"And Professor Pouthas added that when the 1848 revolutions broke out, "its leaders and instigators were intellectuals devoid of political experience, not men of action". This amateur aspect of the protesters of 1848 is repeated today. A description wouldn't be very different from Professor Pouthas'. In 2011 one would say the "leaders and instigators" of the protests are women's rights organisers, self-employed IT consultants, middle-class, jobless squatters, unemployed music teachers, freelance artists, charity volunteers, social workers and media studies students, all of whom, like their predecessors in 1848, are "devoid of political experience, not men and women of action". Surely, one might reflect, there is nothing to fear from such a group.

"On Sunday, some 500 of them held an assembly and agreed on nine points. The process is likely to have been laborious. For participants were reminded that deliberation takes time, that eloquent and confident speakers are not necessarily right and that conditions will not favour the merely quick-witted. ...

"Nonetheless, what the men devoid of political experience did in 1848, and the inexperienced protesters in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt did, is simply to endure, to keep the spark burning. There are two characteristics of a pre-revolutionary situation – a valuable insight widely shared and the endurance of those who hold it. We have the first, but it is not yet clear whether we have the second." (Andreas Whittam Smith, 'Western nations are now ripe for revolution', The Independent, 20th October 2011)

"We begin by attempting to unpack some of the core images which seem to us to form central elements in the 'traditionalist' ideology of crime. Gouldner once argued that all social theories contain 'dominant assumptions' about society embedded in them. We would argue that all social ideologies contain powerful images of society at their heart. These images may be diffuse, quite untheorised in any elaborate sense; but they serve to condense and order the view of society in which the ideologies are active, and they constitute both the unquestioned substratum of truth - what carries conviction - and the source of its collective emotional force and appeal. Together, these images produce and sustain an uncodified but immensely powerful, conservative sense of Englishness, of an English 'way of life', of an 'English' viewpoint which - it also, by its very density of reference, asserts - everyone shares to some extent. We do not make any claim to offer here an exhaustive inventory of this traditional English ideology, only to have identified some of the major issues around which this traditionalist definition of 'Englishness' is constructed and organised. Our aim here is to open a discussion which we regard as of considerable importance, and to touch on two related but distinct aspects. First, can we begin to identify the social content which is being carried in these images, around which a traditionalist view of crime is organised? Second, can we begin to make sense of its power to generalise across social and class divisions - its claims to 'universality'? The traditionalist ideology is not the only active ideology in society by any means; but it is a dominant ideological field. And this dominance, and its claims to general representativeness, are connected. It is dominant because it appears to be able to catch up quite contradictory life and class experiences within its master framework. Ideologies are easier to understand when they seem, within their own logic, to reflect or adequately correspond to the experiences, positions and interests of those who hold them. But though ideologies do include this practical relation, they cannot wholly be explained in this way; indeed, when we speak of the practical social role of ideologies, we are speaking of the power of ideologies to translate into convincing ideological terms the outlook of classes and groups who are not, even in a collective sense, its 'authors'. So we are also concerned here with what it is in the social and material condition of subordinate classes which allows the dominant traditionalist ideologies to gain some real purchase, and to carry conviction, to win support. How is this traditionalist ideological 'unity' constructed out of disparate and contradictory class formations? How does this version of 'the English way of life' provide the basis of ideological consensus?

"We turn, first, to the notion of respectability - at once, so different for different social classes, and yet so 'universal' a social value. It is an extremely complex social idea. It touches on the fundamental notion of self-respect: men who do not respect themselves cannot expect respect from others. But respectability also touches the more 'protestant' values of our culture; it is connected with thrift, self-discipline, living the decent life, and thus with observance of what is commonly held to be upright, decent conduct. It is strongly connected with ideas of self-help and self-reliance, and of 'conformity' to established social standards - standards set and embodied by 'significant others'.

"The 'others' are always those who rank and stand above us in the social hierarchy: people we 'look up to', and in turn respect. The idea of respectability means that we have taken care not to fall into the abyss, not to lose out in the competitive struggle for existence. In the middle classes, the idea of 'respectability' carries with it the powerful overtones of competitive success; its token is the ability to 'keep up appearances', to secure a standard of life which enables you to afford those things which befit - and embody - your social station in life. But in the working classes, it is connected with three, different ideas: with work, with poverty, and with crime in the broad sense. It is work, above all, which is the guarantee of respectability; for work is the means - the only means - to the respectable life. The idea of the 'respectable working classes' is irretrievably associated with regular, often skilled, employment. It is labour which has disciplined the working class into respectability. Loss of respectability is therefore associated with loss of occupation and with poverty. Poverty is the trap which marks the slide away from respectability back into the 'lower depths'. The distinction between the 'respectable' and the 'rough' working class, though in no sense an accurate sociological or historical one, remains an extremely important moral distinction. If poverty is one route downwards out of the respectable life, crime or moral misconduct is another, broader and more certain route. Respectability is the collective internalisation, by the lower orders, of an image of the 'ideal life' held out for them by those who stand higher in the scheme of things; it disciplines society from end to end, rank by rank. Respectability is therefore one of the key values which dovetails and inserts one social class into the social image of another class. It is part of what Gramsci called the 'cement' of society.

"Work is not only the guarantee of working-class respectability, it is also a powerful image in its own right. We know how much our social and indeed personal identities are caught up with our work, and how men (especially men, given the sexual division of labour) who are without work, feel not only materially abandoned but spiritually decentred. We know in fact that this is the product of an extremely long an arduous process of historical acculturation: all that is involved in the erection, alongside the birth fo capitalism, of the Protestant Ethic, and all that was involved in the insertion of the labouring industrial masses into the rigorous disciplines of factory labour. Work has gradually come to be regarded more as 'instrumental' than as 'sacred', as manual labour under capitalism is disciplined by the wage contract; leisure, or rather all that is associated with non-work and with the private sphere, has come to rank even higher than once it did in the hierarchy of social goods, as family and home have been progressively distanced from work. Yet, for men above all, the workaday world of work, and the formal and informal values associated with it, seem in many ways coterminous with the definition of 'reality' itself. And this, though endowed with extremely powerful ideological content reflects a material fact: without work, the material basis of our lives would vanish overnight. What matters here, with respect to crime, however, is not so much the centrality of work, and our feelings about it, as what we might call the calculus of work. The calculus of work implies the belief that, though work may have few intrinsic rewards and is unlikely to lead to wealth, prosperity and riches for the vast majority, it provides one of the stable negotiated bases for our economic existence: a 'fair day's wage for a fair day's work'. It also entails the belief that the valued things - leisure, pleasure, security, free activity, play - are a reward for the diligent application to long-term productive goals through work. The former come after, and as the result of, or recompense for, the latter.

