Feeling invisible is the least of working class problems

“If I was of colour or had a disability or a different sexuality I just wouldn’t even bother turning on the television, because you feel invisible,” Times columnist and author of How to be a woman, Caitlin Moran, told the Radio Times last week.

“The lack of working class people in culture at the moment is notable,” she went on. “And when they are represented … Take Benefits Street. It’s the only time I’ve seen people on benefits on television, but you didn’t get to hear them talking about their ideas on philosophy or politics, you didn’t get to see them being joyful – it was simply about surviving, and that made them look like animals. It didn’t show them as human beings.”

This is true but something jars. Representation of working class people is not the same as representation of other so-called minorities. It’s far more troublesome because the implications of genuine representation are far less containable. Put simply, it’s possible to have a resolutely capitalist society that is authentically diverse, and comfortable with multi-ethnicities, equal representation of women, fluid sexuality and disability. It’s not possible to have a resolutely capitalist society that pays more than lip service to working class lives and experiences.

Merely on a superficial level, working class representation in culture is different. The problem is not invisibility but abject distortion and hostility. When the working class is heard in popular culture, it’s invariably with the prefix ‘white’ as if working class views can only be amplified in racial terms. Benefits Street, Benefits Britain, On Benefits and Proud, Benefits by the Sea, On the Sick, Benefits Hotel, Benefits Cat* etc (it’s quite a long list) are all fixated on looking down at people whose lives, intelligence and moral scruples are presented at a qualitatively lower level than those of the viewer. People live in ‘benefits’ houses, have ‘benefits’ babies and smoke ‘benefits’ fags.

These portrayals are dripping with condescension, stereotypes and malice. Invisibility would be a major advance. You could compare this representation with the way homosexuality or ethnic minorities were depicted in the 1970s but even that was less spiteful. It’s like the venom that’s now not acceptable to vent on other racial groups or non-heterosexual people has been stored up to be spewed on targets few will defend.

What does working class mean?

However these depictions are not of the working class per se but people on out of work benefits. The closer people are materially to those at the bottom of the heap, the more they may well want to differentiate themselves. “I don’t think I would want to be in the same class as somebody who takes what they can and has the attitude of ‘Well, I’m better off not working,” Lorraine, a fork lift truck driver, is quoted as saying towards the end of the book, Social Class in the 21^st Century.

Just under half of society, if you credit official definitions, are now working class. 10.6 million people in Britain can be described as poor (in work poverty has now overtaken out of work poverty), as their income is below 60% of the median. A further 760,000 are claiming Jobseekers Allowance and 2.3 million are getting either Incapacity benefit, or its successor, Employment and Support Allowance. The term ‘working class’ can be applied to all of these groups, or just one, depending on your intention.

It’s possible to react to working class stereotypes in the same way as racial stereotypes or homophobia. Just as there is sexism and racism, so there is classism. The solution is to fight an attritional battle on sexist, racist, homophobic or classist attitudes so that eventually society is free of them. In this ideal world, working class people have their voice heard equally in culture in the same way that women, ethnic minorities, non-heterosexual and transgender people do. The working class are not looked down on or stereotyped.

But this would be a false utopia. Being working class is not a collection of attitudes to be respected, or the spur behind an ambition to colonise the commanding heights of society, but a state of being that should not exist. The aim should be a classless society. The working class should be abolished. And that is a truly transgressive aspiration.

Diversity

It’s easier to see the distinction if you examine society’s acceptable and seemingly unstoppable radical edge, the push for diversity. Since 2010’s Equality Act it has been illegal to discriminate against job applicants on the basis of, not just sex or race, but sexual orientation, transgender status or disability. Discrimination obviously does happen but officially it shouldn’t. Government departments have been at the forefront of this drive. The Home Office has been recognised as one of the UK’s Top 50 Employers for Women and offers guaranteed interviews to qualified people with disabilities.  Secret service agency MI5 been has named ‘employer of the year’ by LGBT rights charity Stonewall. In the US, since the time of George W Bush, the US federal government has declared itself in favour of ‘workplace diversity’.

