The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
So how is Labour going to square the circle with chasing the middle class vote and the working class vote?
SWP expulsions and squabbles
- Thread starter Nigel Irritable
- Start date
So how is Labour going to square the circle with chasing the middle class vote and the working class vote?
Trotsky007
Member
As J Ed said I don't think most people know who the far left is except the swp (from demos and those placards) and Militant now SP (from Liverpool and Kinnock kicking them out of Labour). Even Militant don't mean anything to anyone younger than 40. They may be mentioned by the rightwing media as bogeymen to scare voters away from voting Labour but otherwise they have only minor influence over anything. The trouble is that in the world of activists it can seem as if they/we are big fish but it is a very small pond.
I would say, however, that Anarchists dressing like they are on their way to a ninja convention are alienating to people on demos as they seem quite aggressive and intent just on ineffective aggro with tooled up riot cops. Its that kind of behaviour which makes your first time demonstrater think that demos aren't really for them.
I would say, however, that Anarchists dressing like they are on their way to a ninja convention are alienating to people on demos as they seem quite aggressive and intent just on ineffective aggro with tooled up riot cops. Its that kind of behaviour which makes your first time demonstrater think that demos aren't really for them.
Stop deliberately misrepresenting what I wrote - I said people not all people - of course most people have no idea what the far left is beyond Russel Brand and the rare oddball waving poorly printed papers at them in the high street. The point is they do alienate a very large chunk of the small minority that do try and get involved in politics.
I agree with you about anarchists - like the anarchist banner at the last anti-austerity march where they stood at the back with a banner saying "kill all those who stand in our way"
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
Depends on the context really. At university I think what put a lot of people off of the left, even if they were sympathetic to various causes, was the fact that they (imo correctly) saw left wing students as part of an exclusive subculture with particular clothes, musical preferences and even diets. To a lot of people they just *looked* odd, even if you wanted to join in with them... what would your mates say? They might say that you were a bit weird as well.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
Another thing that's worth thinking about, in terms of the left alienating potential supporters, is that one way in which so many people exclusively encounter the left, unions, organised labour is when a strike affects them. If you are someone who is on a low wage who is living hand to mouth on a zero hours contract and you are affected by a teachers' strike or a rail strike or whatever then convincing that person of the necessity of workers who are probably on higher pay in the first place succeeding in that strike might be quite difficult except no one is making that argument in the first place. There is zero communication between the more unionised public sector and basically union-free workplace like call centres, meaning that the many people working in the latter workplaces are often only going to think about labour militancy in terms of 1) great inconvenience to themselves 2) the interpretation of a right-wing media which is hostile to trade unions
I don't think that there are any short term solutions to this, the obvious long term solution seems to me to be organising efforts in workplaces like distribution centres and call centres but that is not going to happen overnight if it can happen at all.
I don't think that there are any short term solutions to this, the obvious long term solution seems to me to be organising efforts in workplaces like distribution centres and call centres but that is not going to happen overnight if it can happen at all.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
The far-left still exist in sections of the popular imagination, but as a caricature occasionally wheeled out in the media, occasionally faintly remembered from University days or high streets in the 90s.
On the increasingly rare occasion one encounters the far-left in real life they reaffirm that caricature. I passed a TUSC stall in Bristol just before the election. I took a leaflet. A bunch of poorly dressed, middle aged men wielding copies of The Socialist as shield and breastplates against...well I'm not sure really. Clipboards, petitions, a trestle table. Like the fucking sealed knot or something.
...and, yes, the teenage mutant anarcho-ninjas are just as bad.
Outside and against the class or something.
its a bit more complicated than that...of course. But there you go.
TUSC were in The Sun today by the way...being laughed at for getting zero votes.
On the increasingly rare occasion one encounters the far-left in real life they reaffirm that caricature. I passed a TUSC stall in Bristol just before the election. I took a leaflet. A bunch of poorly dressed, middle aged men wielding copies of The Socialist as shield and breastplates against...well I'm not sure really. Clipboards, petitions, a trestle table. Like the fucking sealed knot or something.
