I once heard a clergyman preach against walls. Halfway through, he got the kids to build a wall of polystyrene bricks right across his nave and then to climb up and look over to see (lo, on a sudden!) that we on our side were exactly the same as them on their side. He did this, I may say, standing in front of the heaviest, the reddest, thickest, medieval-est sandstone walls you’ve ever seen. On my way out, I asked him if he locked his cathedral door at night.
The sermon was about “human dignity” and I remembered it recently when Jon Cruddas launched his new book, The Dignity of Labour. Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham and Rainham, thinks it might save the Labour Party from oblivion or (same thing) from giving up its working-class credentials. Unfortunately, although it is timely, the book doesn’t speak of anything anyone in Dagenham might talk about. In search of the higher mysteries of the Marxist labour theory of value, Cruddas spends half the book looking for something that doesn’t really exist. The value of labour, and the historic dignity that underpinned it, is not going to be found in a “labour process” or any other economic abstraction.
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