Class cultures

'We're all middle class now', declared Tony Blair - and even John Prescott claimed that he was 'pretty' middle class. And yet today's Guardian survey shows that the majority of us still consider ourselves to be working class. 53% of us claim to be proletarian, hardly any change from the 55% who said the same at the start of the New Labour decade. The further North you go, the more working class Britain becomes.

Moreover, class identity does not tend to map out easily onto sociologists' 'objective' definitions of class according to one's profession or relationship with the labour market - what Marx called 'class of itself' as opposed to class consciousness - 'class for itself'. So, a third of AB professionals claimed they were 'working class', while a third of DE's said they were middle class. Hardly anyone admits to being upper class - even 'Sloane rangers' these days prefer to say they are middle class.

So what is going on? Indeed, does it matter? Of course class identity is more than a function of the job you currently do - it may well reflect one's upbringing. So a City boy born of working class parents but earning multi-million pound Christmas bonuses may see himself as working class, beacuse he has working class parents and went to a working class school. Or a London plumber on over £100,000 a year may drive a 4x4 and live in a big house in the country, but he does a manual job - with all the aspects of working culture thereby entailed.

But what about social status? How does that relate to class these days? I was always really embarrassed whenever I used to go home from university and had to admit following intense questioning that I went to Oxford University. People at home tended to screw their noses up at that - or sort of pretend to be impressed and say 'oooooo' - with a sort of hint that I shouldn't get too up myself.

For all Tony Blair's 'we're all middle class now', the British (and I think this is an overhwelmingly admirable trait by the way) don't really like people who went to private schools or posh universities. When I was at university, even though I came from a pretty middle class family (we lived in a detached house, were paying off a mortgage, had two cars, my dad was a manager at a chemical plant - though neither of my parents went to university and both came from basically working class families), I was extremely proud of being from the North East (let's face it Northern accents enable you to put on a bit of proletarian swagger whatever the realities of your background) and would readily tell anyone who would ask that I went to a comprehensive school (less than 20% of Oxbridge undergraduates can say that). Those things gave you a certain credibility - whatever you were, you certainly weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth. So, perhaps, a lot of us claim we are working class, because thats just cooler than saying you are middle class - its earthier, its more real, it shows you've done well.

And yet and yet.....as Decca Aitkenhead argues British popular culture is just so overwhelmingly middle class. It is harder to tell someone's class from what they wear, we watch the same TV programmes, go to the same pubs, watch the same films, follow the same sports. So even as we go around saying we are working class, we dress and furnish our homes like we're all part of the same amorphous middle class. Maybe thats what leads Blair to his conclusion that we're becoming middle class - there is a middle class cultural hegemony.

Look at TV - whereas we used to laugh at Margo and Gerald in The Good Life, we now spend our evenings being encouraged to laugh at the consequences of disadvantage. So-called 'reality TV' is not really reality at all - programs like Wife Swap, Big Brother and Supper Nanny fish struggling families and individuals out of all social context and put them under the condescending micro-scope of the middle class professionals. The Jeremy Kyle Show is only the most grotesque example of the voyeuristic freak show.

As Aitkenhead points out, people on Pop Bitch were genuinely taken aback when Julie Burchill pointed out that words such as 'chavs', 'pikeys' and 'pramface' are infused with snobbery and class hatred. So hegemonic is (apparently classless) middle class culture (and so divorced from the realities of working class life are the 'objectively' middle class), that university students see absolutely no problem in having 'chav' parties, where they dress up in burberry and bling. The middle class and the rich are so cocooned in their own comfortable existence, so surrounded by their 'classless' popular culture permeated through television, the music industry, fashion and so forth, that they can't recognise their own class prejudices anymore. They would frown at the hierchical society of Lady Chatterley's Lover or of Dickensian England, but seem utterly impervious to the realities of the modern class structure.

