Abstract
The most effective public condemnation of laissez faire capitalism heard recently noted that a real wage cut of 14 per cent since 2007 had been ‘good for the rich, because it’s cheaper nannies and cheaper chauffeurs, but it’s bad news for ordinary Britons’, leaving workers as an underclass, a situation described by the speaker as ‘a disaster’. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that the critique was made not by someone on the left, but rather by Nigel Farage, the populist leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), during a televised debate with Nick Clegg, the Coalition deputy prime minister, in April 2014. This important but ultimately flawed book, a detailed analysis by Ford and Goodwin of changes in British politics over the last quarter of a century, sets out to explain how and why the shift in radical right-wing ideology has occurred.
Based on interviews, surveys and opinion polling data (pp. 290ff.), Ford and Goodwin draw a sharp contrast between on the one hand working-class UKIP supporters, who are ‘older, less educated, disadvantaged and economically insecure’, and on the other the ‘highly educated, socially liberal middle classes’ who support the three mainstream parties (pp. 10–11). Whereas the former are Eurosceptic, worried about immigration and changes in national identity, those belonging to the latter category are comfortable in an outward-looking society, and celebrate a cosmopolitan and globally-integrated Britain. It is suggested here that such a distinction may not be as clear-cut as the authors imagine.
Although UKIP emerged during the early 1990s, its support increased from 2009 onwards (pp. 76-77), when a combination of the Parliamentary expenses scandal and rising levels of immigration pointed to a specific conclusion: that elected representatives from all mainstream parties were simply in it for themselves; that all were going to promote and not rein in neoliberal capitalism; and, consequently, that all were largely uninterested in addressing the impact of the industrial reserve army on the employment/income/livelihood prospects of their working class constituents.
In what way, Ford and Goodwin ask, is Europe important; and what is at the root of Euroscepticism? Although for conservative business interests it is the ‘restrictive’ (i.e. unwarranted) regulation emanating from Brussels that vexes, ironically it is the opposite that generates most hostility among working-class UKIP supporters: an absence of European regulation over the labour market that licenses an expanding industrial reserve army. Accordingly, workers are not opposed to immigration because they are Eurosceptic, but are Eurosceptic because they are opposed to immigration (pp. 146ff., 183ff.).
Deemed to be poorly skilled/educated, such workers are categorised in the book as having been ‘left behind’. They now support UKIP, a consequence of having been pushed aside electorally by all the mainstream parties courting the votes of ‘the professional middle classes’, who are qualified graduates. The latter, Ford and Goodwin (pp. 117, 122-26, 152, 156) maintain, are not just beneficiaries of economic change, but are also in secure employment, and thus unaffected by the 2008 economic crisis, by rising unemployment and food prices, and by housing shortages. Because for them ‘the problems caused by immigration’ are ‘mild’, they – unlike those in the ‘left behind’ (i.e. ‘victim’) category – perceive this process as beneficial.
While Ford and Goodwin successfully chart how UKIP emerged, less convincing are crucial parts of their explanation as to why this happened. Rightly, they identify among the main causes a ‘left behind’ perception that New Labour has betrayed its own traditional grassroots support, to the extent of not repealing anti-trade-union legislation and encouraging unregulated immigration (pp. 127-36, 172-3). However, issues such as a decline in working-class electoral participation, trade union membership and council housing are all slotted into the ‘left behind’ framework (pp. 114ff.). Accordingly, such developments appear to be part of a ‘natural’ and pre-ordained change (i.e. not the result of ‘from above’ class struggle) – which is the way conservatism explains this process – rather than what it actually was: engineered by the neoliberal policies of the Thatcher/Blair governments, designed to undermine and break organised working-class militancy.
The term ‘left behind’ is not merely pejorative but also misleading, conveying as it does the impression of workers who no longer have the skills required by what Ford and Goodwin (pp. 111-12, 176) term the ‘post-industrial economy’. For many types of economic activity, however, the ‘left behind’ do possess the requisite skills, or have acquired them, only to find that they are currently undercut in the labour market by migrants. What is at issue, therefore, is not so much skill and a lack thereof, but rather the cost of labour-power. Workers used to a standard of living established through a long process of ‘from below’ struggle, which itself depends on improving – or at least maintaining – existing income levels, understandably resist demands by the accumulation process to toil harder for lower wages. Migrants can and do undertake such work, for conflicting reasons (unfree production relations, higher wages here than there, not belonging to trade unions). This, and not skills per se, is the real point of contention.
Those hit by the economic crisis are not just older, poorly skilled and less well-educated working-class voters, but include also the young, skilled and well educated. For all of them, the issue is the same: the inability of capitalism to provide well-paid, permanent jobs and with it a secure livelihood. Historically, those who have supported the far right include groups who have relevant skills and educational qualifications, yet who now had to compete in the labour market with increasing numbers of those from a similar economic but different ethnic or national background. It was precisely the young plus the unemployed middle-class professionals – categories Ford and Goodwin believe to be immune to the far-right influence of UKIP – who in the 1930s economic crisis supported Mosley and the BUF (Skidelsky,1975: 317ff.).
Contrary to what Ford and Goodwin argue, therefore, the educated/qualified young are as much threatened by an expanding industrial reserve army as are their older, less-well-educated counterparts. Unemployed young middle-class graduates these days are as likely as the so-called ‘left behind’ to find themselves in competition with unemployed equivalents from other, crisis-ridden EU countries for what are anyway a declining number of jobs that are temporary, part-time and often poorly paid. In short, ‘the professional middle classes’ – and especially their offspring – are affected by the same developments as the ‘left behind’, and though they at present may not vote UKIP, they might do so in the future. Indeed, data Ford and Goodwin themselves provide (Table 3.2, p. 123) confirm that, although a difference does exist between ‘left behind’ workers and ‘more highly educated middle classes’ on the issue of immigration, opposition to it among all social categories is growing.
