The lessons that the Left should learn are almost diametrically opposed to those that Paul has proposed. Rather than a collapse into the reactionary values of family, fairness, hard work and decency, the Left should base itself on the values of class, solidarity and internationalism.

Rather than searching after an ephemeral broad alliance that requires that the Left liquidate its politics and programme, now is the time when the Left needs to clarify and sharpen its politics and programme. It needs to do that, in order to focus its attention on those tens of thousands of new, young activists drawn into political action, in Britain, and indeed worldwide. There is a crying need for such an approach to all of those drawn into political activity in Hong Kong, for example, where the current middle-class politics of the movement offers no way forward, and only the prospect of defeat, and disaster. …

The fetishisation of winning elections, as against the building of a principled movement and party of the Left, leaves Paul chasing rainbows, and as he does so, his politics and programme are led ever further astray.

“The scale of slump, and the money already spent and borrowed, could open the door to a permanent change in the economic model in a way the 2008 crisis did not — if the left can seize the opportunity.”

True, but the question is how, and its not on the basis of Starmer, or a Popular Front with the centre.

“If you are tempted to leave the party, thinking a new, pristine left one could replace it: that is exactly what the elite and their allies want. In addition, the serious differences on the left — over “identity politics”, Brexit and increasingly human rights in China — would blow any such party into two fragments immediately.” …

Labour’s 2019 Programme was a confused mess. At the heart of that mess was the contradiction it faced over its commitment to pursue Brexit. The clearest manifestation of that contradiction was its attempt to combine that with a similar commitment to hold another referendum. Labour’s position had been correct in 2016. We support remaining in the EU, but we reject the current neoliberal ( conservative social-democratic) political regime that dominates it. Of course, that political regime is simply a reflection of the fact that the same conservative social-democracy dominates the national parliaments of the majority of EU nation states. That, in itself, shows how ridiculous Lexit was as an idea, because the most conservative of those conservative social-democratic states, was Britain itself! …

“Because the liberal+centrist vote is clustered in the big cities, or in the exurban constituencies we already hold, there is no route to government unless you regain votes lost in the ex-industrial small towns.”

Again, this assumes that the most important thing is being in government. But, of course, the old people in those decaying towns are dying out, and their inherited reactionary ideas are dying out with them, as those ideas themselves were generated by a different world that has gone. But, also, those towns themselves are dying and changing. In ten years time, smaller towns, some filled with people who have migrated from high cost cities, as COVID encourages a more rapid move to home-working, will have entirely new populations that more closely resemble the cities in their attitudes. Indeed, as I wrote some time ago — Metropolitan Elite Myth, already in those decaying towns, there are also young working-class people, who already share all those same values, as their metropolitan counterparts. Its not a metropolitan v old industrial town dichotomy, but simply a young, educated, progressive working-class v old, ill-educated, reactionary working-class and petty-bourgeois dichotomy. …

“As a result of this they have consolidated a new and highly defensible “position” (in the Gramscian metaphor): a populist, authoritarian government, with the support of both the socially-liberal middle class and parts of the traditional working class, which promises to “move fast and break things”, including all the traditional checks and balances in our unwritten constitution.”

But, who exactly is it that has consolidated this position? Not the ruling class, or at least its dominant component, the owners of fictitious capital. This is near to being the worst of all possible worlds for them. The last thing they require is a hard Brexit government in Britain, which simply compounds the instability created by Trump in the US. …

Paul draws heavily on Gramscian concepts of strategy of “war of position”, “war of manoeuvre”, and the concept of “hegemony” to flesh out the conclusions he draws from his essentially subjectivist analysis of current conditions. This is the basis of his argument above about the need to move from a strategy of survival to a strategy of resistance.

“Antonio Gramsci warned that, in a Western democracy, the state is just an “outer trench” in the defence of capitalism, and that behind it stands “a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks” stretching right through civil society.”

In actual fact, this statement is back to front. It is all those fortresses, and earthworks that represent the outer trench. It is they which are a natural feature of the bourgeois landscape, so natural that no one notices them. That is what makes them so powerful as ideological bastions, the means by which the “ruling ideas” are able to control civic society without a shot being fired. Its only when that landscape is disrupted by some social earthquake that the ruling class has to fall back to its inner bulwarks of defence, in the form of the state, first in its own passive defences, via the courts and so on, and ultimately via the mobilisation of the bodies of armed men. …

If we look at those voting for Brexit, they were overwhelmingly Tory voters, and they were reactionary Tory voters drawn predominantly from the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie, a petty-bourgeoisie that is often conflated with the working-class purely on a subjective basis of income, education and so on. The same group holds reactionary views on a range of other subjects. It was supplemented by other groups, which a materialist analysis, also demonstrates had objectively determinable reasons for holding the views that it did, and does. Some are workers employed by these petty-bourgeois, whose ideas and condition rubs off on them, who may see themselves pursuing a similar course of action. In the main they are atomised workers, outside the organised labour movement and in some senses alienated from it, as they envy the higher wages and advantages of organised workers in larger businesses, etc. Its amongst this group that you most often find the expression of ideas such as hostility to the “gold plated” pensions of public sector workers, particular hostility to benefit “scroungers”, given the real or perceived small differences in income between them. …

When we look at this question of “values”, we find that they correlate extremely closely with the way people voted in relation to Brexit. Those that voted for Brexit, overwhelmingly also oppose immigration and have reactionary views on other subjects, from women’s and LGBT Rights, to their views on the environment. Most of them, in December 2019, did not vote against Labour because they saw Corbyn as too anti-Brexit, but because they just did not like Corbyn, and the other progressive social-democratic ideas he represents. …