YOUTH WORK & CLASS: THE STRUGGLE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

[These are the notes of the rant I gave on the Sunday morning, March 4th at Youth and Policy’s ‘History of Youth and Community Work’ conference held in Durham. I have resisted messing around with them, although there are a couple of paragraphs here that I missed out on the day for reasons of time. It may be that Youth and Policy would like a version for the Conference ‘Essays’ book. If this is the caseI would need to reference the piece properly. So too I would try to introduce into the text a response to a couple of important points made by workshop participants in the brief discussion that took place. In this context I must thank folk for their attention and support, given that I went on at everybody for most of our allocated hour, leaving precious little time for a critical dialogue! Also I must thank Bren Cook for his warmth and understanding as the chair.]

This morningI’m going to talk about Youth Work and Class, Youth Work and Class Politics, Youth Work and the Class Struggle. And I’m doing so with a touch of trepidation. Thirty years ago I might have swept confidently into this room, wearing my revolutionary bearded look, complete with a red feather in my ear [I jest not], and ready to take on all comers! Today simply to mouth the phrase ‘the class struggle’ is to invite derision and disbelief, particularly perhaps from those within Youth Work (and I was taken a bit aback by how many there were) who danced in the streets ten years ago as New Labour came to power. The party’s message was clear – class politics were redundant and irrelevant, consigned to the dustbin of history. Blair declared ‘the class war is over’. Against this backcloth you may be forgiven for wondering ’where on earth have they dug up this historical relic, a bloke clinging on to the past in the face of the present?’ I could try to blame the Durham air, that twenty one years after my last visit to Durham for the incredibly emotional Miners’ Gala in 1985, the first after the defeat of the Great Strike of 84/85, I can still see the ranks of men and women surging through the crowded streets in the wake of Lodge banners and brass bands. And, knowing this, you might excuse my romantic sentiment for a turbulent past in which Capital did not have its own way. And, let me add in defence of my sanity and in deference to what would be your incredulity that I have decided against playing in this introduction a pirate video tape from 1981 with the title “The Youth Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!” On it can be seen Youth Work notables, who wish to remain anonymous, singing “So comrades come rally and the last fight let us face. The Internationale unites the human race.”

Enough, enough, I hear you cry – and I admit that the video is a fake!I promise this will be my last conscious historical fib in the presentation. Nevertheless, despite the odds, I hope to persuade you that the relationship of Youth Work to Class continues to haunt the Youth Work project, to influence significantly what we think we are up to with young people. The failure to take this on board has undermined fatally the possibility of a holistic Youth Work practice opposed to all oppression and exploitation, whichis unequivocally on the side of the struggle for genuine equality and authentic democracy.

Now before I get much further I’m going to get into a tangle about what I mean by Class Politics. So the following is a touch crude, but I think it serves its purpose. For the past century and longer Class Politics has revealed itself in three ways, roughly equivalent to the much-used notions of Right, Centre and Left:

i)On the Right, a conservative politics which sees class divisions as inevitable and utterly necessary to the well-being of society. In theory the laws of the Market should govern everything, guided by the capitalist class.

ii)In the Centre, a liberal/social democratic politics which would like to soften class divisions by a judicious mix of the Market and the State’s intervention into the economy, hoping to curb capitalism’s excesses

iii)On the Left, a socialist perspective which seeks to gradually erode class divisions through the use of a State under the socialist party’s bureaucratic control. Theoretically this control will reduce over time, indeed even wither away!

To say the least, there have never been neat divisions, despite appearances between these political perspectives, not least because Right, Centre and Left are wedded to Capitalism. They differ only about how to manage the system. Indeed, nowadays, it is increasingly to put a Rizla between any of them!

But outside of this Unholy Trinity, we can just about find what might be called the Ultra-Left, a revolutionary position, which aspires to overthrow Capitalism, the State and the Bureaucracy, heralding a new dawn, where we ourselves and nobody else collectively controls our society. This is a Class Struggle position which knows that the ruling class are not going to relinquish their power without some severe hassle. Tragicallythis emancipatory view of Class Politics has been distorted disastrously by the Leninist tradition, but bear with my interpretation, which holds that radical change must be the creative endeavour of the People themselves or we will just be changing the Masters. As you will see, I’m particularly interested in how far this emancipatory Class Struggle perspective has ever influenced Youth Work.

And in saying this it’s useful to note Bernard Davies’ point that the Labour Movement in general, whether conservative or radical, has been cautious historically about Youth Work, doubting the significance of its emphasis on the arena of leisure when it was the workplace that mattered – never mind wondering whether Youth Work was in any sense ‘proper’ education.

