From: HISSGB-AT-lure.Latrobe.edu.au
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 23:00:54 +1000
Subject: M-I: Re: more on working class community etc


Some extra thoughts on the question of working class local communities and
class consciousness/struggle. There was an interesting sociology study done in
Australia in the 70s which indicated that workers who lived in the older inner
city working class suburbs tended to be less militant industrially than workers
who lived in the newer suburbs further out.

By then of course the great majority of workers no longer lived in the older
inner city working class communities, those that remained there while more
likely to identify as working class and more likely to vote Labor tended to be
older and more demoralised and thus inclined to be less militant 
in the work place.
In the old inner city communities workers tended to be worse off and more
accepting of their position in the world. In other words they could be proudly
and defiantly working class, hostile to the police, protective of their
community but disinclined to actually fight to change the world.

By contrast their sons and daughters who over the previous two decades had fled
to the outer suburbs wanted more from the world. Sometimes this led them 
to identify
themselves as middle class but their rising expectations could also push them
towards industrial militancy especially if their expectations were not being
fulfilled. Also the fact that some of these young workers did have middle class
neighbours could well have pushed them towards greater industrial militancy.
Indeed some surveys indicate that workers who lived in areas where the middle
class formed a greater share of the population (and where the Labor vote was
lower) were more likely to go on strike than workers who lived in more
uniformly working class areas. Maybe their attitude was why should we be
missing out. 

There is also some evidence that workers who lived all their life in poor
working class areas less felt the class divide in society than workers who
lived in more mixed areas. That is if you came from a uniformly poor area and
never travelled to see the mansions of the rich you less appreciated the
extremes of inequality, you could feel that "we were all in the same boat".

In any case definitely in Australia the mass movement of most workers to the
outer suburbs which had occurred by the late 1950s did not prevent the major
upsurge in struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Australian workers in
this period were probably more likely than any workers in the world
(except the US) to live in
the suburbs yet they also had some of the highest levels of industrial
militancy in the world and proportionately the largest movement against the
Vietnam war of any western country. The level of strike action was well above
the 1930s and 1940s the hey days of the older inner city working class
communities.

This of course was the boom years. The self-confidence of these years has now
gone. How the pattern of struggle will revive we can't be sure of but I can't
really see that the lack of the older inner city working class communities is a
major problem preventing a revival of struggle and politicisation.

Mick Armstrong
Socialist Alternative
 



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