Allied to this, there has been constant pressure to make corporate boardrooms and the upper echelons of public sector bodies more reflective of society. The 30% Club campaigns for greater gender balance at board level in the UK. Groups such as OUTstanding claim business can benefit from greater productivity by enhancing representation of LGBT people at executive level.

It is, without question, a good thing that society, and its cultural expressions, reflect its actual diversity. Gay and transgender people, in particular, have suffered terribly from bullying and worse. The current stigmatising tone of coverage of benefit claimants prepares the ground for sanctions and cuts to sickness benefit. So a more realistic, and, gulp, sympathetic portrait may have tangible effects.

But cultural diversity and equal treatment by employers are profoundly inadequate tools for dealing with the inescapable inequality and autocracy of the capitalist organisation of society. This becomes apparent when you consider how the working class fits into the diversity agenda. The short answer is, it doesn't.

If an employer doesn’t want to discriminate, for example, against working class people, how are they to proceed? They could aim to ensure that people with working class backgrounds aren’t excluded. That would be difficult to define and enforce, but beyond these surface difficulties, whether a working class person even gets to the application or interview stage, is dependent upon innumerable factors. These elements, such as education, childhood experiences, parental wealth, ownership of assets, or cultural capital are produced by entrenched political and economic forces, and not within the gift of enlightened employers to bestow.

The result is that, despite the ostensible backing of Left and Right for greater social mobility and equal opportunity, the reality either gets worse or remains static. Two decades ago, Conservative Prime Minister John Major promised a ‘classless society’.  With impeccable amnesia David Cameron now claims the Conservatives as the ‘party of equality’. But class cannot be undiscriminated away.

A cooperative economy

However the incongruity goes far deeper. Genuine representation of working class opinions and experiences cuts against the grain of organisations built on hierarchy and career progression. For a telesales worker, a front-line nurse, a fork lift driver, a cleaner or a receptionist to have an equal say in the management of the organisations they work for presupposes an end to the arbitrary power of management, and the reaping of profits by senior management and shareholders. This simply cannot be allowed to happen. Power should steadily accrue to those who ascend career ladder. So working class experiences and opinions are necessarily suppressed in favour of those of the upper middle class.

If, however, you wish society to genuinely listen to the experiences of working class people, you have to move towards a cooperative economy, in which the distinction between employer and employee is abolished. This doesn’t mean that a division of labour is no longer needed or that management disappears as a function. But it does mean that enterprises and public sector organisations become classless and democratic. The huge cooperative enterprise at Mondragon in Spain, which contains over 250 businesses, indicates this is quite feasible.

The implications of such a change are massive for a society increasingly defined in terms of status, seniority and inequality. But, like a basic income heralding a post-work future, a cooperative economy could be just as liberating for those convinced they benefit from the current make-up of society, as for everyone else.

*This one is made up but I’m hopeful Channel 5 will commission it

Sylvia Pankhurst and feminism, part two

The destinations of the leaders of the Suffragette movement in Britain were, as shown in part one, utterly contradictory. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the WSPU, became a zealous supporter of the First World War, fervent anti-communist and, in time, Conservative party candidate. Sylvia Pankhurst, her daughter, worked to improve the conditions of working class women, opposed the First World War, agitated for universal suffrage and unreservedly backed the Russian Revolution when it burst onto the scene in 1917. In fact, the East London Federation of Suffragettes morphed, after several incarnations, into the first British Communist party, although Sylvia Pankhurst swiftly became an anti-Leninist council communist.

These outcomes were not accidental but pre-determined by a feminism informed by class in contrast to one that regarded class an irrelevant distraction. Sylvia Pankhurst’s support for ‘human suffrage’, her urgent desire to improve the lot of the working class and her instinctual backing of the Russian Revolution did not subsume her feminism. She advocated a system of ‘household soviets’ in order that mothers could be represented in how society was managed and refused to get married, instead co-habiting with an Italian anarchist in Essex. But she became unequivocal socialist.

 A sheen of equality

The other kind of feminism is doomed to play an ultimately conservative role by buttressing already existing institutions, albeit with the caveat that they be opened up equally to women. There is an unmistakable echo of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Party in the assertion of Hillary Clinton’s former speechwriter, Anne-Marie Slaughter, that gender equality will achieved by closing the “leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders.”

