Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 19

  Class is elusive, because it purports to make clear distinctions between individuals when those distinctions are never clear. There are really only two important sociological distinctions, the one between the middle class and the working class, which includes the lumpen proletariat, and the one between the middle class and the owners of large concentrations of capital which includes what we might call a new managerial aristocracy – the boards of large corporations and large investment funds. And there are only two important political distinctions, the one between those who want to redistribute wealth and those who want the distance between wealth and poverty to continue to grow, and the one between those who believe in freedoms, social rights and transparency, and those who believe in authority, property rights and secrecy.

  Norman Tebbit is upset that the values of the working-class world of the fifties have disappeared. These values should surely include community and solidarity, but they get no mention from him. He is concerned about values based on shame, and for a Tory he has an unusual explanation for their disappearance: the working class has adopted the nastier values of the middle and upper classes. It is certainly true that the “Anglo-Saxon” version of middle-class values, based almost exclusively on economic self-interest, is more dominant now than at any time in the past – even the mid-Victorian period when it started to dominate the middle class. Tebbit is unaware that the government he was a member of introduced the policies that led to this ethos, although I don’t agree that the working class has entirely given itself over to middle-class values of any kind. This is sad for Tebbit, and it is probably better that he doesn’t realise the part he played in bringing about this change, because it’s equally true that Tebbit was not primarily motivated by his own economic self-interest, and this demonstrates once more that ideologues do not live in a manner consistent with their ideologies. He wanted to improve mankind, and he thought that this could be achieved by making each individual economically independent and working the market. This was freedom as the right perceived it, and he was willing to work hard to bring in these policies that people like me consider to have been disastrous and which will take decades to put right, even if we were to start reversing them tomorrow.

  Thatcher was horrified when her national airline, British Airways, went international and exchanged its British livery for a global one. This was the airline she had privatised, and its decision was the inevitable consequence of her policy, and yet it appears that this obvious truth never passed through her brain as she scrambled impatiently to find a handkerchief to cover the offending tail fins of a model aeroplane British Airways had displayed at a trade fair. We could add in passing that Thatcher was as bad as her ideology – in fact, even worse.

  Both of these politicians had mediocre intellects, and selfawareness was not their strength, but the real reason for their inability to understand what was happening around them was an obsolete nationalism of the worst kind. They identified very strongly with a nation – England – but not the real England of all its citizens. Theirs was based on an ideal nation that never existed. Its ideal people was the middle class, to which everyone could and should aspire. Neither of them were middle class in origin, and both had successfully joined its ranks. Although their backgrounds were not without relative privilege, they could not see that for many it would be much more difficult than it was for them, even in the times of much higher social mobility that followed the Second World War and lasted until the election of their government. Their nation did not include “the enemy within” who were potentially the entire organised working class and their fellow travellers of whatever class.

  It has to be admitted that the left, at the time, focused on a similarly abstract nation, consisting of an abstract or imagined working class. Nation is a powerful tag, and it is constantly used within class conflict, purposefully stirring the mud to obfuscate political questions of equity and social justice. Nationalist issues are divided by the fundamental difference between great nations and minority nations, but leaving that important point aside, you will often find that just beneath nationalist discourse in political debate lies a fundamental difference of class interests. It may conceal either left-wing or right-wing arguments. The current independence referendum in Scotland is no exception: it is about the defence of hard-won social rights which are under attack throughout the UK and have been most clearly eroded in England, which continues to vote Tory. Those social rights were introduced by the post-war Labour governments and generally speaking left in place by Tory governments before Thatcher’s. After Thatcher both Conservative and Labour governments have set about dismantling those social rights, which now are most effectively defended by the Scottish National Party. Some might say that the SNP is too cautious; I might agree with them, but their programme of gradual reversal may prove to have been well thought out and pragmatic in the “current political climate”.

  Class interests always have a sounder basis than national interests, but national interests have more demagogic force, because class interests are wrapped up in a web of lies, class propaganda and sectorial interests. A national identity is, for some reason, easier to imagine than a class one, even though there are in fact always two imagined nations – one imagined by the working class, the other by the middle class. Left and right are not about class membership, but about whether or not to distribute wealth and social rights more equitably. Nothing else. Members of the working class can identify with a middle-class ethos, as Tebbit argues and strangely finds regrettable. Members of the middle class can identify with the working class, either because they or their parents started out from that class or, more simply, out of a shared sense of social justice, which has always made the left such a potent force and is why so many obfuscations have to be introduced to keep it from successfully achieving aims that are very widely supported.