In hoping to stimulate discussion, my reference point is the sixth chapter of Volume 2 in Bernard Davies’ seminal History of the Youth Service in England. In the midst of exploring the fate of Issue-based Youth Work in a Thatcherite climate, he asks “Whatever Happened to Class?” In the very moment of pondering the question, Bernard recognises its irony, noting that historically Youth Work “has been preoccupied with reaching working-class youth and countering their worst excesses”.It seems to me, Bernard answers his own question here. Traditionally and generally Youth Work has accepted class inequality, its task being to integrate youth into an acceptance of the capitalist system. Putting this into the context of the post-war situation, Bernard reflects on two contrasting periods:

  • Through the 50’s and 60’s the cultivation of a view that society was becoming ‘classless’ [leave aside there was no suggestion that the ruling class should bow out of the scene!] in the light of the slogan “we’ve never had it so good”. As for young people, they ought to have been making the most of the rich opportunities available to them.
  • Followed by a significant shift in the economic and social conditions across the 70’s and 80’s which underlined once more the enormous disparity between the richest and poorest in society and “the extended period of relative poverty and dependency” experienced by large numbers of young people.

As for Youth Service’s response to this dramatically changing scenario, Bernard marks its failure “to construct a practice, theory and ideology for responding to the class roots of the disadvantage experienced by young people”. He calls our attention to the pertinent questions, still utterly relevant today, posed by Tony Jeffs and Mark Smith fifteen years ago:

“Do youth workers…….seek to encourage working-class young people to reflect critically on their experiences of the labour market? Or do they simply seek to ameliorate the situation?”

For what it’s worth, my own experience, interpreted of course in the light of my own politics - from the early 70’s as a part-time worker through being a Training Officer in the early 80’s to the absurdity of being a Chief Youth & Community Officer in the 90’s, up to and including present-day conversations with people on the ground - has been overwhelmingly one of arguing with a profession that, rare exceptions aside, has uncritically poured oil on the troubled waters of class exploitation. Certainly Bernard is right to stress Youth Work’s failure to construct an ideology, a politics supportive of working-class youth, but he stops short of putting his finger on the reason for this shortcoming. For the creation of an educational practice supportive of working-class young men and women would require a revolutionary break from Youth Work’s acceptance of ruling class ideology. They – or rather we – would need to rupture a professional culture which has seldom questioned its uncritical acceptance of the Market, the State and its Bureaucracy. When we talk of the Youth Service, perhaps we ought to speak of an agency in the service not of young people, but of Capital. Not that, obviously, the profession would recognize itself in the picture I paint!

All the more so as its full-time practitioners like to believe that they possess a superior understanding of the condition of young people, compared, for example, to teachers, social workers, probation officers, et al. But how might this be so? In what sense do youth workers have a superior critique of the way in which Capitalism burrows its way into every nook and cranny of young people’s and our existence. To take but the obvious example prompted by Tony and Mark, youth workers accept the inevitability of injustice and inequality in the workplace. At best, they believe in ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s labour’, even as it’s patently obvious that what’s fair for a Tesco cashier is not at all fair for the Tesco Executive. Economic inequality is how the world is, the immovable background to our existence.

Of course, I am heading for trouble in this unfolding argument. Sitting here in 2007, don’t working people (in the widest sense) share the same shrug of the shoulders with youth workers? Sure things ought to be better, but what can you do about it? Folk are hardly straining at the leash to throw off their chains. In an apparent acceptance of the status quo, many have retreated into a ‘privatised’ world of individual rather than collective concern. As Cornelius Castoriadis puts it, a mood of generalised conformity seems to prevail. It is taken-for-granted that a tiny minority rule over the vast majority and that this is called Democracy. Those of you with long memories might remember the 7:84 Theatre Company (who once played in a Youth Centre for which I was responsible). The ratio from which they took their name remains close to the mark, 7% of the world’s population possess 84% of the world’s wealth. And, to take, forgive me, the obvious obscene example that a celebrity footballer earning around 16 million pounds a year, more than 200,000 nurses will earn in a lifetime is worth no more than a sigh of helpless resignation. Am I admitting, despite my emotional attachment to the notion, that the class struggle is dead, and that youth workers can hardly be blamed for reflecting the dominant mood?

Well, as you might guess, I’m not throwing in the towel quite yet. And to do so would really let youth workers off the hook. So let us put today back into an historical context when Youth Work could hardly get away with claiming that the Class War was over.

