“To claim for socialism that it is a class war is to do it an injustice and indefinitely postpone its triumph. Socialism offers a platform broad enough for all to stand upon. It makes war upon a system, not upon a class.”
-Aneurin Bevan

Britain’s TUC recently has recently published research showing that the relative incomes of those who fall into what is often lazily termed ‘middle Britain’ have been falling. My prospective constituency suffering from extremes of wealth, with a fair amount sandwiched in the middle, I find that this topic has a particular pertinence indeed.

In an age where the super rich have monopolised massive sums of cash relative to the rest of the population, it seems to me that there are strong grounds for social democrats to begin to rebuild the third way coalition, but on a much more avowedly social democratic basis.

From a domestic point of view, though Labour has certainly done the right thing by attempting to stimulate demand, it needs to recognise that part of the reason we are in this situation in the first place is because of a stagnation in wages in general.

The Blairite interpretation of the middle class as ‘aspiring’ people with a very strictly individualist definition of aspiration, driving their expensive cars to expensive foreign holidays, has looked less and less sustainable as the years have passed by.Many imagine Woking to be like that, by virtue of its being in Surrey.

The reality has been that many of the cars and holidays have been funded not as the proceeds of hard work (for the most part appropriated by employers and those to whom they pay out) but instead as the product of lax credit regulation and debt fuelled spending. Employees of all grades haven’t been getting a fair enough deal, particularly those on £16-24,000 PA.

It has always been clear that the designation ‘middle class’ is unsatisfactory. I prefer ’skilled workers’, because that is what most of these people are. That is worth remembering, if you are on the left. These people still depend on the good intentions of their employer. While they may not feel solidarity with the poor, there are reasons for that related to the spread of neoliberalism, related to credit rating procedures, and related to the long failures of the centre left in movement and community politics. Below I shall explain why I think conditions are changing.

The most extreme examples of lucid super debt have been at the bottom, where sub-prime customers have been given blank cheques and free mortgages all over the developed world, with particular effect in America, where sub-prime mortgages started the dominoes falling.

But the pressing material issue is why. In previous epochs, the gradual improvements to lifestyle which took place for most throughout the 80s and 90s would have been financed by rising wages. In the UK the economy has been shaped increasingly like a bolus, with an increasing tendency towards normal distribution once the distorting effect of the ’super rich’ is ignored. Once the super rich are factored in, we still end up with fewer at the bottom end of the income scale than one might expect in, say, the 1930s. The political proceeds of this have been evident, as class e-alignment has kicked in, alongside the real material shift as described in Hobsbawm’s ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’. In this sense, in many ways, New Labour and its European counterparts have a direct material basis; the politics of neoliberalism seeped into centre-left parties not in a structuralist, almost immediate way, but as part of a gradual shift in the social base, leaving the right of the Labour Party in control in the 1970s, and parties such as the SDP with groupings such as the prominent Seeheimer Kreis.

Once, however, we count in the super rich, the graph looks much more… well, usual. Those who form the ‘middle’ identified by Blairites shift gradually leftwards on the graph (and hopefully therefore in their politics). The bulk of the depressed wages against total national wealth (and therefore inflation) are normally paid to these people.

Where failing to allow distribution of wealth to the bottom allowed a credit crisis to develop in the US, failing to adequately distribute it to the lower-middle, coupled with oversupply resulting from product improvements and productive innovation, has led to a crisis of demand in most consumer industries. It will continue as an albatross around the neck of the European economy for some time.

How can social democrats respond?

Firstly, the priority must be to create institutions that enable more equitable (and coincidentally thereby more sustainable) distribution of assets and monies to take place.

The state has a role to play in this sense, as in the immediate period fiscal stimulus and ‘control to lend’ type arrangements are clearly required. But there also exists the longer term task. Social democrats must build political institutions capable of stopping this from happening again.

In (and on) Social Europe we spend a lot of time talking about the percieved political failures of social democracy across Europe. This is done with a particular emphasis on electoral success.

I would argue that this is a misallocation of our priorities. Our real problem is at the base. Before the neoliberal onslaught, strong unions and community organisations were responsible for protecting the vulnerable, yes, but they were also crucial, in this sense, to building and maintaining a consumer economy. In the UK in particular we are sorely lacking in this regard. Further backing should also be given to the concept of rebuilding this bulwark, as it firstly provides a guard against potential reactionary backlashes, conservative or fascist, and secondly provides the raw materials from which social democratic movements are made, in great amounts.

Anybody who works with Trade Unions in the UK will know that they are under extreme pressure, subject to many often unnecessary outside constraints, out of touch with the younger generation and new organising models, and unable to cope with the industrial fragmentation inherent to the post-Fordist era. These things need tackling at a movement level rather than a party level. Politicians can help by stopping shock mass unemployment, but in saving their own long term base, social democrats should be looking at big institutions, and how these can be created or won from the bottom up.

As this will clearly be a 20 year struggle, why aren’t we looking at getting kids to festivals and demonstrations instead of just leafleting all the time? We fight elections for a reason.  The leafleting will come. First they need bringing in. Educating. And cementing.

Why aren’t we spending more time tackling the media instead of our local constituents? Why aren’t we organising in our unions to decentralise them, and our workplaces and local parties to make them listen?

Only against such a backdrop can we fight for both working and middle class people, who as I say above, are  both different grades of the same thing, and in any event, increasingly together in terms of direct interests. In the future, both will need social democratic policies of the type we have not seen in some time. That will need to be achieved, and can only be done by building the institutions needed to get us there.

As grim as the present looks, the future points to social democracy. The continuing depression of middle and working class wages decried by the TUC can only represent a long term future of stagnation; of low spending, and low incentive for business and innovation. A future which it is necessary for capitalist society to avoid. Society needs our ideas.

Whether we can build a movement, a basis to sustain a seed change in opinion in order to speed this situation along, is a question only we can answer.

The political requirements are evident, and so are the political (and more crucially social) challenges.