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David McKee
David McKee
2 months ago

David Blunkett, John Reid, Alan Johnson, Frank Dobson: suave public schoolboys! Er, really? But that’s a niggle.

What has happened in recent decades is far more complex than Prof. Eagleton let’s on. In the last thirty years, Africa’s middle class has trebled, India’s has quadrupled. The West has stagnated, whereas the rest of the world is racing to catch up.

This is inconvenient to this jeremiad to growing proletarianisation, and therefore ignored.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

He’s hopelessly out of touch, still trying to fit his lifelong Marxist narrative into events with ever-increasing irrelevance.

Eagleton stands as a parody of the “right-on” Sixties revolutionary in his own lunchtime- the academic equivalent of Citizen Smith.

N Forster
N Forster
2 months ago

I do hope Terrys’ private life has been satisfactory. His professional life has been a waste of time.

Kathleen Burnett
Kathleen Burnett
2 months ago
Reply to  N Forster

Brilliant!

General Store
General Store
2 months ago

You’re forgetting that he’s a greatly esteemed academic. ” By far the largest group of wage labourers in his time were domestic servants, most of whom were women”….actually this group never more than 4%. I was going to suggest he stuck to literature…hmmm

John Wilson
John Wilson
2 months ago

Who is Terry talking about in the first paragraph (apologies for the ignorance)

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago
Reply to  John Wilson

Fictional character used as a counter-example?

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
2 months ago

Marx of course knew all about domestic servants especially his slave which he made pregnant, Helene Demuth.

J Dunne
J Dunne
2 months ago

So maybe he just wished more of the working class were servant women so he could take sexual advantage of them?

j watson
j watson
2 months ago

Marx was good on the diagnosis, less so on the prognosis, but Author correct to outline elements remain as true today as in late C19th. It’s an uncomfortable fact for many on the Right that wealth and power do concentrate if left unchecked, and in western Countries insecurity has increased as organised labour has been weakened. As interestingly growth rates reduce as inequality increases.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
2 months ago
Reply to  j watson

The paradox being, of course, that the growing wealth divide and insecurity faced by the blue collar class today is almost entirely the consequence of policies pursued by the ‘left’.

In 1997 almost any young school leaver in steady employment could quite reasonably aspire to owning a home, starting a family, getting the kids into decent schools, enjoying prompt and effective health care and the rest of it. By 2010 all that was gone. Meanwhile, how much unearned property wealth did you accumulate during the same period? A million? Two?

Marx may have been wrong on the prognosis – but he sure as hell was right about false consciousness and the narcissism of the bourgeoisie.

j watson
j watson
2 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

You assume Blair et al were Left HB. Many on the Left would say they categorically were not and certainly Karl would concur.
More broadly though I think a consensus that Neoliberalism, whoever managed by, has driven this trend.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
2 months ago
Reply to  j watson

But you are a neo-liberal, JW. What is ‘free movement of labour and capital’ if it is not the essence of neo-liberalism?

You’re trying to have it both ways (which, of course, is the essence of blairism).

j watson
j watson
2 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

I thought you end up back there somehow.
Debatable actually what Karl would have said about workers ability to move to where the work was. He was a Internationalist.
But for what’s it’s worth I’ve never been full free movement even when in EU. In the latter we should have applied all the Article constraints that were permissible – minimum capital, jobs advertised locally first, benefits on rate of home country if ever claimed etc, and furthermore incentivised more training and innovation in specific sectors. We could have virtually ceased non EU migration too as that was always in our gift. We did none of that, and in fact the Tories/Right increased the reliance and expanded it to weaken workers

Peter B
Peter B
2 months ago

If only Eagleton could stick to the observational writing at the start of the article (really quite good). But he always triggers himself with something like “class” and gets stuck in his rat hole of Marxist-loser nonsense.
Meanwhile, in spite of Eagleton’s claims, many of these new white collar working class proletarians in the public sector (from the ever victimised trade unions) are pushing ahead to a future of four days weeks (for five days pay) and permanent working from home. But they’re still victims in Eagleton world. And the rest of us are still guilty.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

I couldn’t get much further than the beginning for feeling ill.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
2 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

Yes, dear Terry, those poor union barons who earn a pittance, yet wrangle 70K a year for train drivers. Never trust a Marxist. Even an ex-Marxist. Which Terry is.

Dave Wheeler
Dave Wheeler
2 months ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

As a student of history, I’m with you and will never trust a Marxist, but ex-Marxists are redeemable…see Claire Fox, for instance.

