'Generation Left' is a book by Keir Milburn. William Davies reviewed the book in an essay in the LRB, 20 February 2020, and drew up further facts about politics and the young since 'Generation Left' was published in May 2019. The book and the review are definitely worth their salt, but this blog will borrow some key facts from those sources and others about young people and politics in Britain today - aiming at specific conclusions about Britain's potential political future.
First, a really delicious quotation from the review:
'If you are over the age of 50, the odds are that you are happy with how it's all worked out.' (The UK General Election result.) 'If you are under the age of 50, the odds are you are not, and if you are under the age of 30, you may well be bloody furious.'
But, like everything else in politics, there is an argument, in this case not whether youth are radical (even the most rabid Tory press agree the youth are mainly radical-lefties, tinged with Marxism!) The argument is why has this happened? Inevitably we find that the answer to that question, the reason for the radicalisation of the young, leads to different paths and reflects different social interests.
There are various responses to younger people becoming radical. One example is the often referred to selfishness of the baby boomers (born 1945 - to 1964) who have sucked up the best of the incomes, the health services, welfare and the most devastatingly, have been able to seize home ownership, which in turn has become a wealth asset. It takes seconds, if any time at all, to unravel the boulder in the eye of this piece of hollow reasoning.
It seems plain that the period following WW2 was a patch of western history when most ordinary, working class people in the West were generally able to gain better standards of living than any previous period. But how? Kindness from the ruling classes? Has this ever been a feature of History? More likely the victory over fascism and the organisation of the working classes through unions etc., forced a better redistribution that any previous period. Society between 1945 to 1979 was not created by the selfishness enjoyed by the 'baby boomers'. As unions were fought and defeated; as public services were sold off, it was the selfishness of the ruling class led-society from 1980 that started the social decline of millions and millions of ordinary people, in various degrees, across the western world.
The deliberate act of Thatcher to monetise homes building a working class Tory bloc (long before Boris Johnson) was not in any meaningful sense, a 'choice.' Jobs were becoming precarious. The unions were being defeated. 'Buying' your council house seemed a defence against poverty. But despite the impact of the Thatcher revolution, those young people who have challenged society openly, in action and their argument, seem thus far to have dismissed the nonsense of the selfish baby boomers.
Then there are the 'cultural' arguments that suggest the 'over' universitised experience of the young and extensive lefty education in general (including 'dangerous' institutions like the BBC, the courts, leading show biz stars etc) that leads to unfair judgments on society, particularly in relation to patriotism, the armed forces, immigration etc. There is a genuine fear in the tabloid press that they will cease to exist, and thereby break the lode stone of Britain's 'deep' character. And it is true that the British youth are more educated - in terms of degrees etc., than their forebears. New definitions based on so called 'cultural wars' are used to define this chasm between the youth and their elders. The communication technology is supposed to underline the rift. But, again, these young people that have shifted, particularly in the UK and the US towards radical politics, deny a mainly cultural explanation of their disengagement from modern society.
It is easy to imagine that young radicals have been seeking their own way to a better world. Standard histories describe such moments in all political upheavals - as though the sheer innocence, coupled with deep feelings of the young creates the need for drama. Less picturesquely perhaps, there is a deep economic class basis for young people in the West to radicalise today.
In the late 1970s in the UK owner occupancy was around 50%. On the eve of the crisis of 2008 owner occupancy was 70% and after 2008 it fell to 63%. Meanwhile the rate of home ownership among young adults has halved over the past twenty years. Currently more than £17 billion is loaned to around 1.3 million students in England each year. The value of outstanding loans at the end of March 2019 reached £121 billion. The average debt among the cohort of borrowers who finished their courses in 2018 was £36,000. The average salary for full time work in 2019 was £36,610.. The median starting salary for UK graduates for 2018-2019 is between £19,000 and £22,000 a year. The average earnings of employees aged between 22 are 29 per year are £24 850 for men and £22.921 for women.
Despite the mill stones around their necks and their rental future, students are in the 'privileged' sector of UK youth. They amount now to 49% of young people of the relevant age. The conditions for the 51% non students are worse. According to ASHE, 16-to-17-year-olds entering the job market can expect to earn under £200 a week; under £10,400 a year - should they have a yearly contract.
