Notes on:
Clarke, J. Critcher, C., Johnson, R.
(eds) (1979) Working Class Culture: Studies in
history and theory. London: Hutchinson.
Dave Harris
There is a need to break with or reform past
separations—between the past and the present, the
theoretical and empirical, history and society,
the cultural and the not cultural.
Chapter one
Critcher 'Society, cultural studies and the
postwar working class'
Sociologies of working class culture tend to
overemphasise their passivity. For example
Young and Willmott 'appropriate working class
culture in terms of a discrete sociological
variable: in this case the family' (14), and
Jackson and Marsden can be accused of the same
reduction in the case of education, Hoggart as
well in the case of the mass media. No
account was taken of the background of
redevelopment of the East End in the first study,
for example. As a results, the 'crisis to
which these texts [address]... is essentially that
of a group of social democratic intellectuals
faced with the contention that capitalism
works'(15) [I think this applies to CCCS work
too]. The discussion and criticism of the
affluent worker approach follows. Instead,
we need to reassert the 'relation between…
changes in material life and the forms of working
class consciousness and culture' (15). There
is a rational core or real basis to the culture of
the affluent workers.
Social democratic analysts failed to theorise
capitalism was to disentangle the real from the
superficial aspects of working class culture,
because they were committed to an empiricist
approach. Nevertheless, the working class
was rediscovered, but by 'scholarship boys and
girls', in a move which was 'crucial to their own
identity' (17). Nevertheless, working class
identity remained as a problem, a part of a more
general set of problems arising from the 'crisis
in social democratic thought'. Some examples
of chosen texts follow:
The Uses of Literacy. This text
resonated with left wing intellectuals with its
critique of the quality of modern life and its
concern with 'cultural classlessness'.
However, the methods can be criticised, and so can
its defensiveness. It is essentially a mass
culture thesis, with links to Leavis and Elliott,
but with an inversion of their claims: the real
culture of the folk is urban and working
class. There is some circularity between the
working class and its culture. Militants are
seen as 'atypical'. It does penetrate to the
notion of shared cultural meanings, and gives a
sense of cultural struggle, but also displays
political limitations and offers the danger of an
'eternal working class weltanschauung'
(20). However, it gives a better picture
than embourgeoisment theories, and is preferable
to sociological work on isolated aspects like
attitudes and variables—a list culture is dynamic.
Coal is Our Life. This
comes out of the community studies tradition which
usually operates with Fabian notions of social
policy rather than attempting to explain working
class culture directly. This book is an
exception because it does look at a structural
context and at notions of ideology—'the expression
of the class as representations of structural
situations' (22). The characteristics of a
miner's life can be seen as a response to the wage
system. However, there is no self conscious
method. Bringing in women and families does
show the connections between community and the
'broader national set of apparatuses or
ideological fields' (23).
The rediscovery of poverty, associated with
Titmuss and others can be seen as a theme in
Coates and Silburn[?] Poverty: the Forgotten
Englishmen. This attacks the affluent
worker thesis using a better method, although it
is positivist. There are examples of fine
writing [talk up]. It focuses on structural
deprivation and culture, and denies that the poor
can be seen as lumpenproletarians: it is poverty
that produces conservative effects, and also a
poverty of cultural resources. Elements of
fascism and racism are also consequences.
The Affluent Worker studies [summarized
well 28f]. The authors operate with a notion
of a traditional working class that seems to be
based more on sociology rather than history, and
so never acts as a real benchmark, but rather as a
'clumsy post hoc generalization…
That tends to essentialism' (31). The
methods used operate with surface data only.
There are no data on families or workplaces, and
this misses an important gap between generalized
and localized attitudes. The analysis is too
literal, and develops ideal types. It's not
clear whether instrumentalism is always an option,
and whether it is a cause or an effect of [social]
privatization. The definition of classes
arises from a fusion of Marxism and sociology, and
shows the authors have 'dip[ped] into a ragbag of
concepts when confronted by empirical material
requiring explanation' (33). They display a
'failure of theoretical nerve', and really need to
break from the 'self enclosed discipline of
sociology… into Marxism' (34).
