Today the happy condition is to be middle-class. What characterises the middle-class? Likely some or all of these-
1) Money to sustain status-buying (i.e. of cars, houses).
2) Professional or management jobs, but also white-collar work in general.
3) High-brow culture consuption, such as art, theatre, and clever fiction.
4) Other traditional qualities, such as a wide (and arguably unnecessary use of) vocabulary, and saying 'grarse' instead of 'grass'.
5) Generally conservative economic beliefs and behaviour.
6) A sense of ownership of society.
7) Business culture is seen as basically efficient as it is socially progressive. It is also often held to be directly culturally desirable (in particular by the swooning aspirational working-class)
8) A deep faith in the power of conversation and debate, particularly in the culture of 'meetings' and official phraseologies. For instance, any 'decision' is almost sacred and worth slobbering over in a meeting, which must always have suggestions that are 'going-forward' (not usually hyphenated) or are at least 'forward-looking'. presumably shoes are 'walking-solutions', and etc.
9) A background of the same qualities or the money and taste to acquire the continuance of these qualities to their children. So at least a step in time greater than the term 'working-class rich'.
As is well known, the upper classes depend on the reverance of the middle classes today, and are either propped up or brought down into the middle-classes as the market will allow.
Apparently 70% of British people consider themselves to be middle-class. I may or may not have seen this figure on a recent Melvyn Bragg documentary for the BBC, which also left me with extra reasons to write some thoughts up. Bragg had a working-class background as a child, and for decades he has been a cultural commentator with a delicate palate and a contemplative but welcoming demenour. He has a posh accent, sharp fingernails and a distinguished hair-do, and is pretty much the definitive middle-class male. He presents radio and television as his occupation, and of course only presentes the most ponderously upper-middle-class material such as fine art and literature.
Bragg ends his three-part series on class saying that the cultural activities of the middle classes is what defines society today, and that the old industrial working class either bought their homes and became middle-class thanks to Thatcher and John Major, or got 'left behind' and became the underclass that is decried today as antisocial and feckless. And by the way, although Bragg seems to disapprove of these demonisations (he calls it class chauvanism or similar, and also interviews the author of the book 'Chav' for a similar perspective), he never gets around to giving a positive perspective on the working-class, such as a thoughtful definition - he seems happy that people call themselves (or want to call themselves) middle-class, and he leaves it at that. If you're working class, but get riled up at the misuse of apostrophes, then maybe you're an ok guy. So if you've acquired some tasteful spending habits (such as Hamlet tickets) and have an aspirational comportment (comportment! middle-class language use anyone?), then you can probably be permitted to wear a red jumpsuit aboard the starship Society.
So what of the working class? You'll have understood by now that I don't care much for being 'aspirational' and don't agree with the conclusions of Melvyn Bragg's programme. What are my options for trying to think a working-class?
1) Isn't the cultural lifestyles of the middle-class something produced - an ideology - like the Marxists have alway said? Bragg doesn't go there, and nor would most people in fact. The idea that the middle-class isn't a floating island city, such as one might see in a Japanese manga, but a teetering tower of cards, isn't very good for the constant deferring that aspirationalism (that a word?) requires. And sure, yes, ideology has its own life and its own aims at its own produced level (just as we do as products outselves), and therefore it avoids all harsh reductions to economy (so saying that middle-class culture is basically an ideological illusion is not the end of the discussion), but taking away the eating of the cake from the having of it is still very important.
On this view the working-class are in touch with reality, and the other classes are not, middle-class ideology being at degrees remove from such a working-in-reality undertaken by the working-class. This observation can range from saying that what is real is what you can make with your hands (maybe in agricultural life or something like that, say, for the Maoists), to saying that reality is the ability to really feel your (emotional, environmental) situation, which the corrupt conceptualisations of the middle-class, for exampe, will have always already betrayed (and perhaps the existentialists call to 'be authentic' fits somewhere here). So there's these sorts of things. There's also the idea that the middle-class has become working-class without noticing, due to the power of the market, and this is really very interesting from a traditional point of view and begins by criticising various delusions - very possible to find that the working-class are now called Rosemary, and etc.
