THE CULTURE OF THE "PROLES"
Newman, William J.
1 One advantage of living in a nation like Britain is that it occasionally produces a point of view that has not occurred to Americans. The current discussion in America on mass culture has...
...Morrow...
...As one desperate woman put it: "When I first came," said Mrs...
...So it was with American immigrant culture...
...But in terms of power, without regard to asset positions, not only do 500 corporations control two-thirds of the non-farm economy but within each of that 500 a still smaller group has the ultimate decision-making power...
...The workers, in this view, become not just something operated on or found at the bottom of a dark well, but the source of the values which go under the name Socialism...
...What Hoggart seems to be saying is that the unique way of life which the worker had created for himself within the context of an unfavorable and cramped social setting is now being debased to other ends...
...They don't know you, of course, since friendship is not the sort of thing planned in the offices of the London County Council...
...And these houses do have their effect...
...Not only the family with its omnipotent figure of Mum, but all the other relatives, friends and companions that one accumulates through a lifetime of living in the same street are constant and daily face-to-face contacts...
...They show I59 exactly what happens to the ways of life of Bethnal Green when it is transferred to a housing "estate" project on the edge of London...
...Sandeman is no longer so shocked by the hills that creep up to the shops, but the facts of life in a housing estate have not, therefore, changed: they are isolation, the collapse of community life, the competitive urge to get ahead of you-know-who...
...The group sense of the worker which demanded conformity from his fellows has led to a "callow democratic equalitarianism which is itself the necessary ground for the activities of the publicists...
...The "Them-Us" antithesis is simply a generalized expression of this feeling...
...Even sensationalism is losing its peculiar working-class character and is becoming a "candy-floss world," a world not of blood and thunder as it pretends, but a world "where nothing real happens, a twilight of half-responses automatically given...
...the owners, flat-capped and with an eye cocked upwards and a stopwatch ready, wait for their pigeons to come softly out of the Saturday dusk...
...But what does settling down mean in a housing estate...
...And so, remarkably, do the sociologists of Family and Kinship in East London...
...A workingclass family thus consists of a small cluster of families, that is, the families of marriage of the daughters and their common family of origin, and it is made up in the main of the three generations of grandparents, parents and grandchildren...
...To move the whole bloody borough at once...
...The workers are responsible for the very essence of socialism, which is the concept of collective democracy— a concept that grows out of the culture of the working class...
...III Hoggart says all this community life is being threatened...
...To say that there is constant interaction between households to the extent that they become merged into an extended family pattern is to use sociological jargon for a life which bursts outside of the small and confined household walls of Bethnal Green...
...They point out that those were not good old days but bad old days...
...In this way, he says, mass man emerges from the working man...
...This is, I think, the highest concentration of economic power in recorded history...
...Withdrawing into "Us" therefore becomes not only an instinctive act but the means of drawing the bonds even closer...
...William Morris on the rampage again...
...One is that as the workingclass way of life disappears the moral source of socialism may disappear too...
...by Essential Books, $6...
...Of course...
...Long residence by itself creates a community: There is a sense of community, that is, a feeling of solidarity between people who occupy the common territory, which springs from the fact that people and their families have lived there a long time...
...One must raise one's hat and pass on, recognizing that it is time for the worker to lose his parochial ways...
...Some further statistical analysis is called for if financial corporations be included, for these, of course, double up...
...assumed to be hostile, it is best left alone...
...more striking, 51 per cent of the married women live in the same house or same street as their parents...
...But is the trash which the worker reads today so different from the trash he read thirty years ago...
...These are the reasons they go and stay...
...Maybe socialism can be kept alive without the source itself, and then again maybe it will be transformed—into the welfare state...
...There is no Mum, no pub (in one "estate" there is one pub for 5,000 persons, in Bethnal Green there is one for every 400) , no childhood friends, no network of relations...
...You can't get away from it, they're not so friendly down here...
...Let us turn to the hard-headed soothsayer of our day, the sociologist...
...It is not, he says, a lack of the gadgets of suburban existence which is evidence of a self-contained working-class culture with its own particular set of values—a culture which is almost unknown in America...
...On the housing estate they might as well be at the end of the world...
...so it will be with British working-class culture...
...Nevertheless, he presents a useful hypothesis when he claims that the mass publications by taking advantage of certain already existing attitudes which spring out of the worker's "native" culture can twist them to mean their opposite...
...But it is even more extended than this description implies, since it includes relatives of every sort and degree...
