How Do We Understand the Right?

[Music] yay [Music] actually all genuinely all excellent uh so it's great to be able to talk about how we can understand uh and as you've probably noticed the rights of a bit of a authoritarian hegemonic binge but thankfully we've got keystarma to it would be funny if it wasn't so unbelievably catastrophic a lot of people on the left believe that universal suffrage would lead to an inevitable socialist a government that would represent the class interests of our social majority now as you've probably noticed that did not actually happen and the conservative party is the most successful electoral force on the face of the earth as it is because lord salisbury a former conservative prime minister who opposed universal suffrage as many did uh fearing the obvious social consequences to the left uh had embraced he said that um mobs will not elect first-class men and who surprised the vine that over a third of manual labour's in his time voted consistently for the conservative party including interestingly at the time in working-class conservative readouts uh holdouts like liverpool which was a big sense of working-class conservatism in glasgow though often for secretary reasons now as i say you know democracy in which josephus on the left would which is obviously a very small sliver of the overall electorate they depend their political victory on securing a significant amount of support from those whose economic interests one would imagine it is not to vote for the conservative party we've seen the concern about how it metamorphosizes how it constantly shifts and adapts um after world war ii they were felt compelled to accept the post-war consensus the so-called social democratic consensus in which labor secured more political and social power in the aftermath of world war ii partly because of the fear of revolution um and the conservatives until the seventies accepted that consensus then of course again let's morph the size into factorism with an all-out assault on many of the games won by the labour movement and um encapsulated in that possible settlement and today after the course of the cameron of high austerity with social liberalism of a very limited degree uh gay rights but also lots of racism can't be airbrushed out of existence we see in poland and hungary a very authoritarian racist right which is hollowing out the substance of democracy of liberal democracy and that and many of those trends you can witness in this country uh as well very interesting facts which uh i often talk about myself uh this age divide which is often spoken about as though it's always been like this of course the younger left wing and then the university of life scores them and they become high roads and they shift to the right when actually in 1983 thatcher won a big league amongst 80 to 24 year olds the young uh were very much reagan they were one of the most pro-regular demographics in the united states in the mid-80s 1968 it was older americans who the most anti-vietnam war is young americans in the most pro-vietnam war including the majority of people who went to university at the time so this big age divide that opened up in 2017 and 2019 in this country in which even in 2019 after the disastrous election result uh more people aged 80 to 24 voted later than even in 2017 so we've seen that big divide over and there's lots of things which obviously throughout the history of british conservatives which we'll talk about on this panel racism uh the aliens act of 1905 when the tories introduced anti-migrant legislation then targeting uh jewish refugees and migrants from eastern europe and again that theme continues the backlash against the claims of minorities for justice liberation equality and security often called the culture war uh dividing the attempt to exploit divisions in the working class which obviously many divisions those uh part who are unemployed goes in full-time work urban and so on those divisions how they're exploited the role of the media the play things most of them in this country because of corporate elites whose interests it is to defend the existing social order and again you can see throughout history how the media have used their position in order to fight back against attempts to redistribute wealth and poundless couldn't she famous exactly the 1920s for example there's an over letter when a faked letter uh suggesting the labour party was complicit in an international revolution unfortunately they weren't at the time and so there's a lot of things which our brilliant panel uh are going to talk about now what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna i'm gonna introduce the panel and they're gonna each do a talk and then i'm gonna bring you all in and then the panel are gonna come back so i'll introduce them right beginning uh richard seymour who is an absolutely fantastic writer and his stuff i read religiously and i'm sure many many of you do and do you subscribe on he's got a brilliant uh patreon where he does so much brilliant works do you support that give a big round wrestler in fact absolutely brilliant work on a whole range of issues and not least of course on race and which is not actually pretty tall today so give a big uh the brilliant scholar sociologist at tom hills i feel very sorry for every time i want to talk about the media often i just harass tom uh for quotes for information uh he's one of the best experts that we possibly have on the role of the media to structure the media the role that the media plays in our society to give him a big round of applause and that's not what least my compagniero my steamed comrades they bring in which i'm very very excited about by the way which i think she might mention and you've all got to buy it it's called minority rule so i'm really surprised [Music] [Music] okay so i've got seven to ten minutes i've got a speech written out i'm going to read it um it's going to start off sounding a bit boring but then it will get more and more depressing and doom later as we get to speech so do bear with me okay what does the right do what is the right the right looks for ways to restore hierarchy by democratic means it is a reaction to the arrival of the masses in history which acknowledges that the masses are not leaving history if you listen to tucker carlson's reaction on fox news to the taliban's win in afghanistan he speculated that perhaps the 6th century had defeated the 21st century because the people of afghanistan did not want gender studies symposia they think their masculinity is toxic they like the patriarchy and some of the women like it too and now they're getting it all back he said with a palpable