The concept of 'Society' is a controversial and divisive issue, but today does Society exist or is it just a short-term reflex of Brexit? Or is Brexit a new opportunity for the white working class in the North (WWCN) to expand the invocation of social class conflict power against the perceived 'Remain' middle-class southern voter? An ancient prejudice facilitating a 21st century departure to support the Tories (other than the estimated demographic of 33% of the working classes who are Tories and have always voted Tory)? Is this the new era of social class conflict free of social deference who vote Tory on anti-middle-class grounds?
How to prove the existence of Society is often hidden by levels of dysfunctionality and levels of malleability by tyrants or indulgent. In fact, the pre-existence of Society is often proven by its construct to prove the diametrical opposite, where 'Society deniers' are victims of their own self-delusion where confirmation bias is exposed. Furthermore, we must change and evolve and distinguish between 19th, 2oth, and 21st century versions of Society in the UK alone. One version of Society is not alone! Either a corrupt system or a prosperous one or even a failing society in mortal decline, is still evidence of not just a plethora of Societies but of its ability to evolve and re-birth after either dormancy or self-destruction or enforced destruction from beyond its borders. But let me be clear, I'm not going to talk about 'the State', but I am aware of the need to distinguish between the existence of and the function of Society.
But there are new fast moving technological interactions that involve mass or individual information sharing that are an instrument of making the 'surveillance society' or the mobile phone 'instantaneous society' accountable and are not mutually exclusive and produce direct unfettered authentic visualization of a contemporary 21st century mutually invasive IT development of people power versus those who conflict with such people power when it is beyond the control of state dictat. Yes a Society can be low intrusion or the opposite but acts as a filter to connect people. New tech is always superseded by its more advanced new prototype, and it is racing against the clock to maintain state secrecy and not citizen privacy. But there is a silver lining to limit Big Brother -it too is trying to catch-up with tech that is making it obsolete as well! Let us remember Huxley's 'Brave New World' or current Post Truth Societies as in Russia today to contrast with our own inept 'bumbling along society' that is 'too preoccupied with Xmas parties' to actually restrict our free movements.
Or perhaps a community off the grid can inform us of the varied conditions needed for asocial interactive network loosely arranged supportive mutual cooperation? Yet to my mind the existence of Class conflict in any form in the UK today is testament to an unequal but fully operational post-industrial and a (in the near future) post fossil fuel electric mobility that will evolve into more than just a rudimentary social class division but a post binary non dormant 2 party Platonic and transparent traditional Right and Left, wealthy class and working class historical sickman of British society. It is true to say the 'deference dynamic' has been supplanted by a social coalition of erstwhile opponents that embrace a mutual interest to eliminating the powerful influence of the middle-classes and much of the intelligentsia who experience disproportionate influence in policy making towards the WWCN communities. How is this grudge perpetuated? By the 'Bourgeoisie' (isn't it ironic that Marxist terminology can be assimilated and appropriated by the Right'?!!) gentrifying and leaving WWCN behind and escaping their 'roots', who respond by hauling them back and dragging them down via a Dickensian envy, undermining a social mobility that did not include the WWCN! It is a form of 'levelling down' that Boris wanted to manipulate by stating the opposite as a proponent of his 'Levelling- up.
The irony is that many of those who have benefited from social mobility may have new reasons for still voting Labour, where their loyalties have been tested and yet retain their Left leaning perspectives!?! But Class affiliations and Class electoral orthodoxy may still be undermined by those who have 'envy entitlement' that they may express as Schadenfreude as a social electoral migration but also as a paradoxical social promotion in the 21st century?? But isn't this emergence of a more complex social revaluation a progressive characteristic of the ‘New Labour Heresy'? New Labour divorced and undermined the traditional Class orthodoxy that got them elected back in 1997? Did Blair embolden or undermine Class conflict? Or did he replace Class conflict with an original programme to rebuild it to favour Labour? Is this why many Labour members claimed it was the 2nd Iraq War that lost him support when actually it was the Class orthodoxy that New Labour expanded that many Labour still remain antagonistic to?
Kundera, Huxley and Orwell all tried to warn us and prepare us for tyranny and human corruption, but the existence of it isn't reliant upon a failed welfare system to conceal it or prop it up. Likewise, a failed social class system orthodoxy doesn't affect or exclude any social class narrative, it just suspends it or mutates it. But both features will be fertile ground for New Modernity that's inherited New Labour's 'heresy of being 'More Labour than Labour, yet more Tory than Tory' by self-conspiracy. Where did this appetite for self-transformation and 'thinking the impossible' originate from? Whilst Tory self-satisthatcherism destroyed heavy industry by privatisation, it required a brutalisation by a relativism to undermine Soviet Cold War 'historical science' and the 'concrete inevitability of Marxist-Leninism. How? What? By the eternal ad absurdum of deconstructive hedonism from the knackers-yard of postmodernism! How do you break-up a rigid system of a dialectical Materialist nature? By undermining its very foundations by the debate about philosophical 'structuralism' that exposed Soviet authority and slowly suffocated essentially a 19th century series of out of date texts no longer relevant to the 20th and the looming 21st century that was putting the Soviet system at an almighty technical disadvantage to its superpower rival!
