Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

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When I grew up, the narrative was young people are apathetic and reality TV and playing computer games. In this groundbreaking investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from “salt of the earth” to “scum of the earth. There are always these differences within the working class, but it’s far more porous and much less static than people would have believed.

Now there’s a level of politicisation which exists amongst younger people, because of their economic and material circumstances and their social values.Jones is good on the causes of what appears to be a new sense of working-class powerlessness – the waning power of the unions, the destruction of traditional jobs and, with them, the communities they fostered, the reckless rush towards globalisation and the attendant deregulation of the markets, which has bred a kind of helplessness among those left behind. Then, inequality just becomes a rational distribution based on your efforts and your intelligence and your worth. Jones singles out for opprobrium middle-class contempt towards working-class people, those regarded by rightwing commentators such as Simon Heffer as the "feral underclass". He was going on about Nelson Mandela being locked up, and how terrible it would have looked at the time, but history is full of setbacks.

One one level, Jones has written a book about how the dread word "chav" came into being and how it has been bandied about without much thought. Jones' television appearances include Jeremy Vine, Politics Live, Good Morning Britain and University Challenge. So rather than poverty and unemployment being seen as social injustice, due to the structure of society (which therefore needed a collective correction), these are individual problems, being encouraged and subsidised by the welfare state. Ash Sarkar: You don’t really hear the word chav anymore, and the symbols of chavviness – like hoodies and sportswear – have become the garb of tech billionaires. e f `e ca `f s ld sl jf la f dr lj c wl ro na g- `b cs s mc `o gr lu ak fa kn ag up bn of te fj wf rf , tl scy tef bfcst, rfjltf.

Jones attended Bramhall High School and Ridge Danyers Sixth Form College [11] and studied history at University College, Oxford, graduating with a BA in 2005 and a Master of Studies in US History in 2007. That is until we sat down to reflect on his 2011 book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class , and I made him watch an FKA twigs video. This is free download Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones complete book soft copy. Because that was the basis of New Labour: the working class are not an organised force capable of producing social change.