...To be sure the people in the housing estate are brought there from all the slums of London instead of just Bethnal Green, but what do these people expect...
...Very well...
...they force people to compete against each other to keep up appearances...
...Unfortunately, Hoggart relies not merely on the memories of his own youth, which are always valuable and authentic, but on the more debatable evidence of his studies of mass publications...
...But he does see—luridly—the menace of the mass media to the integrity of the worker...
...For in Williams' view the latter works through the same inequalitarian and impersonal institutions as the former...
...British working-class life, as Hoggart describes it, is characterized by a sense of place...
...The working class has indeed no monopoly of these primary virtues, in particular close family allegiance...
...for each couple studied in Bethnal Green there was an average of thirty-four relatives living in the same borough...
...But the bourgeois idea of social relationships—is not only a cause of tension in itself, leading to open and covert attempts to limit such opportunities...
...Politics never did anybody any good," they will add...
...The outside world—which includes not only, say, the Bank of England but also the motor bus which goes past their known streets— is the unknown and strange...
...that there was not only unemployment and bad housing but that the husband was often brutal in his family relationships...
...Then there is the opposition the British workers have traditionally felt between "Them and Us...
...it is a thing these people desire for the warmth and solidarity which it brings in time of joy as well as trouble...
...The sociologists do not, as perhaps Hoggart might be accused of doing, weep tears over the sad departed past of the workers...
...THE WORKER is concerned with the "personal and the concrete," not with the abstractions which government officials and professors throw at him...
...The picture of working-class life given by Young and Willmott in their recent Family and Kinship in East London confirms both Hoggart and the Universities and Left Review in their emphasis on a still existing but threatened autonomous community and culture among the workers of Britain (in this particular case the workers of Bethnal Green...
...All of which leads to "indifferentism...
...And of these none is closer to the heart of the author than the "scholarship boy...
...and that the working-class home was constantly being broken up by early death, drunkenness, unemployment, or just plain old-fashioned immorality...
...And getting that little more depends less on skill than on luck, since of course it is Them who arbitrate the game...
...One had always thought the Webbs were the source of socialism...
...Williams writes: The primary affections and allegiances, first to the family, then to neighborhood, can in fact be directly extended into social relationships as a whole, so that the idea of a collective democratic society is at once based on direct experience, and is available, as an idea, to others who wish to subscribe to it...
...One hopes that the worker knows that "we" do think that...
...it is a living fact...
...IV One must not be sentimental...
...The worker wants to get by, to get whatever he can out of his life, to get a little extra but not necessarily to move up the social scale...
...And that can best be described in the phrase, community existence—the very opposite of mass culture...
...If you have only a toilet, you're not so good...
...If you have a toilet and a tellie, you're all right...
...There are about half a million pigeon 'fanciers in Great Britain, organized in about one thousand Homing Clubs...
...Hoggart maintains that this traditional working-class culture is not so much a matter of community as it is a "sense of group warmth" that is not to be found outside the working class...
...The British intellectual as the Universal Aunt watching the children at play is always a piquant sight...
...There is of course the tellie and to that they cling with desperation...
...It is from ties of kinship and friendship based on long residence that a community grows up...
...Thus the notion of "live and let live" which Hoggart finds characteristic of workingclass tolerance can become, he claims, a form of "mass hedonism"—the idea that all restraints are gone...
...a world of monstrous and swirling undifferentiation...
...One sign of this importance lies in the discussion it has aroused in Britain, a discussion that tells a great deal about the importance of working-class culture for British Socialism...
...The goal is a housing estate...
...One of the Universities and Left Review writers, Raymond Williams, offers a lively description of the essential difference between working-class culture and both mass and bourgeois culture...
...As Hoggart describes it, the fundamental culture of the English proles is not politically oriented: As to politics...
...Even in such a drab, limited and finally unsatisfactory transformation there will of course be important gains...
...In this way too the worker is trained to follow not the way of life that is deeply part of his experience and heritage but the way of life taught by the ad-man...
...There are other things of course: better housing (the worker is surely not a romantic) , a better place for the children to grow up...
...His discussion of the impact of mass publications has the weakness of most such discussion, i.e., it assumes that what people read crucially affects the way they think...
...He tells us that Marriage and the home [among the working class] retain their importance more strongly than we are often inclined to think...
...And only now, with no lapse into sentimental nostalgia or idyllic fantasies about the life of the proles, are we beginning to appreciate the magnitude of those losses...
