Ed Miliband, class traitor

Ed Miliband also likes cuts, and won't promise them reversed. He uses the exact same rhetorical strategy of divide-and-rule as his toady Balls (and if you're a toady to Ed Miliband, I feel sorry for you) by presenting it as a choice between 'protecting jobs or... pay rises'.

Wherefore see my earlier post on Balls, substituting Miliband's name where appropriate.

Ed Balls, class traitor

Ed Balls is a class traitor. He's accepting that 'we are going to have keep all these cuts'. He's using the government's language of 'pay restraint' when discussing the effective public sector pay cuts in addition to job losses that the Tories are imposing. He's attempting to play workers against each other by creating a false dichotomy between 'higher pay and bringing unemployment down'. In the conflict between the government and the working class, he's positioned the Labour Party firmly in the enemy camp.

Some people don't get upset with Labour anymore because they've come to expect this. I think the reason this sort of betrayal still angers me - the reason it still feels like betrayal at all - is that the Labour Party was founded to be the political arm of the working class, to fight capital and get a fair deal for the great majority, whereas both the Liberals and the Tories have always been bourgeois parties. In capturing Labour, the odious neoliberal flunkeys of the Balls-Miliband variety have turned a weapon of the working class against it.

There are many among the Labour rank and file who are actively fighting cuts and working within the movement against austerity. Balls is betraying them, too. The old Blairite instincts of the party oligarchy are alive and well. We can't count on the Labour Party leadership - and if not now, will they ever be on the right side? There is no parliamentary opposition, and that means there isn't actually any politics left within parliament. But there have been, and will be, marches, strikes and occupations. We will fight, and we will win.

As for Balls, don't say that he's hypocritical - say rather that he's apolitical.

#Nov30 in Nottingham

Today was an important day for the fightback against 'austerity', with two million public sector workers out on strike all over the country. It was a lovely late autumn day, cold but clear and sunny. We got up at an ungodly hour, by student standards, to support our lecturers on the picket lines around University Park Campus.

We put up posters, held placards and posted pickets on all nearby paths. Picketing an open campus is a little tricky: many of the cars going past you will be private sector contractors, who are not on strike, and students may be going in for more than one reason. Still, we encouraged all who came to turn back, go to the pub etc.: some did and were cheered for it. We got quite a lot of declarations of solidarity from passers-by, but really the old principle that you never cross a picket line needs to be reinstated. (I hope this will happen as the struggle against the government broadens and continues.)

There were tight-lipped managers in Jaguars, too, and scabs who would try to avoid looking you in the eye as they drove past. (We generally didn't denounce them as vigorously as I've seen happen at the 2009 Royal Mail strikes, for example.) Shortly after 10am, we packed up and walked to Forest Recreation Ground, where the trade union march was gathering.

It was a terrific march, certainly the largest I've been on in Nottingham. There were people from more unions I've ever seen outside the TUC March for the Alternative, including unions not commonly associated with protest and industrial action, like the Royal College of Nursing. The local Labour Party branches were there, too, reminding us that Labour is not just the spinelessness of an Ed Miliband. As in March, there were people from all sections of society, including many with children. We marched down Mansfield Road, through the city centre and Market Square (past the occupiers, with whom there was much fraternising) before gathering in Wellington Circus.

The atmosphere was amazing. No march I've been on has ever experienced quite so much support from the general public, I think: drivers honked and raised their fists, people young and old clapped and shouted. I don't want to exaggerate this, but polling data suggests the government has pretty much lost the argument on job losses and cuts to services. The Tories and their LibDem running dogs mishandled the conflict from the start, managing to create a broad front between smaller, more militant and larger, more conciliatory unions. The challenge to the anti-cuts movement is to maintain and expand the front that's been created, and keep pressing the most reactionary government since Caligula until victory.

Ed Miliband: cowardly man trapped between two different forms of cowardice

Ed Miliband spoke at TUC Congress today. While much of his speech was crowd-pleasing, Miliband refused to budge on a central point. 'While negotiations were going on, I do believe it was a mistake for strikes to happen [he said in reference to the 30 June walkouts]. I continue to believe that. But what we need now is meaningful negotiation to prevent further confrontation over the autumn.'