"Of course, some professional crime could, technically, be seen as 'work' of a kind, and there are certainly testimonies by professional criminals which would support such an interpretation. But few people would see it that way. The sharpest distinction is made between the professional or organised life of crime, and the petty pilfering and 'borrowing' from one's place of work, which is regarded as a customary way of setting a funamentally exploitative economic relation to right, and is thus not understood as 'crime' in the ordinary sense at all. Crime, in the proper sense, when involving robbery or rackets for gain, is set off against work in the public mind, precisely because it is an attempt to acquire by speed, stealth, fraudulent or shorthand methods what the great majority of law-abiding citizens can only come by through arduous toil, routine, expenditure of time, and the postponement of pleasure. It is through this contrast that some of the most powerful moral feelings come to be transferred against deviants who trhive and prosper, but do not work. One of the most familiar ways in which the moral calculus of work is recruited into attitudes to social problems is in the way people talk about 'scroungers', 'layabouts', those who 'don't do a stroke' or 'live off the Welfare'. The characterisations are often applied indiscriminately, and without much evidence, to various 'out-groups': the poor, the unemployed, the irresponsible and feckless - but also youth, students and black people. These are seen as getting something without 'putting anything into it'. The image implies instant moral condemnation. At the same time it is important to remember that again, a real, objective material reality is distortedly expressed in these negative images of the 'scrounger' and the layabout. For the vast majority of working people, there is absolutely no other route to a minimal degree of security and material comfort apart from the life-long commitment to 'hard graft'. It must be remembered that this feeling that 'everyone should earn what he gets by working for it' also informs working class feelings about the very wealthy, or those who live on unearned incomes, or accumulate large pieces of property, or about the unequal distribution of wealth. There is evidence that what is sometimes called a 'pragmatic acceptance' of the present unequal distribution of wealth is matched by an equally strong feeling that there is something intrinsically wrong and exploitative about it. So sentiments stemming from the prevailing 'work calculus' have their progressive aspect too, though they are often used to underpin root conservative attitudes to all who transgress it.

"Another social image with special importance for public ideologies of crime has to do with the need for social discipline - and with England as a disciplined society. Once again, there are different versions of this very general social idea across the different class cultures; the idea is interpreted and applied differently within different cultural systems of meaning, while retaining sufficient common elements to appear to carry a more universal validity. The idea of a 'disciplined society' is enshrined in popular mythology - the whole nation 'at prayer' having been long ago supplanted by the whole nation in an orderly queue. It is especially strong at those high points of popular history, like 'the War', where a country of free individuals 'pulled itself together' to defeat the enemy. The 'discipline' of English society is not the rigorously organised tyranny of the bureaucratic or regimented state, but that 'self-discipline', flexible yet tenacious, while holds the nation together from the inside when it is under stress. In the English ideology, 'discipline' is always linked and qualified by an opposing tendency which tempers its authoritarian harshness: in the upper classes, the idea of discipline and anarchism (as caricatured, for example, in the roles played by John Cleese in the television comedy series, Monty Python's Flying Circus). Lower down the social scale, discipline is often qualified by the image of a sort of petty-bourgeois 'anarchy' (as, for example, in post-war Ealing comedies or Dad's Army). However, the capacity of popular mythology to counter or qualify the respect for 'social discipline' in these ways does not mean that it is not a strong sentiment - only that it is held, like so many other traditional social values, in a peculiarly British way, and with a very special English sense of irony.

...

"The traditional idea of social discipline is closely linked, on the one hand, with notions about hierarchy and authority. Society is hierarchical, in the dominant view, by nature. Competitive success may promote individuals up through this hierarchy, but does not destroy the notion of a hierarchical order itself. But the hierarchy, in turn, depends upon the giving and taking of authority. And the exercise of authority, both on the part of those who exercise it, and of those who give obedience to it, requires discipline. This trinity - the hierarchical nature of society, the importance of authority and the acclimatisation of the people to both through self-discipline - forms a central complex of attitudes. In this version of the dominant social image, indiscipline is seen as a threat both to the hierarchical conception of the social order and to the exercise of 'due authority' and deference; it is thus the beginnings, the seed bed, of social anarchy.

...

"[T]he three social image clusters we have so far discussed - respectability, work and discipline - are inextricably connected with the fourth image: that of the family.

"In the traditionalist lexicon, the sphere of the family is of course where moral-social compulsions and inner controls are generated, as well as the sphere where the primary socialisation of the young is first tellingly and intimately carried through. The first aspect has to do with the repression and regulation of sexuality - the seat of pleasure - in the family nexus; and thus with authority. The second has to do with the power which the family has, through its intimate exchanges of love and anger, punishment and reward, and the structure of patriarchty, to prepare children for a competitive existence, work and the sexual division of labour. The family, too, is a complex social image; different forms, functions and habits may be found in the different social classes. Thus the structures of sexual identity and repression within the working-class family, though in some respects reproducing the dominant stuctures of sex roles in the organisation of the family, are also profoundly shaped by the material experiences of the class - the construction of practices and a definition of 'masculinity' and masculine work and values in the world of production which are transposed into the sexual organisation of the family. Similarly, the apparently cross-class conception of the family as 'refuge' carries a particular weight and intensity when the world from which the family froms a 'refuge' is the daily experience of class exploitation in production and work. But the 'sense of family' is a strong value because it is an absolutely pivotal social institution. Few would deny its central role in the construction of social identities, and in transmitting, at an extremely deep level, the basic ideological grid of society. Family ideology is undoubtedly also changing; and we have learned to think of the family, also, in more positive, less punitive terms. But, when we come 'right down to it', the dominant image of the family - perhaps across classes - still has more to do with the duty of instilling a basic understanding of fundamental 'do's and don'ts' than it does of providing a mutually sustaining and releasing framework. Love is what we hope and pray will emerge from the family, but disciplining, punishing, rewarding and controlling is what we seem actually to do in it a great deal of the time. Reich, with some justification, calls it a 'factory for creating submissive people'. And, as we have come to see, the fundamental images of authority, power and discipline, aloong with the primary origins of what Giles Playfair calls 'the punitive obsession', are experienced and internalise first within its tiny kingdom. The alignment of the sexual and the social - a fundamental task of the family - is just the homology of structures which creates inside us those repertoires of self-discipline and self-control for which, later, the wider world is to be so thankful. It is little wonder, then, that fears and pancis about the breakdown of social discipline - of which crime is one of the most powerful indices - centre on the indiscipline of 'youth', 'the young', and on those institutions whose task it is to help them internalise social discipline - the school, but above all, the family."

This is just a sort of bookmark, a place to return to when this subject comes up again, as it assuredly will. On a par with climate change, soaring food prices, overproduction and recession, it is apparently a global catastrophe of world-historical significance: overpopulation. To be more precise: excessive breeding among the poor. The link merely contains a recent example of what is routinely available in the mass media - after having been prepared by academics and thinktanks. Imagine the horror:

Friendly governments may be pushed out of power because they were unable to grow their economies to keep pace with population increases; wars between countries over food and land in strategic regions of the world will test our will as peacekeepers; and catastrophic weather events hitting over populated countries are certain to create desperate calls for American assistance. This may indeed be what the world of 2050 looks like when the population hits 9 billion.

Is it just the capitalist crisis, or was it always normal for a new version of this ruling class propaganda to be pumped out every week? This was supposed to be a Swiftian satire on the ruthlessness of capital and its solutions to its production problems, but it now seems redundantly obvious. Because this argument about population is, and always has been, nothing other than a prophalyxis, intended to deflect radical left-wing critique. Such as:

"Capitalist development has always been unsustainable because of its human impact. To understand this point, all we need to do is take the viewpoint of those who have been and continue to be killed by it. A presupposition of capitalism's birth was the sacrifice of a large part of humanity - mass extermination, the production of hunger and misery, slavery, violence and terror. Its continuation requires the same presuppositions." - Mariarosa Dalla Costa

The economy shrank by 0.5% in the last quarter of 2010. If that continues into the next quarter, then the feared 'double dip' recession is on. So, what does the government do? They blame the weather. As Chris Dillow points out, the implication is that the bad weather stopped service sector workers from getting to work, but didn't inhibit industrial workers on their commutes. It's bollocks, in other words. The fall in the construction industry was particularly bad, but I wonder if, rather than being due to very bad weather, this wasn't in part because of 1) the cancellation of major public works by the government and local councils, and 2) the slump in the housing market resulting in a decline in house-building? The Federation of Master Builders, representing small-to-medium sized construction firms, puts it like this:

The construction sector has still not reached the bottom of the most savage recession for the industry in living memory. Cuts in government expenditure are making matters worse with more than half of building companies reporting falling levels of work in public repair and maintenance work. Our survey shows a sharp increase in those expecting workloads to contract once again in the first quarter of 2011.

