Apocalyptic glee not pictured
Plug corner: me on class, cultural populism and resentment in Socialist Worker, and on an exhibition of Cold War Modernism in the New Statesman.
posted by owen hatherley at 3:19 pm
Thursday, September 18, 2008
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5 Comments:
Interesting piece on class politics, but as an aside, perhaps the direction/flow of the "hatred" isn't quite so clear cut? Aristocratic Oxbridge types might throw sneering chav parties but I bet websites like chavscum and their ilk are run and used mainly by people from far more modest backgrounds.
The chav stereotype is enthusiastically spread by a metropolitan media elite but the reason it has such vicious power is that it feeds into the well-worn idea of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor - a lie that many sections of the working class happily collude in. This is best illustrated by the TV programme How Clean is Your House? Sure enough it involves poking around the house of some unfortunate proletarian, but who's doing the poking? In this case, it's Kim and Aggie, one of whom, at least, was a genuine cleaning lady before her TV career took off. It'd be nice to think that people are becoming more conscious of the gap between rich and poor but I wouldn't underestimate the capacity for self-loathing and narrow bourgeois aspirations that these kind of stereotypes breed.
Dan T
Oh, no doubt. There's a long history of depressing working class self-hatred here, from the popularity of the Sun (keep telling us we're worthless, barely literate scum, we love it!) onwards...the undeserving/deserving distinction is indeed quite popular in certain sections of the wc, which is no doubt why governments since Thatcher have revived it so assiduously.
But I'd wager chavscum and its ilk is mainly contributed to and motivated by students, who are beleaguered on all fronts - not only do they no longer have any of the privileges and benefits they used to have, and have to cope with crushing debts, but they're still generally hated by large chunks of the public at large. As most of them are apolitical (and not especially clever, either) all their animosity gets channeled into ugly class hatred. I wouldn't be surprised to see a return of the days when students attacked picket lines (as they did during the general strike, frinstance)...
I wouldn't be surprised to see a return of the days when students attacked picket lines...
Quite probably right (and no doubt already happening in a minor way), though I think there'd be a bit more polarisation than this. Bear in mind most students do actually have to work part-time now, being determining consciousness and all that, I'd be surprised if all of them queued up to drive blackleg buses or whatever.
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