note of longing for the sixth century maybe john the u.s was defeated because what he called the neoliberal program of equal rights is a joke grotesque against human nature and fails to answer our deepest human desires so what are our deepest human desires presumably desires for hierarchy the pleasures of protection and being protected the pleasures of dominance and submission the pleasures of knowing one's place and putting others in theirs pleasures of being raised above the ordinary run of humanity even in one's subordination of not being mediocre or worthless these desires are unevenly distributed and unevenly valued when carlson says as an afterthought that some of their women like it too it's clearly indicating a hierarchy of human worth some desires matter less than others and the right wants to keep it that way so in this struggle the rights only conceptual invention was the concept of race almost everything else including nationalism was appropriated from liberalism on the left the idea of race is erected as a defense against the abyss of equality reactionaries fear that a society without hierarchy is a mishmash to use the term of apartheid intellectual dietary chronie a pulpy mass of an impoverishment of being hierarchy they think is the cellular organic and skeletal structure that prevents disintegration race in this sense keeps the idea of hierarchy alive in a democratic age it promises those at the bottom if they are in the white minority they share in mastery if it works it elevates them spiritually now it doesn't always work cronier was writing at a time when he feared that black and white south african workers were becoming too similar and might begin to feel too similar the whites as david starkey might put it were becoming black hence the need for apartheid what do projects like apartheid achieve wab du bois famously uh described the social and psychological wage of whiteness but it's important to recognize that this wasn't just you know money or social respect it included something darker the right of vicious whites to murder and mutilate for recreation this is a story of civilization and its discontents and freud writing on the eve of the great depression asked why so many people seem to despise civilization and he suggested that despite its rewards it really lasts too much of us it forces us to control our aggression and our sexuality which is what makes us alive to the point where we become miserably neurotic and so he said if the loss is not made good economically you can be sure of disturbances and as a jewish man in europe he knew what he was talking about he neglected to discuss among the sources of civilized misery work the single biggest source of stress the thief of leisure and libido and life expectancy and not just work actually importantly in this context hierarchy it's working for others the white hole studies on workplace stress busted what once was a pro a prevalent myth that managers bearing the greatest responsibility were the most stressed out on their jobs as it turned out they were in fact relaxed confident in control at home in their world the stress and the associated physical symptoms increased the further you went down the chain working-class people tend for this reason to have longer adrenal glands hierarchy is a killer the worldly confidence and stability of the bosses is bought at the expense of years of life taken from those at the bottom what's particularly legal about hierarchy is it can always fall further down the great chain of being now neoliberalism by intensifying inequality also increase the cost of failure it makes the downward plunge that bit steeper as the sociologist th marshall suggested in his analysis of class resentment we become aware of ourselves through comparison with others we have this anxious status checking death by a thousand social comparisons as the psychologist oliver james once put it by producing an emulous and sadistic culture of winners and losers neoliberalism also makes the slide more toxic more humiliating so carson stupidly reviled the neoliberal program as an egalitarian project it's actually more that it's unconsciously nihilistic and jessica white's work on neoliberalism shows us that it is intensely moralistic about family values christianity and western civilization so it's committed to certain moral hierarchies as well as economic hierarchies but if you think about neoliberalism what is its big goal it doesn't have one it is committed to what raymond williams called a willed and deliberate unknown in which the defining farcic factor is advantage to us of what neoliberalism considers tribalist and pre-modern notions of equality it teaches us to see ourselves as competitive risk-taking capitalist betting on the market thus uniquely responsible for a faith that we have no control over but it also teaches us that loadable goals like public service and freedom from what are actually the hypocritical cover stories of power maximizers and parasites it teaches us universal competition and therefore that anyone could stick the knife in the air of neoliberalism is as adam costco suggests as thick with demons as that of the medieval and early modern age of apocalyptic expectancy in witch hunts neoliberalism is generalized paranoia its motto could be they're all out to get you and this paranoia turns lethal turns to witch hunts when millions risk being plunged into the abyss of social being below them all evidence shows that the right recruits not from those at the bottom of society but from those just a little bit above the bottom of the pile the lower middle class the downwardly mobile recently affluent which is most of the capital hill rioters um and slightly better off workers the little man of whom wilhelm wright wrote enslaved craving authority but also rebellious these people are terrified of the void and the right harnesses humiliation insecurity misery and existential dread to a war against white extinction or what they call white genocide it uses class to speak of whiteness the white working class who are notably not exploited but betrayed because their whiteness ostensibly gave them honor and respect until woke elites stole it reaction promises to restore that ontological dignity to restore the dwindling wages of whiteness so in this context what do we say about the red baiting of the right the anti-communism without communism is this just a decorous envelope for their racism no it isn't it's the other way about in rightist ideology communism is the name of the abyss the pulpy mass of it destroys hierarchies that they think are precious to social being under the cover of democracy republicanism or these days gender