The Government is pinning its hopes of economic recovery on the creation of new jobs in the private sector but its policies are having exactly the opposite effect in the building sector. The increase in the rate of VAT earlier this month will cost the construction sector nearly 7,500 jobs this year alone. Cuts in public sector spending on social housing are having a particularly adverse impact with nearly half of building companies reporting that work in this sector had fallen.

The construction sector has the potential to build Britain out of recession and we know that for every £1 spent on construction output generates a total of £2.84 in total economic activity. If this could be coupled with expenditure on infrastructure projects as well as tackling the growing housing crisis the Government would be building the real foundations for a sustained economic recovery.

There are some in the ruling class who aren't very happy. Though the CBI has generally been approving of the government's 'austerity' programme, its outgoing chief has said that: "It's not enough just to slam on the spending brakes. Measures that cut spending but killed demand would actually make matters worse." Like many of the bosses, he seems to want some sort of magical remedy whereby the government could cut spending and stimulate growth at the same time. Finance capital is also gravely murmuring about the "stunningly bad" GDP data - but they fucking asked for this, and it can't be long before they'll be demanding more money from the public purse, then pushing for another austerity budget to pay off the bankers and keep the financial assets of the rich afloat for another few months before the whole thing collapses again.

Despite the denials and the absurd, utterly feeble attempt to pin this on the weather, these figures represent a political problem for the government - especially if they're starting to lose sections of business and the petit bourgoisie on account of it. I expect the medium term effect might be to see more businesses swing behind Labour and its quasi-Keynesian remedies. For its part, Labour, in a bid to remain in capital's orbit, will constantly feel a gravitational pull to the right. Unless, of course, the student rebellions and the strike ballots being prepared in the public sector become a much more power countervailing force.

Yesterday, the FT carried an article calling for the bond markets to discipline the American public to force them to accept austerity. Given that US states and cities have already been forcing through draconian spending cuts, this shows up the savagery of the commentariat when they're talking about other people's money and other people's services. Notably, the FT did not cite the recent experience of Ireland, where the cuts remedy has compounded the deficit and resulted in an unprecedented political crisis and a further round of cuts. It did cite the experience of Portugal, though. It was a bad example. Today it's been announced that despite (or because of) Portugal's austerity measures, its credit rating has been revised down by Moodys credit agency, just days after it has already cut Ireland's credit rating down by 5 points. This is because the austerity measures are damaging growth and thus harming Portugal's ability to repay its debts.

Now Britain's austerity programme may face similar problems. Despite all the 'quantitative easing', which was never going to overcome the problems posed by austerity, and despite slashing spending at record levels, the public sector borrowing requirement has continued to rise. The Tories, with the assistance of their unlovely Liberal props, are determined to keep to their targets of reducing the deficit, which they intend to achieve solely by cutting, and have only more quantitative easing to fall back on. Growth is unlikely to rescue the situation, because even the CBI, which supports the cuts, doesn't expect growth to be higher than 0.2% in the first quarter of 2011. The trading deficit has increased, which means that the manufacturing sector certainly isn't able to take advantage of the weak pound to pick up the slack in the economy. If growth remains stagnant, or if we enter another slump, then Treasury revenues will fall further, and borrowing will have to rise further. If borrowing continues to rise despite previous and current cuts, then the logic of the government's position leads them to further cuts. So, we could be on our way to a second emergency budget - Ireland style.

Still, though global ruling classes have always been divided on the details of this strategy, and have every reason to worry about years of stagnation and low profits, the major voices of capital such as the IMF have not ceased to demand further austerity, privatization and deregulation. And the OECD yesterday demanded that Spain should try to overcome its difficulties by such neoliberal measures. There is, in my opinion, a very simple reason for this. The only plausible alternative to neoliberalism is to attack the wealth and power of the rich - to kill off the rentier, nationalise the banks and convert them into public utilities, redistribute wealth to support demand, engage in mass public housing projects (no more bonanzas from property speculation), and to strengthen the bargaining power of labour to support incomes and demands in the future. This is simply not something the CBI or the British Chambers of Commerce would ever be interested in, even if the alternative was to pull up the drawbridges and allow the economy to tank for a generation. The austerity agenda is thus not just a gamble on squeezing another few years of growth out of the neoliberal accumulation model, but a defensive project against the Left.

The only thing that will make them think twice is if the resultant labour insurgencies prove to be so powerful, and empowering for the constituencies that neoliberalism has previously smashed, that they risk the re-emergence of an anticapitalist pole of attraction. Then they'll be forced to negotiate terms. "Right," said Thucydides, "as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". If we cannot yet defeat the ruling classes, let us at least aspire to be their equal in power.

There was good, frequently funny, debate between bat020 and Tory MP Patrick Mercer on Radio 5 Live over the weekend. It was predictably about whether 'violence' was justifiable in the service of protests. The government has just cleared the way for the use of water cannons, using the excuse of the mysterious 'contact' between Camilla and an unknown prole. But Mercer's moronic blithering suggests that the government's ideological position is weak, and they know it. It's worth listening to the whole thing - you know the Tory's in trouble when he strolls blithely into the minefield of the Northern Ireland civil rights struggle. Listen here.

This is the striking thing. Yesterday's protest had almost no significant institutional backing whatsoever. It's been said, not quite accurately, that there was no left-wing organisation involved. I did see socialists, trade unionists and trade union banners present. To wit, I saw a Unison banner, I saw Billy Hayes of the CWU (looking a bit worried), I saw Right to Work and SWSS placards and stickers, and a few Socialist Worker paper sellers. I saw Socialist Students (that'll be the Socialist Party), and a few 'Revolution' flags. I saw people with loudspeakers who I'd seen at protests before, leading chants and so on. However, the majority of these protesters weren't actually mobilised by any union or party.

Most of the basic work of making people aware and getting them there happened through social media sites, and across the country it is estimated that 130,000 people turned out. I also heard a statistic which suggested that one in ten students were actually participating in the protests, but I can't vouch for its accuracy, and I don't know what its implications would be. In addition, 18 universities went into occupation yesterday. The point is that it was an almost spontaneous eruption of anger against the government. Watch this video to get a sense of the vibrancy, the joyful energy, the sense of purpose - all those qualities that normally seem redundant or perhaps over-stated when ascribed to a protest, but which capture yesterday perfectly.




"But surely," you're saying, "the NUS supported this?" No, it didn't. I regret to say that the NUS played no part in yesterday's action. Indeed, I understand that they had 'distanced' themselves from it. Aaron Porter's response when asked for his view was apparently to reflexively denounce "violence", blaming a handful of "professional troublemakers", while saying absolutely nothing about the police's violence. This latter included, for example, kicking a fifteen year old girl - that was Officer UC2128's contribution to state-sponsored child abuse, if you want to complain - and kneeing a boy in the groin before dragging him along by his hair. The police repeatedly baton-charged the young people, showing little concern for their age and vulnerability. This sort of thing happened all over the country.

