To think the working classes have been demonized in this country?

[AwkwardMary]

I just read an article about it...lost the page though...so can't link sorry! It really resonated with me...it spoke of how their are no positive working class characters on TV anymore...the comedy shows that portray them make them the lowest of the low and shows like TOWIE are only illustrating how the working classed "done good" are only as tacky and badly informed as they "ever were"...and how Little Britain was written by two middle class men who'd been to private schools...so who the eff were THEY to take the piss out of working class girls like they did?

In the 80s we had good, positive and sympathetic worknig class characters like Yosser and it spoke of how Brookside was born of the Thatcher Years and showed a truer representation of the hard working working classes. Those with respect for themselves and a good work ethic. The 50s, 60s and 70s had lots of good literature such as Kes and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Poor Cow, Up the Junction etc

These days people are all about moving forward and away from being working class...nothing wrong with that you may think...why shouldn't people aspire to a better lifestyle? Well of course they should but not if it means that anyone who isn't striving for a bigger house and more "things" is looked down on and called a chav.

Is it all about respectability? Have the real working classes lost their self respect?

(I am working class right through and often feel confused about my past and my present)

and Bread definitely working class

I think I'd like to see a big series, exploring meaty philosophical, existential, emotional, historical issues, with working class people at its centre, just accidentally.

One of the truly dire things is that when media choose a "neutral" set of characters to dramatise things, by default they tend to be middle class. As though middle class is the default setting. You end up with the impression that the wide world of life-experience and representation belongs to/is the natural setting of/the proper place of the middle class. And the proper place of the working class is some little token corner where they go about exploring the "issue" of being working class.

Just my little bug-bear.

The premise of Bread was that they all were on the dole and scamming the system. The family lived in granddads house and he lived in theirs, so they could each get HB paid to them. The original love affair was between Joey in his fancy car and his Signing On clerk.

I don't think that becoming unemployed makes you part of the underclass anymore than I think getting a degree makes you middle class but society does.

MissLemon I once got commissioned on a Radio 4 show and they were all very Oxbridge...I ALMOST went to the first meeting in a tracksuit and big gold hoops just to befuddle them. I wish I had now. I did have a sobering moment once...I had written a short script which was picked up by a theatre in Manchester and the director sneered at me when he met me...he thought I was middle class writing about the "Poor folk".

He was a bit of a wanker really and assumed a lot. All I had written was from personal experience.

It's late. Have just finished my shift. Yes the wc is demonised in this country, either ridiculed for getting above their station or castigated for feckless ways by TV programmes.

Yet these are the people who keep the country moving.

The term underclass is a horrible one. If I had to name it myself I would call it the hidden class or disaffected class but some twat called it the underclass and so that is what we are stuck with.

It IS late LittleAlbert and I should go to bed. Not sit here bollocking on about something I can't quite get my head around.

I would neither use nor think of 'underclass' - there are working class folk, and then there are the others also of limited means but I won't use the B word.
Feckless, shameless, chavvy - call them what you will but they are few and far between. Whatever label is given to these type of people is often used to describe the entire working class too. Entirely incorrectly.

Its cos the poshos is thick innit? They can't tell the difference. Good job WE know.

And the writer of Shameless grew up on a council estate, I think he was raised yhis teenage sister

I wonder who started calling it that Jaqueline I think it should be shot down as a term....it's horrid and only exists if people use it instead of working class.

AwkwardMary - those are interesting experiences. The man sneering at you for being posh writing about poor folk is fascinating. It works rather well to keep people down, doesn't it? It has the patina of being "right on" but at the same time is operating on a very nasty, very suppressive logic: "The working classes have limited access to representation and the means of representatin - to be working class is to have limited access to the means of representation - if you represent the working class you cannot, therefore, be "authentically" working class - only the middle class represent the working class - authentic working classness=silent and represented by others.

Very specious. But effective.

Also the refusal to see you as working class - or to find you terrifying when you "act" all working class, or display your working classness too much.

I reckon we could call all that ... what? A structure, or structures of, Bodenising? An absolute inability to "see" working classness or maybe an insistence on re-representing working-classness in ways acceptable to the existing class structure of representation?

