Of the many famous adages from Karl Marx, one of my favourites—and one that I think should be taken more seriously in one’s analysis—is one found in The German Ideology, in which Marx and Engels describe the role of the ruling class in forming the dominant ideas of a given culture. They wrote:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1845), The German Ideology
The meaning of this adage is simple enough. In addition to controlling the commanding heights of the economy and the machinery of the state, the ruling class also sets the agenda of national discourse and determines which ideas the public are allowed to consider. It does so principally through control of the media, most of which is owned by a handful of billionaires who use their platforms to promote a perspective of the world that is friendly to corporate capitalist interests, and to demonise anyone or any movement that might challenge them, just like they did in Marx’s time.
To be more specific, the capitalist-owned media has, for years, worked to spread the idea that times of economic hardship call for us all to spend less money, and the reason for this is because the Tories and their press allies needed to manufacture consent for their own plans to slash public spending across the board. This political programme is what we call austerity, and it is the usual rightist answer to the crises of capitalism. It is a means by which to reverse the falling rate of profit by intensifying the immiseration of the working class, specifically through the reduction of public spending and the reduction of wages below the poverty level. Underfunding public services, as well as healthcare, also serves a means of dismantling them by rendering them practically non-functional, so that people will become disillusioned enough with public services and public healthcare that they’ll listen when the ruling class offers their own alternative: privatising them wholesale and operating them for a profit.
Here in Britain we have seen what austerity looks like in brutal detail. Public services have been left dramatically underfunded. Hundreds of libraries have closed down. In real terms, public sector wages have fallen, and wages in general have failed to keep up with rising inflation and house prices. School spending has remained below 2010 levels, particularly hurting schools in deprived areas. Cuts to welfare spending have taken a total of at least £14 billion out of social security, throwing many welfare recipients into poverty, many of them after having been falsely declared “fit for work” by the Department for Work and Pensions. For all their “tough on crime” rhetoric, the Tories had actually cut a total of 23,500 police staff, contributing to rising crime rates. Thanks to a total of 50% worth of funding cuts, local councils are now so underfunded that many have fallen into bankruptcy, or are on the brink of bankruptcy. Food bank use has risen dramatically as 1.5 million people have been thrown into poverty, and child poverty has also risen dramatically, meanwhile profits have soared for large corporations such as BT, Amazon and Royal Mail Group.
Austerity has caused untold misery for the working class, the lower middle class, as well as the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society. Yet while we did see the emergence of a broad anti-austerity protest movement which attempted to mobilise popular resistance against austerity, much of the public, far from resisting austerity, continued to support it during the early years of the Tory government. In 2015, a YouGov poll had found that 58% of the British public believed that “austerity” was necessary, and this was an increase from 2011 when the worst of austerity began to bite. It is undeniable that this public support for (or perhaps rather acceptance of) austerity played a role in the re-election of David Cameron’s Tory government, which in 2015 was finally able to govern in an outright majorty for the first time since the 1990s despite Labour maintaining consistent poll leads over the Tories for months at a time throughout the early 2010s.
What explains this phenomenon? It had become fashionable throughout the 2010s to belittle poor people in Britain for “voting against their interests” as the meme goes, and it always seemed like it was the enlightened liberal caste telling the rest of Britain what their interests are. In reality there are two main reasons why the public was willing to continue supporting austerity. Firstly, the Labour Party under the tepid leadership of Ed Miliband failed to adequately challenge austerity as an ideological programme. In fact, in both the 2010 and 2015 elections they had accepted the logic of austerity and even committed to implement spending cuts in both election manifestos. Unable to meaningfully distinguish themselves from the Tories on economic policy, they instead sought to pander to the alleged cultural conservatism of the working class (for example, with those abominable “controls on immigration” mugs), which, though it fell short of advocating for Brexit, resulted in a kind of “left-conservatism” which after 2019 we were told was a novel concept, but of course that failed miserably.
Second, and this is the important detail for this article, it is obvious that the working class had been conditioned into accepting austerity because the media had successfully established an equivalence in people’s minds between government spending and household budgets. It did so through the use of such familiar slogans as “the nation’s maxed out its credit card”, and with that came the argument that apparently governments are like households, and thus they can’t spend what they “don’t have”. It seems ridiculous nowadays, but the reason why it worked so well is because for many people it represented what real life was like, because we are consigned to a life in which we are to work for wages which are less and less able to keep up with the costs of utilities and foodstuffs, themselves set by unscrupulous corporations which arbitrarily raise prices for the simple purpose of extracting profits.