Look at Channel Four's recent Best and Worst Places series, in which the unquestionably bourgois property hunters Phil and Kirsty rate towns according to a range of criteria and tell us whether they would choose to live there or not. So, Edinburgh and numeorus places in Surrey are said to be the best places to move to, whereas, Middelsbrough is the worst. Why? Poorly performing schools, crime, unemployment and so forth. And yet this whole ridiculous charade takes place in complete absence of any analsysis of the class ridden and unjust nature of modern Britain. It is a class free zone. So yes poor people live in poor places, where people like Phil and Kirtsy would not choose to live. I can't believe the production team are so unaware of the sheer offensiveness and stupidity of what thay are saying. There is little about our contemporary culture that is so repulsive.

The two facets of social status I have identified are, ofcourse, connected - we admire the boy who has 'done good', we think we live in a meritocratic society, and so a working class background gives you credibility; and because we believe (wrongly) that this country is a genuine meritocracy in which everyone has a chance if only they rolled up their sleeves, when we see people who were born and have remained working class, they are looked down on and subject to aggressive class prejudice. In fact we live in an immobile and unequal society in which privilege and disadvantage are passed on from one generation to the next.

We live in delusional times.

The long horizon

One of the most inspirational people I have ever met was an octogenarian Communist militant in La Victoria, a working class barrio of Santiago de Chile. La Victoria (the area's colloquial name meaning literally 'victory' over Pinochet) is one of the city's poor poblaciones. It lies like most of the poor barrios at the bottom of the hill on which the city sits, giving the phrase 'la gente arriba' - 'the people above' - refering to the city's super rich who live on the higher ground of Providencia and Las Condes - a particularly graphic resonance.

La Victoria was a bastion of resistance to the fascist dictatorship, long a district with high levels of Communist and Socialist support, the home to very many of the young Communist radicals who led brave and violent protests against the regime in the early 1980s. One resident, a friend of mine, used to hide machine guns under the floor boards of his house - he lay sacks of cannabis over the top because if you got done for drugs you would go to prison, whereas if you got done for aiding the Communist-led armed resistance group the Frente Patriotico Manuel Rodriguez, you would be in all likelihood tortured and murdered by the security forces.

I interviewed the aforementioned Communist militant about four years ago now. He gave me two gifts, one a copper portrait of Pablo Neruda the Communist Nobel laureate and the other a poster of Salvador Allende, both of which still hang on my wall. His experiences were quite extraordinary - spanning a century of activism and repression (the CPCh was proscribed in the 1950s as well as the 1980s), of highs (the Allende victory of 1970) and lows (the Pinochet regime that followed). The Communist Party had been the biggest factor in shaping his life - the party had taught him how to read and write, it had taught him how to think about politics, how to organise, how to interpret the world around him.

What was most remarkable, however, was the sense of historical perspective Marxist doctrine had given him. Politicians and elections come and go - what mattered was the struggle and the revolution - for him, these were the grand forces shaping history. He could look back across almost a century of political steps forwards and back, put passing trends into perspective, and still look to a horizon that others simply miss. He had a profound sense of history. Whatever the flaws in teleological theories of history, that sense of the coming utopia gave him an unstinting optimism - that you just need to keep plugging away, and however implausible it might seem at present, you will get there in the end.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, led to an ideological crisis for many Communists - not just in Chile but around the world. Even for those on the left who passionately condemned the Soviet system, its very existence did help keep alive the hope that one day capitalism would be superseded by something different. Many Chilean Marxists left the Communist Party - some, in desperation, turned to the Third Way for answers.

I'm not a Marxist - but that sense of confidence and that utopian vision that inspired the Communist movement is something that the left desperately needs today - not a 'scientific' way of interpreting history, but a vision of a different way of organising human life that can inspire and a theory that sets out how we can can get closer to it. Otherwise we are rudderless, awash in a decidedly a-political and anti-progressive post-modernism that manifests itself in navel gazing but can never move us forwards.