Well, that sounds familiar, since it's the only statement available to Miliband in recent months. Apparently he's still not impressed by the argument, eloquently made by Mark Serwotka back in June, that the 'negotiations' are a sham. Mary Bousted reiterated the basic point: 'Just for information, the government are not prepared to negotiate. All they are prepared to do is negotiate how to implement the changes they have decided. There are no real negotiations going on. We can give you chapter and verse about that.' This sort of fake 'consultation' favoured by managerial types is well known to anyone who's ever been involved in conflict with our rulers.

The real kick, however, came during questions, when Miliband outlined his idea of what trade unions should be. Highlighting the need to increase unionisation in the private sector, he said:

Unions can offer businesses the prospect of better management, better relationships, as you did during the recession. Of course the right to industrial action will be necessary, as a last resort. But in truth, strikes are always the consequence of failure. Failure on all sides. Failure we cannot afford as a nation. Instead, your real role is as partners in the new economy.

This phony 'vision' for trade unions is quite familiar to me. I've been involved in negotiations with employers, and that's what they want unions to be: 'partners' helping them realise their aims. Channels of communication. Enablers. Miliband is parroting the rhetoric of Thatcherism, but in nicer-sounding New Labour packaging. Unions aren't useless relics, they can help the capitalists realise their profits! Let's all pull together! Unions should reject Miliband's patronising notion that they can be 'partners in the new economy'. To reiterate a basic point New Labour has always pretended not to grasp, workers and employers are locked in an antagonistic relationship, and a refusal to recognise that means surrender to the business owners.

Miliband topped it off with the beautiful reassurance that trade unions were a 'huge asset' to the Labour movement, adding that '[t]hey should never ever feel like passive or unwanted members of our movement. I want them to feel part of it.' Well, that's nice of you, Ed, if a little patronising. But the Labour party was founded to be the political arm of the working class - nothing more, nothing less. Unions are not an 'asset' to Labour: they are what Labour is about, or else the party is nothing. Despite his assurances to the contrary, it hardly seems that Miliband has any plans to reverse New Labour's efforts to subjugate the unions.

You might say that Miliband is caught between a rock and a hard place. He must at least pay lip service to trade union struggles; at the same time he's afraid of what the gutter press will do to him if he appears to openly challenge the neoliberal settlement. (And maybe there are actual political convictions in there somewhere: he never appears to believe what he says, but who really knows?) But this is not the time to be concerned with popularity. Miliband's fear reveals that he is not interested in the wellbeing of the working class, but in his political fortunes and, more broadly, those of his party: and that points to a politician who has seriously lost his way.

I, for one, welcome our Tory overlords

Lord Mandelson famously said that Labour was relaxed about people 'getting filthy rich'. Ed Miliband went further, declaring that 'I'm not just relaxed about you getting rich, I applaud you' and excising that nasty world 'filthy'. That's all very well, but there's one problem: it doesn't go far enough. So here's my humble attempt at an ode that does justice to the glory of the rich.

Miliband praised those who 'generate wealth [and] create jobs'. Indeed. Where would we be without the rich? How would we procure the basic necessities of life? I daresay there would be no wealth, no food, no resources: I fear we should starve to death. Society would fall into ruins. Anarchy would reign. Think of Africa, for example. As the admired British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, Africa had no history, only 'the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe'. It was the rich that brought Africa into world history and sacrificed much to civilise the natives. But did they show proper gratitude? Far from it. It is no wonder Africa has fallen back into barbarity.

For delivering us from this fate we owe a debt of gratitude to the wealthy. They labour day and night doing God's work, and that for very little reward: for what are the baubles the rich are content with compared to the dignity of spirit, that inner light possessed by the poor? What's more, when they have worked hard as entrepreneurs, many go on to sacrifice their twilight years selflessly serving the community as politicians and lobbyists, while the rest of us enjoy our gold-plated pensions.

But that's not all. The Good Book says that the meek will inherit the earth, that a man may lose his soul yet gain the whole world, and that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. That means that the rich are freely forfeiting their salvation and giving up their place in the Kingdom for you, willing that none that believe in them should perish but have flat screen TVs. Greater love hath no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

 Yes, it's true. Our Tory overlords love us. David Cameron loves you. George Osborne loves you. Nick Clegg loves you most of all, and his heart bleeds when he sees you weary and heavy laden under national debt. That's why they're removing benefits: they love you too much to let you waste your life watching daytime television. We have relied on their generosity too much, and their cross has become too heavy to bear. The financial crisis is nothing but the wealthy stumbling under the weight of their work for us. They only ask that we help them a little, take some of their heavy load, as Simon of Cyrene did for Our Lord. Is that too much to ask?