And the kettling, clearly planned by the Metropolitan Police in order to make nice to the Tory bosses after their little embarrassment last time, involved keeping thousands of people, mainly young people, in the freezing cold for hours and hours without food, without toilets and largely without water. In fairness to the Met's PR department, they did give out a few bottles of water at the perimeter toward Parliament Square, but most people didn't see a drop. Finally, in the late evening (I was released at close to 10pm), people were filtered out in ones and twos, very slowly, and with prolonged pauses in between. Every now and again, as the pauses built up, the temperature dropped another degree, and the music got just a little bit shitter, the chant went up again: "Let us out! Let us out! Let us out!" People tried to debate the rows of jutting jawlines holding back the crowd, tried to engage them, make them see how irrational and cruel they were being. No dice. The cops have their schtick worked out for situations like this. They calmly explain that you're being held to prevent a breach of the peace, and then they go back to sniggering with the other filth. There's really nothing to debate with such people. The police also arbitrarily switched the exit point several times, adding to the frustration. Two teenage blokes were talking next to me as this was going on. One said, "there'll be a lot of fucking hatred of the police after this." The other, "I've never had a reason to hate the police until now". Similar sentiments were expressed over and over. And there was a particular passion when people sang along with NWA's "Fuck the police", and Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the name". The chorus building up to "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" was vented with real gusto and vim.

So if people want to talk about 'violence', by which they mean vandalism, it's worth saying that most such small-scale acts took place inside a kettle, which the police controlled like an experiment with fucking lab rats. We expect the media to be hostile, but the NUS is supposed to represent students, present and future. Porter's crawlingly servile attitude doesn't reflect this mandate. It just shows that he's another careerist creep, probably the next Phil Woolas. But given the scale of what happened yesterday outwith the NUS' organisation, the latter now have to make themselves relevant to the fightback against the cuts. It's obvious that hacks like Aaron Porter have nothing sensible to say or do on this front.

Speaking of 'violence', the Daily Mail is leading the chorus of execration (I think they'll know the phrase and like it) regarding young girls being the new face of 'violent' protest. Now, of course there were loads and loads of young girls out there yesterday. They make up at least half the population of school students after all - the smarter half according to those tests the Mail is so fond of. But they weren't remotely 'violent', and the majority were too clued up to attack the 'bait van' - the police van left unattended in the middle of the crowd, apparently to get people to attack it and provide a pretext for the police's kettling operation. Most people knew perfectly well why the van was left there. And among these secondary school and higher education students, there was a serious, open air debate about how to handle situations like this. There were arguments about strategy, and most people concluded that the police had deliberately created a situation designed to provoke petty vandalism and then cite that as justification for kettling. The impromptu speeches, the small debating circles, the gathered crowds, all more or less repeated this verbatim.

I mention this because the news has focused on one young student who they say 'fearlessly' faced down the 'angry mob' and protected police property from vandalism. I suppose this sort of thing feeds their fantasy of good breeding facing down the oiks, and in fairness I don't suppose the student in question will be happy to have been used that way. What they don't say is that the vast majority of students were making similar arguments. The majority of people therefore deliberately neglected to break glass or even spray paint buildings. They sat down and strummed out songs by The Libertines, or danced to Rage Against the Machine, or argued politics, or rationed out rolling tobacco and bottles of water. Some couples engaged in longing embraces and snogged. Some kids had apparently heated arguments, shoved one another. Some were a bit silly. And since the media is depicting these kids as mindless hooligans, it's worth saying that the political arguments were wide-ranging and sophisticated. It wasn't just about fees, it was about the future - war, global warming, everything that concerns us as a species. It's not that everyone sounded off like a right-on socialist. No such thing. Some of the arguments were baffling, some naive, some perverse, but most of it was thoughtful, sensible, and streets ahead of what is offered as serious discussion in the news.

And that's what yesterday was mostly about - thoughtful, intelligent people, pushed to the brink, forced to take some sort of militant action, and by doing so providing an example to the rest of us. It's obviously time to make haste with the student-worker coalition that was vaunted at the last protest. The energy behind this will be squandered if the protesters are left alone to the tender mercies of the police.

Live coverage of today's student walk-out can be found on Socialist Worker and The Guardian. This website has details of all the walk-outs across the country. I am hearing that the tube is full of protesting students and pupils at the moment. Latest news says 600 students have walked out of Leeds Uni, hundreds of pupils have walked out Allerton Grange secondary school in Leeds, 1000 students have set off from ULU, 100 have walked out of Dundee University, and over 100 have left Parkside school in Cambridge... just a few examples of the actions taking place already. I'm also glad to see that LSE students are on their way down to Trafalgar Square to join the rally. In addition, students at Birmingham University have just occupied. This is going to be big.

ps: students at South Bank university are also now in occupation.

From the New York Times: "The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever. American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms ... Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. ... This breakneck pace can be partly attributed to strong productivity growth — which means companies have been able to make more with less — as well as the fact that some of the profits of American companies come from abroad."

What the New York Times doesn't explain is that the struggles of the "nation's workers" bear a direct relationship to high corporate profits. Strong productivity growth here basically means an increase in the rate of exploitation. As the Daily Finance explains: "That productivity boost came as workers spent more hours working, and getting paid less to do it. Specifically, between the third quarter of 2009 and the same period on 2010, productivity was up 2.5% as output rose 4.1%, hours worked increased 1.6%, and unit labor costs fell 1.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The profits of U.S. corporations are growing much faster than their revenues. S&P's Howard Silverblatt estimated that corporate profits in 2010's third quarter would rise 18% from 2009, while sales would be up a mere 5.5%. "

Since domestic demand remains relatively weak in the US, despite some boost from the stimulus and despite some weak wages recovery, corporate investors are also using the cheap money made available by quantitative easing to invest in their overseas operations. And as the NYT acknowledges, much of the increase in profits is coming from abroad. Thus, US capital has used two key advantages to revive profitability. First, it has used its overwhelming strength - political, economic, institutional - over workers to extract more labour from a smaller workforce. The flip-side of high profits are more gruelling work, tighter work discipline, more people unemployed, lower wages, longer lines at the soup kitchens, and so on. Second, it has used its overwhelming international dominance, which we might call imperialism, to extract more value from emerging markets, which remain dependent on and subordinate to the US. The obverse of this increased yield is, of course, violent territorial struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as violent subversion in Honduras and Haiti.

These, aspects of an increasingly brutal, exploitative and repressive capitalist system, are among the reasons why Obamamania has bitten the dust. Obama's electoral coalition was built around the promise of amelioration, a better deal for workers and peace abroad, and neither has been delivered. Obama has been far more completely Wall Street's president than anyone expected. This also helps explain why the corporate media has felt it necessary to act as a mouthpiece and booster for a layer of corporate-funded middle class Poujadists. It is to pre-emptively colonise a political space that might otherwise be filled by the millions of working class Americans who are angry over wages, unemployment, the banks, repossessions, and the endless war. It is to drown out the rational concerns of more popular political constituencies with pageantry, noise and fury, irrational howling, and home-made bigotry. It is to stage the fight that capital wants to see - between ostensibly liberal, cosmopolitan, internationally-oriented, capital-intensive industry, and a parochial, nationalist, bigoted populace, often small business owners working in labour-intensive industries. And the viewer's role is to pick a side, and forget that neither represents their interests.

Ireland is on the brink of a political meltdown. The republic, says Eamonn McCann, is going down the tubes, as the basket-case property and financial system that powered the so-called 'Celtic Tiger' further degenerates. The author Joseph O'Connor says that he cannot a remember a time, even in past recessions, when public anger was at such a level. The government has been trying to lash together a series of stop-gap measures, temporary coalitions, and patch-up agreements for some time. It has long since lost public opinion, has lost the confidence of capitalist elites, is in conflict with organised labour, and has even had its own police force (Garda) protesting against the cuts - the same Garda who brutalised students in Dublin at the start of the month. Now, as the government is forced into bailing out the banking system further, with the mountainous assistance of the EU, the Green Party has withdrawn from the governing coalition and called for a general election. Brian Cowen, the prime minister (taoieseach), is under pressure to resign.

