TV chef
Jamie Oliver excites all sorts of frenzy among Britain's otherwise
cautious highbrow media. Here's Will
Self in the New Statesman:
If
Terence Conran plummily taught the middle classes how to be a proper
European bourgeoisie in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Oliver is his
worthy estuarine successor, taking the permanent foodie revolution on
to that portion of the former working class who bought up the public
housing stock. Now they can borrow against their equity to buy
bruschetta...
Will
Self gets the fascination, albeit only symptomatically: Jamie
Oliver obsesses liberal columnists not because of how he "speaks
to" (to use a very columny phrase) our "notions of class"
but because of how he represents movement
between classes (that
elusive and much abused phenomenon of "social mobility").
The stress in Self's above diatribe on the buying and selling of
class consciousness is not on class in itself but on how class is
constantly changing.
I
traced the New Statesman's
obsession with all things Oliver back to 2007 (I got bored after
that), when they
reviewed a TV show about him growing vegetables in his garden.
The "millionaire television personality" himself was soon
back, this
time being heckled for his views on poverty. While admittedly
naive, Oliver's rather pompous advice ("Cook cheaply - like the
Spanish!") was hardly the most offensive twaddle to pass from an
establishment figure's lips in the last few years. Worse was his
anger at "young Brits" (a much-maligned, often skulkily
silent constituency) who are "too
wet for work" - 80-100 hours a week being his stated
workload norm. Even this was voiced in the context of a ham-fisted
defence of "our eastern European immigrant friends." True,
Oliver's worldview borders on the myopically narrow. He wobbles,
suspended above the twin tides of Victorian moral piety and a diluted
Thatcherite creed of entrepreneurialism. But what else should you
expect from one who so closely fits the role - admittedly a bit
belatedly - of a dragged-up-by-his-own-bootstraps, Tebbitt-lite
petit-bourgeois, the proverbial self-raising man? Most recently the
New Statesman followed
all this up with a clarion call for his defence from a voraciously
exclusive middle class. Oliver, the writer contended, was a victim of
snobbery directed at him and the striving, pestle-and-mortar-bashing
masses. (Just to prove my case, and to widen the gene pool, even the
very snobbish
Economist has
had the oracle in to predict the dietary frontiers of 2036 - a
distinct slippage from its usual, rigorous empiricism).
What
all this chef's broth boils down to is a contest over a very real set
of slippages: how we understand movement within and between social
classes. It's fitting that we should be so mesmerised and confused,
provoked and applauding, of someone like Jamie Oliver, because he -
in voice, tone and annoying colloquialism - represents all that feels
affected and forced in the personality of the effective social
climber. Hopping between classes is culturally a difficult thing to
do. To then become outspokenly critical of the 'lower orders' -
from among whose number you were flung - almost guarantees a welter
of opprobrium. The need to stratify class - to pin down class
identities - is betrayed by someone as energetically contrary and -
let's face it - obnoxious as Jamie Oliver. The historian E.P.
Thompson once described class as not "this or that part of [a
larger social] machine" but as "a social and cultural
formation." For Thompson class could not be defined abstractly
but "only in terms of relationship with other classes... Class
is not a thing, it is a happening." The thing happening
in the fuss around Jamie Oliver is a symptom of anxiety: the middle
class - always a little vulnerable in a society still partially in
awe of aristocratic privilege and yet predominantly working class -
doesn't want its waters muddied.
The
urge to stratify is embodied in that common British pastime, the
class survey. Last April most daily newspapers extensively covered a
report that contended there were now seven
classes in Britain's complex social matrix, from the "precariat"
(a buzzy new gloss on semi-employment) to the more familiar elite.
The research, conducted by the BBC, separated participants according
to empirical data: cars, houses, jobs, savings, and so on. Yet, ask
any of them if they felt like they belonged to their resultant group,
and they would almost certainly balk. Probably nobody
has ever felt passionately drawn to life as an "emergent service
sector worker." In this the "traditional working class"
survived - reduced, however, to a niggling 15% of the population.
Clearly, the survey is inadequate as an expression of class feeling.
Yet, how do we clearly establish what the majority of people feel
about class today?
*
The
social processes and experiences of capitalism tend to be class
forming; yet the degree and direction of class consciousness is not
determined by them. This battle takes place on the twin terrains of
politics and of culture. Clearly, not all people who work will
identify as working class. But because of capitalism's tendency to
unite vast numbers of workers in a similar relation to itself (most
don't have direct access to or ownership of the means of production;
neither do they have control over a great deal of money capital)
similarities not only of interest
but of social behaviour, custom, outlook, culture, and politics are
likely to arise. Selina Todd's recent book The People: The
Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910-2010 tells
this story of growing class consciousness in vibrant terms. What
excludes some from the privilege of membership? CEOs obviously work:
some part of their professional role is given over to the creation of
surplus value. Yet it's unlikely they'll identify in any immediate
sense with a wider working class culture because ultimately their
workplace power is necessarily greater; their proximity to the means
of production closer; their ability to control large amounts of money
capital infinitely greater, than the average worker. Nothing follows
necessarily from these facts. I'm not going to tell you that Sir Alan
Sugar isn't working class; only that you're unlikely to find him in a
dole queue - or for that matter on a picket line. The much talked
about "decline of the working class" since the 1970s does
not refer to an exclusively economic decline; it refers to the
crushing of the politically conscious minority of the working class
and more broadly those who identified with its traditional culture.
Capitalist social processes suggest, however, that its revival in new
political and cultural forms is a constant possibility.
*
Despite
the fact that so many British people continue to identify as working
class, it is the middle-class that fascinates our media. The limits
of this identity are contested in the unassuming form of a Jamie
Oliver or of an Alan Sugar or even of a Wayne Rooney. The British
middle class is, as Marx would have said, a classic "ruling
class." Its ideas tend publicly to dominate others. Yet, just as
capital is not static, the social composition and the worldview of
its core beneficiaries is not static either. Even if capital senses
no existential threat from below, particular layers within the middle
class must constantly reassert their right to privilege and to
elevation above "infiltrators." Through intellectual,
cultural and political ritual the fluidity of the middle class as a
social group can be combated.
E.P.
Thompson described the development of working-class identity from
1790-1832 from two perspectives: firstly, by looking at the growing
internal relations (of, say, artisans to the women's movement or to
unskilled labour) of consciously identifying working class people to
each other; and secondly by looking at the developing antagonisms
between the working class and society's rulers. The practical lesson
we can draw from the likes of both Thompson and Selina Todd is that
these relations do not develop in any fixed or necessary direction
(the admittedly limited attraction, described by Todd, of Oswald
Mosley's fascist Blackshirts for the working class demonstrates
this): class is in a constant process of change and fissure - both
internally and in relation to other classes. This makes the political
development of class relations peculiarly combustible and
unpredictable. Still, the difference between the working class and
the middle class is that only the latter must, by strict definition,
attempt viciously to preserve its privileged status from others. This
ontological openness of class is in fact a great reserve of strength
of the working class.
No comments:
Post a Comment