ideology it reduces white humanity as race theorists lock up studdard feared to the level of beasts and thus destroys civilization the racism is not concealed by the anti-communism rather the racism justifies the anti-communism to give you an example in hitler's early speeches against communism he explained to german workers why they shouldn't seize the wealth of the capitalists he said that the workers had been seduced the jews he claimed had sold them a stupid illusion of equality he said they the workers wouldn't know what to do with this wealth so it would all inevitably flow back to their jewish seducers anti-semitism reconciled violent anti-communism with the supposed material interests of patriotic workers and we think about this when people who claim to speak up for the white working class also oppose any policy that would make their lives any better except they do offer something and it's not immaterial and it is if you're involved in it thrilling william davies in the happiness industry defines the modern experience of depression as a generalized collapse of desire but unable to want anything depression is becoming one of the most pervasive illnesses in late capitalism and the happiness industry that davies describes offers you mindfulness training cbt and pills to stifle your complaints the new right revives desire as a desire to no one's place and to secure it by destroying a neighbor the adventure of selective de-civilization the air is thick with demons and it names them and insofar as this is a bourgeois product project it trusts the state to pulverize these enemies insofar as it is incipient fascism it raises lynch mobs to crush them in india anti-muslim pogroms in the philippines duterte's death squads in the united states malicious hunting for antifa the subtlety of reaction is to understand the material interest can include more than bread to be freed a little from the constraints of civilization to be recognized even if by a master to be erratically electrified by the same master to be permitted a certain amount of aggression by the same master to have one's destructive energy or death drivers for it called it not shamed but socially rewarded these satisfactions go under the heading of enjoyment and that is a form of material interest that the right knows how to cultivate and manipulate we ignore the question of enjoyment at our peril we can't either run away from our own destructive energy not when there are injustice injustices that need to be destroyed we can't hope to bypass the question of enjoyment by dangling economic rewards more bread or moralizing about civility or claiming to parliamentary protocol or i don't know scolding relatively powerless people about privilege on social media the strategic question is how to provoke what freud called the death drive without it turning murderous and without it destroying the things that we value because the prefigurative politics of kindness that jeremy corbyn used to talk about is powerless without it brilliant richard never misses um now garga's got this brilliant book recently empire's end game and uh that part explores how racial nationalist forms of thinking have proved so powerful for the right in constructing a hegemonic political coalition so it could not be more topical so please give a big round of applause and hear from gagi [Music] oh god sorry oh [Music] i should just say about the wrestling thing that um my employer in our recent long-standing dispute which is not over yet and they've sucked some of my colleagues and they're still trying to suck me and others has complained about um the physical threats that they feel just from union reps being alive in the world i think so you should always go out if you've ever seen me or any of my colleagues and say yeah they look like they could beat the out of you whatever your optics might really tell you i'm also apologize that once again i always feel i've done the wrong exam prep because i'm going to talk about why i think we shouldn't be transfixed by the spectra of race when we think about the right and i hope you'll understand why i'm saying that as i go on and there's also already i think a thing about when we talk about the right i think we're quite accustomed to thinking of the right as a street army i made a note a very rude note when richard was talking about how i wasn't interested anymore in the fantasy of the lump and white male but that isn't how i'm interested in us thinking about the right i'm much more interested in thinking about how the right is i think very very effectively changing what political possibility is for nearly all of us including us in this room and let us first think about how we do our politics and i hope i'll explain why i think that the writer getting a kind of edge on us that they're getting in our heads too and that kind of matters um [Music] both the right in its hegemonic kind of state formations and in its street kicking formations depends very deeply on a kind of anti-democratic impulse some of our impulse relates to the things that richard has just spoken about about the desire to feel something the desire to be taken the desire to be taken care of the desire for an authority that feels like it can have a glamour and meaningfulness in your life again and all of that even if we kind of smoke at it it's dangerous because it speaks so very very effectively to what people feel they want and i think now as a moment then it's you know we on the left can't anymore be kind of superior about that longing for an effective authority because if the pandemic has done anything it's shown how deeply that longing for someone to come and do things right do things right take authority take control is absolutely embedded in our people as well and ourselves not for stupid reasons but for reasons that will still have dangerous consequences for us of course for a long long time and still now a dangerous racist exclusionary politics has been the most easily available language of that kind of longing for authority show your power by doing it to them show that i'm human by saying how not human they are i'm not completely sold on the hierarchy idea but i think the idea that someone will will make you whole again by making others unwhole is a kind of continuing theme in the language and the structure of feeling of the right because a lot of this is not even stuff you need to say it's like you're positioning people in ways that they start to feel in that way it's effective because it's got a deep historical embed embedement in our shared histories all the things about you know we are here because you were there britain can still rely on the appeal to the kind of almost