Then we were into the 1980s and suddenly the Conservatives were saying genuinely radical things to working-class people: you don't have to stay where you started out in life; you can buy your council house and join the property-owning class; you can start your own business and leave behind your old assumptions about your place in the world. There followed a generation of Essex Men, with their much-reviled "Loadsamoney" mentality and vulgar habits which Left-wing intellectuals found so easy to despise.
When I first arrived in Britain from America in the 1960s, I was shocked by the class system. Not because such social divides were unknown in the US, but because there was an utterly different attitude here towards the possibility of moving on from the condition into which you had been born. It was not the poverty or the deprivation of British working class life that staggered me – there was plenty of that where I came from. It was the passivity and defeatism, the ineradicable sense of resignation, of people who believed it was inconceivable that they or anyone they knew should transcend their social and cultural limitations. I had never met people who said, when you encouraged their children to aim for university, "Don't go putting ideas in his head."
My memories of that time had faded over the years, but they were brought vividly back to life by last week's controversy over which political party is the truly progressive one. I was on the Left in those days, a veteran of the student revolution at Berkeley: indeed, one of the reasons I had become an expatriate was my disenchantment with America's capitalist values. So my natural political sympathies hovered between the Trotskyite New Left and the fundamentalist wing of the Labour Party.
There was, at first, something deeply stirring in the message that class solidarity was the answer to the unjust arrangements of a hierarchical society, and that solidarity meant loyalty to your roots. It was easy to romanticise the attempt to make an ideological virtue out of entrenched social immobility. To believe, indeed, that to move out of the working class would be treacherous to your brethren, that it was selfish (a word that was to play an enormous role in anti-Thatcherite rhetoric) – an abandonment of those with whom you shared a common misfortune.
Labour's message to what it used to call "our people" was a mix of trade union militancy ("We hate this unjust society, so we will sabotage it") and paternalist, welfare state condescension ("Stay where you are and we'll look after you"). What it preached, above all else, was that the working class could only triumph collectively: that the true struggle was between one fixed set of people who had been born into disadvantage, and another who had, for illegitimate reasons, every privilege that life could offer.
But the Marxist mystique collapsed pretty readily once you looked at the real consequences. Individual aspiration and self-determination – the things that actually made a life worth living in terms of personal fulfilment – were being devalued or forcibly crushed. Opportunities were not so much being denied to working-class people as being renounced by them. And the party that was most enthusiastic in perpetuating this grotesque state of affairs was Labour, because its electoral power base depended on it.(More...)
24 comments:
It was this attitude that disheartened me the most when I was a Swedish foreign exchange student in 1981. I was full of ambition for my future. Indeed, one of the reasons I was there was to pad my resume. So I was curious to ask my fellow high-school students what their aspirations were. And horrified to hear they had NONE. "Why should we work hard," they said, "when the government will just take it all away."
Sweden had income tax over 80% at the time. It was also at that time that Bjorn Borg decided he could not return home to Sweden and became an economic refugee.
You left out one word in the title. "Earned".
Great post.
I would hate to become an economic refugee.
Capitalism - like Marxism - has failed. So what now?
Ope,
Is it that the economic system defines the culture, or vicey versy?
RightGuy, good point. That does make a big difference.
Scunny, I don't disagree on that when. My history book says that Capitalism has been the fertilizer enhancing the growth of Liberty and scientific development.
Admiral, I'm a forced economic refugee from my local Mercedes dealership.
Nickie, I think the hope of the American Dream stems from the perception that we can rise above our "station" in life. A punishing tax structure can steal that dream faster than a bad uncle can empty a pocketbook. So in that case the economic system drives the culture. If I had been stuck in Sweden and not come back to America, I would have toned down my aspirations as well. I mean, why bust your buns when all your hard work is being stolen away.
Ope, having lived in the UK for many years, I share your opinion. When Margaret Thatcher's Britain discovered Capitalism in the 1980's. there was no shortage of motivated and creative entrepreneurs.
Then, Labour and and gutless Tories decided to milk the cow 'til it died. They forgot to feed it.
There are two problems with social mobility.
One is that it works both ways. In order to make room for all those working-class kids to make good, you have to allow middle-class kids to fall into a lower economic bracket. Middle-class parents will fight tooth and claw to prevent that - and by and large, they're people who know just how to do that. So what you get is a social "ratchet", in which, after a generation or so, there just isn't any more room for people to improve.
The other is that - partly because of the abovementioned ratchet - social mobility will never be available to everyone. There just aren't enough middle-class jobs and homes to go around. Someone is always going to have to be poor. The "social solidarity" school holds that we should seek to elevate the condition of everyone, not just the lucky few.
