for example, are working class in the sense that they sell their labour, but are capitalist in that they get a chunk of the proceeds of others’ labour and so are exploiters. I’m not sure how this invalidates the Marxian scheme though: a taxonomy can be useful even if some people are members of more than one set.

On centrist vacuousness

What would you think of a political party that promised to: cut unemployment by one million over two years; increase public investment; borrow more to finance extra welfare benefits and NHS staffing; increase foreign aid; promote worker coops; and aim for “a major extension of profit sharing and worker share-ownership to give people a real stake where they work”?

It’s pure Corbynism isn’t it?

Well, no. All these were in the 1983 Liberal-SDP manifesto. Back then, they were centrist policies.

Not that this was unusual. In 1924 – the year of picture opposite – Liberals called not just for workers to get a share of profits but also for the compulsory purchase of land for housing development and came close to advocating a land value tax.

By contrast, today’s centrists show no such enthusiasm for empowering workers. The LibDems had five years in government without expanding worker coops an inch. Change UK (remember them) were silent on them. And the Labour right are hardly deafening us with their calls for greater worker democracy.

I suspect there’s a simple explanation for this. Centrism is intellectually parasitic, preferring triangulation to developing its own ideas. Its support for coops and profit-sharing was a way of splitting the difference between the right’s belief in private ownership and the left’s in more full-blooded public ownership, and a way of trying to pacify a militant labour force. With workers having been defeated in recent years, however, centrists see no need for such pacification. Indeed, they don’t even need to use the language of “capital” and “labour” as they did in the 1920s. Instead, they’ve retreated into the comfort zone of acquiescence to capital – as demonstrated by the post-Westminster careers of Nick Clegg and the Cukkers.

This explains something else – centrists’ lack of interest in economic policy, or indeed policy generally. It’s clear what they don’t want – the sort of Corbynite policies centrists advocated in the early 80s. But it’s much less obvious what their positive agenda is. What, for example, are their answers to the problems of inequality, stagnant productivity and real wages, unaffordable housing and so on?

We heard this vacuousness from Peter Mandelson on the Today programme yesterday (2’19” in). Nick Robinson asked him what changes he’d like to see Labour make. “I’ll come to that” replied. But he didn’t.

Even when they have deigned to write down some ideas, political centrists have ignored such issues. Pretty much the only reference to economic policy in Change UK’s launch manifesto was to the need for the government’s “responsibility to ensure the sound stewardship of taxpayer’s money”, as if we were still in a  world of bond vigilantes. And Chris Leslie’s Centre Ground paper (pdf) made almost no reference to the fact that the financial crisis and subsequent stagnation in real wages and productivity requires centrists to re-assess the economic idea they had in the 90s.

Instead of intellectual analysis, centrists offer us two things. One is pure retail politics, accommodating itself to a selective perception of what voters want: Mandelson – once a Remainer – for example now thinks Labour must embrace “Brexit values” without also noting that higher taxes on the rich and more nationalization are also popular. Among its many flaws – among which is that this would alienate lots of Labour voters - this ignores the fact that public opinion is changeable: Brexit, for example, moved from being the obsession of a few cranks to the dominant issue in politics as a result of right-wing campaigning and economic stagnation. Taken opinion as given thus means skating to where the puck is rather than to where it is going.

A second strand of centrism is more common among media centrists. Take for example Jonathan Freedland’s anger at Johnson’s corruption. When given the choice between Johnson and the alternative centrists like Freedland ducked out, failing to appreciate that real life is sometimes a choice of the lesser of two evils. In this sense, centrism is a form of identity politics – an urge for what Richard Sennett called a purified identity which leads to a whine about “why can’t you all be sane, rational and honest like ME?”

Now, in saying this I’m not damning all centrists. If we look outside the political-media circle we can find signs of intelligent life such as in Radix or in Sam Bowman and Stian Westlake’s work. Much of this, however, underplays the class problem – of how to build support for policies such as land taxes or tougher competition policy in the face of hostility from rentiers.

That’s a separate argument, though. The fact is that even where centrists do have good ideas these have not (yet?) found their way into the political centre.

Hence Labour’s problem right now. Whilst people will vote for something, even if it’s lousy, they don’t often vote for nothing. The vacuity of the centre has left Labour with a clapped out leadership bereft of ideas without a vision or a coherent message. As Grace says: “Labour has a choice to make: socialism or Pasokification.”

Of course, it has not always been this way. It’s easy to forget that New Labour actually had an intelligent and coherent – if flawed – economic narrative. The challenge for the Labour right is to either discover a version of that narrative fit for the 2020s, or to remain the braindead quislings of rentier capital.