A thank you to Brexiteers.

[Chilli.s]

Nostalgia and 40 years of press and politicians blaming Europe for Westminsters fuck ups and budget cuts

Exactly!

Amazing that the safeguards that EU laws had that are now being ignored are slowly dawning on some people. The obvious one (now we have to holiday at home) being how the water companies have realised that its now possible to tip sewage into rivers and the sea without risk.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Nostalgia and 40 years of press and politicians blaming Europe for Westminsters fuck ups and budget cuts

Part of the problem here is dismissing an actually existing set of conditions - ground in class struggle and relations - as 'nostalgia'.

A historic house building programme, the NHS, near full employment, rising wages and declining levels of inequality, strong levels of community cohesion and social solidarity, the increased access to leisure and consumer goods and a strong national economy aren't the dewy eyed fantasy of old people. It was the actual society they grew up in and one which they felt at the centre of: given that they'd defeated fascism and built collective organsiations with such power that capital felt it necessary to offer up all of the above.

Stop dismisisng it as nostalgia and start thinking about how and why it was overhauled - and the organised working class defeated - and how we've then got from there to here. Dismissing the lived experience of people as 'nostalgia' is not only offensive (imagine repacing the word 'old' with 'black community') but its also profoundly ahistorical and wrongly makes invisible the dynamics and social/economic and political processes - a period when we were on the relative front foot.

 

[ska invita]

Part of the problem here is dismissing an actually existing set of conditions - ground in class struggle and relations - as 'nostalgia'.

A historic house building programme, the NHS, near full employment, rising wages and declining levels of inequality, strong levels of community cohesion and social solidarity, the increased access to leisure and comsumer goods and a strong national economy aren't some dewy eyed dream of old people. It was the actual society they grew up in and one which they felt at the centre of: given that they'd defeated fascism and built collective organsiations with such power that capital felt it necessary to offer up all of the above.

Stop dismisisng it as nostalgia and start thinking about how and why it was overhauled - and the organised working class defeated - and how we've then got from there to here. Dismissing the lived experience of people as 'nostalgia' is not only offensive (imagine repacing the word 'old' with 'black community') but its also profoundly ahistorical and empties out a period when we were on the relative front foot.

The big question there is does leaving the EU mean any meaningful return to the post war boom and associated workers power or is it infinitely more likely we replace the EU with a US trade deal that deepens privatisation and deregulation further than anyone in the UK can imagine.

Knowing these are the vultures with real political power and momentum, long circling, the gambit to leave the EU in the hope of socialism is at best massively risky, or from my perspective doomed to make things worse.

 

[bimble]

All of those things, if you actually remembered them it probably did make the slogan Take Back Control resonate more, regardless of whether you really thought it was the eu who had taken them away from you. Still think those 3 words were a sort of history-changing stroke of genius.

 

[brogdale]

The big question there is does leaving the EU mean any meaningful return to the post war boom and associated workers power or is it infinitely more likely we replace the EU with a US trade deal that deepens privatisation and deregulation further than anyone in the UK can imagine.

Knowing these are the vultures with real political power and momentum, long circling, the gambit to leave the EU in the hope of socialism is at best massively risky, or from my perspective doomed to make things worse.

That is a valid question, but what's not in any doubt is that the L campaigns leveraged that lived experience for all that it was worth and convinced some older demographics of their 'correlation as causation' bollux that the evils of neoliberalism (the shite we face every day) all derived from the supra state and that getting out would bring back the good times.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

The big question there is does leaving the EU mean any meaningful return to the post war boom and associated workers power or is it infinitely more likely we replace the EU with a US trade deal that deepens privatisation and deregulation further than anyone in the UK can imagine.

That's your big question, but not it's not necessarily the one that exercised the way other people voted.

I would add, that both of the possible scenarios you posit are possible and, as with everything, the future will be shaped by the balance of forces and the social, economic and political dialectic.

 

[Chilli.s]

I think nostalgia is a pretty good although catch all term for it though. But to many an equally applicable phrase could be "when we were young" which is tainted by the reality of getting old and the diminishing of physical and mental powers

 

[Artaxerxes]

Part of the problem here is dismissing an actually existing set of conditions - ground in class struggle and relations - as 'nostalgia'.

A historic house building programme, the NHS, near full employment, rising wages and declining levels of inequality, strong levels of community cohesion and social solidarity, the increased access to leisure and comsumer goods and a strong national economy aren't some dewy eyed dream of old people. It was the actual society they grew up in and one which they felt at the centre of: given that they'd defeated fascism and built collective organsiations with such power that capital felt it necessary to offer up all of the above.

