Dangerous Classes

The Underclass and Social Citizenship

Lydia Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134943142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides an authoritative and much needed critical review of British and American debates about the underclass, set in the context of historical material and policy developments. The idea of an underclass is based on a notion of social exclusion, be it cultural or structural in nature. It strikes a contrast with the idea of social citizenship. In accepted definitions of the underclass state dependence had come to be seen as a badge of exclusion rather than a guarantee of inclusion. There has been a gradual shift of emphasis in recent commentary from concern with social rights to anxiety about social obligations, much of which relates to the enforcement of the work ethic. Implicit in much of the literature is an inconclusive examination of gender roles, and particularly the failure of single mother to fulfil their social duties. The ambiguities and contradictions of this postion are uncovered. So too is the neglected issue of migrant labour and its use as a source of labour on terms not acceptable to the native population. The implications of this phenomenon for questions of social inclusion and the definition of the underclass are then considered in the wider context of the social construction of the labour market. The book has emerged from the author's long standing interest and research in unemployment, labour market change, gender relations and social policy. It will be of interest to students and researchers in all of these fields.

Chapter 1

Dangerous classes

There has been a recent growth of speculation and debate about the emergence of an underclass in British and American society. This concept remains ill-defined, as the following chapters will demonstrate, but broadly speaking it rests upon the assertion that there exist certain groupings which fall, in some sense, outside of an otherwise cohesive and integrated society. The idea will sometimes involve a biological argument, sometimes a moral judgement, sometimes a view of changing class structure, and sometimes the idea of inadequate socialisation and a deviant ‘subculture’. Whilst currently experiencing some kind of revival, the notion of a substratum, residuum, or ‘underclass’ has been remarkably tenacious throughout the history of industrial society, and in this chapter we review some of its forerunners in British social thought.

THE REDUNDANT POPULATION

T.R. Malthus, writing in England at the turn of the eighteenth century, expressed concern about the ‘redundant population’, resulting from an excess of births over deaths, which he attributed to three immediate causes: the prolificness of marriages; the proportion of those born who lived to marry; and the earliness of these marriages compared with life expectation (Malthus, 1806; reprinted 1989:11). Whilst he argued that the problem of overpopulation would always eventually be resolved by some natural disaster, an ‘inevitable law of nature’, his concern was to find a solution with ‘the least possible prejudice to the virtue and happiness of human society’ (1989:87). The answer, he believed, lay in ‘selfrestraint’, for ‘If we multiply too fast we die miserably of poverty and contagious diseases’ (1989:88).

The poor, who suffer most from the effects of overpopulation, are, he argued, deluded as to the cause of their poverty:

When the wages of labour are hardly sufficient to maintain two children, a man marries and has five or six. He of course finds himself miserably distressed. He accuses the insufficiency of the price of labour to maintain a family. He accuses his parish for their tardy and sparing fulfilment of their obligation to assist him. He accuses the avarice of the rich, who suffer him to want what they can so well spare. He accuses the partial and unjust institutions of society, which have awarded him an inadequate share of the produce of the earth. He accuses perhaps the dispensations of Providence, which have assigned him a place in society so beset with unavoidable distress and dependence. In searching for objects of accusation, he never adverts to the quarter from which all his misfortunes originate. The last person he would think of accusing is himself. (1989:106)

For Malthus the problems of the poor follow directly from their giving in to natural passions which require regulation and direction, and it is the containment of these desires which holds the key to the elimination of poverty and disease. His ideal situation would be that in which man retained a strong desire to marry, but delayed until he had good prospects of supporting a wife and children. His recommendations are therefore to restrict support for the poor, and to do nothing which might encourage marriage, or destroy the ‘inequality of circumstances’ between a single man and a man with a family. The proper check to population size is moral restraint, for the children of the poor go on to reproduce their own misery: ‘educated in workhouses where every vice is propagated, or bred up at home in filth and rags, and with an utter ignorance of every moral obligation’ (p. 112). Hence, morality is seen as the basis of a good society, and moral failure the cause of poverty and distress.

