Or at least I am deeply suspicious of the public moralising about them.
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of chavdom. All of the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Archbishop of Canterbury and (drugs) Tsar, Cameronite and liberal, social democrat and Blairite think-tank.
Or, to put it more seriously, why is it that in an era when class politics has collapsed, we see the re-emergence of outright snobbery?
The notion of the "chav" strikes me as suspicious. It seems to be a zombie category for people we don't like very much and to have little actual content or meaning. Loud music that we don't like, clothes that we don't like and an anti-social behaviour that we don't approve of. In short, I smell a rat.
Many people object to the characterisation of "chavs" as working class, usually along the lines of "My father was working class and he didn't act like that, these people have no respect" etc., an argument that comes most clearly from an upwardly-mobile middle class perspective. The problem is, so-called "chavs" are most certainly working class. As are, in fact, most supposedly middle-class people. The problem lies in our understanding of the nature of social and economic class.
The middle class is almost entirely fantastic in nature—it has a social component but no economic one. Today's burgeoning middle class has little to do with the petit-bourgeois of yesterday: grocers and shopkeepers, small producers and so on. Today's middle class for the most part have jobs, something which puts them in the economic category of working class because they do not own the means of production. Ironically, the actual petit-bourgeoisie, rather well served for a long time, appears to be a little bit miffed at how it is being treated by what, in the 1960s was called "monopoly capital", hence the re-emergence of Proudhonism in the form of the likes of Jose Bové and the growing interest in small scale production, farmers' markets and the like.
A further objection to the idea of "chavs" as working class commonly raised is that "they're not poor". Perhaps not, though perhaps they are in relative terms, but arguing this means that one simply misunderstands the nature of class composition. It is a liberal conceit that working class-ness is somehow related to poverty. In fact, the economic category is much more simply quantifiable than that: do you work for yourself or for someone else.
Thus, by depriving "chavs" of their working class nature and into some category of Other, I think we're skirting awfully close to the Victorian nature of the "deserving and undeserving poor".
Considering that many people are now uncritically championing Freakonomics this perhaps isn't very surprising. A trendy gloss put on some very unpleasant theories.
Compare the notion of the "chav" with the 1980s concept of "the underclass", a transparent attempt to put a moral character on poverty.
Much of this discourse is predicated upon the disappearance of the industrial working class as a political force, especially since 1984/5—which is fair enough, I suppose, it has gone away. Nevertheless, the absence of cloth caps and the declining power of trade unionism doesn't mean that society has been fundamentally transformed and class has ceased to exist. Interestingly, many commentators are arguing that social mobility has declined since a high-water mark in the 1960s, something that could well be furthered by university top-up fees and so on.
What do you think? Am I way off? Or is there something funny going on? |
