Middle-Aged Punks for the Right

  Speaking on Brexit vote, Rotten said (see Alan's link) "the working class have spoke and I’m one of them and I’m with them.”   Well I wouldn’t exactly call him working class though no doubt he began life in the working class.  According to this site his net worth is $15 million, paltry for a celebrity of his fame but it just enables him to clamber onto the lowest rungs of the capitalist class, I guess (http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celeb/singer/john-lydon-net-worth/) But his comments on the relationship between working class and the Brexit vote are interesting and significant.  Of course, Rotten is not using the term working class on the Marxian sense but in the mainstream sociological sense referring to income and occupational categories.  This is the big problem with identity politics (and Rotten's apparent identification of working class with low income, blue collar workers is an expression of identity politics) is that it covers over and conceals the really basic class fault lines in capitalist society which hinge on one's relationship to the means of wealth production. It’s not that categorising people according to income or occupation is wrong – it is perfectly legitimate to categorise people in this way. The real issue is what is the purpose for using one particular criterion for categorising people into classes as opposed to another I would say the purpose behind the mainstream system of classification is quite complex and is primarily bound up with capitalism system of status differentiation though there are subsidiary aspects to this – such as that it enables businesses to hone their marketing  strategy by pitching their sales drives to particular segments of the population.  But status differentiation is an absolutely essential ideological prop to class rule and I think as socialists we don’t pay enough attention to the sociology of class struggle and how ideology is used as a weapon in that struggle.  The claim that we live in a meritocracy and that the wealthy are somehow deserving of their wealth is clear example of the way in which status differentiation is used to reinforce the status quo. What we are seeing in the case of Rotten’s use of the term working class where “working class” had come to be seen as a badge of honour is analogous to the way the racist word “nigger” has had its meaning inverted by some sections of the black community.  Gangsta Rappers in the music industry, for example, quite often make use of the N word – or “nigga” –in a way which arms them against the conventional stigma associated with that word by turning its meaning into something quite positive. In other words it disarms the racist of the power to belittle blacks by calling them niggers So it is with the word “working class” in the sense of blue collar low income workers.  It is in one sense a positive response against the conventional system of status differentiation that ties high status with large wealth but in another way it is deeply reactionary on the sense that it misidentifies the source of wealth inequality in capitalist society by shifting the focus away from the all-important criterion of how one relates to the means of wealth production and focusses instead on aspects such as occupation  I think to quite a large extent the rise of populism we have witnessed in the past few years – Brexit, Trump, the spread of xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe – can be understood in these terms of a reinvigorated “working class” reacting to the contempt shown towards it by the political establishment.  It is a case of jostling for higher status within a conventional system of status differentiation that does not significantly threaten that system of status differentiation let alone capitalism itself

There's never a Mark Chapman around when you need one.

agreed

I agree with you but the mod has been a help, in this matter. But perhaps we should get back to the issues raised originally and concentrate on the things we said today, rather than rake helter skelter over past posts.

We are getting too many trolls and spammers in this forum