For Malthus it was important that the poor be made to recognise and accept responsibility for their circumstances, and be educated out of their habit of attributing distress to the failure of the rulers of society. ‘The circulation of Paine’s Rights of Man…has done great mischief among the lower and middling classes of people in this country’ (p. 126). A call for greater public provision for the poor may be expressed in terms of liberty and justice, he argues, but in practice raises unrealistic expectations. The result is to release demand for impossible change, which can only be contained by military despotism. An ignorance of the true source of poverty is seen as unfavourable to the cause of civil liberty, with the expectation of government support inevitably provoking irritation against those more securely placed.

The case for raising wages in relation to the cost of living as a means of curbing poverty is also rejected, for the workers themselves are argued to hold the potential for controlling wages; by restricting their own numbers they could force up the price of labour. Malthus does, however, maintain that some imbalance between population size and the availability of resources is necessary to overcome the ‘acknowledged indolence of man’ (1989:93), for without the spur of scarcity the will to work would disappear. This fragile will to work he also felt to be threatened by assistance for the poor, so that the Poor Laws perpetuate rather than resolve the problem of poverty. Even the idea of a contributory insurance system was not well received by Malthus, who argues, as it turns out with some validity, that such schemes give the illusion of security which they cannot provide because demand will eventually outstrip resources. The worthy impulse of benevolence is seen to be ultimately destructive: ‘We shall raise the worthless above the worthy; we shall encourage indolence and check industry; and, in the most marked manner subtract from the sum of human happiness’ (p. 157).

Contained in the work of Malthus on the ‘redundant population’ we find a set of inter-related ideas which will become quite familiar in the course of this book. Poverty is brought upon the sufferer by his own failure; the idea of state responsibility is politically disruptive, dishonest, and likely to end in despotism; poverty is spread by a sub-culture based on vice, filth and moral ignorance; public provision for the poor destroys the will to work; man is naturally indolent; the resolution to the problem lies in moral education and the enforcement of self-reliance.

Such ideas were common at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Carlyle, though overtly opposed to Malthusianism, gives perhaps the strongest expression of the importance of selfreliance. ‘For the idle man there is no place in this England of ours…. He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his necessity: there is no juster law than that’ (n.d.: 177). The New Poor Law of 1834 embodied similar sentiments in the principle of less eligibility: The situation of the individual relieved must not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class.’ It was argued in the Poor Law Report that the state of dependency itself produced a population ‘callous to its own degradation’, thus the failure to work was a moral failure and dependency the cause of moral degeneration.

THE RELATIVE SURPLUS AND THE LUMPENPROLETARIAT

By the latter half of the nineteenth century Marx was to issue a direct rebuttal of the Malthusian explanation of poverty, but in doing so to offer an account which nevertheless carried its own moral message. In the second volume of his Critique of Political Economy Marx wrote of:

The folly of the economic pundits who urge the workers to adapt their numbers to capital’s need for self-expansion…. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation continually adapts the number of the workers to capital’s need for self-expansion. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of relative surplus population, or an industrial reserve army; the last word is the poverty of continually increasing strata of the active labour army, and the dead weight of pauperism. (1930:713)

He was not, however, in complete disagreement with Malthus, for: ‘Although Malthus, in his narrow minded fashion, regards overpopulation as due to an absolute excess of growth of the working population, and not as due to a merely relative superfluity, he nonetheless recognises that overpopulation is necessary to modern industry’ (p. 700).

This excess population is described sometimes in Malthusian terms as ‘redundant’, or as surplus, but is argued by Marx to perform a vital function in capitalist society. Elasticity of capital, the availability of credit, the increase in social wealth, and the technologically enhanced productivity of labour all contribute to a fund of capital ‘urgently seeking investment’, and thus dependent on ‘great masses’ of available labour. By forming an industrial reserve army, this population ‘becomes a lever promoting capital accumulation’. These masses serve not only to support expansions in production, but also through the threat of competition, to exert a pressure on the working population which spurs them on to overwork, and ‘subjects them more completely to the dictatorship of capital’. The expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army helps to regulate the general movement of wages, which are determined not by absolute numbers of workers, but by the relative sizes of the active and reserve army of labour.