crumbling imperial nostalgia but you know little traces of it around i wonder for how much longer because i'm not sure what that means for the younger generation who don't even have the reference points of that kind of language but still just still you can just about do it but i wonder for this moment i can't expect put my glasses on and see you or take my glasses off and see my own notes so excuse me for that um for us in this very dangerous moment and i know lots of people kind of going between here and labour party conference but maybe to try and raise our political imaginations and concerns beyond the next the next headline the next bit of the electoral cycle that we're in a moment when we also need to check our own habits of centering race when we think about the right because once we've centred race we know what to say don't we people are racist for good material reasons because they learn to misrecognize their interests as alongside the elite so you can exclude the racialized other we need to unpack that kind of failure of understanding about their material conditions and their alliance with those who are excluded that's all absolutely well-founded analysis but it's not all that's happening and our fixation with that particular scenario which frankly we've so far failed to address but at least been saying it to each other which is better than saying british jobs for british workers and i don't want to say there's no progress but that can't be our only way of thinking about what the right does or why it does it or how it infects what political possibility can be for all of us and i want to say a few things before i end about state failure this moment of apparently willful state failure on so many fronts um i think is reaching into a collective consciousness across many different kinds of people where you're kind of tapping into that longing for an effective authority even the petrol pump stuff is that you know you hear people on the buses i heard some people on the train this morning saying of course you know it's not authoritarian to force people to do things for the public health that's a good that's a good portmanteau for how the liberal left might be thinking about legitimate authority isn't it public health common good save the infrastructure the common theme through all of these are moving away from a belief in our collective ability to shape the world either through existing democratic structures which frankly have failed on purpose or through any other collective subject so just as um capital is structured to be in kind of constant crisis response we're living through a time where different kinds of almost authorities are igniting a thousand tiny fires the next crisis the next thing will that be toilet paper will there be christmas will the trains work will there be water will the lights be on and if anyone speaks to places where um there's been a more overt battle around the infrastructure and people's access to everyday resources you'll understand that that is a very effective way of changing people's consciousness without even having to say you have this the status of whiteness it turns our everyday lives into a series of constant battles with others who are always our competitors because i might not hate you because you're a migrant but when the last bag of nappies seems like it's in the supermarket it's my baby's ass before yours and and you can see it takes only a few days for britain to fall into that doesn't it this week has been a kind of instructive lesson in that i think um kovit has unleashed these opportunities for the right so not only those kinds of conspiracy theories that doing all the rounds now but also an almost unanswerable longing for an effective authority i just don't know i don't know how to answer that i don't know how to respond to again good trade unionists who are seriously in meetings with me saying oh that you know we could we should hike up the borders we should police people more strongly we should have private security to do this that and the other because people are genuinely afraid genuine fear is a tasty morsel for our political enemies isn't it um but i don't think this is the moment of thatcherism so i don't think our answer to that can be let us tell a better story i think somehow we have to understand how this kind of opening of righteous thinking which i do think goes across what we might think of as the electoral spectrum and beyond is embedded in our practices of life but if you make people's lives precarious and difficult and not working in many ways so that every day is a series of battles to get some everyday resource that you need to get through the day you're structured into wishing that daddy would come when when will daddy come home and bring the shopping and put it on the table and that leaves us all vulnerable to a politics where whoever can articulate some kind of effective authority whether it's technocratic whether it's nationalistic whether it's downright popular culturalist i'm not sure that we yet have the tools of how to go forward with that and i've ended up being more miserable than richard although actually i am a very very cheerful person and i think the answer to this is to articulate our collective desire for something else but also to learn how to solve problems in the everyday because we have to get the nappies to the bums and i'm not going to speak more now thanks [Applause] brilliant compelling stuff as ever i love this panel it is fantastic um we're very lucky now to have tom mills i've already introduced but we'll be he's doing huge amounts of work recently which i know about because i keep using it for my columns um but on the you know sociology of elites some perspective about how uk elites operate and relate to right-wing politics please give tom a big round of applause thank you thanks thanks um yeah it's great to be here in this in such good company and it's really nice i mean if anyone knows me i'm normally at these kind of events as like the the left bbc guy so it's nice to be let out my bbc box and like broaden a little bit so thanks for having me i am going to talk about the media a little bit but really what i wanted to try and do was think about how we on the left should uh analyze the media and analyze the relationship between the the media um political practice capital and conservatism and think about the relationship between these things i'm really glad we're having this panel because i think there's a sort of tendency for us on the left to get all dreary and upset and self-flagellating about all the problems which god knows that we have with ourselves and to sometimes lose track of thinking about the enemy