The Working Class part 2

There is an identity, based on a culture formed among people who worked with their hands; with tools and equipment, utensils. Often hard and dangerous, dirty, repetitive, ill-paid, this work fostered a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to life. People who carried it out lived in densely-packed neighbourhoods. They were close together at work and out. They spoke in regional and local accents. They were not well educated - it wasn't required for the work they did - though this changed, largely through reforms instituted by post-war Labour governments. They had simple tastes, of necessity, being poorly paid, and under-educated, and lived in cheap or subsidised housing for the same reason. They were close-knit, loyal, swift to reply physically to any slight, but sentimental.





In terms of occupation the working classes were in a majority until fairly recently (1970s?). They could be considered the basis of society, on which the other classes rested (except that they were controlled by the latter) The middle classes, self-defined, distinguished themselves by refinement: better housing, better and much longer education, better dress, better taste in general. This 'superiority' was facilitated by more intense education and the propensity for learning engendered by it: a willingness to learn about food, wine, foreign countries which could be visited, to read books and serious newspapers. Plus, of course, the funds to enable all these things. On the other side, the working classes maintained their identity by resolutely rejecting middle-class values.





The post-war years saw a number of changes to the rigid separation of classes that had existed previously. Incomes rose, education was improved, relatively, and the working classes began to be more visible. (Note: I use 'working classes' for the people, 'working class' for the culture). It was young people who led the way, in dress - Teddy Boys - and technology - motor bikes, transistor radios. They were fuelled by rock and roll, which combined with over-exuberance, led to the destruction of cinemas during showings of the film Rock Around the Clock. There were also frequent fights between rival Ted gangs. I should mention that working class culture, though immensely loyal within groups, is strongly tribal, and sorts out differences through violence, at times.





At the same time, there was a feeling of disaffection among elements of the middle classes, which I mentioned in an earlier post. Novels and films started portraying working class characters realistically: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Up the Junction. There was a mood for more grittiness in the arts: plays by Pinter and Wesker, John Osborne, novels by Alan Sillitoe. Richard Hoggart published the seminal Uses of Literacy, a study of working-class culture drawn all by practically all subsequent writers.



Redundancy had been a fact of working life since the beginning of the industrial era, as production methods changed, mechanisation was brought in, and so on. The pace of change increased from the 1950s onwards, with the increasing use of electronic data processing and the shift in manufacturing overseas. Unemployment rose, but many new jobs were created. As there were fewer jobs in traditional industries, young working-class people moved into the information technology and service sectors, as well as the remaining skilled manual areas: installers, service technicians, drivers, operators, as mentioned in my previous post. At the same time general clerical work was being de-skilled, the aptitude most required being typing ability and computer use, systems and programs being designed by those at higher levels. Clerical workers pay slipped relative to other skilled sectors.



The upshot of all this was a blending of classes at the point where the working class and lower middle class met. There had been a sharp division between the factory floor and the office. Now there were fewer factory floors and more offices, and offices became a bit like factory floors, albeit cleaner and quieter.

Another area where there was blending was in popular culture. Television programs and films, intended for a mass audience, were aimed at all classes. Pop and rock music were of working class origin. The affluent working classes could afford to consume popular culture as never before, along with the middle classes. Pubs began to lose their two or three-bar layout, lounge and public bars becoming one public bar, in effect.

This is not to say that class distinctions ceased to exist. Various public figures have declared that "we're all working-class now" which I think is nonsense, though I don't want to pursue the point. However I think that the working class identity, in a somewhat attenuated form, percolated through society and was adopted by sections of the middle class, especially the younger members. If the English temperament has, overall, become more demonstrative, more forthright and uninhibited, I suggest it is a result of this blurring of class edges through changes in the constitution of society.

Works consulted: The Way We Live Now: Richard Hoggart 1995
The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes
1918-1990 Eric Hopkins 1991

The Working Class

I'm thinking here of the British, and more specifically, English working class. which is loosely defined as the social group that includes manual workers of all types, lower-paid clerks and retail sales people, lower ranks in the armed forces and police. It does not, therefore, include everyone who works for a living.Characteristics which reinforce the definition include income, education, accomodation, speech, consumption habits, leisure activities, tastes. I won't attempt to spell out what those characteristics are in any detail.



Of all the groups affected by change in society, the working class is the one most drastically affected. It was brought into being at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution through the movement of peasants from the land into workshops and factories. Slow to begin with, as the first industry was water-powered and literally a cottage industry producing textiles. When steam power was introduced and large mills and facories were built the process accelerated. During the 19th century large areas of high-density housing were built in and around industrial sites.



