Class and nation in the age of populism: The forward march of labour restarted?

Soundings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (75) ◽  
pp. 124-143
Author(s):  
Alvaro de Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Current System ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Service Workers ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Systemic Crisis ◽  
Jeremy Corbyn

To portray populism purely as a threat to democracy is to fail to recognise that it expresses widespread feelings of discontent with the current system, which is in systemic crisis. This has expressed itself through both anti-foreigner (nationalist) and anti-elites (class) sentiment. The left needs to focus on a class-based strategy, and to organise in particular among the new working class, which is ethnically diverse and composed mostly of well-educated service workers in London and the large cities. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn sought to mobilise these constituencies, as well as their more traditional constituencies, along class lines. Though they did not succeed electorally, in the longer run, the fact that the new working class is predominantly young and increasingly attracted by an alternative and socialist vision of economy and society may be a cause for some optimism.

scholarly journals The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Edin ◽  
Timothy Nelson ◽  
Andrew Cherlin ◽  
Robert Francis
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Ethnic Difference ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
White Men ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Work Family ◽  
Diverse Groups

In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class men with a high school diploma but no four-year college degree. Between 2000 and 2013, we deployed heterogeneous sampling techniques in the black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We screened to ensure that each respondent had at least one minor child, making sure to include a subset potentially subject to a child support order (because they were not married to, or living with, their child's mother). We interviewed roughly even numbers of black and white men in each site for a total of 107 respondents. Our approach allows us to explore complex questions in a rich and granular way that allows unanticipated results to emerge. These working-class men showed both a detachment from institutions and an engagement with more autonomous forms of work, childrearing, and spirituality, often with an emphasis on generativity, by which we mean a desire to guide and nurture the next generation. We also discuss the extent to which this autonomous and generative self is also a haphazard self, which may be aligned with counterproductive behaviors. And we look at racial and ethnic difference in perceptions of social standing.

Trumpism, Policing, and the Problem of Surplus Population

2020 ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Cedric Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Current System ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Corporate Elite ◽  
Blue Line ◽  
Surplus Population

This chapter tackles the issues of mass incarceration and aggressive policing, and their impact on low-income communities and people of color. It places Trump's defense of police and denigration of Black Lives Matter into historical context. The chapter connects the rise of the carceral state with an ideology that pathologizes poverty, blames working-class and unemployed people for their failure to get rich, and defines an urban “underclass” as the problem. In this context, the chapter analyzes Trump's reverence for police as the “thin blue line” that separates civilization from chaos. Focusing its attention on the intersection between class and race, the chapter unpacks the logic that has motivated a long-standing effort to shift power and resources away from the working class and toward the corporate elite. It argues that liberal antiracist arguments misunderstand the class relations that underlie the current system of policing. The chapter concludes that labor groups have a crucial role to play in fighting police abuse and mass incarceration.

Clandestine Prostitutes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy M. Wingfield
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Relative Ease ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Paid Employment ◽  
The Social ◽  
As If

Clandestine prostitutes, who constituted the greatest number of prostitutes in large cities, were also part of the social fabric in less urban areas, where they sometimes caused insufficient nuisance to warrant sustained police attention. The term “clandestine,” which Austrian vice police, reformers, and other commentators used as if it were self-evident, was broadly employed. In addition to women who regularly walked the streets, the term encompassed women who occasionally or temporarily engaged in commercial sex to augment their low-paid employment, did not necessarily consider themselves prostitutes, and did not want to attract police attention. They were part of a wider working-class community, into which they disappeared when not engaged in clandestine prostitution. The relative ease with which these women could move in and out of social identities helps explain why few of them were willing to register with vice police and be stigmatized as a prostitutes.

Building the 'Boris' bloc: angry politics in turbulent times

Soundings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (74) ◽  
pp. 118-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Time Scales ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Jeremy Corbyn

The 2019 Conservative election victory has been attributed to different causes: Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn or Labour's loss of the working class. Instead, this article suggests the need to attend to multiple causes, working across widely differing time scales that came together to make this moment. These include the long trajectory of deindustrialisation and financialisation, the British troubles with post-colonialism, and the historical context of the complexities of class in the UK. These underpinned a series of public moods - anger, loss, frustration and popular fiscal realism - that became fertile ground for Conservative politics. Thinking about these multiple forces and their different temporalities enables us to see the election as part of a wider conjuncture (in temporal and spatial terms). Such a view might also allow us to think about the contingent political bloc assembled around 'Brexit and Boris' and to see its potential lines of fracture and failure.

