Labour’s ‘national interest’ rhetoric relocates it against the working class it represents.

Evidence

But, once in government, social democracy is committed to finding solutions to the crisis which are capable of winning support from key sections of capital, since its solutions are framed within the limits of capitalist survival. But this requires that the indissoluble link between party and class serves both to advance and to discipline the class and the organizations it represents. This is only possible if the class-to-party link can somehow be redefined or dismantled and if there can be substituted for it an alternative articulation: people-to-government. The rhetoric of “national interest,” which is the principal ideological form in which a succession of defeats has been imposed on the working class by social democracy in power, is exactly the site where this contradiction shows through and is being constantly reworked. But people-to-government dissects the field of struggle differently from class-to-party. It sets Labour, at key moments of struggle—from the strikes of 1966 right through to the 1979 five percent pay norm—by definition “on the side of the nation” against “sectional interests,” “irresponsible trade-union power,” etc., i.e., against the class. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1106

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: Angle for an essay: how centrist parties structurally discipline their own class base via ‘national interest’ language.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci on hegemony and to later critiques of New Labour.

Related

• Labour’s statist strategy forced it to police its own working-class base (similarity 0.93)
• Labour substituted a people-to-government articulation for the class-to-party link (similarity 0.81)
• Labour’s corporatist crisis management disorganized working-class resistance to the crisis (similarity 0.78)