This will doubtless be a shorter blog than usual, principally because I neither know quite what to say, let alone how to say it. I usually find words come readily enough so it’s a relatively novel experience. The topic is The Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class by the Working Class Collective. This was a project I was immediately attracted to and was pleased to contribute to financially in a very small way and to promote on social media. So why the reticence?
I think my nervousness is mainly down to my own middle-classness. I was born in 1948 and it is true that after WW2 my father, like so many others, had to retrain; and also that our nuclear family of three existed for a number of subsequent years on a single and parsimonious teacher’s income (women weren’t meant to work then). We moved after year or two from a tiny rental to a council house in East Worthing. I can still recall crouching under the kitchen table with my mother to hide from the visiting rent man. I was the first in family to go to university etc etc etc. Yet we were solidly middle class.
The narratives and art works that comprise The Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class are of a different order. It would perhaps be typical of a middle-class career sociologist to describe them as the ‘authentic voices of the working class’. But the word ‘authentic’ is surely more, or worse, than redundant: it too often seems to represent: (i) a patronising attitude, and (ii) a pretentious claim to ‘really understand’, even to ‘identify with’. It remains quite common for sociologists with leftward political inclinations to portray themselves as at the very least empathic with working-class lives. I have previously suggested that the pertinent distinction here is between sociological knowledge on the one hand and experiential knowledge on the other; and no amount of the former supplies you with the latter.
Can a middle-class sociologist be empathic, come to practice Weber’s ‘verstehen’? Yes of course, but to understand is not to ‘be’.
What the Diaries did for me was transport me momentarily into the lives and circumstances of a variety of people who lacked the protection of so many, even all, of Bourdieu’s types of capital. In a way, the fact that the Diaries contained snippets of lives added force. Sometimes an intimate glimpse into a life, allowing the imagination a freer reign, carries more punch than the putative academic summary of a lifecourse. Lisa McKenzie’s linking pieces are exquisitely judged.
Anyway, the brief message is ‘just read and ‘absorb’ the Diaries’.
I close with a few observations. First, it hit me that while the diarists reported daily routines during lockdown and were explicit about the personal and social struggles confronting them, self-pity was almost entirely absent; this was their normal. Moreover, notwithstanding their own hassles, they were typically just as worried about the wellbeing of others, notably children, parents and friends; there was a thread of community and solidarity running through. Second, while everyday concerns inevitably trump ‘theorising’ about society, a sharp and penetrating awareness of exploitation and oppression seep through people’s accounts.
Finally, it seems obvious given the limitations inevitably accompanying middle-class research and theorising about working-class experience that the under-representation of working-class individuals in academia is a major failing. Academia is too often – Bourdieu’s forms of capital again – a self-perpetuating middle-class arena. But this is hardly news. In my opinion sociology will not come to terms with what it is to ‘be’ working class without genuine and comprehensive working-class representation in academia, as well as in other bodies like think tanks. I was pleased to endorse Teresa Crew’s excellent Higher Education and Working-Class Academics, for all that the central message is that universities remain hostile and marginalising environments for working-class students, let alone staff. ‘Classism’ is rife in academia.
As for classism, we must also include sexism and racism; and once more fulsome representation is surely a necessary – but sufficient – condition for transformative change. For many years, even decades, I taught about class, gender and race or ethnicity to medical students and junior doctors. I still think I did ok(ish). But to repeat a point already made, I have come belatedly to the realisation that I was in fact constrained by sociological knowledge, with its long tap routes in structural relations of class, gender and race. I had no experiential knowledge of what it is to ‘be’ working class, a woman or Black or Asian. It matters. It did not invalidate what I taught, but it matters,
Lisa McKenzie will recall that I used to counsel her to restrain her anger on Twitter. ‘You’ll just alienate people and hinder the formation of the types of cross-class alliances that are a precondition for effective movements for change.’ ‘Don’t tell working-class people not to be angry’, was her usual riposte. Ok, I get it. We’re all on a learning curve, or we should be.
The Diaries of the Working Class is a book to read, digest and think through. Hopefully it will be another catalyst for a long overdue societal change.