Here's why. Ireland's capitalist system, dubbed a 'tiger' after the 'Asian Tigers' that were also driven by financialised neoliberal growth, has been through three phases of neoliberalism. First, growth driven by overseas (especially US) investment in a relatively low wage, recently liberalised economy. Secondly, once overseas capital started to desert Ireland for the even cheaper waged economies of Eastern Europe, growth driven by a property boom created through the rationing of social housing. The latter produced a sudden upsurge in construction, such that it eventually accounted for a fifth of all economic activity. Of course, the employers and the state didn't give up on attacking wages. You may recall that prior to the credit crunch, the employers were complaining that obscenely high wages were eating into their profits.

Throughout both these phases, a labyrinthine financial sector has provided the capital for investment, as well as lavish, out-sized rewards to shareholders. It has acted as an auxiliary to the City of London and sucked in a huge amount of American capital, providing ample opportunity for people to line their pockets. The capital coming in from Wall Street was attracted by the de facto duty-free policy that the Irish government applied, and a lax regulatory regime which permitted the banks such as the Anglo Irish to cover their losses and give investors a more sanguine picture of their finances than actually obtained. The eye-popping brazenness of the Irish ruling class was such at that Charlie McCreevy of the Fianna Fail - essentially a party for the property developers and construction industry in recent years - and more recently the EU's internal markets commissioner, suggested that the collapse of Northern Rock just proved that the banking system was too transparent.

The third stage has been the collapse of that system. Ireland, as one of the 'PIIGS' countries, was grossly over-exposed to all of the weaknesses of the neoliberal system. When Wall Street hit the fan, Dublin got sprayed in the face. Despite the sometimes heroic resistance of the working class, the government and the ruling class has succeeded in getting its way a lot of the time. The re-run of the EU Treaty ballot was a victory for Intel and Ryanair, and for the blackmail of the EU which threatened that Ireland would be cut out of future financial assistance if it didn't vote 'yes' - considerable leverage to bring to bear in the middle of a recession. The truth is that, just as in the UK and most of the advanced capitalist world, labour was mostly put on the back foot by the scale of the crisis and the ruling class offensive.

The Irish government was thus able to impose its solution. And its answer to the crisis of neoliberalism was to re-up neoliberalism, cut wages under pressure from the employers, and cut spending. Spending cuts were deep, seeking to reduce total government expenditure by a quarter. On that basis, it hoped to eventually stimulate a new round of neoliberal accumulation. The line was that this would enable the government to pay off the deficit, prove Ireland's mettle as a fiscally solvent financial redoubt, and get the investment flowing again. But the effect of the cuts was, as most people expected, to reduce growth, deflate the economy and produce a fiscal crisis. The government has found itself much less able to pay off its debts, and the banks are in a worse state than before. This is why the government has had to go running to the EU.

The mutating crisis of capitalism is such that what started as a financial crisis exposed all the weaknesses in the global capitalist system, becoming a crisis of the 'real' economy, before becoming a crisis of the state as capital seeks to solve its problems through a process of accumulation-by-dispossession. Of course, 'austerity' shouldn't just be seen as a process dictated by the needs of 'the economy'. It's also a political process, a defensive measure to foreclose any more democratic or socialist economic agendas from emerging in response to the crisis. It is designed to pre-empt anything that smacks of redistribution and nationalisation, to dictate the lines of the new post-crisis settlement and have it set in stone before anyone else gets a look in. It's also intended to shatter the forces of the grassroots opposition, of organised labour and community resistance, and to engineer a more divided, frightened, conservative society that will accept a greatly reduced standard of living in the long-term.

That's why the political crisis in Ireland is significant in so many ways. Fianna Fail, now down to 17% in the polls, has traditionally operated as a hegemonic right-wing populist party which could integrated some sections of the working class into the system through nationalism and protectionism. The neoliberal turn and the subsequent crisis has resulted in a profound break with Fianna Fail. (When Luke Kelly, a founder of The Dubliners, asked "For what died the Sons Of Róisín?", I wonder if he was thinking of the hypocritical capitalist spivs, the reactionaries of the Fianna Fail ilk who appeal to patriotism and the republican tradition, but are comfortable bedfellows of multinational capitalism.)

This breakdown of Fianna Fail's support hasn't yet benefited the Left in a big way, but it can do so. Labour is the main centre-left opposition party, and has made serious gains in the polls as a result of Fianna Fail's difficulties, rising to 27%, an increase of 10% since last year. The radical left has previously demonstrated its ability to make surprising break-throughs, and is probably represented in the 8% support that 'independents' get. The Greens are worried about their own position, and they're right to be worried. They gambled on collusion with the government's austerity measures, justifying every betrayal on similar grounds to those offered by the Liberals - because we're in government, we can implement some of the beneficial policies that we want to see. But they now know they face the wrath of the voters and are trying to limit the damage. They certainly have no ability to channel any protest, as they've made themselves the objects of protest: they garner a miserable 3% in the polls. As yet, it still looks like the right-wing Fine Gael will be the main beneficiary of the protest vote, with 33% support.

The long-term result of this crisis of legitimacy, though, might be to galvanise precisely those social forces that can really sustain a left-wing alternative. As the scale of the crisis and the ruling class attack becomes manifest, the opposition is certainly becoming more militant. If you thought our students were radical, think of the Irish protesters who broke into Brian Cowen's offices last week. The immediate impact of recession and ruling class attack stunned the left and the labour movements, but now at last we might be starting to see the kinds of militancy that will be proportionate to the scale of the problem that we face.

Well, that was interesting. You can view the transcript of my talk below this post, but the debate deserves to be outlined, little as I can do it real justice. Nicola Livingstone of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh opened with a discussion of charity, specifically retail charity, in an attempt to theorise its role within late capitalism, so that we can better understand the kinds of organisation that the government supposedly wants to deliver public services.

The argument traced the development of retail charity from the salvage shops in poorer districts in the 1800s, through the launch of Oxfam, to the professionalised and 'profit-maximising' organisations of today. They have become very marketing conscious, and the proliferation of high street branches - increasingly in wealthy areas, where most volunteers can be attracted to work, and most revenues raised - is an aspect of this development, as retail shops are an efficient way of raising funds. Charity itself becomes commodified, as it is in the consumption of retail goods that one expresses social solidarity.

Based on voluntary labour, the organisations work - so it is argued - not by extracting value from the volunteers, but by using the volunteers to realise the exchange value in the merchandise itself. The volunteers themselves are typically not in employment. Only 5% of volunteers are in full-time employment, with the bulk either retired or unemployed. They also tend to be on lower incomes, with most on under £15,000 per year. There are antagonistic relations between managers and workers, the former under enormous pressure to get the most out of the volunteers with few resources. The workers have more leverage than in the typical capitalist firm, in that they are compelled neither by economics or direct coercion to be there.

When asked why they volunteer, a typical answer involves "giving something back to society", though it is never clear what exactly is being given. Another common phrase is "conscience salving". There is no particular attachment to any one charity. Most volunteers choose the retail charity outlet nearest to them. There is little questioning of the framework in which the charitable act takes place, how effective it is, what might be better than charity... certainly, there is little questioning of the capitalist social relations that make it necessary that some should give up their free time. These are organisations that, one would gather, are ill-equipped to run public services. Voluntary labour is no replacement for waged labour, and commodified "conscience-salving" is no substitute for social solidarity.

Marina Kaneti (I didn't get what institution she was from, but I think this is her), then gave a talk completely in contrast to the above, arguing that social entrepreneurs are not necessarily co-opted by capitalism, and can act as an oppositional force, challenging the structure in some ways. Arguing from Mike Davis' Planet of Slums, Kaneti argued that there were large parts of the world that were 'radically excluded' from the capitalist economy, where the activities of big populations do not feed into capital accumulation or generate profit. Among these would be the slum-dwellers who numbered 921 millon in 2001, and will number 2 billion by 2030.

