<nettime> Jeremy Seabrook: A Pretense of Progress (NI)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Aloha All,
Re: what happened to the Left - and why is it so impotent?
Well, here are some cues.
Enjoy (?) p+2D!



original to: 
https://newint.org/features/2017/03/01/a-pretence-of-progress/
A pretence of progress
Jeremy Seabrook, New Internationalist, March 01, 2017


The marriage of welfare with prosperity seemed like a permanent 
settlement between capital and labour after the Second World War. So 
what went wrong? Jeremy Seabrook considers the past, present and future 
implications of a growing inequality.
The welfare state – in Britain and all the Western world – was after 
1945 an incarnation of the politics of repentance for an ideology that 
had reduced a continent to ruin. Racism, for centuries the animating 
principle of European empires, had been returned in the mid-20th century 
to the continent that had been pleased to call itself the cradle, not 
simply of one civilization, but of Civilization itself. After the time 
of bones and ashes, Europe needed to cleanse itself of the taint of 
racism, and present itself as the supreme model of humanitarian values.
Never Again: the welfare state was a pledge that the malignant fantasy 
that had laid waste much of Europe would be vanquished for ever; wild 
flowers would burst through the concrete sites of grief and desolation 
that scarred the continent. The living would no longer be left to make 
their own individual accommodation with the forces of wealth and power; 
they would be sheltered by universal welfare, available at the point of 
need, for which no justification would be required.
On the welfare state the whole structure of post-War society depended. 
Since economic breakdown had caused ruin in Germany, it was in the 
economic arena that redemption was sought; economic miracles duly 
appeared. Of all institutions for human salvation, it might have been 
thought the economic was the least promising. But there it was: ‘the 
economy’, euphemism for capitalism, became the arena where 
rehabilitation from European barbarism would occur.
First came the security of the people: defence against the economic 
cycle – unemployment, poverty wages and debt – and against the 
vicissitudes of life – sickness, ageing and loss. The 1948 National 
Assistance Act began: ‘The Poor Law shall cease to exist…’ – words that 
lifted from millions the shadow of the workhouse, humiliation, fear of 
destitution. It was indeed a liberation; and if sensitive ears detected 
a grumble of discontent that the working classes would have all their 
teeth pulled for the sake of free dentures, these were noises-off in the 
restrained jubilation of the age of true austerity.
Tolerance and greater diversity offered new experiences to a dour, 
monochrome, patriarchal Britain; social liberation was in the air
On this foundation the ‘affluent society’, in the words of J K 
Galbraith, was constructed. This brought within reach of a majority a 
modest prosperity and small items of undreamed-of luxury. That such a 
benign development might take on a life of its own and become florid 
consumerism did not disturb the comfort of people newly enfranchised by 
more than mere electoral freedoms. The marriage of welfare with 
prosperity appeared a permanent settlement between capital and labour. 
That settlements in human affairs are rarely permanent occurred to few 
in the euphoria of the time. Tolerance and greater diversity offered new 
experiences to a dour, monochrome, patriarchal Britain; social 
liberation was in the air.
Spreading inequality

Continuously rising income seemed, for a season, unstoppable. The 1960s 
marked the zenith of optimism. The great carnival of youth, the 
mobility, leisure and entertainment industries were accompanied by 
increased public expenditure on higher education, public administration, 
slum clearance and social work; partly to assist the laggards of 
progress to join a mainstream which foresaw a future of perpetual 
economic growth. A more socially liberal regime decriminalized 
homosexuality and attempted suicide, eased divorce laws, facilitated 
contraception and abolished capital punishment.
There were setbacks in this march of progress. In the 1970s, the rise in 
oil prices and assertiveness of organized labour, which culminated in 
the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978-79, called into question a settlement 
which those who disputed it believed could be undone by a good dose of 
unemployment or another war. With the coming of Margaret Thatcher, they 
got both. Her devotion to dissolving the more equal partnership between 
workers and employers led not only to an attack upon the trade unions 
but also to the demolition of the very industrial base out of which 
their strength had grown. Defeat of the miners in 1984 gave any 
‘settlement’ its quietus. The Labour Party seemed a dwindling force, as 
its ghost-army of workers, redundant or retired, melted away.
But Labour, resilient and tenacious, re-invented itself. New Labour 
renewed – in an altered context in which even the memory of the 
industrial revolution had been effaced – the compact between wealth and 
welfare. By this time that project was between unequal partners. New 
Labour invested in health and education, but was extremely permissive 
about private wealth, which soared and demonstrated a formidable 
capacity to breed. Welfare was now avowedly dependent upon a 
wealth-creationism that had more than a whiff of mysticism. But the 
society which resulted from this patched-up alliance led to greater 
diversity and deepening tolerance, supposed to be a defining quality of 
the British.
Racism, which had for centuries guided our imperial relationship with 
the world and ‘lesser peoples’, was outlawed. Further social reform 
lowered the age of consent and the rights of alternative sexualities 
were recognized. Women, whose lives had been spent in carceral 
domesticity for generations, now constituted half the workforce. People 
with disability, formerly dependent upon organizations like the Crutch 
and Kindness League, were no longer passive recipients of charity. All 
these groups were assisted by enhanced concern with ‘equalities’ – in 
the plural.

New Labour invested in health and education, but was extremely 
permissive about private wealth, which demonstrated a formidable 
capacity to breed
The problem was that ‘progressives’ overlooked the great psychic wound 
caused by eradication of the making of useful, necessary things in the 
industrial division of labour of Britain. To this was added an apparent 
indifference to inequality – in the singular – exacerbated by the 
freedom of the already rich to accumulate ever greater (and concealed) 
wealth.
Labour’s championing of the social cause of ethnic minorities, women, 
people with disability and the LGBT community ensured these groups were 
more equitably represented among the successful in society. But the 
majority remained victims of worsening economic inequality.
This inequality was not amenable to government intervention, the more so 
since globalism had not only set the people of one country in 
competition with one another, but had drawn the whole world into an 
increasingly specialized division of labour. The limited presence of a 
minority that rose, socially and economically, to join the ranks of 
people now pejoratively described as a ‘liberal elite’ had the effect, 
not of reducing inequality, but of spreading social injustice more 
fairly.
Rage of the ‘left-behind’

The more equitable distribution of unfairness is not a slogan to win 
elections or to emblazon on banners of progress. It is not a slogan at 
all. In fact, rigorous silence was maintained over this development. The 
modest success of some members of disadvantaged groups only concealed 
the obvious. But that obvious has now become clear to the newly awakened 
‘working class’ of Britain, as of the US, a group hitherto assumed 
sufficiently drowsy with consumerism not to have noticed what was 
happening behind their backs. The ‘angry white men’, the ‘rage of the 
left-behind’ have joined with the discreet self-interest of the very 
rich in an attack upon a political ‘establishment’ and its love of 
‘political correctness’ in furthering the careers of the previously 
deprived. For this was not simply a ‘rust-belt’ revolt, either in Brexit 
or the Trump ascendancy. The waning of the US working classes had been 
so complete that it had ceased to exist in the global media. It had 
miraculously become ‘middle-class’, a classification designed to make 
them realize how lucky they were. The principal beneficiaries of their 
enlistment in the politics of malignant nostalgia have been the very 
rich, who are happy to make common cause with their admirers, people 
whom they serve as fantasy role-models.
The ‘liberal elite’ have become hate-figures. But they, too, have served 
a less noble purpose than their defence of minorities would have us 
believe. Their stand against racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, 
Islamophobia and all the other demonology of a now waning orthodoxy has 
dominated political discourse for so long that these laudable, humane 
views are identified, not with advocates for the downtrodden, but with 
the ruling classes of the world; a role these liberal elitists (if that 
is what they are) were eager to accept. In other words, they formed a 
front line, behind which corrosive social inequities flourished.
So when people who have lost their function in the creative work of 
society observe conspicuous wealth in which they have no part, and rise 
up against those they see as agents of their dispossession, they turn 
upon the advocates of tolerance, social liberalism, humanity and 
kindness – ‘the people we are’, or were supposed to be – who shun 
bigotry, violence and hatred.
Behind the façade of liberal elitism stand, in shadowy concealment, the 
truly opulent, owners of fabulous fortunes, godlike beings whose 
allegiance is to no country, but to the jurisdiction or haven which 
protects their wealth from scrutiny. This accumulation of treasures is 
not visible as a malignant force to the dimming eye of the unprivileged, 
the socially downwardly mobile, former workers of the world. Quite the 
opposite: as labour was degraded, deference passed to those who 
manipulate fortunes, the possessing classes who parade their iconography 
of symbols of privilege in real estate, yachts, aircraft, jewels, gold 
and, above all, in money-power.
While the ‘liberal elite’ were performing their rites of progress, the 
true wielders of power were picking away at the social fabric, undoing 
the work of which progressives were so proud
While the ‘liberal elite’ or the ‘metropolitan bubble’ were performing 
their rites of progress, the true wielders of power were picking away at 
the social fabric, undoing the work of which progressives were so proud. 
The welfare state is being dismantled; the prosperity that depended on 
it eroded by years of declining real income; while ethnic minorities, 
women, lesbians and gays, and people with disability are openly 
disparaged by those whose supremacy permits them to ridicule any 
pretence of ‘progress’, which has proved more volatile than anyone had 
dreamed.
Instruments of disfranchisement

It seems, in this complex tragic-comedy, that everyone has had an opaque 
role, undisclosed to them. Passionate commitment to humanitarian 
‘values’ has veiled the immodesty of those who were most advantaged by 
this late and subtle capitalist restoration. People have seen 
livelihoods abolished, communities ruined; have watched heroin, 
hopelessness and hate invade familiar small towns, suburbs and 
inner-cities, while welfare no longer provides security against 
destitution. But they see the instruments of their disfranchisement, not 
in global celebrities, CEOs of transnational corporations, or wizards of 
banking and finance, but in the now-despised liberals who officially 
presided over the era of globalism; for this spirited away, as if by 
sorcery, their culture and way of life, even as their skills were 
floated off to remote places of industrial exploitation, the names of 
which are only echoes of forgotten geography lessons.
The true owners of wealth and power have returned to claim their 
rightful property, evicting an impotently liberal tenant whose franchise 
is now at an end. These wreckers of the security of the people know that 
social peace and internal harmony have, for three generations, been 
guaranteed by the welfare state; they are also aware of what sombre 
consequences may follow the dismantling of this fragile, elegant 
edifice. For behind the tottering structures, designed by progressives 
to banish the spectre of racism from Europe, an old ideology is rising 
from its shallow grave, clad once more in the garb of springtime and 
renewal. Those who imagined themselves midwives of a better world see 
re-emerging the shape of an older, worse one, and regression to the 
nationalisms, xenophobia and intolerance of difference which the reforms 
of 1945 were to have laid to rest for ever. The earlier vow ‘Never 
Again’ resounds through the echo-chamber of time, heard anew, bitter and 
mocking, as ‘Semper Idem – always the same.’
Jeremy Seabrook’s latest book, The Song of the Shirt, (Hurst, London and 
Navayana, New Delhi) is out now. He is currently working on a book about 
orphans.
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