One of the recurrent themes of previous chapters has been the profound failures of the mainstream centre-left in Britain, as well as in Europe and the US. While any number of examples could be chosen, the two major humiliations for the left that most interested British people throughout 2016 were the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the United States. The main reason these events are humiliations is not simply because of the results per se, but because in both cases it was the right that successfully deployed the language of class, and the left that tried to frame this language as divisive. It was the latter, as a result, that was more easily presented as the out-of-touch elite.
This was discussed at length in Chapter 1. But the language around class politics has inevitably become closely entangled with other debates around identity and diversity, often in counterproductive or self-serving ways. A narrative has proliferated which basically runs as follows: it is now the political right that speaks for those that have been left behind by global capitalism, while the political left is mainly concerned with
‘identity politics’. ‘Left behind’ is a euphemism used to refer to people in communities rendered insecure and/or impoverished by globalisation.*
‘Identity politics’ is used to denote political movements seeking to secure greater inclusion in public life for particular population groups that have previously been marginalised – often related to sexuality, race or gender. It is now mainly used as a pejorative phrase in more or less the same way as
‘political correctness’ always has been – its meaning is largely equivalent but has the advantage of making its user sound less like Alan Partridge.
A comedian, in character as an angry left-wing journalist, encapsulates an explanation for Donald Trump’s victory which is apparently accepted as gospel by many people from a range of political backgrounds:
* See also the ‘just-about managing’ in heresa May-speak.
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If I see, fuck me, one more tweet containing a ‘#TrumpWins’ next to a ‘#EverydaySexism’ I’m going to drop a *inaudible* … Most people didn’t vote for [Clinton] not because she’s a women, but because she offered no palpable change whatsoever … People can’t admit what they think, the left don’t allow them to … every time someone on the left says ‘you mustn’t say that’ they are contributing to this culture … if my mansplaining is triggering you, you can fuck off to your safe space.
This is the right-wing class warrior’s argument repurposed as liberal self-flagellation. The story goes that the ‘working class’ has been alienated by anti-racism or anti-sexism campaigns. The latter are basically minority concerns voiced by cosmopolitans who have no connection to the real ‘left behind’, who have quite justifiably embraced right-wing nationalism as a result. It is very important to note that, in these kinds of arguments, the idea of the ‘working class’ is employed in a way that is obviously very different to the category of ‘labour’ as I have been using it in this book.
Evidently, global financial capitalism has created insecurity, power-lessness and a sense of diminished community among many people. The failure of the centre-left in Britain and elsewhere has been their inability to find alternative means of coping with this problem which are more compelling than those proposed by the nationalist right. It has been the shift to a more radical approach that has seen the Labour Party take some tentative steps to addressing this, a point to which I return in the Conclusion. On the international centre-left, by contrast, the tone of debate is not particularly encouraging. Take the US, whose left-leaning political talk-show scene is thriving in inverse proportion to its ability to get its agenda implemented. Some commentators therein have basically accepted the right-wing class warrior narrative, deciding that the left’s response to Trump should be a period of remorse for having spent too much time worrying about the use of racist and sexist language.
According to the comedian/talk-show host Bill Maher, the left has gone from ‘protecting people to protecting feelings’. This kind of material is highly reliant on some dubious generalisations about how easily offended college students are, enabling the speaker to present himself as the tough-but-rational left-winger in a culture of ‘PC gone mad’.
There are two main problems with this wearyingly trendy argument.
First, because it accepts a very flimsy premise: the intolerant and unrea-sonable practitioner of politically correct identity politics looms much
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larger in conservative imagination than in empirical reality. For instance, even if there was not a single person that had ever wanted to disinvite a ‘mens’ rights activist’ from a university debate, the same people would still print news stories about how left-wing students are stifling free speech on campuses, and the same audience would still believe these stories. Hence, fixating on this as ‘the reason for Trump/Brexit’ becomes nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. Second, it misses a much bigger and more important truth, which is that Trump and Brexit were decisive victories of ‘identity politics’, just identity politics practised by very different demographics. There is no more perfect distillation of identity politics than Nigel Farage wearing tweed, drinking in a pub and talking about ‘real Britons’.
