The NYT on the Obama victory

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Those who know my politics will know that I am primarily interested in how different social forces become dominant or lose that dominance, within the ‘superstructure’ of our economy – that is to say, the fields of culture and politics. A key part of this in my own experience of political developments is that of the ‘paradigm shift’, i.e. a deep and embedded change in the makeup of politics and debate. Great examples of this are the birth of Keynesian macroeconimics and welfarism on one hand, and the retrenchment and fragmentation of the New Right and post-fordism on the other.

I don’t think this election represents one of those shifts, because the key requirements of this kind of shift is that your opponents concede your basic propositions, and to an extent that produces real difference. In this sense, the whole stratum of ‘intelligentsia’, left or right, can be seen to occupy a new position on the spectrum as a whole. In Marxist terms, this represents a re-alignment and reconfiguration of the politics of a given bourgeois society – one which usually accompanies change to the economic ‘base’.

Put into terms that more conventional political scientists might understand, in a society where social antagonisms are mainly (and indeed comfortably) expressed through electoral politics and public debate (what Gramsci would term ‘a war of position’) rather than sustained struggles of open political violence (‘a war of maneuvre’), this is the moving of the Overton Window.

Is this happening here? I would say no, the key determinant of the US political process at the moment is its economic relationship with the BRIC economies, which are resulting in a state of frustrated flux and unpredictability.

But the question does seem to be one which is suddenly being contested – which can’t be a bad thing.

So anyway, there are some really interesting NYT pieces about all this and the issues which underlie it. Being the NYT, the comments are often as instructive as the pieces themselves. They are worth a read.

Robert S. McElvaine – Obama vs Hoover

Ross Douthat – the Obama re-alignment?

Drew Westen – America’s leftward tilt

While I’m not convinced that this is a big qualitative shift, let alone an irreversible one, Obama can do a lot to cement in the vaguely left of centre domestic direction he has taken and at least land a big punch on the conservative movement. Firstly, he can pass immigration reform. Secondly, he can make a dash to re-introduce the Fairness Doctrine – and indeed, why not? Thirdly he can introduce new Supreme Court justices, and fourthly, he can use this to clamp down on voter suppression, a disturbing trend which really seems to have taken root, with Republicans all over the place brazenly taking part in gerrymandering, often with obviously racist elements. Fifth, and probably least likely, he can make moves to embed union membership as an essential part of economic life.

He has a hopelessly obstructive House to get past thanks to America’s absurd deadlock-seeking parliamentary system. So let’s see if he can be creative.

Tired of London

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This is a post because it’s too long, ranty and self-indulgent to go on Facebook.

I am about to leave my current flat due to my flatmate wanting the space for her boyfriend and her to move into.

I went to do a second view at a place in Harlesden tonight. Nice enough, but outside in front of me two men ‘secretly’ (brazenly) exchanged drugs and masked their actions by having a loud conversation about how they hate ‘all these fucking Asian people’. Both were from an ethnic minority background themselves.

People walked the streets in a clear state of mental illness related alarm and anxiety. Smashed windows. No police.

It was basically like a bad lyric from a Rancid album.

I was asked for money three times, presumably because I have a posh coat and stupid hair. But I never really got why people in deprivation hotspots beg for money in the first place. I’m not saying it’s jobs central, but what’s the point in begging hundreds of people who also have no money for cash?

It all screams at the need for solutions far bigger than futile compassion for cases of individual poverty – for example decent support systems backed by the wider community (including the state), and policies which encourage both employment and decent pay.

Both of those are the opposite of what we have right now, and I have absolutely no qualms about saying that the situation in Harlesden is set to get even worse. It’s hard to believe that Sarah Teather is the MP for a place like this, being someone dedicated to the cause of taking it apart piece by piece.

It all makes Harlesden a difficult place to live, and I’m definitely not sure about it.

This is not some old bastion of working class solidarity. People here target each other rather than supporting each other. There is little respect for surroundings or the diversity that everyone here is so accustomed too. Thatcherism sent the working class up a blind alley of resentment, division and indifference, but most of it still walks in the same direction regardless. In the old days, the paternalist communitarians of the international labour movement would march against alcohol and gambling. I wonder how they would have felt about the payday loan sharks, ‘amusements’ arcades, ‘saunas’ (i.e. brothels), Chicken Cottage, or rather more obviously, crack and crystal meth.