Stop dismisisng it as nostalgia and start thinking about how and why it was overhauled - and the organised working class defeated - and how we've then got from there to here. Dismissing the lived experience of people as 'nostalgia' is not only offensive (imagine repacing the word 'old' with 'black community') but its also profoundly ahistorical and wrongly makes invisible the dynamics and social/economic and political processes - a period when we were on the relative front foot.

I’m not dismissing anything but the vision from then to now recalled fondly is nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time capitalism hadnt beaten the world to absolute shit is still nostalgia.


That you’re defensive about this and feel the need to explain it doesn’t spare the fact it’s looking back fondly on a world that doesn’t exist any more.

The reasons for this are many and varied but the oil crash is a good start, the eu has a place alongside Thatcher and Reagan cementing capitalist hegemony and the state of the global left over the 50 years.

 

[bimble]

An irrelevant anecdote - i saw a demonstation in Athens a while ago, it was at least a couple of thousand people marching about something to do with pensions, from looking at them almost all over 65, some had walking stick in 1 hand placard in the other, was great to see, did make me wonder about why that is something id be completely amazed to see here.

 

[Doppelgänger]

Exactly!

Amazing that the safeguards that EU laws had that are now being ignored are slowly dawning on some people. The obvious one (now we have to holiday at home) being how the water companies have realised that its now possible to tip sewage into rivers and the sea without risk.

Precisely.

Brits were being told that the clean beaches were nothing to do with EU and that the UK government would have put all those measures in anyway...

 

[Doppelgänger]

The big question there is does leaving the EU mean any meaningful return to the post war boom and associated workers power or is it infinitely more likely we replace the EU with a US trade deal that deepens privatisation and deregulation further than anyone in the UK can imagine.

Knowing these are the vultures with real political power and momentum, long circling, the gambit to leave the EU in the hope of socialism is at best massively risky, or from my perspective doomed to make things worse.

It's already happening. Look at BT and the hire and refire malarkey that was happening.

 

[ska invita]

That's your big question, but not it's not necessarily the one that exercised the way other people voted.

I would add, that both of the possible scenarios you posit are possible and, as with everything, the future will be shaped by the balance of forces and the social, economic and political dialectic.

Sure, anything is possible, im on board.
Workers power and organisation is historically low at this time though, if it were a boxing match I know which way I'd bet.

 

[brogdale]

I’m not dismissing anything but the vision from then to now recalled fondly is nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time capitalism hadnt beaten the world to absolute shit is still nostalgia.


That you’re defensive about this and feel the need to explain it doesn’t spare the fact it’s looking back fondly on a world that doesn’t exist any more.

The reasons for this are many and varied but the oil crash is a good start, the eu has a place alongside Thatcher and Reagan cementing capitalist hegemony and the state of the global left over the 50 years.

Whenever I see the 1973 OPEC Oil crisis exogenous shock cited as the root of/orgins of the present shit-show, I'm always tempted to say go back further, or at least 5 years before to the events of '68 when, IMHO, capital decided to walk away from the "post-war social contract" or whatever we might call the compromises that capital made in the period when they feared really existing system competition. I think that was the point that increasingly globalised, incipiently financialised corporations realised that whatever they gave to labour it would never be enough and they took the neoliberal turn.

 

[Pickman's model]

I’m not dismissing anything but the vision from then to now recalled fondly is nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time capitalism hadnt beaten the world to absolute shit is still nostalgia.


That you’re defensive about this and feel the need to explain it doesn’t spare the fact it’s looking back fondly on a world that doesn’t exist any more.

The reasons for this are many and varied but the oil crash is a good start, the eu has a place alongside Thatcher and Reagan cementing capitalist hegemony and the state of the global left over the 50 years.

I'd have thought American-led efforts to smash communist and socialist parties in europe might be a better place to start. And the eu didnt exist till after thatcher and reagan had left office.

 

[Chilli.s]

The post war boom took years to be apparent, London still had bombed out sites at the end of the 60s and the north was covered with declining heavy industry. It wasnt better then it was just cos we were young

Brits were being told that the clean beaches were nothing to do with EU and that the UK government would have put all those measures in anyway...

Well the environment agency could prosecute, but doesnt have the staff or the motivation.

 

[Superdupastupor]

oh yeh,

I got my 'foreign resident=exploited worker' ID card.

One step closer to burning my passport.

 

[Chilli.s]

1973 OPEC Oil crisis

This, and the deregulation of banking that led to easy mortgages were defining changes for the UK

 

[Artaxerxes]

Whenever I see the 1973 OPEC Oil crisis exogenous shock cited as the root of/orgins of the present shit-show, I'm always tempted to say go back further, or at least 5 years before to the events of '68 when, IMHO, capital decided to walk away from the "post-war social contract" or whatever we might call the compromises that capital made in the period when they feared really existing system competition. I think that was the point that increasingly globalised, incipiently financialised corporations realised that whatever they gave to labour it would never be enough and they took the neoliberal turn.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

I’m not dismissing anything but the vision from then to now recalled fondly is nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time capitalism hadnt beaten the world to absolute shit is still nostalgia.


