Kameraden en vrienden, op deze fraaie zaterdag tijd voor een interessant artikel uit het Britse
over arbeiderscultuur, middenklasse-cultuur en gentrificatie.
London’s middle class are in crisis — they feel empty and clamor for vitality. Their work is alienating and meaningless, many of them in “bullshit jobs” that are either socially useless, overly bureaucratic or divorced from any traditional notion of labor.
Financial services exist to
grow the fortunes of capitalists, advertising to exploit our
insecurities and public relations to manage the reputations of companies
that do wrong. Society would not collapse without these industries. We
could cope without the nexus of lobbyists, corporate lawyers and big
firm accountants whose sole purpose is to protect the interests of
capital. How empty if must feel to work a job that could be abolished
tomorrow. One that at best makes no tangible difference to society and
at worst encourages poverty, hunger and ecological collapse.
At
the same time our doctors, teachers, university professors, architects,
lawyers, solicitors and probation officers are rendered impotent.
Desperate to just do their jobs yet besieged by bureaucracy and
box-ticking. Their energies are focused not on helping the sick,
teaching the young or building hospitals but on creating and maintaining
the trail of paperwork that is a prerequisite of any meaningful action
in late capitalist society. Talk to anybody in these professions, from
the public or private sector, and the frustration that comes up again
and again is that they spend the majority of their time writing reports,
filling in forms and navigating bureaucratic labyrinths that serve only
to justify themselves.
This
inaction hurts the middle-class man. He feels impotent in the blue
glare of his computer screen. Unable to do anything useful, alienated
from physical labor and plagued by the knowledge that his father could
use his hands, and the lower classes still do. Escape, however, is
impossible. Ever since the advent of the smartphone the traditional
working day has been abolished. Office workers are at the constant mercy
of email, a culture of overwork and a digitalization of work. Your job
can be done anytime, anywhere and this is exactly what capital demands.
Refuge can only be found in sleep, another domain which capital is determined to control.
And
when the middle classes are awake and working, they cannot even show
contempt for their jobs. Affective (or emotional) labor has always been a
part of nursing and prostitution, be it fluffing pillows or faking
orgasms, but now it has infected both the shop floor of corporate
consumer chains and the offices of middle-management above. Staff
working at Pret-à-Manger are encouraged to touch each other, “have
presence” and “be happy to be themselves.” In the same way the open
plan, hyper-extroverted modern office environment enforces positivity.
Offering a systemic critique of the very nature of your work does not
make you a ‘team player.’ In such an environment, bringing up the
pointlessness of your job is akin to taking a shit on the boss’s desk.
This
culture is symptomatic of neoliberal contradiction, one which tells us
to be true to ourselves and follow our passions in a system that makes
it nearly impossible to do so. A system where we work longer hours, for
less money and are taught to consume instead of create. Where fulfilling
vocations such as teaching, caring or the arts are either vilified,
badly paid or not paid at all. Where the only work that will enable you
to have a comfortable life is meaningless, bureaucratic or evil. In such
a system you are left with only one option: to embrace the myth that
your job is your passion while on a deeper level recognizing that it is
actually bullshit.
This is London’s middle class crisis.
But
thankfully capital has an antidote. Just as in Titanic, when Kate
Winslet saps the life from the visceral, working class Leonardo
DiCaprio, middle-class Londoners flock to bars and clubs that sell a
pre-packaged, commodified experience of working class and immigrant
culture. Pitched as a way to re-connect with reality, experience life on
the edge and escape the bureaucratic, meaningless, alienated dissonance
that pervades their working lives.
The
problem, however, is that the symbols, aesthetics and identities that
populate these experiences have been ripped from their original contexts
and re-positioned in a way that is acceptable to the middle class. In
the process, they are stripped of their culture and assigned an economic
value. In this way, they are emptied of all possible meaning.
Visit
any bar in the hip districts of Brixton, Dalston or Peckham and you
will invariably end up in a warehouse, on the top floor of a car park or
under a railway arch. Signage will be minimal and white bobbing faces
will be crammed close, a Stockholm syndrome recreation of the
twice-daily commute, enjoying their two hours of planned hedonism before
the work/sleep cycle grinds back into gear.
Expect
gritty, urban aesthetics. Railway sleepers grouped around fire pits,
scuffed tables and chairs reclaimed from the last generation’s secondary
schools and hastily erected toilets with clattering wooden doors and
graffitied mixed sex washrooms. Notice the lack of anything meaningful.
Anything with politics or soul. Notice the ubiquity of Red Stripe, once
an emblem of Jamaican culture, now sold to white ‘creatives’ at £4 a
can.
The warehouse, once
a site of industry, has trudged down this path of appropriation. At
first it was squatters and free parties, the disadvantaged of a
different kind, transforming a space of labor into one of hedonistic
illegality and sound system counter-culture. Now the warehouse resides
in the middle-class consciousness as the go-to space for every art
exhibition or party. Any meaning it may once have had is dead. Its
industrial identity has been destroyed and the transgressive thrill the
warehouse once represented has been neutered by money, legality and
middle-class civility.