There are of course some great people living there and working to improve Harlesden. I’ve met a few of them myself, through various stuff to do with both Labour and anti-cuts campaigns. But their work is undone day by day, and many of them see themselves as ‘non-political’ voluntary sector people, despite politics largely being to blame for the fragmentation here. And the less I say about the failure of ‘centrist’ ‘new Labour’ politics to offer any kind of salvation, the better off readers will be.

The room itself is tiny, though slightly bigger than one I viewed recently in Dollis Hill, near my place in Willesden Green. But the rent is at £450, which is £50 higher than my current rent for a decent sized room. This also does not include bills. This is rock bottom pricing for London – my salary won’t cope with anything higher.

So to add to the general social crisis which is so heavily interlinked with low pay and unemployment, the symbiotic twin demons of our time – at a personal level, I can also feel the dead hand of an enormous crisis of housing and landlord extortionism at a very personal level in my life.

I wonder if I will ever find a position where I feel financially comfortable, or stable in terms of my housing situation. The age of precarity is grinding me down, and the worst thing of all is that it kind of makes me wonder why I bothered going through the education system.

For the first time in a good couple of years, tonight I felt tired of London. They are hardly a nirvana, but still – I miss the suburbs, and I wonder if my whole life will look as difficult as my twenties.

London can be such a great place, but right now, it weighs my soul.

What is ‘one nation’ politics?

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“Well, society may be in its infancy,” said Egremont slightly smiling; “but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.”

“Which nation?” asked the younger stranger, “for she reigns over two.”

The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.

“Yes,” resumed the younger stranger after a moment’s interval. “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”

“You speak of–” said Egremont, hesitatingly.

“THE RICH AND THE POOR.”

At this moment a sudden flush of rosy light, suffusing the grey ruins, indicated that the sun had just fallen; and through a vacant arch that overlooked them, alone in the resplendent sky, glittered the twilight star.

-Sybil, or the Two Nations (Disraeli, 1845)

History pleases me, especially given the dire content of the present. And one of the lovely things about history is there where we cannot agree much about the future, the past is something in which we can all take any stake we choose.

Ed Miliband’s conference speech marked an ascendency of trust from both party and press, though I have some scepticism as to how much conference speeches influence a sceptical public these days. In any event, it’s certainly sparked some thinking among people whose views I appreciate. I have had some interesting thoughts triggered since by two people whose views I respect, despite the wild divergence of their politics. One is conservative, Ashton Cull, who chaired Conservative Future locally when I was at uni in Manchester. Another is Liam McNulty, who it would be fair to describe in the broadest terms as a Marxist.

I’ve been prompted twice to ask myself what is really meant by ‘One Nation’. On one level, the adaption of Tory rhetoric, expecially class collaborationist Tory rhetoric, marks a reactionary step for the leader of a Labour Party. At the same time, the founding ideas of the philosphy of One Nation Toryism find themselves significantly left of Blairism, which accepted the ceaseless march of a society moving apart from itself – the poorest satisfying themselves with the workfare crumbs of those who got ‘filthy rich’ and (sometimes) paid their taxes, the middle bought into wrestless neutrality with tax credits.

Consider this:

“If a society that has been created by labour suddenly becomes independent of it, that society is bound to maintain the race whose only property is labour, from the proceeds of that property, which has not ceased to be productive.”

- Disraeli

This is no Marxism. But the mutual obligation implied can have ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ obligations, and is just as rightly the property of social democratic reformists as it is moderate Tories. So for that reason, whatever the merits of reformist social democrats, it is far from charlatanism for them to take up the slogan. And further, it may well be a way of blocking together part of the professional so-called ‘middle class’ workers with the lower paid parts of the working class who are currently being hit with the freight train of austerity – making this part of the ‘middle class’ a progressive one. As a front in totality, if theis is a majority, ‘One Nation’ can be a broad project which is also some distance left of the common sernse, and also potentially hegemonic, if done right. Anyway, this is basically my response to those (such as Liam) who might believe that the notion is wholly useless to the left. It’s not revolutionary, but it can just as much be consciousness raising and majoritarian as it can be damaging. It depends on the substance.