...and, yes, the teenage mutant anarcho-ninjas are just as bad.
Outside and against the class or something.
its a bit more complicated than that...of course. But there you go.
TUSC were in The Sun today by the way...being laughed at for getting zero votes.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Maybe time for the left to stop fetishising strikes?
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
Spot on.
The current debates relating to the post election state of the Labour Party are a reminder of just how weak the labour movement has become don't you think? It used to be when Labour lost an election we still had a fall back position of being able to rely upon the trade unions to keep our wage rates and conditions reasonable. Labour losing the election isn't a disaster for many people, just a few MPs and and a sprinkling of birocrats. But i reckon the absence of a decent union fightback will be much more critical in the medium/longer term.
Speaking to a former comrade from north England recently (who i once considered a friend, but renegade former SWP members are often de-friended, not unlike a lapsed adherent of the Plymouth Brethren, the sect who notoriously send former members to Coventry). He had stood for Tusc but did rather badly, despite working very hard on the knocker. When i explained that the Tory vote was an expression of middle class confidence in the south east of England, and that the SNP vote was an expression of working class confidence in Scotland he strongly disagreed. The SWP line, if he articulated properly, was that the new Tory government is pretty weak, and will be easily dealt with by a rising tide of class struggle (which, as usual, is just around the corner).
In a way i can see that argument, and one day it might be right, like a stopped clock being correct every 24 hours. But what i have difficulty with is seeing where the organised blue collar resistance will come from. Deindustrialisation has done more damage to working class potential than we often allow for - even taking into consideration the 'changing nature of the working class', it is hard to see Unison members, or teachers, or call centre workers being in the vanguard of any future movement for social change, in the way that colliers were for example.
Pass the bottle.
Speaking to a former comrade from north England recently (who i once considered a friend, but renegade former SWP members are often de-friended, not unlike a lapsed adherent of the Plymouth Brethren, the sect who notoriously send former members to Coventry). He had stood for Tusc but did rather badly, despite working very hard on the knocker. When i explained that the Tory vote was an expression of middle class confidence in the south east of England, and that the SNP vote was an expression of working class confidence in Scotland he strongly disagreed. The SWP line, if he articulated properly, was that the new Tory government is pretty weak, and will be easily dealt with by a rising tide of class struggle (which, as usual, is just around the corner).
In a way i can see that argument, and one day it might be right, like a stopped clock being correct every 24 hours. But what i have difficulty with is seeing where the organised blue collar resistance will come from. Deindustrialisation has done more damage to working class potential than we often allow for - even taking into consideration the 'changing nature of the working class', it is hard to see Unison members, or teachers, or call centre workers being in the vanguard of any future movement for social change, in the way that colliers were for example.
Pass the bottle.
Yes, me too. I don't think cost of subs is a good reason to have a go at the SWP; there are plenty more worthwhile and accurate ones to be had.
If I can read?
There is no homogenous working class vote or middle class vote. However, appeasing their traditional vote is going to shore up the 30% they would get anyway. They need to attract people who would otherwise not vote Labour. Not those who will anyway.
Leaving aside 'taken for granted', no, Scotland has demonstrated the unique circumstances of the referendum and Labour's disastrous position in that referendum.
Actually you're half right - they need to appeal to the centre ground swing voters in the marginals and they need to reconnect with traditional voters who went UKIP last time - this will not be achieved by tacking left or to the technocratic right, but by listening to people and helping them to construct a narrative that answers at least some of their aspirations which won't I suspect be that far apart.
Yes, that's a sophisticated version of what I said. Pulling from UKIP is far from 'move left' and I have to confess I'm not sure about the answer further north.
I like the use of the word 'technocratic'.
I do think Labour should read this study: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/45855.html
More difficult than my answer, I grant you. As I said in the other reply, the answer isn't to shift left though. Ed Miliband was 'shifting left' and it didn't work, as many Labour members predicted.