The move from rural to urban life was a big change. However I would surmise that their situation changed, the people involved did not, retaining their lifestyle as far as circumstances permitted. This is in line with my equilibrium theory. This lifestyle is very much a communal one, centred on the extended family and the workplace, the residential area, income level, and educational level. I would go so far as to say that the surviving working-class culture has its roots in its rural origins. Thus, although much affected by change, working class people have retained much of their character throughout.

Between the wars the condition of the working class changed considerably. Prior to 1914 low wages, poor housing and poverty characterised their life, laeding to poor physical condition and a short life-span. Efforts were begun to correct these in order to supply fit men for the First World War, and continued thereafter. Working hours were gradually reduced, pay increased and housing gradually improved. There had been a building boom at the turn of the century, but this, on my personal observation, was largely for the burgeoning middle class. Although traditional industries declined between the wars, new ones appeared, eg. motor vehicles, aircraft, electricity and items powered by it.

Increased leisure time and income meant more opportunities for recreation. Radio shows were popular (Music while you Work, Harry Halls Guest Night), football, horse-racing(betting) greyhound racing, motor cycle speedway, the cinema. Works outings were well attended. Hobbies included gardening on allotments, keeping racing pigeons, playing in brass or silver bands. Literacy increased, though reading tended to concentrate on newspapers such as the Daily Mirror and News of the World, and popular magazines such as Picturegoer.

Health, welfare and education were improved through the provision of schools, hospitals and clinics. Voting rights were extended. All in all, the lot of the working class was vastly better than it had been at the end of the previous century.

Still, any changes in the economic state of the country were most strongly felt by the workers, who were first to be laid off and did not have transferrable skills. Pockets of poverty remained. And changes in production techniques were strongly felt on the shop floor. Automation, which had begun quite slowly, accelerated after the second world war. All the changes in production techniques which were instituted since early in the Industrial Revolution had one aim: to reduce the size of the workforce required for a given production level. So this required workers to learn new skills or depend on the state or charity for a living.

The relative affluence of the working class depended on the health of industry, mainly in manufacturing. However, in the latter half of the twentieth century the bulk of manufacturing began to shift towards the Far East. Coal mining and steel manufacture, some of the last remnants of staple industries, were closed down. The base of the working class, in terms of work places, was whittled away. Privatisation, pushed forward under the Thatcher government, undermined organised labour. Thus the working class underwent some of the most drastic changes it had suffered since being brought from the fields into the factories.

But this class, its members, the people, didn't disappear. They are still there. I don't know enough about present-day Britain to say just how they are constituted, so much of what follows is somewhat speculative. (I avoid resorting to stereotypes as much as possible). A moment's thought produces a list of jobs that can be considered working-class. That is, jobs done by people fitting the definition of working-class. For example, baggage handlers, security guards, transport drivers, construction workers, fork-lift truck drivers, crane drivers, bus drivers, retail salespeople and catering staffs.

I have a theory, which is the main point of this exercise, is that working-class culture has spread into the main stream of British society to some extent, more so than the spread of bourgeois values into the working class. I shall have to pursue this further. So far all I have done is to sketch the development of and changes in the British working class.

Post-war England: Affluence and Angst

The British population, at the end of the Second World War, was exhausted and relieved. It took a little while for things to get back to anything approaching normal; rationing stayed in force for another nine years for some goods, infrastructure needed rebuilding, industry needed reorganising. England, more directly affected by the war than Scotland or Wales, probably had more sorting-out to do, but even if that were not the case, my thoughts are more concerned with England.

Despite the poor material shape of the country, it's my sense that the people, having survived the privations of wartime conditions, rebounded fairly well and got on with life as best they could. However, if they thought life would go on just as it had before the war, they became disillusioned fairly soon. Changes were in the air.

It wasn't until the fifties that changes became really apparent. New buildings were in new styles, and with new purposes: council estates, secondary modern schools, technical colleges. There were new styles in clothes, new cars, new aircraft. The government tried to bolster a patchy spirit of optimism and confidence by launching the Festival of Britain, which was intended to show how British industry was forging ahead. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was a morale-booster, coinciding with a large increase in sales of TV sets and subsequent viewing.


Against the material advances there were some counter-currents: the Korean war, the Emergency in Malaya, the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, and at home, failure to achieve a satisfactory state of labour relations. This was part of of a larger picture of relative decline, in which Britain was losing her empire, and losing ground against other industrialised nations, having been the world leader in both these areas.

Within this milieu voices of dissent began to be heard. A group of writers labelled the Angry Young men expressed through their work a rumbling of dissatisfaction with the state of things. Post-war England was not shaping up in the way they had hoped, or had been led to expect. Look Back in Anger, the play by John Osborne, inspired the label. The group wasn't really cohesive, and it's members probably denied being members, or even denied it's existence. Room at the Top, the novel by John Braine, was not really anti-establishment, being the account of a bloke of working-class origins making his way up the social ladder in the provincial north of England. However it paved the way for a grittier style of writing and film-making as represented by A Kind of Loving, The L-Shaped Room, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Girl with Green Eyes, Up the Junction and The Pumpkin Eater. Most of them were successful as both books and films.

