"Modernism", "Elitism", and "The Working Classes"

[Richard Barrett]

For the sort of reason the greenilex suggests above.

I'm missing a reason there.

Otherwise I think it's clear in many accounts how capitalism divides men and women from each other, and that any kind of socialism that doesn't enshrine gender equality is not worth the name.

[Serial_Apologist]

Indeed - and this is why I have reservations about the inclusion of the term "class" here; it could be anyone capable of getting themselves into some kind of positions of power.

The existence of class doesn't preclude people from moving through it! I spent my whole working life in what would be termed working class occupations, though coming originally from a middle class family background.

[french frank]

I spent my whole working life in what would be termed working class occupations, though coming originally from a middle class family background.

As a matter of interest, through choice or necessity?

I have a feeling that women can be less conformist than men tend to be (if that is sufficiently elastic to avoid accusations of sexism or sweeping generalisation). Or perhaps it's a different sort of conformism from the kinds of conformism developed by men to fit the systems which they've created?

[ahinton]

I'm missing a reason there.

Otherwise I think it's clear in many accounts how capitalism divides men and women from each other, and that any kind of socialism that doesn't enshrine gender equality is not worth the name.

Any aspect of capitalism in pratice that divides men and women from one another is one that has to go and will remain a discrediting stain upon it until it does; any kind of socialism or capitalism that doesn't enshrine gender equality is not worth the name.

[Serial_Apologist]

As a matter of interest, through choice or necessity?

I have a feeling that women can be less conformist than men tend to be (if that is sufficiently elastic to avoid accusations of sexism or sweeping generalisation). Or perhaps it's a different sort of conformism from the kinds of conformism developed by men to fit the systems which they've created?

Hard to say why really, ff. Practically the moment I was born I was booked into the boarding school my father, grandfather and two uncles had attended, which came, or would have come, in for a lot of bad press publicity had certain still potentially actionable charges been brought against staff for the kind of stuff one reads lately about institutional child abuse. At the end of it I was pretty much crushed, and it was only my own bootstraps consciousness raising efforts in the radically changing cultural climate of "the sixties" that seemed to re-equip me with the mental and intellectual wherewithal for survival, if not the likelihood of a career in one or another of the favoured pathways followed (or placed in) for my schoolboy contemporaries, some of whom have done OK for themselves. This automatically gravitated me towards the working class as a "de-racinated petty bourgeois outsider", circumstances in which I found out about w/c traditions of solidarity and the warmth and honesty of so-called "ordinary people" as compared to status pretentions that had governed interpersonal relations hitherto. I still feel a deep ambivalence towards the value system and ethos of the founding background to which I had ineluctably subscribed, today finding (as I'd half expected) a greater feeling of empathy living in a multicultural, multi-ethnic community and city, retired and liberated from the burden of pretence that, if anything, is becoming even more characteristic in terms of how people are expected to make livings in todays world of short-term (or no) contracts and perpetual re-skilling.

[ahinton]

The existence of class doesn't preclude people from moving through it! I spent my whole working life in what would be termed working class occupations, though coming originally from a middle class family background.

No, of course it doesn't, but what strikes me about these "rulers" is that, for the most part, they are individuals with their own distinct (and usually self-serving) agendas which, whilst some might share certain aims, are not really part of a group-thinking philosophy within which most or all adherents seek to wield the same kinds of power over the same kinds of people in the same kinds of ways.

You are correct in drawing attention to the mobility aspect but, again, I believe that this applies to individuals who move through their individual backgrounds in the hope of changing them in their own self-interests.

You write about having come from "a middle class family background" but wonder in what sense you declare this; what are "middle class", "working class", "ruling/upper class" or whatever in reality? Many people in the first two of those three work so, in that one sense, they are all "working class"; I seem to recall Prince Philip describing his wife as "working class" because she works. By a similar token, how should people how have been made redundant or otherwise lost their employment, or those who are seeking but have yet to find employment for the first time, to be "classified"? Not as "working class", surely - at least until they are working. What about those who have worked for years and have fully retired; have they ceased to be members of the working class" because they no longer work? What of self-employed sole traders who work (as most of them do); are they "working class" because they work even though one might at the same time consider them to be "entrepreneur class" (I nearly wrote "business class" but thought better of it!) purely by reason of being their own employers rather than working "for" someone else? (I, for example, have never been an employee since I first entered the world of work aged 13).