Finally, the decline of young people's economic conditions has been projected into the future as a new study that examines life expectancy, welfare and health has been published (25 February 2020.) From the Financial Times, we read the following;
'Improvements in life expectancy in England have stalled for the first sustained period in 120 years after a decade of government austerity, according to one of the world’s leading experts on the link between social deprivation and health.
Describing his findings as “shocking”, Michael Marmot, who heads the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, highlighted rising child poverty, declines in education funding, an increase in zero-hours contracts and the large number of people resorting to food banks. The result was “ignored communities with poor conditions and little reason for hope”.
Sir Michael told the Financial Times: “I’m not saying ‘austerity is killing people’. I’m saying it’s highly likely — because we identified the key drivers of health and health inequalities, and because they’ve changed in an adverse direction — that those changes are responsible for the health effects that we see.”
He has drawn a stronger link between austerity and the slowing increase in life expectancy than in his last report, in 2017.'
This is the meaning of the polarisation of British politics and society. Brexit has never been its basis and nor has its result somehow achieved any real solution, anymore than the radicalisation of young people is based on some fantasy, on a 'culture war' or youth's wishful thinking. The Labour Party members now deciding their votes for leader will have a serious effect on whether young people can organise and express their radical views, from the Labour platform, across society. Labour under Corbyn offered a route that opened to the radical youth, and now so does Sanders and a section of the US Democrats. But both of the would-be dominant forces in those traditional parties want to pretend that they can wish the polarisation of society out of existence and find their own fantasy of a 'middle way.' If they win the leadership vote, their failure will mean that the young will learn yet another sad truth about who are their friends and will need to take an entirely different and much harder road.
Wednesday 26 February 2020
Friday 14 February 2020
Our new rulers
Our ruling classes are demonstrating a new initiative. It arises first in their political choices.
Most political commentators and analysts talk and write about a new populism that has arisen in the West. Populism is an odd term that explains very little. It has arisen as a response to the later part of the 20th Century and the early 21st, when the major political parties had coagulated and where voters declined to respond to the narrower and narrower options offered by those traditional mass parties.
Following the 2008 crash the class nature of the capitalist system in the West became immediately obvious to millions, perhaps billions. Most people were directly effected by the panicky shift of funds held by states that poured wealth into banks and then into stock exchanges, in order to prop up to the prevailing economic system across the West. It created the demand that ordinary people's needs should and could be met by governments and politicians. Accordingly, the (largely) new working class population demanded political action. It was this political upheaval that was first described as 'populism'; the naive, underdeveloped, simplistic demand by the working class that would drive inroads into capitalism's apparently universal domination and instead demand politics that acted in their favour.
When the media and the academics' wriggles and giggles finished; when the halo around 'Apple' and Obama lost their angelic haze, it was quite apparent to many people at the base of society that the ordinary political mechanisms in the West were still failing to respond to the new context. Springing up out of the decaying political history of the West came a range of alternatives. In the societies in eastern Europe that had broken up the remnants of the USSR, the golden EU had turned pretty sour, pretty quick. After 2008 in eastern Europe there was a choice of enemies; the suspicious, corrupt legions of ex-bureaucrats at home, or the slicker, richer and corrupter 'globalisers' in Brussels and, most of all, those centred in a united Germany and those refugees at the border of Greece and Turkey. The new racist right and their local bureaucrats and their billionaires filled the political gap. The political model became Putinised and Populist.
Further West, in Italy, institutional politics had always failed. The project that Italy, as a decisive component of an overall ruling class European leadership, had also begun to collapse. The political order now vies for another version of Mussolini or for taking over the squares. In France the traditional parties collapsed and Macron, the spirit of the age according to the Economist, is now also collapsing, as he concedes and concedes more and more of his Thatcherite plans to the trade unions. Macron's failing populism is in danger of mushrooming a new version under the banner of the fascists as the only means to stop the left. And on it goes.
Further West we have the UK, Ireland and the US.
In the UK, as things stand, a dramatically (albeit partially) reformed Labour Party, failed. Some correspondents thought Labour was the populist menace (now thoroughly defeated.) But meanwhile the Tories managed to break themselves up. They have now coalesced away from the policy favoured by leading elements of the traditional ruling class in Britain over the EU and, with its new block of working class voters, the Tories under Boris, have power. They call themselves the 'Peoples Government'. They used Brexit as their leverage. They succeeded in smashing the their own image of a ten-year Tory government that openly and proudly delivered nothing but poverty! They used their new bloc of ex Labour voters, their new patriotism and the use of Brexit as the second victory of WW2 to build what is now the real successful British populism.
