Does class still count? (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the years following the second world war it was widely said that “the old class barriers'’ were being broken down. England, characterised as the most class-ridden country in the world, had at last given up its forelock-touching, its obsession with accents, its one-law-for-the-rich-and-one-for-the-poor, thank you kindly ma’am, and the rest. Marghanita Laski’s novel The Village, published in 1951, showed the breakdown of tradition-based assumptions of social superiority in a small community: gentility and “background” gagging on the discovery of their small weight in the modern world. The class assumptions were those of pre-war Punch and West-End stage jokes, in which low incomes meant male illiteracy and female idiocy, and a servile manner was de rigueur from both.

In those terms, it was commonplace also that relatively few people admitted to being working-class. The usual term was “lower middle class”. What strata lay above this mass has always been indistinct—whether there existed a central middle class to which this was the aspiring lower fringe and another the cake-icing, as it were, or whether the middle class was a two-layer affair of uppers and lowers only. But whatever the boundaries, the array of qualifications was formidable: the school one went to, one’s dress and speech, family connections, tastes and, of course, income. And these things, we were told, were fast losing their significance in the nineteen-fifties. Social progress and humane legislation had equalised us all, making Jack as good as his master and privilege an archaism.

Superior & Inferior

Talking of “class” like that does not mean class at all. What is meant is social groupings imbued with the idea of places in a hierarchy. Viewed from the top, they are simply a question of degrees of extravagance. Veblin in his Theory of the Leisure Class dwelt on fox-hunting as the acme of “conspicuous wasteful consumption”, an incredibly expensive and incompetent—but ostentatious—way of doing what a chicken-farmer achieves better with a shotgun: and the ability to afford it makes its own social demarcation. The same applies to the public schooling and the domestic splendour, down to the details of personal appearance and manner. Nobody who has read Daphne Du Maurier’s snob-romance Rebecca is likely to forget the description of the cad: the kind of man who did not wear a hat and who would appeal only to “girls who gave one programmes in a cinema”.

From below, the groupings are stages in presumed rising-above the familiar deprivations and humiliations of working-class life. The person who has escaped from run-down housing to a suburb with trees, become a car-owner and seen his children “doing well”, is strongly persuaded to think of it as superiority. Those left behind in seedy surroundings and dismal jobs, condemned to having their noses rubbed in the worst of capitalism’s dirt, are all in a boat he has got out of: and what he now has, he’ll hold. On the other side there are people with more advantages — better houses, bigger cars, ampler displays of status — who look down on him. Called “class distinction”, these are the views from different rungs of the ladder.

Welfare Culture

What was implied, then, in the claim to break down class barriers was the ending of inequalities between social groups. The biggest factor ironing-out the differences was held to be the Welfare State. Not only need no-one be thrown into destitution by sickness or unemployment; medical attention was available to all according to need, and such stigmas as the pauper funeral were abolished. The extension of the school-leaving age and the accessibility of grants for further education were parts of the same process. “Equality of opportunity” was the watchword.

But besides these legislative steamrollers, equality was claimed to be spreading through society from the sheer diffusion of commodities. In money terms the television set in working-class homes was less of a luxury than what it replaced, the family piano; but in cultural terms, the same programmes went into the houses of rich and poor alike. Newspapers, car travel, labour-saving domestic appliances were all seen as having the same equalising tendency. Even holidays abroad, once the exclusive prerogative of the very well-to-do, were now available to working people. “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” had vanished as social symbols. Instead, both were believed to be seated in front of television sets, reading the same continental holiday brochures through National Health spectacles.

New Labels

If any of this had been true, a silent social revolution should have taken place in the past twenty years. What has happened? In fact, the crude semi-feudal tokens of privilege whose disappearance was being celebrated have been replaced by a complex of social groupings and distinctions. “Class” is as pervasive as ever.

The redevelopment of towns has, if anything, intensified their stratification. Any large city is, socially, a series of islands on which people live among their acknowledged kinds — white-collars, labouring population, art-and-craft, high prosperity, etc.: the next island may be only up the road, but it is a foreign land whose children may not play with one’s own. The growth of council-house estates and owner-occupation, to say nothing of immigrant districts, has multiplied the islands. Likewise in rural areas the two layers of village life, gentry and farmworkers, have given way to the varied social self-valuations of commuters, directors and retired shopkeepers. It is commonly complained in the country that these new populations from town ‘‘don’t mix”; that is, they bring with them their own social-group palisades.

