IN PRAISE OF SMALL THINGS - Class politics and identity politics

This is an incisive article by Aurelien. 

It indicates the sickness (on the left) that has bedevilled modern politics. This is the way that identity politics has displaced class politics and thereby led to political fragmentation. This wasn't a conspiracy but embracing it meant that the real threat to the ruling clas and its ideology was diluted and weakened because it took the focus away from capitalism and into the area of 'beliefs'.

Left parties need to focus on the economy and wages, housing and public services and the environment - the bread and butter issues. Issues relating to 'beliefs' such as the trans issue are of secondary importance and produce a confused shopping list of 'demands' that cause divisions within the constituency that you are trying to unite. What religion people embrace (or not), what their attitudes are to 'moral' issues are not constructive in building a wide alliance of people around the bread and butter issues. These were traditionally seen as 'private'. People should have the freedom to do what they want unless it affects the freedoms of others BUT trying to legislate for beliefs will divide rather than unite the alliance you are trying to create. This is just what the ruling class (and Starmer is part of that) want.

It is true that the changing economic structures and the mobility of people has led to communities of interest weakening geographical communities and so uniting people has become more difficult but this underlines the case for MORE political clarity and focus on the key issues. 

If this focus isn't achieved then the kinds of mass demonstrations we saw last weekend in which a huge number of people took to the streets largely because they have lost confidence in politics because their issues seem to be ignored. They then become fodder for divisive political forces.

Some quotations from the essay...

'Until the last generation or so, it was possible to arrange parties more-or-less in the orderly spectrum from Left to Right that has been used since the French Revolution. Think of this, if you like, as the X-axis of a graph. Very roughly, the Left looked to the future, to improving the lives of ordinary people and to a fairer and more just society. As you travelled towards the Right, there was a desire to conserve rather than to change, a defence of the existing distributions of power and wealth and a deference to traditional institutions and customs. There was a loose correlation with other forms of change: the Left was in favour of universal education, laws to regulate working conditions and the extension of the right to vote, first to all males and then to everyone. The Right eventually followed, with more or less enthusiasm, in most cases. But there were also even looser correlations: the abolition of the death penalty, both in Britain and in France, took place under governments of the Left, for example.........I continue to insist that politics is like engineering: it requires forces to act on a body get things done. And the instruction manual, if you like, has to be based on an ideology. It’s a common cliché today that we live in a post-ideological society, but few people pause to reflect on what this actually means. It is not as if the issues that prompted ideologies in the past have gone away. Questions of wealth and poverty, power and resistance, community, ethnicity and class, among others, have not disappeared. It’s just that our political parties today refuse to acknowledge them, except for performative purposes. The Clintons and Blairs and Macrons, with their waffle about “beyond Left and Right” and being “post-ideological” have created a world in which the intellectual discipline provided by ideology is no longer available to help people think in an organised fashion. The result is that people think in a disorganised fashion, alienated intellectually from each other, and either act randomly on the basis of feeling and instinct (as may be the case with the bloke shot in the US last week) or grab onto any half-coherent passing system of thought, like a shipwrecked mariner clutching a piece of driftwood....

.........the origins of most political parties are, in fact, bottom up, and that requires precisely the communities, organisation and (broadly defined) ideology, that neoliberalism has assiduously been destroying. Is there a solution to this conundrum?

Let’s begin by recognising that groups engage in political actions of all kinds because of self-interest. Now, that may sound shocking, because surely politics should be concerned with higher ideals of justice, truth, democracy, the rule of law and so forth? Well, if you have the time and leisure to worry about abstractions maybe, just as if you have the time and leisure to go on performative demonstrations. But the origins of political groupings and their most important struggles, lie elsewhere. In Britain, the first trades unionists demanded humane working hours and a living wage. In France the Radicals and Socialists waged a decades-long bitter struggle to get education out of the hands of the reactionary Church and to inculcate democratic principles. These, and many other movements, required organisation and commitment by ordinary people, and the willingness to sink ideological differences. But today’s political systems are built on obsessive cultivation of difference and confrontation, exacerbated by the Internet, certainly, but stemming from contemporary conceptions of politics itself....you have to take account of actual common interests, not ascriptive, identity-based ones. Modern politics on the Notional Left consists of Identity Entrepreneurs identifying target populations, and convincing them that they are unhappy, exploited and repressed, and that there is no prospect of their situation improving, so give me the money and vote for me. And new political parties and independent thinkers (some on the genuine Left) have felt obliged to mouth such nonsense to avoid a visit from the Thought Police...we need to get away from ascriptive and largely phantom identity groups, and towards the search for common interests.'