Class struggle after Brexit

Abstract

The Brexit debate has highlighted major divides within British politics and the politics of the left. During the referendum campaign, the Labour Party seemed to divide roughly between lukewarm support for Remain among the new Corbyn leadership, and enthusiasm from the party's more liberal or centrist membership and, especially, parliamentary elite. Likewise, the trade union movement saw most unions--with the exception of the more militant Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT)--support Remain. In contrast, some on the far left advocated Lexit, in opposition to the neoliberal European Union (EU), most notably the Socialist Workers Party. This then combined with the fact that a significant proportion of the Labour Party's natural constituency voted Brexit, and that low income correlated with support for the Leave vote. That lower income voters also adopted a position that contrasted with that of most of the political elite has also been interpreted by many as a sign that Leave was an anti-establishment vote, as well as being prompted by fears that falling wages resulted from heightened immigration. Since the Brexit vote took place, however, we have seen growing concern that the effect will be detrimental for workers' rights, and produce damaging divisions, especially between those same groups with low incomes, and increase the potential for xenophobia, racism and racially motivated abuse and violence. Brexit therefore clearly raises difficult questions for anti-capitalists. As such, Capital and Class has put together the present forum in an attempt to foster further discussion around the issue, specifically from the perspective of class struggle and what the vote means for the left. This forum therefore represents an attempt to bring together a number of important contributions to the debate, reflecting a range of positions that are united only by the fact that we share a concern for how class struggle can be advanced in the complex context of Brexit. The forum initially arose from a roundtable debate which took place at the British International Studies Association-International Political Economy Group (BISA-IPEG) annual conference, at Leeds Beckett University in October 2016. The roundtable highlighted the contentious nature of the Brexit issue, and as such we have since sought to turn contributions to that roundtable into the written contributions in the following pages. In that earlier roundtable, each contributor was asked to consider the issues raised by Brexit, specifically in terms of the impact that it would have upon class struggle: How can we avoid any economic harm that might result from Brexit falling on the shoulders of the least privileged? How do we avoid an exacerbation of nationalism and the scapegoating of migrant workers? What should class struggle look like in the context of deep political divisions and a potential Brexit-induced economic crisis? How should workers organise in the current context? How does Brexit impact upon the parliamentary left, the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn's leadership? And who, anyway, is the 'working class' in this new Brexit context? The responses to these questions were, perhaps predictably, not straightforward. The decision to hold a Brexit referendum represented a compromise between the more promarket, pro-austerity wing of the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, and its more traditionalist, anti-immigration wing, particularly prevalent among the party membership and represented at the parliamentary level by Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Iain Duncan Smith and Bill Cash (Moore 2015). Either outcome that the referendum offered, therefore, was likely to be unpalatable to the left. Faced with a choice between pro-market, austerity-focused neoliberalism and anti-immigrant nationalism, it was always difficult to see how the referendum could end well for those in Britain seeking to advance some form of egalitarian politics. Despite this, the fact that the Leave vote was most popular amongst both the low paid and those regions where austerity measures had been most sharply felt (Becker et al. …