Common sense

In last week's blog I made the claim that common sense tends to be rightward leaning. This caused some comments with some readers taking exception to the implication that common sense is, by definition, right-wing.

The point I was trying to make was that we cannot rely on "common sense" to solve any political issues. But, I suppose, in using common-sense as a throwaway phrase in the way I did I opened myself up to criticism. Indeed, the whole notion of common sense is so ubiquitous that the fact that there is such a thing seems to be, well, common sense.

If you look up common sense in a dictionary you are likely to find it defined in the following way:

“the basic level of practical knowledge and judgment that we all need to help us live in a reasonable and safe way”

Which tells us very little. However, it does point to one important facet of “common sense” and that is its contextual nature. If it concerns “practical knowledge” that we “need to help us live”, then it suggests that in different societies common sense is going to mean different things. Which suggests that the whole notion of common sense is socially constructed.

Why does it matter? From a political perspective it matters because common sense represents not just a sense of the right way to live in order to survive but the right way to live in terms of social justice. The right-wing think-tank British Futures published a blog in 2013 in which they started with the following assertion concerning good citizenship:

“Obey the law, learn the language, play by the rules and contribute positively to British society.”

They went on to describe the evidence from their own focus groups on integration in which these ideas “were all seen as obvious and common-sense requirements, in the realm of personal behaviour. This reflects a robust and widely held sense of what many people think of as pretty self-evident common-sense foundations for integration.”

The fact is they are right. Many ordinary citizens would agree with these notions without too much pause for thought. Many on the left would, of course, see these common-sense notions for what they are: not a recipe for integration but for assimilation in which a mono-English culture imposes itself on all other cultures with which it comes into contact. 

Common sense tends to be an appeal to what could be thought of as a mob instinct, so that in 2010 when then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron wanted to rid his business friends of the iniquities of health and safety legislation he appointed his friend Lord Young to write a report which he titled, interestingly enough, “Common Sense, Common Safety”. The report makes a number of claims, amongst them this:

“We should all accept that health and safety in non-hazardous occupations is little more than common sense in action.”

In other words, we do not need legislation to protect workers just “common sense”. It is this common sense that led to the workplace deaths of 111 workers in 2019/20, and to over 69,000 workplace injuries resulting in 28.2 million days lost due to workplace illness and injury (according to the Health & Safety Executive). How many of us have worked in workplaces where somebody has been injured only to hear management declare that they would have been okay “if they had just used their common sense”. The result of which is to absolve management of any responsibility for the safety of those they employ.

Common sense is a favourite weapon of Conservatives and their allies in their cultural war against the working class. Rebecca Roberts writing on the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies website in 2011 noted that it, “offers a set of simplistic yet often misguided justifications for the existence and expansion of criminal justice.” She cites the example of Louise Casey, Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses, who giving evidence to a parliamentary committee argued ‘The evidence base is common sense, Chairman’ to which the Chair of the Justice Committee Sir Alan Beith retorted “There is common sense and there is evidence. They are not the same thing.” The point is that, according to Ms Roberts, common sense is used to propagate a series of, usually false, myths that have the collective outcome of increasing the policing of working-class communities. 

As I pointed out a few weeks ago in this blog the DWP, supported by the common-sense view that benefit fraud is both wrong and endemic employs eight times more people to investigate benefit fraud than HMRC employs to investigate tax evasion. Common sense is the justification used by Tory ministers to create the hostile environments for immigrants, for those on benefits, for trade unionists and for pretty much anybody with whom they disagree.

Does this mean that all common sense is, by definition, right wing? My friend Paul commenting on last week’s post made the following point:

“Common-sense is, at  least  in  part, acting  in  the   interests of  the  community  in  the   knowledge that  this  will  benefit  you  as  an  individual.. Ideas  like  the  NHS, the  welfare  state  and  free  education are  common  sense left  wing  ideas  which  are  supported  by the  vast  majority  of  people  in  the  UK.”

Of course, he is right. There is and always has been a strain of thought in this country, let’s call it socialism, that has had an appeal beyond the narrow confines of the left. In other words, common sense is not immutable, it can be challenged, and it can change. 

My friend Lee, also commenting on last week’s post, pre-empted my defence when he said:

“…the prevailing ideas in society are those of the ruling class, but ..ideas change on the basis of class struggle.”

What Lee is pointing to here is a passage from Marx from ‘The German Ideology’ where he discusses where ideas come from. The passage is worth repeating in full, not least because like so much of Marx it is so beautifully written.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

It is not difficult to see the point that Marx is making here. The class which controls the “means of material production” (by which he means the economy) also controls “the means of mental production” (by which he means not just the mass media, but also culture more generally). So, the dominant ideas (which include what we come to think of as common sense) dominate, and those who do not control, but do consume, the dominant culture, are subject to it. In other words, the dominant ideas, including common sense, are treated as universal, and those ideas come directly from the ruling class and are propagated by their control of the mass media and popular culture.

