In my forthcoming Healthy Societies: Policy, Practice and Obstacles, I pick up on the longstanding notion that radical change in the United Kingdom in general and England in particular is more than unlikely to be accomplished via parliament. As Ralph Miliband noted many years ago, what we have is a ‘capitalism democracy’; that is, a system oriented to maintaining rather than replacing capitalism. The election of Keir Starmer to lead the Labour Party and the ease with which Jeremy Corbyn was usurped merely underline Miliband’s point. There are multiple texts both critiquing capitalist democracy and documenting the deteriorating living standards of the working class and the increasingly squeezed elements of the middle class in the post-Thatcher development of financialised or rentier capitalism. I reflect this literature in my book, but I also try to show how radical social and structural change might yet be achieved. The case I make in the book is briefly rehearsed in this blog.
First, I insist that class action is a necessary condition for the kind of change that reaches down to impact enduring social structures. The prevailing class structure in Britain diverges from that obtaining even a generation ago. Furthermore, class is multifaceted for all that it retains its potent structural force. Class can and must be analysed as a lived experience as well as in terms of a what Dan Evans terms ‘class on paper’. Subjective class, in other words, must be distinguished from objective class. Moreover, an inert class in-itself is far removed from an active and engaged class for-itself. To claim a high level of causal significance for class in relation to transformative structural change therefore requires considerable qualification and support. I contend that class mobilisation remains a necessary – if not a sufficient – condition for the effectiveness of what Ben Abrams calls spontaneous mass mobilisation; but for this necessary condition to be realised: (i) new cross-class alliances must be built, and (ii) this presupposes the overcoming of many obstacles due to fragmentations in the class structure and fractured society’s pervasive cultural relativity.
Many sociologists are agreed on a growing fragmentation of the class structure, and for a number of neo-Marxists debates on how to define today’s working class have become a preoccupation. It is apparent, however, that upward trends in post-2010 UK in under- employment and precarity, family and child poverty, homelessness, sickness and premature death have trespassed into Dan Evans’ petty bourgeoisie and beyond into what Erik Ohlin Wright refers to as the formerly stable middle class (ie well into the ‘squeezed middle’). The escalating cost of living crisis has breached today’s more permeable class boundaries. Naturally, it does not follow that this has or will translate into any kind of cross-class coalescence and the formation of a class-based social actor. Indeed, the imposingly high hurdle of cultural relativity might suggest otherwise.
The possibility of an emergent and expanded working-class for-itself, however comprised, seems slight. If it is right to claim that objective class has become more potent in rentier capitalism, as I have consistently maintained, subjective class has during this same period diminished its impact on identity-formation. ‘Identitarian politics’ has muddied the structural waters. It has led to a rapid inflation of individualised conflicts around who we are and might become, often linked to niche markets and increasingly fuelled by populist reactionary and right-wing political groups as a way of garnering support. Just as material cost of living quandaries have come to impact Dan Evans’ petty bourgeoisie and Erik Ohlin Wright’s hitherto comfortable and stable middle class, so the politics of identity has transposed cultural quandaries onto and into the traditional working class. And the key point about cultural relativity is that it breeds scepticism and distrust about ALL rationally constructed narratives signalling and promoting the very idea of transformative social change.
All this would seem to count against regarding social class as a lever for transformative social change. Moreover this ‘pessimism’ is reinforced by another observation, namely, that many of the most vigorous activists for change, with regard to the climate, peace, income and health inequality and so on, are drawn from the university-educated professional middle class. These activists are generally comfortable and secure citizens. Little wonder that there remains a working-class propensity to neglect the message and shoot the messengers.
My claim is that if emancipatory and transformative structural change is to occur in countries like Britain, then objective-to-subjective class action is a necessary condition, but that for now it appears to be on the back foot. This understandable pessimism is countered in the subsections that follow.
The second point I stress is that there exists a predisposition to anger, even hatred, that is relevant here. If there is a single emotion that leaks through permeable class boundaries in England and the UK it is likely to be public anger caused by the stress and distress of post-2010 political austerity and the descent into what seems at the time of writing to be an ever-deepening cost of living crisis. If this predisposition to indignation remains largely latent and contained within the private sphere of the lifeworld, this is doubtless a function of widespread anxiety and fatigue due to a protracted commitment to ‘getting by’. The collapse of the postwar ‘social contract’ has left millions of low-income families ‘surviving not living.’ In my book I list a number of common sources of public anger which I will not repeat here.