Think about this the next time you wrongfully covet the goods of the rich. David Cameron was raised for this moment. Since childhood he was prepared to see his life poured out for us. When you grumble, when you kick against the pricks, you are only hurting yourself. Not for me wanton rebellion and lawlessness. I love our government.

The 'feral underclass' in ancient Rome

During social conflicts around debt in the early Roman Republic, the patricians were split between conciliating the plebeians and a more robust approach:

[N]aturally harsh as he was, and rendered even more uncompromising by the hatred of the commons and the fervid support of the nobility, [Appius Claudius] roundly declared that the mob had nothing whatever to complain of: the disturbances were not due to their sufferings but to their disregard for law and order; they were not angry - for they had nothing to be angry about: they were merely out of hand. That, he continued, was the natural consequence of the right of appeal: the appeal had destroyed consular authority; for now that the law allowed an appeal to those who were equally guilty, the consuls could never act - only threaten.
-Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.30 (in The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose:

This is criminality, pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated. (David Cameron)

I've dealt with plenty of civil disobedience in my time, but the riots in August shocked me to the core. What I found most disturbing was the sense that the hardcore of rioters came from a feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism. Equally worrying was the instinctive criminal behaviour of apparently random passers-by. (Ken Clarke)

I don't doubt that the Cameroons would now identify some very definite social reasons for rioting in ancient Rome beyond 'disregard for law and order'. But they're Tories, innit: they always accept real social factors a generation after the event. But let's salute them: they've been fighting the corrosive effects of 'liberal dogma' for two and a half millennia. That must take it out of you.

Why I won't condemn the riots

As unexpected as the riots in England's cities were, the response was tediously predictable. Beside the hang-'em-high fulminations of the right-wing press, media consensus from the Guardian to the Telegraph was to deplore 'mindless', 'senseless' violence by 'feral youths', 'thugs', and so on. We're used to this: it's how they've talked about all clashes on Britain's streets since Millbank (and long before that).

The BBC's stance, too, was well-rehearsed. Their reporting was thoroughly on-message, narrowing the issue at stake to 'Is the police response effective or not?' The most distinctive characteristic of such reporting on Tory Britain, however, was that from Diane Abbott to Nigel Farage, anyone who had a microphone shoved in their face was asked to condemn the rioters before anything else.

Those who did not do so with sufficient force ran into trouble with their interviewers, as Darcus Howe found out. It's a test of loyalty: agree with our political elites or become a non-person, an Other as far as the media are concerned. Such ideological rigidity rather gives the lie to our liberal democracy's self-professed openness.

David Starkey's racist comments, on the other hand, were not condemned as vigorously. (Toby Young's incompetent attempt to exonerate Starkey is typical of the 'He wasn't racist' crowd.) I don't think Emily Maitlis gave Starkey a free pass: she challenged him repeatedly. The historian may simply have been ignorant: he confused Jamaican Patois with Textspeak and saw rap as the reason for the riots (one might ask him about the role of rap in 1790s riots).

But there's something more malicious and calculated here. Starkey consistently attempted to racialise the debate, reducing debates about gang culture (valid by themselves) to questions about 'black culture' (and Owen Jones was spot on when he pointed out that by 'white' Starkey meant 'respectable'). Of course, the last forty years have seen a change in the discourse: instead of skin colour the Right now talks about culture, understood as a fixed quality innate to human beings, not a constantly changing process influenced by all sorts of factors, i.e. dialectically. Thus the sign 'culture' still points to the signified 'skin colour', but without embarrassingly blatant racism.

There's the first reason we shouldn't condemn the rioters: the racist vocabulary in which they are being execrated. Starkey is only making explicit what has been implied in much of the condemnation: the rioters are, pardon my Disney, savages, barely even human. Here's Max Hastings's astonishing tirade:

The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame... They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries. They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. (emphasis mine)

Hastings goes on to express regret that looters were not shot, and complains about their antisocial refusal to watch the royal wedding. Disadvantaged young people are constructed as an utterly alien and contemptible Other. This isn't new: the people we now dismiss as 'chavs' were once Burke's 'swinish multitude' and the Victorians' 'vicious, semi-criminal' urban poor. To smear an entire segment of the population as the forces of chaos is hardly ethical.

