YOUTH WORK & CLASS: THE STRUGGLE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

[These are the notes of the rant I gave on the Sunday morning, March 4th at Youth and Policy’s ‘History of Youth and Community Work’ conference held in Durham. I have resisted messing around with them, although there are a couple of paragraphs here that I missed out on the day for reasons of time. It may be that Youth and Policy would like a version for the Conference ‘Essays’ book. If this is the case I would need to reference the piece properly. So too I would try to introduce into the text a response to a couple of important points made by workshop participants in the brief discussion that took place. In this context I must thank folk for their attention and support, given that I went on at everybody for most of our allocated hour, leaving precious little time for a critical dialogue! Also I must thank Bren Cook for his warmth and understanding as the chair.]

This morning I’m going to talk about Youth Work and Class, Youth Work and Class Politics, Youth Work and the Class Struggle. And I’m doing so with a touch of trepidation. Thirty years ago I might have swept confidently into this room, wearing my revolutionary bearded look, complete with a red feather in my ear [I jest not], and ready to take on all comers! Today simply to mouth the phrase ‘the class struggle’ is to invite derision and disbelief, particularly perhaps from those within Youth Work (and I was taken a bit aback by how many there were) who danced in the streets ten years ago as New Labour came to power. The party’s message was clear – class politics were redundant and irrelevant, consigned to the dustbin of history. Blair declared ‘the class war is over’. Against this backcloth you may be forgiven for wondering ’where on earth have they dug up this historical relic, a bloke clinging on to the past in the face of the present?’ I could try to blame the Durham air, that twenty one years after my last visit to Durham for the incredibly emotional Miners’ Gala in 1985, the first after the defeat of the Great Strike of 84/85, I can still see the ranks of men and women surging through the crowded streets in the wake of Lodge banners and brass bands. And, knowing this, you might excuse my romantic sentiment for a turbulent past in which Capital did not have its own way. And, let me add in defence of my sanity and in deference to what would be your incredulity that I have decided against playing in this introduction a pirate video tape from 1981 with the title “The Youth Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!” On it can be seen Youth Work notables, who wish to remain anonymous, singing “So comrades come rally and the last fight let us face. The Internationale unites the human race.”

Enough, enough, I hear you cry – and I admit that the video is a fake! I promise this will be my last conscious historical fib in the presentation. Nevertheless, despite the odds, I hope to persuade you that the relationship of Youth Work to Class continues to haunt the Youth Work project, to influence significantly what we think we are up to with young people. The failure to take this on board has undermined fatally the possibility of a holistic Youth Work practice opposed to all oppression and exploitation, which is unequivocally on the side of the struggle for genuine equality and authentic democracy.

Now before I get much further I’m going to get into a tangle about what I mean by Class Politics. So the following is a touch crude, but I think it serves its purpose. For

1 the past century and longer Class Politics has revealed itself in three ways, roughly equivalent to the much-used notions of Right, Centre and Left:

i) On the Right, a conservative politics which sees class divisions as inevitable and utterly necessary to the well-being of society. In theory the laws of the Market should govern everything, guided by the capitalist class. ii) In the Centre, a liberal/social democratic politics which would like to soften class divisions by a judicious mix of the Market and the State’s intervention into the economy, hoping to curb capitalism’s excesses iii) On the Left, a socialist perspective which seeks to gradually erode class divisions through the use of a State under the socialist party’s bureaucratic control. Theoretically this control will reduce over time, indeed even wither away!

To say the least, there have never been neat divisions, despite appearances between these political perspectives, not least because Right, Centre and Left are wedded to Capitalism. They differ only about how to manage the system. Indeed, nowadays, it is increasingly to put a Rizla between any of them!

But outside of this Unholy Trinity, we can just about find what might be called the Ultra-Left, a revolutionary position, which aspires to overthrow Capitalism, the State and the Bureaucracy, heralding a new dawn, where we ourselves and nobody else collectively controls our society. This is a Class Struggle position which knows that the ruling class are not going to relinquish their power without some severe hassle. Tragically this emancipatory view of Class Politics has been distorted disastrously by the Leninist tradition, but bear with my interpretation, which holds that radical change must be the creative endeavour of the People themselves or we will just be changing the Masters. As you will see, I’m particularly interested in how far this emancipatory Class Struggle perspective has ever influenced Youth Work.

And in saying this it’s useful to note Bernard Davies’ point that the Labour Movement in general, whether conservative or radical, has been cautious historically about Youth Work, doubting the significance of its emphasis on the arena of leisure when it was the workplace that mattered – never mind wondering whether Youth Work was in any sense ‘proper’ education.

