The last couple of blogs have centred on the decay of global capitalism, which increasingly requires a global change - much more significantly than any cure of Covid 19. Now the argument about change, particularly in the West, is shifting. And it will not mainly be about pandemics. Will there be substantial social, economic and political change? Who will make such changes? And, as we cannot stand still, what happens when change is blocked? (At this point it is worth warning that some stats will be required!)
Let us start with the recent General Election in Holland. Historically the Dutch are a sophisticated electorate. This time they came down with a hammer. From the 15th to the 17th of March 2021, they devastated the remains of Holland's Social Democracy. Its vote was the lowest since the Dutch people first won their franchise. Instead the biggest vote went to Mark Rutte. He has led Holland since 2010. He is a right-wing 'liberal'. Yet his speeches were almost entirely about the danger of the pandemic during the election, touched with his apparent call for dumping austerity and the need to elevate social support for the neediest sections of the population. A right-winger, apparently turning away from traditional right-wing economics and supporting state welfare. Heard it before?
The Dutch working class, like a large part of the UK working class, share a broadly radical perspective, regarding taxation, public health and welfare, as well as demanding equality and the need for government ownership of various utilities. Polls on these views are deeply established. Like the experience of Blair's ten year term as Prime Minister in the UK, the Dutch social democracy shifted right in the case of Holland, carried out austerity and thereby found themselves destroyed. But in Holland (and in the UK) the working classes, regardless of their potential radicalism, then seized the new right wing rather than the traditional left. Many pedagogues explained this political shift in the working class as the organised pressure of racism. It is true for example that the early Brexit in the UK argument was mainly racist. But subsequently, as the Brexit debate developed, racism dropped to fourth or fifth as the main issue.
This is the heart of the matter, in both the Dutch and the UK working classes. Yes, of course organised racism tried hard to win working class support. It is a significant bloc of 10 to 20% across many European countries. But that has, so far, not been the most decisive or fundamental issue for the working class.
Racism is alive in all classes, but it is the particular conditions of the new working classes in Holland and in the UK that is creating the Ruttes and Johnsons. It is the work carried out by the new working classes that has drastically changed. And it is most significantly obvious in the growth of the relentless de-construction of large scale work, the break-down of large scale communities and the constant, increasing competition for individual jobs, for the lowest wages, for housing and public services in general. The Dutch working class, like that of the UK, therefore simultaneously saw the failures of the new capitalism and thereby called for some state reforms, but their day-to-day competitiveness for work, and in work, for money, for housing, for health and welfare, inevitably focussed on people, especially on their fellow immigrants and refugees. And these two combined elements among sectors of the working class, in the first place the radicalism required to improve on a declining way-of-life and secondly, the obvious competition against 'the others' - particularly immigrants - became the root of the new right wing's political platform. The conditions of the working class in the West have been diminished and thoroughly reorganised via globalisation. The politics that has emerged is deeply based in the new conditions of labour.
Here are some significant data about the present working class in the UK.
First, here are the top ten industries in order of size in the UK. 1. Supermarkets 2. Hospitals 3. Charities 4. Agencies 5. Secondary Education 6. Selling and Marketing. 7. Construction contractors. 8. Restaurants 9. Management consultants. 10. Universities.
Here are the numbers of workers in the top seven groups.
1. Wholesales and retail - 5 million. 2. Health and welfare - 4.5 million. 3. Professionals - 3.2 million. 4. Admin - 3 million. 5. Education - 2.9 million. 6. Manufacturing - 2.7 million. 7. Accommodation and food - 2.5 million. 8. Construction - 2.2 million.
Here are some of the effects of small to medium businesses for the working class.
Such businesses have increased by 72% since 2000. In 2020, there were 6 million such businesses. Three-fifths of all workers in the UK work with 1 to 49 people at their work. 96% have fewer than 10 employees where they work. General service-work employs 79% of all workers. Retail alone accounts for 18% of all workers. (Health and social work and education provides 9%.)
In one respect, the many small and medium businesses owners (who hate taxes, dodge minimum wages, increase working time and swallow profit and would-be investment) have recreated the petite bourgeoise that was first evolved in Victorian times. Their workers are, in part, in modern shackles, without collective strength and in fear of individual replacement. Their most immediate ambition appears to become an owner themselves.
The deliberate construction of working class work in the West is the result of globalisation. The destruction of large scale, collective work in the West is also deliberate. The consequences of the new conditions have already emerged in the social and political developments in the 2020s, obvious in the recent Elections in Holland and the UK. And most significantly, despite the 10.1 and possibly 13.1 million workers who are working in whole or in part of larger, collective, working lives, the de facto lead of the working class - as a whole in society - is most dominant by the spiralling impact, especially among the young, of the small and medium businesses.
What, as somebody once said, is to be done?
That will follow as the concrete reality arises out of the imagination of millions of difficult lives.
Part of it has already begun. Although the pandemic has become a starting point for particularly middle class calls, calling for working at home and worrying about the desperate plight of shops, the most substantial issue that has emerged is the desperate and continuing increase of inequality. Right at the centre is the 1.1 million who directly work in the NHS. In the course of the pandemic the NHS workers proved the critical force and achievement through what was often self-managed, collective efforts. (Despite the state's endless ranking and layering.) For now, that leads across the whole working class and in wider society.
New unions have broken through (despite the Trade Union Congress, which has by and large defensively tried to freeze their 6.1 million members into its own version of a tight lock-down.) The new unions are widespread, not even limited to particular work in some cases and all of them are led by youth. While the larger society is as yet unaware of these growing organisations they will be front and centre when the obvious classes and people end up paying for the pandemic. (Already a big government mistake with the NHS income cuts.)
The crucial point here is the creation of a new leadership in society, starting from that part of the working class that cannot (for the time being) be broken up, or pressured by racism, or unable to organise in work, or torn politically away from their views about state support for utilities etc., and instead stay in fear of their own positions. The TUC could have an enormous part. Instead its managers ally with government and Her Majesty's polite opposition.
The necessary practicalities are new. Just like the massive and fast construction of globalisation, so massive and fast need to be the watchwords for those who want something better than a collapsing world economy, an end to profits in all the utilities, building small-rent housing, who see a much wider democracy and a much deeper equality.
More to come.
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