Thus in order to understand how austerity could continue as government policy, one has to consider how people have come to accept austerity at home, and this will be of particular revelance to our current cost of living crisis. When dealing with economic hardship, the advice you are given is not to defend your wages and living standards through political means, but rather to manage your own finances with enough fiscal probity that you are able to balance one’s budget. You are encouraged by the nation’s political and cultural institutions to do two things:
- “Thrifting”: the act of deliberately cutting corners by buying cheaper goods and services, regardless of whether or not they are of poorer quality.
- “Budgeting”: the act of trying in vain to plan how you will spend less and less money in order to somehow save enough money to meet costs which are presently spiralling vastly beyond many people’s ability to cope with them.
Throughout the era of austerity, much of our culture has dutifully served to promote the ideological agenda of the new Tory government, and it has done so through shows like The Great British Budget Menu (where celebrity chefs cook budget meals to try and save money), Nick and Margaret’s We All Pay Your Benefits (where two The Apprentice stars try to justify cuts to social security), Benefits Street (which demonised welfare claimants as state-sponsored criminals and frauds), and The Martin Lewis Money Show (which offers advice on how the individual can change their own habits to make them more “economical”). Benefits Street in particular was a toxic emblem of the early 2010s, conveniently produced at roundabout the time when the government was rolling out the Universal Credit system, which is designed to force claimants to go to work or face sanctions. Much has already been written about the casual class bigotry of that show, but the message of even the less outwardly toxic shows was the same as that of Benefits Street: the state shouldn’t be helping you and you shouldn’t seek political action, it’s your own fault that you’re poor, and if you don’t change your ways then if necessary the media will humiliate you into mending your sinful ways.
Lost in the cultural discourse of thrifting and benefit “scroungers” was the fact that austerity politics was founded on unvarnished economic fiction. Governments do not work the way households are expected to, they are capable of printing money as necessary and borrowing money in order to spend on certain projects, indeed during the early stages of the pandemic it had to borrow money in order to support people who have had to stay home to avoid catching COVID-19. Many homes may also spend what they don’t have by way of mortgages. More to the point, the idea that you can stimulate a service economy dependant on consumer spending by weakening people’s spending power is at best laughable, and at worst complete madness. From a capitalist perspective, consumer spending is another way of making profits, and so if people aren’t spending any disposable income (because they have none) then that depresses sales and thus also depresses profits. Indeed many high street chains have closed down precisely becauses sales have been depressed by a lack of consumer spending.
Thus it is often said if the ruling class were smart, they would be implementing policies such as UBI, which would allow for the maintenance of consumer spending power to make sure that there are enough people to buy the goods that are being made. While it is true that the British ruling class has demonstrated a phenomenal incompetence, the trouble with saying “if the ruling class were smart they would do x” is that to say this is to misunderstand the nature of ruling classes. From slave owners to feudal lords to capitalists, what all ruling classes have had in common is that the one thing they truly want is everything: all the wealth, all the land, control of all the resources, constant supply of cheap labour, hegemonic political power, all the luxuries, and all of the privileges that society can afford, all the rewards of wealth and power but without any of the burdens, taxes, constraints, obligations, and without being accountable to any of the rest of us living under them. That is the basic moral and ethical code of any ruling class, and it is the reason why the ruling class pursued and promoted the radically reactionary economic ideology we now call neoliberalism, its primary function was to liberate the ruling class from the obligations of running a Keynesian social democracy which was clearly failing to keep the contradictions of capitalism under wraps, and it has clearly succeeded. The lesson one should learn from that is that if a ruling class can keep all of their profits through austerity, then why would they do anything else if they could help it?
It is also not true that people on welfare are simply “scrounging” off the taxpayer either, as former Tory leadership candidate Suella Braverman had claimed. Even the right-wing Legatum Institute has admitted this in their report which found a majority of the 840,000 UC recipients set to be affected by the government’s social security cuts were in work prior to the pandemic, with 320,000 recipients in full-time work families. Many current UC recipients are in families where at least one adult has a disability or has a long-term mental condition. It is if anything a testament to how successful UC has been in its aims that Tom O’Grady, associate professor of Political Science at UCL, observed that “worklessness today is concentrated among people who are unable to work”.
