Wake Up Bradford!

A Review of Paul Embery’s Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class; Polity: Cambridge.

Simeon Scott

Introduction

Published in 2021, I bought this book recently in order to know Mr Embery’s views on such topics as mass immigration, identity politics, Brexit and multiculturalism. I must say that I agree with most of the author’s views on these subjects; although it would have been useful to know his views on the anti-immigration rioting of Summer 2024. However, there are some serious flaws in Embery’s text; firstly, his failure to understand the systematic exploitation of working class people at the core of the capitalist system. Secondly, Embery’s repeatedly uses of the spatial metaphors left wing right wing, and such qualifications as “centre left”, “modern left” and the like which, although a commonplace amongst journalists, is confusing and yet another example of the spectacle of contemporary capitalism. Thirdly, reminding us of Bertrand Russell’s ironic comments on those members of the middle classes who praise the working class as long as they keep stoking the boilers: Embery idealises working class people, in particular what he refers to as their “small c conservatism”. After a section on each of these three topics, the review ends with a conclusion advocating abolishing, rather than praising, the working class.

Capitalism as systematic exploitation

So, let us begin by examining the essential characteristics of capitalism, in particular the relationship between the two contending social classes: workers and capitalists. Early in his text Embery attempts to explain the meaning of the term working class. He offers a number of alternative definitions including “personal characteristics such as accent or lifestyle, or whether a person owns his own home or takes a holiday abroad, or by qualifications or income. Many on the Left argue that it covers all those who are forced to sell their labour in return for a wage; others get sniffy about including certain sections of the middle class”. After referring to some statistical categories, Embery concludes his analysis with: “There will likely never be a universally accepted definition of ‘working class’. You pays your money and takes your choice”. With these words lies a key flaw in the book: a failure to understand the exploitative relationship at the core of capitalism. We cannot understand the essence of the working class without simultaneously understanding that of the capitalist class, in the same way that we cannot understand the being of a slave without understanding his or her relationship with a slave-owner, or a serf without a land-owner. Mr Embery would be well advised to read some of the work of the British political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, not to mention Karl Marx, the latter spending his later years living in London. What these writers explained was how the profits of the capitalists are the result of the unpaid wages of their worker employees. In short, the worker receives less in money wages than the value she or he creates by their labour. Due to the complexity of the contemporary global capitalist system, the exploitation of the worker is not as transparent of that of the earlier mentioned slave or serf, but as long as capitalism remains, and it will not last forever, so will the unpaid wages due to the worker.

Left wing, right wing

Describing the seating arrangements in the parliament of post revolutionary France, the metaphors left wing, right wing, and their qualification: centre left, far right and so on, have become the norm in political discourse; we all, more or less, know what they mean. Yet, as the German philosopher Hegel explains, as the complexities at issue become more manifest then our vocabularies need to become more appropriate. Mr Embery’s use of such qualifying terms “the Left”, with a capital L, or the “modern Left” surely offer little help given the complexities of 21^st century global capitalism. We can perhaps clarify the differences between contemporary political ideologies by classifying them as pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist, the latter term being used by American opponents of the World Trade Organisation, the power of Wall Street and other institutions of capitalism. This simple distinction would cut through much of the journalistic chatter around Westminster and beyond, it becoming clear that the vast majority of MPs, for instance, are wholly in favour of capitalism. Those readers who attend demonstrations on Gaza or Ukraine will note the paper sellers who refer to themselves as “socialists”. Such people are the remnants of the largely discredited Bolshevik one party state political philosophy which is in fact, as Lenin made clear, in favour of state capitalism. In other words, rather than the working class being exploited by the private capitalist, the state employs managers who, in the case of the Soviet Union, used Taylorist time and motion techniques to squeeze every ounce of unpaid labour out of the Russian working class. So, let us be clear, the current regimes in China, North Korea, Cuba and the like are pro-capitalist, i.e. state capitalist; workers there are even more exploited than those in the advanced capitalist nations.

