Bottom of the Class (1996)

Spot the typo.

TV Review from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

BBC2 has been running a three-part series presented by that “thinking Essex Man" Tony Parsons, called Parsons On Class, in which he explored the supposedly "changing" class structure in Britain. A writer who made his name on the New Musical Express during the hey-day of punk, Parsons claimed in the blurb given out for the programme that “What we found doing this series is that the class system is as real as it ever was. It embarrasses people because it is a reminder of a Britain they think doesn’t exist anymore. But John Major got it completely wrong—we'll never have a classless society.

So spoke the soothsayer, and he had more to say besides. In the first programme Parsons fell head-over-heels in love the British aristocracy, as exemplified by the Gordon-Duff-Penningtons of Cumbria, living in a grand stately home they cannot afford to keep.

Parsons generally had a lot to say, and were informed in general that the aristocracy have had much to give society over the years, although we were never informed about this in the particular. Have they built magnificent houses, made miraculous inventions or kept society ticking along in any other ways? Certainly not, though one thing that was clear from Parsons’s programme was that they have known how to enjoy luxury to the full, and in this sense set an example to us all.

The underlying subtext to the programme was that the aristocracy are on the way out, being replaced by the rising “middle class", the class that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Parsons opined that at least five families of the landed gentry disappear from the rolls every year. This is indeed the case. But where, we are entitled to ask, has he been living? Is this really all a new phenomenon—another product of Thatcherism and the enterprise culture? Of course not. Nearly one hundred and fifty years ago Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified this very same changing class character of society which was sweeping away the old landed gentry and installed the hegemony of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie:

  "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley, feudal lies that bound man to his 'natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'” (Communist Manifesto, 1848).

Large elements of the old "upper class”, more properly called the aristocracy, used their landed interests to secure a steady income for themselves as capitalists decades—and in some cases virtually centuries—ago. Those which haven’t, like the Gordon-Duff-Penningtons, are doomed to a life of social obscurity as relics from the past, merely hanging on until they are bought out by some rising capitalist with an eye on the glamour of a stately pile.

Middle of the Road

The “middle class" of semi-feudal society are now the owning class of capitalists, but this has just left the way open for people like Parsons to abuse its usage with gay abandon, equating middle income earners in capitalist society with a spurious new "middle class". Like the veritable sage on such matters that he is, Parsons commented that "A lot of people think of themselves as working class when they're not anymore. It’s a sentimental affectation . . ." The type of people he evidently had in mind when making this comment are those who work in an office, pay a mortgage, own a car and so on—and these are people, sure enough, who are neither at the top nor bottom of the income brackets. What they certainly do not constitute, however, is a specific social class properly speaking, the determinant of which is relationship to the means of living. Indeed. precisely why so many of Parsons’s “middle class" feel working class is because they know that their existence depends on selling their mental and physical energies on the market for a wage or salary, just like most of the population. They have to work in order to survive unlike the old aristocrats so beloved of Parsons or the modern capitalists who can survive without offering themselves for hire.

In many respects the very title Parsons On Class is a misnomer. As the final two programmes demonstrated, his brief was to examine social status, income differentials and lifestyles as much as class and in this the series was a back-up to style guru Peter York’s recent BBC2 programmes about the 1980s, Sloane Rangers, Yuppies and Mayfair Mercs.

One particular aside from the series stood out to exemplify the whole thing. Even though class society is here to stay in the Parsons world-view, he memorably claimed that "the class war is almost dead", subsumed by the victory of "middle-class" culture. But this is wishful thinking indeed for a man who apparently wishes to mask the class realities of capitalist society in endless discussion of lifestyles and cultural variation and whose prime example of real social mobility is a trend—involving a tiny percentage of the population— which started centuries ago. Parsons should take heed—the working class of wage and salary earners, the world over, is more numerous than ever—and we still have to a world to win. Sooner or later win it we shall with, or preferably without, his confused social commentary.

Dave Perrin