|
|
Socialism
and Class Reflections
on the 'Undeserving Poor' Class
and Politics Living
in 'X Factor' Britain: Neo-liberalism and 'Educated' Publics Ten
Propositions on Contemporary Class Formation: its Geography
and its Implications for Politics |
Read comments:
Tahir Abbas responds to Amir Saaed 24 June:
Dr Amir Saeed has written an important article that is of considerable interest to me. In my work I have emphasised that radicalisation or violent extremism among British-born Muslims has little to do with Islam per se and everything to do with history, politics, economics and sociology. The identity vacuum that is created within second and third generation British Muslims is exacerbated by class and ideological struggles that continue to plague the Muslim world (which still finds itself recovering from hundreds of years of imperialism, colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism). It is a struggle for resources and the ownership of the means of production. Such is the state of our evolution if our immediate survival goals are facilitated by appropriating and the exploiting the very natural resources that make this planet tick. It also says something even more about what people in positions of power actually feel the need to do to in order to achieve human progress.
Muslims in Britain face the entire range of exclusions and marginalisation that all people face, but their experience is particularly acute given the falsity of the global 'war of terror', the discussion of national cultural identity politics - i.e., are you a good Briton or are you a good Muslim? - and, locally, the concern in relation to 'self-styled segregation' or deliberate isolated living. This is, of course, principally, spurious and no more or no less of a concern than it is for Orthodox Jews living in Muswell Hill or third-generation white-Britons experiencing low education, high unemployment, high teenage pregnancies and single-parenthood, and, ultimately, a sense of disenfranchisement and exclusion that is largely thought to be explained by the presence of foreign people in Britain. These 'others' might have been Irish or African-Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s, the 'Invading Asians' of the 1970s and 1980s (and their potential 'swamping' of our society, words famously immortalised by Margaret Thatcher in 1978, who swept into power a year later in 1979), or African and Arab 'asylum seekers and refugees' in the 1990s. But, in the Noughties, it is 'Muslims', conveniently intersecting religion with skin colour, who are seen to represent that which is seen to be most outside of perceived boundaries of Englishness or Britishness, whatever these might be, of course.
Dr Saaed is wholly right when he states that class is a defining issue, and, in particular, the downward social mobility pressures that many Muslim-Britons have been facing as well as a lack of a cultural, political or theological steer to guide them away from harm. As much as we can talk about the role of Al-Qaida, Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami, Hiz-but-Tahrir, and so on, all of this chatter is empty when there is a simple discovery that connects every single one of the UK Muslims involved in some kind of anti-state terror activity - they are all 'made in Britain'. The government, however, is quick to place the emphasis upon mosques, imams, women, and media - which are important to help improve the capacity and professionalisation of institutions and Islamic centres - but the huge fat elephant in the room is still ignored or vehemently under-emphasised: foreign policy.
Having said all of this, my research points to the analysis that many professional Muslims operating in various policy and community contexts are savvy enough to know what is going on right now. For all the years that these mosques, imams, and women's networks have lacked the physical resources but also the emotional and intellectual confidence it is now an important time to work on these fronts and when there is high-level ownership linked with dedicated funding. If this recent preventing violent extremism agenda can help to build resilient communities, the stronger they will be able to fight racism, discrimination, fascism, and vilification, and the better they will be as effective citizens who can look confidently to the future. It will certainly not entirely eliminate the threat of violent extremism as the essential drivers of that are based on personalised globalised gripes that result in localised acts of extreme anti-state violence.
Dr Tahir Abbas FRSA is editor of Muslim Britain (Zed, 2005) and Islamic Political Radicalism (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). His forthcoming monograph, British Islam is to be published by Cambridge University Press in February 2009.