...to-day affair, as something around which her domestic economy is orgnized, her life arranged, the extended family has ceased to exist...
...The current discussion in America on mass culture has been concerned mainly with its effect on the psyche of the distraught middle class and its unfortunate offspring...
...Everybody lives by themselves," said a Mr...
...So do the writers of the Universities and Left Review...
...Life centres on the groups of known streets, on their complex and active group life .. . [It is] an extremely Iocal life in which everything is remarkably near...
...For in Britain the working class is not merely a Marxist category or a socialist abstraction...
...Long residence is the rule in Bethnal Green: 53 per cent of the people interviewed by Young and Willmott had been born there, and of the others more than half had lived there over 15 years...
...This nearness of friends and relations—not to mention enemies —is not merely a matter of necessity but also of choice...
...For facts beyond the immediate experience come from Them and are to be treated accordingly...
...Most working-class people are not climbing...
...Still, there are plenty of good houses on these estates...
...The key to the character and viability of this particular type of family-community life is the length of residence of most if not all of the members of the family in a very restricted area...
...they have a limited realism which tells them that, as far as they can see, "there's no future" in it for them...
...Such a flat summary does not do justice to the richness of detail with which Hoggart carries out his exploration of these attitudes...
...Since the United States carries on not quite half of the manufacturing production of the entire world today, these 500 groupings—each with its own little dominating pyramid within it—represent a concentration of power over economics which makes the medieval feudal system look like a Sunday School party.—[From Economic Power and the Free Society, by A.A...
...They come to terms with it, but most of them still look to Bethnal Green as their home and would like to go back...
...he is being taught to conform to the same concepts and patterns of behavior as all the other classes...
...That will weaken the economy of Britain and thereby the whole Western way of life...
...Cultural subjection is the end result of this process and the end result of the use—actually, of course, the abuse—of literacy...
...It is a family which has a secure and integral role as the essence of a community of relations and friends...
...But in passing several points may be made...
...Instead of dropping into Mum's next door they stay at home, lower the shades, turn out the lights and sit quietly waiting for the BBC or ITV to amuse them...
...Has he not gone to great pains to bring together people of similar economic background...
...Much of this has been changed in Bethnal Green today...
...The closeness of kinship ties, the multiplicity of friends and relations in a particular area, and the consequent feeling of belonging to one place and group is thus seen as a fundamental characteristic of British working-class life and culture...
...Sandeman, "I cried for weeks, it was so lonely...
...The birth rate has fallen so that women are no longer burdened with unwanted children, and the husband not only does not spend all his time and cash in the pub but even helps with the dishes...
...It is a story, familiar to Americans, bright working-class boys being taken out of their class and moved into a sort of no-man's land between the middle and working class...
...One of the largest and most plainly oligarchically controlled corporations in the United States, the Metropoiltan Life Insurance Company, duplicates assets because it holds securities of other corporations...
...Published in the U.S...
...It is not just that [the wife] sees less of relatives than before: as a day...
...Suddenly they find all their props, all their habits and relationships at an end...
...His removal from his working-class past and his refusal or inability to participate in the culture of the working class must eventually lead to the destruction of that culture...
...Distrust of the outside world is combined with a sense of uniqueness to create and maintain an atmosphere of exclusiveness...
...Being sent to Coventry is still probably the most terrifying weapon a trade union can use against a recalcitrant worker, and its roots lie not in an administrative fiat from Transport House but in the feeling that if you are not one of Us you are one of Them...
...Living in these housing estates can be a grim experience to the workers of Bethnal Green...
...Sentimental bosh...
...Nineteenth-century romantic humanitarianism...
...In the light of this tough defensive pact, appeals from Them to work harder for the benefit of dear old Britain are more than slightly ludicrous...
...The unique nature of socialism as distinct from the welfare state—a distinction the Labor Party has in effect rejected— comes from its making the best aspects of working-class culture into an ideological goal...
...they do not quarrel with their general level...
...they only want the little more that allows for a few frills...
...Nor must one show any sign of delight when the worker asserts his independence and calls an unofficial strike against the orders of both the government and his union boss...
...Insofar as Labor Democracy or Tory Democracy—one is no longer sure there is much difference between them—actually achieves its aim of taking the best brains out of the working class and integrating them into the pre-existing class structure, the working class must of necessity become both devitalized and rejected...
...THE NATURE of the threat to the working class of this particular form of social mobility is not quite grasped by Hoggart...