That you’re defensive about this and feel the need to explain it doesn’t spare the fact it’s looking back fondly on a world that doesn’t exist any more.

The reasons for this are many and varied but the oil crash is a good start, the eu has a place alongside Thatcher and Reagan cementing capitalist hegemony and the state of the global left over the 50 years.

You are all over the place on 'nostalgia'. Reflective nostalgia, interpretive nostalgia, and restorative nostalgia are not the same things. Thee is a mass of research on this.

However, instead the dismissive use of the term 'nostalgia' often fails to adequately describe the diverse uses, understandings and lived experiences of the past to which it is applied. It is not 'defensive' to point this out, it's a fact.

 

[Artaxerxes]

You are all over the place on 'nostalgia'. Reflective nostalgia, interpretive nostalgia, and restorative nostalgia are not the same things. Thee is a mass of research on this.

However, instead the dismissive use of the term 'nostalgia' often fails to adequately describe the diverse uses, understandings and lived experiences of the past to which it is applied. It is not 'defensive' to point this out, it's a fact.

Now I’m being dismissive

 

[bimble]

But if its young people who are at the sharp end of the housing crisis, increased inequality loss of job security and so on, did they overwhelmingly vote the other way from their grandparents out of ignorance or what.

 

[brogdale]

This, and the deregulation of banking that led to easy mortgages were defining changes for the UK

I'd agree that the expansion of private (household) debt has been one element of the neoliberal state "buying time" after capital abandoned any pretence to the 'social contract'. In chronological order the 3 'money illusions' employed as macro-economic policy across the OECD since 1968 have been relaxed inflationary pressure from lose fiscal policy, the rise of (farmed) private debt and, more recently, the collective debt farming derived from soaring public debt.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Now I’m being dismissive

Yeah, you are. Makes you look like a bit of a knob frankly.

Anyway, I won't waste my time in future because there is no genuine desire to actually explore or understand the processes at play.

 

[ska invita]

Whenever I see the 1973 OPEC Oil crisis exogenous shock cited as the root of/orgins of the present shit-show, I'm always tempted to say go back further, or at least 5 years before to the events of '68 when, IMHO, capital decided to walk away from the "post-war social contract" or whatever we might call the compromises that capital made in the period when they feared really existing system competition. I think that was the point that increasingly globalised, incipiently financialised corporations realised that whatever they gave to labour it would never be enough and they took the neoliberal turn.

what happened in 68?

 

[brogdale]

what happened in 68?

Quite a lot, really.

 

[Artaxerxes]

what happened in 68?

Riots, riots everywhere

 

[ska invita]

Riots, riots everywhere

And this was the beginning of the end for the working class?

 

[The39thStep]

Riots, riots everywhere

Which riots were connected to brogdale assertion of 1968 being the year capital took its neo liberal turn?

 

[two sheds]

Lets not forget the Barber boom of 72-74

The early years of the 1970s were a period of rapid economic growth.

1. The Bank of England deregulated the mortgage market - meaning High Street Banks could now lend mortgages (not just local building societies). This helped fuel a rise in house prices and consumer wealth.
2. Barber Boom of 1972. In the 1972 budget, the chancellor Anthony Barber made a dash for growth - with large tax cuts against a backdrop of high economic growth.
3. Growth of Credit. It was in the 1970s, we saw the first mass use of credit cards (Access). This helped create a consumer bubble.

By 1973, inflation in the UK was accelerating to over 20%. This was due to:

• Rising wages, partly due to strength of unions.
• The inflationary budget of 1972.
• Growth in credit and consumer spending.
• Oil price shock of 1973, leading to 70% increase in oil prices.

The Economy of the 1970s

See previous decade - 1960s . The 1970s was not just an era of dayglow trousers, lava lamps and the emergence of punk rock. It was a traum...

econ.economicshelp.org

I wonder how much was due to rising wages, but I think it was the start of the boom/bust cycle we'd not seen since before WWII.

 

[Artaxerxes]

And this was the beginning of the end for the working class?

Not really but it might be seen as the high water mark for equality and concrete social mobility* not to mention actual debates about class being on everyone’s lips. Before the grim spirals of the 70s and wage depreciation and the overwhelming capitalist fight back and deregulation in the next couple of decades


*for the white European/American working class - I’m not getting into the race and sex vs class debate but there’s a wide disparity between levels of equality. In many ways minorities and women are much better off than 1968. Capitals won the fight in making us all scramble to survive not just some of us.