Date of publication: July 8, 2006
Source: The Guardian
By Jeremy Seabrook
Britain has, since the Thatcher era, been celebrating the end of class warfare. The very creation of Tony Blair's New Labour was possible only in the jubilation over the version of social peace established by the elimination of class antagonisms - a conflict that had come to appear sterile and without meaning in the modern world. In Britain, with the extinction of the industrial base, it seemed the class that had been called into existence to serve a system of manufacture only 200 years ago, had been laid to rest. It would remain, as it were, buried in the shallow graves of history, from where it could work no more harm.
This left, of course, a skeleton, the bare bones of those beached by the closure of mines, factories and mills; people consigned to a new minority, an "underclass", or, when the leaven of recent migrants and their descendants is stripped out, in the contemptuous vocabulary of the US, "white trash".
If the working class disappeared from Britain, this was not because it had become dispensable, but because it was being reconstructed worldwide.
It is easy to identify the new working class: machinists in sweatshops, the cheapness of whose labour has brought us throwaway clothing, young women from the countryside working up to 14 hours a day, subject to stringent "disciplines", which often include beating, humiliation and rape. The new working class is made up of factory employees in Jakarta, Mexico City and Chongqing, making shoes, trainers and toys in enclosures surrounded by razor-wire, and watched as they work by CCTV.
It is not, as we choose to believe, our own efforts and hard work that have socially wafted upwards to the majority of people in western Europe, but the successful export of the labour they once performed to remote sites of desolation elsewhere in the world.
In other words, the majority of the people of Britain have become part of the global middle class. If the people of the west have largely become part of a worldwide middle class, this places us in the same relation to the humiliated and exploited of earth as those whose social position was above ours, when most people in Britain toiled in the mines and factories at an earlier stage of industrialism. Our relationship now to the global poor reflects that of the lower middle class in Britain towards the great mass of the labourers of early industrialism.
If there is continuity, it lies in the meannesses and petty hatreds now directed against the global poor - migrants and refugees and all those set in movement across the world by a system of which they were no more the originators than the labouring poor were as they settled in the fetid slums of Manchester or Lambeth, described by Engels and Mayhew. We understand who to look down on and how; long familiar with the archaic language of class, as we were for so long on the receiving end of it.
And, like so many languages thought to be extinct, it is the object of eager revivalism.
The stories are not now about the shirkers and the great unwashed; not of coals-in-the-bath or the money they squander on drink or laudanum, not their smell, their spendthrift imprudence. Now it is a question of the desperate efforts of victims of globalisation to storm the citadels of our wellbeing, bringing with them drugs, crime and their repressed and dangerous sexuality; seeking a way through the defences we have erected, defying our prohibitions, swamping, in fact, the decidedly un-genteel and unrespectable pleasure-gardens of our fortified privilege. For they threaten, not the Victorian values of our thrift and frugality, but on the contrary, our epic excursions into selfishness, waste and debt.
Relationships remain constant. Only the circumstances change. What we are seeking to protect remains the same. The minced vowels and the polite small talk, like the penurious penny-pinching that accompanied them, have been swept away. But we still know who our enemies are; and if race obscures class, there is still no cruel rumour, no vileness, no horror story we will not believe, in order to maintain our distance from the hungry, predatory poor.