...The sense of group solidarity tends to decline into the claim that "everybody's doing it...
...It was a shock to see such a deep hill going up to the shops...
...So they mostly ignore each other...
...A recent book, Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy,* has focused attention on the problem by attempting to show that the values embodied in British working-class culture are now under sustained attack...
...If it is a book with many flaws, at least it releases one from the tyranny of middle-class Narcissism...
...But the British have been wondering about another aspect of the problem: What is the effect of mass culture on the working class and its particular way of life...
...1 One advantage of living in a nation like Britain is that it occasionally produces a point of view that has not occurred to Americans...
...Footnote to the Power Elite Today approximately 50 per cent of American manufacturing—that is everything other than financial and transportation—is held by about 150 corporations, reckoned, at least, by asset values...
...Thus one out of every three persons in Bethnal Green has his parents living within two or three miles...
...Men live in and belong to a particular locality, usually no more than a very small number of streets...
...11 If The Uses of Literacy has many weaknesses, it is also an important book...
...And it is this known and felt reality of working-class life which emerges from the discussion of Hoggart's book in a recent issue of Universities and Left Review, a new magazine edited by socialist students...
...Do they settle down...
...But Raymond Williams will have none of this guff...
...As a result, efforts to step outside the group way of behavior are heavily paid for...
...The problem involved is by now a cliche in America, but in Britain it is new I55 and painful, since the scholarship boy is a postwar phenomenon...
...Yes, that's it, the whole bloody borough...
...Thus the political significance of British working-class life lies in its family and neighborhood relationships which have been or can be generalized to a whole society...
...Presumably Mrs...
...And the Gaitskells and all the bright young Oxford men who did so much to help the workers...
...Life is earnest, life is real and the grave is not the goal...
...The important things in life, so far as they can see, are other things...
...Socialism, he says, is not the bourgeois competitive society and is not—repeat, not—the service-welfare state...
...What happens is very simply that the Bethnal Green existence comes to an abrupt end and the workers are brought uneasily to adopt mass middleclass standards of existence...
...But the drama of the book resides in the other forces which he sees destroying the working-class style of life...
...He fails to convince because like so many other British intellectuals he responds to the worker in terms of a quasi-romanticism based on moral patronage...
...Getting to like the tellie...
...It's not 'Hello, Joe,' 'Hello, mate.' They pass you with a sideglance as though they don't know you...
...Conformity beyond the extent of middle-class conformity lies at the heart of this culture: "There may be little of the competitive urge to keep up with the Joneses, but just as powerful can be the pressure to keep down with the Atkinses...
...True, housing is still very bad, but better than it was...
...The worker] is more likely to change his place of work than his place of living: he belongs to a district more than to one works...
...The changes of the past few decades have thus created an "emerging partnership" between husband and wife where before there had been a family on the verge of collapse...
...These are the men whose birds are released from cane baskets by railway porters at the end of the quieter platforms on Saturdays...
...Evidently giving up the middle class as lost, and trained to a keen sense of differences in class behavior, some of the British are concerned about what is happening to the worker in the age of the big screen, the big prize, and the big boom...
...Things are too serious to allow the worker to demonstrate his sense of class identiy...
...THE PATTERN which is and has been characteristic of workingclass life is that of a three-generation family...
...The house becomes a tyrant...
...They do not stay because they enjoy living there...
...A surprise, this...
...And he also concludes that there remain elements of resistance to mass culture in the working class today: The Hulton Survey suggests that bird-fancying is more popular with working-class people than with any others...
...This is actual asset ownership...
...Nor is naivete missing from Hoggart's approach...
...If finance and transportation are included, the total increases...
...If a rather larger group is taken, the statistics would probably show that about two-thirds of the economically productive assets of the United States, excluding agriculture, are owned by a group of not more than 500 corporations...
...but Hoggart, Williams and our two sociologists tells us that there will also be significant losses...
...it is also a cause of immediate tension, in that the values of the family cannot be extended into society as a whole—a man works for a family, but competes against other men to do so...
...To the planner this must seem wilful perversity...
...The sense of place and of knowing where you are—is this not the very reverse of subtopia...
...Berle Jr., published by the Fund for the Republic...
...Hoggart tries to show that it is, but here he is not entirely convincing...
...The working class and the bourgeois are "committed to different and alternative versions of the nature and purposes of society, and consequently to different versions of human relations...
Vol. 5 • April 1958 • No. 2
