The neo-liberal consequences of the last few decades have been a disaster for working people here and across the globe. Robert Dale describes the great dispossession that has taken place – and how to combat it

It’s always hard to understand the time you live in. It’s especially hard when real change is under way. In May 1968, did people think ‘oh this is a famous turning point in history’? I don’t think so. Even ‘the sixties’ weren’t a thing until they were long past.

What’s not hard is to look back at the four or five decades and know that they were awful. Pretty much my first proper political memory is Thatcher getting elected in 1979. And after that things just went from bad to worse.

I saw the epochal defeat of the miners’ strike close up. (I also got a glimpse of workers’ power and solidarity that has never left me). Ever since I’ve been wondering when things will start looking up again, when we’ll turn the corner.

I’m starting to think that the past four decades have been historically exceptional, and not in a good way. Two aspects stand out. First, sustained inequality of income and wealth at levels not seen since before the First World War. Second, a period of unprecedented quiet on the labour front.

The filthy rich

There has been massive shift in income and wealth over the past four or five decades. This is usually discussed under labels like ‘inequality’ and ‘cost of living’, which I find inadequate. Brazen theft and looting more like. Today the rich and powerful are grabbing a much bigger share of society’s wealth than they used to. That leaves even fewer crumbs for the rest of us – and then they goad us into fighting over them.

The effects of this heist are felt most harshly at the bottom of the income ladder. At the top, the obscenely filthy rich have taken the biggest share for themselves. But the merely grotesquely rich and their hangers-on are in on the feeding frenzy too. Very roughly, about 20 per cent of the population are in on the pilfering. Today the top 10 per cent account for 40 per cent of all consumer spending.

The polite way of describing the problem is to say that labour’s share of the national income has declined steadily since the mid-1970s. Statistics always sound so harmless. What it means is la-di-das and snouts-in-the-trough stuffing their faces in their fancy mansions while children go hungry to school and parents tear their hair out at the end of the month.

That great dispossession, I think, lies at the heart of politics today. Workers have been robbed, and know it in some form or other. Yet this central question is never mentioned in broader politics. None of the existing parties is even going to whisper it. 

Even if they were so minded, it is not a question that is not terribly amenable to policy solutions. Tinkering with benefits rules doesn’t even start to make a real difference. Electing the vegan hipster is not going to cut it, however good a game he talks. Nor is electing the racist toff.

It’s going to take a very big bang to shift the dial. The improvements during the twentieth century were won by a strong labour movement in times of revolution and war. We can’t expect the filthy rich to give up their ill-gotten gains without a fight. They will scream and shout and stomp about. They have their grubby paws on all the levers of power.

Workers

Workers have borne the brunt of the neoliberal assault. I’m going to concentrate here on what I’d call the ‘core working class’: essentially manual workers and lower clerical grades. The situation of the graduate professions – which include doctors and teachers – is also relevant of course, but a little different. Another time… 

Workers are cold, hungry, angry, at their wits’ end. Wages simply don’t cover the outgoings (with another round of price shocks incoming). Food banks are overrun and children go to school hungry. Families find themselves one unexpected expense away from disaster. People are pulling their own teeth for lack of NHS dentistry. The working classes are hardest hit by service cuts and least able to go private. 

Workers are fed up to the back teeth. A reputable recent poll finds half of all workers (and four in ten overall) agreeing that ‘our political and social institutions should burn rather then be preserved and improved’. Across the population as a whole, 65 per cent think that top pay should be no more than ten times the wage of the lowest earner. Currently the fattest cats take hundreds of times more than their workers.

If you’re thinking there’s rather a gap between the level of anger and the level of action, I’d be inclined to agree with you. Two questions arise: Why have workers not been able to swing the pendulum back? And where does all that leave us ?

The ‘why?’ is complicated I won’t get too tangled up in it here, although it will need unpacking sometime. Off the top of my head: Thatcher’s deindustrialisation, major trade union defeats in the 1980s (the miners, Warrington, Wapping), the council house sell-off, the abolition of earnings-related unemployment benefit, vicious cuts in benefits and public services across the board, privatisation of industries and public services at all levels (including the so-called non-profits), globalisation and offshoring, outsourcing, two-tier-workforces, three-tier workforces, sub-contracting, sub-sub-contracting, zero-hours contracts, and so on and so forth… 

Each of these changes represented a direct financial hit for workers. And each one of them also made it harder for us to organise to assert our interests. It’s been death by a hundred cuts. At the end of it, we have a situation where few workers in the private sector are union members. Those who are, are rarely called to action. And when they are, strikes have been pretty ineffectual. (Apologies to the honourable exceptions.)

I found myself wondering, when was the last time things were this bad? The answer seems to be ‘never’. You can go all the way back to the legalisation of trade unions in the 1870s without finding a comparable four-decade stretch where there was so little going on in the labour movement.

So where does that leave us then?

All sounds a bit grim, doesn’t it. And certainly explains why revolutionary class politics is a hard furrow to plough at the present time. But I’m not pessimistic, not at all. It can’t go on for ever, and it won’t. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I sure see signs that the ice is cracking. 

I think we could maybe keep an open mind about the forms of action to be keeping an eye out for. It might be outside the workplace, the Mouvement des gilets jaunes spring to mind for example (the Yellow Vest movement, France, 2018–2020). I’d like to know more about that story. When something big shifts, it won’t be hard to see. The question will be understanding what it means. (The gilets jaunes spring to mind again).

And until it kicks off big time, which it will, we must continue to plod along, doing the right thing as best we can. Building, building movements against fascism and war. Building workers’ organisation and supporting the strikes that do occur. And all the while, building a revolutionary organisation too. Apart from anything, if we’re going to have to fight so hard just to take back a piece of the cake, we might as well have the bakery too.

If you’ve been nodding along to all this, maybe you’d like to think about joining us. There’s plenty of work to be done.

Robert Dale lives in the Berlin region, where he has been active in socialist politics since the 1980s.