Secondly, this demonisation both ignores and facilitates neoliberal 'reforms'. The Right initially insisted that any attempt to search for root causes amounted to an endorsement, and with good reason: such a search might uncover that youth club closures left young people with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It might find that 20 per cent of youth and half of young black people are unemployed, or that black people are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white peers. By moralising looting and demonising the young such inconvenient facts can be ignored, while their 'feral' nature can be used to justify the attacks on jobs and services this government is anxious to push through.

Thirdly, the condemners keep bad company. The moralism now echoing through the Commons, from people who cheerfully defrauded the taxpayer, is nought but rank hypocrisy. David Cameron enjoyed smashing private property in his youth. The BNP and EDL racists now coming out of the woodwork to act as Freikorps are using understandable fear and anger to preach a message of hate. Frankly, I don't want to agree with these people on much at all.

Lastly and perhaps controversially, looting shows a response to real injustice, however poorly expressed. I hold that any attack on property is political - it claims that 'this should not belong to you'. What sort of politics this expresses depends on the situation: after all, imperialism or the current looting of the public sector are also attacks on the property of others. But the riots attacked a system in which corporations and the rich running them control the vast majority of human wealth, expropriating and withholding them from the majority. Ultimately, looting is an unhelpful, sporadic, localised response to this general malaise: a much better response would frankly be to expropriate all capital.

In refusing to condemn the riots, let's not fall into the trap of claiming they were not terrifying and destructive to many people, few of them wealthy. It's in the nature of riots that most of the people hurt will be subaltern, not the elites. But that doesn't mean we should collude in demonising the rioters: it means that we should argue for better working-class politics and engage with frustrated young people in building resistance movements. Riots are counter-violence, but ultimately they do little to hurt ruling-class violence. For that, we need revolutionary politcs.

Out-Torying the Tories

David Blunkett, of cursed memory, has just announced that the Labour Party must learn from the recent election results:

We did do extremely well in areas where we were fighting the Liberal Democrats. The challenge however - given the at least temporary demise of the Liberal Democrats across the country - is to take on the Conservatives. Whilst in cities like Sheffield, we had to fight the Lib Dems, we have got to actually win over Tory supporters and non-voters. That's the challenge. There are some very substantial lessons to be learnt if we are going to win in four years' time.

 So Blunkett suggests two priorities: (a) winning over Tory supporters, (b) winning over non-voters. The second is clearly a substantial issue. Labour lost five million voters between 1997 and 2010, the vast majority of them working class. Did these people choose to vote Conservative instead? Hardly; the Conservative vote has not recovered substantially since 1997 (and is in fact in decades-long decline). The majority has, rather, simply stopped voting. So Blunkett is right: the Labour Party, if it wants to get back into power, needs to connect with non-voters. How is it to do this? My suggestion would be to take its own name seriously and actually represent the working class again, to end the abominable situation in which none of the three main parties advocate working-class interests even half-seriously.

But appeal to Tory voters? One is reminded not only of 'Blue Labour', but also of the despicable attempts to appeal to racism during the Blair/Brown years. Not only is this repulsive, it's also pointless: if voters want nasty policies, they'll vote for the Nasty Party, not the semi-skimmed New Labour version. The electoral base of the Tory Party includes groups who are unlikely to ever vote Labour (the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, certain petty-bourgeois layers), although there is of course working-class Tory support. I'd suggest that the only way the Labour vote will recover is to become a genuine social people's party. Yes, the great and the good won't like you anymore; but surely it's worth ending the pathetic Milibandian attempt to be against the cuts, but not too much?

Impressions from London: which side are you on?

I’ve just got back from the great anti-cuts march in London. Estimates of numbers are still confused – the number most often cited is 250,000, although the Guardian claims half a million. One of the most paradoxical aspects of attending a demonstration of this size is that while you’re there, you have no idea what’s happening on a larger scale; it takes leaving and reading the news to gain an impression of the whole. But I thought I should record a few impressions.