It is only necessary to look back to the last General Election, to see how true this analysis remains. How many left-wing Labour activists reported that on the doorsteps we were losing votes because of Jeremy Corbyn and, specifically, the accusations of anti-Semitism. Remember, the left had spent a good deal of effort repelling and debunking the anti-Semitism claims and also in counteracting the lies told about Jeremy Corbyn, mostly to little avail. It was a form of common-sense that held that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was institutionally anti-Semitic and that Jeremy Corbyn was unfit to be Prime Minister, even when up against a serial liar unable to say how many children he had fathered.

These ideas about Jeremy Corbyn have been repeated ad nauseum since the election, particularly by his political enemies on the right-wing of Labour. The recent report from Labour Together makes the following point:

“In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn’s personal poll ratings dramatically improved over the campaign.  Had these levels been maintained, Labour’s vote share in 2019 would have been 6 points higher. The very low poll ratings on leadership going into the 2019 election cannot easily be disentangled from the handling of issues like Brexit, party disunity and anti-Semitism.”

What the report fails to mention is that the Conservatives were equally divided over Brexit, that there was little faith in many parts of the party for Boris Johnson and they were being criticised for their failure to act on accusations of Islamophobia led by Baroness Warsi. But, the crucial difference was that the mass media did not preface every mention of Boris Johnson with the fact that he is a serial liar, or every report on the Conservatives by reminding viewers, listeners and readers that the party was (still is) institutionally racist, with particularly high levels of Islamophobia at every level of the party.

The reason for this failure to hold the Conservatives to account in the same way is explained by the fact that the owners of all the major newspapers are Tory supporters, as are all the senior management of the main broadcast news organisations. But, in addition, years of propaganda favouring the Tories have had their effect. It is now common-sense knowledge that the Tories are more trustworthy with the economy than Labour, that the Tories are less divided than Labour and, of late, that Labour’s grassroots are a bunch of bullying racists (which ironically has always been a valid description of the Tory faithful).

This is why common-sense is rightward leaning. Despite pockets of left-wing sentiment (and for sure these exist) the average voter is subjected to a veritable tsunami of pro-establishment propaganda, resulting in their passive acceptance of the idea that some things are simply the result of natural forces over which they have no control. Lee (see above) is correct that when brought into direct contact with the ambiguities of modern capitalism people can be won to a view that common-sense is the problem not the answer. That indeed, all the things they have been brought up to believe are, on reflection, untrue. Anybody on the left will know how this works because unless they have been very fortunate, they will have undertaken this journey. I know I had to.

It is easy for people on the left to forget that the left are a minority in British politics. This side of the socialist revolution, to quote Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party, the socialists are a minority. Does this mean, though, that we cannot possibly win? Is this the obvious conclusion from an analysis which accepts that we are swimming against the tide? 

Ted Grant

Both Carol and Tony thought that what I said last week was accurate but “depressing” and “really defeatist”. I certainly don’t set out to depress people or to sound defeatist, but I have always thought that false optimism is almost as bad as naïve pessimism. In one the revolution is always just around the corner. Ted Grant of Militant used to end his speeches with the news that the revolution was 5, 10, 15 years away. As a friend of mine once remarked ‘at least it is not getting further away’ though that was 35 years ago. But that kind of optimism is better than the pessimists I used to encounter who would tell me that ‘we tried that and it failed’ as if nothing could ever succeed. Being realistic involves accepting what we are up against, and that includes a widely accepted common sense which supports the established ruling class. But, it means also understanding that ideas actually matter. That people can be won over to ideas which make them question and abandon the common sense conceptions that they have been told are natural.

Common sense has no great value from a socialist perspective because it is presented as universal and the only rational way of seeing the World. Socialists cannot accept capitalist/bourgeouis ideas as somehow divorced from the social system that gave birth to them. Only in a socialist society can common sense be said to have a socialist flavour. 

As Marx concludes in ‘The German Ideology’:

“For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”

In capitalist society, the ruling class (the establishment if you like) dominates the production and reproduction of ideas, presenting ideas which support its continued dominance of economic, cultural and social life as merely common sense. The problem is that socialists in challenging those ideas tend to do so on the same grounds as Paul (see above) argued, mainly that there is a socialist common sense and therefore common sense does not have to be rightward leaning. In my view that is to totally misunderstand the role of ideas and how they are formed in capitalist societies. It is to assume that just because a minority have seen through the system, that we can claim to be the majority.

As socialists we cannot assume that the vast majority of people passively accept our ideas for we do not have control of the means of mental production to convince them. This should not be taken to mean that change is impossible. No society that has undergone a revolutionary change – France, Russia, China, America, Iran etc. – have done so based purely on ideas. It is material factors which drive revolutionary change. 

Yes, it would be nice to see a left-wing government in the UK, but would that bring about socialism? Capitalism will only allow a Labour government on condition that it does not challenge the social system itself. For socialists to pretend that they can harness common sense for the greater good within a capitalist system is, in my view, naïve. Common sense in a capitalist social system is capitalist supporting. At the point at which common sense becomes socialist we will be living in a socialist society where ideas such as equality, public service, justice will be able to find their true representations. That future may not appear to be within our grasp currently, but with the environmental catastrophe still looming and the Covid crisis some way from being resolved, capitalism as a system is under enormous strain. These could yet prove to be the conditions which herald a change of social system, as only socialism offers a realistic way of managing the earth’s resources and allowing the utmost freedom in a quickly changing landscape.