Konvolut a: social movement

Class (again)

In a Guardian piece in January, LSE researcher Sam Friedman noted the findings of his recent report on “intergenerational” self-perceptions of class:

Britain certainly has an unusual attachment to working-class identities. While in most western countries people tend to identify as middle class, Britain has long been an intriguing outlier. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, 47% of Britons in middle-class professional and managerial jobs identify as working class. Even more curiously, a quarter of people in such jobs who come from middle-class backgrounds– in the sense that their parents did professional work – also identify as working class. […]

Take Ella, an actor who was conscious that her claim to a working-class identity might be undermined by her middle-class accent (“I consider my background to be a working-class one even though I don’t sound like that”). She also tried to play down her private schooling (“one of the small ones, quite cheap”). Or Mike, a partner in an accountancy firm who gave a long family history when asked about his background, focusing less on his father’s career as an architect (“he was a technician made good, really”) and more on his grandmother, who had worked in a mill as a child.

Friedman describes these “misidentifications” as “having a performative dimension”, one structured by the codes and rules of meritocracy. Privilege (in its sense in recent social theory) is owned and disowned in one movement: yes, I have these advantages or distinctions that I may not even be aware of even as they form the parameters of my life, but they aren’t really “mine”; they were bought by the “hard work” or talent of myself or more recent ancestors. Privilege is only privilege if, in Peggy McIntosh’s telling word, “unearned”. But what is it really to “earn” social mobility now? What place does class, apparently as something only to be overcome, occupy in the social imaginary of the middle classes?

The piece occasioned, as these things are solely designed to do now, quite a bit of social media chatter. The experience of class privilege in Britain, some leftist posters noted, is one of relentless dishonesty and barely forgotten false consciousness: if getting ahead in the professions requires endless lies it’s only natural people would fib about one more thing. Having stolen everything else from the working class, others pointed out, it’s unsurprising—if insulting—that they would thieve their experiences of hardship too. All indisputable, of course. And yet none of these observations quite caught at the wider and more difficult dynamic at work in these more-than-partial falsehoods. That dynamic makes class formation—the modern sense of class as irreducible differentiation and distinction, seen most clearly in the famous “two great classes directly facing each other” of the Communist Manifesto—the object, primarily, of a lot of problems and contradictions.

All of this inconclusive yammering made more sense when I recently read TJ Clark’s Image of the People, his 1973 study of the politics of Gustave Courbet’s paintings in the years around the 1848 revolution in France. The Parisian bourgeoisie, writes Clark, had often come from the French provinces, arriving at their social position by gradual steps, including enrichment from agriculture followed by a period spent in a subordinate position in the city (Courbet’s own father was a peasant made good who owned extensive interests in vineyards in the agricultural backwater of the Doubs). The bourgeois needed the peasant as an imaginary figure, but only to distinguish himself as bourgeois:

Men like this most likely disguised their origins. They were the bourgeois who, so the common story had it, greeted their peasant father and mother in a Paris street with consummate distaste. Other young dandies walked the boulevard with their mothers on their arm, wizened old ladies dressed in stiff peasant calico….

For such a bourgeois—whether he occasionally paraded his peasant origins or grimly concealed them—the nature of rural society crucial. It was part of his myth of himself: it was where he came from, and what he had rejected….

The rejection in fact was all but absolute: he had become a Parisian, and he staked everything on bourgeois status. Return to the land was an aristocratic practice. But in fantasy his rural past stayed with him: it told him what it meant to be a bourgeois; it was the equal and opposite term in his personal equation. It was everything that bourgeois existence was not.

