Asset economy strawmen: A response to Pitts et al.
| Author | Kellam, Jack |
Following the result of the 2019 general election, and Keir Starmer's rise to the Labour Party leadership, the 'post-Corbyn' left have looked to explain away their failures by pinning their future hopes on a new analysis of the UK economy as fundamentally divided by asset ownership--or at least so claim Harry Pitts, John Cruddas MP and colleagues in their piece for the last issue of Renewal. By updating Corbynism's populist binary from a division between a 'plebian 99 per cent and an elite one per cent' to a generational clash between 'insecure, asset-poor young people and supposedly secure, asset-rich older people', the defeated left have sought solace in a new form of economic determinism, they claim. Rather than confronting 'the disaster' of the Corbyn project, this 'professionalised' radical left instead trusts that a new collective subject, formed by a simple economic logic that cleaves along neat demographic lines--so-called 'Generation Rent'--will soon reopen the electoral road to socialism. (1)
Pitts et al see this as a road only to disaster. They argue that the new 'Corbynite' analysis they have identified: (i) subsumes real economic complexity into a new narrow and dichotomous class structure; (ii) focuses myopically on assets and property over 'work'; (iii) underestimates how 'values' and 'identity' overdetermine economic 'interests'; and (iv) discourages electoral coalition-building in favour of 'all or nothing' class war.
Unfortunately, their critique relies on a long series of what used to be called 'straw men'. It caricatures a range of recent thinking on the asset economy, from figures like Keir Milburn, Will Davies, Brett Christophers and Christine Berry--as well as our own work for the think-tank Autonomy--reducing careful analysis to a crude economism, in order to construct (ironically given its authors' purported anti-populism) a simplified, yet powerful and influential 'enemy' (the post-Corbynite left), which the Labour Party is urged to resist.
In this piece we set out where Pitts et al have gone wrong. Space constraints leave us unable to correct every misrepresentation, but we look to give a more honest account of recent thinking on 'the asset economy' within the 'post-Corbyn left'. Our aim is to move forward in a more productive manner the important debates around wealth and income inequality, the world of work, and the need for political strategies that can straddle electoral success and economic change.
Who are the left asset populists?
Pitts et al are not entirely wrong in identifying renewed theoretical interest in 'the asset economy' among sections of the UK's 'post-Corbyn left'. Some contributions, such as Keir Milburn's Generation Left, have emphasised the generational and political dynamics of the UK's asset ownership distribution. (2) Others, such as Will Davies and Brett Christophers, have published well-received books and articles on the political and economic effects of asset-dominated economies. (3) This area of research has also influenced our own work for the think tank Autonomy, where we have produced research on the geographic and demographic distribution of housing status--renting or home ownership--across the UK. (4) In addition, we also commissioned a series of exploratory articles from political economist and ownership policy expert Christine Berry, exploring the asset economy--from its colonial underpinnings to democratic alternatives. (5)
But is this uptick in interest in asset ownership as crude or myopic as Pitts et al suggest?
In fact, none of the (scant) materials referenced by Pitts et al offer anything approaching confident strategic prescriptions for the Labour Party along the lines of an asset populism speaking to a 'new demographic vanguard', broken along exclusively generational lines. For the most part, they are diagnostic: they attempt to explain significant developments in the class structure of contemporary capitalist societies, and, in turn, how such changes have made particular class fractions susceptible to political formations that promise to protect the interests of asset owners. In short, how the rise of the asset economy has increasingly entrenched Tory support among (primarily older) homeowners. Many of these authors are reluctant, however, to declare that an about-turn to a populism of the dispossessed would therefore be a nailed-on winning formula for Labour. The political story leans far more heavily on the asset economy's intractability--as an...
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