  Classes are represented by political movements, and political movements develop interests that can diverge from the class they are supposed to represent. They act within a national and international context in which all manner of cultural forces are in play. The significance of those cultural forces has been underestimated.

  We have to consider the time and place of each class. The values of the European nineteenth-century middle classes were best preserved by the Soviet bureaucracy and Soviet society at large. Similarly the English revolution preserved the values of the rural middle class or gentry long after these had disappeared elsewhere, except in America where they have, if anything, been better preserved than in England. Was the Cold War a conflict between two entirely different views of what the middle class should be? No, but there was a little bit of that – most noticeable in the different attitudes to education: a social approach with a profound reverence for classical European culture in the Soviet Union and a pragmatic and vocational approach with subtle methods for stymieing social mobility in America. The Russian Revolution was also a revolution in social behaviour, but this was partly reversed under Stalin, more or less at the time when social change began to gather pace in America. Modernity travelled by different paths towards a single end. The superpowers were mirror images in many ways, but the differences were also very clear and above all they concerned class – each peddling absurdly distorted self-images.

  I have been emphatic about class, but my classism is not based on hatred of anyone. When I read Marx’s and Engel’s Communist Manifesto in my teens I was impressed by the ideas, but uncertain about the tone, although it did have undoubted literary value. When I understood better that there was in fact no communist party, only two energetic young men stirring up a lot of trouble, my uncertainties increased. The line, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”,2 appears to have been designed to terrify the middle classes. But why wave a red rag at a bull? The middle class by its very nature is a paranoid and somewhat jittery class. There are good reasons for this: they enjoy great privilege, but unlike aristocratic privilege, it is fragile, and was particularly fragile in the ninetee
nth century. Many a member of the comfortable rentier class lost a fortune overnight, because of a bad investment. More recently, Lloyds names have found their fortunes could disappear overnight and leave them in debt. The middle class are a people who have a lot to gain and a lot to lose, and they want greater security than the economic system they espouse can guarantee them. This has been bad for colonial peoples and it has been bad for the working class. Threatening them when you have no power and no organisation could be construed as an act of irresponsibility.

  During the seventies I was once in a pub with three or four comrades (a term I disliked because it was never comradely in tone), and one said, “Trotsky says that the high bourgeoisie should be shipped off to an island and left to their own devices,” (I don’t know if this was an accurate summary) “but I think that’s being too soft on them.” Others agreed, and someone suggested that putting them against a wall and shooting them might be a safer approach. I have a bad habit of being in a minority of one when I join an organisation, but in this case I don’t think I was. I suggested to these enlightened individuals that if the rich had been expropriated, they would have been punished enough and should be left in peace. The comrades ignored me – no doubt they had placed me in the category for “unsound petty-bourgeois elements”. My sitting at their table was concession enough. Did they become leading lights in New Labour or economics reporters for the Financial Times? Very possibly.

  I perceive the rich as victims of their own system. There is no end to the desire for profit. There are exceptions, such as Warren Buffet who spends his time giving his huge wealth away, and exhorting governments to increase taxes on the rich. He is very probably one of the happiest rich men. There are reasons why most rich people are so compulsive. Firstly, they pride themselves on their ability to make money. Obviously the more money you make, the better you must be at doing it. They want to make a point, and now there are lists of the richest people in the world, so they have to compete for billions. Secondly, a rich man’s greatest fear is losing his wealth. This is greater than his fear of death, which probably does trouble the rich more than the poor, who are busy with survival. The best way to protect your billions or millions is to keep making more of them. Thirdly, rich people have to sacrifice part of their humanity to become rich, and that is a high price to pay. Epictetus provides us with an elegant thought on this point. If you see a blind man trying to cross the road, you naturally come to his assistance. But if you see someone whose behaviour reveals moral blindness, you criticise him and give him no assistance. But moral blindness is infinitely worse than visual blindness, and should also be pitied and given assistance. The very rich are mostly morally blind. They have more money than they could spend if they lived as long as Methuselah and hired the whole of the Ritz Hotel every night of their life. They hoard things that are useful when they’re singular but useless when they’re plural, such as houses and cars and horses. They buy things that are not that useful even when they’re singular, such as castles and yachts. They attempt to buy intangible things that cannot be bought, such as friendship and love. They buy intangible things that can be bought, such as political influence and the degree of celebrity status they are most comfortable with. At least those who hoard artworks do some good, because they can bequeath them to the nation or city council when they die. And many of the rich cannot enjoy any of these wonders, because their assets are simply too many and because they are too busy making more money to increase their capital or to buy things they cannot enjoy. Do you condemn an alcoholic? Do you want to put an unhappy drug addict up against a wall and shoot him? Why would you want to harm these people? They are not in control of their own lives, any more than the sad gambler down at the casino.