The seeds, by the way, of the left undoing that, are treating supplicant, weaker groups and individuals as part of a different nation – one where food banks or immigration detention centres are acceptible human situations, while a land accross the social waters knocks back a Friday night Sauvingnon or two.

No doubt pressure for this kind of ‘two-nationism’, of making positionally weaker humans into ‘others’, will surely form the substance of the Tory response to this speech – alongside subsequent a Blairite call to triangulate it (or as I prefer, ‘submit’). Labour, after all, isn’t learning – right?

But moving back, I was moved to a deeper thought about what social democracy in the first place means to me by Ashton (whose opinion I value and await).

He asks:

…This has been niggling me for a couple of days. How do you feel about the One Nation rhetoric?

Very much in favour. For me my social democracy can basically be summed up as ‘settled consensus that we have obligations to each other, that bodies must carry them out in a way which is widely democratically accountable, and that fulfilling them helps to make us each more free’ [*].

I don’t think that society and the state are the same thing, but I also think it is artificial to seperate them when the goal of the state is to serve society, when much of society benefits from the state, much of society works for it, and pretty much all of society to some degree or another pays for it.

What I’m saying is that I think the heritage of One Nation stretches beyond individual philanthropy, though Disraeli himself probably would not have approved. I think it stretches from one nation Toryism, deep into social democracy. Economic liberalism is not totally alien to it either, but I think that there is still a mad dash for economic liberalism which is massively socially divisive, and is as contrary to One Nation philosophy as exiling the rich.

Anyway, I think it’s a bold move, and whether Tory or Social Democratic, the driving feature is basically human compassion – something that I think is the main thing our society is forgetting, lamentably. I don’t want someone ruining my mortgage or cutting my wages – nor am I happy to see people spit in the face of bus drivers.

Common manners and respect need a big return, in society and in the economy.

Anyway, here’s my family secret. A political one too.

When I was very young, indeed before I can remember, my father was awarded custody of me. I have lived with him and my Stepmother since when he met her (I was three). My biological mother has been estranged to me for what I make twelve years, for various reasons, though I am considering getting in touch with her now.

Anyway, turns out that one of Ashton’s predecessors as the Tory Chair at Manchester Uni was her father**. Uber One-Nation MP. I never met the bloke, and having politicised into the left at a young age, and with a class background of skilled manual labour via my father and his family, it rather shocked me. His wife was descended from Charles II! Mad.

Oh well. There is plenty of determism aside from the genetic.

The fact is, as happy as I am to accept the rhetoric of One Nation, if I was a Tory, I would be a Thatcherite. I respect ideological leadership, sticking to guns, and having guns to stick to in the first place.

I think if there is to be one nation, that’s all well and good. And if the term helps gain support for it, that’s just as well.

But Disraeli’s mistake was that he thought a society that encouraged freedom and was at ease with itself was the rightful gift of the honourable rich.

But wealth is not gained for honour. Nor is it spent in the pursuit of obligation.

Wealth under neoliberalism is precisely and literally the privilege of being in a different nation. If the poor don’t like tax, they buy less food. If the rich don’t like tax, they move. The same logic applies to pay rises in the two nations.

We need One Nation. ‘Middle class’ workers are essential to engendering this. But it’s not the disadvantaged who split the nation in the first place. If the nation is to be brought towards a tolerant, pluralist and relatively equal place – ‘One Nation’ – then democratic and civic power over divisive market dogma must be massively increased, and on terms which are inclusive of the disadvantaged – our subaltern ‘second nation’. It’s simply not One Nation if they are forced into a cramped island with no way out. And make no mistake, that’s where they are headed, and have been headed for decades.

This inclusion is not something achieved through centrist vaccilation. Particularly in this climate of divisive attacks, and the intended resentment culture that now sits in place of solidarity. In situations where forces are jockeying beneath the surface for position, it’s achieved by creating a social coalition which is broad, yes, but also genuinely progressive, and has reason to be. Good luck getting that from establishment wets! It’s a path we have tried for years.

