Chavs by Owen Jones

Was actually interested in reading this. I knew of the author when he was around UK left network many years ago. I think he's in the labour party now if I am not mistaken.

I often don't like Toynbee, but that's a great article

Yeah from his twitter he is in the Labour Party and actively promotes leftists joining it to try to bring it back to being a left wing party again or something like this.

http://libcom.org/tags/labour-party should either convince you that it never was a left wing party, or convince you that the concept of a left wing party is meaningless.

Hmmm, I'm dubious. Sounds like identity politics for poor people, sketched out by the comfortably off. If that hunch is correct, that would be two kinds of shit.

Seems interesting. But it's kinda expensive, gonna wait for it to lower price.

Well there are lots of parts to this:

Most articles don't say it explicitly, but I have never seen 'chav' used to mean anything other than (usually poor) white people. So usually they are comparing 'chav' to 'white trash' as used in the US, at least IMO.

The idea that 'chav' can be used interchangeably for 'working class' ignores that there are vast swathes of the working class who would never be referred to as chavs.

When I see people like Toynbee jumping on this, it feels like just another way to reinforce their view that working class people only live on benefits/housing estates (this is also something that annoyed me about some IWCA literature, and Class War). So yes I do think a lot of the anti-Chav stuff is identity politics.

This is partly because there is another level where chav to at least some extent does describe particular subcultures - when I was growing up I don't ever remember hearing chav, but there was 'townies' and 'garys' - and these tended to refer to specific types of behaviour like driving souped up Ford fiestas in circles around the town centre one way system for hours on Friday night. All of these regional words which were used interchangeably with other subcultural terms like goth etc. appear to have been merged into a single national epithet over the past 15-20 years.

The Owen Jones book may or may not fall into this, but it's definitely an issue with Guardian articles on the subject.

The term 'chav' tends to refer to what is sometimes called the 'underclass', which is a class reviled by many who see themselves as 'working class'.

Not recognising that the most explicit hatred for 'chavs' comes from the working class is not understanding why this divide is so harmful to any aspirations of the working classes to work together.

The likes of Toynbee are looking too far up the 'food chain' when describing this issue.

Interesting review here

Or another review here: http://www.blowe.org.uk/2011/08/review-chavs-demonization-of-working.html

Anyone read this yet?

So has anyone read it? I am thinking of buying it.

Second half of this you have a defence of Owens thesis against Little BritIain.

Thanks for the link. I thought what he said about agency at the very end was very true, but the earlier part of his argument was a bit workerist and sociological for me. I think it would have been better if he had taken a more Marxist approach to his analysis and talked about wage labour, the problems with the sociological definition of class etc.

you know Malva, there is a big big big tradition of marxist sociologists

But I thought we were interested in revolution on this forum. Not in the way that reading Marx can inform the economic or cultural policies of contemporary society. There is a big big big tradition of Marxist economists too. Ed Miliband's dad was one! I'm just not interested in that kind of use of Marx at all. (And from a more totalising point of view these kind of specialist readings of Marx are a very dubious way of reading his project). That isn't to say I don't think Owen's argument is useful or worthwhile, I'm just being critical of it from the perspective of what concerns me.

Not in the way that reading Marx can inform the economic or cultural policies of contemporary society.

This definition does not exhaust sociology, and is equally applicable to every area of study....

There are many marxist sociologists are also interested in revolution (and a concomitant question, why it doesn't seem to have happened, despite all the 'revolutionary' sutras). In my view Marxism is a heterogeneous multi-disciplinary school that should stress the co-production of totality across disciplines rather adding footnotes to the bible *cough* I mean Capital*. Marx says so at the beginning of Capital Vol. 1 himself. He is not writing receipts for the future. Marxism is a school of thought and a tradition of study and praxis. Why should sociology be excluded from that?

I think its also worth pointing out that Ralph Milliband himself wasn't strictly speaking an 'economist' (or to be pedantic a political economist) but instead covered a broad set of disciplines from political science, sociology and political economy

Now I am on the fence about Owen Jones book as i haven't read it, what I am defending is sociology against its use as a term of denigration. The fact that you are not interested in Marxist influenced sociology, doesn't mean it doesn't exist

*Capital its self is not only a book about economics. Chapter on the working day anybody? Seems pretty *sociological* to me!