You also write of having worked in "what would be termed working class occupations", but who would so term them, on what grounds and with what accuracy or meaningfulness?

[french frank]

Thanks, S-A. Completely understandable. Choice and necessity, I'd say. Certainly not the choice that many with your background would have chosen, though others have made that choice without the same necessity …

Getting back to gender equality: it goes without saying that "everyone" supports gender equality (except those who don't), but it's shown in different ways: having the same respect (and all that goes with it) for the head or boss, whether a man or a woman, is only one. Another is in making determined efforts to redress an imbalance where women (usually) are disadvantaged. What does one make of the fact that the Conservative party is the only one to have provided a woman leader/Prime Minister? And the UK legislation has been passed to allow an elder daughter to take precedence over a younger son in succession to the throne. And the fact that many women have reached the top job in commerce …

[Serial_Apologist]

No, of course it doesn't, but what strikes me about these "rulers" is that, for the most part, they are individuals with their own distinct (and usually self-serving) agendas which, whilst some might share certain aims, are not really part of a group-thinking philosophy within which most or all adherents seek to wield the same kinds of power over the same kinds of people in the same kinds of ways.

You are correct in drawing attention to the mobility aspect but, again, I believe that this applies to individuals who move through their individual backgrounds in the hope of changing them in their own self-interests.

You write about having come from "a middle class family background" but wonder in what sense you declare this; what are "middle class", "working class", "ruling/upper class" or whatever in reality? Many people in the first two of those three work so, in that one sense, they are all "working class"; I seem to recall Prince Philip describing his wife as "working class" because she works. By a similar token, how should people how have been made redundant or otherwise lost their employment, or those who are seeking but have yet to find employment for the first time, to be "classified"? Not as "working class", surely - at least until they are working. What about those who have worked for years and have fully retired; have they ceased to be members of the working class" because they no longer work? What of self-employed sole traders who work (as most of them do); are they "working class" because they work even though one might at the same time consider them to be "entrepreneur class" (I nearly wrote "business class" but thought better of it!) purely by reason of being their own employers rather than working "for" someone else? (I, for example, have never been an employee since I first entered the world of work aged 13).

You also write of having worked in "what would be termed working class occupations", but who would so term them, on what grounds and with what accuracy or meaningfulness?

There are of course historical continuums (continua??) which have defined routes through which successive generations have moved, adjusting themselves to the demands and requirements of changes in the nature of (and qualifications needed for) work. It might make things more complex but more accurate to see class in terms of overlapping processes of sociological change; making definitive statements about class relations at a particular juncture can only amount to a snapshot. The "encircling" class structure defining the individual's place within it changes more gradually, however, so it is the framework rather than its individualisation in terms of biographical or autobiographical detail that defines the class. As someone said to me "Don't tell your next employer you were made redundant; say your JOB was made redundant"! If one sees class functionally in this way, it becomes easier to speak of (a) group identification: eg the collective nature of the working class as a mass of sometimes relatively scattered rurally-based individuals, sometimes individuaLISTS by virtue of the singularity of eg their clog-making skills, being drawn into factory production as a consequence of the greater productivity of the group rendered by steam power, where they are collectively organised, not as individuals, but as a mass in-itself, to the extent of being at the beck-and-call of its master (b), (usually male), the factory owner, who has individually optimised opportunities logistically open only to a few (we can't ALL become the ruling class!) to assume his position in the given hierarchy of power relations.