2) I can still ask - Is the new underclass the real working class? That is certainly possible, but it may take more than a few Lenins to drag anything revolutionary out of them. Apparently there has been one so far and in very different circumstances. This notwithstanding, however, the goals of the old industrial working-class families are pretty much up for grabs if you think about it, even if it seems impossible to put into any kind of practice. There are huge problems, however. It is said that the violent nature of this underclass is and has been a projection of the higher classes who love terrifying stories about monstrous working-class oiks - since Victorian times and beyond. Yet this also means there has been a social role to fill, and this has been filled really saddeningly well. I don't actually understand how the underclass is separable from the middle-class in this regard, they're symbiotic to some important extent. In the olden days of Communism there was a term, the 'Lumpenproletariat', which is that section of the proletariat that is irredeemable for revolutionary purposes, and who betray their class and become conscripted by the middle-class ideology. All too eerily familiar if you ask me.
But then, what really characterises this 'underclass' - lumpenproletariat or not? Is it some or all of:
1) Violence (physical and emotional). Criminality and disaffection. 'Hooliganism' and 'Yobbishness'.
2) 'Childish sense of entitlement' and 'shamelessness'.
3) Harsh tones and prejudice against all that is high-brow.
4) Low income, usually manual work (not usually lower white collar positions, but struggling to have manual work).
5) Racist, sexist, homophobic.
6) National Lottery; Football; ITV; The Sun newspaper.
7) Lives in council-owned accommodation; bedsits; housing associations.
8) No inheritance; background is the opposite of helpful; incapable of good parenting.
Well, I'll stop there. You can see if you compare the lists that it doesn't look like much good can come from the second, whilst the first is at least debatable. Seems like the underclass deserve their monicker. Of course, the authors of books that demonstrate how the underclass has been culturally created by the middle-class media would probably say 'just stop making them seem like monsters and they'll be better', as if they would suddenly recover from some illness. If the effects are temporary, yes, sure, but why should they be temporary? Because they are ideological in nature and not 'really real'? Well my feeling is that hate is real enough for most and is especially real when the alternative is as underdeveloped as is the case here.
I seem to be drawn more to the idea of the 'scab', and the betrayer of one's own class, than to the middle-class idea of 'the monster that lurks out of its animalistic nature'. All the time I've spent in the company of the underclass convinces me that this is an entirely engineered culture (and whoever says the construction of a people has to be for their overall betterment needs something of a lesson on the history of Empire), and that it isn't the 'savage' that needs to worry me but the 'scab' that betrays even my very existence. The middle-class is, after all, the class of representation, and the underclass serve to offer up former the qualities of the working-class for representation at every turn. The problem of the scab is that these representations always serve to demonstrate the baseness of the historical working-class and therefore justify the middle-class monopoly of culture.
So there's the possibility of a constructive working-class arising from the depths of the current 'underclass', or even just the completion of violence (aimed at the middle-class rather than their fellow working-class), that could possibly be hoped for. Otherwise there's the problem of the scab, and the concomitant problem of who on earth it is that is truly working-class that can still oppose the scab class.
3) As the Philosophers say, the working-class is not a people but a movement.
This is likely the most promising and least negative way of characterising the working-class, a way of trying to affirm all the historically positive powers of the industrial working-class people (i.e. the people that embodied the movement for a while) and all the freedoms that they won, whilst maintaining the effectiveness of that power and the efficacy of those freedoms even when the industrial movements were eventually defeated. Some say this is romanticising pointlessly and takes the working-class away from areas of struggle, which is impossible (and it is therefore contradictory and wrong). Others say that there is no need for an overwhlemingly positive (i.e. constructive and active) formulation, since negative means can yield positive results, and that today anger and uprising is in order. I have some sympathy for the latter, but less for the former. It seems in a way that the mere notion of something 'constructive' and 'creative' is just the appropriation of the idea of a movement by the mere movement of middle-class language. If I get a job I'm being constructive. If I languish on the dole I'm lacking any positive contribution. Positive/negative, and creative/destructive (or creative/unoriginal) as oppositions, therefore, aren't doing any work whatsoever while they remain mired in their unhelpful economical and political conventions.
And then there's another weird shopping list including:
1) The internet.
2) Robots.
I'll write about those another time, but they're really interesting.
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Oh and why am I writing all this down and making this blog? It is to identify areas for study or explication, but also so that I can identify presuppositions, principles and maxims that can serve as guides to future thinking, in the aim of just trying to be as consistent as possible and to avoid the problems of poor health! The right thing to do is just to feel your way and go as far as possible, and that's really the whole premise behind the blog. I'll therefore be groping through these pages idenifying enemies and whatever weapons can be brought to bear against them. If this helps you too so be it, but really I don't see why it should at this stage. Still, nice weather.
Comments if you got 'em.
V
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