The 'Underclass'

You're not living in freedom, you are still subjected to the rules of capitalism even if you dodge some of them.

What did you do while you were 'opted out'?
How did you survive, I find it hard to believe that you weren't still in the system. Although you might not have been contributing you almost certainly used it to some sense. Human beings need to work together to survive, we are social beings and an element of solidarity is pretty much natural, capitalism tries to both use this against us (ie blackmailing nurses to take low wages) and to destroy it (setting us in competition against each other, using us against us)

Firstly many trades are not as simple as watching and doing, they require a certain amount of knowledge and skills and not everyone who can do something can teach it. In a world where people are set against each other of course people aren't going to help you for nothing, especially if you're a stranger.

Expecting people to be trained before you let them do a job and wanting a site to be safe are not necessarily bad things.

A vegan soap shop will be run by the bourgeois unless it's a co-op. Either way it's not outside of capitalism and it's certainly not underclass.

Capitalism is about forcing us to work and about taking the pleasure of creation and turning it into production. We'll still be making things after a revolution. Whether we avoid directly participating in capitalism or not we're still involved in it. In the same way as working in health or education (like many anarchists) removes you from the day to day making of profits but doesn't take you out of the system. We do what we can live with to get what we need to live.

Why did you choose to come to Dublin and Edinburgh out of interest?

I'm not convinced that there really is an 'underclass', at least not in terms of constituting a distinct social class, though the term can perhaps be used to identify one or more groupings or class fractions of destitute (semi)workers. But the term tends to be used rather too loosely to be all that useful. For the most part the 'underclass' is made up of unemployed workers, and those who are in various forms of short-term, casual, and precarious work. Some may well give up on formal employment, engaging instead in various forms of petty trading or commodity production, informal labour, illegal or semi-legal commercial activities, begging, or subsisting on the dole (to the extent that the vestiges of the welfare state in some countries makes that possible).

Some people in this position may adopt a 'petit-bourgeois' consciousness, as they attempt to subsist at an individual or household level by extracting scraps of wealth from the working class through various means. But they often move in and out of wage labour, and their other income sources are often temporary or supplementary in nature. Most of the sociological studies I've looked at on this issue also suggest that members of the 'underclass' tend to retain a working class consciousness, in terms of their backgrounds, aspirations, social outlook, and self-identification. (This is also true to some extent of the urban poor in the postcolonial world, where 'underclass' communities rely on the re-circulation of income derived from wage labour).

I agree with Alderson Warm-Fork that this isn't really an ethical or 'moral' issue. Politically, we shouldn't encourage the stigmatisation of those members of the class who have been less successful in selling their labour power. Although some hostility to those who engage in the more predatory 'underclass' activities is to be expected, at a political level most of this hostility is better directed at the 'underworld capitalists' who are actually turning a profit. (Still, stealing consumer goods from workers? Selling recreational pharmaceuticals of dubious and dangerous quality? Fraud, extortion, pimping, etc? Definitely predatory, and frankly deserving of hostility at an individual level. Living on the dole, busking, selling stuff at a street or market stall, doing some shoplifting or whatever in order to get by? Fair enough).

However, doing 'odd jobs' for cash does not make you a free agent, it makes you a casual, poorly-employed worker with little ability to struggle collectively. Why do you think so many jobs in many different industries have now been turned into positions for 'independent contractors'? It is clear that this is a mechanism for increasing exploitation and fragmenting resistance, as well as inculcating a neoliberal 'entrepreneurial' consciousness among workers. 'Underclass' forms of labour are often simply more precarious and stigmatised forms of this. Giving it a counter-cultural/anarchist gloss doesn't really change that at all. While you may not be directly producing value for capital, you are almost certainly contributing by playing a role in the circulation, realisation or reproduction of value.

Also, anonation, if you are working without proper skills or training you may be jeopardising the safety of other workers and/or the end consumer, and quite possibly helping to undermine some hard-fought improvements in working conditions. In terms of your personal position, I'd say it is probably best to go for that vegan soap job because living on the dole long-term really sucks (at least in Australia, but I imagine it is similar in Ireland and Scotland). You might want to join a union, though, and look hard at the wages and conditions on offer, because those kind of 'hippy' jobs often rely on the assumed cultural/political commitments of their employees to increase their exploitation. Also, in the case of very small businesses, the owners will often use their close personal relationships with their employees to exploit them even more. This is not necessarily because they are bad people - many are sincere in their 'we are all family/friends here' rhetoric - but because that is what their precarious economic position impels them to do.

In many ways it can actually be better to work for a large corporation – they tend to impinge less directly on your own affective and emotional life, and despite being rather alienating the various layers of management between workers and owners can give you more room to breathe (avoid work, evade surveillance, express your complaints to your fellow workers, maintain a cynical distance from work goals and corporate 'philosophy', appropriate supplies, form social attachments that exclude the boss, etc).

It is important not to romanticise the underclass as somehow being more radical due to being outside of capitalism – they aren't, really, in any substantial way. The existence of an 'underclass' is more a symptom of capitalist exploitation and alienation than it is a challenge to them. The limited extent to which you as an individual manage to distance yourself from alienated labour will also tend to intensify your alienation from society as a whole. This may or may not be a good thing for you personally - after all, our current society is inherently alienating and antagonistic in nature. But this is basically a personal lifestyle choice, not a political strategy. At a social-political level, greater distance from the social antagonism at the heart of capitalism reduces the power of a social group to struggle through and against that antagonism.

I'd argue that the 'underclass' can play an important political role if they are organised as part of the working class, as in unemployed workers' movements or in battles over social services, housing rights, etc. This can also help break down some of the divisions of relative privilege that undermine class action. Just as the objective of working class struggle should be to overcome the very existence of the 'working class' as such, so should struggles around the 'underclass' be directed against the very existence of an 'underclass' as a distinct, stigmatised and marginalised sector of the working class.

Read this far, took issue. People who work don't do so to actively support anything. Prisoners don't actively support their prisons. People work because the alternative is having an extremely low quality of life on social welfare.

What does this mean? Also what part of Dublin are you based in, you can build me a shed.