The Dignity of Labour. Jon Cruddas
the election of Jeremy Corbyn provided a virtuous antidote to what had gone before. Many extracted renewed hope from significant seat gains in a 2017 election loss that offset underreported chinks in what was later termed Labour’s ‘Red Wall’. At best a brittle unease remained between the party and significant sections of the electorate. At worse palpable resentment and anger were clearly on show amongst many the left was created to represent. They were there at the Brexit referendum twelve months earlier and festered in the years of Brexit stasis that followed, before the wall formally collapsed, bringing with it an 80-strong Tory majority in late 2019.
In Dagenham, 70 per cent voted to leave the EU. On election day pollsters assumed a significant Tory victory.3 We held on, just. We chiselled out a 293 majority by somehow retaining nearly 90 per cent of our support, one of the few bricks that stayed upright in Labour’s disintegrating ‘Red Wall’. Months later a virus detonated politics, undermined the government and created unanticipated space for a demoralized left under new leadership.
The following chapters navigate this terrain. We focus on the work people do, what it means to them, how this has changed and what might happen in the future following the pandemic. We inspect fashionable visions to overturn the system – new left utopias – fuelled by technological change compared to more prosaic traditional desires to civilize capitalism. Talk of a ‘post-work’ nirvana sits uncomfortably with traditional attempts to regulate employment and respect the dignity of human labour, especially given the calamitous effects of a tiny virus. We will ask if such modern utopias offer ‘radical hope’ and help build a new left telos to confront authoritarian populism, or distract with bouts of indulgent scientific fiction, detours symptomatic of a dying political tradition. Throughout we bend the conversation through Dagenham.
Notes
1 1. Compare the emphasis of Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’ with the utopian narratives of Paul Mason and Aaron Bastani. M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There an Alternative?, Zero Books, 2009. P. Mason, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Penguin, 2015. A. Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, Verso, 2019.
2 2. The ‘Mardyke’ has since been demolished and rebuilt as ‘Orchard Village’ and became a national example of dodgy new-build housing regeneration; see J. Harris, ‘Leaking sewage and rotten floorboards: life on a “flagship” housing estate’, The Guardian, 6 February 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/06/life-flagship-housing-estate-orchard-village-east-london.
3 3. The respected Electoral Calculus website overestimated Labour’s national support yet calculated a Tory majority of 5,923 votes in Dagenham and Rainham.
1 Work and the Modern World
Politics and Belonging
Political instability threatens the foundations of liberal democracy. We cannot assume democracy will prevail. It requires us to rethink the purpose of politics.
Politics demands thought and action. Thought in asking philosophical questions, such as: how do we wish to live, what provides meaning in our lives, where and to what do we belong? How we answer these questions has helped shape competing theories of justice; visions of how society should be organized. Action in terms of the practice of politics, understood to refer to the way power is exercised on behalf of the people.1 A practice in which different political traditions contest the governance of a specific community or territory; a competition between groups and shared interests to shape the collective ‘we’.
The two elements, thought and action, are linked by the ways the practical contest is often, not always, shaped by these alternative philosophical approaches to justice, grounded within different traditions of thought. Politics addresses our beliefs and attachment to the communities within which we live and might think we belong.
However, today’s political instability could reflect a declining attachment to physical communities in the modern world, disrupted by technological change and the processes of globalization. The popular Marxist thinker David Harvey has talked of ‘time-space compression’ and ‘a speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us’.2 It could also mean the opposite. Such change might threaten our attachments but reassert new, more disruptive forms of community and nation.
Political instability might reflect a declining philosophical attachment to the idea of a political community. Are we attached, for example, to a specific rather than global community? Or in terms recently popularized, are we citizens of somewhere rather than anywhere?3 Do our concerns tend towards the parochial rather than the cosmopolitan? These questions are difficult ones for practising politicians who seek mandates from specific territories – a constituency or nation – rather than global electorates. Do these politicians have specific moral obligations to their constituents over and above global responsibilities to all inhabitants of the planet?
These practical and philosophical questions challenge a sense of politics grounded within geographical boundaries and emerge at a period of political instability. Do they help account for such political unease or are they symptoms of it? Across the globe democratic politics appears endangered. Just a few years ago mainstream politics assumed it had reached a high point of human evolution achieved through the dominance of the market. A specific form of liberal democratic politics – dominant in the era we now recognize as neo-liberalism – announced it had secured the ‘end of history’ yet is now upended by the forces of authoritarianism and populism.
The terms of political debate are being redrawn. This book engages with these technological, philosophical and practical political debates through the study of the work we do.4 We discuss the purpose of work in our lives, if this is changing and how this might affect the lives we wish to live. For instance, if work retains personal significance, what consequences follow when it is threatened and is unable to provide what we wish it would? How do these threats find political expression and how might society respond? We discuss the political implications of alternative ways to understand the physical and mental labour we perform.
Identities based on work are transforming in an age for many characterized by precariousness, declining material reward and flatlining social mobility, digitalization, job rotation and meaningless labour. Many now question the future of work itself. These shifts might alter our views about work and how we understand our own lives, and be expressed in how we live together.
I should make clear from the outset that personally I believe work can be a vocation, a calling, and create significant landmarks in life which provide identity and belonging.5 The practice of belonging, or dwelling, involves sacrifice and is rewarded in the creation of community. Yet this orthodox approach is unfashionable today, especially on the left. The issues we will address therefore stretch beyond conventional political concerns to maximize utility – of material justice – and direct us towards questions of personal character and attachment.
Degradation
Work is important beyond providing us with material subsistence. It can both contribute to and undermine our overall sense of worth; our human wellbeing. This suggests a basic paradox. Work can be a source of human dignity; it can provide meaning and purpose in our lives and confer a certain standing in the eyes of others. Yet it is not guaranteed to deliver these things. Work can be degrading. This paradox of labour links to another recurring theme of the book: the contrast between what we want from life and what modern capitalism provides. This simple juxtaposition, between how we might wish to live and how we inhabit the world, found political expression on the streets of Dagenham and in the turbulence engulfing liberal democracy even before the virus struck.
One recent short book has addressed the paradoxical quality of labour in an accessible way. James Bloodworth’s popular book Hired has helped