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

Between the Lines: Parsons, Baker & Quayle (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Culture and Chips

"The trouble with the working class today is that they're such peasants."

So began Tony Parsons's thirty-minute moan about lager louts, football stadiums and dogs called Tyson. (The Tattooed Jungle, C4, Monday, 5 October, 9.30pm). The same night, before watching this poor man's Matthew Arnold vent his frustration against the karaoke culture which he lacked the intelligence to connect with the cash-and-flog-it standards of capitalism, I watched Noel Edmonds present that hateful half-hour of working class self-abasement, Telly Addicts (BBC1, 7pm).

In this quiz for couch potatoes, families with scholarships in TV drivel compete to prove who can remember the most inanities, banalities and famous names. It is knowledge diluted to the purest spectacle: you don't need to have been anywhere or read anything to win Telly Addicts, but you need to have a fine-tuned memory for what imaginary one-dimensional TV stars have done, said or hummed as their theme tunes. The proles as peasants? A case could be made.

Tony Parsons makes the case very poorly. Parsons is the essential Essex Man. He romanticizes "the good old working class" who loved Churchill, went in for (k)nobbly knees contests in holiday camps and passed away the time scrubbing doorsteps and working diligently. Parsons bemoans the rise of the lager-lout patriots and the boneheads with tattoos who never read books. He is too stupid to realize that nationalism thrives upon the irrational callousness which he deplores; the two go together. And perhaps the lack of book reading is a result of half the libraries being shut and schools having only one book between five pupils.

In fact, in Britain today far more workers visit museums every year than go to football matches - and the vast majority of football spectators are neither drunk nor violent. Modern Britain is not filled with workers who never read: despite the overwhelming financial advantage of the film and video industry, it is still the case that millions of workers regularly read books, journals and newspapers which are not tabloids; only a minority of wage slaves read the Sun and get off on Rambo movies.  

Could it just be possible that, like the vicars whose bleak view of human life is derived from the nasty circles they mix in, Parsons's conception of the proletarian peasant is derived from spending too much time staring angrily into the mirror and seeing what Basildon has done to him? Like a black lackey supporting slavery, Parsons the Conservative called in Auberon Waugh (the voice of the modern slave owners) to add his sneers to Parsons's vitriol.

Waugh hates the working class for not knowing their place. Our place, in case anyone wants to know, is trembling in fear at the innate superiority of the inherited privilege of Waugh and his indolent, mind-stunted class of legalized thieves, but at least Waugh's hatred is against a class which is a real potential threat to him. (Stated plainly, a socialist majority will have no time to entertain the snobbery of old Auberon - we shall undoubtedly declare war on Waugh).

Tony Parsons's nostalgia for 1950s' conservatism is not only without taste or sense, but is the moronic cry of a slave for his chains to be tightened. And when he stated of workers that "If you treat them like animals they act like animals, if you treat them like humans they still act like animals" what is that but an inelegant chant of the stale old human nature myth? Danny Baker, who earns a fortune pretending to be a good old cockney lad, explained violence on the football terraces as coming from the same source that causes wars; healthy young hetero males like a good old punch-up, don't they John? Tony Parsons has reason to feel anguish, for when he looks to the future the prospect of a TV peasantry with Danny Boy Baker as the Pearly King and himself as the proley court jester-cum-philosopher is a nightmare worse than being in an Indian restaurant in Basildon on a Friday night after closing time.

THE POLITICIAN WHO WAS DEFEATED BY A FICTITIOUS CHARACTER

By the time that you read this you will know whether Dan Quayle has been re-elected as American Vice-President, White House dope and speller-in-chief of very short words. If he is defeated it will have no small relationship to the attack made on him on the networked US sit-com, Murphy Brown. To be precise, the first attack was made by Quayle when he made a speech appealing to the Christian loonies calling for imaginary TV characters to act more responsibly and set the nation a better moral example. The example he gave was Murphy Brown who decided to go ahead with a pregnancy even though she was not married. Quayle's attack backfired when the show's makers broadcast an episode in which the fictitious character, watched on TV the Quayle speech attacking her conduct and them proceeded to tear to pieces his moral self-righteousness.

The episode of the show drew the biggest audience on US TV since the episode of Dallas in which J.R. was shot. So now elections are won and lost in America by TV-style politicians debating with non-existent TV characters - and the invisible debaters win! All they need  to do now is to have a fictitious TV audience (paid extras to fill a vast Oprah Winfrey studio, perhaps?) and the whole election could be run on TV without real life having to intervene at all.

Steve Coleman