Contrary to what the media and the culture industry may tell you, you will not get richer or improve your lot in life by spending little and working hard, not would you be rich if you only gave up Netflix. Perhaps it used to be the case that you could, for example, buy a house with your wages, but that time is gone. Nowadays you would need an annual salary of at least £60,000 to buy a house, well above the average income, and it would take an average person at least eight years to save enough money to buy their own home. Billionaires will tell you “work hard and save money”, but in reality it would take you about 350,000 years to become a billionaire just by saving up your wages. Thus even domestic austerity is based on pure fiction.
Of course capitalism has another way of conditioning people to accept austerity, by giving people something that they have to save and budget for. I am of course talking about bills for electricity, gas, water and other utilities. This is made possible by the fact that these are controlled by a handful of large monopolist cartels which hold them for a profit, and seek to extract as much profit out of all of us that use them as possible. Thus they make us pay monthly (or even weekly) for that which should be the common wealth of humankind at increasingly exorbitant rates, and it is this cycle which ingrains in us the need to “save” money to pay the bills. These bills are not a natural fact of life, but rather the consequence of a system in which the essentials of living are held under private ownership by wealthy capitalists.
Once you establish conditions in which the average consumer might have to “tighten their belt”, it then becomes easier to sell harsh and brutal austerity measures to the public getting them to imagine that the government is somehow in the same dire straits as you, that they too are in debt and have “maxed out their credit card”, and that we all can get out of this situation if only we are willing to make painful sacrifices. That is how you get a population willing to vote for its own immiseration, by conditioning people to accept a domestic version of the same policy as a fact of life.
As the current cost of living crisis goes into full swing, we will surely see a resurrection of the same austerity tropes from the last decade as the Tory government, now a venal shadow of the Cameron years, seeks to resolve it by accelerating austerity even after they assured us that we would see the end of it. Already we see the promotion of “extreme frugality” on parts of the Internet, with such fantastical suggestions such as showering in your bra or driving extremely slow. One Guardian article talks of such madness with fond enthusiasm, with the author describe how after her bout of economic insanity ended she “felt sick at how many luxuries are presented as normal, if not essential, draining our pockets and planet”. Such is the sort of idiocy you get from people who think without Marx and without any sort of class analysis. It is once again no accident that we are advised to embrace frugalism to offset rising costs. Like Marx said, the prevailing ideology is always that of the ruling class, and what the ruling class wants is for us to embrace a lower standard of living so that they can have an ever higher and more opulent standard of living off the back of our labour and energy bills.
Of course, this is not the early 2010s, and thankfully we are seeing encouraging signs that people are not so willing to fall for these old tricks. This time they can see quite plainly that the cost of living crisis is entirely the creation of the ruling class, whose lackeys in the Tory government have artificially worsened everyone’s living situation by raising the energy price cap, reversing the £20 Universal Credit uplift, raising the national insurance tax and by refusing to deliver on public sector pay rises that might actually keep up with rapidly rising inflation, and whose hard Brexit policies have directly contributed to our current economic crisis. The reality of our situation is beginning to set in, to the point that even the money saving expert Martin Lewis, who more or less became part of austerity Britain’s cultural establishment, has now been repeatedly and strenuously calling on the government to directly intervene to stem the impact of inflation and rising energy prices, warning that failure to act will result in civil unrest akin to the anti-Poll Tax movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
With the Labour Party in opposition still unwilling to meaningfully challenge the ideological assumptions undergirding austerity, the fight to defend workers’ living standards has had to be led by an ascendent trade union movement, particularly the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) and its leader Mick Lynch, who are showing the rest of Britain that the only way to see any meaningful improvements in your living standards is to actually confront the people making your life a miserable grind. Their success has struck fear into the hearts of the ruling class, to the point that both the two remaining Tory leadership candidates have pledged to ban railway strikes, with Starmer firing any Labour MP that dares to stand in solidarity with RMT. What RMT is doing is dangerous for the ruling class because it fundamentally undermines that central tenet of austerity, that you cannot seek political solutions to improve your lot in life. A weak Tory government whose authority is rapidly diminishing can also do nothing but act hostile to unions because it is desperate to project strength and thus retain the support of hard-right voters.
What the ruling class does, however, matters little. The genie of solidarity is out of the box, and once released it cannot be put back in very easily. It is becoming increasingly clear that austerity has been an abject disaster, but what is missing is a cultural transformation away from the doctrine of frugality. We must aspire to more than simply defending our living standards, although that is a very necessary struggle that must be won. In order to put austerity back in its box, the whole social order must be questioned, and we must strive to build a world in which nobody has to choose between heating and eating ever again, and in which nobody needs to thrift themselves out of having a good life.
East of Eden 