There are very, very few ‘progressive’ Tories. Show me a Tory as left wing as Disraeli these days, and I’ll show you a Compass member. Leadership towards a more cohesive society isn’t just something the broad left has a claim to.

When it comes to questions of motivation and material ability, they are the only forces in the country capable of taking the claim up, and the labour movement in particular the only one with the withdrawable surplus and power in numbers for the battle ahead.

The die is cast. The struggle of note will therefore be that to achieve leadership within the paradigm itself.

My next post will be about the virtues of populism. It will be shorter.

-

* Note – perhaps I should have added in ‘that economic class as related to ownership is a major obstacle to this’?
** In the interests of my own credibility, not that proper lefts judge us on lineage, I should point out that I am also descended from a Communist militant immigrant bus driver from the T & G who sacrificed his life to fight Franco. I think that means I genetically average out somewhere near Roy Hattersley.

Why a Galloway / NUS case could be really interesting…

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So, apparently George Galloway is suing NUS after it passed a motion describing him as a ‘rape denier’.

Now firstly, cards on the table. I don’t think Assange should be extradited to the US, but I do think he should be on trial. Secondly, I don’t think any formulation of the NUS motion, amended or not, was perfect. Thirdly, I don’t think politicians should be in the business of suing democratic organisations for what are essentially political views, democratically expressed. Further, I think it’s ridiculous for alleged anti-capitalists to resort to courts which are, at the end of the day, institutions of law designed to protect the powerful – especially in the case of Libel in England.

With that out of the way, a quick point: the effects of this case are potentially hilarious. Why?

Given the video evidence and the text of the resolution passed, it’s improbable that the court will examine issues of fact in any detail. Nor are there obvious areas of law in the larger sense which will be explored.

If it goes ahead, the case is likely to focus therefore on how issues of established fact fit issues of established law.

Galloway’s claim is likely to focus on whether what he said can be described as ‘rape denial’. It should be noted that the motion was badly worded, and that ‘denialism’ would have been a far better choice of words than ‘denial’ to describe what the proponents were trying to describe. But herein could lie the saving grace of the NUS case.

If Galloway is pulled into an argument about whether the facts of rape took place in Assange’s case, things could get very messy.

Firstly, in what would necessarily be a politicised trial, an English court would be given the opportunity to comment on whether what was alleged would also be rape if it took place in England. My own answer from an personal political point of view would be an unequivocal ‘yes’. But legally, there is some precedent to suggest that this is also so in English law. Does Galloway really want this said?

Secondly, Galloway could also easily be pulled into a debate about whether said incident actually took place. I must confess that I am not exactly hot on defamation law as it surrounds foreign criminal cases – but if such an examination of the facts takes place, the burden of proof is significantly lower than in a criminal case. It would come down to probability rather than reasonable doubt, if the court felt that it was within its jurisdiction to examine it. Was it probable that Assange did rape somebody? Does Galloway really want this asked?

GG thinks he is playing a deft hand by suing, and promising to donate the funds to an Assange defence fund. But firstly, this is atrocious PR that will backfire heavily, especially within the left. He should probably have just followed Tony Benn into an apology and restatement of views. We know, however, that this is a pathological impossibility for a man so arrogant – a deep and political flaw of Galloway that his followers are equally unwilling to arrest.

Secondly though, the whole thing could end up with Assange looking more guilty in the eyes of the public than he did before, if a court ends up ruling that it is likely that rape took place (and that Galloway is therefore a denier).

That way Galloway would be taking several political steps backward – as if it wasn’t bad enough suing the student movement – as well as damaging the man he is trying to protect.

It’s a risky game.

Solidarity with the Bolivarian revolutions

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This piece from Colin Burgon MP on LabourList is worth a read.

I’m not sure models such as Venezuela are applicable to the economies or body politics of Western Europe – but I do think Colin Burgon is basically right to stress the importance of international solidarity with democratic socialist revolutions in Latin America.