and there is a political enemy and there is these people are human beings like us and they operate in institutions and they have objectives which they try and fulfill they operate strategically we need to do the same and if we're going to do that effectively we need to think about who these people are what they want and how they get it and that's why i think this panel is really important now i think it's useful first of all for us on the left to start with the recognition that capital and conservativism are distinct now in practice they overlap considerably and i think particularly in in this country that's why we don't tend to think about them as such but it's important that we see them as being distinct analytically and overlapping in practice as an actually existing set of institutions and movements right so capitalists can be conservatives and they often are conservative supporters not all of them but the vast majority of them and conservatives can be capitalists right they uh conservatives tend not to be capitalists right or at least conservative supporters that's what we've all been discussing so far is that effort to reach out beyond that narrow class interest now we have to remember that so not to fall into two traps like number one is not to think of everything as being the result of a ruling class or elite capitalist interests right and the second one which i think is the track which probably people at twit aren't going to fall into so much is thinking about the enemy as being purely a set of bigoted conservative ideas or institutions so say like the daily mail for example this is kind of a liberal fallacy uh if you're there then hopefully we'll get you out of that point by the time we finish this panel and have a discussion now we have to understand these social groups as being distinct right from from each other but have overlapping interests and then that plays out through the political system and in society so capitalists in in the narrow sense that marx uses the term like any elite like any ruling class as owen said at the beginning they have a minority interest in society this is the sort of kernel of marxist analysis right they have to build beyond that they can do that in different ways now the the many contradictions of conservatism are basically rooted in that effort to build popular support for a minority interest it's a structural feature of capitalism they have to do this they can try and do it through liberalism for an appeal to universalist ideas and that leads to all kinds of um contradictions about what freedom means and what and and those with those appeals to like universal equality but usually the bet the way that they do this is through the appeal to social hierarchies is richard laid out at the beginning now this this panel isn't about liberalism so but i think it's important to mention that the relationship between capitalism or capital and conservatism is kind of contingent right it could go in different directions um you can appeal to liberalism and you can appeal concert to conservatives and you have liberal catalysts right but that need to represent a minority interest of a class as being universal is fundamental to capitalism and that is what conservatism is rooted in ideologically that's the structural feature of it so what are the interests of capital well the accumulation of more capital right and we can go and read capital and we can all um we can all swat up on that in in sort of more basic terms making profit right expanding their market share but so capitalist interest the capitalist ruling class you know they do have a sort of structured rationality to them right because they operate in master structures and in that sense we can think of capitalists as being a more rational ruling class they calculate things they have balance books right they have the they read the ft they keep their eye on the markets they look at their investment they do have these structured sets of interests okay but we can't simply expect an appeal to capitalist interest and expect them to do x y or zed these are real human beings as richard said earlier on they are embodied in in a very specific social context right they're not all seeing they're not all knowing they don't necessarily know what their interests are and they're also not as homogeneous as abstract class theory can sometimes make them seem right they're different from each other now mark's called capitalists of band of warring brothers or some sort of words that effect richard will probably know the actual quote maybe some of the other panelists mate um but they have conflicting interests as well structured by nation and industrial sector and so on they're also very equal from each other in terms of their wealth and power more than workers actually so if you look at wealth um differences the closer you get to the top of that um that that that one percent that 0.1 and up and up and up you go all the capitalists incredibly unequal until you get up to those billionaires right so they're very sort of fracture class interest and they need to develop a collective sense of their own project so we can think of capitalists as having a core and a periphery if you like at the core you know you've got the financiers and the billionaires and then you've got parochial business interests right and and then everything in between and then beyond that minority class interest right you've got um other classes i'll talk about in a minute but the point is they had to negotiate and articulate the set of interests through an actual existing set of institutions and they need to mobilize their interests in politics and civil society and they do that for a number of institutions they do that through the conservative party which is a subject of a recent book by phil burton cartilage i recommend you'll read published with verso they do that in less public organizations they do that in business and industrial associations they do it for media organizations which is like my area they do it through public affairs consultancies so lobbyists that's just basically you know a euphemism for lobbyists think tanks and so on these are the infrastructures of the conservative movement and the overlaps through capitalism in this country there the point is that their interests aren't self-evident right then they're they're they're not unchanging and they have organizations and groups to do this like we do they have their own twts but they don't look like this obviously and they don't look like it look like us at least i hope they don't i hope we don't um now beyond that core capitalist interest they had to build broader coalitions and so this is what gramsci referred