Robin Wilson responds to Tony Blackshaw 24 June:
There is a lot in Tony Blackshaw's argument, which indeed would be reinforced by Ulrich Beck. There was always a real difficulty in the assumption that class could operate as a political as well as an economic category, since politics was structured by the state, political parties and so on, interpellating individuals as citizens rather than mere bearers of class positions; indeed much of the left's historic role has been to ensure equality of citizenship by extension of the franchise to members of the working class, as well as ending the confinement of women to the private sphere and the exclusion of members of ethnic minorities.
Today's challenge is in many ways to develop a narrative of equality of life chances (including those of future generations), which goes with the grain of individual autonomy - the foundation of any democratic society - but which ensures it is universalised and equally enjoyed. This would represent the classless society which is of course the left's goal. That does imply a political revolution in as much as it does mean the subordination of the market to the common good, though clearly Nordic social democracy offers plenty of experience on which to build. It has always worked on the principle that the construction of a cross-class political majority depends not on a self-defeating effort to appease conservative prejudice but on constructing a high-quality welfare state through progressive taxation which engenders social trust and is attractive even to the most demanding citizens.
The paradox of the two revolutions to which Tony pointed is that the insecurities generated by the economic revolution undermine the freedoms generated by the social revolution, particularly in the context of the disequilibria neoliberalism has inevitably bequeathed on a global scale. A politics which offers a secure social springboard for all throughout their lives, rather than just a safety net for the poor, provides the only viable alternative to the rising threat of populism and xenophobia, last resurgent in Europe when the left indulged in a quixotic 'class against class' campaign.
The biggest single difficulty for this politics, apart from the scale of potential climate change and the havoc it may wreak, is that while globalised distribution is not an historic novelty globalised production is a feature of the last few decades, attenuating the capacity of states to regulate capital and in the process fostering a loss of belief in democratic engagement. A key part of the progressive narrative, of how Europe (allied to liberal America) needs to provide an alternative model of regulation to the world, remains literally a foreign language to most of the left in Britain.
'Workers of all lands unite!' was always a utopian slogan, as the first world war indicated. 'Cosmopolitans of all lands unite!' has, however, a more plausible ring.
David Byrne: A debate on class but what is missing?, 21 June:
The contributions to this debate are interesting but reading through them I was struck by a major absence, a common response of mine to intellectual and academic discussions of class. That absence was any real reference to the actual lived experience of everyday life in the UK today. There was a lot of discussion of media representations of that everyday life but virtually nothing which drew on actual professional - a term I use without apology - ethnographies which deal with the complex and dynamic reality of how most people live. Now the Soundings contributions are not only London originating and London centred but actually seem to be informed by most of the authors' own lived experience of inner London. Let me commend to those who wish to understand the reality of post-industrial life, a study which deals with the outer London predominantly but not exclusively white working class - David Smith's outstanding (2006) account of those who live on the margins of inclusion in South West London's former major industrial heartlands. This is not a media story of 'chavs' but rather demonstrates the complex, changing (dynamic), and multiple trajectories of people's lives through the industrial / post-industrial transition. In fact, to stay with London, I saw little evidence in the contributions of the implications of the descriptions of careful and professional - that word again - social geography of the kind represented by Chris Hamnett's (2003) study of the dynamics of space and hence of residential identities.* I read Hamnett's account as one in which a white collar proletariat - both public and private sector in employment locale - has replaced the old skilled manual working class.
To use the term proletariat is to agree with the tenor of Hugo Radice's comment to this debate of the 4th of June to the effect that any debate on class which substitutes - without explicit discussion - terms which emphasize culture and ignore position in the relations of production, or even command over material resources - throws out Weber as much as Marx and is fundamentally flawed. Indeed in a context of crisis, the time when, as E.P. Thompson put it so vividly 'reality walks in the door without knocking', that seems particularly inane. That said we do need to take account of the complex historical reality of the present. Home ownership and inheritance do modify the material circumstances of people. When that is associated with an increasingly privatized route towards significant social mobility - assets can pay school fees and we are talking Leicester Grammar here rather than Eton - then social closure becomes more extreme. Cultural forms signify but they are really rather more complex than the debate suggests.
