Wake Up Bradford!

The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain

by Darren McGarvey

Simeon Scott

Published in 2022, Darren McGarvey’s book is well written, well presented and full of insights relevant to the working class of Bradford. As a “rapper” and “social commentator” from a working class Scottish background, in the book’s final chapter, called Coda, he is uneasy regarding his new found fame and relative financial security due to his book sales and radio career. Whilst to cite a well worn journalistic cliché, his heart remains in the right place, Darren’s text reveals some limitations regarding the fundamentals of social class. On the three main classes in Britain to day, he seems to distinguish between them in terms of typical levels of income and wealth, educational opportunities and whether people live in the inner city or leafy suburbs. Whilst describing such relevant characteristics is a media commonplace, it fails to capture the essence, to cite a term used by the ancient philosophers, of capitalism. That is, capitalism is not a system based on the seemingly random socio-economic differences between people, rather its core characteristic is the relationship between capitalist and worker inherent in the wage labour system. This is a system which continues to dominate our socio-economic environment, but which is, like slavery and serfdom before it, fundamentally exploitative. At its simplest, workers receive only a portion of the value which they collectively create, in the form of wages or salaries; the rest is pocketed by the capitalist in the form of profits.

Throughout his lengthy book, Darren fails to make this crucial point. As a result, his repeated calls for social and economic equality are puzzling. What, for example, does greater equality mean? Do we all become equally rich or equally poor; do we all live in palaces or pigsties? Crucially, if a worker were to receive the full value of what she or he produces, then the capitalist employer’s profit would be zero, and the wage labour system would come to an abrupt end. In view of his failure to highlight this relationship at the core of capitalism, the rest of Darren’s text rings a little hollow. For instance, his call for change in the education system tacitly accepts that learning is nothing more than skill training; that education should be about making us all better able to increase human wellbeing seems to escape Darren’s attention. As things stand, education is about acquiring knowledge that contributes to the process of value creation inherent in the wage labour system. The more knowledge a worker acquires the higher the value created by her or him; therefore the income of both the worker and the capitalist rises and the wage labour system and its inherently exploitative core remains in tact. Similarly, with regard to the middle classes, despite his Coda, Darren underplays the contradictions inherent in the theory and practice of members of this class, located as they are one remove from direct confrontation between the capitalist and the worker.

One faction of this middle class is what Darren calls the “Radical Left” in his 17^th chapter; or what might be more accurately referred to as the radical intelligentsia. In this chapter, he fails to mention the crucial issue with regard to the so-called socialists, who some of us have seen selling their papers and trying to recruit vulnerable young people on marches, demonstrations and rallies up and down the country for decades. This issue is as follows: do we want to replace the market capitalist system we currently have in Britain with state run capitalism, as existed in the Bolshevik USSR and currently exists in China and North Korea? Compared with this issue all the rest is “just propaganda”, as the factory worker, played by Albert Finney, says in the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Surely, what we should be talking about is how to rid ourselves of global capitalism, irrespective of whether the worker is exploited by the private sector employer or the communist party intellectual. The current standoff between the private and state versions of capitalism generates arms manufacturing, for example, instead of decent housing. Rather than the pseudo-socialism offered by the paper sellers, we could be talking about how to set up workplace democracy. Ignoring the distraction that is the Westminster gossip pumped out by the media, by means of authentic democracy we can gear production to providing food, clothing and shelter, rather than profits or communist party surpluses, as ends in themselves. Whilst this might seem like a Hollywood fantasy at the moment, surely discussing such a credible democratic possibility is a step forward from naïvely calling for a “more equal” version of capitalism in which we all go to posh schools and have second homes in the Cotswolds. There have been times when British capitalism was indeed more equal than it is today, as in the 1945 to 1964 period. However, given global competition, a low profit British capitalism was never going to last and the Thatcher/Blair counter-revolution has taken us to where we are today, as described so well in Darren’s book.