Towards Socialism
marks an important break, also indicated from the
change from Universities and Left Review
to New Left Review. The volume
includes debates and contributions from Hall and
EP Thompson in terms of the relations between
class consciousness and 'objective forces' (35),
and this leads to Westergaard's criticisms of the
old left orthodoxy about white collar work as well
[as a conservative factor?] . Anderson talks
about crisis as an historical event, Williams on
working class culture is a basic collective idea
rather than individualist. The notion of a global
class struggle appears, and this helps introduce
Gramsci as providing a suitable set of theoretical
concepts, for example hegemonic as opposed to
corporate class consciousness. This is
supplied by Williams in a rather ideological way,
however, as a failure of the working class to
impose their own values. Nairn discusses the
need to break with the Labour Party, since
historical analysis shows a failure of adequate
theories emerging from Labour. Labour has
become the problem, and we need to dethrone it as
the judge of the adequacy of working class
culture.
Johnson, R. Culture and the Historians
This discusses the impact of the theoretical
debates between Althusser and Gramsci on labour
history. We can see a 'crisis in hegemony'
developing in the late 1880s and 1890s (43), and a
search for a new settlement especially to take
account of the emerging labour movement.
This led to an interest in economic history,
however, rather than tracing the development to
the economy itself. For example the history
of social institutions undertaken by Fabian
campaigners, including history or trade unions,
local government, voluntary associations and the
Labour Party. This offered moralistic and
instrumental accounts rather than exploring the
lived dimensions of working class life, because
of 'no feeling for the rank and file'. This
is not surprising, since these were middle class
intellectuals, and conventional political
organizations were the focus: those organizations
also acted as 'the only ground of a more or less
equal encounter' (47). [People like Williams
and Thomson were to find this ground in adult
education, and some later lefties in the idealised
Open University]. There was also an
[imagined?] 'contemporaneous relationship between
the writers and those of whom they wrote' (47).
There were exceptions, however, such as the
Hammonds who were 'so critical… of the
culture of their own class… that they were
able to stand quite outside it and see the
rationality of popular responses'[just what a lot
of university radicals need to do]
In the 1970s, there was the rediscovery and the
emergence of debates about Marxism, largely
through the work of Cole, who had criticized
humanist Marxism as metaphysical. This led
to a vague economic determinism instead. However,
there was little substantive connection with
Cole's history, although there was some use of his
narrative, especially to criticize Althusser
(51). This was because many of Cole's books
were actually written for a popular audience and
for adult education courses. There are
ambiguities as well, for example the largely
mechanical relations of the state of the economy
and political responses so that affluence led to
reformism, while depression led to revolt, with no
cultural mediations.
We can then examine the tradition of Communist
Party historians of the 1950s, including Dobb and
Torr (54f). They are for the rich
understanding of the complexity of economic
determinism, but offer very little on political or
ideological specifics, which were seen as
representing social classes directly. But
they did examine culture, and it was exciting
writing. However, there was a focus on
leaders, while the class itself was seen as a
combination of 'elemental forces plus juntas'(58).
Hoggart and Williams did most to reclaim the
notion of culture, and the emergence of working
class intellectuals helped the Left overcome their
anxieties. They saw the 'importance of adult
and working class education as an arena in which
these relations were worked out' (59). Their
own work on popular culture saw it as
'proto-political', as a primitive, archaic or
transitional form of social protest [and E.P.
Thompson's Making... is included in
this]. In the 1970s, the same notions were
applied to the present forms of protest.