One example is the emphasis on 'Englishness'. Now much of England's white working class is not simply English at all. A very substantial part of its origins lie in the nineteenth and twentieth century immigration to industrial England, including London, of healthy and fertile young adults from the whole of the Celtic periphery but especially from Ireland. East London's white working class is at least as much Irish as English in a demographic sense, although nearly two hundred years of inter-marriage have had their complex effect. The same is true of almost all the industrial conurbations and many of the coalfields in this country. What does this mean for class and identity? I don't have a clear answer but I know that the question is relevant.
Finally let me pick up the issue of the non-poor working class, particularly outside inner London (but certainly not outside outer London or the enormous Greater South East). We have very little in the way of a developed account of the people who live on the new owner occupied housing estates across this country - the 'normal' way of life in contemporary Britain (and Ireland by the way). What little we have shows that many of them are the children, and increasingly of course grandchildren, of the old industrial working class - origins actually matter here. They depend on two incomes for their position in the middle three quintiles of household income distribution. Their children stay in education but don't gain the almost automatic access to elite universities which seems to be the birthright of the children of the top decile by income of households. They work in both the public and private sectors, often one household of two adults has a representative in both. What are they like? I can answer that question statistically but not in qualitative terms because the last major study of them I can identify was done more than forty years ago, Family and Class in a London Suburb by Wilmott and Young, although there have been some interesting Ph. D. theses since. Let me say that if we are to have a sensible debate about class we need to pay attention to them.
*Chris Hamnett, Unequal City, London: Routledge (2003)
John Kirk responds to the debate, 23 June:
Employing the language of class has always been a potentially controversial exercise, and this is never more so than in the British context, it seems. From Marx to Margaret Thatcher and beyond, the subject of class - usually in the shape of the working class - has rested like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Attitudes towards class from the late nineteenth century to the present day have seen it either as alive and well or dead and buried, depending on the particular historical moment such claims occur. In more recent times, a new reaction to class has emerged though - the idea that class may exist, but only in the form of "dis-identification," and this marks a number of contemporary discussions on the working class in particular (Skeggs, 2004; Savage, 2000). In these discussions, class inequalities persist yet clear class identities have failed to materialise in response to such conditions. Thus one critic tells us that 'Britain is not a deeply class conscious society, where class is seen as embodying membership of collective groups' (Savage, 200, p. 40), so that 'the structural importance of class to people's lives appears not to be recognised by the people themselves. Culturally, class does not appear to be a self-conscious principle of social identity. Structurally, it appears to be highly pertinent' (Savage, 2000, xii). If structural inequalities persist, why do those experiencing them not see them in class terms? For Savage this is because people shape their responses to enquiries about social class in ways that flag up a self-identity 'linked to a claim of "ordinariness" or "normality"' and this 'profoundly undermines the salience of class.' There is a reluctance to name themselves as, say, working class. Yet, he points to the paradoxical double movement invoked here that, in the end, speaks class, 'since ordinariness only means something if contrasted with non-ordinary - the snobs for instance' (Savage, 2000, p. 115). And the snobs know themselves, often quite succinctly, in class terms, something Ruth Levitas's contribution to this debate powerfully underlines.
But arguments against class suggested by Savage seem to be predicated upon the necessary presence of a fully formed collective consciousness of class, and its absence then confirms its insignificance. This then conforms to his argument that class identities may still exist, but in an individualised form echoing the "individualisation" thesis of writers like Anthony Giddens. While it might be unduly "romantic" on the part of some commentators to speak of working-class collectivism, or working-class community - and, perhaps, a symptom, too, of a nostalgic structure of feeling inattentive to the historical division within working-class formations - class nevertheless exists collectively in an objective sense and is therefore potentially available for political mobilisation, a view marginalized in contemporary times by mainstream political groups and hegemonic formations. Although it might be the case that trade unions have been significantly weakened over the past twenty years, they remain effective vehicles for articulating working-class demands and interests - and it is such vital institutional sites where working-class people as individuals (as we all are in some significant, if complicated, sense) find collective alignments to engage with issues which affect their everyday lives. It remains the case that active trade unionism can still provide working people with a radical epistemology with which to make sense of their place in society, and even try to change society itself (as Hugo Radice's comments infer). At one level, this epistemology is shaped around notions of fairness, and in a world where inequalities of wealth are widening all the time, what constitutes moral/ethical imperatives - as well as material/economic ones - have an important role in understanding and articulating class positions.