In other words, even at the zenith of bourgeois civilisation, the bourgeoisie had no autonomous identity, developed without reference to other classes. A similar process seems to be at work in these contemporary “misidentifications”. Except that now, instead of fixing the working class in a place of rejection in their fantasies, the middle class incorporates them as their other and “authentic” self. Why should this be? The role of the class fractions excluded from the original bourgeois myth is suggestive here. As Clark puts it, the myth shores up “an unstable, precarious category of existence” by “enforcing distinctions and eliminating ambiguities”, including the mediating terms of the path of social mobility. Courbet’s paintings angered the critics at the 1850 Salon, Clark suggests, because they displayed, in all its incoherence, the existence of a rural bourgeoisie of which they had once been part, breaking the spell of rural society as “a unity, a one-class society in which peasant and master work in harmony… a world in social conflicts are magically resolved”. Likewise, the critics’ frothing invective latched on to the figure of the displaced peasant as their imagined audience for Courbet’s work—the migrant and precarious worker, uprooted from the land by that same rural bourgeois, unhabituated to city life, given to drink and socialist agitation; a “dangerous class” who would, in 20 years’ time, form the social basis of the Commune.

The processes of class recomposition since 1979 have seen the production of a whole variety of “dangerous classes”: the post-industrial poor for which the images of the “chav” and rudebwoy were coined; proletarianised students and white collar workers, who’ve seen what were apparently meant to be their industries and housing disappear; the new petite bourgeoisie that comprises the ranks of landlords, middle managers, small business tyrants, white van men and propertied retirees who, we were told, “went” Tory at the last general election. As Joe Kennedy—who has done some of the most vital analysis on this subject—has noted, the figures of the “hipster” and the petit-bourgeois (prototyped in Hyacinth Bucket of Keeping Up Appearances, the avatar of an “abject or zombie conservatism, something that has no place, but can’t recognise the fact of its own demise”) are crucial for what he calls centrist “authentocracy”: that viewpoint by which the grounding “real” of working class life or labour can only be accessed through its representation in a hermetically enclosed political and media class. What is rejected in the authentocratic myth is the dangerous classes, in the name of that object out of which they sprang in its fragmentation—a working class whole and entire, vitally “alive” and real. Such a subject-position—the working class subject who somehow remains working class despite earning more than £50k a year and having academic parents—is the only secure one available, after the liquidation of the old middle class of “organisation men”, civil servants and liberal professionals, but one secured only by a negative fantasy of the déclassé or the class impostor. As Clark says of the bourgeois and the peasant on the make, the distinction in the mind of the authentocrat between himself and the precariously employed Corbynist writer is “absolute”.

What makes this fantasy possible, even necessary, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, is indicated by Matt Karp’s recent Jacobin essay on ‘The Politics of a Second Gilded Age’. Karp sees the major US political parties undergoing a moment of “class dealignment” analogous to the era of the robber barons. The Democrats increasingly become the party of suburban professionals, college graduates employed and otherwise, managers and higher functionaries, while the Republicans pick up the lumpen, Latinos and increasingly large fractions of what remains of the blue collar vote. The insistence on party-political and institutional identity screws ever tighter, but completely detached from any connection to class interests, while low-paid workers increasingly drop out of the political process. As in the 1880s, despite nationwide unrest in the streets, “remarkably little of this mass frustration left a deep imprint on the electoral system.” But as much as a cooptation and mystification of an actually existing class interest, this dealignment—perfectly convenient for consultants and Wall Street donors—demonstrates how difficult it is to think “class”, to secure a class as an object or framework in the social imaginary, in the absence of any wider collective vehicle, movement or shared experience. “Class recomposition”, as much as anything else, is a name for the systematic destruction and sapping of what helped make “the working class” not just a self-conscious social grouping with a collective interest opposed to the owners of capital, but the class whose vocation was the abolition of class distinctions tout court. There certainly exists a “new working class”, as Gabriel Winant reminds us, a social majority with nothing other than their labour power to sell, who absolutely fit the bare and clean definition of class as “relation to the means of production”, and are marked, in uneven but unmistakable ways, by the classic experiences of class oppression. But whether they conceive of themselves as a class, not just through the phenomenology of painful tradition or the ratiocination of economics and sociology but in the collective exercise of power, is a different and deeply uncertain question. It may be years before such an opening and collective construction occurs; it may be decades; it may never happen. Until then, class as thought in the hall of mirrors of media authentocracy (and its “left wing” counterparts) will be just so many figments and images, waiting unknowing for the moment when no-one will have to “earn” anything anymore.