However, the work also returned to Lenin and his
contributions on the notion of the labour
aristocracy: 'It has therefore been necessary [!]
for a new cohort to retrace that path… out
of Hobsbawm and into an encounter with Gramsci
'[poor Gramsci! Everyone has to be forced to
read him!]. However these new histories were
just added to the old ones and did not transform
them. Perhaps it was easier to break with
the old conceptions using the new grounds rather
than the familiar ones, but working class culture
was often assumed to be familiar, homogeneous
rather than fragmented, and divisions like that
between the public and private were accepted as
natural. The new interest in notions like
political and ideological levels, and in more
detailed research, lead to a focus on experience,
especially of the oppressed, and an emphasis on
'ethical humanism'(65). We can detect
similar trends in sociology.
An adequate history of the future requires a break
with the old conceptions not a new empiricism, and
must not evade theoretical challenges. The
latter emerged from the New Left Review's project
to import books on continental Marxism.
Gramsci was rapidly assimilated, but simplified,
as in the work on the different
problematics. Althusser's work led to
debates within Marxism, but it still looks
asymmetric, with no proper theory of culture as
such, as a whole. This split in British
Marxism deepened, with Thomson and Williams seen
as 'cultural Marxists', and those influenced by
Althusser as 'structuralists'. This led to
the work on problematics [Hall?].
The rejection of the claim that structuralism was
more scientific than culturalism lead to a
proliferation of positions rather than a
synthesis. However, structuralism remained
as important, with its emphasis on forces
rather than experiences, and this led to problems
of terminology: 'culture' was too general, as was
the 'working class', and there was a tendency to
reduce experience to class. Working
solutions to these dilemmas led to the decision to
continue to study with the best means available;
to carry on as culturalists with acknowledgement
of the limitations; or to merge the two and
attempt synthesis. [Johnson's gloss on
Gramsci in this discussion suggests that
'"hegemony" is in effect Althusser's
"reproduction"; but… without the
functionalism… The normal state… is a
state of massive disjunctions and unevenness, for
example from "survivals"' 233]
Johnson, R. 'Really Useful Knowledge':
radical education and working class culture
1790-1848.
[Note that this particular version with its
pagination appears as chapter one in Dale, R. et
al. (eds) (1981) Education and the State vol
2: Politics, Patriarchy and Practice,
Basingstoke: Falmer/Open University Press]
Work like EP Thompson's shows the persistence of a
number of popular educational traditions,
including radical press, local associations, and
families. With the press, there was still
the distance between the writers and the audience,
and this probably influenced the (un)popularity of
particular types of radicalism.
The radical dilemma focused on education. On
the one hand, there was criticism of 'provided'
education, including those proposals made by the
state, which radicals opposed. However, this
led to struggles to generate a more general
understanding and a practical grasp of the
issues. Radicals also developed alternative
educational goals, generally based around the
notion of 'really useful knowledge'. The
development of education was seen as a political
strategy [by both sides?]. There was also
quite a 'vigorous and varied' range of educational
practice at the time. Adult education was
provided mostly to educate parents, but there was
no real distinction between adult and other forms
of education before the development of the 'middle
class culture of childhood'.
The typical part of the dilemma was that knowledge
was widely sought as a use-value, but the poverty
of existing resources, both quantitative and
qualitative, led to struggle about the growth of
facilities. Education promised liberation,
but it also threatened subjection (5). Some
of it seemed to offer useless knowledge,
supporting the tyranny of factory owners or
priests. This led to people like Paine and
Cobbett deriding school routine and opposing the
'ideology and rationale of schooling by which all
evils were ascribed to "popular ignorance"'
(6). Even the most promising new forms of
the 1830s, including Mechanics Institutes and
other schools, some provided by the Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, were suspect
and this led to parodies of the useful knowledge
they offered. Instead, radicals tended to
rely on their own collective enterprise—genuinely
radical education for Johnson.
Radicals addressed the issue of the form of
education, whether it should be informal, and this
led to proposals by Owen for counter
institutions. Educational pursuits were not
to be separated in separate organizations, but
were to be seen as improvised, ephemeral. Education
was not the same as school. We could find
knowledge in books, but it was also available in
nature and from life, and this was the basis for a
whole struggle and contestation about educational
policy. These resources were outside the
control of capital. For example, literacy
could be developed in families, neighbourhoods, in
workplace discussions, even in Sunday
schools. The radical press was to play a
role. There were travelling lecturers and
educational networks. However, these were
limited and fragile so that the 'working class
intellectual was (and is) a rare creation' (8).