Andrew Sayer's The Moral Significance of Class (2005) has taken up this point. Sayer's work shows that 'class matters to us …not only because of differences in material wealth and economic security, but also because it affects our access to things, relationships, experiences and practices, which we have reason to value, and hence our chances of living a fulfilling life' (Sayer, 2005; see also Skeggs, 2004; Kirk, 2007). He highlights key experiences that invariably shape, and are shaped by, class positioning - experiences linked to deference and shame, dignity and respect, and how these sentiments are withheld from or ascribed to others in a culture and society shaped by class inequality and difference, a point made in slightly different terms by Nunn and Biressi.
Though the economics of class remain central to understandings of inequality and access to power, class politics in its broadest sense is, and has always been, strongly driven also by moral concerns and a sense of injustice. Thus alongside the concern with inequality and re-distribution, understandings of class must also take cognisance of the desire for recognition, respect and dignity, which emerges as a central pre-occupation in terms of what Sayer calls 'the micro- and macro-politics of class.' Historically, the struggle for recognition has powerfully shaped class politics, whether this struggle has been fought through the workplace environment or the communal space in which class is lived. At a very straightforward level, the battle to secure the vote for working men and women - fought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - constitutes a call for recognition aimed towards those intent on concentrating power and influence to themselves. Indeed, this is what we might call, in contemporary idiom, struggles over notions of citizenship. Trade unions function not only to ensure the full fruits of labour, in terms of material reward, go to workers, but that workers receive their full entitlement of recognition and respect for the essential contribution they make to the wealth and well-being of society. There are processes occurring here - the act of demanding recognition implies, or foregrounds, the dialogic relations which constitute the social and which can be, and are seen to be within a range of contexts, articulated in antagonistic terms. Recognition suggests de-or mis-recognition: the othering that also constitutes notions of the self. Relations of domination emerge from this, as well as relations based on solidarity. For Sayer, the importance of recognition lies in his understanding of 'symbolic domination' and how this is compounded by economic inequality so that the desire for recognition need not contradict, nor stand in opposition to, the politics of redistribution - "traditional" imperatives in the politics of class. The two things interact, sometimes closely bound together in identity practice, sometimes separated out, and this is reflected, in part, in Jane Wills's argument here.
Indeed, when people seek recognition for the work that they do, this recognition, as suggested above, is not always demanded in terms of monetary reward alone. Moreover, in some occupations, the desire for recognition and respect may be the primary motivation for those involved in the work and this can form a basis for class politics, too. At the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, we have recently completed a three-year ESRC research project on the contemporary significance of work in people's lives. Some of our findings prove very pertinent in relation to class issues, as might be expected. This project has attempted to understand social class in a number of ways. The research approached the subject of class in part through conceptions of civic engagement and social action. This found expression through trade union and political activity, which in some cases propels workers to involve themselves in wider community activity, corresponding to broadly conceived notions of industrial citizenship. Trade unionism is one way where modes of identification frame class collectively as 'for itself'- where active trade unions, like the RMT, for instance, develop strategies that encourage identification with the work itself, rather than the privatised companies now running the railways. This provides a context for class issues to be articulated at the point of production. But class is also articulated in many instances through personal stories of family, neighbourhood and workplace identification, where class identities can be seen to derive from embedded structures of feeling, to use a term taken from Raymond Williams. Class consciousness, or consciousness of class, articulated in complex ways by respondents, coalesce with gender and generational co-ordinates (as well as notions of community, certainly for older respondents), producing reactions that correspond to many of Sayer's arguments outlined above around the subjective - moral/ethical - dimensions of class experience and its importance. These are sentiments (and not sentimentality) that turn often, as I suggested above, on notions of fairness and of what is right: dimensions of experience that inform class feeling, if not articulated in straightforwardly class terms (though often they are).