This hopefully makes clearer the difference between the collective and the individual in class terms, rather than the mere fact you elucidated of some people making maximal use of life chances as if all happens in a vacuum. The working class, collectively organised in the workplace to make the things that will create surplus value, have the potential to gain experience in new skilling and workplace organisation to enable them to dispense with the boss altogether; pressures of exhaustion and identity-shaping to conformist ends have constantly to be tweaked and reinforced to stop this class from even contemplating such ambitions - and leisure time and better conditions long won through battles over any share out could actually be used to reinforce that "policeman inside our heads", once the benefits of maintaining the status quo were played out in the culture of mass consumerism that emerged post WW2. Identity - your defining characteristics as an individual extrapolated from the material conditions of your existence - can then be designated as being more important than class!

As far as sub-categories are concerned, if one can see intermediate occupational layers, eg clerks, bureaucrats, teachers, refuse collectors, the social and medical professions - the so-called lower middle class occupations - in terms of their relationship to the main categories that produce or control wealth, ie commodity production and it and property ownership, we can see the political expressin of this relationship, ie the extent of identification to be found among these intermediate layers with either the direct makers of wealth - towards whose efforts their own are in a very real sense auxiliary, meaning one could say objectively that they too are part of wealth (value) creating, a drain on profits from the capitalists' pov, whereas those who control them and enrich themselves thereby are therefore part of the ruling class, and so it becomes easier to differentiate class categories the way Marx did when such categorisation was obviously easier to do.

[Joseph K]

"While the principle of radical egalitarianism may appear unassailable in itself, problems arise out of the way in which it gets articulated with other spheres of action. The definition of social groups is always contested, for example. While multiculturalism can accommodate the ideal of equality between most self-identified social groups, the one persistent divide is that of class. This is so because class is the foundational inequality necessary for the reproduction of capitalism. So the answer of existing political power is either to deny that class exists, or to say that the category is so confusing and complicated (as if the other categories like race and gender are not) as to be analytically useless. In this way the question of class gets evaded, denied or ignored, whether it be in hegemonic intellectual constructions of the world (in, say, the field of economics) or in practical politics... ....Clearly, class identities, like racial identities are multiple and overlapping. I work as a labourer but have a pension fund that invests in the stock market and I own a house that I am improving with sweat equity and which I intend to sell for speculative gain. Does that make the concept of class incoherent? Class is a role, not a label that attaches to persons. We play multiple roles all the time. But we do not say because most of us play the roles of both car drivers and pedestrians that it is impossible to plan a city around an analysis of relations between drivers and pedestrians. The role of the capitalist is to use money to command the labour or the assets of others and to use that command to make a profit, to accumulate capital and thereby augment personal command over wealth and power. The relation between the roles of capital and labour need to be confronted and regulated even within capitalism..."

- David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism

[Lat-Literal]

It is such a broad topic I am not sure that I am up for it anymore. One changes as society changes. I was expecting to loathe every word that was uttered by Steve Bannon in the Newsnight interview with him last night. Instead, I had to accept that I was in agreement with much of what he said. The politics of identity that is not related to class background was crucially important for the first decades in which I was alive. There needed to be a realignment in which children, people of ethnicity, gay people and those with disability were treated more fairly and justly than hitherto, specifically in terms of cultural norms. Maybe it is because I am a man who was raised without sisters as well as brothers but I always felt that women were in a different category from those I have listed. Their historical roles in the home, the ordinary workplace and the community seemed to me to be equally respected. But I accept that there were massive differences between men and women in terms of power roles in employment. Where there were achievements in that regard which were so against the odds, I felt it was much the same to me as similar achievements by men from ordinary origins. Women were, as it were, the male working class. They weren't the black, gay or disabled.

In terms of all the categories listed, it is - or was - easy to love the stereotypically downtrodden. I fell in love with them on an emotional if conceptual level. Mostly the stereotypically downtrodden have no voice in broad societal terms. But there is greater unease when the debate becomes more about percentages. As with the adolescent who is rarely the prettiest creature alive, one has to witness people learning the supposed skills of strategy, tactics and manipulation for individual purpose, albeit in ever larger numbers. Additionally, at the back of the mind there is the thought that we were all handed a sop. Greater dignity for those "with identity" was the pay off for an economically more divided society. Much as I support grammar schools, those who oppose them need to know that identity politics is grammar school politics. It mainly benefits the stronger elements of minorities rather than the poorer elements. But unlike grammar schools the ability it champions is one based on the application of power for personal gain rather than a socially ineffective and somewhat academic IQ. What a pity. There is no art or individuality in it and I doubt that there is very much niceness. Nice is now the dirtiest word. It means in societal terms being well rather than peculiar.

