A Return to Class

The New Statesman has started to show a greater interest in leftwing thought since 2019, which might appear paradoxical given its clear support for Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party. This has also coincided with a turnover in contributors that has seen more varied voices - such as Rory Scothorne and Richard Seymour - added to the roster, though it has also seen the conventional if occasionally astute Stephen Bush recently replaced as Political Editor by the even more conventional and invariably obtuse Andrew Marr. Its foreign affairs coverage, which is what the establishment ultimately cares most about, remains decidely Atlanticist, whether in the form of Jeremy Cliffe's eurocentrism or Paul Mason's nostalgic social democracy. So what is going on? Are these tentative steps towards the left a recognition that the paper alienated many of its readers by its often hysterical opposition to Jeremy Corbyn? Or is this an attempt to confine the left to arid discourse, well away from the levers of power, as was the case in the 1990s? 

These respectively material and cynical explanations are plausible, but I think there's a case to be made for another: that this is part of a wider war of position that complements Starmer's war of manoeuvre. That doesn't mean promoting leftwing thought but absorbing it into a hegemonic project. A current example of this is provided in an interview with the communist academic, Jodi Dean, centred on her 2019 book, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. It's significant that the interviewer, Freddie Hayward, references the first part of that title but not the second. Dean's position is that organic political identity - the recognition of one's own oppression as a woman or an ethnic minority - can distract from a political belonging that has to be painstakingly constructed. But Hayward reinterprets this to mean that identity politics is a dead-end that undermines class politics, rather than a stage in a process of growing political consciousness (in Marx's famous formulation, towards a class for itself). The central premise of the article is that the left (never precisely defined) is divided by "arguments about race and gender" (again, assumed rather than explained or exemplified). 

In fact, Dean's argument is a more subtle one: that "communicative capitalism" - i.e. modernity and the way that self-actualisation has been commodified through new media - leads to the over-valuation of the personal and emotional over the collective and the rational. At heart, hers is an intersectional argument, not unlike Bernie Sanders' point in 2016 that being a woman was not enough - that class solidarity matters too. But you'd easily come away from the article with the suspicion that Dean didn't think much of Black Lives Matter or the Gender Recognition Act. You also have to put Dean's arguments into the context of a longer tradition dating from the 1980s that deplored the postmodern (or "post-Marxist", in the contemporary terminology) turn away from class analysis. This turn was seen less as the product of new technology or academic fashion than as the result of neoliberal hegemony. A notable example was Ellen Meiksins Wood's 1986 work, The Retreat from Class, which took issue with the intellectual tendency, exemplified by Marxism Today in the UK, to substitute a progressive universalism for class politics, something that appeared particularly questionable against the backdrop of the miners' strike.

The change between Meiksins Wood and Dean concerns the way that the neoliberal dream of a progressive universalism advanced by free markets and personal choice has been undermined, not only by imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan but by the steady growth of inequality, the looming threat of climate change and the recrudescence of national chauvinism and xenophobia. In the conclusion of her book, Meiksins Wood quotes Michael Ignatieff (whom she describes as "the darling of the British literary press, their favourite repentant socialist and resident progressive") from a New Statesman article of December 1984, entitled Strangers and Comrades: "What the Left needs is a language of national unity expressed as commitment to fellowship among strangers. We need a language of trust built upon a practice of social comradeship". As subsequent history has shown, not least Ignatieff's political career, the use of "comrade" was about diluting class solidarity into a civic nationalism (the UK Labour Party's current appeals to patriotism show that this project continues). In contrast, Dean's use of the term is about surfacing class interests against the distractions of national identity as much as fragmented social identity.