In Ireland, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Fianna Fail have been defeated - from the Sinn Fain led left. Another 'populist' manoeuvre? Even the British correspondents doubt it. It is certainly another serious upheaval; one that arose from a working class population that saw the results of 2008. The British elite savoured Varadkar for his 'progressiveness' and his Cameron type alliance with low company taxation, mainly EU based. Varadkar had, has, no intention of returning Northern Ireland to Ireland - even given the complexity of EU borders in the island. Now the shadow of the disintegration of the UK hangs over British politics. In the event that politics in Ireland genuinely move that way - then - as with the remodelled Tories in Britain, a 'real' populist politics will start to surface.
The US demonstrates the most advanced character of the new populism. As a successful political agency, US populism has now shown most of its features. As with the transformation of the British Tory Party the Republicans back Trump completely. Apparently Trump's 'America first' slogan cut against the US's ruling classes in respect of their global reach; but little damage has actually occurred, in banking, among the international corporations (where using force against free trade has often proved handy in China etc.) The biggest corporate tax cut keep profits high and the stock market ebullient. Most important of all has been the political block that the Democrats potentially broke with Obama (who dismally failed) has now, for the time being, been nailed up. Populism in America is the exciting way to maintain the status quo.
And this is the point about the modern version of populism.
If we take the EU issue in British politics - ostensibly the British ruling class opposed Brexit to the hilt. The structure of successful capitalism in Britain depended on open access to the biggest market in the world. But what happened? The hilt proved less important than the rise of the left, coming out of the experience of 2008. It cannot be picked out, British billionaire by billionaire, but the risk of the Corbyn government proved more immediate than Brexit. The Tory Party, the party of Britain's ruling class for centuries, helped create a populist Tory government as the means of destroying Corbyn's danger.
There are several analyses of the structure of the modern ruling class in the UK and internationally. Certainly deep national attachments to the great sources of wealth operating in the UK are diminishing. Practically speaking most very wealthy Brits live all over the world with their compatriots from other countries. The British state is still essential as the 2008 crash shows, but it is not the location of British wealth that matters, it is the political and legal safety of its institutions, (including most of the world'd tax havens) that keeps it defined as 'home.'
That's the point of populism and the populist parties and movements now emerging across the West. Neither big Capital mainly based in country by country, nor the consensual politics between the major political parties, can be resurrected. The US Democrats are not going to cut Trump away with a 'love you all' consensus Democrat President. The Tories needed their internal revolution to stall the British left. The working classes in the West have already suffered a drastic reduction in their standards of living. There is neither a social nor an economic basis for a return to consensus. The promotion of self-styled populism is the first step in the polarisation of Western society. And big Capital knows what side it is on. It showed its mettle in Nazi Germany.
Most political commentators and analysts talk and write about a new populism that has arisen in the West. Populism is an odd term that explains very little. It has arisen as a response to the later part of the 20th Century and the early 21st, when the major political parties had coagulated and where voters declined to respond to the narrower and narrower options offered by those traditional mass parties.
Following the 2008 crash the class nature of the capitalist system in the West became immediately obvious to millions, perhaps billions. Most people were directly effected by the panicky shift of funds held by states that poured wealth into banks and then into stock exchanges, in order to prop up to the prevailing economic system across the West. It created the demand that ordinary people's needs should and could be met by governments and politicians. Accordingly, the (largely) new working class population demanded political action. It was this political upheaval that was first described as 'populism'; the naive, underdeveloped, simplistic demand by the working class that would drive inroads into capitalism's apparently universal domination and instead demand politics that acted in their favour.
When the media and the academics' wriggles and giggles finished; when the halo around 'Apple' and Obama lost their angelic haze, it was quite apparent to many people at the base of society that the ordinary political mechanisms in the West were still failing to respond to the new context. Springing up out of the decaying political history of the West came a range of alternatives. In the societies in eastern Europe that had broken up the remnants of the USSR, the golden EU had turned pretty sour, pretty quick. After 2008 in eastern Europe there was a choice of enemies; the suspicious, corrupt legions of ex-bureaucrats at home, or the slicker, richer and corrupter 'globalisers' in Brussels and, most of all, those centred in a united Germany and those refugees at the border of Greece and Turkey. The new racist right and their local bureaucrats and their billionaires filled the political gap. The political model became Putinised and Populist.
