John Westmoreland shared his experience of talking to an ex-Miner and Farage admirer, and Mike Wayne follows with his thoughts on what the conversation can teach the left

He was in his sixties. I offered him a leaflet and asked if he was interested in the new left party.

No. He was interested in stopping immigrants. He ‘knew’ facts and figures about immigrants, the population, and the threat of a Muslim takeover. He said ‘Nigel is the man for me’.

I hadn’t thought out in advance what to say, so I asked him if he had ever been in a trade union because Farage was anti-union.

He told me that he was an ex-miner. Which pit? Manton, in Worksop. Ah! I know some old miners from there. Remember Andy Phipps? Yes, a good man.

I told him about Farage joining the Tories because of Thatcher’s attack on the NUM. 

Hmm.

He was desperate to get back to immigrants. And I started to see how ‘immigrants’ was a kind of support. It was something visibly wrong with the country, as far as he was concerned, and a radical approach was needed. It was, and I’m not being unkind, something to hide behind. A political comfort blanket.

So, rightly or wrongly, I just said that we won’t agree on that and asked him about other issues that he was angry about.

He bit on that. And I chose to listen.

Corruption in politics was a big issue for him. The decay of his town, and the way the privatised utilities are milking us. I just added in stuff about the NHS, and pensioners.

He was with me now.

The clincher was Palestine. His initial attempts to excuse Israel dissolved without much trouble. I said, there isn’t any crime worse than genocide. Killing children in front of their parents, nothing is worse than that.

He agreed and his wife, quiet until now, came in. Back to Farage. Why doesn’t he call out the genocide? He is cruel to immigrants and cruel to Palestinians. He was cruel to miners and their families. I cashed in on my own support for the miners back in the day. That moved him towards me and he said, ‘I’m sure you’re a good person’. I’ll take that.

He shook my hand and thanked me for talking to him. He said good luck, and, I had to smile- ‘my neighbour loves Corbyn.’

I would like to say I recruited him. I would like to say I changed his attitude to immigrants. I can’t claim either. But I do claim to have affected his outlook. And I feel happy about how it went.

The working class has been worked over and beaten down. Don’t expect them to come off their sick bed and enter a marathon. We have to learn to lead. To listen. To pick our points of agreement and difference.

Big meetings and unity demonstrations can start to change the context for these conversations. But we have to learn too: Why people are in this state of desperation and how the right are winning minds that at bottom are with us.

I write this post as a thank you to that ex-miner. I don’t even know his name!

My final thought is optimistic, that the working class can be a fighting class again. A conversation is an essential part of it.

And, when we engage the class enemy with purpose, the anti-immigrant comfort blanket will get thrown aside.

The Interpersonal is Political

Dialogue has long been recognised as central to learning, to understanding and to political will formation. The Socratic dialogue was an early model, collaborative and question driven. Gramsci recommended it, describing it as the ‘maieutic’ approach, a related term that describes bringing a mass of often confused and contradictory ideas to a clear consciousness.  The whole concept of ‘dialectics’ so central to Marxism comes out of the European medieval scholastic mode of enquiry where truth emerges through dialogue and disagreement. The disagreeing part is as important as the agreeing part. Marx merely added that there are socio-economic contexts and grounds for such things. But there are also political grounds and contexts, which pose questions as to how to talk right now in the situation we are in with the rise of the right. And very importantly, perhaps even more importantly, how to listen.

A recent social media post by Counterfire’s John Westmoreland demonstrated the art of talking and listening to working-class people who are being channelled to the right. John’s post was a wonderfully rendered account that captured the dynamics of a conversation about politics in Doncaster while handing out leaflets. There were many dimensions: the interpersonal (two people who had some shared common knowledge of the area, the past, even of specific individuals); navigating a disagreement (around Farage and the ‘threat’ of a Muslim takeover), shifts in topics (they weren’t going to agree so John explored other things); the psychological (the Muslim ‘threat’ was a ‘comfort blanket’), the intuitive (when and how to build on common ground). The post was widely shared and widely appreciated. It was a case study in how to do it right, how to have that most normal and everyday of things, which sometimes the left is not very good at, a conversation. Why was it so appreciated? Possibly because this may now be a lost art for the left which it needs to recover and fast. 

As it has drifted away from its once integral working-class constituency, the ability to talk, to communicate in a shared language and frame of reference has been replaced by an ever-narrowing circle of moralising virtue signalling and naked class abuse from the expanding constituency of middle-class leftists. One of the things which stand out from John’s account is the willingness to listen, to hear from someone who turned out to be an ex-miner and how they were interpreting and making intelligible to themselves, their own lived experience. That making sense of the world had been infiltrated by the language of Farage and Tommy Robinson, but it was also clear how the politics of the right and the policies of the right were only aligned in a very partial and contradictory way with the grievances. The ex-miner was concerned with corruption, says John, in politics, the privatised utilities, etc. Big openings which John naturally utilised. Had he instead called him a racist, a bigot, a fascist, or adopted a lecturing tone, the conversation would have been a non-starter. Even just trying to slap a theoretical model onto the experience (capitalism, imperialism, neoliberalism) would have probably been counterproductive if done prematurely. As the conversation moved onto Palestine, the man’s wife became involved and classified Farage as cruel to the Palestinians and immigrants. Who knows what conversations the pair had once they moved on, but the wife’s entry into the conversation in explicitly critical terms towards Farage, is obviously significant. The left is going to have to learn to have millions of conversations like this over the next few years to turn conversations into a political alternative to right-wing common sense. The frightening rationalisations we are seeing online for mass murder in Palestine show the stakes.

Social media of course is one of those places where a lot of conversations are happening and the left need to be there as well, but there is nothing like being face-to- face with someone, one to one, eyeball to eyeball, where tone, gesture, demeanour facilitate the dialogue. John’s account would not have happened online, where generally people stick to their positions rather than think again about them. The left needs to build many more contexts in which such conversations can happen, where listening to people’s lived experience can happen, and where alternative explanations as to why people feel like this or that, can acquire a hearing. It’s good to listen and talk. The left needs to get better at it.