According to Marx the relative surplus population of the unemployed or partially employed exists in three forms: floating, latent and stagnant. The floating surplus is made up of young workers who are dismissed when they reach manhood. Even workers who remain in relatively secure employment through their adult years become superfluous as they age, for the middle-aged worker is apt to be ‘worn out’ by the demands of industrial employment. The latent surplus derives from the rural population, released ‘as capitalist production [masters] the domain of agriculture’. The stagnant surplus is that part of active labour whose employment is ‘extremely irregular…characterised by working hours of extreme length for wages of extreme lowness’ (p. 710). In writing of this latter grouping Marx highlights an issue which in subsequent years became a major source of social concern, and which prompted much of the debate surrounding the ‘surplus population’. ‘This stagnant section of the reserve army…forms a selfperpetuating and self-reproducing element of the working class, and it takes a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than do other elements’ (p. 711).

The lowest sediment of the reserve population—which specifically excludes vagrants, criminals and prostitutes— ‘dwells in the world of pauperism…the tatterdemalion and slum proletariat’ (p. 711), and is made up of a further three categories: the ablebodied without work, orphans and pauper children, and the demoralised, degenerate and unemployable. ‘Pauperism constitutes the infirmary of the active labour army…but capital knows how to shift this burden, for the most part, from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the lower middle class’ (p. 712).

Though self-reproducing, a burden to society, and living lives of misery, this surplus population is, for Marx, an inescapable feature of capitalist society, for:

The accumulation of wealth at one pole of society involves a simultaneous accumulation of poverty, labour torment, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation, and moral degradation, at the opposite pole—where dwells the class that produces its own product in the form of capital, (p. 714)

In opposition to Malthus, Marx offers an account of unemployment, underemployment and poverty in terms of the dynamic of capitalism, rather than individual morality. The reserve population may thus be termed the necessary casualties of capitalism. Moral condemnation appears, however, in his treatment of the lumpenproletariat, whom he sharply distinguishes from the reserve army or surplus:¹

‘This scum of the depraved elements of all classes’ (a);

‘The dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society’ (b);

‘The lumpenproletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu’ (c);

‘decayed roués…vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème’ (d).

Bovenkerk (1984) has documented the inconsistent use by Marx of the term lumpenproletariat, which may variously refer to an historical remnant from an earlier society, a group of individual social degenerates, or a category located outside of the economic system of industrial capitalism, whilst Bussard (1987) notes a similarity with traditional European attitudes towards the poor. In fact, Marx’s writing reflects the morality of his times. Here in the lumpenproletariat we are presented with an entirely blameworthy, immoral and degenerate mass, a category which differs from the surplus cast off by the industrial machinery of capitalism, standing apart from the ‘real workers’ of the proletariat (Bussard, 1987). Marx’s disdain seems to be rooted in part in the lack of any potential for collective class awareness in this grouping, but also betrays a condemnation of their individual morality.

This moral and economic marginality is a recurrent theme in much of the writing on the underclass, but beneath this issue lies the question of whether the concept has any validity as a tool of social analysis. The questions which are central to contemporary debate about the underclass are already present in these samples of thought more than a hundred years old: does the explanation of poverty and idleness lie in the economic structure or in personal morality; does state responsibility for poverty encourage dependency and degradation; is there a homogeneous social grouping which lies outside society’s norms, values and economic structures? The identification of such a grouping, and the need for its integration or elimination, came to dominate social thought in the latter half of nineteenth century England, just as it has reappeared at the end of the twentieth century.

THE LONDON STREET FOLK

By the middle of the nineteenth century the separation of the respectable working class from a substratum of social outcasts had become a major concern for London society, and a moral ambiguity is present in many accounts of the period. Mayhew’s work is distinctive in being fully grounded in an understanding of the nature of the London labour market, which offered little secure industrial employment. Casual work and seasonal employment were endemic, and there was a glut of unskilled labour, swollen by the influx of population from the countryside (Stedman-Jones, 1984). Much of Mayhew’s early writing, for a series of articles in the Morning Chronicle beginning in 1848, and finally appearing as London Labour and the London Poor (1861), provided detail of casual and sweated work, and a sympathetic view of its victims’ apparently undisciplined behaviour. Mayhew understood that ‘All casual labour…is necessarily uncertain labour, and wherever uncertainty exists, there can be no foresight or providence’ (1861, II:325), and saw that ‘Regularity of habits are incompatible with irregularity of income…it is a moral impossibility that a class of labourers who are only occasionally employed should be either generally industrious or temperate’ (1861, III:309).