 

We got off the Unison coach at Euston and proceeded to ULU where we joined a students’ feeder march. Upon reaching Embankment, where we joined the main march and the trade unionists, the previously tense atmosphere, changed markedly. The mood was one of cheerful defiance as we moved on to Parliament Square and from there to Trafalgar Square. (Being the largest demonstration I’ve ever attended, it was also the slowest.) The news reports will tell you about ‘protesters’, as if these were isolated people; but the overwhelming impression on the ground was that we were with the working class, union banner by union banner. And what banners! We were near the CWU and (massive) RMT contingents most of the time, and they were not alone in having the most fantastic and individual banners for local sections, clearly painstakingly sewn and painted; many were decades old but clearly beloved. I – and as a child of the bourgeoisie I felt like an imposter – was quite overwhelmed by the pride these workers had in their self-organisation, their struggles and their past: many banners referenced the labour tradition. There was great solidarity between the unions as well, a shared sense of having come here to defend working people. When I say ‘working people’, I include teachers and others in accordance with the Marxian tradition – a sense that will hopefully be revived as all who need to work for their living come together to resist the class warfare of this government.

What I mean to say is that there was love: a recognition that public services are an expression of love for one another, and a willingness to smile and talk to total strangers recognised as comrades. Sure, the usual suspects were around: in Hyde Park the CPGB-ML, the CPB, the SWP and the SP had their stalls quite close together. There were plenty of hooded activists, but the day was not about destruction of property (which I do not oppose), unlike the student demonstrations. Instead, it was dominated by this peaceful celebration of the working class. I hope that the march will have helped create a working-class sense of solidarity that goes far beyond any individual cut but recognises the government as attacking working people as a whole. The fight-back must begin in practical terms very soon. There need to be occupations of government buildings and of public spaces, actual disruption of the smooth running of the machinery of power. Defeating the cuts practically is the only way to honour this country’s great tradition of working-class struggles.

Economic apotheosis, with reference to South Park

In the South Park episode ‘Margaritaville’, Randy becomes a preacher, explaining the Great Money Disappearing Event to a rapt audience:

We have become lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of the Economy! There are those who will say that the Economy has forsaken us! Nay! You have forsaken the Economy! And now you know the Economy's wrath! O thoust can shop at a sporting goods store, but knowest thou that the Economy will take away thy Broncos' cap from thine head! Mock the Economy without fear! Thine own stockbrokers... now lie dead by their own hand and thou knowest that thy stockbrokers did not fear the Economy! Well here we are, my friends! You have brought the Economy's vengeance upon yourselves! … We must all wear sheets instead of buying clothes that need detergent! Instead of cars that take gasoline we can get around on llamas from Drake's farm! Instead of video games that take batteries and software, our kids will play with squirrels! We must let the Economy know that we are capable of respecting it! No more needless spending! The Economy is our shepherd. We shall not want.

Modern society, whose elites pride themselves on their rationality, has made ‘the economy’ into a god. Not an ever-kind and smiling one, mind you: this one puts the Greek gods to shame in its fickleness. Economists, who are its priests, cannot predict its actions; governments cannot tame it; its victims must bear its wrath cheerfully as the vengeance of a power beyond comprehension. And yet ‘the economy’ is fundamentally a set of relationships between human beings: it is man-made. Where does this mystification come from?

According to Nicos Poulantzas, the concept of the ‘free labourer’, who owns nothing but his labour power,

generates the relative separation of the State and the economic sphere… a separation which underlies the characteristic institutional framework of the capitalist State, since it maps out the new spaces and respective fields of the State and the economy. This separation of the State and the space of the reproduction of capital is therefore specific to capitalism: it must not be understood as a particular effect of essentially autonomous instances composed of elements that remain constant whatever the mode of production. (State, Power, Socialism, p. 18.)

In feudal society, by contrast, producers owned (that is, lived on and tilled) the land and the tools, so extracting their product involved the direct application of legitimate state violence; and the guy who took away your produce was quite obviously the same person that ruled you politically. I want to suggest, however, that there is a different approach to the question of why ‘the economy’ appears as a thing capable of action in capitalism. The explanation, I think, lies in capitalism’s capacity to produce periodic crises.