I didn't express myself very well above at all. I was saying the opposite of what you think I said. I was trying to say that just because there is a 'big big big' tradition of something doesn't mean we shouldn't be critical of it. The kind of reading I was rejecting was precisely one that isn't multidisciplinary! When I was dissing sociology I was also dissing economics. Of course, they have made interesting intellectual contributions but i've always understood, following the SI, that the important thing was not just to describe the world but to change it. In other words, I thought the 'sociological' category of class Owen used was not as useful/interesting as a more class struggle oriented definition would have been. Obviously that isn't the book he was trying to write, but that was my point.

I might add that, ok I didn't express myself well, but I feel you were pretty quick to jump down my throat before asking me to clarify my opinion. It's that sort of thing that puts many people off posting.

Thats not an SI idea, it is Marx's famous eleventh thesis in the Theses on Feuerbach, but yeah it is a guiding thread that runs through all Marxist scholarship (including some sociology believe it or not). I'm pretty sure when Marx made the point however, he was not throwing the descriptive baby out with the revolutionary bath water (and Capital attests to the need for description and interpretation).

OK I didn't ask you to clarify your opinion perhaps that was wrong, but I am not sure my first post constitutes jumping down throats. Maybe I will make a new thread about it, because I'm getting pretty hacked off with the way people lazily band around an unqualified versions of 'sociology' as if it were a meaningful derogatory adjective rather than a huge area of scholarship...

Maybe I'm following this wrong, but I think there's a perfectly legitimate critique of the descriptive way a large amount of sociology uses class as a concept.

The way the political content of much sociology is simply the dull and slightly sanctimonious references to gender, race and sexuality as if they're ticking off boxes. This doesn't seem to ignore the existence of Marxist sociologists but is what I thought Malva was getting at.

OK I will really have to start a thread about this because it is really veering this thread off course

Yeah I know it was Marx in the Theses on Feuerback but it was the SI who applied it to sociology, as a separate school of thought and an academic discipline, precisely because of the function it currently serves within contemporary society. Also, you could argue that sociology, or the sociological, is a parcellisation of the kind of synthesis Marx aimed at creating. It was the SI who asked 'Why do we need sociologists?' Of course Marx wasn't throwing out the 'descriptive baby with the revolutionary bath water' but he was saying that how you describe something also depends on the results you are trying to achieve. Owen has described the working class in terms that are not useful to the self abolishment of that class. That is the problem people have with sociology and why it is used as a derogatory term. Again, it was not the book he was trying to write. And again, that is my problem with his book and with sociology in general.

Yeah, I don't know if you've read any Ralph Milliband. But from the limited amount I have read, I think you are being completely and utterly unfair to him. His two major works were a study on the labour party and a study on the role of the state in capitalism. Neither of which are their to provide 'economic policy' but are marxist analyses clearly written to help the working class movement for socialism.

Okay. I take back what I said about Ralph Milliband as I have never read his work and I was casting him as guilty by association, all of which is unfair.

@Arbeiten: Definitely start a thread on sociology. I'd be interested in hearing more of your point of view.

Was he ever a chav/townie/scally/whatever? Really don't like him trying to speak on other's behalf. Seems like a replacement for Johann Hari (just as Penny is Toynbee's)...

For what it's work, I read it around a month ago and I thought it was pretty good. The accusations of "identity politics" describe the marketing of the book rather than its content, which is much more concerned with the sociology of class (in which regard he does adopt a para-Marxist definition of the working class as "those who have to work for others to make a living") and, as Jacques Roux said, the manipulation of class as an ideological framework. (In fact, once you get a few chapters in, the title doesn't actually begin to make much sense. He spends more time talking about call centres than he does about Vicky Pollard.)

It won't tell you a huge amount you don't know, but sometimes its useful just to read a coherent discussion of a topic to help tidy up your own understanding. The political allegiances of the author only intrude in the final chapter, in which he attempts (frankly pretty lamely) to offer a sketch of a revived class politics, and for all the hostility towards someone from a relatively privileged background writing about those from poor backgrounds ("Engels: what a cunt"?), it did not seemed to me possessed of any illusions one way or the other.

He sounds like a children's TV presenter whenever he's interviewed. Pin-up boy for the Labour left. No idea what the book's like though...

http://thecommune.co.uk/2012/10/26/owen-jones-cringing-in-the-shadow-of-margaret-thatcher/