The results of last week’s elections and the Labour Party’s responses to them suggest that the leadership and Party right would rather reduce Labour to an irrelevant husk than reckon with reality.

There are two major obstacles to Labour building a winning electoral coalition, but these are two key things missing in the commentary from the Party leadership, the mainstream commentariat, and even parts of the left.

(1) A coherent analysis of class—incl. its relations, interests & alignments—& how it has been remoulded by changes to work & social reproduction over the past 40+ years
(2) Clear narratives that speak to people’s experiences of class amid this contemporary landscape of work

Some advocate doing away with the term 'working class'. We think it’s useful as an explanatory tool- but only if it’s used precisely. There are two widely disseminated myths that need to be challenged, and both are based on flawed understandings of class:

(1) 'Labour is becoming the party of the Southern or metropolitan educated middle class and the Tories the party of the traditional [read: white] Northern working class'

This reduces class either to an identity or to an outdated, occupation-based model.

The prevailing, reductive concept of class fails to take account of how changing forms of work and changing political economic conditions have transformed the composition of the working classes.

(2) 'Politics is now all about values, not right/left economics'

There’s a grain of truth in this. We can observe radical realignments & new cleavages (e.g. age). But treating values as facts deflects from the more urgent & important issue of explaining how they are formed.

Again, these values are strongly shaped by changing experiences of work (more entrepreneurial, atomised, based in knowledge & sociality) and other material conditions (home/asset ownership, protecting pensioners from effects of austerity, racialised oppressions etc.)

But demographics and economics don’t completely determine how or if people vote, or their class consciousness. That also relies on ideological formation via experiences of work, but also social reproduction, cultural consumption, and the stories we hear & identify with.

Our New Class Narratives project is working on this; developing new narratives that resonate with contemporary experiences of class, rooted in a coherent, rigorous analysis of how class is composed by capital and how it can be reshaped through workplace & community organising.

The mainstream analysis leads to the conclusion Labour must either pivot to a progressive metropolitan coalition (impossible without alliances under FTTP) or build a coalition of all left-liberal & a sufficient proportion of left-authoritarian voters.

It would be better to understand the material production of cultural & economic values in order to work out how to stitch together a patchwork of different class fractions- including new proletarian fractions- and also capture some contradictory class positions.

The Tories know how to appeal to the class landscape they’ve remade with nostalgic imperialistic fantasies. But Labour is stuck in ineffective fantasies of its own, eg a homogenous London elite & nothing to replace memories of work-based solidarities of the past.

The left needs stories that build alliances concretely among fractions of the working classes, instead of trying haplessly to unite voters around a vision so vacuous or abstract that it fails to connect with today’s experiences of class or voters' hopes for the future.