It is in these areas that social entrepreneurs can build, channelling people's creativity, changing social patterns, impacting the structures of the system - and this, she maintained, does not have to be coopted by capitalism. To back up this point, she cited the patron of social entrepreneurs (and old Reaganite arch-capitalist), William Draper, pointing out that social entrepreneurs solve social problems, not economic problems. They engage in non-market activities to improve lives. They allow for local empowerment, and capability-development that may be able to elude capitalist enclosure. A short video clip from one of those TED talks was shown to illustrate the point. The 'Blackberry' logo appeared on screen, then a rather lively host with a headset spoke from a vast stage, inviting a guest to join him from the floor. The man, William Kambwamba, was from Malawi, and he had become a 'social entrepreneur' by building a windmill from instructions in a book found in a nearby library run by USAID. The story is, he just had this idea of building a windmill to electrify his home, so went looking for the information, found it, and built it with the materials available to him. He was eventually able to power his local community with the assistance of overseas investors.

I didn't agree with the talk, and I was squirming at the video. I thought it was patronising, racist rubbish. It was like an Israeli foundation getting a Palestinian to talk about social activism without mentioning the occupation. There was no mention of the famine which drove his father's farming business into the ground, the Washington Consensus which contributed to the famine, or the privatised secondary and tertiary education system which meant that Kambwamba could not afford to continue school. The whole semiotics of the clip was appalling, with the presenter smarmily gushing, and the audience whooping and hollering, and no mention of the social context in which this 'entrepreneurialism' took place - just this atomised individual, devoid of political views or any relationship to Malawi's trade unions or socialist left, which would be challenging capitalism in different ways. (And, by the way, Kambwamba does have a view on imperialism, the IMF, neoliberalism, exploitation, and so on.) I really disliked it. I think it's fair to say most of the audience did as well, as someone complained to me afterward that people were rather unfairly aggressive toward Marina.

On the other hand, John Holloway, speaking from the floor, loved the presentation. He was very enthusiastic about it, seeing it as an excellent antidote to the idea of marxism as a 'theory of domination', which I suppose he saw reflected in the presentations by Nicola Livingstone and myself. He argued that marxism had to be a theory of antagonism, and the key antagonism in capitalism is between use value and exchange value, between abstract and concrete labour. The key antagonism of capitalism, then, centres on despair, frustration and alienation, and social entrepreneurs by unleashing our capabilities can help overcome this. I was neither surprised nor particularly moved by this, considering...

Anyway, here's my talk:

Thoroughly Modern Tories? From 'One Nation' to 'The Big Society'
Richard Seymour

In search of tradition
The Tories have a habit of justifying whatever they’re doing in terms of an ancestral tradition, of which they are the legatees. Some examples. When Sir Robert Peel, in effectively founding the modern Conservative Party, embraced industrial capitalism and the Great Reform Act of 1832, he signalled his acceptance of the new order with the ‘Tamworth Manifesto’. It is a rather dull document to read, written for a bye-election. But it acknowledged the reform as both “a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question” and at the same time as nothing more than a “careful review” of existing institutions to root out “abuses”, the better to preserve “ancients rights” and “deference to prescriptive authority”.

When Benjamin Disraeli led the Tories toward the Second Reform Act of 1867, which enfranchised a section of the working class, he asserted that the 1832 Act had “abolished all the franchises of the working class” which were “as ancient as those of the Baronage of England”. Thus, adapting to mass democracy was not a reluctant last-ditch embrace of reform to mitigate its effects and claim its benefits, but the restoration of a tradition which the Tories had, mysteriously, forgotten about. Embracing the ideology of social reform, Disraeli asserted that raising up the condition of the people was one of the three pillars of the Tories’ historic mission. Stanley Baldwin, in turn, embracing certain fledgling forms of welfare and palliation, grounded his appeal in a ‘One Nation’ tradition going back all the way to Disraeli. Harold Macmillan, embracing social democracy, asserted that Toryism is nothing other than “paternal socialism”. He harked back to Disraeli. The New Right, whose rise coincided with some fresh thinking on Disraeli found that they were able to claim him as an ancestor too. And of course, David Cameron, positioning himself as a quasi-egalitarian, a social reformer concerned with poverty, considers himself an advocate of Tory radicalism in the tradition of Benjamin Disraeli.

There is in fact no coherent tradition here, no unbroken lineage that resolves the many turbulent shifts of official Tory doctrine and practise into a solid body of accumulated wisdom. There are constant commitments – but these are not to tradition, and the familiar, as so many Tory apologists vouch. Whether opposing mass democracy or acquiescing to it, whether red-baiting social democrats or mimicking them, whether raising spending or cutting it, the enduring ideological commitment of the Conservative Party is to inequality, hierarchy and domination.

Or, to put it in less abstract terms, the capitalist mode of production, the system of Burke’s veneration, the system that made the Tory landowning class rich (for it was still largely an agrarian system when the Conservative Party first emerged in its modern form), and the system whose technological expansion made the Peel family rich, as they were original investors behind the spread of the ‘Spinning Jenny’. In the marxist idiom, the Conservative Party is a bourgeois party, a party that exists to wage political struggles on behalf of the capitalist class into which it is integrated. And if this is right, then the shifting orthodoxies of official Conservatism will not merely express the changing interests, composition and cohesion of the ruling class, but also its relations with the rest of society, its relative power with respect to the working class, and so on.

So, it is on that basis that I want to outline the patterns of the shift, from the post-war consensus to Thatcherism, and now the post-Thatcherite neoliberal consensus that has a near monopoly on our parliamentary system.

‘One Nation’
The Tories’ acceptance of the social democratic state, which Labour constructed out of the materials of the war state, was at first reluctant. Lord Hailsham’s famous warning to parliament at the height of war in 1943 urged that: “If you do not give the people social reform they are going to give you a social revolution.” This was a recognition that the war-making state had mobilised millions of workers in a collective effort, under the direction of a state that had showed that it could engage in planning. It was also a recognition of the radicalism that was sweeping the country during the war, something that Paul Foot describes in his posthumously published book, The Vote. But while social reform was on the agenda, it was no part of the Tories’ agenda in 1945 to deliver social democracy.

There was bipartisan agreement, coming out of the war, that there should be some form of social safety net. Capitalism would be re-organised to integrate a labour movement with a specifically reformist, anti-communist orientation into the institutions of government – a process that really began in the 1840s in response to the challenge of Chartism. Importantly, there is nothing inherent in the welfare state that ‘free market’ Tories should oppose. Its basis is liberal, rather than socialist. The Beveridge report, composed in 1942, out of the work of an obscure reconstruction committee, builds on the Liberal reforms of 1906. Welfare was not conceived of as an obligation of a society to its members, but a commodity, traded between contracting parties. It was intended to provide a subsistence-level minimum income rather than to fundamentally redistribute the balance of wealth and power. But the idea of economic planning, of a corporatist state with a set of nationalised industries at its core enabling the government to orchestrate demand, and integrating the demands of the working class through the absorption of the trade union bureaucracy, was fiercely opposed at first.