I think underclass is linked to all that pomo stuff that decentred Marxism, etc., and wanted to take the issue of class away from agency, revolution and structural stuff. Though whether it was right or left wing I can't remember. My guess would be right-wing.

I think of and use the term underclass as I used and discussed that and the working classess a lot in my dissertation. I hate it but it is used regularly now to describe and pigeon hole a large section of society.

I don't view those catergorised as the underclass as feckless, shameless or chavvy (others may think this is what they are but I don't). They are often the most vunerable members of our society and sadly are not few and far between and desperately need positive role models in their lives and equality of oppertunity in education.

Animula, I completely agree with you re. inability to see the WC and the preference to re-classify. Nasty, nasty, nasty.

That's right Animula I never had the guts to make myself stand out as working class really. My accent has probably faded into something neither here nor there if I'm honest...so the director might have found it hard to "place" me.

It's ok for Johnny Vegas to be all working class but when a woman tries it on, she's shat on.

jaqueline but don't you feel you are doing those people a disservice?

Doea anyone else remember that show in the mid to late ninties? It had three to four stand alone episodes and had been written by a group of people on a council estate. I think it was on BBC2 and the episode that sticks out in my mind was about an ice cream van being used for dealing.
As for classes, I'll stick with Marx for my defintion. The proletariat are the people who are paid wages and the bourgeois are the people who pay them.
Probably a bit too simplistic for modern society but it works for me.

I think I have to go to bed...but thank you for all the insight. It's been very enlightening. I have learned a lot.

I might remember that fridakahlo did it also have one where a little girl and her siblings stole some money from a dealer relative and went to Blackpool and blew it all on crap and a good time?

jaqueline its late and I may have read your post wrongly, but the point I was making about 'feckless, chavvy etc' is that we working class are often referred to in the same way as the few in society who add nothing, literally nothing. It is unfair on us that the term 'underclass' refers from the bottom up and includes us iyswim?

No why would I be?

I am recognising that society and that includes many working class people have decided to define those at the bottom of the class structure as an underclass.

I could refuse to recognise this and not use the terminology but that would then stop me from ever properly being able to challenge it. I refuse to just sweep it under the carpet and pretend that these stratifications in class haven't happened, they have and they must be addressed.

G'night, AwkwardMary.

You know, FridaKahlo, I only partly agree with that (about Marx). The little analysis thingy I proffered earlier is very, very indebted to the thinking of Black theorists, theorists of racial oppression and identity, and the experience of living in a racially exploitative and oppressive society/ies. I've found a lot of this work to be subtle and very useful.

I sometimes wonder if one of the problems we have in speaking about the working class these days is because of the debt to Marxism to name and speak of the working class. And we need to accept work done eslewhere and accept it with gratitude.

That said, Marxism, at the end of the day, speaks powerfully of exploitation - which for me is the fndamental thing I'm bothered with - so I'd never want to lose that.

I missed the series set on a council estate. I watch waaay too many US crime dramas.

"underclass" can be useful in highlighting the fact that many people are extremely removed from the structures of production and society in any meaningful way. And that this class has a meaningful presence in the way modern socieites are structured - one requiring of modern analysis.

I think Marx's lumpenproletariat doesn't really cover it.

An interesting idea is that, far from the working classes disappearing, in fact they are expanding. A lot of folk who think of themselves as middle class are, in fact, a new proletariat. Eg. lots of people working in the education indistries, at may levels.

MissKeithLemon -- 'the point I was making about 'feckless, chavvy etc' is that we working class are often referred to in the same way as the few in society who add nothing, literally nothing. It is unfair on us that the term 'underclass' refers from the bottom up and includes us iyswim?'

This is almost my entire point, what you have just said is that you are fed up as a working class person of being lumped in with the underclasses who offer nothing to society.

Yes you are right there is some blurring of the lines between the lower classes but generally the working classess are held in a higher esteem than those in the underclasses. You yourself have just defined yourself as seperate to those who in your opinion contribute nothing. You do not want to be placed in the same class as that group of people, you do not want to be associated with those people who contribute nothing.

Some people are wankers and happily take from everyone and never, ever contribute to society. However, I would argue that these people are in all classes and would not be how I define the underclass.