Solid Workers

In his recent interview on Politics Theory Other about the long-term decline of Conservatives and Conservatism, Andy Beckett suggests incuriosity about Corbyn and Corbynism is a symptom of the establishment right and establishment left's disengagement from political reality. It's a point this blog has made plenty of times . Apart from the ridiculous “explanation” favoured by sundry right wingers that a quarter of a million Trots were waiting for their moment to swarm into the Labour Party as soon as Jeremy Corbyn gave them the green light. But the claim of incuriosity does not apply across the board. Gavin Shuker recently had a go explaining Change UK's failure, an endeavour that, euphemistically speaking, left a lot to be desired. And last year we had published Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts, which claims to be a Marxist critique of Corbynism. For this reason alone it is worth considering. It begins, as you might expect, with an...

What is the Conservative Party? Why, for the majority of the left it is the traditional party of Britain's ruling class. And while it has proven to be its preferred vehicle, having dominated the 20th century and holding the title of the most successful party in electoral politics anywhere , it is not and has never been the party of all the ruling class. When Marx wrote about the state as the general committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, it did not necessarily follow that the Tories as a collective political entity were similarly stamped by these "common affairs". As the Conservative Party suffered its first week from hell under Boris Johnson's dubious leadership, we are reminded of the sectional character of the Tories by last week's series of not-hostile articles in the Financial Times on Corbynomics. This involved the not insignificant news of Citibank and Deutsche Bank coming out in favour of a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government over a no de...

There isn't much more depressing than watching the Amazon burn. And is there anything more infuriating than watching Jair Bolsonaro trolling the world about it? The crooked, clownish creep has argued NGOs are torching the jungle because he cut their funding, and feeding off the blowback he's moved in to false contrition. Brazil doesn't have the resources to fight the fires he claims , and that's that. The sun rises in the morning, and rain forests are getting reduced to ash. Such is the order of things and he can't do anything about it. It's tempting to blame Bolsonaro for all that is rotten in Brazil, as if this uniquely evil/stupid individual turns everything to shit with his touch. Tempting, but far too simplistic. Like his many analogues elsewhere - Trump, Duterte, Orban, Netanyahu to name several - Bolsonaro and friends will, if there's any justice, get their time in the dock. Yet they cannot be separated from the power bloc who put them there and the p...

Have just finished reading Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of the Indebted Man , a work that packs a helluva punch for such a slim volume. It covers everything: the origins of neoliberalism, the constitutive character of debt to the project, the 2007-8 crisis, social security reform, shifting governance in capitalist societies, a critique of the risk society thesis, and an advancement of a theory of the ubiquity of stupidity. Lazzarato, famed for being the originator of the concept of immaterial labour , is able to accomplish his wide-ranging analysis by drawing on the young Marx, Nietzsche of On The Genealogy of Morality , the late Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari and remain entirely readable. You should therefore seek it out and read it for yourself. This is not a review by any means ( here's one , and more on Papa Lazz here ), but he does throw down a challenge to the work of Hardt and Negri long championed on this blog. First off, debt precedes exchange: in other words, ...

Bryan Mosley was a regular face on the telly growing up. Better known to millions as Alf Roberts, the kindly shopkeep from Coronation Street I remember hearing the news that he died of a heart attack just over a month into retirement. A tragedy for his family to be sure especially as he was only 67, but also a reminder to the rest of us that retirement, if we get there, could be briefer than we expect. This brings us to the latest wheeze from Iain Duncan Smith's favourite think tank, the grossly misnamed Centre for Social Justice, about their proposal to raise the retirement age to 75. No need to fret about what to do in retirement or concern yourself with how long its going to last if a sizeable chunk of the population stand little chance of seeing it. What cod argument do the CSJ offer by way of justifying raising the pension age by eight more years? Crucial to their position is the Old Age Dependency Ratio, the number of over 65s there are per 100 of the working age population,...

The Moon landing 50 years ago today ranks as the most audacious and spectacular event of the 20th century. Billions watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin goofing about the surface, and for a moment it appeared - at least transmitted by retrospective commemorations - that the human race was united in awe. For the first time members of our species escaped the gravity well of our world and took our first steps onto a body other than the Earth. It represented the pinnacle of human ingenuity, and was testament to the courage of the men prepared to risk a lingering, public death had it all gone wrong. Rightly, and despite the motives of the US government who put them there, for as long as there are people the flight of Apollo 11 is and be celebrated among our greatest collective accomplishments. We should salute the army of NASA technicians, astronauts, admin and support staff that made the Apollo programme possible, acknowledge the spin offs and engineering know-how - later largely harnes...

A very interesting discussion on Novara Media on Tuesday night. Michael was joined by James Meadway, oft-credited with the heavy lifting regards Corbynomics, and Gillian Keegan, Conservative MP for Chichester. For a Tory to appear on Novara is interesting in and of itself, but how she engages with and tries rebutting James's position is a useful lesson in Tory thought processes. She no doubt genuinely believes that austerity was necessary and worthwhile, and neoliberal economics are the best way to go, but how she defends these positions betrays a certain something. It reminds me of defences of privilege. Anyone speaking up for inequality knows it's an untenable position, but reach for any old rope to try and justify it. Gillian does exactly the same here, preferring to shelter in ideology and occasionally shouting Corbyn! and McDonnell! instead of addressing James's points and Labour's economic programme . Worth watching.

Growing up in the 1980s, communism didn't have a lot going for it. The taming of Siberia and the stellar achievements of the Soviet space programme were never talked about, and its depression-busting economic performance was long forgotten. The crushing conformity of Soviet life, its concrete vistas and secret police, and the queues in Moscow supermarkets for a single loaf of bread did a better job of queering the pitch for communism than voluminous anti-communist polemic and occasional speeches from Margaret Thatcher. Communism was poverty stricken, dictatorial, and backward - so much so the good people of the Eastern bloc countries wanted a piece of the capitalist action, and duly got it as the so-called "people's democracies" and the USSR came tumbling down. Capitalism, at least in the advanced West and Japan was dynamic, modern, raising living standards and appeared the wave of the future (or, if you like, the end of history ). Communism was dead. Its presence as ...

Articles like this boil my piss. According to the BBC , a third of all graduates are "overeducated" for the jobs they currently have. This is up by over a fifth since 1992, and nearly a quarter of all workers in London are overeducated for their job versus 16% for the national background. At least according to the Office for National Statistics. It goes on to say that while a degree is most often a passport to higher wages/salaries, some of these stats can be explained by graduates deliberately choosing to do jobs. That makes it alright then. Well, it does acknowledge that another explanation might be worth considering. "It can also be seen as a form of underemployment, hence contributing to the extent of labour market slack". How very nice, but it's telling the only explanation the ONS offers is faux neutral gubbins about people plumping for jobs/careers that pay less. Which is what you would expect from an institution inflected with bourgeois common sense. Th...