Let’s return to the 70’s and 80’s, when, I want to propose that Bernard’s “shift in the social and economic conditions” is a euphemism for a sometimes bloody battle between Capital and Labour, a period of sustained attack upon a working-class too big for its own clogs, by a ruling class desperate to regain its own control and profitability. Across this period Capital’s aim was to undermine and fracture the institutions and achievements, however partial, of class struggle and solidarity, from the trade unions through to the right of free education for all, including the very character of the post-Albermarle Youth Service itself. Indeed it was Bernard himself who led a critical response to the attack on Youth Work, posed, in particular, by the emergence of the Manpower Services Commission [MSC], via his prescient pamphlets, ‘In Whose Interests [1979] and ‘The State We’re In’ [1981]. Writing around the same time in the Bulletin of Social Policy, I accused the MSC in suitably dramatic terms of desiring “the behavioural modification of the young proletariat”. Proletariat indeed – now there’s a word that has gone out of fashion! Whatever, in Bernard’s greatest achievement, “Threatening Youth” (1986), he was pains to recognise the class conflict underlying the fluctuations in social policy towards young people. We will see later that this work had a positive impact upon a trade union response to the threat to the supposed ‘soul’ of Youth Work. But I shall argue that this example is exceptional. The truth is that across this period of class turbulence, Youth Work was no more than a spectator at the drama unfolding before its eyes. Despite its claim to be a source of social and even political awareness, as an institution, as a profession, it contributed very little to the class struggle of those years. Complacently it shrugged its shoulders back then. And this clavicular compliance was not by chance.

From this point I’ll try to give some substance to my sweeping assertions. So I’ll note what I see as the glaring absence of a class politics ‘on the side of young people’ within most Youth Work, using the example of Training and then drawing largely on my own history refer to initiatives which sought to bring a class struggle or at least a class-conscious dimension to the work. This is not, I hope, personal indulgence. It means no more than that this history is the history I know best and in my time I made a great deal of arguing for a revolutionary socialist practice – witness a pretentious piece , ‘Youth Workers As Character-Builders: Constructing A Socialist Alternative’ (1986). I’ll return in my conclusion to where I stand now and the critical question of the relationship between class, gender, race and sexuality.

So let us start my opinionated historical helter-skelter in the realm of Training.

TRAINING

I’ll turn first to the training of the full-time professional. The liberal-social –democratic inspired training of the first full-time vanguard in the 60’s, with its notion that class dilemmas were melting away, focused on supporting young people stripped of their class, gender, race, sexuality and disability. The emancipatory potential of this training’s emphasis on a person-centred critical process was diminished greatly by its failure to root its subjects (both youth workers and young people) in the relations of class, in relations of power. My own training as a primary teacher in the same period (65-68) mirrored the same illusion. As far as class went, my sole memory is that of being lectured on Bernstein’s theory of elaborated (read sophisticated middle-class) and restricted (read backward working-class] codes of expression. Indeed the thrust of my Higher Education seemed intent (in retrospect) on undermining my very sense of being working-class. It possessed no idea that the working-class had created its own History.

From the 70’s onwards I came into contact with full-time qualifying courses either as a visiting lecturer, a practice-based supervisor or as an external examiner. In all these roles I found myself arguing for the inclusion of a Marxist understanding of class. My special pleading in Youth Work circles contrasted strongly with the situation in many Social and Community Work Departments, where prominent academic Marxists such as Peter Leonard, Paul Corrigan, Paul Willis and Jim Kincaid held court. In 1980 I did an MA in Community Work Studies at Bradford, where, for example, I was encouraged to write a Marxist critique of Herbert Gintis the American co-author of the Open University reader, ‘Schooling under Capitalism’. Bradford was rife with a creative energy and tension around ‘the unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism’. But, in my experience, apart from isolated heretics such as Frank Booton, Tony Jeffs and Jean Spence in the North-East, this was not at all the case within Youth Work academia.

In this context it is not perhaps surprising that, even when Youth Work training was being radicalised, class was seen as much less significant than gender and race, and later sexuality and disability. If class did get onto the agenda, it was via a sociological analysis (stressing status, occupation and culture) rather than a Marxist model of political conflict. Indeed, much later, in 1997, when I was lecturing briefly at the Manchester Metropolitan University, I found myself forced to argue for the inclusion of a session on ‘Class’ in the opening Social Divisions module, seen as a political cornerstone of the course. My own feeling is that the necessary shift in the make-up of the staff in the institutions through the 80’s and 90’s saw the recruitment of men and women, black and white, gay and straight, whose ideological priorities were gender, race and sexuality. By and large, class was not prioritised in the same way, dashing hopes of an integrated analysis. Indeed to talk of class, to be a Marxist became less and less chic, even more so as post-modernism’s superficial sophistication gained in prestige.