4. Alienation and reification

2017 ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
Stephen Eric Bronner
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Current System ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Human Control ◽  
Marxist Concept ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
New Framework

‘Alienation and reification’ explores the concepts of alienation and reification in Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and how this affected 20th century Western Marxism. Alienation is not a uniquely Marxist concept, but Marx defined it as an inability to grasp the workings of history and subject them to human control. In the capitalist system, alienation occurs through the lack of working class consciousness, and their transformation from people into objects—their reification. The Frankfurt School saw alienation and reification as philosophical and experiential problems, but believed that trying to remedy them in the current system was pointless, and a new framework was needed to cultivate autonomy.

The politics of Generation Grime

Race & Class ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Perera
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Jeremy Corbyn

In the 2017 UK general election, Grime artists (musicians representing the experience of a young black dispossessed city working class) came out in support of the Labour Party’s radical leader Jeremy Corbyn. The author, drawing on in-depth interviews with Grime experts and leftwing activists and an examination of social media, explains that endorsement in terms of the concept of ‘embedded ethics’ which allows Grime artists to present themselves as authentic social commentators on intersecting forms of poverty, state racism and social exclusion. Using the work of cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, she argues that Grime is more than a music genre and more a way of life giving cultural meaning – explaining the mobilisations for both the election and, later, over the Grenfell fire. But the piece asks whether, at a time of blatant neoliberalism and harsh austerity, there is a need now to insert a more direct discussion of class into the cultural theory debate.

scholarly journals The other side of coastal towns: Young men’s precarious lives on the margins of England

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 916-932 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda McDowell ◽  
Carl Bonner-Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Media ◽  
White Working Class

English coastal resorts are among the most deprived towns in the country, with levels of economic and social deprivation often exceeding those of the inner areas of large cities and former industrial settlements. Their dominant image in the media and other forms of representation, however, is of places of innocent fun and leisure, often associated with their history as holiday destinations for working-class families, although the darker side of these towns is not completely ignored. The lives of white working-class, year-round residents in these towns, however, seldom feature in representations or in policy and academic research. Here, we focus on the everyday lives of one group: young white working-class men whose employment opportunities have been adversely affected by economic decline, austerity and rising inequality. In places where employment is largely restricted to customer-facing jobs in the holiday trade, the dominant construction of youthful masculinity and the associated rhetorical view of these men as troublesome not only excludes them from the labour market but exacerbates their marginality. Through interviews in four English resorts, we explore the causes and consequences of their precarity.

Class Shaming in Post-Recession U.S. Advertising

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew P. McAllister ◽  
Anna Aupperle
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Service Workers

Class is an issue rarely foregrounded in advertising criticism, although the emphasis on consumption and commodity-defined images of the good life frequently makes advertising a class-oriented discourse. The degree and manner that advertising contains overt symbols and discussions of class may be influenced by the particular era in which a campaign appears. This article argues that several “postrecession” U.S. campaigns including for Buick, Allstate, and DirecTV make class comparisons explicit, as seen in “class shaming” strategies such as a ridicule of service workers, presenting the wealthy as victimized by the working class, and “lower-classface” performances that contrast class-based lifestyles. In such ads, representations of the working class are equated with losers, incompetents, and non-brand users in the ads, while affluent users and opulent lifestyles are celebrated. Final reflections focus on the ideological implications of more obvious depictions of class in current and future advertising.

Residents’ perspectives on defining neighbourhood: mental mapping as a tool for participatory neighbourhood research

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 735-752 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gemma Catney ◽  
Diane Frost ◽  
Leona Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Common Part ◽  
Strong Potential ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mental Mapping ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Mapping Exercise

Definitions of neighbourhood in the Social Sciences are complex, varying in their characteristics (for example, perceived boundaries and content) and between residents of that neighbourhood (for example, by class and ethnicity). This study employs an under-utilised methodology offering strong potential for overcoming some of the difficulties associated with neighbourhood definitions. A mental mapping exercise involving local residents is showcased for an ethnically diverse working-class neighbourhood in south Liverpool. The results demonstrate distinctions between residents in the geographical demarcation of the area and the features included, with important implications for how neighbourhood is best measured and understood. We suggest that one size does not fit all in definitions of neighbourhood, and that mental mapping should form a more common part of a neighbourhood researcher’s toolkit.

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