Inspired(ish) by Dave’s Part’s entertaining condemnation of the British working classes for not being very good at revolution, I offer you this little gem from my recent sad geek holiday reading. “One result of such an experience of exploitation is a relatively low interest in politics as such. Politics was, after all a game played almost entirely in private by a small number of wealthy and remote families – rather like merchant banking today. Collectively, the decisions of merchant bankers have no little influence on our society, yet I suggest that few of us have the remotest idea of how they are made. Neither do we spend much time worrying about it. Why then is it surprising that working men, so much further removed from access to power and information, did not waste time writing, say, Labour and the New Social Order? Even today one cannot help but notice how little space the popular press gives to politics – and most of the space is devoted to personalities and scandal��?
Given current concerns in the ‘establishment’ about disaffection with all things political, and the emergence of scheme like this to patch it all up and ‘re-engage people’, you’d be forgive for thinking this might have been written just the other day. In fact it comes from Henry Drucker’s interesting 1979 “Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party’ (London: George Allen & Unwin); this passage is part an interesting assessment of the ‘defensiveness’ of the Labour movement in the early part of the twentieth century (leavin aside the question he fails to answer of why exploitation of ‘working men’ should create low interest in politics in the UK, but be a precursor to revolution in other countries). 30 years ago, then, Henry was worried that people just wouldn’t do politics because they were too busy making ends meet and because the press was crap. Not much change there then…?
Of course, what does date it is the reference to “merchant bankers��? (and not only because Henry D went on to be a chief fundraiser for Oxford University and presumably therefore met quite a lot of them).
What happened to the merchant bankers? High finance now operates in its own parallel universe seemingly independent of mundane things like production of stuff and the ‘merchanting’ of it (another great bit of holiday reading was David Harvey short, readable, but superbly researched A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which I’d recommend to anyone and which covers this trend really well).
No self-respecting financier would sully themselves with the term ‘merchant’ nowadays, it would seem, and neoliberalism have even deprived the masses of a once-cherished faux cockney rhyming term of abuse, which combined a valuable discursive relationship between sexual practices that no right-thinking worker would engage in, or at least own up to, and the kind of thing that rich tosser (as it were) might get up to.
Surely, as Dave has also helpfully intimated (well sort of), a key feature of 21st century class struggle must be to combat the use of Chav by counter-hegemonically replacing it at any opportunity with a renewed reference to banking.