That John McDonnell "radical labour" nonsense will appeal to about 120 people - the danger of him is he doesn't realise why he gets elected as an MP every time - which is because he's an excellent constituency MP his politics have very little to do with it.
Just found out my Nephew, lives in the N.E, first time voter voted UKIP, is joining them and wants to be a UKIP MP or at least a councillor!
electric.avenue
lots of work to be done
Here in West Yorkshire a lot of the traditional Labour vote is starting to trickle over to UKIP.
As I get older, I become more protective of friendships. People who you have known me for longer have seen different, better sides of me. Few of my more recent friends will have a sense of how much energy I had at my activist best, twenty years ago.
It is not just about age; I have always been watchful of my friends, inclined to see the best in people and determined to forgive when I can. There are very, very people whose friendship I have deliberately neglected. Most, I hope, know exactly why I did.
One of the difficult, ambiguous consequences of the last ten days is that I have a former friend who is now in a position of influence. You might say that was inevitable: given the school I went to, the university, my family. But this is different.
I spent most of my teenage years in rebellion against the class into which I was born. And by rebellion, I really do mean the word, inchoate, unformed and violent, running away from home and then school, getting into trouble with police repeatedly, skipping school at times for weeks on end, fighting with teachers, trying to damage the physical environment I was in, at every waking second plotting my escape...
Many people from that time are now in government: as far as I was concerned they were the kids who sat at the back of classes and nodded to the teacher, the ones who understood nothing, read nothing, wanted to know nothing. The ones who had not been outside a tiny set of distinct places (a couple of streets in London, a country estate). The ones who knew no-one outside the friendships tolerated by their parents. The ones who had never walked through a city, taking everything in.
One, now a Cabinet minister, was never more than a blur of tally-ho subservient goofiness. Nor was his also-promoted brother, save that he lacked the better-known boy’s sly humour. (I remember watching the oldest, the night Pinochet was jailed, wooing an audience of 68-lefties, the way Clinton once did, looking for the person in the room who grimaced at them with the greatest hostility, and speaking to them first). If I really made the effort, there are probably another 10 people like them that I knew as children, who are now in Parliament – but each I saw at a distance. I saw nothing in them that would have justified a greater interest.
But this boy was different. I knew him when he was 5 (when we were best friends), and again with equal intensity between the ages of 14 and 17. We were in the same classes; we chose the same options. I remember him when he was very young, his face like a monkey and the words rushed out of him without caution. I remember him again in adolescence, his words now guarded by sentries (he had a father who worked in diplomacy, possibly Intelligence). Any bookish kid in an environment like ours saw the hypocrisies at once, knew that we were being fed lies and being trained to feed them out in due course. And when we did speak we agreed.
At different times since, I have tried to reconstruct the moment when he made peace with a class, two institutions, a whole way of being. It is a pointless exercise; I once though I knew him well. For more than half our lives, we have not spoken.
I miss him. I am still angry with him. I regret our collective failure to summon into being such monsters of the human imagination as to defeat him and his kind.
discokermit
Well-Known Member
posh cunt.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
The far-left has nothing concrete to offer people. No real life examples of how it works in practise. Living memory no longer goes back far enough.
A few occupied university buldingp in Paris in 1968, a factory or two in Turin in 1977, some squatted houses in Berlin in 1981 a few villages in the Mexican jungle in 1994. That's all that I can draw on, what chance for everyone else?
The left is living (barely) on a memory of a memory and its practice is naturally therefore ritualised.
Hmm.
...but we've had this argument over and over in ever decreasing circles.
Oh well.
A few occupied university buldingp in Paris in 1968, a factory or two in Turin in 1977, some squatted houses in Berlin in 1981 a few villages in the Mexican jungle in 1994. That's all that I can draw on, what chance for everyone else?
The left is living (barely) on a memory of a memory and its practice is naturally therefore ritualised.
Hmm.
...but we've had this argument over and over in ever decreasing circles.
Oh well.
discokermit
Well-Known Member
such a rebel he became a barrister.
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