The end of the Cold War was beyond saving. In fact, the concoction of a 'European social class' of Professionals that would open its entrepreneurial doors to the ex-Warsaw Pact countries in the form of the EU, actually must have rubbed-in salt in the ex-Soviet wounds by being the very social class (in Marxist terms-'The Bourgeoisie') that Marxism was meant to destroy! But in the form of Brexit, it was rekindled by WWCN who specifically wanted to transmit its class enmity to the Politically Correct through anti-middle-class respectability! Ex -Soviet class hatred may have actually restored 'social envy' as a weapon to be manipulated by another anti-Marxist party - the Tories!!? That's what I call enjoying the spoils of war!!
But the Remain vote in the European referendum weren't exactly transparent, where I believe Remainers may have perceived for example France in a reductive way to propagandize its perspective. The belief that France is Paris and Cannes next to the low-countries established a deliberate miscommunication ; did Remainers believe that Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome, Madrid, London, Milan, Brussels etc connected the 'European professional classes', where urban poverty and deprivation and massive underdeveloped ex Warsaw Pact countries new to capitalism and new to democracy wouldn't impact on the fresh gleaming well to do aspirations of the Western 'European Classes'? Well, the Tories did, and the WWCN weren't prepared to fork-out for it ! Sovereignty and the free flow of new EU migrants able to work in Britain led many Brexiteers to ask the question : After the 2nd WW Britain didn't seem to benefit from any spoils of war, so why should the recently liberated ex-Warsaw Pact countries after a very bitter struggle to win the Cold War actually prosper at the expense of locals in Britain whose wages may have been realigned to Eastern Europe's levels (a cut in Pay) but the returning Eastern European would be very rich in his/her country of origin ? It wasn't all about border controls from migration to Europe and then to Britain via Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East etc. It was felt that whilst Eastern EU migrants could inject their standards of living by working in a wealthier Country like Britain, the reverse situation was not applicable! Unfair?! Therefore the move to levelling-up Britain promoting Britons in Britain was a vote winner ! But special treatment and prioritizing WWCN seemed paradoxically like a new form of social elevation and social mobility that WWCN wanted to deny the middle-classes precisely because of its social mobility and aspirations??! Welcome to 'contradiction politics !
I think that actually Britain has made itself far more attractive to migration via the Channel by Brexit? How does that work? Better transferable skills, more qualified professionals, new linguistic skill sets, bringing richer clients to, for example, the City of London etc it's a nightmare of Brexit's own making? Indeed, I believe that Brexit will have to update its concept of ethnic indigeneity to be a more representative inclusive prosperous society. Indeed, a new concept of 'nationhood’ may have to bridge the gap between highly skilled new Britons and WWCN? A social-Ecosystem of self-sustaining self-regulating society may divorce from WWCN and yet still vote Professional Tory, just as Brexiteers!?! But just as the money markets need stability, so do new demographics integrating or establishing a more definitive stabilizing effect in the contemporising of social class conflict. But a new 'social ethnicity' that emerged because Brexit Britain was more of a permanent attraction for highfliers may be a post New Labour too far! How does one square a Brexit that was meant to restrict immigration actually encourage more and better qualified Professionals that make Britain better but exclude those benefits of Brexit from the very WWCN who risked turning their allegiances away from their neighbours to win Brexit in the referendum and in Boris' general election in 2019? Maybe Macmillan's government did feel snubbed by the early EU in the 1950's when membership of the EU was rejected? Perhaps Brexit was the Tory revenge 60 or so years later? Or did the failed Marxist system of the Soviet Union settle old scores after the Cold War was lost by it by distorting Britain's Class system to vote in Brexit only to leverage WWCN as traitors to their own social class by an indiscriminate prejudice and hatred towards the middle-classes, only to provide a new wave of complicit immigrant highly qualified wealthy Tories from the North and the South Hemisphere's with little interest but in how to be snobbish towards and have no loyalties to the WWCN who voted Brexit in the first place !?! So, has WWCN betrayed itself and stabbed its own supporters in the back only to find it has been a useful idiot by new and old Toryism? Where does the WWCN now fit ? Welcome to a new era of an inimitable 'British Social Class Politics' that will diversify rather than self-destruct. Social class tensions endure, mutate, divide and tribalise, but it always delivers a social agitation that defies 19th century Marx and 20th and 21st century Marxists because of its rugged but unique status!