Anger, in fact, falls into Ben Abrams’ categories of (psychological and) social affinities in relation to spontaneous mass mobilisation. In his examination of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, initially published in 1848, China Mieville considers the current political role and potential of anger manifested as hate. That hatred can have a positive impact is not an easy case to make. But we inhabit a cruel rentier capitalist world, Mieville argues, that thrives on and encourages sadism, despair and disempowerment. Hatred on the part of the oppressed is inevitable: it is far from productive to pathologise hate per se, not least when it arises naturally, let alone to make it a cause for shame. ‘Class hatred’ in the UK in the twenty-first century, this thesis runs, might be judged to have arisen naturally. This kind of hate is not a personal, psychological or pathological hate, ‘but a radical structural hate for what the world has become.’
Hate has a political function, that is, hatred of the system and its enduring structures, forces and tendencies. Class hatred is part of a complex set of arms and tools of resistance and can and might inform an effective strategy and push for transformative change. Hate might optimally: (i) be harnessed to motivate systemic and structural change, (ii) be used reflexively and strategically, and (iii) come second to love in any transition to a better, post-capitalist society.
My third point involves the possibility of a legitimation crisis. On the cusp of the switch to financialised or rentier capitalism Jurgen Habermas (1975) published a somewhat neglected work entitled Legitimation Crisis. The relevance at this point of Habermas’ analysis is that a crisis of state legitimation seems the most probable way forces for change might be brought to a head. In the era of liberal capitalism, the logic, ethos and praxis of political economy seeped into, or more accurately ‘stained’, the everyday to-ing and fro-ing of interaction that constituted the fabric of the lifeworld. Capitalism provided not only for ‘system integration’ but for ‘social integration’. Because of its contradictions, however, capitalism is always prone to economic crises. These can be frequent, following the natural course of the business cycle. In postwar liberal capitalism the state came to play an ever-increasing part in ‘managing the economy’ to offset these economic crisis tendencies. It monitored the likes of inflation and levels of employment, counteracting potentially damaging trends via policy shifts. It made welfare provision available, kept the heads of the unemployed above water, and slowed the downward spiral of overproduction by underwriting the unemployed as consumers. It also financed research and development. In short, it brought and maintained the unemployed ‘inside’ the system.
This enhanced role of the state, Habermas argues, represented a ‘functional adaptation’ within capitalism. It contained class conflict. But it also carried risks: with economic engagement came responsibility. Capitalism’s crisis tendencies were not eliminated but rather displaced. The state picked up the tab. This opened up the possibility of what Habermas termed a ‘rationality crisis’, or a crisis that might be understood as emanating from the very philosophy of mediation adopted by the state. This philosophy promised to deliver economically whilst also retaining legitimacy re-the electorate. It has been suggested that in the mid-to-late 1970s the state’s Keynesian philosophy and approach came to be regarded as no longer ‘fit for purpose’, making a rationality crisis all the more likely. A legitimation crisis occurs when the citizenry experiences a democratic shortfall, that is, when people feel under-represented. Habermas is aware that the ‘formal’ parliamentary-style democracy characteristic of modern highly differentiated societies falls well short of ‘substantive’ or participatory democracy. People know this and are generally content to let politicians go about their business. But people will on occasion rebel, notably when they come to regard those they elect too unaccountable to the electorate. So the state runs the risk of a rationality crisis if it fails to accommodate the demands of the economy, and a legitimation crisis if it fails to fails to meet the demands of it citizens. An additional type of crisis Habermas refers to as a ‘motivation crisis’. This occurs when the culture of the lifeworld, in which what he calls civic privatism is embedded, falters. This transmutes into a risk when the social and cultural institutions of primary and secondary socialisation fail to produce and reproduce the work ethic. The ‘imperative to work’ is of course a basic premise of capitalism, fuelling the subsystems of the economy (directly) and the state (indirectly). A weakening of the work ethic can render citizens, most especially young people, unresponsive or indifferent to this imperative. This is a peculiarly perspicacious piece of theorising with clear ramifications for high-income countries like the UK in rentier capitalism.