There is an alternative response which, once again, is expressed more loudly and explicitly in the US. This is to take pride in the ‘identity politics’ label and double down on it. Another liberal comedian/talk-show host, Samantha Bee, responds to arguments such as those advanced by Bill Maher as follows:
Democrats, I know you’re having a rough time, you hate being lost in the wilderness … but if your panic over a loss makes you abandon both your principles and the people who actually vote for you, then you’ll be in the wilderness for a decade … By all means invite working class white people to the party, just don’t let them take over the DJ table.*
Here, it is made explicit that the Democrats, as a centre-left party, should see its natural base as open-minded cosmopolitans, and be fighting primarily on their behalf. According to this line, the conserva-tive class warrior is not the sad result of the mainstream left abandoning its historic constituencies, but the natural enemy it should have been fighting all along. This is the kind of argument that ends up with people like the bosses of Amazon or Apple being held up as the vanguard of anti-Trump sentiment whenever they express queasiness about travel bans and the like. They may heap misery and degradation on their workers, but at least they believe in openness.
Rebecca Solnit has written a powerful attack on the idea that Clinton lost because of her identity politics, making various points: most notably,
* See the Full Frontal with Samantha Bee segment entitled ‘Democrats in the Wilderness’, uploaded onto YouTube on 12 December 2016, and available to view here: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=CH7GCMm1ngA.
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that Trump is in reality a far more practised exponent, and the reason that Clinton was labelled the identity politics candidate is more to do with her gender than her politics (in this sense, the attack on identity politics demonstrates the need for it).1 This is almost certainly true, but Solnit also protests that Clinton actually mentioned jobs significantly more frequently than she did issues such as abortion or racism. This, she suggests, indicates that any female candidate, unless they were explicitly running on an anti-abortion platform, would probably be accused of only caring about ‘women’s issues’.
This is highly likely, but it reveals another problem. It is one thing to mention the word ‘jobs’ frequently, but this was generally done in a highly abstract way: jobs are good things in themselves, and if business is confident, the economy will grow and there will be more jobs, and so on. But evidently there was a level of emotion and rage in her opponent’s language that resonated far more deeply among the ‘left behind’.* It is not enough to talk about jobs, it also depends what you say about them.
Lots of blue-collar Trump voters have jobs, but they are (often) very unrewarding ones. Dylan Riley writes that ‘the basic problems to which Trump points are demonstrably real’. Much of his support was drawn from areas where many people have ‘uncertain prospects’ and where the most highly routinised jobs are disproportionately common. ‘But this class-based revolt was supercharged by racist and patriarchal resentment.
This issue is not whether class, race or gender was the decisive factor, but rather how they combined’.2
Hopefully I can be forgiven for this short detour into US politics, since it has some lessons for what is happening in the UK. In both countries, the goals of increased inequality and inclusion on the grounds of gender, race or sexuality are jeopardised by the shifting balance of class power, and particularly of the complicity of centre-left politicians in this shift. Insecurity, class discipline and the hollowing-out of post-in-dustrial areas produces anger, which the centre-left has done nothing to harness; if anything, it has tried to hush it up, and it has done this because it’s scared of capital. The fact that the same parties have, over the same period, been comparatively more sympathetic on issues relating to gender, race and sexuality has made it very easy for ‘identity politics’
to be made the scapegoat for class-related failures. The root problem for
* We need to be careful here, because in the end Clinton still got more votes than Trump.
But it is still clear that defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory by the Democrats’
failures with groups that were traditionally supportive of them.
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centre-left parties is thus not that ‘identity politics’ is incompatible with
‘representing the working class’, but that their manifest failure to do the latter has tarnished their entire project, setting the stage for right-wing nationalism to appropriate the language of class.
As such, this chapter is concerned with looking in more depth at the way in which the concept of class (by which, of course, I mean the relationship between labour and capital) interacts with other issues that connect with the broader idea of ‘equality’ and identity, beginning with the subject of gender.