The free market means an uncontrolled labour supply, always taken advantage of by capital as a way not just of undermining the bargaining power of existing workers, but also of rolling back any gains they have made (wages, conditions) in the course of the class struggle. This is precisely why socialists have always argued for state intervention/planning, to prevent this downward pressure on pay/conditions from continuing. Any attempt to circumvent or deny this, by for example downgrading or ignoring political economy and privileging non-class identity as a form of migrant self-empowerment, plays directly into the hands of capital. Although on the left current discussion about the impact of the industrial reserve army on the existing workforce still tends to be dismissed as inherently racist, this was not always so. A century ago, socialism contemplated halting immigration so as to safeguard present and future gains made in the course of class struggle. 1
Socialists have long argued that the industrial reserve army is one of the most powerful weapons in the economic armoury at the disposal of capital in its struggle with the working class (Marx, 1976: 781–94). An expanding industrial reserve army, generated as a result of globalisation, enables capital to adopt a divide-and-rule policy, and with it to give additional momentum to the ‘race to the bottom’ in pay and conditions. 2 This was recognised by Trotsky (1975: 268), who conceptualised the final historical stage of the accumulation process as ‘civil war against the proletariat’. Part of this ‘civil war’ involves turning workers against one another in their attempts to secure employment, a common tactic in a laissez-faire economic context in which capital has unfettered access to the industrial reserve army. When the latter is global in scope, the element of struggle is correspondingly more acute.
This is especially true of contexts in which migrants are many and jobs are few, and competition in the labour market is particularly intense. In such circumstances, it is an issue that surfaces among the working class and their representatives as one of ethnic/national identity only so long as the continued reproduction of the system which gives rise to the industrial reserve army and its effects (low wages, fierce competition for jobs, and unemployment) is not addressed. In a capitalist context, therefore, socialists have on occasion argued that controlling the level of the industrial reserve army precedes and enables regulation. 3 It diminishes competition in the labour market, thereby permitting workers and their representatives to begin to settle accounts with employers from a position of strength.
In ways that anticipate current argument about withdrawal from EU membership so as to stem competition from the industrial reserve army, a century and a half ago Marx (Marx and Engels 1934: 289-90) advocated severing the link with Ireland precisely in order to prevent migrants from competing with and undercutting English workers. He insisted that working-class emancipation in England depended ultimately on Ireland’s following its own path of capitalist development, and to this end international solidarity would take the form of support from English workers for Irish equivalents in their struggle for economic and political independence, as distinct from migrating to places in which this had already occurred.
Hence the addressing of the related issues of an unregulated expansion in the industrial reserve army and who benefits from this is a first step, after which – in a capitalist context – a government representing all workers (of whatever ethnicity and gender) can then proceed to implement regulation of wages and conditions. The alternative, as Trotsky (1940) pointed out, is a drift to the right on the part of the proletariat – fascism being a punishment visited by history on politicians of the left for abandoning the transition to socialism.
An additional factor unmentioned by Ford and Goodwin is the influence of the ‘cultural turn’ on leftist contributions to discussions about the industrial reserve army – a case of the dog that hasn’t barked. Having dismissed class and socialism as Eurocentric foundationalism, an academically dominant postmodern theory has instead essentialised non-class identities (ethnicity, nationalism) as innate and empowering (see the exchange in Brass 2002; Beverley 2004; Brass 2006).
Thus, for example, Mezzadra (2006) looks at the problem simply from the viewpoint of a non-class-specific migrant (i.e. ‘the right to escape’), not the migrating worker, nor the worker in the country of destination. Such an approach makes it impossible to make common cause with labourers in the latter context, in which one is effectively in competition with them for the same jobs, the getting of which by the ‘escaping’ migrant at the expense of an actual/potential worker in another country is the only thing that seems to be seen as a politically acceptable objective.
In so far as it privileges cultural identity as empowering, therefore, postmodern theory is complicit with the kind of nationalist ideology represented by UKIP. What postmodernism has done is to move into an ideological space occupied historically by populism: to the postmodern argument emphasising the cultural identity of the migrant-as-‘other’-nationality, the far right counterposes an argument similarly emphasising cultural identity, only this time the nationality of the non-migrant worker (i.e. British selfhood). In the absence of socialist ideas/practice, and as capitalism spreads across the globe, this form of nationalist discourse can be deployed effectively by populists who claim it is the only way to safeguard/retain workers’ jobs and living standards.
In conclusion, if – as Ford and Goodwin infer – support for UKIP corresponds to the reaffirmation by disadvantaged workers of British citizenship, then this underlines the direction in which citizenship in a capitalist nation may ultimately lead. Ominously, just as many on the left of the political spectrum moved rightwards, abandoning core beliefs (socialism, class) and espousing postmodern notions of non-class identity as innate/empowering, so the far right has in turn moved onto the political ground they vacated, incorporating class identity into its own ideology. Herein lies the real significance of UKIP.
Until, and unless, leftists succeed both in putting socialism/class back on the political agenda, and in decoupling an expanding industrial reserve army as a cultural issue simply about non-class identity from analysis examining the same process within a political economy framework, immigration will continue to pose questions without leftist answers. Worse still, the longer this remains the case, the more likely it is that under the present laissez-faire regime, immigration as a class issue will increasingly be absorbed into and consolidated within a far-right political agenda.