Further West, in Italy, institutional politics had always failed. The project that Italy, as a decisive component of an overall ruling class European leadership, had also begun to collapse. The political order now vies for another version of Mussolini or for taking over the squares. In France the traditional parties collapsed and Macron, the spirit of the age according to the Economist, is now also collapsing, as he concedes and concedes more and more of his Thatcherite plans to the trade unions. Macron's failing populism is in danger of mushrooming a new version under the banner of the fascists as the only means to stop the left. And on it goes.
Further West we have the UK, Ireland and the US.
In the UK, as things stand, a dramatically (albeit partially) reformed Labour Party, failed. Some correspondents thought Labour was the populist menace (now thoroughly defeated.) But meanwhile the Tories managed to break themselves up. They have now coalesced away from the policy favoured by leading elements of the traditional ruling class in Britain over the EU and, with its new block of working class voters, the Tories under Boris, have power. They call themselves the 'Peoples Government'. They used Brexit as their leverage. They succeeded in smashing the their own image of a ten-year Tory government that openly and proudly delivered nothing but poverty! They used their new bloc of ex Labour voters, their new patriotism and the use of Brexit as the second victory of WW2 to build what is now the real successful British populism.
In Ireland, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Fianna Fail have been defeated - from the Sinn Fain led left. Another 'populist' manoeuvre? Even the British correspondents doubt it. It is certainly another serious upheaval; one that arose from a working class population that saw the results of 2008. The British elite savoured Varadkar for his 'progressiveness' and his Cameron type alliance with low company taxation, mainly EU based. Varadkar had, has, no intention of returning Northern Ireland to Ireland - even given the complexity of EU borders in the island. Now the shadow of the disintegration of the UK hangs over British politics. In the event that politics in Ireland genuinely move that way - then - as with the remodelled Tories in Britain, a 'real' populist politics will start to surface.
The US demonstrates the most advanced character of the new populism. As a successful political agency, US populism has now shown most of its features. As with the transformation of the British Tory Party the Republicans back Trump completely. Apparently Trump's 'America first' slogan cut against the US's ruling classes in respect of their global reach; but little damage has actually occurred, in banking, among the international corporations (where using force against free trade has often proved handy in China etc.) The biggest corporate tax cut keep profits high and the stock market ebullient. Most important of all has been the political block that the Democrats potentially broke with Obama (who dismally failed) has now, for the time being, been nailed up. Populism in America is the exciting way to maintain the status quo.
And this is the point about the modern version of populism.
If we take the EU issue in British politics - ostensibly the British ruling class opposed Brexit to the hilt. The structure of successful capitalism in Britain depended on open access to the biggest market in the world. But what happened? The hilt proved less important than the rise of the left, coming out of the experience of 2008. It cannot be picked out, British billionaire by billionaire, but the risk of the Corbyn government proved more immediate than Brexit. The Tory Party, the party of Britain's ruling class for centuries, helped create a populist Tory government as the means of destroying Corbyn's danger.
There are several analyses of the structure of the modern ruling class in the UK and internationally. Certainly deep national attachments to the great sources of wealth operating in the UK are diminishing. Practically speaking most very wealthy Brits live all over the world with their compatriots from other countries. The British state is still essential as the 2008 crash shows, but it is not the location of British wealth that matters, it is the political and legal safety of its institutions, (including most of the world'd tax havens) that keeps it defined as 'home.'
That's the point of populism and the populist parties and movements now emerging across the West. Neither big Capital mainly based in country by country, nor the consensual politics between the major political parties, can be resurrected. The US Democrats are not going to cut Trump away with a 'love you all' consensus Democrat President. The Tories needed their internal revolution to stall the British left. The working classes in the West have already suffered a drastic reduction in their standards of living. There is neither a social nor an economic basis for a return to consensus. The promotion of self-styled populism is the first step in the polarisation of Western society. And big Capital knows what side it is on. It showed its mettle in Nazi Germany.
Tuesday 11 February 2020
An astonishing book
'Will and Testament', a novel by Norwegian Vigdis Hjorth, available from Verso, is a masterpiece. Reading the book, translated into English by Charlotte Barslund, is coming to grips with a new type of novel that should inspire and be followed across the literary world.