The Soundings debate is timely. The importance of "re-thinking," or "re-visiting," class in its range of manifestations remains vital and is now getting underway. In the USA for instance - that stronghold of so-called "classlessness" - working-class studies has emerged over the past decade as a exciting focus of study on university campuses, where university teachers and researchers, attempting to think through class, are in the process establishing connections with the wider working-class community and its institutions and representatives. Troubled economic times in the US have put class back on the agenda. But it might be that any renewed rhetoric of class has to re-find, or restate, its political impetus and its emancipatory promise if in the end it is to re-ignite at all.
References
"Does Work Still Shape Social Identities and Action?" Steve Jefferys,
John Kirk, Jane Martin, Tim Strangleman and Christine Wall - ESRC Identities
Programme.
Kirk, John, Class, Culture and Social Change: On the Trail of the
Working Class (London, Palgrave, 2007).
Savage, Mike, Class Analysis and Social Transformation (Buckingham,
Open University Press, 2001).
Sayer, Andrew, The Moral Significance of Class (London, Routledge,
2005). Skeggs, Beverley, Self, Class, Culture (London, Routledge,
2004).
Peter comments on Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's contribution 19 June
One doesn't have to do thought experiments like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett to reach the conclusion that social status hierarchies and inequality are likely to persist under different economic systems. The former USSR had no private ownership of productive capital nor (mostly) of land, yet suffered enormously from inequalities of: status, access to power, access to goods, to services and to freedoms. The clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, who receive very similar financial stipends regardless of their rank yet who have vastly different power, status and privileges, provides another example; does Prada, who make Pope Benedict's vestments, also make those of your local parish priest?
Hugo Radice comments on Mike Prior's contribution 6 June
Mike Prior's refusal to offer any definition of class or of socialism seriously undermines his attempt to chart the relation between the two, and appears to leave us with little to hope for. I want to argue that an alternative analytical approach reveals a very different potential for resuscitating socialist ideas.
From Marx's own work - as opposed to later 'Marxists' - I think it can be inferred that the two were for him very closely related. The class nature of capitalism centres on the relations of production, in which the 'two great classes', the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, confront each other respectively as owners of the means of production and owners of nothing but their labour power. Socialism is then envisaged as a form of society in which this division no longer exists; the means of production are held in common by all, and the 'freely associated producers' determine the deployment of available natural and human resources to meet the agreed needs of all.
The problem with most 'Marxist' interpretations since Marx is that they have abandoned this straightforward definition of classes under capitalism in favour of an essentially occupational approach, which is descriptively richer but analytically disempowering. In this approach, 'capitalists' are rich white men in top hats who tell people what to do; 'workers' are industrial and low-level clerical employees; and then we have the 'middle classes', a hotch-potch of small shop-keepers, members of the professions, and technical and administrative staff. It is then assumed that only 'workers' as thus defined are the natural bearers of revolutionary class consciousness, while the 'middle classes' have to be either won over by bribes, or politically suppressed.
If instead we return to Marx's original class analysis, we see that the great majority of 'middle class' people are in fact proletarians, in the crucial sense that they rely for their subsistence on the sale of their labour power. Only a very small proportion of them have any realistic expectation of becoming bourgeois in Marx's sense - of being able to live from the return on their property. After all, to generate an average UK pre-tax household income of say £25000 requires a capital sum of £250,000 at the very generous rate of return of 10%, or £500,000 at a more realistic 5% - and this means capital that is invested either in means of production, rental property or securities, and therefore excludes the family home which constitutes the main 'asset' of middle-class households.
