00:00 Phil Hearse: … to discuss the working class on a world scale, right the way down to what's going on in Britain today. There may be difficulties defining exactly what class consciousness is. The article starts off with a quote from an online encyclopedia which seems to have a pretty good one, but even in that definition, the first thing it makes the point of is that the concept of consciousness is always evolving.
00:30 And the most difficult thing — this is what I was saying at the beginning about known unknowns — is to capture the contradictory things and to see what the main element of it is. And actually the main element of it, for a political organisation, is not necessarily the dominant thing at the present time: it might be the thing that we have to pick up. It might be that in general there is this decline in working-class consciousness, but that there are possibilities in new layers coming into struggle that we have to capitalise on. There are all kinds of variants in it.
01:01 I think one could be incredibly pragmatic about it and look at it this way. One of the things we talk about — celebrity culture, depoliticisation among the youth, people being particularly concerned about their careers and so on — there's a dominant idea, a received wisdom, which isn't even made explicit generally amongst lots of people: that you can only rely on personal solutions to your problems. You cannot any longer rely on collective solutions, whether those collective solutions are solutions through struggle, through the trade unions or political organisations, or collective solutions in the form of state or local government provision.
02:03 And I think this started — actually I think one of the most intelligent things that Margaret Thatcher ever did [was] to make Britain a property-owning democracy, because that tied so many people to retirement incomes, to having a little lump of capital. But you can see it all the time in a college. People come who've not had a job before, come out of university and teacher training college, come in, and they are dead keen to develop their careers.
02:34 And this is where the question of class differentiation becomes important, because actually I think somebody who's earning, maybe as a new teacher, £22,000 a year is part of the working class; a principal who's earning ninety or a hundred thousand is not part of the working class. And it's to do with the supervisory and career thing. I say, in individuals, people who used to be in the Communist Party, who were strong supporters of the NUT, who get a management position — and then suddenly they're less interested, they don't come to your meetings any more.
03:36 But what often happens with these younger people is that they come bang slap up against the reality of college and educational life nowadays, which is this immense pressure — which drives me mad — [which] gives you immense amounts of work. And if Ofsted says your college is only satisfactory, which increasingly almost everywhere in north-east London is — just satisfactory — and as we know, satisfactory is completely unsatisfactory anyway.
04:06 But the whole point about it, I think — okay, let's take that outside of the educational sphere. The dreams of personal advance, the confidence and the expectation of personal advance, increasingly during this period of crisis, is going to come unstuck. And it's going to be people who assumed that they had a final-salary-linked pension, or people who assumed that the money in their pension fund was actually going to be used for pensions rather than something else. In this period you can see the signs of distress [?].
04:37 And it's going to go into the middle class and it's going to go into the working class. And often the debates about where the petit bourgeoisie starts, where the supervisory petit bourgeoisie starts, can be a bit arcane, because in this period [everyone] who assumed that they had a job for life — it's going to hit both very hard.
05:10 The problem is having an alternative, and the possibility of an alternative. And I don't want to sound a falsely optimistic [?] note here, but all the experience — if you actually talk to trade union militants in virtually any sphere, but especially in the public sector — is that in a workplace, management always say that we have no alternative. Right: we've got to reorganise by this, we've got to hold your wages at this level, there is no alternative. And this is a microcosm of what happens in society as a whole. I mean, the political autism [?] of New Labour: well, you know, this crisis is caused by international factors, so what can we do? There is no alternative.
06:10 And it's extraordinary — they've gone to the big power and energy companies and said, please, we've got a few problems, can you give us a few crumbs so we can give a rebate? And they've said [expletive] off. New Labour [got] smacked around the face. "Who are you? We're the big energy companies. We're going to decide what's going to happen."
06:40 People have to believe that. In most workplaces it just takes two or three people to get up and say, it's not true that there's no alternative, and we don't have to make all those redundancies, and it's not true that we have to have this pay freeze — and the situation changes. Especially when there are people who are very disappointed in their expectations. I'm not saying it's all young people who wanted a nice career, but older workers as well, in many, many different spheres, who are seeing their dreams literally torn up. And one of the big dreams which has been torn up is Margaret Thatcher's property-owning democracy — the property-owning democracy until you have a few problems, in which case you're kicked out of your house, especially if you can't keep up the payments [?].
07:12 But here is the problem. I think it is the problem of crystallising a political alternative, and I think we can all agree with that: that a crystallised political alternative is key to helping resolve the problem of working-class consciousness and middle-class consciousness.
07:42 The formula that Alan used — I think it was what we used to call in the IMG an elliptical and synthetic formula, which means it was wrong. It means: if the anti-war movement had existed at the time of militant trade unions — yeah, I agree with that. But if there had been militant trade unions, it would have meant that there had not been that big decline of trade union struggle right away from the 1980s, and then that would have meant that the whole political culture would have been different.
08:14 The two things go together. The peace movement has had three big waves in Britain since about 1958. I came into politics during the first wave, and the political culture then was such that, you know, the first thing I ever read was *Tribune* [?]. There was a Labour left — all those kinds of things, all those things that we sum up with the word socialism. All those things have got to be recreated, but the basis for it is struggle. And on that, there's plenty of potential in the next period.
08:45 The idea that millions of public sector workers are going to settle for two per cent — when I don't know what the real inflation rate is; it depends on how much you earn, I suppose, but to most people it's ten, twelve, fourteen — this is insane. So there could still be struggles ahead. Okay.
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