Nor did their subsequent experiences automatically change their opinions. If the scale of the defeat in 1945, halving the Tories’ parliamentary representation, reducing their share of the vote from 53.7% to 39.8%, briefly empowered those in the Conservative Party who wanted to move in the direction of some moderate industrial planning, by the time the Cold War was being launched in 1947, the Tories, led by Winston Churchill, had lapsed into a red-baiting crusade for capitalist freedom. Churchill vituperated that social democracy was a half-way house to communism. His allies and advisors, such as Oliver Lyttelton, argued –in ways that foreshadowed the ‘New Right’ – that planning of the economy must involve planning the lives of individuals, not just in Britain, but in all those countries that Britain traded with (or possessed as colonies). According to such early neo-liberal thought, planning was absurd, tyrannical and unworkable. The 1951 election was fought on the basis of opposing government intervention, denationalisation, restoring capitalist freedom. “Set the people free”, ran the slogan. And had the distribution of seats been proportionate to the vote, the Tories would have lost the election, as Labour consolidated its support with 48.8% of the vote – proving itself to have a durable electoral basis.

In office, very little was done to reverse Labour’s reforms. Planning was maintained, unemployment remained minimal, below half a million for 8 of 13 years of Tory rule, public spending was kept up, a few abridgments notwithstanding. Working class wages kept up with productivity – in fact, when it comes to incomes policies, workers tended to do slightly better under Tory than Labour administrations. The reasons for the Tories’ acquiescence are varied. Such planning as had been institutionalised was not planning in any strong, radical Keynesian sense, but in the weak sense of evening out imbalances in the economy and manipulating proportions of activity in accordance with an overall strategy. Such industries as had been nationalised had been handsomely recompensed, were important to the UK’s industrial performance, and it was not obvious that they would survive in the private sector. Above all, the Tories did not want to risk being turfed out again in 1955. It’s important to recall how terrified they were of losing their hegemonic position. They were very well aware of the urgent need to consolidate a mass base – a problem the Tories had faced since 1867, and which manifested itself after 1945 with a poll-driven strategy to win over the lower middle class and the ‘skilled’ working class. So the modernisers around Harold Macmillan were able to win the argument for social democracy.

This did not, to repeat an earlier point, signal the accession of some ‘One Nation’ tradition to the leadership. The ‘One Nation’ faction in the Tory party has never been identical with its paternalist ‘left-wing’. Its early members included reactionaries such as Enoch Powell and, later, Keith Joseph. Its recent advocates have included Thatcherites like Ian Duncan Smith. Acquiescence in the social democratic state was a conscious adaptation to the strength and cohesion of the working class as a political force, the challenge of socialism, the relative weakness of the British ruling class, and the new needs of British capitalism in an era of global decline and bipolar international competition. Accepting the social democratic state enabled the Tories to continue to act as a hegemonic party of capital. Studies of working class support for the Tories carried out in the Sixties tended to interpret it as deferential, but an important component of that elusive phenomenon was the belief that the Tories ‘looked after’ the working classes.

However, the corporatist instruments refined under Eden, Macmillan, and Douglas-Home were unable to protect British capitalism from a number of endemic problems. First of all, the relative decline of Britain could not be overcome by corporatist modernisation projects adopted by both Wilson and Heath. The public spending projects embraced in the Sixties and early Seventies actually tended to produce lame ducks. Capital was also finding it increasingly possible to sidestep social democratic constraints, partly because of increased international mobility – this problem was one of the reasons for the reformist Left’s attempt to produce a new settlement, the Alternative Economic Strategy which formed the basis of Labour’s 1974 general election strategy. Secondly, social democracy could not overcome the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and that tendency did begin to manifest itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Reduced profit rates meant lower private sector investment, slower growth, higher unemployment, and the beginnings of a crisis of the system. Lastly, corporatist institutions such as incomes policies, and repeated attempts at curbing the right to strike by both Labour and Tory administrations, could not contain labour militancy and wage claims. The explosion of radicalism, and the shop stewards movement, led to the second major crisis of the Tories’ ability to act as a hegemonic party, which the Heath administration crippled and ultimately broken by mass strikes. Out of this humiliating defeat, a combative new Right, eschewing the integument of social democracy, arose.

The restoration of capitalist freedom
Mrs Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative Party was seen by many big business advocates as a scandalous ideological deviation, a short sharp route to the dead end of being a middle class protest party, much as UKIP is today. There is an element of truth in this. There had been a growing revolt by the middle classes against high taxes since the Fifties. The ‘new Right’ that consolidated first around Powell and then Thatcher had its roots in the Freedom League and the Institute of Economic Affairs, and in the reactionary, petit-bourgeois rightist bedrock. Throughout the 1980s, moreover, the most solid Tories were the petit-bourgeoisie, 70% of whom consistently backed Thatcher – the only class to back Thatcher by a majority.

But the Hayekian doctrines guiding the Conservative leadership were not just the cri de coeur of the middle class. They contained a serious analysis of, and remedy for, the ‘British disease’. Powell had shown that it was possible for the Tories to build a mass base without accepting social democracy, by espousing an authoritarian politics of ‘the nation’ allied with economic liberalism –protecting national identity, restoring national competitiveness, asserting British national interests in Ireland and elsewhere, etc. But it would be no good doing so if the Tories could not by these self-same means effectively restore British capitalism and continue to act as a hegemonic party of capital. Since this ability was already in question, the Tory leadership was prepared to take a gamble on a radical new policy mix.

Thatcher knew that the corporatist state depended on healthy revenue streams, but that its ability to intervene and generate those revenue streams was by then seriously weakened. Higher public spending did not reduce unemployment. It just added to inflation. Price controls were ineffectual, and the ‘winter of discontent’ would later show that wage controls were just as ineffectual. Notably, it was during that period in 1978 that big business first rallied behind Thatcher in a major way. In their place, capitalist freedom would be restored. Collective bargaining was out, incomes policies and price controls were out, demand management and job-creation was out.

In the new neoliberal statecraft, the government would spend less, and such money as was spent would be channelled through market-based delivery mechanisms, and undemocratic bodies such as quangos. The boss of Sainsburys was brought in to write a report which led to the introduction of internal markets in the NHS, inflating administrative overheads dramatically. The major macroeconomic objective of government would be to control inflation, which meant controlling wages. That was to be achieved primarily through high unemployment, and a co-ordinated attack on the bargaining power of labour. Defeating the unions achieved this objective, of course, but it also had the intended effect of devastating the social forces best placed to resist Thatcher’s agenda and obstruct social democracy’s adaptation to the new order.

The rentier would be revived, and sound money would replace cheap money. The City’s speculative activities would drive capitalist investment by increasing the rewards of such investment, while integrating a section of the working class by allowing them to borrow against their property - which, owing to rationing in the provision of housing, would perpetually increase in value. Enough people would feel wealthy enough to form a viable political constituency in favour of the new settlement. Until about 1989, the politics of ‘the nation’ thus configured could command between 42 and 44% of the vote, a slight recovery from Ted Heath’s 1974 low of 35%, but still well below the post-war performance – in fact, votes of the Thatcher scale would have resulted in defeats in the 1950s and 1960s.

By the time of the poll tax riots, however, it was clear that Thatcherism could no longer command an electoral plurality. Not only that, but Thatcherite combativeness was exhausted as an option after the poll tax riots. The last major confrontation that the Tories risked with the labour movement, for example, was with the signal workers in 1993. The capitalist class threw hundreds of millions into supporting British rail in that dispute. The Institute of Directors and the CBI mucked in. But the strike was fairly solid, and the employers were defeated. This suggested that the militancy and cohesion had not been completely knocked out of the working class, and that the ruling class now had to turn to other means to get its way. Swinging behind New Labour was the main way it sought to do this. Some Tories lived in denial about this for years. They blamed John Major, and his pro-European allies for their difficulties. If he hadn’t joined the ERM, and been such a wet, the locomotive of the Thatcher revolution would still be charging through the polity today, they maintained. It took three successive election defeats, twice with hard right leaderships pandering to the petit-bourgeois base, saving the pound and stopping immigration, and all leaving the Tories with just over thirty percent of a shrinking vote, to disabuse them of this idea. The Tories had kept the petit-bourgeois base, but they had lost many of the skilled workers Cameron belongs to a faction of the Conservative Party that is loyal to Thatcher’s accomplishments, and has repeatedly paid verbal tribute to her legacy, but is realistic about the need to detoxify the Tory brand of those associations. And that’s how we get to the ‘Big Society’.