to as historic block right so beyond the capitalists themselves you've got sticking with marxist categories you've got the petty bourgeoisie the little capitalists right the owners of small businesses then you've got the middle class people um set workers right supposedly part of our class um now these are the people in the upper structures of the class structure who share very close interests with capital corporate lawyers accountants senior corporate managers advertisers some of my best friends i'm not nothing against these people public relations consultants wealth managers this is the natural consistent constituency and then beyond that you've got to reach out to build political support in broader a broader political support right working class support the lower middle classes that's where conservative ideology fits in now i'm not going to linger too much on conservative ideology because the other speakers have done a good job so far and i'm not even the last speaker about about that process of appealing to broader um constituencies um but okay so that i did want to show this it's a very popular quote from aaron bevin how can wealth per se persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power here in lies the whole art of conservative politics in the 20th century now of course it's not just about wealth right it's also about a whole set of racialized and gendered conceptions of social authority that allows them to build up this broader support and and that's been been mentioned before but this this is ultimately what conservatism is about now i think one important point i'd like to make if there's a sort of takeaway from my talk is that what we should never do on the left is attack the right based on the inconsistency and incoherence of their ideas right yes capitalist interests are sort of rational but but the political practice of defending the rule of capital and defending power more broadly that is not a project that needs coherence it's a reactive project okay it's much about neutralizing threats and making politically convenient arguments in political struggle than there is about building consent in any coherent or meaningful way which is why they just seem so wild all the time and why they don't care about lying there's a structural reason that conservatism is so dishonest it's politically dishonest because it's trying to build beyond the narrow constituency and sell that as a as in the broader interest so if you think about i'm not just saying that they lie all the time because they do let's think back to the 19 2019 election where there was that study looking at the um political advertising that found i don't know what it was it was like 83 or something like that of um conservative political advertising was misleading labour was much much lower right they have to lie in order to build this coalition okay um they had they don't need to be coherent so people need to stop attacking them for being like uh contradictory or hypocritical or any of these things they don't care about that stuff what they care about is winning and that's what we should care about but we should not abandon ourselves our commitment to truth in doing so let's leave that to them now i just wanna i need to get on to the media because i'm the media guy right what role does the media play in this process of reaching beyond this narrow class interest and broadening it now i think it's useful for us to think about the media in broader terms and just um you know as one system right different media organizations do different things the right has their elite media so that's like the spectator and the telegraph and some sent the times the current ruling clique of the conservative party is very networked into the spectator and the telegraph that there's the liberal stuff i'm not going to talk about liberals right but remember we got the economist we've got the ft and that sort of thing and then the times is kind of in the middle the popular press traditionally right which has been a real strength of the riot in this country the sun and the daily mail perform such an important function for the right like there's all these debates right how how powerful are they how much do they persuade people well the jury was out for a while but there was some research published by aaron reeves and colleagues a few years ago i think it was 2006 maybe which looked at sun readers and what they found was that the the switch of the sun's loyalty in the case of the 2010 election and the 1997 election was able to deliver seven points and fifteen percentage points respectively to when they switched controlling for uh values right no change in political attitudes this is very small parts of the population right but they do they do have that concrete role right they can swing elections but that's a very small electoral impact that's a very narrow measure what the reactionary media does is they play a constant role in misrepresenting issues and particularly in smearing the left right they don't necessarily have to convince anybody that um left-wing ideas are bad they just need to convince people that the people who are pushing them are bad and we saw that all the time right we're all going to be very familiar with that um the the these institutions the murdoch media and the daily mail the reason they play this very important function isn't by the way just for swinging elections that's a very narrow thing they play a much broader role in the the practice of conservatives and why do they do that they are organizations of the ruling class in the narrow sense they're owned by oligarchs these are billionaire tax avoiders but by the nature of their market position they have to appeal to a broad audience that's what these businesses do so that they're used by the conservative party as sort of like feelers for that process of appealing to popular reaction and building up those constituencies in those attitudes and that's what conservatism feeds off so it's very important um function that they perform in what we might call the capital conservative like power structure right they help to keep the tories in touch to use that horrible cliche that's always used on the bbc and so on all right i'm just going to sort of wrap up right because i feel like i've talked for quite a long time what what's the what's what can we conclude from this i think we need to be a little bit careful in terms of not thinking about a battle of ideas right the right doesn't think in these terms right they think about interests and they think about the ideas that bind together and serve those interests in particular context right so i think the left needs to start thinking about where we're