I loved the trailblazers. Really loved them. My mind being out of time - to paraphrase Dylan - I still do. Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Ellen Wilkinson, Mickey Rooney, Kenneth Williams, Douglas Bader.....these were people who really achieved remarkable things. To be the latest successful person from a category is as theoretically dull as to be the latest successful white man, although as with white men there are some marvellous exceptions. I am not too sure that I have found people in power roles who are not white men to have been any more relevant or acceptable to me than powerful white men. Most become that power and it isn't personally relevant. Power can appear to be answerable and it is better when it tries to be. I'm quite pleased by my local MP's tolerance of me as offering "interesting" comment even if I don't agree with him on a lot of things and feel that what I say will never hit the spot. This is more about the area of civility which is in truth what democracy and the law must try to underpin. I am not too bothered and never have been by the aristocracy. They had lost by the time I came along. The need for an upkeep of mansions isn't something I could envy or feel that was wrong. You can't fight whatever it is that knows it's an anachronism when the greater point is getting people out of smaller six bedroom houses and tiny flats in tower blocks. As for the Royal Family, it is a party piece that is absolutely right for national cohesion.

I think the multiculturalists did pretty well at the end of the last century. They were seeing the money in their policies but many of us ignored that point and appreciated the education and broader culture. The problem was in the modernism that was money colonising soul. The end of working class male culture in football and at the dog track. I'm not actually in favour of dogs being raced around a track but believe strongly in a space for ordinary men. It prevents war. I can't help myself but I can't like the female boxer. As for tattoos, those have become less militarily reassuring and more egomaniacal uniform meets post-apocalypse. It's ok, I guess, but people from the remaining council estates could at least be warned how they might well affect their ability in middle age to be given an MRI scan. They are another nicotine in that sense. Then there is the decoupling of innovation in music, especially the popular kind, from the dollar. It is no coincidence that the concept of singing was altered when denominations of money became the orchestration. Nor that the crime rate is a direct reflection of the lyric. The upper layers remain untouched as their wallets expand. I lament the destruction of community. That goes back to the Miners' Strike if not before and it was too easy given my own background for seeing that as working class. It was in truth and away from family nostalgia evident too in the lower middle class background of my upbringing. Remarkably we still have it in this small road of ours and to the extent that I believe in anything it supports that I'd require everyone in this country to live in a two bedroom house.

(On reflection, I am satisfied with this post - social democracy is all over the place and in need of serious re-definition and as I look at it, I do believe I see that I am a social democrat)

[Serial_Apologist]

"[C]lass is a role, not a label that attaches to persons.

See?

We play multiple roles all the time. But we do not say because most of us play the roles of both car drivers and pedestrians that it is impossible to plan a city around an analysis of relations between drivers and pedestrians. The role of the capitalist is to use money to command the labour or the assets of others and to use that command to make a profit, to accumulate capital and thereby augment personal command over wealth and power. The relation between the roles of capital and labour need to be confronted and regulated even within capitalism..."

- David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism

I have difficulty explaining the class concept to myself, let alone to other people such as on here, and am glad to find I've understood it correctly by the eminent David Harvey's criteria! Thanks very much indeed for reproducing that passage, Joseph, and thereby making my day!

[Serial_Apologist]

That's a great post Lat, though I have difficulties in connecting what you write in your final paragraph to the rest. I'll take just some of the comments, if you'll forgive me.