Hayward doesn't mention Ellen Meiksins Wood but he does mention Mark Fisher whose 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, he summarises as rejecting "identitarianism", but without explaining that Fisher's beef was more precisely with "bourgeois modes of subjectivity" and the "moralism" that this gives rise to (in other words, a well-established critique of liberalism) rather than identity politics tout court. Of course, many of Fisher's contemporaries made the same mistake and promptly formed a firing squad. Just as Meiksins Wood's analysis should not be divorced from its context in the repression of the organised working class in the mid-80s, so Fisher's lament reflected his frustrations with the anticapitalist protests that culminated in the Occupy movement, which he castigated for its unwillingness to organise and embrace power: "Because the anti-capitalist movements that have arisen since the 90s have ultimately done nothing, they have caused capital no concern at all — it has been so easy to route around them. Part of the reason for that is the fact that they have taken place out on the street, ignoring the politics of the workplace and of the everyday."

This was too pessimistic an analysis by Fisher. The contemporary context for Dean's book, published before Labour's 2019 defeat and the end of Bernie Sanders' second presidential nomination campaign, was of a resurgent left that was busy organising (and compromising) within the established centre-left parties and union movements of both the UK and US. In other words, there has been a conscious move by the left towards power, even allowing for the periodic recourse to emblematic street protest, such as Black Lives Matter marches and the toppling of statues, and this move has been marked by both a theoretical and a practical revival of class politics: from a push to get more working class (and female and minority) representatives in legislatures to fights for union recognition and a new workplace militancy. The context of Hayward's article, in contrast, is the steady black-balling of the left on both sides of the Atlantic, with Labour members expelled on the flimsiest of pretexts, or disciplined into silence, and the Democrat left marginalised by the party machine.

Amusingly, Hayward's article has two tags: communism and Dominic Cummings. The latter appears in the introduction purely in order to lever in a (slighting) reference to Jacques Lacan that in turn serves to allow Hayward to characterise the left as subject to a Lacanian "drive" - i.e. the repetitive circling around an object of desire that cannot give full satisfaction. This is pretty shallow pyschology that simply reframes the traditional dismissal of the left as unrealistic and obsessive. It also seeks to shift responsibility for what Hayward calls the left's "recent impotence" onto its own shortcomings and away from the resistance and sabotage of the political centre. For example, "The Labour Party seems to enjoy endlessly arguing about its failures more than ruthlessly focusing on success. Conflicts over the legacy of Jeremy Corbyn and the disaster of the 2019 general election are filled with such passion you can’t help but sense a whiff of jouissance." 

This might appear a general criticism of the party except that the constant harping on about failure (and the studied amnesia over relative success, such as 2017) has been a characteristic of the party right more than the left in recent years. For them, the answer to every "disaster", real or imagined, is a further move to the right, even to the point of outflanking the Tories. In reality, the left recognised that there would be no Corbyn legacy two years ago when Starmer began to renege on his promise to build on it. Inasmuch as the left engaged in bitter recrimination after the 2019 defeat, it centred on the questions of whether more could have been done to cement its advance organisationally and whether a better Brexit policy was ever possible. Both were examples of a pragmatic perspective on power rather than the utopian delusion or self-indulgence with which the left is routinely charged by its critics.

In part Hayward is borrowing Dean's ideas on communicative capitalism to further damn social media as an antisocial development that breeds solipsism. So far, so typical of his profession. But his emphasis on the recovery of class politics, while simultaneously approving of nominally left parties that "have distanced themselves from the socialism of the past", presents something of a conundrum. This is clearly more than an attempt to hold the demands of identity politics at bay. It has a positive as much as a negative element to it. So what is Hayward arguing for? The answer appears to be a return to Labour's traditional economism, though in the more explicitly pro-business guise introduced by New Labour, thus: "Until the left refocuses on the economy as opposed to culture, Dean says, the inequalities that identity politics highlights are going to persist." That's not actually what Dean says. As a Marxist, she is very clear that the issue is ultimately the ownership of the means of production, not the fantastic object that we call the economy. This explains why an article on class finds no space for the role of trade unions, let alone more radical ideas such as workers' control.