For me, it means that electoral politics is dead in the water. The politics of voting 'least worst' has got us into this mess we find ourselves in. I've been doing stuff with some defend social housing stuff last few months - these are all Labour councils pushing through massive regeneration programmes that actually end up ripping the heart of working class communities, sending people to the other side of the country, and leading to barely any social housing. Corbyn and 'Labour left' ministers on one hand will wring their hands and speak to their social media fanbase about what we need to do urgently, whilst not even calling out the behaviour of their own councils. Easy to merely pass the buck onto the government of course (whilst obviously the shower of cunts are very much to blame too).
Whilst people on those estates see their already precarious work/employment conditions constantly eroded further and further. And, yes some of them have either dropped out of voting altogether, or flirt with UKIP, and when both your economic and social stability is threatened - especially by your local Labour 'co-operative' council, or watching Labour privatise everything with PFI schemes over many years, no amount of talk of 'opportunity' and 'progressiveness' from liberals will prevent people from lurching towards some reactionary attitudes. But they are 'attitudes' created out of capitalism and the dire social/economic situations people find themselves in, not because people are 'born racists', or naturally 'socially conservative' which appears to be the liberal and left-liberal sneery takedown and again, why we've ended up in this state of affairs.
And so, the only way to build any kind of inclusive politics of community and local cohesion now has to be fought and built right at the heart of those communities again. Where social and economic issues are a uniting factor across all people, not a dividing one. Where people of all races/genders/sexuality are again united by class and not divided by liberal identity politics. And certainly not looking to Labour, or Corbyn, or frankly any party on the 'pseudo-left' to actually do this hard work. This is the only way now towards genuine pro-working class, pro-socialist politics again.
(Which I realise doesn't necessarily offer any great solutions and is more of a rant of where we find ourselves in general. I've been doing what I can though - spending less time on here and going out trying to fight things on such a level but also trying to challenge/persuade people away from the lure of UKIP and reactionary politics where possible. It's difficult, often infuriating, but I never give up because I refuse to consign anybody on the rough end of being left behind our great neoliberal 'choice and opportunity for all' world (sponsored by Labour) to the shitheap.
Thankyou for taking the time, I was beginning to think no-one had any clue at all. I don't disagree with you on very much of that tbh, though I've been told electoral politics are dead- and Labour the problem- throughout my adult life and they appear to me to be still going strong.
they are 'attitudes' created out of capitalism and the dire social/economic situations people find themselves in, not because people are 'born racists', or naturally 'socially conservative' which appears to be the liberal and left-liberal sneery takedown and again, why we've ended up in this state of affairs.
sure, but liberal social and economic policies have to be seen against the backdrop of capitalist technological globalisation. Earlier phases of which brought the canal, railway, foreign cotton and a much bigger workforce to somewhere like Rochdale, but more recent changes have left the swollen population with little economic reason to be there. Raw cotton is no longer imported for them to make into textiles for us southerners to buy, the manufacturing is now done closer to where the stuff is grown, or where labour is cheapest. It's reasonable to blame the Labour party or left/liberals for their responses to those changes, but they're not wholly responsible for the underlying engines of change. Nothing was inevitable, but technology can't be uninvented and third world populations couldn't be expected to remain drudge producers of raw materials forever just so people in Rochdale could have decent, skilled jobs. So no,
left-liberal sneery takedown is not
why we've ended up in this state of affairs.
We are where we are and the next phase appears to be robotics, automation and AI. That won't help the woman in the pub who wants to wind the clock back 25 years either.
The academic quoted says that the "
“foundational economy” – provision of essential goods like health, education, social care, utilities, refuse collection, transport, prisons and food distribution – constitutes by far the biggest source of employment in many towns".
Capital has little need for a mass workforce to make or produce stuff in former industrial towns that once thrived. Production has moved elsewhere and dragged a workforce to it. There are, however,
signs that the EU born workforce is diminishing. Are the white w/c of Rochdale going to be prepared to move elsewhere to harvest lettuces or gut fish? There's no reason why they should, but no reason why they shouldn't either. Their forebears moved to Rochdale for work, just as neighbours moved from Pakistan, Trinidad or Latvia.
and therein lies the problem. it's all very well for journalists to go out and provide sketches of people grumbling about stuff and to try to draw out those examples into a narrative. This journalist, like many on here and elsewhere, has focussed on the traditional, mostly white, working class living in industrial areas that have lost the economic relevance they once had. He's described some of the people he met, and their attitudes, well enough. Their attitudes matter, of course they do, (though he appears to have made no attempt to discover the attitudes of the local Asian heritage population or EU born people in Rochdale or Wigan, they matter too). But he/we need to dig deeper than that: what shape of society can
realistically be built around those attitudes? We ain't going back to the glory days of working in mass manufacturing mills or factories. It's easy to say that electoral politics is dead or that capitalism should be overthrown but that doesn't provide a particularly realistic pointer to the shape of society in 5 years time.
I don't have any answers, but equally, I don't see reading nasty drivel like the market is "
full of tat and loads of rabbit-hutch stalls run by Muslims with their stuff” and accepting that somehow post-Brexit society should reflect attitudes like that.