I do think solidarity should be critical, and not vulgar or unthinking. But I have lots of caveats about lots of things.

As an example, I’m quite happy to disagree with Chavez and say that Iran, a state with a special line in repression and bigotry, is no friend of working people.

But that does not mean that a Chavista government should not be supported, and even more importantly the movmement which put it there and partly holds it accountable, because what really matters is the enormous and largely positive social change taking place there.

It’s also important to note, as Burgon points out, that this continent-wide process includes ‘pink’ revolutions in countries such as Brazil as well as ‘red’ ones in Venezuela, Bolivia and the like. Red or pink, each of them is characterised by electoralist, openly mandated and openly debated politics – something which should make democratic socialists a lot more comfortable about them than, say, Cuba. Yes, Chavez isn’t nice to some parts of the private press – small ones, it has to be said – but perhaps they shouldn’t take part in military coups. I couldn’t see ITV getting its license renewed in the same circumstances, to be honest.

The stunning stats in terms of social improvements, their repeated continent-wide democratic backing, and comparative lack of repression, make supporting these revolutionary processes worthy of those who believe both in democracy and socialism.

It saddens me that many within the Labour Party are quite happy to drop bombs on people, but not willing to show a bit of solidarity with those who propose feeding them (and put their ballot box where their mouth is as they go about it).

This is no internationalism that I recognise. So Burgon is right, on his core point at least.

This isn’t just the sort of thing Labour should be thinking about. Our direct sister party in Venezuela was involved in a military and media coup against the elected President, and has been pushing for the country to direct itself rightwards. It is a party of an old and corrupt Trade Union establishment, carved into the culture of the country as part of a succession of stitch-up governments held in place by oil barons.

Many of the ‘pink tide’ parties are affiliated to the Socialist International, of which Labour is part, but PSUV and the PT are not.

Instead, we have a proxy relationship with them through the Sao Paulo forum, which has consultative status at the SI.

In many ways, the politics of this organisation are similar to the so called 2½/Vienna International, which included Labour’s ancestor and sibling the ILP.

While there would be obvious difficulties joining with an organisation that is happy to include ‘tankie’ Communist Parties, The Socialist International nevertheless needs to develop better ways of cooperating with some of these parties on a regular basis. It must stop backing despotic coup makers, as it also did in Africa before that got inconvenient. This is not just Labour’s issue, but one for the democratic left worldwide.

Solidarity with these processes can’t just be reduced down to cult of personality style worship of various Presidents. It needs to include closer institutional working, and is an opportunity to reform the as yet tainted politics of the Socialist International, which in places are as close to despots as to the democratic left.

It’s notable that left support for these contemptibles is seldom mentioned – but solidarity with a particular President who is broadly speaking left wing, and who wins loads of elections, and who accepts defeats in his referendums, is so often the target of ‘decent‘ liberal condescension.

Instead, how about solidarity with a generation who would previously have been denied the right to read?

The left should pursue former Tories – but on our terms.

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I was reading a well penned blog post by Aiyan Maharasingam on the Next Generation Labour website about our attitude to ex-Tories, swing voters, and the like.

Thought it worth recording a few thoughts there.

My view for a long time has been that Labour has been losing two groups of voters, both of whom I identify with, so perhaps a personal bias. But those two broad groups are the less well-off and the more left-wing, including many Guardian type liberals. It has also lost some chunks of voters to its right – but a word of caution – centrist swing voters in swing constituencies still make up a minority of the Labour vote there, and need a motivated core themselves.

In terms of how this is addressed, I think it is crucial that Labour is a party which is much more clearly identifiable with the left as a whole, firstly, but also that those who constitute the organised parts of the left have a long think about their strategic aims and how it they are met, especially given the continual slow weathering of traditional class organisations like unions.

For those of us acting within the party itself, there also needs to be a hell of a lot more thought on what defeat and victory means to the left, and whether the left of Labour in particular wants to put the larger part of its focus focus on what I shall call ‘specific demand politics’ or ‘directional/orientation politics’. Cards on the table, I’m for the latter.

