Labour MP Jon Cruddas wants to “re-establish a public philosophy for the left” centred around work. The working class has suffered a loss of security and of esteem, he argues in his new book, and rebuilding that is Labour’s task. It is a call to arms for a coherent philosophy with which to define the party—something desperately needed by its current leader Keir Starmer, who describes this book as “an ambitious and essential read.”
Cruddas, who represents the East London constituency of Dagenham and Rainham, repeatedly lambasts the left for focusing on “cosmopolitan,” “urban,” “globally orientated” and “educated” young people, who have “replaced the workers” the party has traditionally represented. (He seems to assume that “workers” cannot be urban, educated or young.)
For Cruddas, this “fashionable” tendency is personified in the work of Paul Mason and Aaron Bastani. But Cruddas’s critiques of these figures are often inaccurate: for example, Bastani does not, as he thinks, give in to “technological determinism,” but wants to harness the emancipatory potential of technology for the same common good Cruddas desires.
New Labour doesn’t emerge unscathed. According to Cruddas, “they sought to maximise the welfare of the working class through tax reform rather than the extension of collective bargaining.” Apparently this approach was “passported on to the Corbynite left,” which is surprising to read, since Corbyn’s 2019 Labour manifesto committed to “roll out sectoral collective bargaining across the economy.”
The book suffers from its author not interviewing his antagonists, leaving his criticisms partial and selective. His alternatives are, in fact, eerily similar to Corbyn’s. He advocates worker-directors on company boards and laments that “industrial democracy has never been a priority,” but Labour under Corbyn backed “one-third of boards to be reserved for elected worker-directors.” His endorsements of a job guarantee, Green New Deal, ending workfare and setting up a single labour enforcement body all echo Corbyn/McDonnell-era policies too. In a microcosm of the current Labour Party, The Dignity of Labour finds division where alliances are possible.
The Dignity of Labour by Jon Cruddas (Polity, £14.99)
