Labour’s confected culture war is class conflict for a new age

The socialist dream didn’t disappear, but instead took on a new shape to fight against the concept of common sense

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Keir Starmer insists that his Government is not engaged in class war. It might look like that if you regard private schools, rural England and people who would like to leave their life savings to their children as enemies of the Left – but no, that is definitely not the case.
His policies are not, he says, a form of Marxist class revenge. And I totally agree with him on that point. The groups on whom this Government has showered its beneficence are clearly not working class.
The doctors, civil servants and public sector staff who have received pay increases in return for nothing by way of reform or promises of improved performance are not the industrial proletariat who, as the original Marxist analysis put it, have had the value of their labour stolen from them by greedy capitalist owners. They are virtually all quintessentially bourgeois. The Great Starmer Redistribution is not Bolshevik.
If there is any precedent for this phenomenon it is the period of late Soviet corruption in which party apparatchiks and government puppet agencies received favoured treatment with special indulgences reserved for party members who even had access to scarce foods and luxury goods that were unavailable to the general population.
Before it collapsed, communism had become a parody of itself: the state and its operators were a privileged elite who reserved for themselves whatever benefits a failing economy could provide. Some animals were definitely more equal than others.
So no, what is going on under this Labour government isn’t about class war in the sense that it was originally conceived at all. In fact, it is precisely the opposite.
Most real working class people are now employed, or self-employed, in the private sector. Some of them, by virtue of hard work, determination and discipline, have been able to start their own small businesses to which they (and often their families) devote almost every waking moment.
They must look at the pay and conditions deals being offered to four-day-a week train drivers and work-from-home public sector staff and wonder whether they are fools for trying to carry on. But the pride and self-determination still, miraculously, seem to be worth it.
So they mortgage their homes, take on debt at crippling interest rates, and work, hoping to secure the future for themselves and those who will follow them.
If they can afford it, they may invest in a pension fund, but they can never hope for the splendid secure pensions – or the job security – which are guaranteed by the state to those in the public sector.Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Starmer Labour project, is its extension of the most hated tax in the world: the one which seizes the existing assets of those who have managed to prosper.
Inheritance Tax is regarded as an outrage even by those who are unlikely to be affected by it because it is in a morally different category from most forms of taxation which are levied on earnings (income tax), profits (capital gains) or transactions (Vat).
It is a confiscation of something that you already own: rather as if HMRC entered your home today, counted up the estimated worth of every possession you had – however long it had belonged to you – and demanded a proportion of that value. (That is, of course, effectively what it does do upon your death.)
It feels like an outrage against the principle of private ownership itself: nothing belongs to anyone in the end even if they purchased it from earnings which had already been taxed.
Once upon a time when “inherited wealth” was solely the privilege of aristocrats who had not earned it, this may have been morally plausible. Now it seems like nothing more than vengeance against those who have made good in life by their own efforts.
Which is the key to it all: in spite of the official abandonment of Marxist ideology, the central tenet remains embedded. The fruits of success should be collective not individual. But you can’t say that, not if you are the leader of the modern Labour party who pretends to have capitalism’s interests at heart.
So you end up tying yourself in rhetorical knots and offering pay offs to the people with whom, at one time, you were supposed to share a political belief system.
So whatever did happen to that original socialist mission which was taken over by bureaucrats and their self-serving comrades in the trade unions? And why did that idealism that was supposed to right injustice and bring about a fair and equal society evaporate?
Answer: it failed comprehensively because the state ownership of the means of production turned out to be a recipe for systemic incompetence, and the temporary dictatorship of the proletariat became the permanent dictatorship of a vainglorious clique.
But the dream itself did not disappear, it took another shape. It was in the business of transforming itself from an economic revolution into a cultural one even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of communist governments.
As far back as the 1960s, when the Communist Bloc – the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries – still seemed impregnable, the Western Left had come to realise that there would be no revolution here.
The capitals of Europe and the United States would not be stormed and the democratic institutions of free societies would remain in place.
So instead of revolutionary takeover by an armed mob seizing the levers of government, there would have to be a gradual usurpation making use of the existing institutions which the Left rightly understood to be the true sources of power in society.
Herbert Marcuse’s “long march through the institutions” was well underway before the fall of the Soviet empire but its technique of activist infiltration has since taken off in ways that are truly breathtaking.
The culture war has become the new class war. It has the same enemies: historical truth, individual achievement, the sanctity of personal relationships.
But it goes further: challenging scientific fact and common sense understanding in ways that are designed to derange and undermine shared experience – and it is now the real project of the Left.
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