I agree that the working poor shouldnt be included and I do agree with the main right wing underclass proponent Charles Murray when he says “the underclass is not about a LEVEL of poverty but a TYPE of poverty”.

Anyone who has lived or lives in neighbourhoods where these people dominate and bully percieved weaker others will perhaps instead shy away from tired old Marxist cliches of failures of capitalism etc.
To paraphrase George Orwell I think the underclass is a sort of human fungus that grows from morally corrupt consumerism. Or maybe that a capitalist society gets the underclass it deserves!

The underclass eschew all decent working class values in favour of a grotesque parody of macho materialism and grabbing of crass ephemeral commodities such as the latest trainers and designer tracksuits and plasma TVs etc.

Yes capitalism is essentially the root of the problem but liberal and do-gooder ideas do not help and I do return to Marx with his no-nonsense and brilliant perjorative term ‘lumpen’ as however way we look at these people they stand for something very ugly, ignorant and primitive.

The BNP will benefit from the demographic of a growing welfare state underclass while the left will do waht it does best and sit back and pontificate on ‘the failures of capitalism’!!

I especially like what you say when you offer the view;

“It may be one thing to explain capitalist crises as a large reason for crime and anti-social behaviour, but its another excusing such behaviour”. This is the crux of the matter I think.

We need to win support from the working class as it is mainly the working class who have to suffer at the hands of the underclass and their anti social and criminal behaviour (as well as vile racist behaviour). The working class will not be fobbed with excuses and Marxist rhetoric and the move towards left-realism particularly within a discourse of criminology has demonstrated that when policing is seen as part of the community as has been the case so far through Labour’s flagship Crime and Disorder Act 1998, then in fact there is a call for more measures to intervene in areas of deprivation. Local consultation with people who live in poor areas consistenly shows calls for more police in their neighbourhoods.

Yes we may remember the police during the Miners srike in the 1980s but things have come a long way since then and the people have begun to trust a community led policing.

The experience of community safety has been mostly sucessful under Labour and Marxists shouldnt always take a knee-jerk approach to seeing the police as part of the problem.

Actually Carl, Marxists do have a critique of the welfare state. In advanced capitalist states - despite anti-welfare neo-liberal rhetoric - welfare still plays a handy role for ruling elites in legitimating the mass unemployment that free market philosophy has a regular tendency to create. At present, welfare coupled with the usual bourgeois sloganeering like ‘we can see the green shoots’, ‘capitalism always has slumps but emerges stronger’ - as a carrot to tempt the working class into giving the market ‘one more chance’.

Marx’s analyses of capitalism shouldn’t be ignored by IWCA. They can be a useful starting point, but shouldn’t be the final word. But Carl’s right with regards to Marxist tendencies towards economic reductionism. It may be one thing to explain capitalist crises as a large reason for crime and anti-social behaviour, but its another excusing such behaviour. Unlike other organisations across the spectrum this is a balanced position that IWCA appears happy to take.

nice idea your suggestion of… “the ‘nouveau lumpen’ referred to are actually the BNP supporters the IWCA wants to canvass votes from” however the lumpen proletariate will never be purseuded of the benefits of a socialist society as by definition they are impervious to reasoned argument and they prefer a simplistic aggressive based argument based on xenophobic solutions.

I think the drive for racism goes deep when one deals with a primitive and inferior class (that is morally and intellectually inferior, rather than any biological implication) and I think it fulfills a need with these people for them to imagine that other races are inferior, in that they may know that they are at the bottom of the social heap but they have a strong need to feel that that ethnic minorities are beneath them.

Nick Griffen whom I’m sure feels a sense of inferiority due to his repulsive physical unsightly and Quasimodo type appearance also has this need to feel his ego boosted through race hatred. I think most racist urges stem from an inadequate sense of self.

The BNP trade in the most vile recesses of the human ego and I’m sure that racism is actually secondary to a general misanthropy whereby nationalism and racism becomes a mere rallying flag for a hatred of human kind born out of emotional pain of the protagonists. This is what I meant about ’simplistic Marxist ideas of relationships to the means of production’.

Yes Marx over 100 years ago was correct to believe that the lumpen proletariate were never going to form part of a revolutionary movement but now I think we need a more sophisticated analysis to explain the motivations of the underclass. Also we need to consider welfare reform to effectively ‘design out’ this reactionary and parastical class.

It was as a student of social policy many years ago, that I came to realise that the generosity of the welfare state over the last 5 decades has perpetuated misery, and has in fact been the main causal factor for the growth of a large underclass.

I won’t sell the argument here but I urge all to read Charles Murray’s classic ‘Emergence of a British Underclass’ (1994). Murray, an American social scientist, often written off as a right wing hater of the poor, or racist, uses official statistics to explain worrying social trends such as the growth of violent crime and to use Murray’s own definition; the underclass is “about a TYPE of poverty, not a level of poverty”.

Sociology and the left in general continue to bury their heads in the sand as the demographic time bomb continues to tick!!

One hundred years ago or thereabouts, the Labour Party emerged as parilementrary champion of the respectable and truly downtrodden working class. Now after years of profligate and naive welfarism the statistically significant white underclass have now got their voice.

Marx was certainly correct in his analysis of the lumpen proletariate and until we all face the reality of the true ugliness of this underclass as opposed to explaining everything away as a capitalist conspiracy then the BNP will I’m afraid become a very dangerous force.

Crime contributes massively to atomisation and demoralisation, so organising against it is the first stage to turning things round. In terms of whether its an issue the traditional left have flinched from addressing-the number of posts on this thread suggest its an issue many of us have felt has been ignored for too long.

As a slightly different example- the latest tabloid rumour re the 13 year old baby father story is that the real father is his 16 year old brother and that both families knew this but knew the 13 year old would sell better to the tabloids. What it comes down to is drawing a physical line against anti-working class crime-but also a moral/ideological line within our communities-that the race to the bottom has to stop somewhere-that the white working class equivalent of a minstrel dance has to end-that not every behaviour is acceptable in pursuit of cash money. Before the lefties start up-I’m not suggesting a working class version of the Taliban!! What I am suggesting is that working class militants have to be seen to stand for something and-logically-to stand against other things…,

Particularly here
If you seek to maintain a society on the basis of an ideology of material success and an economy which undercuts the prospect of any such material success for the majority, the shit’ll hit the fan before too long.

and here
The consequences of the defeat and decay of political and social organisation within working class communities in the last quarter-century can only be offset by the re-politicisation and re-organisation of our communities. That means in part a struggle against the influence of capitalist ideologies within our class-within working class cultures.

I’m just wary of making youth culture the enemy and not capitalist culture.