On the Gaza demonstrations in my adopted city of Bradford, some of those attending, including some claiming to be ‘socialists’, are supporters of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and are not interested in the fact that most members of the Ukrainian working class prefer to take their chances by looking to the EU rather than being subject to the tyranny of Putin’s gangster capitalism. I therefore ask Mr Embery: are these self styled ‘socialists’ left wing or right wing? Further to this, some of these demonstrators of Pakistani origin are strongly pro-capitalist, some being small business employers paying scant regard to the rights of their employees. On these demos one senses a current of Islamism, some participants privately calling for Sharia law to be established in Britain. In Bradford more generally there exists an Arabic orientated chic consumerism, especially amongst young women of Pakistani origin, with talk about trips to shopping centres in Dubai, a city well known for the money laundering services offered by its banks. Again Mr Embery, left wing or right wing?

In praise of the working class

The UK’s broadcast and print media rarely consider the lives of working class people. A rare exception to this is a BBC Radio 4 series Payslip Britain, in which Sean Farrington has highlighted the deteriorating conditions which workers are forced to endure, resulting in increasing numbers of workers resigning from their jobs due to poor mental or physical health. Embery draws attention to the dismissive attitude to working class people shown by many on “the Left”, the “cultural revolutionaries” as he calls them; in particular they deplore the decision of millions of workers to vote to leave the European Union. In writing of these “revolutionaries”, Embery is drawing attention to the changes in social attitudes shown by many educated middle class people as a result of events, particularly student demonstrations, during the 1960s. He argues further that many of the sons and daughters of this 60s generation have rejected such “old fashioned concepts” as “patriotism, self-discipline, conscience, religious belief, marriage and the centrality of family, manners, respect for tradition (and) personal morality”. “in their place”, he continues, “came the beginnings of a new age of free love, drugs, self-gratification, individualism, divorce, contempt for tradition, and disdain for the concept of personal responsibility for one’s own actions”.

In fact, from the ruling elites of what remains a hierarchical Britain down to the most dispossessed members of the working class, we all to varying degrees manifest differences in our public image, on the one hand, and our private lives, on the other. Therefore, Embery’s claim that working class people tend to embrace the values of “small c conservatism” to a larger degree than other classes seems lacking in relevance. We must ask Mr Embery a number of questions: where does patriotism end and fascism begin, is competing religious chauvinism merely just another divide and rule tactic by Britain’s ruling elites, is the nuclear family a sustainable institution for working class people struggling to pay their bills, is deference for the land owning aristocracy and the royal family really a desirable trait?

In the mass unemployment era of the 1930s, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote the following in In Praise Of Idleness (see Reading below): “The morality of work is the morality of slaves…a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters”. Calling for a reduction in the working day to just 4 hours, Russell points out that in earlier modes of production “warriors and priests” appropriated a portion of the goods produced by the landless peasants. With regard to state capitalism, referred to above, Russell noted that in Bolshevik Communist Russia, which he visited, Party officials took a portion of the value created by Russian workers, whilst at the same time praising the latter’s hard labour. Sylvia Pankhurst, who talked to Lenin on a visit in the 1920s, said similar things and as a result was denounced by Lenin as suffering from an “infantile disorder”. Russell pointed out that “with modern techniques it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilisation”. Thus, with the appropriate use of technology, we could stop the routine exploitation of temporary immigrant farm workers, who come here to do the back breaking seasonal piece work that most English workers are, quite rightly, not prepared to perform. Russell writes of the 1930s that some workers are “made to work long hours, and the rest (are) left to starve as unemployed; the growing number of beggars on the streets of British towns and cities would suggest that not much has changed in the 2020s. Anticipating Embery’s praise for working class people, Russell ironically refers to Biblical verses in which “the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich”. Also anticipating Debord’d text Society of the Spectacle, (see below) Russell refers to the largely passive leisure time of workers, mentioned watching football, and would, were he alive today, probably have mentioned the mind numbing zombie-like obsession with the smart phone displayed by most workers.