strongest and that's probably in areas like you know uh the the appeals that we can make to the public those sets of ideas right we don't we don't have a lot of social power in our institutions at the moment perhaps certain trends in political demography right but what we really need to think about is where the enemy are weakest and this means being attentive to their ideas and interests and and the way that this sort of capital conservative coalition is structured in this country right i think we also need to avoid thinking about the uk or other capitalist countries has been inherently and irrevocably conservative right the right has to work to win and they work hard to do that and they have an advantage almost axiomatically by the fact that they they are the people in power right but in order to so we're in a disadvantage and that i think is why research on them and strategic thinking about how the right operate is so important i think we need more of that and i'm really glad to be part of this panel which i hope is is the start of a conversation and a longer process on the left [Applause] tom there now uh very honored to have our final esteemed speaker who has a brilliant speech which i know because i've been cheekily looking at her notes so please give a big round of applause to asaka you said that daddy wasn't coming to save us but daddy's home um gargey disclosure i'm quite hungover so in comparison to these scintillating and sparky speakers i feel like my brain is buffering so please give me a bit of leeway i want to talk today about class culture and culture war because i think that it is tempting for the left to see the right's use of culture wars framing and go what we must do comrades is return to a pure class politics i know what i want to argue is that one a pure class politics has never existed outside of culture and two right now everybody is doing identity politics including if not especially those who profess to disdain identity politics now before i get cracking on that bit i should probably talk about what i mean by identity politics because identity politics was coined by anti-capitalist black feminists the combi river collective but it has become detached from those explicitly anti-capitalist routes now more broadly identity politics is the question of how we perceive ourselves and our communities in relation to others and it has become the master frame through which all politics must pass in order for it to become visible identity politics is no longer concerned with being freed or liberated from constructed positions of vulnerability it merely asks that those positions of vulnerability be recognized and it has become i think the dominant mode through which politics is experienced through an in an age of intense mediatization and so one of the things that i'm trying to understand is is how is it that the conservative party is able to reinvent itself as the tribune of the left behind the uk hit peak income equality in 1978. uh in april 2018 we reached the first inequality peak since 1913 so equality getting worse and yet boris johnson has sold the conservatives as an insurgent force despite the party having formed governments in 18 out of the last 28 general elections now we can talk about the favorable conditions of a right-leaning media we can talk about that it is easier having oligarchic capital on your side but i think that we need to go deeper than that and we need to grapple with the transformations in britain's class composition and analyze the political narratives which have emerged from those changes so it's weird right that the party of capital flourishes in a context where uh economically we are so unequal but i think the thing that we've got to understand is that class consciousness how we experience our class position how we experience our social selves has become decoupled from wealth and wages as margaret thatcher famously put it economics are the method the object is to change the soul and that soul has been transformed through 40 years of neoliberalism the power of the trade union movement was broken by the end of the minus strike and the anti-union legislation that followed result resulting in the uk worker strike total falling to its lowest level since 1893. globalization and shift towards the service sector economy meant the decline of heavy industry in the uk driving up regional inequalities which of course corroded communities and resulted in a kind of dispersal and the right and the advent of right to buy the collapse of council house building did two things one it created a new propertied class out of former council tenants and a new landlord class four out of ten properties bought under right to buy are now buy to let's but it also created a new generation of atomized and precarious private sector renters so class obviously didn't cease to exist under neoliberalism but the institutions which produced class consciousness grounded and material conditions did and so one of the things that has happened with these you know kind of bastions of of left-wing consciousness being smashed to pieces is that unmoored from the gravitational giants of industrial labor social housing and trade union militancy class consciousness has now been allowed to throw fleet freely amongst a nebulous set of social signifiers and so this is how we get into all this silly like is feta middle class right accent proximity to manual labor immigration status education race consumer habits geography political and cultural disposition and sometimes outright delusion determines who gets to claim the moral authority of speaking for the working class and the reason why i talk about outright delusion is i'll never forget a tweet by uh the guardian's northern correspondent helen pid saying that you can be working class and be a property developer what like it just it doesn't make sense you can be a multi-millionaire working class person as long as you've got both reactionary politics and a regional accent right this tells us something about the way in which social signifiers are really important in terms of how people perceive themselves and others these social signifiers can obscure the matter of income and assets and the reason why that's possible is because culture is tangible culture is where we live culture is how we experience the world and so these snapshots and these totems this hodgepodge have become i think particularly loaded in recent years and it's weird that the economics of class have somehow become more distant and abstract than what coffee somebody orders or whether they feel comfortable around transgender people or how they feel about black lives matter the malleability of culture