Using this definitional approach, the UK is, as it has been for 200 years, one of the most proletarian countries in the world. So why does this vast proletariat show so little interest in socialism? Perhaps it is because the main self-proclaimed socialist parties have always placed as the centre of their political strategies the capture of the capitalist state machinery, and have consistently substituted the professional apparatus of the party for the direct engagement of workers in political struggle. It is simply assumed that the economic deprivation of workers - meaning the lower-level manual and clerical employees - will lead them to support socialist parties which promise to redistribute income in their favour. And this unavoidably leads to a dead end, as the relative mass of these workers dwindles.
Instead we could start from the concept of the 'free association of producers', of workers acting together to challenge the content, conditions and control of their work, in what Marx called 'the hidden abode of production'. We can then find ample evidence that, under the neoliberal onslaught of the last thirty years or so, professional, technical and administrative workers in both the private and the public sectors have increasingly come to face exactly the conditions of alienation and powerlessness at work that we imputed in the past to industrial workers.
Mobilising the common discontents across the myriad workplaces of our society requires a radical rethink of the nature and purpose of both trade unions and political parties. For the unions, it is vital to break with the old hostility to demands for worker participation, based on the idea that bargaining over wages and working conditions are the be-all and end-all. As for the parties, the abject failure of both social-democratic and communist parties in the 20th century strongly suggests that the standard bourgeois model of centralised hierarchical direction merely serves to encourage the substitution of party for class, and the disempowering of ordinary citizens.
For those readers who want the security of familiar reference points in the history of socialist politics, what I'm advocating would build on the marginalised 20th-century traditions of revolutionary syndicalism, guild socialism and council communism. Maybe it is only now that these traditions can come into their own.
Tony Blackshaw on commnity and class 7 June
Labour politicians have indeed spent a decade dodging the issue of class, and have been able to do so because like the Tories before them they have been busy talking about community: the idiom which has become a symbol of a certain kind of neoliberal public policy intervention, at least those directed at the poorest denizens of society. What is most tellingly neoliberal about the idiom of community as it is used by politicians is its phraseology: 'social capitalism', 'capacity building', 'community empowerment', 'entrepreneurial values', 'efficiency', 'targets', 'evidence' etc. Policy is not just about investing in social capital, however, it is also about welfare consumerism and self-actualized welfare, which is short hand for more individual 'choice' and 'selectivity', with the hope of engendering marketwise community values through a new form of managerialism and where possible a decentralization of services. The result is that the idiom of community has changed the world radically in the last twenty years: 'health', 'old people's homes and mental institutions', 'tax on the rateable values of people's homes' 'arts', 'sports', 'policing', 'safety', architecture, 'fire stations', 'businesses', 'the underclass' and so on stopped being 'health', 'old people's homes and mental institutions', 'tax on rateable values of people's homes', 'arts', 'sports', 'policing', 'safety', architecture, 'fire stations', 'businesses', 'the underclass', the Football Association's Charity Shield match and all the rest became 'community health', 'community care', 'the community charge', 'community arts', 'community sports', 'community policing', 'community safety', 'community architecture', 'community fire stations', 'the business community', 'poor communities', the FA Community Shield sponsored by MacDonald's and all the rest.
We all know that the kind of 'community' interventions identified above are more often than not limited to a game of second-best in which there is the tacit assumption that the market is the clear winner - e.g. community support officers as second rate police officers employed to do policing on the cheap, NHS dentists abandoning the health and hygiene side of their profession for the more lucrative but less public oriented one of beautification etc. So why has the language of community been so successful? It has been successful because community gives the impression of being inclusive rather than exclusive, and not only that, but politicians know that it is able to capture the concerns of the contemporary world in thought and develop ways of conveying these in ways that men and women today can easily follow, and which lead them to realizations which are very much a part of their everyday existences. The challenge for the Left is how to frame an alternative socialist agenda with the same universal appeal. In what kind of language would this alternative be framed? Should it also be in the language of community? Should it be in the language of class?
Add your comment:
Subscribe to Soundings a journal of politics and culture
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |