The Left We Want

If all you're after is the basic gist, it's: the government should not be the only advocate of the public, and the left should have multiple figureheads. Any meaningful revival of the term “public” must come from bottom up rather than the slogans of professional politicians.

One that understands the extent to which the people it needs to fight with are  inundated by the private sector.

We all know that the private sector can claim no lasting, procedural democratic credentials. Companies can cite anecdotes to claim they are responsive to popular demands, but there are no safeguards and no way of monitoring the environment and context in which those demands were voiced, what gave rise to them, and how much they have transformed before being spluttered out in multiple feedback assessments or marketing campaigns. And anyway, as we all know as well, companies are utterly (and undeniably) subordinate to financial necessity.

That said, if you’re outside the 17.1% that is employed by the public sector, your struggle for sustenance is enmeshed in the endless labyrinth of private sector hierarchies. The left speaks far less forcibly for you than it does for those who are employed by the public sector. 

Newspaper columns are occupied by the tiny minority that has not been co-opted and tarnished by neo-liberalism. Those who boast of their days sacrificed to the good of others (be that for the NHS, the BBC or the education system), but somehow seem to have come out of it with a two-storey house in their name. They are die-hard Labour supporters, but also the main engines of Labour’s inertia. Because they know their world-views will not be replicated. There are no more public-sector jobs to give younger people, so journalists of the future will have inevitably, in the absence of trust funds, have had to snake their ways up slimy ladders perfecting their marketing lingo, their statistical research on consumer propensities, their affinity with profit in some form or another. That’s inevitable now. As yet, these barons of the public sector sit tight, absolved of the need to fill their days attempting to market and sell something that has no benefit other than the accumulation of material wealth. The moral superiority this absolution gives them also blinds them to the ways their cultural backgrounds and nationalities have given them an implicit advantage. “Well, I’m working for the public” they say. Do they even know what the public is? 

 Democracy is at risk when these people's grievances, their tirades against private sector “greed”, are the only ones the left can voice. When they brand upward mobility a Hollywood-mediated fantasy without realising their own material well-being completely rests on the upward mobility of their parents’ generation, and the spoils of war that the state handed them, the left is just as dislocated as the right. 

And, of course, even if you are inside that 17.1% that is employed by the private sector, you’ll most likely find yourself interacting with companies, spending your leisure-time patronising them, relying on them for nourishment, enlightenment and respite. And so there we are, struggling to pledge allegiance to them, defining ourselves by the petty squabbles they conduct with one another.

If politics becomes the realm of squabbles about which resources should be allocated where in the public sector, and the public sector becomes the main forum for these squabbles, the term “public” really needs a revival. And that revival cannot just come from the discourse of party politics. This is because party politics are encumbered by an impediment that makes them almost impotent on an ethical level: they only have impact within national boundaries.

Change has to be grasped by people who are not unionised. Who don’t have slogans spoke down to them by leaders. Who don’t get council flats or month-long holidays. Who are somehow co-opted by the structures which clearly have no claim to democratic credentials whatsoever.

One that focuses on all the non-monetary guises that wealth takes 

Regrettably, the right is far more successful than the left at extending the debate about poverty beyond the realms of materialism, and into culture. Its monopoly over the realm of “choice” and “self-reinvention” just makes it more compelling. 

The established left has failed to explain and include individual and communal reinvention, viewing change with suspicion and self-reinvention as something that reeks of Reganism. Is there anything easier for a Leftist to deride than a diet-conscious yuppie or an eco-coconscious consumers, wrangled with guilt and yet unable to stop perpetuating its very causes? Criticism of reinvention makes for an incredibly easy rhetorical device but in doing that, fails to engage with any of the complexities of human behaviour. Criticising “all those yuppies worrying about calories whilst living off their parents (or the jobs their parents ushered them into, paid their way to get etc) and destroying rain forests to plant asparagus and soya to feed their ill-informed and ultimately doomed, completely individualistic aspirations” is broaching an extremely complex subject. But instead, the rhetoric simplifies and ignores all the social and cultural factors that give rise to it, like the brutal loneliness imposed upon us by multi-media advertising campaigns.

While the mainstream Leftists are busy arguing that Regan-style personal reinvention and social mobility is all a Hollywood-mediated fantasy, the right can demonstrate the fickleness of self-reinvention more skillfully without reducing its ultimate desirability. 

Entrepreneurship may not be capable of solving all ills, but the left has to acknowledge that there are circumstances in which people have improved their lives, fortunes, character, abilities through it. Denying this, as many who have invested riches do, is a ridiculous refusal to face up to reality. Much more simply, it's also a refusal to be reflexive and circumspect in their thinking. To obediently reuse blanket categories, even when these are opposed to the basic interests of their struggle.

This, I think, is not evidence of any ideological failing on the part of the left, but a basic symptom of the right’s superior resources – its knowledge of the world. Of course, the right, unlike the left, also spends much time arguing that the supporters of its own ultra-extreme guises are “ignorant”. Not because they have different experiences, and the foundations and attributes for their material well-being have been completely shaken, but because they need educating and enriching. This task, the right argues should belong to the private sector. Put them on an EasyJet flight and they’ll realise Europe’s wine and cheese tastes good, and won’t fall for Farage’s pranks next time.

One that registers that not all prejudice and disadvantage is rooted in class. 

This is one of the established left’s most visible failings. By letting class monopolise the discourse, it is, of course making its self into a completely compliant breeding ground for racism. 

And Lastly..

The established, political representatives of the left should not foster an environment in which what I have just said calls into question any of my Leftist credentials.

I never doubt that human beings should all be afforded health care and education in equal measure, regardless of their bank balances. Not because I think this question no longer has to be posed (it clearly does, and those two things are clearly being quickly eradicated in the UK), but because I am consistently convinced that where the material resources are available for these two very basic goods, they should be shared unconditionally. Where the established, political representations of the left may disagree with each other, and instate very halfhearted and contradictory policies regarding, is when it comes to envisaging people outside the confines of the national state being entitled to these two goods.

And, hark, we have the great unsolved and unformulated nationalist v internationalist debate that, along with the environment, will likely form the pillars of political argument in our children's generation.

Back when they were bringing me up, the Leftists said it was a simple question of "the people" just goddam taking back control of "the factories", future finished.