It is such a broad topic I am not sure that I am up for it anymore. One changes as society changes. I was expecting to loathe every word that was uttered by Steve Bannon in the Newsnight interview with him last night. Instead, I had to accept that I was in agreement with much of what he said. The politics of identity that is not related to class background was crucially important for the first decades in which I was alive. There needed to be a realignment in which children, people of ethnicity, gay people and those with disability were treated more fairly and justly than hitherto, specifically in terms of cultural norms. Maybe it is because I am a man who was raised without sisters as well as brothers but I always felt that women were in a different category from those I have listed. Their historical roles in the home, the ordinary workplace and the community seemed to me to be equally respected. But I accept that there were massive differences between men and women in terms of power roles in employment. Where there were achievements in that regard which were so against the odds, I felt it was much the same to me as similar achievements by men from ordinary origins. Women were, as it were, the male working class. They weren't the black, gay or disabled.

I think the politics of identity can indeed be crucial as a first step in defining oneself other than in socially disparaging terms. After all, we are both less than the conventional labels put upon us, we ought to get rid of them, and more, because just conceptions and conceptualisations are limited to words, and words can never encompass the complexity of everything we are (states of being which change from moment to moment), or the ontological fact that we are inseparable from our physical and organic matrix: like the foodies say, we ARE what we eat, we Are the ground we're standing on, the air we're breathing, etc etc. It goes without saying, to coin a pun, that that complexity is only defined in relation to the words and concepts, and even mathematical calculations, needed to put it across; by contrast the brain, breathing, nay all the spontaneous physiological functionings, do it themselves without needing a second self pre-deciding when to breathe, etc; this being the "miracle of life" we're more part of than the attributions and internalised self-definitions with limited groundings people use to place us. Nevertheless we have to start somewhere, and the self, even if provisionally defined negatively, ie in defiance of external definitions, is the only reliable place from which to.

In terms of all the categories listed, it is - or was - easy to love the stereotypically downtrodden. I fell in love with them on an emotional if conceptual level. Mostly the stereotypically downtrodden have no voice in broad societal terms. But there is greater unease when the debate becomes more about percentages. As with the adolescent who is rarely the prettiest creature alive, one has to witness people learning the supposed skills of strategy, tactics and manipulation for individual purpose, albeit in ever larger numbers. Additionally, at the back of the mind there is the thought that we were all handed a sop. Greater dignity for those "with identity" was the pay off for an economically more divided society. Much as I support grammar schools, those who oppose them need to know that identity politics is grammar school politics. It mainly benefits the stronger elements of minorities rather than the poorer elements. But unlike grammar schools the ability it champions is one based on the application of power for personal gain rather than a socially ineffective and somewhat academic IQ. What a pity. There is no art or individuality in it and I doubt that there is very much niceness. Nice is now the dirtiest word. It means in societal terms being well rather than peculiar.

The "returns for a mess of pottage" comprised the hard lesson of Daily Mail exposure learned by a certain well-known member of the shadow cabinet as a consequence of sending her son to a private school to compensate for the disadvantages of being a black child in the mainstream education system, though she does not acknowledge such as far as I am aware.

I loved the trailblazers. Really loved them. My mind being out of time - to paraphrase Dylan - I still do. Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Ellen Wilkinson, Mickey Rooney, Kenneth Williams, Douglas Bader.....these were people who really achieved remarkable things. To be the latest successful person from a category is as theoretically dull as to be the latest successful white man, although as with white men there are some marvellous exceptions. I am not too sure that I have found people in power roles who are not white men to have been any more relevant or acceptable to me than powerful white men. Most become that power and it isn't personally relevant. Power can appear to be answerable and it is better when it tries to be. I'm quite pleased by my local MP's tolerance of me as offering "interesting" comment even if I don't agree with him on a lot of things and feel that what I say will never hit the spot. This is more about the area of civility which is in truth what democracy and the law must try to underpin. I am not too bothered and never have been by the aristocracy. They had lost by the time I came along. The need for an upkeep of mansions isn't something I could envy or feel that was wrong. You can't fight whatever it is that knows it's an anachronism when the greater point is getting people out of smaller six bedroom houses and tiny flats in tower blocks. As for the Royal Family, it is a party piece that is absolutely right for national cohesion.

The TV series "The Rise and Sprawl of the Middle Classes" was most illuminating from the point of view of showing how the class emerged from the artisan class of pre-Industrial Revolution times, and from under the wing of the aristocracy, whose values and mannerisms, which it replaced, themselves set out with heroic intentions, only to become degraded as the middle class moved out of the city centre to seek secluded exclusivity just far enough out. If you didn't see it I think you would also find it most interesting.

