Jonathan Bishop (.org.uk)

Popular self-confessed 12-year-old lookalike Owen Jones posted this tweet to Twitter:

“The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.”- Tory Arthur Balfour

I replied to this, criticising him for glorifying class conflict, and he replied:

@jonathan_bishop To get rid of those divisions we have to understand the ones that currently exist, rather than pretend they’re not there

I think he is right that we should understand the ones that exist, and many of them are perpetuated by many associated with the Labour Party calling entrepreurs who want to do something with their life, or any public service funded by tax-payers income and not their taxes “posh”.

It seems from Labour politicans point of view, anyone who has any amount of wealth, even if they earned it from the fruits of their own Labour are “posh” and being posh is bad. One thing one can take from this is, working class voters, are not posh, and therefore as Labour aren’t posh, then if one is working class one should vote Labour.

How does one define working class? Is it someone who works hard but earns below the national average? Is it someone who is a member of a trade union who has no choice but to work in order to live?

If it was the first one, then as a risk taking entrepreneur I meet that definition. In terms of the second, well I could not maintain my existence without working, but how does one define ‘trade union’?

For me being working class has little to do with income and more to do with division of labour and control over one’s working life. I would say one is working class where:

• One works for an employer for income and has little freedom over the work they do and the direction it takes.
• One cannot vary one’s asking price for work as one’s paymasters has one tied down to a restrictive contract of employment
• One cannot easily withdraw one’s labour without risking breach of contract and losing one’s income stream
• One cannot send someone else to do one’s work if one is ill, meaning one could lose one’s income for the day one is not at work
• One has to work a set amount of hours in order to get by and often relies on overtime to make ends meet.
• One can be moved from a task one is enjoying doing without any say-so if that is what one’s paymaster wants

Trade unions depend on the working class, as if there were not people under the restrictive conditions above, they would have no purpose. I am self-employed, and probably take home less money that most workers in those jobs above. However, I don’t see myself as working class, for one because none of the above apply to me, and also because I:

• Enjoy the fruits of my own labour – the profit made from the work I do goes to me
• I control my own means of production – I can do whatever work I think profitable, at present writing and speaking, and I can vary how much I do and when I do it
• I control my own means of distribution – I can sell my products and services to whoever I want who also want it. I can distribute it via any printer/publisher, I can choose my own supply chain, engage my own marketers, etc.
• I control my own means of exchange – I can decide to only write for people who pay me certain royalties, or I can choose to barter, by providing a person with a good or service in exchange for theirs, or even using what I call ‘co-operative advantage’ which is where I work with others pro-bono in the hope of future profits from what we co-produce

Ask yourself this. If everyone, like me, was self-employed and a member of a profession body that gave similar rights to traditional trade unions, then who would join these traditional trade unions? Equally, if every worker was emancipated through self-employment, accountable only to themselves and not being supressed by an employer or trade union, and therefore not working class, then who would vote Labour?

While Labour and The Sun are the guardians of the working class, and the Tories and certain broadsheets are the guardians of the business owners the class system in this country will continue to perpetuate. It is only by breaking past these divides and people taking control of their own working life, perhaps through self-employment, that the suppression of the working classes can end, as they would cease to be working class and start being the individuals they are.

There are people across the country acting so smug that they know something the Prime Minister doesn’t know. The BBC reports on what the Twitterverse is calling ‘lolgate’, which is the apparent revelation that David Cameron needed to be told that LOL does not mean ‘lots of love’ as he and other older generations would like it to, but in fact means ‘laugh at loud’ according to younger generations. Well I am laughing out loud at them. Most of these people, young and old, are still growing their cyberpubes as Noobs (newbies) who never used the Internet before the start of the century.

The Internet dictionary NetLingo (www.netlingo.com), which has existed since the early 1990s, when I started using the Internet, makes it clear that there is more than one meaning for LOL. They say LOL can mean the common ‘laugh out loud’, ‘lots of laughs’ as well as ‘lots of love’.

In fact, my first use of LOL back then was ‘lots of laughs’. However, I and a small number of other Internet users resented the use of LOL to reflect one’s joy, as we feel it devalues ‘emoticons’. The emoticon ‘:-D’ means the same as ‘laugh out loud’ and, in fact, many Internet chat platforms will using the same computer graphic for ‘LOL;’ as ‘:-D’

So for anyone who thought they were ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ for thinking they knew the meaning of LOL or indeed that David Cameron was “out of touch” for not sharing their meaning, I think the last laugh-out-loud is on you. To Internet scholars like myself I am glad he is not going with the crowd, who are still novices on the Internet who lack the depth of exposure to Internet culture of veterans despite how clever they feel.

