OLY DUROSE
In December 2019, Oly Durose stood as the Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Brentwood and Ongar, one of the UK’s most conservative seats; he was defeated by over 25,000 votes. In his new book Suburban Socialism (Or Barbarism) (Repeater, 2022), he reflects on the conditions and context of that loss, and outlines the strategies necessary for developing a framework of solidarity and mutual support in the suburbs. He spoke to TANK about his experience on the doorstep in 2019, the difference between the suburbs and suburbia, and how to break through the stultification of “suburban realism”.
Interview by Kia Golsorkhi-Ainslie
Kia Golsorkhi-Ainslie Could you talk about how your experience of canvassing in 2019 informed the arguments that you make in the book?
Oly Durose I went canvassing whenever I could, but I often found it extremely tiring and boring because nobody was answering the door and those who did generally didn’t want to speak to me. We think of the affluent suburbs, but one of the reasons why I don’t really use a distinction between affluent and poor suburbs is because affluent suburbs depend on the labour of workers. They may not live there or they may live in more impoverished pockets. People didn’t want to speak to me in the evening because lots of commuters are working, everyone’s too tired, while the people during the day who were in were usually mothers looking after their kids. It just goes to show that if we dig a little deeper into the idea of middle-class suburbia, there’s a large working-class population. So many suburbanites are just worked into the ground and they have no time for more community care, leisure or rest. Another way is as I just mentioned, mostly women used to answer the door, which was a perfect illustration of how they bear a disproportionate burden. Increasingly, women are working double shifts; they stay at home and look after the kids and also perform productive labour. Just by knocking on the door and seeing who did or didn’t answer and how tired and irritable people really are showed that the suburbs rely on the exploitation of people’s labour, even if some people live in more comfortable conditions than others.
KGA Is your argument that those workers could constitute enough of a bloc to win elections or would they just be outnumbered by the more affluent residents?
OD The chances of socialism winning come down to the size of the coalition that we can build. We can either try to expand the notion of the working class or find as many working-class people as possible to lead the movement. But we have to ask ourselves, do we need a specific, precise definition of the working class? We need to ask ourselves, what is our purpose when searching for a definition of class in general? For one, it’s to avoid culturally reductionist narratives. And two, it’s to identify people who you may not think of as working class, but who share certain conditions and a potential interest in dismantling the social relation in which they exist. The coalition of socialism is a lot larger than we have assumed in the suburbs, precisely because there are a lot of these people who we see in ambiguous class locations. My parents, for example, have spent their lives working, but they’re not necessarily reliant on selling their labour to survive because they have other assets, et cetera. What interests do they have in upending the social relation that benefits and harms them at the same time? One thing is their experience of monotonous work. This goes back to David Graeber’s idea of bullshit jobs. There are so many jobs that people do that are unfulfilling, working five days a week, nine to five, unpaid labour on the train, doing your emails and so on. We can convince a larger bloc than we think that there’s a world in which you don’t work yourself into the ground and you have more time for community, care and leisure.
KGA In 2015, UKIP came second in that seat. Then two years later, in 2017, that vote completely collapsed, while the Tories gained 7% and Labour gained 8% on the 2015 vote. So presumably in 2017, Labour was able to absorb at least part of that UKIP vote. I was wondering whether you encountered a lot of far-right sentiment or very pro-Brexit sentiment, and how that fed into the campaign?
OD The suburbs are really good terrain in which to study the manifestations of racial capitalism because we tend to think of suburbia, as I said, as white and homogenous, which sometimes is true. So Brentwood and Ongar is 94% white, but white homogeneity doesn’t really capture what’s going on; there is racial inequality, where wealth is hoarded by white hands from racialised communities who live in suburban and impoverished pockets. It’s important to understand how racial inequalities exist within and between suburban spaces, and our infrastructure in terms of public safety and security is there to uphold those inequalities. One example, which goes back to canvassing, is the video doorbell, where you press the doorbell and this ginormous light comes on with this really loud noise. You look at any of the apps that come with it, and it’s just full of neighbours being suspicious of Black workers, especially Black delivery drivers. They are trying to protect the white space of the suburbs.
KGA One of the most noteworthy features of the past two general elections has been the extremely stark generational divide. In 2019, those under 40 strongly supported Labour, whereas over-60s overwhelmingly backed the Conservative Party. Does that divide take a specific form in the suburbs?
