"Chavs" posted by Richard Seymour

I am so sick of hearing about this shit. Alright, I get the joke: poverty is big fucking laugh, and anyone who gets ideas above their station (for instance, saves money to buy Burberry gear) is clearly readying themselves for social ridicule. This pathetic, obnoxious middle-class party conversation point is so openly class-supremacist that pointing it out defeats satire. Take this website, which describes the poor who have to eat at McDonalds and whose only social frisson is donning branded sports gear as "Britain's new ruling class". What a service to the actual ruling class that is - those who are accoutured in bespoke suits and leather loafers, whose teeth are perfectly formed, and whose fingers and nails are perpetually manicured.

"Chavscum", as the website is so enlighteningly named, is replete with working class vulgarity that university educated, sneering, 'ironic' liberals can guffaw about. The images are the most potent message, and they do a better job at relaying class-hatred than all of New Labour's subliminal messages about the deserving and undeserving poor ever could. If Blair wanted to justify benefit cuts, he could not say himself that the poor only spend this money on bookies, pubs and drugs. He would have to rely on liberal intellectuals like David Aaronovitch to do it for him. (Delegating nastiness is New Labour's modus operandi). And if he wanted to jusify ASBOs, on-the-spot fines and tougher rules to put them fags out, he'd have no better alibi than this ridiculous cultural pustulation about 'chavs'. And of course, multinationals who purvey mythologies about 'real' brands are immensely assisted by those who deride 'chavs' for wearing 'counterfeit' clothing or jewellery (as if the brand itself was anything more than a signifier of 'authenticity').

Oh, their scorn for the working class woman who happens to be either up the duff or with child is most amusing. (Single mothers, too, deserve to have their benefits cut.) If such a woman dyes her hair and pulls it back in a pony tail, this is known either as a 'Croydon facelift' or a 'council house facelift'. If she pushes a pram along, she is a 'pramface'. This naked and unadorned hatred for the working class could not be made more apparent by adornment, and yet it is accepted because the stilleto knife is coated with the unction of 'satire' before slid between the ribs. Poisonous as it is, the main point is that someone who isn't me is having the piss taken out of them. Shit comics like Jimmy Carr make a living out of that. You can be as vile as you like about fat women, mother-in-laws and even members of your audience, provided it is presented on the prettifying chopping board of irony. 'Little Britain', similarly, provides an 'ironic' veneer for social resentment (of 'chavs', wheelchair layabouts, gays etc), validating the undercurrents of hatred that it purports to satirise.

This is the striking thing about the 'chavs' phenomena - its micro-progenitors are often middle class 'liberals', racist, classist and ignorant to the very marrow, yet who operate under the strange illusion that they are enlightened, liberal, anti-racist while it is their designated 'chavs' who are racist, sexist, vulgar etc.

The discourse is notable for one other curiosity - it 'ethnicises' poverty. K-Punk asked some while back: "Why is it that the desire to eliminate poverty - which, presumably, we all share - inevitably becomes a desire to eliminate the poor? It is because, in capitalist ideology, poverty has to be thought of as an ethnic, rather than a social or economic, trait? The poor are those who are genetically destined to fail, those who lack 'middle-class skills' as the Herald and Tribune put it the other day". The very word 'chav' appears to derive from the 'gypsy' word 'chavo' meaning 'little person'. It has long been used in the South East, and has now become a chic reference for 'culturally aware' apolitical liberals. Often it is the same people who indulge in gypsy-bashing who retail the schtick. They also seem to be the same who purvey and circulate the hysteria about "hoodies". Much of the e-mail traffic in workplaces is saturated with knowing references to this sort of shit. Office workers, unaware that they are allowed their e-mail and internet usage as a means of releasing job resentment, indulge in it as if it were slightly subversive and witty. And the news media, forever amused by the sumptuary proclivities of the working class, feed off this meme when they illustrate their stories about late night drinking with footage of some pissed women falling on their arses and disporting themselves across the pavement.

I can't say I wish these fervid nightmarish imaginings about the working class (violent, drunk, uncouth, branded, depoliticised, unsophisticated, thuggish etc) were expressed more honestly. Because they couldn't be expressed more honestly. It is exhibited in front of your very nose, and you are invited to revel in it. The victims of the Thatcherite purge on welfare and unions, of the atomisation and deprivation that this has produced, are now to be endlessly mocked for their condition, and this is authorised by the hilarity about "chavs". What a larf.