Below even the casually employed and sweated labourers he identifies the self-employed London street folk, and finally the ‘social outcasts’, though the distinction between these two categories is somewhat blurred. The former include ‘street sellers, street finders, street performers, street artisans, street labourers’, and the latter ‘prostitutes, thieves, swindlers and beggars’. Stedman-Jones (1984:89) has commented on the problem of distinguishing vagrants from ordinary casual labourers, for the former can be drawn into temporary labour with seasonal demand, and their situation may anyway be the result of the vagaries of the labour market. Mayhew, however, leans towards a moral and biological account, dividing humanity broadly into two races: the wanderers and the settlers; the vagabond and the citizen; the nomadic and the civilised tribes. The whole of the rootless category is seen as a race apart, a wandering tribe, sharing a love of the roving life, a repugnance towards civilisation, and a psychological incapacity for steady work.

In contrast with his sympathy for the casual worker Mayhew asserts: ‘The nomad…is distinguished from the civilized man by his repugnance to regular and continuous labour—by his want of providence in laying up store for the future—by his inability to perceive consequences ever so slightly removed from immediate apprehension’ (1861, I:2). Thus Mayhew’s structural understanding of the London labour market sits uneasily with a focus on individual predispositions, captured in his opposition between the vagrant and the citizen. The former group shares: ‘a greater development of the animal than of the intellectual or moral nature’, ‘high cheekbones and protruding jaws’, ‘slang language’, ‘lax ideas about property’, ‘general improvidence’, ‘repugnance to continuous labour’, ‘disregard of female honour’, ‘love of cruelty’, ‘pugnacity’, ‘an utter want of religion’, ‘extreme animal fondness for the opposite sex’ (cited in Himmelfarb, 1984:325).

They are described as socially, morally, and perhaps even physically distinct; a race apart. Though Mayhew makes particular reference to the Irish and the Jews, the wandering category as a whole is set in opposition to the civilised population: ‘Paupers, beggars and outcasts, possessing nothing but what they acquire by depredation from the industrious, provident, and civilized portion of the community’. He felt he had identified a distinctive physical, mental and moral constitution, and argued, ‘It is curious that no one has yet applied the above facts to the explanation of certain anomalies in the present state of society among ourselves’ (1861, I:2–3).

There was more pity for some than for others, however, ‘according as they will work, they can’t work, and they won’t work’. Those who were born to the street and those who were driven there, were deemed more deserving than those who chose the street. For many, Mayhew argued, street life was adopted ‘From a horror of the workhouse, and a disposition to do at least something for the food they eat’ (1861, IV:322–3). Those born to the street, however, were felt to share a particular cultural predisposition, ‘imbibing the habits and the morals of the gutters almost with their mother’s milk…the child without training goes back to its parent stock the vagabond savage’ (1861, I:320), a view reminiscent of Malthus’ passage: ‘bred up in vice and ignorance’.

Mayhew’s intention was to plead the cause of these people, who are termed ‘an evil of our own making’, ‘a national disgrace to us all’, and who were to be looked upon more with pity than with anger. Yet they were described in terms that condemn, as ‘a foul disgrace’, ‘living in an utterly creedless, mindless and principleless state’, ‘the lowest depths of barbarism’, ‘beasts of the field’, ‘instinctless animals’. He certainly identifies them as a class apart: ‘I am anxious that the public should no longer confound the honest, independent working men, with the vagrant beggars and pilferers of this country; and that they should see that the one class is as respectable and worthy as the other is degraded and vicious’ (1861, III:371). Yet by his own account of the market for labour a line between the casual labourer and the vagrant cannot be so easily drawn.

His description is not primarily of an economic category but a moral and biological one; the relation of the street folk and the social outcasts to employment was thus seen to be incidental to these features, rather than the cause of them. Their circumstances were reported in such a way that the individuals became associated with the conditions:

As the streets grow blue with the coming light…they come sauntering forth, the unwashed poor, some with greasy wallets on their back, to haunt over each dirt heap, and eke out life by seeking refuse, bones or stray rags and pieces of old iron. (Morning Chronicle, Oct. 1849, quoted in Himmelfarb, 1984: 318)

There are similiarities in other documents of the time. For example the Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Poor (1842) refers to ‘the residuum’ as refuse and offal, whilst one eyewitness report of bone pickers describes them as follows: ‘Often hardly human in appearance...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Conclusion
• References