OD The generational divide only exists through class, in my opinion. The reason why young people are more likely to vote Labour or support radical demands is because they have been excluded from generational wealth, from the spoils of capitalism that certain proportions of older people have hoarded. It’s not an either/or on what age group to prioritise. Having said that, the suburbs are sometimes a place of retirement or at least a place to go with the eventual dream of retiring. This is another example of suburban capitalism, which again goes back to reproductive labour where elder care is privatised: there’s an extreme individualisation of care work in the suburbs. You have lots of multigenerational homes where people have expanded because they need to make room for elderly relatives. One in five pensioners are millionaires, but almost the same proportion live in poverty. It’s not the case that it’s just like the young and old; it’s the intersection of class and age. But we can appeal to these populations; we want to build a society in which everybody can retire in dignity and not in isolation. I met a lot of elderly people who were very lonely and stripped of identity, all because of society’s obsession with a particular kind of productivity that denigrates those who can’t generate any form of recognised value. And socialism is not just for the young; it’s for everybody, right? That said, it’s so important to emphasise that young people are suburbanites as well. I lived with my parents for two years. On the one hand, I was very grateful that I could live there. On the other hand, one of the only reasons why I didn’t move out is because I knew that the rents were extortionate in London. Young people are forced to sacrifice both their independence and any form of economic security. The problem is we still need to find a way of increasing turnout within the young population. One thing not to do is to just shit on them when they express any kind of collective dissent. We need to encourage that form of collective dissent and then build a manifesto that emerges from it.
KGA There’s a long-standing critique of suburbia that focuses on how the layout of the actual locations either reflects or exacerbates a reactionary worldview. You’ve hinted towards that with your analysis of the video doorbell and what you’ve been calling suburban realism. Can you talk more about how actual urban planning contributes towards anti-left sentiment or reflects a pre-existing anti-left mentality?
OD Firstly, we should make a big distinction between suburbia and the suburbs. Suburbia is a political construct or even an ideology that is deeply capitalist, rooted in ideas of individualised aspiration. And yes, the layout is partly to blame. The commuter’s detached home, private lawn and picketed fence creates a kind of compartmentalised, individualised and non-communal lifestyle. Add things like road design, friendly to private car ownership, and you can quickly see how suburbia fuels the relationship between neoliberal ideology and climate change. By contrast, though, the suburbs are a vast geographical settlement that has a lot more political, racial, class variation. The big mistake we make on the left is confusing the two. Because we’re thinking of suburbia when we think of the suburbs, we assume that the idea of suburban socialism is a misnomer because suburbia and socialism don’t mix, precisely for the reasons I lay out in Suburban Socialism, where the whole architecture of suburbia and certain suburban spaces are characterised by the most pervasively harmful forms of capitalism. Our task is to disentangle suburbia from the suburbs and build a uniquely socialist suburban sentiment on the ground.
KGA So what kind of organising strategy can win over suburban populations to socialism? What policy programme would appeal to suburban populations?
OD The first question really builds on the idea of suburban realism: that there is no alternative to capitalism in the suburbs. It sounds tautological, but we have to show that socialism can work in the suburbs, which means changing this idea of electability. When we think of electability, it’s usually used by people on the right. So when we think about capitalist realism, one of the takeaways is that if capitalism is so ingrained in people’s psyches, there’s no hope of providing alternatives, we might as well appeal to their intuitions and adapt where we can. That’s obviously what [Keir] Starmer has done with his shift to the right and his pathetic assault on the left. They’re resigning themselves to the capitalist realist terms of electability because a socialist platform is deemed unelectable precisely because capitalist structures convince us that we can’t live without them. There’s no point in being more electable unless we confront the terms and conditions of electability themselves. What we need to do is explore and enact forms of suburban solidarity. One is industrial action and how the suburbanisation of workers presents obstacles to, but also opportunities for, forms of industrial action and strikes. City centres are typically seen as a more fertile space for workers to organise. By contrast, suburban workers often either live further from their workplaces, or they live farther apart from each other, which logistically limits organising. To counteract this, we just need to understand it. We need to treat suburban organisation as a form of industrial organisation, something that’s worthwhile in its own right and we need to identify sectors, whether they’re unionised or not, as part of the suburban fabric, whether that is inside or outside the traditional workplace. With reproductive labour, there is a huge form of untapped dissent. There’s also a huge opportunity for transport strikes in the suburbs to disrupt the link from the suburbs to the city to show how dependent they are on each other. ◉