My fourth point calls on the notion of trigger events. The thesis here is that it is likely to take a single unpredictable and isolated (ie spontaneous) event to light the blue touch paper for the kind of impactful mass protest that is a precondition for deep and lasting change. These events can assume many different shapes and forms, so there is necessarily a limit to what can be said. In his discussion of the role of ‘situations’ in the structural conditions of convergence, Ben Abrams refers to ‘paramount situations’ when the structural obligation to participate can trump lingering fears or concerns people might have. Such situations can be inspired by an array of factors, but Ben Abrams stresses the importance of threat. He cites an incident in Egypt when mounted brigands charged into a peaceful protest in Tahrir Square, ‘swinging swords at protesters and tossing Molotov cocktails into the crowds.’ This repression immediately – spontaneously – backfired, with the result that ‘scores of ordinary Egyptians poured forth into the streets to defend the revolutionary cause, remaining there for days to come.’ As this case testifies, events that trigger spontaneous ‘mass’ mobilisations do not guarantee lasting structural change. Indeed, there are never guarantees. But for transformative social change to occur, the ducks of the causal prerequisites like those ventured here have to be in line.
Fifth comes a point about civil disobedience/violence. While few UK citizens would sign up to the view that all laws are warranted, there remains a deep-seated reluctance as well as trepidation at the prospect of flouting them. Moreover, what might be categorised as mild forms of activism, like the ‘slow walking’ protests of the ‘Just Stop Oil’ protagonists, are now being heavily policed and overtly condemned by agents of an increasingly oppressive state. Marchers defending the NHS against privatisation, promoting rent controls, opposing continuing fossil fuel subsidies and ‘Stop the War’ activists calling for talks are alike being threatened with substantial fines and imprisonment. Holding up a placard has in and of itself been lambasted by statist defenders of the status quo; moreover there are at the time of writing plans to extend the definition of ‘extremism’ to cover virtually all sorts of ‘anti-governmental protest’. In other words, the state itself is trespassing beyond the ‘symbolic violence’ implicit in its defence of the status quo.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the potency of soft power. In my Health and Social Change, I posited the state-sanctioning and promotion of an adaptive, class-driven national ‘habitus’ or mindset in the UK from the 1970s, a mindset that gave succour to the new neoliberal ideology. This longstanding political reliance on soft power is now being complemented by a more coercive form of state power. The Public Order Bill builds on the public order measures in Part III of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022. Among other things, it enables the police to impose conditions on a protest, provides for a statutory offence of intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance, and increases the maximum penalty for the offence of wilful obstruction of a highway. It would be foolish to deny this well documented drift towards a more authoritarian state, and sociologically naive to doubt that the police, and if necessary the armed forces, would be vigorously deployed in the event of a spontaneous mass mobilisation oriented to significant and lasting social change.
If the British state in rentier capitalism is acting first and foremost in the interests of monopoly capitalists, as is asserted in the class/command dynamic, while itself endeavouring to avoid a crisis of legitimation, and it is prepared to extend its soft or symbolic power to embrace more coercive types of policing, including violence, then this puts any discussion of the rights and wrongs of the civil disobedience and the violence committed by activists into context and perspective. Marx himself fleetingly hoped that the change he envisaged and campaigned for might be achieved in England by parliamentary means, but he was quickly disillusioned. In his Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, Marxist Ralph Miliband also rejected the parliamentary route as unrealistic. It is an analysis substantiated by the quick and decisive undermining of Jeremy Corbyn (and of Bernie Sanders in the US), and this despite the popularity of the measures contained in the Labour manifesto prior to the 2017 election. Dan Evans writes:
‘overwhelmingly, the Labour Party – and indeed, the labour movement – is represented in parliament and the media (and sometimes on the streets) by the professional-managerial classes – a strata of people who are (justifiably) the most widely detested people in society: people whose sense of their own superiority and self-righteousness is far more unacceptable to working-class people than the traditional economic bourgeoisie or even the aristocracy.’