But I suppose nothing is for certain. For example the Guardian review, printed on the back of the book, manages to entirely miss the point of 'Will and Testament'.
'This is a novel that people can enjoy either as high literature or as a work of down-and-dirty revenge.'
Anybody is entitled to have their own understanding about a public book - and even have their views printed. But it is difficult to see anything in the Guardian's comment that touches on the simple furnace of truth that the main character opens up to us. Bergljot is not producing 'high literature' or plotting her vengeance. She is ruminating on the terrible events of her childhood and struggling with her day to day relationships, her friends, her children and relatives and her meaning as a sophisticated, older woman. She is doing it in her totally clear, often repeated (but never copied) razor sharp, thoughts.
I'm not going to repeat the 'plot.' (It hangs around a will and a testament.) The essence of the book is surely not the plot in the simple sense of a 'beginning, middle and end' story. It is the astonishingly honest reflections of a woman who is trying to survive. The simple truths that hesitantly emerge, then tumble out, then block any movement and then overwhelm the sadness of pain and fear are mounted inside the same theme, but are endlessly different. The events in the book are platforms in Bergljot's present life and require their consideration, they create further revelations and her fuller emergence.
What is the result for the reader from this revelatory experience? The opposite of boredom (or any fight with 'high literature' or a dished up cathartic solution). It is the intimate knowledge of another person. Frankly, a life-changing event.
Criticism? Well; there are all the innate aspects and implications of the western world to deal with. They are present in all works, in every piece of western art and culture. Bergljot does not represent the whole of humanity (and does not pretend too.) More, Bergljot has access to therapy, a signal part of her history in the book. (We do not go there with her.) And the book's author allows for a different character to spell out to Bergljot the Freudian message of personality - where unresolved 'instincts' are discovered as the reason for human beings' grotesque acts, such as the overthrow of humanity's reason in the 1st WW. Interestingly, Bergljot makes no comments about her friend's views on Freud. To be honest, it is the least engaging part of the novel. The 'why' of her abuse is much more real as she describes her own experience of the abuser.
The argument surrounding the social context of personality is not developed in the novel, exception touched on the above. The core remains the irrefutable, unmistakable, unforgettable truth.
But I suppose nothing is for certain. For example the Guardian review, printed on the back of the book, manages to entirely miss the point of 'Will and Testament'.
'This is a novel that people can enjoy either as high literature or as a work of down-and-dirty revenge.'
Anybody is entitled to have their own understanding about a public book - and even have their views printed. But it is difficult to see anything in the Guardian's comment that touches on the simple furnace of truth that the main character opens up to us. Bergljot is not producing 'high literature' or plotting her vengeance. She is ruminating on the terrible events of her childhood and struggling with her day to day relationships, her friends, her children and relatives and her meaning as a sophisticated, older woman. She is doing it in her totally clear, often repeated (but never copied) razor sharp, thoughts.
I'm not going to repeat the 'plot.' (It hangs around a will and a testament.) The essence of the book is surely not the plot in the simple sense of a 'beginning, middle and end' story. It is the astonishingly honest reflections of a woman who is trying to survive. The simple truths that hesitantly emerge, then tumble out, then block any movement and then overwhelm the sadness of pain and fear are mounted inside the same theme, but are endlessly different. The events in the book are platforms in Bergljot's present life and require their consideration, they create further revelations and her fuller emergence.
What is the result for the reader from this revelatory experience? The opposite of boredom (or any fight with 'high literature' or a dished up cathartic solution). It is the intimate knowledge of another person. Frankly, a life-changing event.
Criticism? Well; there are all the innate aspects and implications of the western world to deal with. They are present in all works, in every piece of western art and culture. Bergljot does not represent the whole of humanity (and does not pretend too.) More, Bergljot has access to therapy, a signal part of her history in the book. (We do not go there with her.) And the book's author allows for a different character to spell out to Bergljot the Freudian message of personality - where unresolved 'instincts' are discovered as the reason for human beings' grotesque acts, such as the overthrow of humanity's reason in the 1st WW. Interestingly, Bergljot makes no comments about her friend's views on Freud. To be honest, it is the least engaging part of the novel. The 'why' of her abuse is much more real as she describes her own experience of the abuser.
The argument surrounding the social context of personality is not developed in the novel, exception touched on the above. The core remains the irrefutable, unmistakable, unforgettable truth.
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