Straight to the point

Imagine a Conservative Party intent on moving to the political centre but anxious about alienating its Right-wing by doing so. One way of resolving this problem would be to appoint as its deputy leader a wine merchant who owned a slice of Aberdeenshire, wore the finest tweeds in Westminster and spoke up for traditional values at every turn. Admired for his patrician manner, flamboyant waistcoats and fondness for the Elizabethan lute, he would be a living symbol of the fact that the party had retained its roots in tradition at the very moment it was busy scrapping much of what it once stood for.

The Labour equivalent of such a figure was John Prescott, a man who supported the illegal invasion of Iraq and the shackling of the trade unions, but who did so in a Yorkshire accent which proclaimed him a man of the people. He drove a Jaguar and was touchy about his status, but who cared when he could down a pint of bitter in one go? The British love a lord, but they love a character even more, and Prescott was nothing if not that. Forthright, bellicose and bloody-minded, he catered for the British admiration for those who refuse to be anything but themselves.

English individualism is very different from the American variety. Individualism in the United States is a strenuous, muscular affair, a matter of conquest and dominion, of expanding one’s powers and flexing the will. In England, it’s a more a matter of lovable eccentricity, of doing what you like in quiet defiance of social convention. Individualists in English culture don’t blazon their name on high-risers but stand in pubs with a parrot on their shoulder (I used to know an Oxford don who did just that). They run the London Marathon dressed as washing machines or share their bed with a chimpanzee. If we feel affection for these oddballs, it’s because they vicariously fulfil our own desire to flout social convention while being too timid to do so. It was why so many voters warmed to Boris Johnson, another political jester. It’s also one of the reasons why we like toddlers, who are incapable of doing the conventional thing and are just ruthlessly, spontaneously themselves. The modern mantra “I like to be myself” is appealing because in a world of images and fantasises, so many people feel that they can’t be, or that they don’t have a definite enough identity to express. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein liked to be himself as well. Being themselves is some people’s problem.

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If the political establishment indulges such idiosyncratic figures, greeting their antics with a patronising smile, it’s not least because it knows they are basically harmless. The jester may beat the monarch around the head with a bladder of dried peas, but that’s what he’s paid to do. As Shakespeare puts it in Twelfth Night, there’s no harm in a licensed Fool. Prescott’s role was to give Tony Blair political cover. While Blair and his cronies invited the rich to get even richer, the bruiser from Hull was at hand with his blustering, no-nonsense, syntactically chaotic style to make such policies sound as authentically socialist as Keir Hardie. It was as though a creature from a working-class that was rapidly becoming extinct had somehow managed to survive into the modern age, like a wolf boy discovered deep in the forest.

Prescott was so much a one-off, as a solitary plebeian character among a bunch of suave public schoolboys, that (ironically enough) he lent credence to the middle-class liberal myth that the working-class has all but disappeared. Not only the working class, in fact, but social class as such. The dressed-down mateyness of the modern office, where you call the boss Pettikins or Lover Boy, is part of a decentralised, network-based, team-oriented, information-rich, open-neck-shirted capitalism very far from the old social hierarchies and exclusions. Leftists, however, aren’t particularly concerned with whether the CEO wears sneakers to work. They are more struck by the fact that (as The Communist Manifesto predicted) capital today is concentrated in fewer hands than ever before, while globally speaking the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed continue to swell. Class is about property and power, not about whether you pronounce “basin” to rhyme with “bison”. Far from being an outdated notion peddled by a diehard far-Left, it is the dreary reality of everyday life for most citizens of the world. The fact that Etonians learn how to slur their speech, or that the European aristocracy are honoured to hobnob with Mick Jagger, has signally failed to usher in the classless society.

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On a global scale, nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that class no longer matters. Most of the mega-cities of the south of the planet are stinking slums rife with disease and overcrowding — slum-dwellers represent one third of the global urban population. The urban poor more generally constitutes at least half of the world’s population. Alongside the garment makers and casual labourers there are hawkers, hustlers, sex workers, food and drink sellers and rickshaw pullers, which is to say an immense layer of unemployed or sporadically employed workers. Taken together, they from the fastest growing social group on the planet. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce.

The original proletariat wasn’t the blue-collar, male, working-class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” is derived from the Latin word for producing offspring, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state except by producing potential labourers from their wombs. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their bodies. Today, in an era of Third World sweatshops and agricultural labour, the typical proletarian is still a woman. White-collar work, which in Victorian times was performed mostly by lower-middle-class men, is nowadays largely the reserve of working-class women, and it was also women who staffed the huge expansion in shop and clerical work which followed the decline of heavy industry after the First World War.

The concept of social class is linked above all to the name of Karl Marx, who writes of the industrial manual workers he calls the proletariat. Yet as a citizen of Victorian England, Marx was well aware that such workers didn’t constitute the majority of the working-class. By far the largest group of wage labourers in his time were domestic servants, most of whom were women. Even when Britain was famed as the workshop of the world, manufacturing workers were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. So the working class is a much broader category than men who wield hammers or operate machines. What has declined on a global scale is industrial employment. But that doesn’t mean that the working class has disappeared along with it. The middle-class liberals will have to think again.

Today, there is a white-collar working-class as well as an industrial one, which includes a great many technical, clerical and administrative workers. Marx himself noted this expansion in his own age, remarking on how industrial capital was constantly drawing more technical and scientific labour into its orbit. When he writes of “general social knowledge becoming a direct productive force”, he anticipates what some would now call the information society. There’s also been an immense growth in the service, information and communications sectors of the economy. None of this, however, has changed the nature of capitalist property relations. It’s also worth recalling that work in the service sector can be just as heavy, dirty and disagreeable as traditional industrial labour. The legendary shift from the industrial to the post-industrial, or from production to consumption, means, among other things, that those who are exploited now work in call centres rather than coal mines. Labels like “service” or “white-collar” serve to obscure the massive differences between, say, airline pilots and hospital porters, or senior civil servants and hotel chambermaids.

In one sense, the working-class is spreading rather than shrinking. As the philosopher John Gray puts it, “The middle classes are rediscovering the condition of assetless economic insecurity that afflicted the 19th century proletariat.” Many of those who used to be labelled lower-middle-class — teachers, social workers, journalists, technicians, middling clerical and administrative officials — have been subject to a relentless process of proletarianisation, stripped of control of their own working conditions and plagued by financial insecurity. The working-class proper then, can be taken to include both manual labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workers. And this constitutes a massive proportion of the world population, estimated by some economists to be around 2 or 3 billion men and women, the working-class seems to have disappeared rather les successfully than Lord Lucan.

From Peterloo to the Eighties miners strike, the treatment of organised labour in Britain has been for the most part a shameful story. Killed, gagged, deported or imprisoned, vilified by the media and denounced as power-hungry demagogues, the leaders of the labour movement have paid dearly over the centuries for their efforts to win decent wages and working conditions. From time to time, some among their ranks have been incorporated by the political establishment so that they may use their inside knowledge of working people to persuade them to back off from such inconvenient demands. When that fails, one can always send in the police horses. John Prescott has been much praised since his death as a bridge and mediator, a canny power-broker and negotiator, all of which is a polite way of saying that he maintained the style of a working-class militant with absolutely none of the substance.

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