Strong words with more than a germ of truth. The moral would seem to be not only that extra-parliamentary (spontaneous mass) mobilisations are critical, but that working-class leadership is paramount. This is another sub-theme that will be revisited later. Just as narratives of de-growth and loss will not galvanise the working-class re-climate change, nor will professional/managerial class leadership re-collective agency.
My sixth and final point here refers to the salience of utopian narratives. My argument here is that spontaneous mass mobilisations sooner rather than later require a narrative addressing freedom to (achieve a richer, fairer and more caring lifeworld) as well as freedom from (the uncompromising travails of the class/command generated exploitation and bureaucratic domination of rentier capitalism). In practice this means: (a) distinguishing between ‘utopian blueprints’ that offer, to coin a phrase, oven-ready futures, and are almost invariably propagated by professional-class radical intellectuals and ‘utopian realist’ narratives that start from accessible critiques of the neoliberal status quo and are then constructed out of working-class grassroots activism; and (b) ‘scholarly texts’ and ‘manifestos’, the former orientated to blueprint formats, and the latter to persuasions to engage and act.
In his Preface to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote:
‘When it was written we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital or profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working class movement, and looking rather to the ‘educated’ classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, ‘respectable’; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that ‘the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself’, there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take.’
The concepts and emotions conjured up by the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ may be different in the twenty-first century, but Engels is making an important point that has a lively resonance here. Seeking to rehabilitate the idea of communism, the French philosopher Alain Badiou has advanced what he calls the ‘communist hypothesis’ in an attempt to reconceptualise the left. ‘We know’, he insists, ‘that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy – the form of state suited to capitalism – and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.’ This was a universal call to arms.
Whatever the choice of words, there is a strong case for taking seriously the concept of communism advocated by Engels and Badiou. As Jamie Morgan writes:
‘from our current geo-historical position, embedded in a growth system and socialised to think progress means a blanket commitment to more and more stuff in bigger and bigger economies (by exchange value), any radically different alternative seems alien and perhaps fantastical. But there is nothing natural about a capital accumulation system that puts profit before people and assumes human welfare can be an unintended consequence of a dynamic process of economic growth. This is just one form of social organisation, one that may appear uncoordinated but depends crucially on institutions that produce its possibility.’
The idea of communism introduced here embodies a challenge not just to rentier capitalism’s neoliberal ideology but also to Thatcher’s iniquitous insistence that ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA).
It is incumbent on proponents of an alternative to rentier capitalism – whether under the rubric of communism or not – to disseminate a utopian realist narrative in manifesto form that: (i) eschews overly comprehensive blueprints, and (ii) is either (ideally) emergent from working-class leadership or (expediently) lends itself to working-class curiosity, adaptation and co-option.
There are many texts, for example, that establish sound principles of justice, democracy, ‘sharing and caring’ and so on with which action plans ‘should’ emerge. And there are others which lay out generalised policies which, if only they were enacted, would in and of themselves represent a fundamental shift in the social order. It is not that critiques of the status quo or inputs solely at the level of philosophical principle or solely at the level of ideal(istic) policy recommendations are without value, far from it. It is rather that they end where we arguably should begin. As critical realists might put it, they ‘absent’ the more awkward issue of how significant social change might be accomplished in the real world and in the face of direct, and likely violent, resistance on the part capital monopolists and their cross-class and state-recruited allies acting in accordance with the class/command dynamic.
I cannot do justice in a blog to the arguments developed and illustrated in far more detail in my book (due out in summer 2024), but I hope this brief offering will: (a) contribute to the ongoing debate around social/structural change, and (b) whet colleagues’ appetites for my book!
References
Ben Adams (2023) The Rise of the Masses: Spontaneous Mobilisation and Contentious Politics. Chicago; Chicago University Press.
Ben Evans (2023) A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie. London; Repeater Books.
China Mieville (2022) A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto. London; Head of Zeus Ltd.
Jamie Morgan (2022) Andrew Sayer on inequality, climate emergency and the ecological breakdown: can we afford the rich? In Eds Sanghera,B & Calder,G: Ethics, Economy and Social Sience: Dialogues with Andrew Sayer. London; Routledge.
Erik Ohlin Wright (2019) How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century. London; Verso.