I think the multiculturalists did pretty well at the end of the last century. They were seeing the money in their policies but many of us ignored that point and appreciated the education and broader culture. The problem was in the modernism that was money colonising soul. The end of working class male culture in football and at the dog track. I'm not actually in favour of dogs being raced around a track but believe strongly in a space for ordinary men. It prevents war[1]. I can't help myself but I can't like the female boxer. As for tattoos, those have become less militarily reassuring and more egomaniacal uniform meets post-apocalypse. It's ok, I guess, but people from the remaining council estates could at least be warned how they might well affect their ability in middle age to be given an MRI scan. They are another nicotine in that sense. Then there is the decoupling of innovation in music, especially the popular kind, from the dollar. It is no coincidence that the concept of singing was altered when denominations of money became the orchestration.[2] Nor that the crime rate is a direct reflection of the lyric. The upper layers remain untouched as their wallets expand. I lament the destruction of community. That goes back to the Miners' Strike if not before and it was too easy given my own background for seeing that as working class. It was in truth and away from family nostalgia evident too in the lower middle class background of my upbringing. Remarkably we still have it in this small road of ours and to the extent that I believe in anything it supports that I'd require everyone in this country to live in a two bedroom house.

I don't quite follow the points I've taken the liberty of numbering as [1] and [2], Lat? On destruction of community, I've just obtained two DVDs of a two-part documentary outlining the course of East End communities, respectively, from between 1900 and 1940, and 1940 and 1975. The narrator (stephen Bray) makes points with which I am in general agreement about the slum clearance that began in the 1920s, and was sped up by the bombing of WW2, to be continued in the postwar period with street level living replaced by tower blocs. Where I disagree is with the presented view that the establishment of the welfare state also contributed, in usurping the spirit of collective self-reliance that had served the community well up to that point. This was a weakness in the documentary: to me the reforms, introduced by caring Fabians, notwithstanding a paternalism that saw people as not capable of taking on some of the work to run themselves, were not deliberately intended to disempower. A stronger critique would have been directed towards the top-down paternalistic way in which welfare was imposed.

[Joseph K]

See?





I have difficulty explaining the class concept to myself, let alone to other people such as on here, and am glad to find I've understood it correctly by the eminent David Harvey's criteria! Thanks very much indeed for reproducing that passage, Joseph, and thereby making my day!

You're welcome!

I haven't read much Marx - only the Communist Manifesto. I have an unread copy of Capital vol 1 though. I admit, I have read more by Terry Eagleton and David Harvey than Marx himself.... but they are both excellent writers if I may say so.

[Serial_Apologist]

You're welcome!

I haven't read much Marx - only the Communist Manifesto. I have an unread copy of Capital vol 1 though. I admit, I have read more by Terry Eagleton and David Harvey than Marx himself.... but they are both excellent writers if I may say so.

Yes, as a wisdoms recipient in general, I must admit I'm very much a second hander. Ernest Mandel's Marxist Economic Theory is also very readable as far as I've got, but I still haven't managed to get right through even after owning it for about 40 years!

[vinteuil]

"... class identities, like racial identities are multiple and overlapping. I work as a labourer but have a pension fund that invests in the stock market and I own a house that I am improving with sweat equity and which I intend to sell for speculative gain. Does that make the concept of class incoherent? Class is a role, not a label that attaches to persons. We play multiple roles all the time. But we do not say because most of us play the roles of both car drivers and pedestrians that it is impossible to plan a city around an analysis of relations between drivers and pedestrians."

... no, I find that this 'explanation' leaves me more confused than I was before. So person A, a labourer, is "working class", but also is in pension scheme that invests, so is a "capitalist", in the same way that he is "a car driver" but also sometimes "a pedestrian". I imagine the majority of those who identify as "working class" also have pensions or similar that will make them at the same time "capitalists"...

In what way is Harvey's 'explanation' helpful?

.