The radical press was the epitome of radical
education. It got particularly closely
linked to Chartism. It was a very flexible
medium, and could be read again and again, or read
aloud to different levels in the audience.
One example was the Northern Star, a
journal which also provides the best source of Chartist
thought. However, it also had genuinely
educational content, containing reviews, notices
of lecturers, criticisms of schools and
schoolmasters and discussion of new provisions
such as Sunday schools. It was in the
business of enlightenment.
A major theme in the content provided turned on
the notion of really useful knowledge. This
notion opposed capitalist conceptions of utility,
recreation and diversion. Real knowledge was
practical and relevant to experienced problems of
life. There was no time for 'wilful
abstractness or abstruseness, a failure to speak
plainly' (9). Preaching was opposed, and the
demand expressed for intellectual work 'for
us'. Education was to be comprehensive in
every sense, not 'confined by monopoly or
control'. Yet useful knowledge was never
just pragmatic—'knowledge was not just a political
instrument; the search for "truth" matters'
(10).
There were priorities, though, especially the
struggle for emancipation. This involved an
interest in political knowledge. Paine was
still popular, but the state was different in the
1830s, taking more of a role in disciplining
capitals and accumulation, and attacking the
defences of the poor rather than pursuing notions
of natural rights [as a modernizing strategy, as
in America]. Natural rights became focused
on power struggles between property and the
working classes, not between the aristocrats and
the people as in Paine. Issues like
mobilizing actual majorities and forming actual
groups became important. Useful knowledge
also required an understanding of social science,
based on the rights of man, populism, and the
class nature of the state. Owenism offered
analyses of community and the origins of altruism,
arising after education. The Cooperative Society
was based on reason as a contrast to capitalist
irrationality: this arose because nasty
institutions corrupt people and can affect
socialization. Reason also led to opposition
to the family, school, and church. Finally,
knowledge of economics was required to understand
poverty and exploitation. Conventional
economics saw profits as a tax, capital as a mere
factor in production, and any exploitation as
arising from exchange. Cooperation would cut
out the middleman. Again, reasonable
combinations of [or possibly substitutions for]
exchange, class and the state, and domination
would produce better characters as a social
effect.
Other elements in useful knowledge included
science and literature. Owen's ideas on
education were remarkably progressive, for example
by seeing the idea of a skill much more widely, to
include mind and body. This provided a role
for a book learning as well as developments in
competence required to make a living.
Current state education was seen as offering the
opposite of useful knowledge—knowledge is
abstracted from its context and teaching was
coercive. Owen advocated local skills to
make a living, for example helping farm labourers
develop husbandry and engage in a 'cottage
economy'. He denied that ignorance just
arose from illiteracy, and debunked the educated
as literate but still unwise. Literacy was
important, to defend the poor against the literate
rich [Cobbett is the main example here], but
efforts to develop it would limited to the limited
horizons of the small producer and the
family. However, at least this made it based
directly on experience.
The real problem was the monopoly on or distortion
of knowledge as a feature of capitalism.
This included protecting the 'secrets of the
trade', and this in turn produced an early splits
between mental and manual labour. An
emphasis on science would be more productive, and
this was being argued in 1832 (15).
Political or moral science on the other hand was
seen as apologetic. Cooperative activity was
a way out, helping to unify split roles, and to
properly reclaim knowledge that was restricted in
capitalism.