Nonetheless
many still function as clubs across Southeast London, pumping out
reggae and soul music appropriated from the long-established
Afro-Caribbean communities to white middle-class twenty-somethings who
can afford the £15 entrance. Eventually the warehouse aesthetic will
make its way to the top of the pay scale and, as the areas in which they
reside reach an acceptable level of gentrification, they will become
blocks of luxury flats. Because what else does London need but more
kitsch, high ceiling hideaways to shield capital from tax?
The
‘street food revolution’ was not a revolution but a middle-class
realization that they could abandon their faux bourgeois restaurants and
reach down the socioeconomic ladder instead of up. Markets that once
sold fruit and vegetables for a pound a bowl to working class and
immigrant communities became venues that commodified and sold the
culture of their former clientèle. Vendors with new cute names but the
same gritty aesthetics serve over-priced ethnic food and craft beer to a
bustling metropolitan crowd, paying not for the cuisine or the cold but
for the opportunity to bathe in the edgy cool aesthetic of a former
working class space.
This
is the romantic illusion that these bars, clubs and street food markets
construct; that their customers are the ones on the edge of life,
running the gauntlet of Zola’s Les Halles, eating local on
makeshift benches whilst drinking beer from the can. Yet this zest is
vicarious. Only experienced secondhand through objects and spaces
appropriated from below. Spaces which are dully sanitized of any edge
and rendered un-intimidating enough for the middle classes to inhabit.
Appealing enough for them to trek to parts of London in which they’d
never dare live in search of something meaningful. In the hope that some
semblance of reality will slip back into view.
The illusion is delicate and fleeting. In part it explains the roving zeitgeist of the metropolitan hipster whose anatomy Douglas Haddow so brilliantly managed to pin down. Because as soon as a place becomes
inhabited with too many white, middle-class faces it becomes difficult
to keep playing penniless. The braying accents crowd in and the illusion
shatters. Those who aren’t committed to the working class aesthetic,
yuppies dressed in loafers and shirts rather than scruffy plimsoles and
vintage wool coats, begin to dominate and it all becomes just a bit too
West London. And in no-time at all the zeitgeist rolls on to the next
market, pool hall or dive bar ripe for discovery, colonization and
commodification.
Not all
businesses understand this delicacy. Champagne and Fromage waded into
the hipster darling food market of Brixton Village, upsetting locals and
regulars alike. This explicitly bourgeois restaurant, attracted by the
hip kudos and ready spending of the area, inadvertently pointed out that
the emperor had no clothes. That the commodified working class
experience the other restaurants had been pedaling was nothing more than
an illusion.
The same
anxiety that fuels this cultural appropriation also drives first wave
gentrifiers to ‘discover’ new areas that have been populated by working
class or immigrant communities for decades. Cheap rents beckon but so
does the chance of emancipation from the bourgeois culture of their
previous North London existence. The chance to live in an area that is
gritty, genuine and real. But this reality is always kept at arm’s
length. Gentrifiers have the income to inoculate themselves from how
locals live. They plump for spacious Georgian semi-detached houses on a
quiet street away from the tower blocks. They socialize in gastro-pubs
and artisan cafés. They can do without sure start centers, food banks
and the local comprehensive.
Their
experience will always be confined to dancing in a warehouse, drinking
cocktails from jam jars or climbing the stairs of a multi-story car park
in search of a new pop-up restaurant. Never will they face the grinding
monotony of mindless work, the inability to pay bills or feed their
children, nor the feeling of guilt and hopelessness that comes from
being at the bottom of a system that blames the individual but offers no
legitimate means by which they can escape.
This
partial experience is deliberate. Because with intimate knowledge of
how the other half live comes an ugly truth: that middle-class privilege
is in many ways premised on working class exploitation. That the rising
house prices and cheap mortgages from which they have benefited create a
rental market shot with misery. That the money inherited from their
parents goes largely untaxed while benefits for both the unemployed and
working poor are slashed. That the unpaid internships they can afford to
take sustains a culture that excludes the majority from comfortable,
white collar jobs. That their accent, speech patterns and knowledge of
institutions, by their very deployment in the job market, perpetuate
norms that exclude those who were born outside of the cultural elite.
Effie Trinket of the Hunger Games
is the ideal manifestation of this contradiction. She is Kaitness and
Peeta’s flamboyant chaperone who goes from being a necessary annoyance
in the first film towards nominal acceptance in the second. The
relationship climaxes when, just as Kaitness and Peeta are about to
re-enter the arena, Effie presents Hamich and Peeta with a gold band and
necklace, a consumerist expression of their heightened intimacy. And in
that very moment, her practiced façade of enthusiastic positivity
finally breaks. Through her sobs she cries “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” and
backs away, absent for the rest of the film.
For
Effie, the contradiction surfaced and was too much to bear. She
realized that the misery and oppression of those in the districts was in
some way caused by her privilege. But her tears were shed for a more
fundamental truth — that although she recognizes the horror of the
world, she enjoys the material comfort exploitation brings. That if
given the choice between the status quo and revolution, she wouldn’t
change a thing.