These thoughts were stimulated by Raphael Samuel's post-humous set of essays The Lost World of British Communism. In Britain, much more so than in Chile, we have largely forgotten about the Communist sub-culture that to a not insignificant degree helped shaped the trajectory of the British Left in the twentieth century. Samuel sets out the idiosyncracies of that subculture wonderfully - the obsession with punctuality and cleanliness, the almost all-consuming nature of being a member of 'the Party', the idea of the 'good Communist' family, the commitment to solid industrial work, the disapproval (shared by Methodists and some Labour thinkers) of some of the cultural facets of working class life, especially drink and the betting shop, the veneration of discipline, the premium placed on personal modesty and the inherent dislike of careerism of any kind (whether political or industrial).

This Communist sub-culture is now almost entirely lost - the fact that orthodox Marxism no longer provides a credible interpretation of our history has destroyed its ideological appeal.

But what we have lost with it is our confidence, a belief that if we all keep chipping away, we'll get there in the end - that, whatever the vagaries of the present, the economic and political ups and down, the forward march will continue and that we all have a responsibility to be part of it. Inspite of everything, we still need theory, utopia and the long horizon.

It's social democracy, Jim, but not as we know it.

Polly Toynbee has decided that this week heralded 'the death of social democracy' http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2189461,00.html.

This is too much too soon, Polly: Brown has recommitted himself to Blair's poverty reduction targets, the broad social and economic policy direction is sound and the inheritance tax cut was more progressive than that proposed by the Tories (saving £2billion for investment in public services), and given the electoral realities, probably unavoidable.

Still I too smell retreat, the ceding of territory, a loss of nerve. Brown's conference speech was one populist socially conservative measure after another. This morning I buried my head into my pillow and screamed when I heard Andy Burnham (is he old enough to have three children? he looks about fifteen) declare that its not wrong to incentivise marriage through the tax system. Apparently these are just his 'personal views' and not policy. Well, I think it is wrong Andy - the state should stay out of family structures, and focus on supporting children, whether their parents are married or not - it is the poorest children who would suffer from a tax system rigged to support the 'traditional family'.

I know in the past I've said that Gordon Brown is strategic - but if there had been an election this month - what would our manifesto have said? Where is the vision? Where is the sketching out of a new progressive agenda for the next ten years?

I remain hopeful that these little Daily Mail flourishes are just that - and that soon enough we will start setting the agenda and pull the centre of political gravity to the left. Cameron has, afterall, gvien us the cover to do that. But after this week you can smell a hint of capitulation in the air. Please prove me wrong Gordon.

Turbulence

What can we take from the last few turbulent weeks? First, that public opinion is unsettled - we have gone from Cameron walking on water, to the Brown bounce, to a Tory renaissance on the back of popular tax cuts. From double digit Labour leads to at best a narrower edge and at worst a deficit of several points - and an even greater deficit in the key marginals. Gordon's decision to hold off on an election is very sensible from the point of view of chipping away with a longer term strategy to try to establish a more resilient lead. As things stand public opinion is up in the air, liable to swing this way and that - but equally, despite the embarrassment of the last 24 hours, and the likelihood that the government will suffer over the next few weeks - everything is still to play for.

Second, that the next period of British politics will be a two party affair, a struggle between a party of the centre left and a party of the centre right, occasionally stealing each other's clothes for reasons of electioral expediency, but with ultimately different visions for the country - one a modernised social democracy that supports state intervention to deliver more egalitarian social outcomes, and the other a less rugged, less Thatcherite conservativism, but one that nevertheless wishes to roll back the frontiers of the state, support marriage and cut taxes.

The Lib Dems are currently on 16% - some blame Ming Campbell, but I think the causes of their current predicament are much more fundamental than that. They are not authors of their own fate - they have benefited over the last 15 years by taking moderate votes from a nakedly right-wing Conservative party, and liberal-left votes from a Labour government that took the country into an unpopular and disastrous war in Iraq. The Tories have moved to the centre and the Brown government is withdrawing from Iraq - both have benefited at the third party's expense. We can expect this to continue and the prospect of a 2009 election may well lead the Lib Dems to evict their current leader at some point next year.