A more expressly anti-establishment voice was heard in the satirical TV show, That was the Week that Was, and in the magazine, Private Eye. Left-wing newspapers, the Daily Herald (Labour) and Daily Worker (Communist) were a bit stodgy and appealed only to staunch members of their respective constituencies. At some point more strident publications began to appear: Socialist Worker, Militant, Red Mole. These were matched by more radical groups, the Socialist Workers Party, International Socialists and the like.

On a more popular cultural level, unrest seemed to grow among young males, with battles between gangs of Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers, and later, skinheads and football hooligans. Milder forms of dissent appeared with the Beats, hippies, and Punks.

The context of the social scene was a growing affluence and vigorous modernisation schemes that saw the building of motorways, shopping centres, tower blocks, industrial estates. But in the larger world context, Britain was declining economically relative to other advanced countries and losing international influence.

It's hard to say what were the direct causes of the various forms of discontent: perhaps they were many. And it would probably be wrong to link together the various manifestations of discontent. Nevertheless it would be true to say that from 1945 until at least 1980 there was a sense of alienation and futility running through English society. I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of this subject and hope to develop it further. Having been out of the country for the last thirty years I'd like to find out if it persisted and whether it still exists.

Globalisation

Something I read started me thinking about globalisation. It was an essay looking at early views, eg. in Shakespeare, of the world as a whole, a globe. I began to see that if one thought of the planet in this way and went back in time well before Shakespeare, one quickly saw that the world was global, so to speak, from very early on. After all, life spread across the whole world, from the earlies forms up to homo sapiens. It's the latter that's interesting for my puposes, since modern man emerged in a particular part of the world and spread fairly rapidly thoughout it. The habitable planet was not exactly a blank slate, but a well-stocked garden open for the taking, more or less (beware the predators!) Since the first outward expansion there have been many migrations, conquests, colonisations. The Roman Empire, for example, covered most of what the Romans thought of as the known world. Phoenician traders sailed round most of it. The British Empire was a global enterprise, foreshadowing today's globalisation, lacking not much more than the instant communications and fast travel available today.

Plenty has been written about the present situation so I shall not venture any comments on it. I feel that taking the longer and braoder view, however, helps put it in perspective. And looking at that longer view, we see that as humans spread across the world they diversified in appearance, language and culture. It is possible, then, that the apparent homogenising effect of globalisation will be counteracted by local variation.

What's the Matter with Kansas

I read this book by Thomas Frank. It is an account of a shift to the right among ordinary working Americans as a result of radical conservative propaganda employing social issues, enabling Republican administrations to support big business which is shafting ordinary Americans. Whether this account is strictly accurate I don't know, but it was an entertaining read. It attracted a lot of discussion which I'm not going to go into. The Wikipedia entry sums it up; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What's_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F

Supercapitalism

I'm parking this synopsis here as a lazy way of making notes of this book's contents. having just finished reading it;



Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday LifeWritten by Robert B. Reich

From the greatly admired author of The Work of Nations and The Future of Success, one of America's greatest economic and political thinkers as well as a distinguished public servant in three national administrations, a breakthrough book on the clash between capitalism and democracy.Mid-twentieth-century capitalism has turned into global capitalism, and global capitalism—turbocharged, Web-based, and able to find and make almost anything just about anywhere—has turned into supercapitalism. But as Robert B. Reich makes clear in this eye-opening book, while supercapitalism is working wonderfully well to enlarge the economic pie, democracy—charged with caring for all citizens—is becoming less and less effective under its influence.Reich explains how widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and the spreading effects of global warming are the logical outcomes of supercapitalism. He shows us why companies, fighting harder than ever to maintain their competitive positions, have become even more deeply involved in politics; and how average citizens, seeking great deals and invested in the stock market to an unprecedented degree, are increasingly loath to stand by their values if it means biting the hands that feed them. He makes clear how the tools traditionally used to temper America's societal problems—fair taxation, well-funded public education, trade unions—have withered as supercapitalism has burgeoned. Reich sets out a clear course to a vibrant capitalism and a concurrent, equally vibrant democracy. He argues forcefully that the spheres of business and politics must be kept distinct. He calls for an end to the legal fiction that corporations are citizens, as well as the illusion that corporations can be "socially responsible" until laws define social needs. Reich explains why we must stop treating companies as if they were people—and must therefore abolish the corporate income tax and levy it on shareholders instead, hold individuals rather than corporations guilty of criminal conduct, and not expect companies to be "patriotic." For, as Reich says, only people can be citizens, and only citizens should be allowed to participate in democratic decision making. "

It was quite an eye-opener, illustrating something I've known for a long time without quite getting my finger on, viz. that corporations exist to make money for their shareholders. Reich makes it clear that this is their only bottom-line function, and within a world become more competitive through deregulation and free trade, have been forced to be more energetic in their pursuit of profits. This has led to benefit for consumers in the shape of "great deals', but not without social and environmental costs. His main argument in the second half of the book is that these costs can only be reduced through regulation, which can only be effectively imposed politically by democratic means, not through spurious 'self-regulation' by corporations.