There is undoubtedly value in doing this, opening up roles to women that have been the province of men for decades or even centuries. But it is a tightly constricted form of progress. The value will be felt, and already is being felt, by middle class women who will fill those roles as social mobility stagnates or goes into reverse. In the OECD, a club of 34 rich countries, half of the well-paid professional and managerial “class 1” jobs are now held by women. Norway has a law demanding that 40% of company directors are women. Its effect has been extremely limited, aside from creating a tiny elite of rich women. What changes like this do achieve, however, is to lend a sheen of equality and diversity to institutions that don’t merit such validation. They also leave in place, even solidify, armies of poorly paid, overwhelming female, workers doing ‘caring’ jobs such as nursery assistant or cleaner. Gender equality becomes synonymous with elite concerns.

Chartism and other ‘male’ movements

We would do well not to cast ‘patriarchical’ male-dominated movements of the past into the dustbin of history. When the first extension of the vote in Britain in 1832 confined enfranchisement to middle class men only (13% of adult males), the result was the formation of co-operatives and trade unions throughout society. Chartism, the original movement to enlarge the franchise which swiftly followed, was inherently sexist – it demanded the vote for all men only. But this did not stop it being bitterly resisted and posing an existential challenge to the order of things. Male democracy was deemed a mortal danger to the newly minted capitalist system by the liberal rulers of the day and, according to one historian, “the mere demand for the ballot was often treated as a criminal act by the authorities.”

Chartism was accompanied by a wave of strikes and the right to vote was extended gradually, only once the ruling class was convinced workers had become sufficiently docile. “Only when the working class had accepted the principles of a capitalist economy and the trade unions had made the smooth running of industry their chief concern did the middle classes concede the vote to the better situated workers,” wrote economic historian Karl Polanyi in the 1940s, “that is, long after the Chartist Movement had subsided and it had become certain that the workers would not try to use the franchise in the service of any ideas of their own,”. Syndicalism was similarly male dominated (the document quoted in part one from the Welsh miners’ union refers to ‘men’ determining how work shall be done) but it nonetheless represented a radical challenge to how society and industry should be managed.

What this means is that divisions among white men will be replicated among women and people of different ethnicities and, conversely, movements for equality among white men can be adapted beyond their original sexist and racist defects. To take one historical example, Ancient Athens was patriarchical to an absurd degree - women were not allowed outside the family home unless under male surveillance. It resembled, in this respect, modern-day Saudi Arabia. But Athens pioneered a form of direct democracy and political equality that can be used to increase female participation in public affairs. Sortition – where decision makers are chosen by random selection as opposed to elected to a position – has been demonstrated to be far more representative of the population than conventional forms of democracy, reliant on universal suffrage and the vote. The very rights the Suffragettes fought for. Nearly 90 years after women gained the vote in Britain, working class women are the most unrepresented group in the House of Commons. Formal equality and enfranchisement have clearly not had the seismic effects both the Suffragettes, and their opponents at the time, imagined.

Economic inequality and class

But class is very definitely still with us. One of the chief television ‘entertainments’ of today in Britain are reality programmes about the lives of people on welfare benefits. Their tone is uniformly contemptuous and stigmatising, to the degree that, were they about an ethnic group, they would be deemed irredeemably racist. The current width of the UK’s Overton Window permits the suggestion that people who don’t pay sufficient taxes should have the right to vote taken from them, while businesses should be enfranchised. The higher echelons of politics, the judiciary and the corporate world are dominated by the privately educated and Oxbridge graduates, while 91% of the general population go to state schools.

The Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, published in 2010 by the last Labour government, found that inequalities among individuals from the same social group (for example gender or ethnicity) were much greater than differences between the social groups. “Even if all differences between groups were removed, overall inequalities would remain wide,” it concluded.

For this reason, the push to increase gender inequality at the summit of major social institutions, though necessary and valuable for other reasons, will not dent overall inequality which is now huge and getting more extreme. An overwhelming concentration on gender will not make class disappear. This is something Sylvia Pankhurst understood very well. It is why there are statues of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst opposite the Houses of Parliament but not of her.