Whenever I get the opportunity now, I’m going to write that LOL has different meanings to different generations. To older Noobs it means ‘lots of love’ and to younger Noobs it means ‘laugh out loud’.

The tip of the iceberg is that John Prescott, as reported in that BBC article, wants a freedom of information request to access David Cameron’s text messages. Would he be happy for all the recorded minutes of his cabinet meetings to be made public? I doubt it. So I sent him this tweet below:

WTF Doesn’t @johnprescott have a life? http://t.co/baJnwjhA IMHO he should ALTG There is life beyond politics. FFS JAD for him it seems! )

He has not responded, I guess he is not as with it as he thought, as there is so much to learn beyond LOL. Maybe he could buy a paper copy of Netlingo to look them up with in a more familiar format.

When most people think of the word Chav they think of someone on benefits with a distinct appearance of what one who is poor and whose common ancestors were working class and did not have much mobility outside of their locality.

For me however, the term reflects a socio-economic cultural group, that should not be looked down upon. Characteristics of this group for me include:

• Aspiration – Despite living in an environment where their income is not as high as they need it to be, they are driven to want to be successful and would be if they had the opportunity
• Delusion – Because they are being denied the opportunity to be successful, Chavs adopt a way of life which is an exaggeration of those typical of those in the upper classes or simply wealthy celebrities

From this, one can easily identify the stereotypical Chav – the person who wears a baseball cap like a sportsman, has lots of jewellery like a rap star, and always has designer clothes and the latest gadgets.

Unlike Owen Jones, I don’t think the word ‘Chav’ applies exclusively to the working class. I know of people who are Middle Class who act ‘posh’ by adopting the lifestyle people of more upper classes would find normal. These people will look down on other Middle Class people as less worthy, if they do not dress or sound pukka for instance.

I once made an app for Facebook using these stereotypes called ‘Are you Chav Labour?’. For each of the other options, people were given a negative description, like ‘pacifist’ for the apathetic and ‘stooge’ for the loyalist. Only those who were ‘Chavs’ had a positive description. I wrote this app long before Owen Jones came on the scene making out the term ‘Chav’ was one solely to abuse and “demonise” the working class.

I use this word no differently to the way others use NEET, or any other socio-economic term. I feel ‘demonised’ by Owen Jones for wanting to use this term, and regularly tweet him to make this fact known. A Chav for me, as someone who is an egalitarian who believes in the eradication of the class system will always be:

Someone who is denied opportunity or income that they would be able to manage if it were not of the barriers placed on them by the financial system imposed on the community they are in, and whom deal with this through acting out grandiose stereotypes of the socio-economic group they would rather be in.

This applies therefore to all classes and not just the working class. So I should be allowed to use the term Chav in a sympathetic way without being told I am being unfair to the working classes, as I think being a Chav is less about lack of money and more about a lifestyle of imitating those with the economic status one desires but ‘knows’ one can never have.

Every British political scholar has spoken about the ‘Clause 4 Moment’ in the Labour Party – the point at which Tony Blair changed the Labour Party’s fortunes around by removing the Regressive Clause IV that wedding them to nationalisation, and created a new one, the Progressive Clause IV. I write here about how that had the same effect on me of convincing me the Labour Party was now ready to use Labour values in a 21st century context.

At the election account on Friday, even the Labour MP Owen Smith said he doesn’t believe in the Progressive Clause 4 – hardly anyone in the Labour Party does. This is even more frustrating that I felt I had to leave when on paper I was a member of a party whose progressive vision of pro-business, pro-opportunity, pro-market, pro-freedom I identified with as someone from a family of three generations of entrepreneurs.

Maybe if the people in the Labour Party were to be completely truthful about what they see the Labour Party as existing to do, then Clause IV would look something like this (deleted parts marked, added parts bold):

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more electoral wins than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the a few Labour Party members; where the rights we enjoy are disproportionate to reflect the duties we owe and where we live together freely, in a spirit of solidarity, without tolerance and or respect for people who aren’t Labour.