As a share of GDP, wages have fallen from a high of 64% in 1974 to approximately 54% in 2010. This is despite the fact that we have become more productive.
Correct. The split between wages and profit is tilting more and more towards profit. The profit goes to shareholders, who tend more and more to be the high-paid. Wealth becomes concentrated while wages stagnate. We're seeing this replicated across the Atlantic, too.
"What has happened is the direct culmination of Thatcherite class war, aimed at breaking up the bargaining power of labour"
Cobblers. Thatcherite class war, if it can be so called, was only one of the factors breaking up the bargaining power of labour. It would have fared very poorly against the working class of, say, 1956. The other factors were all related to one overriding phenomenon - the collapse of British cultural self-confidence and social cohesion between around 1963 and 2003 (though some would say the process is not yet complete). This cultural revolution has transformed Britain - most Guardian readers now would be horrified at Attlee's country of 60 years back.
The effect of the 60s cultural revolution was devastating for the British working class. As Sheila Rowbotham put it in the Guardian :
"Four decades on, we can see that the rebellions of 1968 coincided with capitalism changing gear."
That's one way of putting it. But it was no coincidence.
The brilliantly successful cultural revolution weakened the old culture to the point where capitalism, flexible by nature and untrammeled by its previous cultural constraints, could flourish on the weakened social organism like some opportunistic infection.
We can identify three main strands or themes when examining the effects of the collapse :
a) individualism and infantilism rather than communalism and responsibility
"what's good for me"
"if it feels good, do it"
"love the one you're with"
"Access - takes the waiting out of wanting"
"all that really matters is right now"
All of these cultural trends were ominous for traditional trade union and working class solidarity, which often required deferred gratification and individual self-sacrifice.
b) newly educated middle class children (often of working class origin), without experience of poverty or war, who both swallowed the 60s medicine whole, and preached it to the least self-confident and most vulnerable of the working class. I wonder now how much the existence of 1970s-style Claimants Unions, whose middle class volunteers preached that the working class were OWED a living by "the state", played in creating the underclass of the 80s and beyond.
At the same time, those working class people who rejected the 60s gospel were looked down on by their newly liberated children, who may have loved them but were slightly ashamed of them (I remember the contempt my uncles had for people who chose to live on benefits. What could they, in a South Wales steelworks all their working life, have to teach a politics student about socialism?). This tendency is now the default view, in that 'enlightened' left views are now a sign of a civilised middle-class person - those not holding such views being irredeemable hicks, Sun readers.
c) a consequence of b), mass immigration.
"Disembowel Enoch Powell" chanted the students in 1969 outside the Any Questions venue. What did the demonstrations in his favour by the London dockers count for against civilised opinion ? You can see that the rupture between the working class and their self-appointed leaders and defenders goes back a long way.
Mass immigration's main effect has been to drive down wages :
“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”
But nearly as important to capitalists is that a religiously and ethnically divided working class is much less likely to combine effectively against them - there are so many fault lines to exploit.
"Today, capitalism's crisis is all the deeper"
No it ain't. British society's crisis has rarely never been deeper in our history - but meanwhile the capitalists are filling their boots - while there's still stuff left to loot. Remember, they're 60s children too. All that really matters is right now.
14 comments:
I think you have got the balance somewhat wrong here because finance capital was seeking to undermine the post-war Keynesian consensus even before it was fully built, in order to restore the old order
eg Friedman and von Hayek etc - Mont Pelerin in 47
The City starting to create tax havens in the fifties and the unregulated Euro-dollar market to defeat capital controls; Warburg's pioneering in the asset-stripping field with the invention of the hostile takeover; later Heath's credit de-regulation
It seems to me that the miners and steel-workers of the early eighties were much the same as ever they were before they were destroyed by Thatcher, but the protective walls had been systematically undermined by finance capitalism.
"I remember the contempt my uncles had for people who chose to live on benefits. What could they, in a South Wales steelworks all their working life, have to teach a politics student about socialism?"
Benefits were always pitifully low, some choice. The collapse in morale resulted from the destruction of the livlihood not from moral collapse; and the destruction of the livlihood was very largely the work of the financial interest.
However agreed about the pernicious influences which hold sway and have been long in their toxic concoction.