Looking forward, Cameron should be careful. His rubbing it in antics on the TV today smacked too much of mischief making. Moreover, while he will probably gain short term political capital from all this, 2009 is a long way away. He has tied himself to a much more right-wing agenda ina bid to provide substance in anticipation of an election and to stave off a rebellion in his own ranks. From hugging hoodies, he now scraps early prisoner releases, from no tax cuts that threaten stability to an inheritance tax cut arguably based on dodgy figures, from not mentioning Europe or immigration to calling for a referendum and promising a cap on numbers. The Cameroons are calling it a 'balanced approach' - it can just as easily be interpreted as a 'lurch to the right'.

The Labour party faces a difficult few weeks - but we should calm down and settle in for the long war.

Structure, agency and social democracy

What are the possibilities for progressive social change under democratic conditions in the periphery of global capitalism? That is the question at the heart of a new collaborative book by Richard Sandbrook and colleagues (Social Democracy in the Global Periphery. Origins, Challenges, Prospects).

Globalization is generally thought to have seriously limited the possibilities for sustaining egalitarian social systems in developed nations, where both neo-liberals and Third Way thinkers have argued that social democratic parties in government must give up on state interventionism and adapt to new market-oriented realities. If this is the case in the core wealthy nations - then presumably the chances for sustaining a sucessful social democratic politics in the poor South, where the constraints on governments imposed by the globalized economy are surely greater, are negligible?

Not so, argue the authors, in a book that should be read by all those who hope that Thatcher was wrong to declare that, post-1989, 'there is no alternative'. Of course, the neo-liberal thesis on globalization - that it has spelt the end for any kind of distinctive left-of-centre politics in the social democratic heartlands of Western Europe - has been shown to be way off the mark. Authors such as Geoffrey Garrett, Carles Boix and Dwane Swank have found that left parties in power in the core OECD states can continue to successfuly combine economic dynamism with egalitarian social outcomes, even under globalized conditions.

Sandbrook et al. assess whether this is also possible in poorer states - and take four cases that in their own regions are seen as exceptional, because of the way they have managed to combine economic growth, high levels of public spending and progressive social achievements. By comparing the economies, social structures and recent political histories of Kerala, Chile, Mauritius and Costa Rica, the authors are able to establish that while each is exceptional in their own backyard, taken together they constitute 'exceptionalisms of a general type'.

The central analytical focus of the book - and the central question for social democratic political strategy anywhere in the world - is on the relative role of structure and agency in determining the left's ability to change capitalism under democratic conditions. The authors identify a number of structural conditions that facilitated the development of a viable social democratic politics in each country. These include the early development of a capitalist economy, a resulting social formation that leant itself to a social democratic politics of class alliances, a state which was autonomous enough from the economically dominant class to give governments the space to pursue a compromise between conflicting class interests and active civil societies that consoldiated the democratic rules of the game.

On the side of agency the authors point to the establishment of programmatic left-of-centre parties that (with the exception of Chile in the 1960s and 70s) were able to both give guarantees to capital that private property would be respected (sustaining investment) and deliver real social achievements for their supportive coalitions of urban and rural workers. The authors find that just as European social democrats have been able to offer a positive climate for private investment, through state expenditure on raising skills, providing universal education systems and diversifying the economic base - so too have social democrats in the South managed to attract private investment in part because of the benefits to capital of higher levels of social investment by the state. In short, 'there is an alternative'.

Moreover, there is an alternative not just to neo-liberalism, but also to 'Third Way' models of social democracy - the Costa Rican, Mauritian and Keralan cases show that left parties in office are able to sustain much more radical or classical social democratic strategies under globalized conditions. The adoption of Third way policies in the Chilean case was more a consequence of the political legacies of pinochetismo as it was a requirement of the economic realities facing the country.