  The radical Catholic priest, Don Milani, perhaps meant this when he distinguished himself from the communists – that no one should be in the business of punishing anybody else. He said that communism was “a doctrine without love”, unaware perhaps that Che Guevara said, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”3 That he felt he had to qualify his statement with that “risk of seeming ridiculous” demonstrates the times, the machismo of the left and his courage at challenging it. Milani also said that he was more classist than the communists, and he might have been right about that. He was also being unfair to the Communist Party, which had not been a revolutionary party for some time when Milani was writing, and it was a communist paper that would publish him when it came to the quote below, which is taken from an open letter, “Obedience Is Not a Virtue”, sent to all Italian newspapers in February 1965. He was addressing the military chaplains who had signed a press release denouncing conscientious objectors.

  I’m not going to discuss the idea of fatherland here. I don’t like such divisions.

  If you’re entitled to divide the world into Italians and foreigners, then I tell you that, in the meaning you attribute to it, I have no country and claim my right to divide the world into the dispossessed and the oppressed on the one hand and the privileged and the oppressors on the other. The former are my country and the latter my foreigners. And if you have the right, without being censured by the Curia, to teach that Italians and foreigners can lawfully and indeed heroically tear each other apart, then I claim the right to say that the poor have a right to fight against the rich. At least in the choice of methods I am better than you: the arms you approve of are horrible machines for killing, mutilating, destroying and making orphans and widows. The only arms I approve of are noble and non-violent ones: strikes and votes.4

  Don Milani was forthright in his defence of the strike as a means for working people to improve their lot. I could not agree with him more. He is worth quoting in this context for two reasons. He has an intriguing and eccentric approach to things, mostly in his language. He says elsewhere, “The word ‘strike’ is sacred to the poor, the only weapon they have against their overlords.”5 We would not call it a “sacred right” but a social or positive one, or a fundamental freedom. And he brings up the important question of non-violence, which is a key element in what I’m trying to argue, but I am not putting as much emphasis on it as it deserves, because it has been well argued by others for a long time. We could add here that this is not a time for violent revolution, but for non-violent action particularly against the increasing use of armed force and state intrusion in international and domestic politics. In the eighties, my belief in revolutionary politics started to fade, but my belief in the long-term aims of socialism has remained undiminished. Our history since the eighties has deepened that conviction: one of the most important factors was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The irresponsible actions of America and the West in using Yeltsin to push through a revolution in reverse, showed that the East-West conflict was never about human rights. The most striking thing about that event was that the huge sacrifices made by the Russians to achieve that state all came to nothing without thier being consulted. The last thing they needed was another upheaval on the same scale as the forced collectivisation, but that is what they got. The Soviet state had to be undermined so that redistribution of wealth could be reversed. It was all a matter of class.

  The Berlusconi Bonus, my satirical novel which was published by Luath in 2005, contained the following line: “Perhaps a society that ensured that everyone was above a certain threshold of poverty and below a certain threshold of wealth would not be such a bad idea after all,” which was the most radical thing in the whole book. In spite of the complete absence of evidence, this line was enough for me to be accused of being a communist and even an apologist for Uncle Joe. I was “against shopping” (I heard a lot of that), and perversely denying that the right had won all the economic arguments. Strangely enough they were not wholly wrong. I am not an apologist for Stalin and I am not against shopping. I am a communist and I do question whether consumerism leads to a good life and a good soc
iety. I’m a communist in that I believe that certain things should be owned communally, particularly land, which should be treated no differently from the air and the waterways. This was a belief in many European societies until relatively recent historical times, for instance in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. Corporations should be state-owned, but there could be competition between them, and they should be under the control of those who work in them. Monopolies – railways, ports, airports, electricity, water, health services, education, prisons (which should only be for serious crimes), pharmaceuticals and restricted substances (drugs that are legalised but controlled) – should be nationalised and run jointly by the workforce and those who use them or are affected by them. Small capital should be allowed, because it can be innovative and some people enjoy its risks. A good society is an equal society, but absolute equality cannot be imposed, and to go that last distance would involve an unacceptable bureaucratisation of society. In any case, there are too many factors that simply cannot be measured. How, for instance, would you deal with the inequality between those who live in a beautiful city and those who live in an ugly city? What is an ugly city? And so on. Does this make me a communist? I don’t know. It’s a label, and I’m not scared of it.