Planet of Slums

I came across the name of Mike Davis recently, and read a book edited by him: Evil Paradises, which describes rich enclaves in an increasingly impoverished world:

"Although they read like science fiction, the case studies are shockingly real. In Dubai, where child slavery existed until very recently, a gilded archipelago of private islands known as “The World” is literally being added to the ocean. In Medellín and Kabul, drug lords—in many ways textbook capitalists—are redefining conspicuous consumption in fortified palaces. In Hong Kong, Cairo, and even the Iranian desert, burgeoning communities of nouveaux riches have taken shelter in fantasy Californias, complete with Mickey Mouse statues, while their maids sleep in rooftop chicken coops. Meanwhile, Ted Turner rides herd over his bison in 2 million acres of private parkland." (New Press review)

Next I read Planet of Slums:

Imagine a place where thousands live crammed together in makeshift shacks bordering toxic dumps, with no access to clean water or electricity. Residents defecate on the ground because there are no latrines, and perpetually live in their own waste because there are no sanitation services. Nobody maintains the roads or regulates traffic, so many perish in car accidents. There is no industry; there are no jobs, no education system, no health care whatsoever. Police presence is limited to collecting protection money. This dystopian vision may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it's far from that–it's reality for more than one billion of the earth's population.
Renowned American scholar Mike Davis chronicles the horrific living conditions in the world's ghettos, favelas, and barrios, detailing the global policy decisions that have fuelled their explosive expansion. The text reveals that most of the world's population growth is taking place in developing countries, with 95 percent of that growth occurring in cities. There are now more than 200,000 slums on the planet, with populations ranging from several hundred to 20 million.
Davis ties the rise of slums to World Bank policy. For the last 30 years, the institution has been lending money to impoverished nations at high interest rates, then leveraging those debts to aggressively restructure local economies. Many nations now spend more than half of their annual budget on debt repayment, and the bank requires these countries to slash social spending for what's left. The result is the complete retreat of the state–and an unprecedented level of misery for the poor of the world.
The grim situation that Davis describes should ring the alarm for civil society and governments alike. Sadly, the academic approach of the book guarantees its readership will be limited. The text is packed with tables and statistics, but it's short on narrative. The reader walks away with a good understanding of how a billion people are living–but gains no real connection to this mass of humanity. In spite of its best intentions, Planet of Slums winds up reinforcing the abstraction of slum populations when it should be humanizing them.

Straight.com (Vanvouver) review. Cutting and pasting may be lazy but it's quick. I tend to agree with the final sentence, which echoes another review I read online. Davis cuts from one slum to another in his account, without really distinguishing one from another, so that slums worldwide tend to coalesce into an homogeneous mass. Still, this global view portrays the global horror, which was brought about largely through colonialism, maintained through post-colonialism, when middle classes maintained the barriers keeping slum-dwellers out, or moved into slum areas that were tidied up, and reinforced by neoliberal economic policies.

State of the World

I'm finding myself getting more interested in world affairs these days, probably as a result of web browsing and reading articles. I was given a copy of Charlie Wilson's War as a birthday present, and having read that decided to read non-fiction books again after years of reading mainly crime fiction. Charlie Wilson's War describes how the CIA assisted the mujahideen against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, with the aid of congressman Charlie Wilson.

I next read Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, who gives an account of the way countries that have been subject to a disaster of some kind are made vulnerable to the imposition of an open market, allowing foreign corporations to move in. Then I read Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill, who describes the rise of the "security" contractor, or mercenary army, and the privatisation of the American military.

I'm presently reading The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt, who runs the TomDispatch website which I visit regularly, and who examines the American psyche. So it will be seen from these notes that I am looking at the state of the world from the perspective of American involvement, which is considerable, and influence, which may be the strongest, but not the only one.

The prevailing world view among the administrative classes seems to be that expressed by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History, which asserts that the world model is now universally based on democracy and free markets, that the clash of ideologies is over. However he has modified that position, and I believe there are in fact countervailing forces, which is what makes the world a turbulent and interesting place.

May you live in interesting times (purported Chinese curse)