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No one can be surprised that the Tory press (i.e., 90% of the daily editorial commentary) is in danger of cardiac arrest because the new leader of the Labour Party was elected with the support of the trade unions (seems logical, Labour Party, labour unions). What is a bit mystifying is that journalists and commentators associated with a left of centre location also seem prone to hyper-tension on this issue. For example, on the BBC Today programme (27 September) Polly Toynbee of the Guardian assured listeners that Ed Miliband was not “in hock to the unions”.
To place this assurance in context, a few obvious points might be made. First, most of the major social programmes that progressives support in the United States, Britain and continental Europe have been the result of the active and often militant support of trade unions. Governments enacted these programmes because they were “in hock to the unions”. With this so obviously the case, why are progressives urging Ed Miliband not to make more trips to the TUC pawn shop?
This question leads to a second fact even more obvious: capitalist societies are divided into three classes, the capitalists themselves, those they hire (once called workers), and the professionals that may or may not be hired by capital (captured in the now never-used term “petite bourgeoisie”, which despite or because of its current disuse has an entry in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie). The first of these three is fully organised into its own political movement which it wholly owns, the Conservative Party, as well as a smaller one it does not directly own, but for which it maintains a first-refusal option (the Liberal Democratic Party).
Since the employers are organized, why not the employees (note that I avoid the ideological terms “bosses and workers”)? Unless I have missed something, “the Labour Party in hock to the unions” would seem the logical and necessary response to the Tory part wholly owned by capital. The alternative pursued by the late, unlamented Tony Blair, a bargain price to capital to purchase the Labour Party, would not seem what progressives would want. But, it is the de facto alternative to being “in hock to the unions”, because those of us in the PB are never organized as a principle of our existence.
How then, do we account for anxieties by progressives that Ed Miliband was elected with union support? This derives from a rather particular petite bourgeois (please forgive the term) view of the electoral process; namely that it should unfold in market place of individuals, and the contending politicians should offer their policy products for selection on the basis of the personal choice of voters. In this political market place monopolies and collusion by any group, be it capital, labour or the East Hampshire Cat Lovers, is an affront to democracy. By this line of argument, labour unions are always Big Labour, with plans as nefarious as those of Big Capital, to deny free thinking individuals the democratic process (as well as causing the Winter of Discontent and all that).
This view of the democratic process is the political equivalent of free market ideology, and if we reject the one, we must reject the other. A progressive politics without being “in hock to the unions” is as likely as competitive markets generating full employment and equitable distribution. Competitive markets are destabilizing, generate concentrations of economic power in the hands of capital, and that economic power of capital becomes its political power through control of the media and its own parties.
Ha-Joon Chang has written a new book ridiculing the idea of “free markets” (see my review under Media and ecomment). No less imaginary and worthy of ridicule is the idea of a free and open political arena where ideas compete on their merit. In hock to the unions? Go for it Ed.
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