The popularity of these ideas can be assessed by
looking at the growth of Chartism. That
movement did feature local leadership, and there
were activist intellectuals deliberately out to
educate members. Gramsci's notion of the
organic intellectual is useful here. But how
organic were Chartist intellectuals? There
was a close relation 1816 - 40s, seen for example
in the class origin of Chartist leaders, which was
mostly indigenous (16): however, there were very
'few open roads to cooption' for intellectuals
anyway (16). The extent of organicism can
also be tested by the links between theory and
practice, according to Gramsci, on whether theory
is based on problems in experience. 19th
century radicals did qualify on this text as well,
although again there was no other rival source of
socialist theory, with the possible exception of
Paine. Radicals formed loose organisations,
so they were not so open to bureaucratic
alienation, and this preserved a useful
informality, and a mix of non academic bits.
Clarke, J. Capital and culture: the
working class revisited
The affluent worker should be seen as produced by
a specific transformation rather than as a general
trend. It seems to be capital derivationist
any way. We need to consider the political
and the ideological as forms in which economic
struggles are fought out etc. What has
happened is a Fordist form of capital accumulation
has led to deskilling and the growth of service
industries; geographical shifts and instructions
of locality; cultural changes such as those which
undermine working class community [Cohen is cited
here, presumably P. Cohen on skinheads?]. We
have to remember however that those communities
have many forms rather than one classic archetypal
one. This form of capital accumulation has
lead to problems as well which include working
class apathy, which have produced as a response
'community work, community skills, community
liaison' (240). Educational expansion
involves political and ideological interpellation
through notions of equality and achievement, and
this shows the extent of negotiation around
provision provided by capital. We can see
the emergence of youth sub cultures also as a
representational consequence, again this shows the
cultural variability of affluence. Changes
in family patterns have arisen through a double
subordination of women in both family and labour
markets, and this in turn has led to an increased
attempts to police child rearing: social
reconstruction is seen as enshrining the ideal
nuclear family. Changes in shopping have
produced the rise of the consumer: even pubs now
'interpellate a new identity for the drinker—that
of "consumer" rather than "member"' (245).
It is these changes in marketing and consumerism
that have produced affluence, not political
practices and changes. The recomposition
involved includes adding ethnic labour on top of
an already subdivided working class, and
reinforcing divisions such as those between roughs
and respectables, although these are now
threatened by standardisation (247).
So there has been a variety of processes at the
e.p. and i. levels, and these produced a cultural
transition from one uneven ensemble to
another. Continuities with the past include
persisting shopfloor solidarity, as in Willis
[below] , since the wage relation persists.
However there have been struggles around the
resources for resistance and struggles over skill,
which produced new solidarities and foci of
resistance, such as struggles against the machine
rather than the foreman, scorn for scientists as
much as capitalists, the emergence of shopfloor
wage bargaining.
There is also more variety in cultural
reproduction, together with greater attempts at
articulation, which have led, for example to
different specific lived experiences of the
relation between home and work (249). A
continuity here is provided by the sexual division
of labour, both in work and in terms of concepts
such as respectability, or links to working class
resistance. Leisure has been standardized
and desegregated. Reconstructed femininity
serves as a stimulus to consumption. This
has affected the quality of reproduction, and led
to more [social, personal] privatization. Locality
also persists, even for youth, as a metaphor for
change and resistance—for example used by older
workers to discuss the impact of migrant labour
[with a reference to Policing…].
The working class has been addressed in a number
of voices—as the nation, as the bearer of
traditional values in Thatcherism, by various 'sub
ensembles' of the ideological repertoire. As
a result, there is no homogeneous entity, and
constant requirements for transformation.
Blanch, M. Imperialism, nationalism and
youth
Policing youth is part of a general attempt to
manage working class culture 1890-1918, especially
through notions of imperialism and
nationalism. Some historical material on
youth symbolics appears on page 104 F. There
was an attempt to organize youth to combat in
discipline, to respectabilize and delocalize
them, to reconstitute them as divisions within a
nation rather than as a class. Detailed
analysis ensues, for example of the Boys' Brigade
and the reactions it attracted from rough and
unskilled working class members: this is a classic
example of an 'attempted resocialization', which
paradoxically put off the unskilled in particular,
and which showed uneven responses according to
class and gender [same with Scouts] .