The Big Society
No one knows exactly what the ‘Big Society’ is. It is a childishly sunny locution, the sort of thing a children’s television presenter in dungarees and a stripy rainbow sweater might gush about. Before its emergence as an electoral talking point, though, Cameron was given to lachrymose jeremiads about the ‘broken society’. And if we look at the background to the ‘broken society’, it might disclose some of the contours of the ‘big society’. The first signs of the attempt to fashion a more ‘compassionate conservatism’ were evident under Ian Duncan Smith’s watch between 2001 and 2003. It was during this period, you’ll recall, that Theresa May warned Tories that they were seen as the “nasty party”.

The Tories believed that they had won the fight over the fundamentals of the free market economy, but now stood accused of being callous with it, of not having a compassionate social policy to complement their emphasis on capitalist efficiency. If anything, free market economics seemed most compatible with shameless elitism and social Darwinism. Keith Joseph’s bid for the Tory leadership against Ted Heath had floundered when he argued that “the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened” by high birth rates among the underclass; and that greater birth control was needed to contain it. Post-Thatcherite social policy would have to obliterate all traces of such ideology in the public mind.

The trouble for the Conservatives was that despite their attacks on the welfare state while in office, despite under-funding the public sector, and despite various reforms intended to make the public sector more like the market, they had not succeeded in keeping overall spending down. One reason for this was that the high unemployment resulting from their economic policies drove up the cost of social security. The other plank of their policy designed to cope with just this problem was workfare. This involved changing the benefits structure to ‘reward work’ and introducing welfare-to-work schemes designed to change individuals’ capacity to find work in the labour market. Such policies made no lasting impact on employment, and thus did not reduce the social security bill. As far as the Tories were concerned, the tax bill that paid for public spending was still a drain on capitalist dynamism, and the further erosion of the welfare state was essential: it was just not politically popular.

Fortunately for the Tories, New Labour’s acceptance of the neoliberal policy mix extended to accepting workfare, privatization and fiscal austerity. This automatically drew the sting out of any attack on such policies from the centre-left, leaving only the question of how to define the Tory brand, creating the perception of ‘clear blue water’ between themselves and New Labour. Staking out a traditionalist stance on homosexuality, the family, drugs, and race was not an option – though in truth, Cameron did try in his early days as an MP to do just this, his latter day reinvention as a social liberal notwithstanding. It wasn’t popular, and it divided the Tories - beyond the old Tory ‘left-wing’, there were a section of Thatcherite ‘mods’ (as distinct from the ‘rockers’), who later became known as the Notting Hill set, who believed that market liberalism should lead logically to social liberalism on drugs, race, sexuality and so on. So, it transpired that the best strategy for the Tories was to become cloyingly touchy-feely in public, lock the old hard-nosed self-made Thatcherite bruisers in the coffin, and hug a hoody.

Under Ian Duncan Smith, the new dispensation declared that society did exist. The centrist Tory intellectual David Willets was put in charge of welfare policy, with a remit of discussing how amid general prosperity there was such terrible deprivation in parts of the country. But IDS could not carry his party over support for gay adoption, and was unceremoniously chucked in favour of the charismatic old hawk, Michael Howard, who stuck to an old hard right script. After the glorious Howard interregnum, Cameron took over the process of liberalisation. He was instructed to do so by Lord Ashcroft, whose money it was he was playing with. He talked up the party’s green credentials, and promised to stick to Labour’s spending commitments if elected. IDS’s think-tank, the ‘Centre for Social Justice’ set up in 2004, provided the soundtrack on social policy.

The ‘broken Britain’ spiel, developed in successive reports by the CSJ, argued that the problems of poverty, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, crime, ill health, and economic inactivity, were the result of cultural habits that needed to be broken with. These cultural habits made the society more unequal by creating an environment that deprived the ‘underclass’ of opportunity. To overcome these habits, and thus distribute opportunity more equally, it would be necessary to undertake a number of reforms that would boost social virtue: improve school discipline and expand school places by allowing charities, parents and voluntary organisations to set up new schools (that’s ‘free schools’); workfare, with a new set of incentives and penalties to make the benefits system less attractive and thus erode ‘welfare dependency’; tougher policing of anti-social behaviour, with higher sentencing for knife-crimes and such, to attack an important environmental obstacle to opportunity; and give more support to families through the welfare system in order to boost social cohesion. All of this would be accompanied by official encouragement of charities, social enterprises and NGOs, whose flourishing would help restore a lost social solidarity. That’s the ‘Big Society’.

I think it’s plain from this list that very little distinctive in the way of policy is being offered here. Almost all of it is continuous with New Labour, who in turn were faithfully following Thatcher. The state would continue to be rationalised and downsized at roughly the same pace as under New Labour, and the reforms to welfare and the public sector would be roughly as New Labour intended. What is distinctive is the branding, and the problem it was supposed to remedy. Cameron sought to situate himself as a ‘progressive’, interested in equality, someone who could be trusted not to utterly savage the public sector, and someone who was open to trade unions as a potential partner rather than a punching bag. And in fact, his leadership saw bye-elections where the Tory candidate outflanked New Labour to the left on Post Office closures. This effort was very costly, and the results were ideologically incoherent and diffuse. But it did contribute soften the Tories’ image and, for the first time since ERM and the 1992 miners’ strike, the Tories found themselves with a sustained lead over Labour, their support hovering around 40%.

The Tories’ decision to ‘turn nasty’ again, using the issue of the deficit and New Labour’s compliance with City demands that fiscal rectitude be restored at the earliest convenience, cost them electorally. That they could still only get just over a third of the vote with a weak incumbency amid the deepest crisis since the Depression says a great deal. Only a fraction of the skilled working class and professionals returned to them. They did not get a mandate, even in the terms of this gerrymandered electoral system. Nevertheless, the decision of Nick Clegg’s Liberals to ally with the Tories, helped along by an ad hoc set of ‘rules’ contrived by senior civil servants, helped overcome this problem and has probably done more to detoxify the Tory brand than all the ‘Big Society’ stuff. But all this raises an important point, which I’ll finish on.

Cameron’s leadership is operating in a situation in which two key difficulties beset the party’s ability to act as, as I say, a hegemonic party of capital. First is the secular tendency for its electoral base to decline, which is actually obscured a bit by the declining turnout, which is concentrated mainly among former Labour voters. The actual share of Tories among the total electorate may be closer to a quarter than a third. To overcome this, Cameron has had to triangulate, pacifying the core vote while appearing to offer something to the centre and centre-left. The second problem is the growing gap between the interests of the hard right base, the lower middle class, and those of the capitalist class, particularly the dominant financial fraction. This demands a second triangulation, though where there is a conflict, capital tends to win. If it did not, big business would withdraw its support and its funding. Cameron’s position on Europe – allying with the parties of the far right, while implementing the policy of big business – is typical of this strategy.

These two difficulties are combining to produce a long-term crisis for the Tories, notwithstanding their present lead in the polls (which isn’t usually greater than 5%). Thus, the reinvention of the ‘Big Society’ as a mantra for spending cuts, welfare cuts, and faster privatization, is part and parcel of a gamble by the Tory leadership that a repetition and further entrenchment of the Thatcher revolution will revive British capitalism and restore their position in it, as the dominant party of business. It is, as the students have shown, a gamble that has the potential to backfire horribly on them.