Ralph Miliband and the Politics of Class Today

Wednesday 27 November
7pm-8.30pm
Parliament, Committee Room 9

With speakers including:

John McDonnell MP (Chair), Colin Leys, Andrew Murray and Hilary Wainwright

Reserve your free place here.


The Socialist Register was founded by Ralph Miliband and John Saville in 1964 as ‘an annual survey of movements and ideas’ from the standpoint of the independent new left. It is currently edited by Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber, assisted by an editorial collective of eminent scholars in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Each volume is focused on a topical theme and characterized by the inclusion of relatively long, sustained analyses which cut across intellectual disciplines and geographical boundaries.

The 50th volume of the Socialist Register is dedicated to the theme of 'registering class' in light of the spread and deepening of capitalist social relations around the globe.

Today's economic crisis has been deployed to extend the class struggle from above while many resistances have been explicitly cast in terms of class struggles from below.

This volume addresses how capitalist classes are reorganizing as well as the structure and composition of working classes in the 21st century.

Don't be distracted by an exaggerated 'intergenerational divide' ...

There has been some quite silly spinning in recent days about an 'intergenerational divide'. It reached its apogee on twitter (where else?) with this tweet:

For once the UK's economic differences are not so much between rich and poor...they are between old and young http://t.co/uKjcuVQprd
— Shiv Malik (@shivmalik1) June 14, 2013

The tweet links to an article by Paul Johnson - the director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies. What he says is somewhat different to what Malik tweeted. Johnson says of distrubutional changes in income since the recession, "the differences are not so much between rich and poor" - and points out that "pensioner incomes have continued to rise on average, albeit very modestly".

But when Johnson uses terms like 'rich' and 'poor' he is talking about quintiles (20%) or deciles (10%) at best. The real rich are the top 1% or even less - whose grotesque incomes and wealth continue to grow unhindered (for example FTSE director pay grew by 34% in 2010 and by 49% in 2011). The Sunday Times Rich List also shows that in the last year, the richest 1,000 Britons saw their wealth expand by £35 billion - that's more than all the welfare cuts announced, in total!

In the last five years, since the start of the recession, unemployment has increased by a staggering 49% for 18-24 year olds, but the same is also true for 35-49 year olds. More staggering is that the number of 50 to 64 year olds unemployed has risen by 82% in that same period. So actually the hardest hit by the recession (remember youth unemployment was high and rising before the recession) are older workers.


And pensioners are not having it easy - as DWP poverty figures released yesterday showed. The pensioner poverty rate is 18%, compared with 17% for working age adults (see Guardian article). The UK still lags behind the rest of Europe on what it spends (public and private) on pensions: with our spending just 5.4% of GDP, compared to 6.0% in the US, 8.8% in Japan, 10.7% in Germany and 12.5% in France.

The reality is that we need intergenerational solidarity to defeat the cuts that are hitting both young and old. Whether one section of society is being hit slightly harder is only of secondary importance to us all uniting to stop the bastards that are hitting us!

Evidence of the 'squeezed middle'?

Labour leader Ed Miliband, and the rest of the Labour frontbench now seem to be triangulating towards a group they have dubbed the 'squeezed middle' although he seems a bit confused about who the 'squeezed middle' is.

The term has been coined by the Resolution Foundation (RF), which seems a fairly New Labour-ish kind of think-tank populated by the usual pretentious canape-devouring circuit that churns-out 'influential' waffle at an impressive rate.

Still at least RF knows what it means by the 'squeezed middle': "the 11 million households who (sic) earn between £12,000 and £30,000 a year". To most people that might look the vast majority of the working class, and really would be better described a low income households (full-time on the minimum wage is over £11,500), and indeed as well as using the political soundbite 'squeezed middle' they also use the more prosaic epithet "low-to-middle earners".

The language is important here: why from "low-to-middle earners" has Ed Miliband adopted "squeezed middle". Admittedly, "shat-upon-poor" is less acceptable to the Daily Mail, but it seems the concerns of the poor or low paid are so illegitimate as to be irrelevant to the new Labour leader (should that 'n' be capitalised?).

Miliband actually appears to be crow-barring higher earners into the "squeezed middle" too - stating those having child benefit removed are also the "squeezed middle".

Clearly Miliband is confused.

However, there is no reason for him to be: the low and middle income households are indeed being squeezed. Serious evidence of this was published this week by the Office for National Statistics in their Family Spending survey which showed for the first time (in the 10 years the data has been published in this way) UK household spending declined over the last year.

In 2009 the average household spent £455, down from £471 in 2008. With unemployment rising, short-term working, and pay freezes it is not surprising that households tightened their belts over this period.

The risk must be that with unemployment still high, and likely to rise further, there could be a continued downward slump. It is also clear evidence of the need for policies that are redistributive rather than regressive. With the Coalition cutting jobs, freezing pay and slashing benefits household expenditure will tighten further.

The squeeze exists, but not exclusively for the middle.