There is a helllish alliance between finance capital and the left well summed up in this nauseating piece
"Last night Arsenal, England’s most attractive football team, beat Barcelona, the world’s most attractive football team. In doing so, they delivered a powerful riposte to the many anti-immigrationists in the game who claim that the influx of foreign players is doing untold damage to the prospects of young English players and the English national team"
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/julianastle/100076628/arsenal-an-advertisement-for-immigration/#dsq-content
Just the stuff the left loves
But take a look the sponsers of the thinktank
http://www.centreforum.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=138&Itemid=57
The City of London Corporation
Citi
KPMG
Carousel Capital
Nice
"But nearly as important to capitalists is that a religiously and ethnically divided working class is much less likely to combine effectively against them - there are so many fault lines to exploit."
True, and more to the point a national resistance of the type we are now seeing and have seen in Eastern Europe is precluded; so salvation, if it is at all achieveable, must come a paradoxical way
"No it ain't. British society's crisis has rarely never been deeper in our history - but meanwhile the capitalists are filling their boots - while there's still stuff left to loot. Remember, they're 60s children too. All that really matters is right now."
Are you not yourself falling victim to anti-baby boomer propaganda here Laban?
Thatcher, Keith Joseph, Lawson et all whatever else were not boomers.
There have been a rash of blame-the-boomers-article but it seems to me that they are just as manipulative as the pro-immigration article I linked to above.
The guilty will always deflect blame
The guilty are banksters and left-liberals and commies
Interesting site about a Battle of Britain Hurricane squadron
Terrible, tragic losses - bounced by far superior German fighters the Hurricane's cockpit was soon turned into a blow torch
"The next day we flew another two sorties, during which S/Ldr Starr was killed. The following day S/Ldr Gleave was very badly burned. Early in September Bell-Salter and Sgt Metham were both shot down, injured and hospitalised. We had lost both our C.O.s so Bill Cambridge was now acting C.O. P/O Clifton was killed shortly afterwards and L C Murch was shot down uninjured. On 4 Sept F/O Trueman was killed; on 5 September Samolinski was shot down but uninjured; on Sept 6 Bill Cambridge was killed; on Sept 9 F/O Watts was shot down but unhurt; Sept 14 Sgt Higgins was killed; Sept 20 P/O Barton was wounded and Sgt Innes shot down but unhurt; Sept 26 P/O Samolinski was killed and F/Lt Edge, who had taken over as C.O., was shot down and injured; Sept 29 P/O Graves and Sgt Edgely were both injured; Oct 10 Sgt Allgood was killed; Oct 11 P/O Murch was injured; Oct 15 Sgt Key was shot down but unhurt, as was P/O Novak; and so it went on."
http://www.battleofbritain1940.net/greenwood/story-01.html
And for what?
"I feel extreme emotional sadness for the young men I knew that gave their lives willingly for a cause in which we all believed. And I often say to myself now if those young boys would come down now and walk through the villages, through the towns and through the cities and look around and see what is happening to us, they would say somewhere along the line we have been betrayed."
Alex Henshaw
We would have done better to cut a deal as the aristocracy and the Royal Family wanted - the King's Speech is the usual propaganda
Laban,
Good piece. I would have added to it a little on the effects of unmandated 'globalisation' that has taken place since the collapse of Communism; on how, two decades after the event, we can now reflect on how the slump of that ideology on a continental scale enabled some of those who were nominally on our side to show that they were just as unpleasant in their own ways as the Communists had been in theirs. A century from now, the historians might be discussing 1991 as if it were 1848. .
I agree with much of what you say but there is one hole in the piece. You have to account for the effects of Trade Union abuse of power in the 70s. I still remember the man who couldn't get his wife into hospital for her cancer, because the porter was deciding who was and who wasn't seriously enough ill to be admitted. After episodes such as that, how could anyone fail to laugh derisively at all talk of the nobility of the workers and their sacrosanct unions; how could any decent man fail to desire their downfall?
Spot on Laban.
One point I think you could have covered is wealth redistribution from young to old, which is inherent in the mechanics you describe.
Spot on.
I support workers rights especially in the face of modern globalism, but in this story we can't ignore the abuse of Union power which is as much responsible for the loss of British industry as bandit capitalists.