However, one key question that is not resolved by this book is how replicable these experiences are across developing countries. Is a social democratic politics really possible in most poor countries where the kind of facilitating social conditions identified above are absent?

The authors point to the example of Brazil under Lula and the PT as an example of a country that lacks many of the socio-structural conditions set out above but is nevertheless making progress. While it is true that Lula's administration has many social achievements to its name, in particular in terms of poverty reduction, that government's failure to deliver a genuinely ground breaking class compromise in that highly stratified country could mean one of two things - either that the structural conditions for social democracy are simply not there in Brazil and this seriously limits what the PT is able to deliver, or that the PT's leadership has made political choices that have prematurely netured their social democratic project. The jury is still out.

Ultimately, however, this book is an antedote to fatalism - and the recent election of left-of-centre governments across Latin America offers the potential for further social democratic experimentation. These are countries with very different social structures and political systems and their governments now have the opportunity to test the boundaries, push the envelope and establish whether these successful cases can be replicated or even surpassed elsewhere.

Civic liberalism

What can the liberal state expect of its citizens? Liberalism is often caricatured as 'anything goes', as a form of moral relativism in which we can all just do whatever we like, as a form of anarchy. We hear this played out all the time in popular discourse, whether this be in relation to the behaviour of the young ('young people these days don't have enough discipline') or in relation to the welfare system ('you just turn up and if you're pregnant or a drug addict they give you a house') or, in a criticism levelled at liberalism from political Islamists and fundamentalist Christians alike, the sense that mainstream Western society is all about hedonism and self-gratification - decadent clothing, drugs and promiscuity.

But liberalism has rules - and those of us who are liberals in the political philosophical sense probably don't emphasise that point enough. So, under liberalism, if your enjoyment of your freedom results in harm to others (or, more controversially, to yourself), then the state can intervene so long as it acts according to the law.

Liberalism is, moreover, not blind to the need for shared norms and obligations among citizens. Of course at the heart of the liberal settlement is a charter of civil and political rights, which defend us as citizens from the arbitrary tyranny of the state. This is based on the quintessentially liberal notion that we are better off if left to choose our own way of living our lives and to freely pursue our own conceptions of the good life, without state interference except in the kind of circumstances set out above. This is what liberalism is about - and what makes it distinct from authoritarian alternatives.

However, the existence of those rights also implies some obligations on liberalism's citizens. This is not in the worrying sense implied by Blair and Reid in their hey day (thankfully passed) - that you have to earn your rights by fulfilling your duties. Rather our obligations ensue from the understanding that if a liberal system of rights is to survive in the long term, then it requires certain qualities of its citizens - that we settle disputes peacefully where possible, that we obey the law, that we treat others with tolerance and respect, that we participate in public affairs in some minimal respect and so forth.

Some of these duties might be so important to the functioning of a liberal system that they may be legally enforceable - to obey the law obviously, to serve on a jury when requested, and, I would argue, to vote in a general election (sending off a form once every five years, which is all it now amounts to, with the right to abstain or reject the whole lot by putting a line through it, is hardly onerous when one considers the benefits we all derive from living in a democratic society).

But there are relatively few of these compulsory duties - and that's a good thing, that's the whole point. There are, however, other citizen virtues that may be important to maintaining a healthy liberalism - though not so crucial to its survival that they should be made legally binding. With these the liberal state has a legitimate role in spending public money on promoting them - socialising children for instance through citizenship education, teaching the history of the struggle for our liberal rights, waging a battle of ideas with illiberal political groups such as the BNP or Hizb ut-Tahrir, setting out a civic calendar or an honours system that celebrates liberal and democratic values, among other things.

The liberal state is not neutral, it is liberal, and if it is to survive and flourish in defence of our rights, it should enforce its rules and promote these civic virtues and vital social norms. We bleeding hearts believe in some rules, norms and duties too.