Status Updates From How the Establishment Lost ...

This is clearly not a moment to be downhearted, but nor is it a moment for cheering from the sidelines. A time of system failure and classbased discontent is a time to take the initiative.

Only people actively and passionately engaged in trying to change the world can identify the elements in the situation which can take the struggle forward. This is the practical meaning of the central idea that socialist theory is the crystallization of the experience of working people.

Concentrated at the heart of the corporate machine and in all the strategic institutions of the system, working people can become agents of self-liberation through their collective and active opposition to the system.

Once mass opinion, mass movements, and a mass political project started to assert alternatives the core project of the ruling class was thrown into doubt.

In Britain the anti-austerity movement took some time to gather after the banking crisis. But the anti-war movement had created a model and the inspiration of the Occupy movement, UK Uncut actions, protests by disability activists, huge trade union demonstrations and important one-day strikes helped to cohere the sense of common action and generate enthusiasm for an anti-austerity coalition.

Trade union organisation and struggle is stuck at very low levels. And the left needs to turn its attention to overcoming this weakness because organised workplace based resistance is the necessary centrepiece of any successful struggle for social transformation.

These are real changes going on that require a serious strategic response from the left and the labour movement. But permanent and full-time jobs remain the majority experience, and the facts don’t support the idea of a new, separate precarious class.

The kind of industry that a person works in is not what defines their class position. In our highly commodified society, almost all production and the majority of what are defined as services are produced directly for profit. What is decisive is an individual’s relationship to that process of profit making.

No one nowadays bothers much to challenge the idea of a ruling class. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the owners of big capital is so blatant that it can’t be completely denied.

But it is important to note in the meantime that nothing spreads clarity and understanding about capitalist class relations more effectively than mass struggle, the active embodiment of human being’s ability to cooperate to change things. Participatory struggles are important because they can lead to victories, but also because they are profoundly educational.

The very decision to join and get active in a union is a recognition of a fundamental antagonism in society and an expression of a basic class consciousness.

In practice, the necessity for the capitalist to drive down workers’ wages and attack conditions means that the commodification of labour always risks a pushback. What appears to the capitalist as a mere quantitative reduction in wages or lengthening of the working day can be for the worker a qualitative break, a lifechanging, sometimes even life-threatening event.

A poll taken during Corbyn’s second election campaign in 2016 found that 51% of the population thought the media was deliberately biased against Corbyn and only 29% didn’t.

Bizarrely, in our version of ‘freedom of the press’, it is regarded as acceptable for business tycoons to own segments of the media and use them shamelessly to promote their politics.

Not only is it assumed that most people cluster around the centre, but that this ‘moderate’ middle is the most rational and sensible pace to be.

David Cameron’s plan was to promise an EU referendum as a way of undercutting support for UKIP and marginalising the Europhobic right in his own party. Not only did he fail to carry the country, exit polls suggest 58% of Tory voters voted Leave.

The progressive programme outlined in Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto would have been much harder to implement had Britain remained at the mercy of the endless EU directives outlawing nationalisation and state intervention.

In fact the scale and scope of Corbyn’s support was, inconceivable except as an expression of deep social trends. Labour Party membership was well over 600,000 by December 2016, up from 201,000 in May 2015, making Labour the biggest party in Western Europe.

So, rather than a rejection of politics, what was happening was a rejection of the type of politics and policies on offer in the mainstream up to that point. An unjust economic system was at the top of people’s concerns and they were starting to link economic malfunction with a broken political system.

Accompanying this distrust of the institutions was a sense that big business has become too powerful. This predated the economic crash.

Ignoring the way in which recent wars have destabilised the world, the British foreign policy establishment remains keen on intervention and supportive of a series of murderous proxy wars.

In countries like Greece and Ireland, anything resembling democracy will be effectively suspended for many years; in order to behave ‘responsibly’, as defined by international markets and institutions, national governments will have to impose strict austerity, at the price of becoming increasingly unresponsive to their citizens.

The banking crisis of 2008 brought all this to a head. The rhetoric of deregulation and small state turned out to be not just empty, but in bad faith. Not only had the most unfettered market imaginable gone into freefall but the immediate response of the government was to throw vast amounts of money – our money – at the banks until they stabilised and could return to their destructive business.

Thatcher, it has been said, may have idolised her hard working lower middle-class father, but she produced a society in the image of her dissolute and corrupt son.

Data collected under the 2010 coalition government shows that living standards continued to fall for all but the very rich.