means that the freelancer with a laptop hello is coded as privileged rather than precarious and the retired homeowner is indeed left behind and so we've ended up with an image of the british working class that does not include the majority of working age people which more often than not comes attached with a prefix of white that renders invisible the army of uber drivers and deliver delivery riders that underpaid tribe of many nations which constitutes the british precaria and so how do we understand political antagonism today political conflict really is identitarian it's city versus town it's woke versus reactionary it's culture versus culture and i think that making sense of this it's instructive to return to stuart hall he says that politics does not reflect majorities it constructs them but the same is true of minorities politics makes the minority as well as the majority and the minority can do lots of different things the majority the minority can signify threat it can signify moral authority it can also signify vulnerability and so i think that one of the things that helps us make sense of what's going on is both the real and imagined forms of minority rule there are fantasies of minority rule the idea that people of color are out breeding white people i mean what's your attachment to whiteness what does it mean why would it matter in 2016 if more people are going to be a bit browner than you unless it means everything right this fantasy about transgender people taking away your right to think about your gender in relation to biological sex no that's not happening there's fantasy around you know kind of climate protesters who want to rob you of your car and your holiday but also what the minority can signify as a kind of authority status and that's why we see the right appropriating and nicking from the language of the left this happens when it comes to issues around free speech but this also happens when the language of minoritized grievance is used to articulate dominant interests there's a reason why the language of demographic apocalypse appeals to white people's fear of becoming a minority because they know how badly minorities were treated by themselves i think that it's important i think to acknowledge what tom said which is that this doesn't have to be coherent that it's deeply contradictory what matters is that it is emotionally potent and these paranoid fantasies about the imminent overturning of the social order have long been a part of right-wing self-mythology enoch powell saying in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white but i think why it matters now is because it's become attached to a new authoritarian project which is a hegemonic project i think in a grammation sense so it's not just about legislative power but establishing control over the cultural machine steering political antagonism away from wealth and towards the more malleable category of those who are seen to wield illegitimate power brown people black people immigrants women gay people trans people people who eat vegan sausage rolls and i think that this deep paranoid fantasy and the way in which it dictates politics i think that we have an investment in it ourselves one of the things that we try and do in order to overcome it is emphasize our decency no we're not wrongings no we're not weirdos oh no we're not we're not scary we look just like you we are you and i think that what that does is buy into this idea that there are certain kinds of human who are inherently scary who are inherently threatening and they're threatening because of the way in which they wield their vulnerability and the minute we buy into that the idea that vulnerability is a threat we abandon i think the central tenet of left-wing politics which is that everyone is deserving of care everyone is deserving of love everyone is deserving of dignity there's the social conditions which deny people those things which are obscene and i think i want to maybe just uh end it here perhaps on on a hopeful note which is this project of paranoid fantasizing around minority rule it is not the project of a confident right wing it is the project of a deeply scared and anxious one i think they're worried about what's going on in the realm of culture the fact that that support for capitalism is collapsing amongst young people but not just that support for white nationalism for ethnic superiority for bigotry against lgbt people is also falling i was talking to a former conservative strategist whose rhyme name whose name rhymes with her shmonic dumbings and one things he said is there is a culture war and the left have won it now i think that this is an oversimplification but i think that this is why they're so focused on institutions around knowledge production the bbc museums universities what's going on in social media it's because what young people actually think what the next generation of voters think is that well maybe equality isn't so bad indeed maybe it's desirable maybe we don't need to buy into this notion of hierarchy in the sense that what it's going to do is bring meaning to our lives you look at the way in which demographics are changing in this country on the basis of race what does that tell you it tells you that people are falling in love it tells you that people are having families together this is where i am actually a bit of a liberal i think that it becomes quite hard to maintain a sense of your own superiority when you have to share a life with somebody and raise children with them so the right are scared and i think they try and deal with that fear by making it our fear and i think that the way in which we deal with it is by meeting it not with a different kind of scaremongering but with a renewed confidence a sense of optimism of faith in human collective action and what it can achieve and most of all not sound like a big hippie but love love for one another love for those that we are taught to hate and love for those whose vulnerability we are taught to be afraid of because we think it signals a threat [Music] wow and i for one cannot wait for ash's book it's going to be one of the most important books of our time what's that on the cover if you like erotic uh no but her raw humanity really came through there and and i'm glad we had a bit of optimism as well let's try and we're gonna i'm gonna bring you in now and optimism is always great if anyone could inject that to the conversation things are fine so do whack your hands up and i will call you [Music] you

Channel: The World Transformed

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Length: 59min 50sec (3590 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021