Grandpa:
Rjan:
The truth of what we’re talking about is centre-right liberals. …
It’s a combination of both left and right. Cameron and Corbyn are both political opposites, but both are remainers.
Corbyn may have run a party that was predominantly Remain, but there’s little evidence that he himself is.
I think a lot of what you go on to describe, and attribute to Corbyn, is actually the continued influence of the right of the party.
The increased competition and resulting stagnant wages is a consequence of policy failure and a by-product of equality.
It’s like I said, it’s not that social liberalism or social equality is the cause of falling wages. It’s that the centre-right - best personified by Blair and Cameron - indulge every equality except class equality. Their real agenda is to fight hard against the class politics which Labour traditionally represents, and one of their methods of doing so is to placate every other demand by oppressed minorities.
Like I say, this has several effects. Firstly, the oppressed minorities are pacified by having their major or most salient demands met - they may still be poor, maybe even getting poorer, but they are unlikely to attack the party which is genuinely trying to address their subordinate social status. The classic example is women’s rights.
Secondly, as I say, it enlarges the labour market, and creates more flexibility for capitalist exploitation. For the woman, the gay, the black, or the Irish native, again this is good news, against the prejudice and exclusion they were previously subject to, but of course it’s the best news for the bosses, because it means fresh meat.
I think your idea is that these oppressive relations must be restored in order to increase wages. But that wasn’t what increased wages in the first place. It was solidarity and class politics - amongst white men perhaps, but that’s because white men were traditionally the only ones in the labour market, they weren’t engaged in keeping their black neighbours down or out of the workplace, before the 1950s most people just didn’t have black neighbours.
And men were only loosely keeping women out of the workplace - the demands of family life, of child-rearing and homemaking, meant that most women simply wouldn’t have had the time or energy to work full-time on top, especially in heavy industry. It was middle class women, who had servants to perform the drudge work at home, who were the main ones who were excluded from the workplace, despite having the time and energy to so so which working class women largely didn’t.
And the stronger you fight against these minorities, not only do you break solidarity, but you provide the distraction from class politics on which the centre-right depend for their strategy.
Ironically, the capitalists who favoured the exploitation of mass-immigrant labour didn’t realize until too late that the result of increased labour competition to drive up profits have now sent many bankrupt as they now also compete against each other.
Indeed, although it is probably a mistake to assume that the capitalist class always spoke with one voice in favour of immigration, or that they weren’t aware of its dual possibilities (in that it not only forces down wages, but potentially enables their worst competitors to force down wages most, and disrupt the stability of the whole marketplace and their place within it).
The leftist politicians found that their policy of open borders and identity politics at the expense of the working class has almost destroyed them. It was always going to end this way.
I think at the heart of the matter, the problem for some left liberals is that they largely recognise that it’s important to avoid breaking solidarity with each other, but in the process they’ve become infected largely with the logic of centre-right liberalism that borders must be open, and that it is a step towards “internationalism” (when EU market liberalism is nothing of the sort).
I read a good article recently:
americanaffairsjournal.org/2018 … n-borders/
