Corbynism and the Second Referendum
Does that mean we can put our feet up and wait for the polls return to normal? If only politics were so easy. Labour's predicament going into the EU elections was it had a Brexit position designed for a general election. Farage's return to politics and field testing of his Brexit Party vehicle was always going to monopolise the anger of leave voters brassed off about the Tories' failure to serve up Brexit. As advocates of leaving come what may, including the stupidity of no deal, with this dynamic in play an insurgency galvanised its counter-insurgency: the very simple no to Farage, and yes to the EU by way of the LibDems, Greens, Plaid in Wales (ignoring Scotland's "special circumstances"), and trailing in their wake, our friends the CHUK-ups. Under the circumstances of a second order election where the consequences, broadly, do not matter as per a general election, middling positions were crushed. The polarising logic that governed 2017 and gave Labour and the Tories a wild ride returned and smashed us instead.
Given these appalling results, the Labour right wasted no time crowing their displeasure. The Twitter hashtag #ExpelMeToo saw sundry right wingers coming out in solidarity with Alastair Campbell and, with all the strategic verve they've demonstrated time and again, invited automatic self-exclusion onto their heads. Well done, comrades. Nevertheless, their dismal theatrics aside, the party went into this election something less than the sum of its parts. The compromise position of customs union deal or general election or second referendum, despite being perfectly clear on paper, does not make for snappy campaigning in a polarised contest. The campaign the party ran, not surprisingly, turned out fewer leafleters and door knockers than even the local elections (indeed, it seems my polling district didn't even receive a Labour electoral communication - though UKIP and the Brexit Party got theirs out). And, if that YouGov poll is a reliable indicator, 42% of party members went mostly LibDem or Green. Labour's biggest electoral asset, the size and depth of its body politic, was almost completely absent. If the party couldn't convince its own members to support it, then we're in big trouble.
The immediate priority of the Corbyn project is building and holding together a coalition that can win a general election. To do this successfully means understanding where a) the huge membership came from, b) why we were unexpectedly insurgent in 2017, and c) the character of the relationship of that constituency to the party. This enables us to think about strategy more deeply and with greater chances of success.
On the first two, we've discussed this many times before and so doesn't really need repeating in much depth. The two (overlapping) sources of Labour's expanded membership were the return of many thousands of activists and members who were alienated from the party in the Blair/Brown years, as well as a periphery of previously non-Labour activists who were in and around the labour movement (and as documented in Alex Nunns's The Candidate). And the second, larger group, were representative of the decades-long wider transformation of class composition and class politics. I am talking about the mass of networked (but, paradoxically, often atomised) workers engaged in immaterial labour. That is the increasing displacement of wage earners who made stuff by wage earners who produce intangible things, such as knowledge, data, services, care, relationships: what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the authors of the Empire trilogy, call socialised workers. Why does this matter to politics? Because it leads to a different experience of what it means to be working class.
Here comes the theory bit.
As Marx noted in Capital, the wage relationship individuates workers. The employment contract is between you as an individual and your employer as a single, legal entity. You give your labour power for x amount of time, and it is you who receives your wage or salary from them. However, because the workers Marx was most concerned with produced material things, be it raw materials torn from the earth or commodities shot out a factory's gates, these workers had to cooperate with one another (under the command of the boss/firm, who organised the production process) under shared conditions. Therefore, despite the individual legal relation between worker and boss, the bringing together of workers under one roof or manufacturing complex tended toward cooperative and solidaristic social relationships: the capitalist production process necessarily engendered a collective agent that would resist workplace reorganisation, the imposition of wage settlements, the lengthening of the working day, intensification of production, and would, by virtue of its collective muscle, contest management for control of the workplace. The dark satanic mills of Marx's day, the mines, the factories, the shipyards and railways simultaneously individuated but collectivised workers. And out of these conditions grew the trade unions, the friendly societies and cooperative movements, and ultimately the Labour Party.