The idea of amenities as an equalitarian force is part of the old Fabian nonsense. In the early nineteen- twenties H. G. Wells informed Lenin and Trotsky that electric power would achieve more than the class struggle (“What a little bourgeois”, Lenin is supposed to have said afterwards). However, the divisive effects of piped and purchased amenities have grown as fast as they have spread. Every car carries its social label, the make and age connoting the owner’s income and status. The Fabians’ picture of ‘‘gas-and-water socialism” did not include House and Garden showing impossibly opulent kitchens and the Florentine statuary in Sir Wiliam’s loo. As for holidays abroad, "package” has become almost a contemptuous term implying bone-pared schedules of cheap hotels and sweaty droves pressed between famous buildings and souvenir shops. If a modern Robin Hood took that from the rich to give to the poor, he died laughing.

Dole, School, Colour

The Welfare State has, notoriously, gone sour on those who idealised it —not least in its promise to dissolve have-and-have-not differences. In general, what is provided by the State is the barest and most minimal; better has to be paid for, by those who can. The inevitable outcome has been the growth of private insurance schemes catering for the sizeable section who can’t quite afford to be cash patients but may, on an actuarial basis, keep their feet out of the water in which the poorest swim. In the everyday administration of “welfare”, the rise of the Claimants’ Unions owes directly to social-group attitudes to the Social Security system. So far from seeing themselves as part of the will of the community, officials have taken their task as a defensive action against undeserving layabouts and would-be tricksters. Indeed, the Welfare State has produced a saloon-bar mythology nearly as profuse as that of race. Its favourite character, heard-of everywhere, is the man who chooses unemployment because it pays him better: no-one seems to ask what appalling wage he gets in work, then.

The hope of educational equality has gone the same way. The replacement of selective separate schools by comprehensive ones was hailed as a great levelling movement: few people can have noticed that comprehensive education was called “true selection” in the 1958 Labour Party document on the subject. Apart from the grading principle on which comprehensive education is based, the schools themselves have quickly acquired their own status to be sought-after or not: the case of Holland Park as the “superior” comp is now being reproduced again and again. Nor does the admission of working-class boys and girls to universities go far to diminish the differences. Last month E. R. Braithwaite, the black West Indian writer, described on television his days at an English university where all students were equal before the subject at study — and his discovery later that this did not make them equal before the world.

Race has been one other field round which social groups have formed themselves. It is curious how the issue is always made that of colour when it is patently class. Anyone who doubts that should try fitting everything now said about coloured immigrants over what used to be said about the so-called lumpenproletariat — the poorest, most deprived sections of the working class — any time up to 1939. The fit is exact. Of inferior intelligence; lazy (of course); dirty; and disposed to violent crime. Moreover, they have huge families (living like animals), have rowdy parties every night, eat smelly food, and would ruin a decent neighbourhood if they were allowed in it. Enoch Powell might be interested to know that his story of excrement pushed through the letter-box was first heard by the writer from an industrial housing estate, all white, over twenty years ago.

Class and Capitalism

What is class, then, that will not be eradicated? The numerous groupings and divisions which persist and re-form continually in our society are, as has been said, not classes though they call themselves so. Classes are categories deriving from the basic organisation of society. If one looks at capitalism for its organic structure, there are two classes only: those who live by owning the means of production and distribution, and those who don’t. The position of the former is obvious enough. For the latter, the position would be also easy to see if it were not obscured — for many — by semantics and humbug. It is one of dependence on being employed and paid a wage. Regardless of accent, colour, education and high or low income, nine-tenths of the population everywhere are in this situation.

The supposed other classes are not sub-sections within that division. They are reflections of it, demonstrations of the way capitalism sets man against man. The fact that people are always hoping to get rid of these “class barriers”, and short-lived successes in doing so are claimed, shows their fluidity while the single great division remains. They are fluid because no-one is secure who depends on a wage. Last year publicity was given to the troubles of out-of-work executives. One, in a television programme, spoke angrily of the treatment at the Social Security office: if the clerk had not been a woman, he said, he would have smashed her face in. On the scrap-heap, the pretences of class are exchanged for the realities.

What is Classless Society?

One thing which is clear about “class” is that nobody likes it. Many people take it to be inevitable, but live in hopes of some lucky break which will take them to another rung of the ladder where, it is thought, things would be different. Everyone talks of “getting out of the rat race”.

When the phrase “classless society” is used, it usually means the absence of unfairness and inequality among social groups. What must be seen is that these problems derive from and exist because of capitalism’s division into owners and non-owners. The classless society is one in which the means of living have become common property. Given that, the basis for any assumption of social superiority from race, sex or possessions disappears. The first step to making such a society, however, is for all those dependent on wages to recognise this as the only true factor of their class position now. "Class-consciousness” is commonly a term for snobbery. Correctly, it means understanding of the fact that everyone who has to work is — working-class.

Robert Barltrop