There also needs to be thought about how we engage with plurality. The ‘pluralism disputes’ within Compass and its subsequent fall from relevance to the debates within the Labour Party answered some of these questions. But they are not yet resolved organisationally. Compass was an organisation with strove for breadth, particularly as the moderate Labour left (and its more liberal wing, at that), a party faction capable of and committed to fostering plurality, tolerance and breadth, took a leadership position within the organisation.

But there is no clear articulation of this kind of left politics within the party, simply organs of the moderate left which are defunct or irrelevant, and hard left dominated factions which are more active but similarly (if not more) irrelevant to the actual structure of political power within party or country.

How do we engage with liberals or greens who share some key aims, without putting them in a leadership position which encourages open hostility to Labour, the largest left-of-centre party, or the unions, the bulk of our movement?

How does the moderate left itself regain political expression within Labour?

Outside the left, should we really be writing off those who currently back the right, who might be moved to backing social democratic policies on social democratic terms?

At a more fundamental level, how do we halt the decay of movements and the subsequent trend towards reliance, even by parts of the Labour leadership, on dehumanised money of the right?

These are all questions that are lying there without answer.

In my view, from a ‘big public politics’ point of view, Ed Miliband is partly pursuing the correct strategy – float ideas which are left of the established consensus (i.e. the hegemonic ideology), but will still appeal to swing voters. Try to encourage an open approach to those who are leftish minded, even when they are spineless (like Vince Cable), or unhinged (like the Green Party).

But from the point of view of being a paid party organiser covering at least one swing seat, what I would like to see a bit more of would be angry working class left-populism.

A good start would be an all-fronts attack on workfare, but specifically from a class standpoint rather than simply that of individual rights, which are very well, but have more narrow political appeal.

Why is it that the Government, in the middle of a huge recession, is replacing paid vacancies for working people with compulsory free labour, undercutting the job opportunities and wages of those who work hardest but rightly expect something back? All very well to target benefit fraud, but what about tax evaders? What about the fact that people who pay into the benefits system their whole life are receiving so little back if they find themselves short of work?

if we were to ask that, why would it mean losing the prospect of votes from the middle? Most people have to work for a living. But everyone’s living standards are declining unless they have ‘independent means’, or in other words directly constitute part of the bourgeoisie. Mums and Dads can’t afford Waitrose anymore, at one end. At the other, people are being expected to choose between work and pay, except without the choice of pay.

Quality of life should be something that we are hammering day in, day out. A perfect cross-class, left consensus type issue. It should be the title of our conference, really.

We have a lot of room to expand our left flank, but still hold our right one, as long as we avoid latter-phase Blairite policies which are deliberately offensive to our own base. The idea that those are the only policies that will appeal to the centre are a mutual fallacy of both the hard left and hard right within the party.

But the background remains. The continued failure of pretty much all of our internal factions to respect internal plurality or to seriously lead with new ideas themselves undermines our ability to get on with any strategy properly, right or wrong. It’s a great thing that we have avoided an internal war. But we can’t be content to resort to stagnation, in its place. So let’s challenge all the orthodoxies, and see what remains?

Predistribution and New Labour: a new hegemonic project?

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I had many axes to grind with New Labour, which I thought fell short in a lot of areas. Most of all was the idea that being in office was all – a notion itself founded on the preconception that being in office meant that Labour, and perhaps by extension the movement it was born to express in parliamentary form, was in power.

Obviously the equation of office and power is not generally true (see Clegg, 2010), and was certainly not true when so much of New Labour was about fighting people who wanted often achievable and effective left policies.

In short, New Labour saw itself as being in government because it accepted the core premises of Thatcherism – in other words, it accepted the leadership and domination on policy of the conservative project and a conservative common sense. In other words, by its own admission, New Labour was an admission of conservative leadership of ideas, and domination of ideas – it accepted the hegemony, therefore, of the conservative project.

And if that is so, it cannot be that it had any kind of project to build or assert a hegemony of the left.

If you want to make the case that it did, it’s particularly hard to do, as many of the key politicians involved defined themselves as being in the ‘centre’ – rather than the ‘centre-left’ favoured by Kinnock/Smith era social democrats, ‘democratic left’ favoured by Gramscians and other ‘broad leftists’, and the ‘Labour left’ favoured by partisan traditionalists of both the Benn/Briefing and Foot/Tribune varieties.