The world of immaterial labour is similar, but different. Work is very much a necessity (as education, social security, the media, and politics never stops to remind us), but immaterial labour mobilises something else. Manual labour tends to mobilise the physicality of our bodies, whereas immaterial labour mobilises our brains. Not necessarily in the narrow definition of so-called brain work, but our sociality, our being as social beings. For example, the training I received for my first ever teaching gig was a copy of a module handbook and the directions to the room the class was taking place in. The training I received for my first ever supermarket job was on food safety, how to pick up cooked chickens with skewers and tongues, how to operate ovens, and so on. In both cases the real meat and gravy of the jobs, of being a personable service provider was something I had to provide myself, drawing on my prior history as a social being forged through countless social interactions. This was not inessential to these jobs, but absolutely central to them. And these competencies were not owned by the employer, like the deep fat fryer or the white board, but by me. They are inseparable from my brain, and any enhancements to social competencies picked up in the course of this work leaks out into the social world outside of work and ultimately becomes part of a skill set that may later be employed elsewhere. As far as capitalism is concerned then, work in the advanced societies depends to an ever greater extent on capturing our sociality and redeploying it for profit (this, indeed, is the business model for social media and so much of our digital infrastructure). And because capital aims at capturing our social qualities, it does not so much organise production any more but piggy backs off our spontaneous capacity for social production.
What has this got to do with politics? For one, because socialised workers acquire their competencies through, well, being social, there is a broad tendency for them to be more socially liberal. The right can moan about political correctness and diversity quotas as much as they want, when it is the system they hold sacrosanct that is feeding off the very social stuff that, over time, is eroding the sorts of attitudes they used to skilfully push and exploit for a good old bit of divide and rule. The second key characteristic is as immaterial labour has expanded in scope over the last few decades, it follows that the younger someone is the more likely their job now and their future career trajectory will be characterised by work of this sort. Younger workers are more likely to be socialised workers, which helps explain not just the values differences between the generations, but their tendency to vote in opposite directions too. And lastly, unfortunately, they are less likely to encounter the traditional institutions of the working class and when they do, well, what have unions got to offer them? Apart from bits of the public sector where the strength, power, and purpose of unions are more evident, why would a bar worker, a book seller, a dressing room attendant, a Deliveroo courier, or call centre worker sign up? Well, we know the reasons why and, it appears, increasing numbers of socialised workers do too, with unions posting the second successive year of membership rises - though this is mainly in the public sector.
And Corbynism? The bulk of its support who came to the party, and those who voted Labour in 2017, did so not because they were spontaneously socialist, though the alignment of values were a factor, but because Labour produced a programme that spoke to their interests. The cuts, the decimation of services, the running down of the NHS and education, crap jobs, the housing crisis, zero prospects, the insecurity, the sense nothing could get better, all of a sudden Labour offered something else that spoke to this diffuse and at times keenly, and times faintly felt complex of pressures. The new working class connected with the party of the old working class, and a programme the right wing careerists and the sneerists damned as a hard left throwback because Corbyn's rebooted Bennism offered the most modern solutions to the most current questions. It wasn't out of affection or magic grandpa nonsense, but was something a wee bit more mercenary: it was transactional. Socialised workers voted Labour in disproportionate number because it offered them something. As far as the party continued doing so, it had an advantage over a Tory party in long term decline as its base rose and fell on Brexit.
Unfortunately, in the context of the EU elections this transactional relationship came a cropper. Immaterial labour tended to vote remain over leave in the EU referendum, and since this constituency has grown as younger voters have been added to the electoral rolls and leavers have passed away, there is a sense that the vote to leave has robbed younger people of something - be it greater economic stability, the amorphous possibility of a better future, as well as a rude rejection of liberal internationalism, which, of course, is also a component of social liberalism more generally. Immaterial labour tends to believe staying in the EU is in its interests, again, on a transactional basis, and so is more disposed to a soft Brexit, a second referendum, or no Brexit at all - with the latter being the most preferred. Therefore, while you can put down an unwillingness to compromise to a certain impatience, the instinct to remain spontaneously arises from the experience of being a socialised worker where nothing is permanent, nothing is getting better, and what you do have is threatened.
An obvious problem for the Labour Party then. Given the opportunity to state their preference on matters Brexit-related, unsurprisingly the parties of second referendum/remain did well as immaterial labour asserted its interests regardless - well, those sections that thought it important enough to vote did. Unfortunately, crossing our fingers and hoping this was a mere flirtation is not good enough, especially as the next election will have Brexit front and centre, whether it takes place in early autumn or comes later. To keep the bulk of its 2017 support the party's position has to pivot more towards them. This does not mean going full remain, the party cannot reduce itself entirely to one side of the Brexit schism because it needs to appeal across it to win. But never again can it leave itself so dangerously exposed. If Corbynism is to realise its promise and be the vehicle by which immaterial labour sets about reworking society in its image, the party must shift to a soft Brexit plus confirmatory referendum position. It's not something I particularly like, having fulminated against it previously, and it will cause us a great deal of difficulty in some leave-voting seats, but we're in no easy option territory. In such a situation, our best bet is to go with the wisdom of our crowd.
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