What business in their right mind would have started a large operation in Britain in the 70's in the face of that Union power and aggression, who also effectively controlled a political party.
-
Sgt Troy..
"The guilty are banksters and left-liberals and commies"
Yes, and who are they?
Not my generation, they have little power anyway, not my Grandparents generation, they are not tricked so easily by things like global warming..
Good point Edmund.
We see in these Arab countries that are rebelling that its is in large part because of the demographics of the young is out of proportion to what is considered normal.
Giving the young generation much more power on the street, and politically if they had elections.
In Britain, it was the boomers who had that extra political weight, and they have used it.
Slightly O/T.
Just saw this on Yahoo:
Best British cities for jobs
Aberdeen
Milton Keynes
Reading
Leeds
Bristol
This is most curious as none of these are partcularly noted for their vibrancy and diversity (except maybe Bristol). This being such an important attribute of any forward looking city.
"preached it to the least self-confident and most vulnerable of the working class" Creepy, does Laban know me?! I went to a Uni in NI in the early 80s and looking back it seems like some wierd feverish dream which I glad I'm awake from. I met an Irish communist tankie who filled my head with all this. I lapped it up. Really messed me up. I've been rescued by history (end of communism) and the internet (which allows reasoned right wing opinion to flourish and the critique the left as a phenomenon.) The 30s version of me ended up in a lime pit. I feel like a fool a course but maybe that can help if you face up to it. I actually believed for instance that Hitler's movement was just a fiendish defense of Big Business. This is post war KGB propaganda. From what I can gather the totalitarian movements were all regarded as forms of socialism in the 30s. Solutions to chaos and uncertainty - or just donwright atractive to a humanity tragiclly attacted to bullying per se. I also remember reading an article where the Pol Pot regime and its mass murder were blamed on American bombing in Cambodia - I suppose I thought it drove them all mad or something. As if they did not have their own history full of contradictions and deadly possibiities. You know who wrote that done you? Anyway - it's good to be alive and spring is on its way!
'a religiously and ethnically divided working class is much less likely to combine effectively against them - there are so many fault lines to exploit'.
Hence elite support for the Diversity agenda- a fact which some clued up Leftists have been aware of for years, as this link shows-
http://www.namebase.org/news03.html
Brandt's prediction in 1993-'Ultimately the ruling elites intend nothing less than the Balkanization of the American middle class' applies equally on this side of the pond as well.
"Brandt's prediction in 1993-'Ultimately the ruling elites intend nothing less than the Balkanization of the American middle class' applies equally on this side of the pond as well" -
aka Hindification, the process of turning a small, well-governed country like the UK into a large, poorly-governed one like India. When the Blairs went to India, Tony turned himself out in a Nehru jacket, while Cherie donned a sari. Unless my cultural antennae are failing me, an Old Fettesian in a Nehru jacket still looks like an Old Fettesian; yet it is with thay way of doing things, that level of gap between rich and poor, that degree of social immobility, that Blair seemed to identify - instead of remembering that he's a tax inspector's son from Stepps.
One could also call it Xenofication, the process of turning the country you come from into a foreign one.
Don't forget that the beer and sandwiches mentality is alive and well; instead of Wilson entertaining union barons in No. 10, it's Mandy having champagne and caviar with Nat and Oleg.
Why are miners and other strikers exempt from the requirement to shoulder their own burdens for the sake of social cohesion? The fact is after the NUM made Britain ungovernable for the Conservatives under Edward Heath, the social compact was already broken. Margeret Thatcher was not about to fold over, she may have overreacted and the monetarists may have screwed industry over, but don't let the so-called working class off the hook. The story of the decline of Britain is like the Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone had a role in it.
Ivan
"I still remember the man who couldn't get his wife into hospital for her cancer, because the porter was deciding who was and who wasn't seriously enough ill to be admitted. After episodes such as that, how could anyone fail to laugh derisively at all talk of the nobility of the workers and their sacrosanct unions; how could any decent man fail to desire their downfall?"
A single anecdote is not sufficient to justify the destruction of industry and community across parts of Britain.
If you were a patriot, then you'd be concerned about the well-being of all your countrymen, and not just ones like yourself.
Neo-Marxism and economic neo-liberalism complement each other quite nicely these days:
http://mariatheproblem.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/neo-liberalism-meets-neo-marxism/
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