It proudly accepted conservative hegemony in many senses, as well as defined itself as the centre (a centre, it must be remembered, forged by Thatcher). It thus opposed broad structural hegemony for the left on two separate but related grounds.

Part of the reason that it was necessary for parts of the thinking left to be on the left of the party in the first place, therefore, was to ditch the strategy of New Labour not for some abstract failure of general policy, but for strategic reasons. It was necessary to move the party leftwards to ditch a disciplined, top down and self interested project that was counter-hegemonic for the left in the long term. Whether it had the strategy right for winning elections is one debate, but whatever the outcome, it had no strategy for winning the country, and even if it did, it would for winning the country to the centre (i.e the general balance of how it is already) rather than any permutation of the left.

It was necessary to ditch New Labour because as well as leaving left voters with nowhere to go by appropriating their natural party, it was against the interests of the whole movement within the country in the long term. It was not strategic to any structural end shared by the left.

So, I’m glad we have Ed Miliband, and I was glad to vote for him at the time. It’s good to see that others are too.

And after a bit of a educational non-debate with a friend on facebook (we both agreed with each other), I was left thinking about ‘predistribution’ – and how well it fits into a more ambitious, hegemonic style of social democracy.

First things first. The name. People don’t like it, because it’s a wonk word. But I feel that around half of the people who say that should simply go away. Why? Because they spent years plugging something called ‘public service reform’, including such populist notions as ‘foundation hospitals’ and ‘internal markets’. Something you always hear from people down the pub, no doubt.

None of these names are good, and that is certainly important for an idea to gain currency. It is a wonk word, and hardly an everyday topic. But I can’t think of a better one that is as general. So for now, ‘predistribution’ will do.

An idea with hegemonic potential

There are several advantages from the point of view of hegemonic strategy (and note at this point that I am reproducing facebook)…

Like the Scandinavian social democracy admired by the soft left, it firstly offers a way to transpose the institutions of the left into the economy, thus providing a fundamental change to the temporally immediate class structure of local capitalism, and increasing hegemonic potential – a dual benefit. Cooperatives. Unions. Management board modifications. Shareholder transparency.

But secondly, I think it underscores rather than diminishes the role of redistribution as well as predistribution more strongly than redistribution can itself (via discourse)… predistribution implies that there is something wrong about how we are paid and treated in a way that is not immediately evident to people simply because they pay progressive tax rates or receive working family tax credit. As well as offering the organising and material base as per the paragraph above, it also pushes the argument that capitalism produces unjust and inadequate outcomes right into our everyday lives. It forces people, especially those reliant on wages, to question the equity and suitability of their situation. This leads to emphasis on collective redistribution as much as it does predistribution itself.

As such, it has the potential to actively attack the current common sense around distributive justice, as well as having two different ways to embed a new one.

So for me, leaving aside the impact on party politics, there are three cultural and organisational reasons to see this as a really exciting intellectual project.

And it’s free.

And it means that some of the huge pile of corporate savings might be released back into the real economy.

Stuff Blue Labour, this is where it’s at.

Nukes or not…

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Currently reconsidering my views on nuclear weapons. I have previously supported maintaining them in the UK as a way of bargaining them away elsewhere and playing our own part in multilateral disarmament. This is an unusual position on the Labour left, even among those who are more Bevan than Benn.

But can spending on them really be justified while vital services are being cut, and there are far more efficient ways of investing in jobs without endangering millions of lives? Secondly, multilateralism is fine. But why us? If Germany can simply avoid wasting its money on these idle murder factories, why should we?

This is the single thing I have been least consistent on since I started ‘having views’. Free education? Solid. Unions and that? All good. Military actions? I haven’t always fallen one way or the other easily, but I do have a consistent set of principles – I oppose ground occupations and military actions that are not in defence of genuine grassroots uprisings elsewhere, or self-defence here.

I just think that nukes are the hardest question of all. For anyone remotely sensible, removing them has to be a priority. There is just so much game theory involved.