We tend to accept as given that economic crises happen; despite the protestations of bankers and politicians, everyone knows that the next crisis is certain. In that environment, it is difficult to remember that internal crisis was simply unknown in feudal society. Since commodity production was only a tiny proportion of overall economic activity, there could be no crisis of overproduction; since finance in the modern sense hardly existed and was only employed by a narrow sector of society, financial crises were also impossible. Crises of confidence could not occur where economic activity was not based on investment and information travelled very slowly, preventing panic. The feudal economy’s need for natural resources was insignificant compared to the enormous appetite of today’s productive sector, and hence no supply crises could occur. Thus internal systemic crisis was impossible as long as capitalism as a mode of production was restricted to a small part of the urban population. The feudal economy was not based on explosive growth, but could exist in equilibrium.

Not, of course, that feudal society was incapable of crisis per se. External crisis not only existed, but could have harrowing consequences. Droughts, floods, excessively cold winters and other natural disasters easily led to famine. The low productive surplus feudalism generated often resulted in large loss of life in such crises. External crises could profoundly affect social relations, of course. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century killed so many English peasants that the position of the remaining peasants vis-à-vis the nobility was immediately strengthened by the shortage of labour power. King Edward III cracked down in 1351, laying down laws to limit peasants’ gains. The Black Death led to a wave of migration to the cities and the creation of opportunities for women, as economic sectors previously monopolised by men opened up because of mass death.

Such crises have much in common with capitalist crises. Both strike suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, and destroy livelihoods and fortunes, leading to a decline in living standards and in many cases to starvation and death (be it directly or indirectly, through ‘structural adjustment’). Both tend to lead to political polarisation and a rise in tension and. Both, in short, rapidly destroy the lives their stunned victims were accustomed to and create a new, much more unpleasant reality. But of course there is a key difference between the two. The sort of crisis that could ravage medieval society was caused by acts of God. Capitalist crisis is man-made: indeed natural disasters tend to create wonderful opportunities for capitalists rather than impoverish them. The former sort of crisis was caused by the mode of production’s vulnerability to external events; the latter kind is inherent in the mode of production itself.

That difference, it seems to me, neatly explains how ‘the economy’ became a sphere of life quite distinct from others – politics and everyday life. The inexplicable natural disasters that befell medieval society were attributed to God; but since, at least officially, economic life is man-made and God has no hand in it, he cannot be held responsible. The system can inflict punishment all by itself. Thus begins ‘the economy’s’ reign of terror as it smites its terrified victims. We must propitiate the economy and treat it well, or expect awesome vengeance.

Of course, in reality ‘the economy’ is an abstraction from sets of social relations, productive and commercial. Mystification, the elevation of the abstraction into a godlike being (alienation), serves dominant interests because it denies individuals’ and classes’ specific roles and responsibilities. Blame the bankers? Not if Bob Diamond has anything to do with it. Failure is an orphan, and when crisis strikes it can only be ‘the economy’ that somehow malfunctioned. Economic crises become as natural as the seasons rather than being, as they should be, associated with a particular form of society – one that can be overcome.

The non-existence of ‘the economy’ in pre-modern society also points us to what will happen to this strange god if an alternative form of life is attempted. For, as people begin to take control of their own lives, as the profit motive is removed, production is for use rather than profit and crisis disappears, ‘the economy’ will lose its dreadful power and, like all false gods, will wither away.

Julian Glover and the Thatcherite Left

The Guardian commentariat is divided into two groups: left-wingers of all shapes and colours on the one hand, and ‘progressive’ pro-European liberals on the other. It’s no secret where my sympathies lie, and so I must turn to the second group: for there we have, among many well-meaning, idealistic people, others who, having drunk deep at the well of Thatcherism, evince some very unpleasant tendencies.

Take Julian Glover. Glover often writes news items, but he’s also a fairly regular commentator, and not one you’d suspect of being ‘loony left’. ‘Smearing Labour’s new leader, a decent man, as Red Ed will backfire on his critics’, Glover warned upon Ed Miliband’s election, which was of a ‘peculiar and undemocratic nature’. In there, you have all the instinctive suspicion some ‘progressives’ harbour towards socialism and the labour movement: if Ed is a decent man, he obviously can’t be red. Those trade union crazies, it seems, are beyond the pale of common human decency. ‘Progressives’ draw up a political spectrum which, in including the wealthy and educated and excluding the working class, reveals their elitist nature.

