What is the Working Class anyway?To: oi@QueerNet.ORG Date: Sat, 06 Jun 1998 David wrote: :What do folx mean by 'working-class'? Having parents did :physical labour for a living? Being a labourer yourself? Does unemployed :count? Does disabled count? Are University students working-class? Unfortunately people tend to use the term in lots of different ways. Sometimes people use it to classify certain individuals by their jobs or income bracket (like demographers and market researchers with their A, B, C1, C2 and so on). Sometimes people use it to talk about cultural things like attitudes and customs. Personally, being an old-fashioned lefty, I'd say the most basic definition is an economic one: working class people who own no significant capital of their own and have to go work for someone else in order to earn their means of subsistence. This not only includes manual labourers but also most office workers and lots more besides, but it excludes the sort of people who can live off their own capital, extracting their profit by putting others to work. There are borderline cases, like small-scale self-employed people and well-paid professionals, but despite this and despite all the talk of the 'classless' society I think this basic division in society is still (sadly, imo) in place. The classic image of the working class was based on workers in large-scale industry, since at one time these accounted for the bulk of the working class in the industrialised world. These workers tended to live in high concentrations in certain urban areas, with large numbers working for the same employer, so they shared many of the same experiences and problems. Not surprisingly, this situation supported the growth of strongly coherent cultures, attitudes and institutions in particular places. One of the things it encouraged was that people became *conscious* of being working class, and of having common interests which conflicted with the interests of their employers. The skinhead cult originally grew up in just such a culture, though at the time it was already in a state of decline as the industrial economy of urban Britain slowly but surely collapsed, taking the traditional communities with it. Nevertheless it seems clear most skinheads consciously identified with their class, and opposed themselves actively to middle-class values. Skin gear at its most basic is a modification of manual work wear: heavy boots, jeans, and, at the very beginning, collarless 'granddad' shirts that harked back to pre-war working clothes. Today, talk of being working class seems like an anachronism, a throwback to a bygone age, even in a country that until recently had a reputation for being class-obsessed like Britain. The old working class communities of the Western world are largely vanished, victims of economic decline and the decimation of heavy industry and other forms of intensive employment; at the same time, wider political and ideological shifts have all but obliterated the notion of class consciousness, and the sense that things can be changed for the better by acting collectively with those who share a common interest. Nonetheless the economic division persists, even though most people on the sharp end of it have been fooled into not recognising it. Once again I should say I recognise that things happened differently in the United States. In fact in the 1920s and 30s the US had one of the most militant and organised working class populations in the world. A number of factors acted to change: economic depression, harassment and repression from both employers and state, war, and, in the post-war period, being bought off with the economic prosperity that resulted from the country achieving global hegemony. The situation is also complicated by the racial divisions which are even more entrenched than they are in Britain. Nonetheless the same basic economic divisions persist in the US as they do in the rest of the world, and among all that prosperity there are some desperately poor people. Sorry if this seems an off-topic digression: it's a complex subject but I do think it has some relevance. I think the self-consciously working class origin of skinheads is one of the things that has ensured the persistence of the cult. I think it's also behind the tensions around masculinity experienced by gay skins, since the gay scene and traditional gay identities are largely middle-class: in the past this has caused problems for working class gay men who feel themselves under pressure to adopt middle class values in order to express their sexuality, not to mention the hotbed of issues around the association between working class men and masculinity. And finally I think the collapse of the old social and economic base from which skinheads arose is the main factor behind the current identity crisis felt by many people, gay and straight, who still want to identify with the cult. Des |