Nevertheless, such attempts did have an effect
especially when combined with the schools and the
press, which featured similar ideologies: national
efficiency and fitness, authority and hierarchy,
the need to deal with outside enemies. The
convergence between these networks of school and
church did provide a sort of unity which did
affect the working classes. We can see them
supporting nationalist parties, and even joining
adult organisations like the Territorial Army,
and, of course, enrolling in 1914 to 18.
Taylor, P. Daughters and mothers—maids and
mistresses: domestic service between the wars
There was a boom in domestic service in the 1930s,
and this was important in reproducing conservative
attitudes. The practice had attracted both
cultural and ideological support, for example in
managing [generational?] transitions from family
to family. This chapter is based on 40
personal accounts of what domestic service was
like. Poverty was clearly a factor in
persuading people to become domestic
servants. The demand for them mostly arose
from an Edwardian interest in conspicuous
consumption. The families of origin were
often harsh for the girls, who had to obey their
mothers: this was as a kind of training for
service producing 'instinctive obedience'.
Childhood ended early for these girls. They
were socialized into the family where they worked
and into relations with their employers.
Their mothers deferred to their employers.
The employers themselves maintained a strong
distance between them and working class culture,
policing habits of appearance and speech.
They tended to address servants as if they were
children or animals, using particular tones of
voice and methods of address, including a kindly
or hectoring tone (further examples 134), and this
effectively excluded them at the same time.
Responses were varied, from full acquiescence, to
various elements of resistance. The latter
was particularly common among those who had never
been keen to be domestic servants, who were bright
or radical: it often took the form of 'answering
back'. Domestic servants did commonly see
themselves as being exploited. The whole
analysis shows how underlying class relations can
take on extra forms of subordination [in
particular occupations].
Wild, P. Recreation in Rochdale 1900-40
There is early evidence of the penetration of
capitalism, such as the rise of the dance hall and
the cinema to replace the pub, music hall and
chapel. There was also the development of
holidays. Cinemas actually change their
patterns of ownership, and these even developed
super cinemas. The new forms of recreation
involve 'limited commitment and an essentially
casual usage' (159), and developed around more
specialized functions and premises, permitting
concentration and centralization. There was
some potential for reappropriation, however, but
generally, the developments show that there was
now an important stake for capital in the private
sphere.
Willis, P. Shopfloor culture: masculinity
and the wage form
We need an anthropological definition of culture,
and to see that work is at the heart of lived
culture in Britain. Cultural discourses work
through the direct experiences of
production. These affect the whole culture,
for males at least. Work dispossessed its
people, it's boring, and this leads to a search
for meaning, as an exercise of skill for example
[I have recorded lots of talking up, page
188]. To survive is seen as a demonstration
of bravery, pride and masculinity, even in light
jobs. Pride involves managing the task and
the machinery, through skill and competence.
There is often a struggle to gain informal
control, collectively and to win or fiddle
[developed well in de
Certeau]. You also need to cope on the
shopfloor in using language, coping with jokes,
especially practical jokes. The emphasis is
on practice, with the disdain for theory,
supported by lots of apocryphal stories [some of
these appear in Learning
to Labour—come to think of it, this
might be a chapter in that book!]: This is a
partial recognition of the hollowness of much
theory, and also that labour is treated as a
commodity, but also as a special one—and this
leads to some criticisms of the wage form.
The whole culture appears as 'naturally'
male. Labour is empty of any stigma for
concern the outside, so a 'transformed patriarchy
has filled it with significance from the inside'
(198). This explains the other
elements. Jobs become the property of proper
men rather than the logic of the production
system, masculinity is a matter of becoming rather
than being, confined to women (197). This
stance is also influence trade unions struggle,
with its stories of bluff, conflict, short
termism, and openness to being bought off or
symbolically placated. The whole stance
arises from the 'interlocked grip of masculinity
and the wage form'.
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