Glover went further in this delightful piece: ‘The left should recognise that equality is undesirable’. His argument runs like this: life isn't fair. ‘[F]air opportunity in a liberal society’ (‘equality of opportunity’, that old Blairite watchword) does ‘not produce equal outcomes’. People are different, you see. ‘Life is an erratic blend of luck, ability and effort. We should encourage effort and hope for ability, and try to minimise dependence on luck. But we are fooling ourselves if we think we can eradicate inequality.’

There is an unacknowledged right-wing framework to all this, and before I lay out what is hopefully a more persuasive account of ‘opportunity’ and ‘outcomes’, let's take that framework apart. I can think of no better place to start than Glover’s own sub-heading: ‘It sounds horribly rightwing [sic], but a fair society may be one in which people have the right to strive for inequality.’

‘It sounds horribly rightwing’: Glover, of course, wants you to take his argument as something a ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ person can accept. But he's also, in advance, trying to belittle his opponents by using that word ‘horribly’, which suggests they are stuborn creatures of tradition. Enlightened inequality against the proles' ‘yuck’ reaction!

A ‘fair society’: as Glover himself points out, ‘fair’ is a popular word with politicians because you can use it to describe almost anything, projecting warm fuzziness all the while – unlike ‘equal’. ‘People’: there's the mindset of the atomised individual who ‘strives’ (yet to come!) for various things, possibly competing with others, but not working in a larger, constraining framework. ‘The right to... ’: and now the game is surely up, for that’s the language of big business: ‘free market’, ‘economic freedom’, ‘the right of management to manage’. The right always tries to paint accumulation as the exercise of freedom. ‘Strive for inequality’: there’s that word ‘strive’, which paints the capitalist’s accumulation of profits as an heroic quest. But in the phrase ‘strive for inequality’, Glover’s failure – wilful or otherwise - to comprehend inequality reveals itself, and that failure concedes the entire argument to the Right. Think in their terms – as too many nominally on the Left do – and it’s not surprising you end up with their conclusions.

It turns out that life isn’t really the way Glover imagines. In his mind, human beings are race horses: some will turn out to be faster and more successful than others, thanks to that ‘erratic blend of luck, ability and effort’, and to the victor go the spoils. (A left-wing government to Glover’s liking would presumably attempt to level the playing field – make sure all horses stand the same chance at the outset.) That view – some are just luckier, better and more hard-working than you and me – flatters the rich immensely. They rather like thinking of themselves that way, either as hard-working success stories or, as your Richard Bransons and Alan Sugars go, as big bad predators who out-competed the plebs. But this narrative conveniently forgets the most fundamental fact of capitalism, namely class.

Class in capitalist society means that a few people own and control what is needed to produce society's wealth – machines and factories (industrial capital), but also communications, infrastructure, financial institutions etc. The majority of the population – the working class – operates these means of production to produce goods and services, from cars and microwaves to wireless broadband, in return for a wage from the owner of the means of production – that is, they sell their labour power. The capitalist then sells the finished products on the market for a profit. Everything is owned by the employer, but nothing would be produced without the labour of the many.

Who produces social wealth: the corporations? No, it is the working class. If no-one worked (if no labour power was expended), the means of production would be useless, nothing would be produced and sold, and the capitalist would be deprived of his profit. That is, it is the work of the majority of the population that makes the rich rich. Note that the reverse is not true: if the capitalist class was relieved of its power there can be no suggestion that all production would immediately cease, although we would need to imagine new ways of administering and coordinating economic life.

The bourgeoisie (let’s call a spade a spade, in the manner of the Deputy Prime Minister) may have become the capitalist class through ‘luck, ability and effort’, but once there they retain their position through the work of the many, enforced by the institutions of the state. There is no level playing field, nor can there be one so long as private property exists. The class system reproduces itself as people are born into ‘their’ class, grow up in their neighbourhoods, attend their schools and begin working in the jobs available to their class. The capitalist gets richer as he siphons off the value created by the workers, who take home a very small share of the social product (just how small is negotiated through trade union class struggle).

So I just thought I’d set the record straight. There is no capitalism without class, and class means that a few rule while many labour. The rich aren’t more successful, ruthless, lucky, able: they're just in a position to reap the benefits of others' work. It’s nonsense to demand the ‘right to strive for inequality’. People are not atomised individuals ‘competing’ with each other - they're engaged in a set of very definite social relations, a class system that holds the many down to enrich the few. Under capitalism, there can be no wealth without poverty. Time to break the structure up, eh?