Personally, I think there's a lot to be said for it.
How do you "elevate the condition of everyone"?
What is the optimal or acceptable "condition" and does it eliminate a ratchet effect.
Curious...
"there just isn't any more room for people to improve"
Vet, that statement separates you and me. A rising sea lifts all the boats.
Theories of, and observations about, social mobility are pretty complex, and maybe they all model some realities pretty well.
Just guessing, but those which assume some kind of class stasis prohibiting movement across barriers need to show, if it isn't benign, how that can be changed.
Is it income that matters? Taste?
Type of employment?
Motivation?
How do you "elevate the condition of everyone"? Good question, and one that needs a lot of debate in its own right. But before we can get down to that debate, we have to eliminate the red herring that is "social mobility". That's why people who do elevate only themselves are sometimes seen as "class traitors" - they are literally abandoning their fellows.
In practice, it probably means things like clean water, universal health care, universal education, progressive taxation, food standards, pollution controls... Some of these things are sometimes called "socialism". That doesn't make them bad.
"A rising sea lifts all boats" - that's hardly social mobility, is it? It kinda implies everyone moving upwards but staying in the same relative position - social stagnation. Except that the "sea" metaphor also implies that all boats are at the same level, which just plain isn't true.
Semantic quibbles aside, in practice it doesn't work that smoothly. For a while the sea may rise, then it stops for a bit - and suddenly, it becomes apparent to everyone that some of the boats are running aground while those on top are still riding high. Then those on top look down and say "Hey, you should've climbed when you had the chance" - and those below start shaking fists, and sometimes more dangerous things than fists. And the end result is that we all have to live in a more dangerous world.
Recommended reading.
Thanks. Pretty standard stuff. Not worth arguing here, chiefly because therminology will end up driving the debate all over the place, and we'd end up annoying each other.
You've theorized a pretty tight circle. We'd have to go higher and higher into the observations, the facts as they're known, and the values we bring to the material world each of us envisions.
I'm satisfied. Thanks.
Terminology. Sorry
Scunnert:
Corporatism failed.
Vet:
For your scenario to be true, I'd have to believe the world is a very small zero sum game. Such is not the case. Your argument smacks of left wing social populism. It's disproven every day by immigrants that come to this country, at every level, and excel. In America there some limitations, but everyone has the right to be in the race. Larry Ellison came from the wrong side of the tracks, Steve Jobs father was a machinist. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college. Stories like this abound. It's about ambition, desire and doing the right things and making the right decisions. If anything holds people back in in America and life in general, it's faulty and sometimes magical thinking. It also takes a lot of work.
In countries like England or Denmark, ambition is killed by the economic system and a society that has low expectations because of it. On top of this, classism exist in England. For instance I knew a guy form England he said when you go on an interview, they ask you want your father does or did. They judge you from where you came from. That doesn't happen here.
What Obama and this progressive socialist non-sense represent is the death of American Exceptionalism. Sounds like you like that path.
Rhod:
You can't elevate everyone, you really can't elevate anyone. The desire to excel must come from the individual. I would ague that a socialist system does enough for people that it kills ambition in the average person and over time most people.
The Right Guy, that's kind of my point. Sure there are people from all backgrounds who get on and excel. (And the same is true in England, believe it or not. I've been on dozens of job interviews in England, and nobody ever asked me about my family background.)
But those who excel are a minority. More: they logically must be a minority. Economic necessity means that they can only ever be a minority. If everyone from that background is equally clever and works equally hard, they won't all get ahead.
It's like buying a lottery ticket. You can win, everyone has a (let's presume) fair and equal chance to win, but no matter what happens, not everyone is going to win. Ever.
It wasn't your original point. In Comment #1 you described a mechanistic process of one-up-one-down limitations on movement across class boundaries.
What you're describing now is simply negative evidence, or the chance outcomes of competition which are unseen and therefore not measured. Probability is in control and not individual talent.
This makes more sense in the hard world of success or failure than impermeable class barriers. But it has little if anything to do with a "good" life (for lack of a better word).
I'm with The Right Guy on this. Beyond a solid degree of health, comfort and safety, attainment is entirely subjective and not simply economic.
Vet:
The reason they are in the minority is because not everyone has the attributes and talents. It's not a matter of limited positions, but limited abilities. THose folks I mentioned didn't fall into positions that already existed, but created them. That's my point. We are creators of our own destiny. Some have it, some don't, not matter what necessity you believe.
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