As regards the lives of working class people, until the post-1945 period, for the most part it was short and often brutish, as Engels’ pioneering research on the North of England, to name but one source, clearly demonstrated. In the period up to the 1970s the lives of working class improved greatly, with council housing offering bathrooms, inside toilets and adequate bedroom space; with higher education becoming a possibility for workers for the first time ever. However, things began to deteriorate in the 1980s because, simply put, some members the British capitalist class, especially those in manufacturing, saw their profits being eaten away; with domestic investment in decline and much of the UK economy nationalised. As a result, led by Margaret Thatcher, the 1979 Tory government began a programme of privatisation and attacks on the living standards of workers, in particular the miners and others who were members of trade unions. At this time, Embery contends, inside the Labour Party a “new, emergent liberal class” took over key positions in the Party and from this base Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made “peace not only with the market itself but with the most severe strains of free-market ideology…most of the restrictive trade union laws passed by the Tories in the 1980s remained in place, and there was no effort to reverse the privatisation and outsourcing of public services”. Yet, in his telling final chapter which, following the title of a text by Lenin, he calls What is to be Done?, Embery actually agrees with this New Labour market approach. He argues against “the Left”, whoever they might be, “adopting an anti-market position…markets are not only essential to the functioning of a free and democratic society, but are often the best mechanism by which to allocate scarce resources, reward effort, stimulate dynamism and innovation, and raise living standards”. I suspect that both Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher would find little to disagree with in this statement by Mr Embery. His pro-capitalism agenda significantly undermines many of the arguments presented in the book. We may also note his 2021 prediction that there is unlikely to be a Labour government any time soon unless it re-establishes its roots in the working class. This prediction proved utterly wrong for, as we know, Labour won a large victory in 2024 without any noticeable ideological move in this direction. So, what conclusions can we draw from this discussion of Mr Embery’s arguments?

Conclusion: abolishing the working class

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him; from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.

The driving relationships between people of all social classes in Britain, as elsewhere in the most advanced capitalist nations, are transactional: buying and selling. This has the result that the vast range of other kinds of relationships are judged to be of lesser importance. This state of affairs, treating everyone we come into contact with as a potential means of making money, leads to a dysfunctional society in which stress, poor mental and physical health, rather than flourishing and wellbeing, become the order of the day. No one, whatever their social class is immune, we are all caught up in buying and selling. For workers, who form the vast majority of the British population, the wage labour system is central: we rent out our capacity to work “by hand or brain” on an ongoing basis for the simple reason that in capitalist Britain there are few, if any, alternative ways of satisfying our, and our dependents, food clothing and shelter. Given the brutal reality of the daily grind of the lowest paid workers, is it any great surprise that many do not display “small c conservatism” but rather contribute to pollution in various ways, including dumping mattresses and other rubbish so as to avoid disposal costs, along with littering the inner cities in which they live. In the inner city part of Bradford in which I live, some young working class lads join gangs and sell and consume illegal drugs; others show profound disrespect towards women and girls. The rioting of Summer 2024 was a deep stain on the reputation of, mainly young, working class people.

With regard to better paid workers, there is currently little appetite for political change and, especially amongst women, an epidemic of consumerism. This is to be explained by the fact that during colonial times the ruling elites of the European powers, particularly British factory owners, made their profits by importing raw materials at rock bottom prices, using them to manufacture goods which were then exported across the world. However, this model collapsed with 20^th century decolonisation and ruling elites had to increasingly rely on selling their goods and services in their home markets. So, fulfilling Debord’s worst nightmare, workers are bombarded with advertising on our screens, billboards and elsewhere: spend spend spend. In sharp contrast to Embery’s romancing the alleged “small c conservatism” of the working class, let us call for the abolition of all social classes and a rapid end to the capitalist mode of production. Surely, Mr Embery would not call for better treatment for slaves or landless serfs, and such practices still exist in Britain, but rather would call for slavery and serfdom to be abolished.

Obviously, abolishing capitalism, vital though it is, is no easy task. However, we can begin by seeking to establish democracy in the workplace, as promoted by Tony Benn in the form of workers’ co-operatives. The pseudo-democracy that exists now, in the form of the Houses of Commons and Lords, is barely worthy of discussion. Clearly, we need to establish local communities in which people actually begin to know, interact with and trust their neighbours. With the abolition of money, much of the labour required to maintain the profits of the capitalists would be rendered pointless and for the first time in human history we can establish a world in which everyone has sufficient food, clothing and shelter.

Reading

Debord. G. free download available at: libcom.org

Russell, B, available at: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/