this whole article is great, give it a read
The new Labour left is composed of three main forces: a segment of ambitious and perhaps precarious professionals who feel that according to their educated status they should have more say in society. They also want a good life for ‘the working class’, but their approach is technocratic: learned people and progressive experts are supposed to decide how things are run, not the bankers and the parasitic elite. They form an alliance with the second main force, the union bureaucracy. The union apparatus allows the new professionals to speak in the name of the workers and the union bosses can extend their power into the political class.
This. Another middle class vanguard not different enough to the neolib blairite ones before it.
Yeah I thought that paragraph was bang on too - Angry Workers of the World always have sound analysis but this is particularly clinical, great economy of language, just laying it out… it’s the sort of political writing I’d love to see more of (and be able to write myself tbh)
Like, you can be absolutely deadly in your criticism without exaggerating or devolving into that ‘social media outrage’ style and tone that is so much noise these days. For example:
Materially the new left intelligentsia reproduces itself as the ‘neoliberal self’ that they pretend to criticise: hardly any of them are ‘organic intellectuals’ forged in working class existence and struggle, most of them survive by creating a social media and academic persona whose opinion is valued on the marketplace. Whether you read the “Alternative Models of Ownership” by the Labour party advisers, Bastani’s ‘luxury communism’ or Srnicek’s ‘Inventing the Future’, the prime agent is always the figure of the well-educated and networked activist. Unfortunately this forces our intellectual democratic socialist comrades to chase their own tails. There is a big blank space when it comes to the question of how their well-meaning ideas will be enforced and implemented. Who will enforce workers’ participation if workers are seen as people who are only able to engage in political discourse during election times? The absence of a strategy rooted in the working class then leads to the creation of a trite and kitsch icon of ‘the people’ – a mass of honest victims who need cultural belonging and political leadership.
Fucking Nailed It
Love it. For me it explains the view the new left (Sarkar, Bastini, Jones) have of the working class. There was a clear divide between these metropolitan ‘educated’ professional activist types, and regular working class people. Like even during peak Corbynism people from my estate (the ‘left behind’ working class in a deindustrialised dead zone) tended not to vote, not to engage. They failed to break down those walls. To them people like me are victims being ravaged by Tory austerity, who the Labour party need to save. It’s a dead end. And demeaning. I’d rather we empower ourselves on our estates and build on our already existing mutual aid to bring about change.