Conflicts About Class by David J. Lee Bryan S. Turner

Author:David J. Lee, Bryan S. Turner [David J. Lee, Bryan S. Turner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317889632
Google: _8CCBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-12T02:44:17+00:00

Underclass segregation versus mass affluence?

Talk about emancipation through new consumer empowerment often goes together with a view that accepts some of the evidence for increased inequality, but none the less regards its signalling a dissolution of old class divisions. In their place, a new division is supposedly emerging between a minority, the ‘underclass’, cut off either by moral depravity or by economic deprivation, and the rest of society. The ‘rest of society’, it is said, consists of a classless mass-majority united in more-or-less common experience of growing affluence. There is then one line of division left; but this is a new line, which divides only the indigent or the poorest from everybody else. There are, according to such fashionable assumptions, no comparable lines left above that which will matter much over time ahead: no line of lasting importance, for example, between regular rank-and-file wage-earners and salaried executives or professionals in high-set careers; no line, of great concern at least, between these categories in turn and elites right at the top by way of privilege and power. I need to look at conjecture of this sort more closely, both because it subsumes several of the themes in other current counter-class thinking; and because here is the point where, most visibly perhaps, academic social theory and more widely pervasive public commentary have overlapped with each other, in partly common tune with the shift of economic and political climate from the late 1970s.

One of the various versions of ‘underclass talk’ (Westergaard 1992) takes present-day poverty to be essentially a cultural phenomenon, which has grown as an ‘underclass culture’ has spread (Murray 1990). The carriers of that culture are people who do not want to work: unemployment, according to this thesis, is largely self-chosen. They are people who choose to live outside regular marriage – who therefore bring up their children in the poverty of lone parentage, and pass on their irregular life style to those children. They are people prone to habits of delinquency and criminality. They are people who have been corrupted into irresponsible dependency on public welfare provision. There is, however, a large array of factual evidence to show that the vast majority of unemployed people want to have paid work, but cannot find it; that single-parenthood, while growing, is spread across the class structure, and so has variable consequences for family economic circumstances; that delinquency and crime have multiple causes and, while class-skewed, tend to arise from poor material opportunities rather than create them; and that, when the poor depend on public welfare provision, they do so not by choice but by force of circumstance. It is both false and arbitrary to assert that unemployment, marriage instability, delinquency and subsistence on state benefits somehow make up a single package which, in turn, constitutes a self-chosen style of life. Underclass talk in this ‘moral turpitude’ version revives the old notion of a ‘dangerous class’ below respectable society and turns a blind eye to the evident and predominant structural causes of poverty. (See e.

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