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
2 months ago

Far more concerned about elite over-production combined with AI eviscerating the thinking class. Working class muscularity is unrest; bitter elites is revolution and they often co-exist and the former historically provided the manpower for the latter. Fascinating watching the 4th turning start to move from naissance to emergence. The world will be a very different place by 2032.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
2 months ago

“Marx himself noted this expansion in his own age, remarking ….”
Marx is not Jesus Christ

Adrian G
Adrian G
2 months ago

Go on, give him a job Kath!

Graeme Kemp
Graeme Kemp
2 months ago

Was the parrot alive on the don’s shoulder?

David Collier
David Collier
2 months ago

England? English individualism? True Prescott was from Hull and thus English. And: ‘Most of the mega-cities of the south of the planet are stinking slums rife with disease and overcrowding ‘ Maybe they are, I haven’t been to Australia or New Zealand for some years. Bit of insular chauvinism going on here though, I think, possibly.

Maverick Melonsmith
Maverick Melonsmith
2 months ago
Reply to  David Collier

I’ve been to Melbourne! It’s a beastly place!

Marco Sandeman
Marco Sandeman
2 months ago

I’m going to stick my neck out here, if only to counterbalance the criticism, and declare that I always enjoy Eagleton’s articles. I had an English teacher who taught in a similar way to how he writes (albeit without the Marxism), and it made things stick.

Susie Bell
Susie Bell
2 months ago

Bless

mike flynn
mike flynn
2 months ago

Appreciate this well written analysis using Prescott as metaphor for universal experience.

One can see much truth in these words, and still be anti-Marxist. What communism does not account for is human nature. Greed, avarice, hypocrisy, violence, are perhaps more rampant in a Marxist system than a capitalist one. 20th century experience as proof Marxism cannot improve the human condition.

The wishy washy split the difference social democracy has tried to help, but has wound up with the worst of both economic philosophies. The rich get richer. The operatives crush the proles, all the while telling us life is better under their thumb.

This leaves us capitalism. No less brutal than the others. An enlightened upper class would see to it basic needs are covered for the proles. Hunger is largely nonexistent. It’s a struggle, but shelter is available to all who seek it. Other things have become entitlements, but really are not.

Making sure all citizens have a chance to climb up to a more comfortable life is essential. Here is where concentration of wealth fails. Call it the low spark of high heeled boys effect. In US very low estate tax, foundations, trusts, are all used to transfer vast fortunes to undeserving progeny. These mechanisms must be taxed to keep generational wealth from destroying opportunity.

Maverick Melonsmith
Maverick Melonsmith
2 months ago

Imagine a Conservative Party intent on moving to the political centre but anxious about alienating its Right-wing by doing so. One way of resolving this problem would be to appoint as its deputy leader a wine merchant who owned a slice of Aberdeenshire, wore the finest tweeds in Westminster and spoke up for traditional values at every turn. Know ye of such a man?

Fernando B
Fernando B
2 months ago

Many teachers & nurses in this country have been working for the last 20/30 years with secured wages and a final salary pension. How has that been conducive of financial insecurity?

Howard Medwell
Howard Medwell
2 months ago

If a politician or a celebrity is loud, bullying, vulgar, drunk, inarticulate. a snappy dresser and occasionally free with his hands (in either the pugilistic or the Gregg whatsisname sense), the British media will describe him as “a typical working class lad”. Much of the left goes along with this line of thinking, and sees class as just another identity, like race, gender and sexuality. People are held to be victims of, or perpetrators of, “classism”, in the sense of, nostrils wrinkled at the sound of particular vowel sounds. “Working class”, actually a collective noun phrase, is used as an adjectival phrase referring to an individual – this would be an absurdity in most European languages.
Strangely, the Tory MP’s who brayed “gin and tonic, Giovanni” whenever the young John Prescott, the former ship’s steward, had the temerity to stand up and speak in Parliament, were expressing their instinctive awareness that his class had another dimension. It was his former job that made him a member of the working class, and thus a danger to what they represented. As a rank-and-file member of what was then the National Union of Seamen he had played an important role in pressurising that union’s right wing leadership to support the 1966 Merchant Navy strike. He authored a pamphlet, “Not Wanted On Voyage”, which set out the seafarers’ grievances, and he was described by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson as one of the “tightly knit group of politically motivated men” who were “blowing the Labour government off course.”

Will D. Mann
Will D. Mann
2 months ago

Marx’s Capitalists were those who owned the means of production and distribution. One might quibble about shop keepers and self employed trades people with a couple of vans and a workshop but for all practical purposes the Ruling Class is tiny, Musk, Dyson, Thiel, Trump and a few thousand others.