In hoping to stimulate discussion, my reference point is the sixth chapter of Volume 2 in Bernard Davies’ seminal History of the Youth Service in England. In the midst of exploring the fate of Issue-based Youth Work in a Thatcherite climate, he asks “Whatever Happened to Class?” In the very moment of pondering the question, Bernard recognises its irony, noting that historically Youth Work “has been preoccupied with reaching working-class youth and countering their worst excesses”. It seems to me, Bernard answers his own question here. Traditionally and generally Youth Work has accepted class inequality, its task being to integrate youth into an acceptance of the capitalist system. Putting this into the context of the post-war situation, Bernard reflects on two contrasting periods:

 Through the 50’s and 60’s the cultivation of a view that society was becoming ‘classless’ [leave aside there was no suggestion that the ruling class should

2 bow out of the scene!] in the light of the slogan “we’ve never had it so good”. As for young people, they ought to have been making the most of the rich opportunities available to them.  Followed by a significant shift in the economic and social conditions across the 70’s and 80’s which underlined once more the enormous disparity between the richest and poorest in society and “the extended period of relative poverty and dependency” experienced by large numbers of young people.

As for Youth Service’s response to this dramatically changing scenario, Bernard marks its failure “to construct a practice, theory and ideology for responding to the class roots of the disadvantage experienced by young people”. He calls our attention to the pertinent questions, still utterly relevant today, posed by Tony Jeffs and Mark Smith fifteen years ago:

“Do youth workers…….seek to encourage working-class young people to reflect critically on their experiences of the labour market? Or do they simply seek to ameliorate the situation?”

For what it’s worth, my own experience, interpreted of course in the light of my own politics - from the early 70’s as a part-time worker through being a Training Officer in the early 80’s to the absurdity of being a Chief Youth & Community Officer in the 90’s, up to and including present-day conversations with people on the ground - has been overwhelmingly one of arguing with a profession that, rare exceptions aside, has uncritically poured oil on the troubled waters of class exploitation. Certainly Bernard is right to stress Youth Work’s failure to construct an ideology, a politics supportive of working-class youth, but he stops short of putting his finger on the reason for this shortcoming. For the creation of an educational practice supportive of working-class young men and women would require a revolutionary break from Youth Work’s acceptance of ruling class ideology. They – or rather we – would need to rupture a professional culture which has seldom questioned its uncritical acceptance of the Market, the State and its Bureaucracy. When we talk of the Youth Service, perhaps we ought to speak of an agency in the service not of young people, but of Capital. Not that, obviously, the profession would recognize itself in the picture I paint!

All the more so as its full-time practitioners like to believe that they possess a superior understanding of the condition of young people, compared, for example, to teachers, social workers, probation officers, et al. But how might this be so? In what sense do youth workers have a superior critique of the way in which Capitalism burrows its way into every nook and cranny of young people’s and our existence. To take but the obvious example prompted by Tony and Mark, youth workers accept the inevitability of injustice and inequality in the workplace. At best, they believe in ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s labour’, even as it’s patently obvious that what’s fair for a Tesco cashier is not at all fair for the Tesco Executive. Economic inequality is how the world is, the immovable background to our existence.

Of course, I am heading for trouble in this unfolding argument. Sitting here in 2007, don’t working people (in the widest sense) share the same shrug of the shoulders with youth workers? Sure things ought to be better, but what can you do about it? Folk are hardly straining at the leash to throw off their chains. In an apparent acceptance of the status quo, many have retreated into a ‘privatised’ world of individual rather than

3 collective concern. As Cornelius Castoriadis puts it, a mood of generalised conformity seems to prevail. It is taken-for-granted that a tiny minority rule over the vast majority and that this is called Democracy. Those of you with long memories might remember the 7:84 Theatre Company (who once played in a Youth Centre for which I was responsible). The ratio from which they took their name remains close to the mark, 7% of the world’s population possess 84% of the world’s wealth. And, to take, forgive me, the obvious obscene example that a celebrity footballer earning around 16 million pounds a year, more than 200,000 nurses will earn in a lifetime is worth no more than a sigh of helpless resignation. Am I admitting, despite my emotional attachment to the notion, that the class struggle is dead, and that youth workers can hardly be blamed for reflecting the dominant mood?

Well, as you might guess, I’m not throwing in the towel quite yet. And to do so would really let youth workers off the hook. So let us put today back into an historical context when Youth Work could hardly get away with claiming that the Class War was over.

Let’s return to the 70’s and 80’s, when, I want to propose that Bernard’s “shift in the social and economic conditions” is a euphemism for a sometimes bloody battle between Capital and Labour, a period of sustained attack upon a working-class too big for its own clogs, by a ruling class desperate to regain its own control and profitability. Across this period Capital’s aim was to undermine and fracture the institutions and achievements, however partial, of class struggle and solidarity, from the trade unions through to the right of free education for all, including the very character of the post-Albermarle Youth Service itself. Indeed it was Bernard himself who led a critical response to the attack on Youth Work, posed, in particular, by the emergence of the Manpower Services Commission [MSC], via his prescient pamphlets, ‘In Whose Interests [1979] and ‘The State We’re In’ [1981]. Writing around the same time in the Bulletin of Social Policy, I accused the MSC in suitably dramatic terms of desiring “the behavioural modification of the young proletariat”. Proletariat indeed – now there’s a word that has gone out of fashion! Whatever, in Bernard’s greatest achievement, “Threatening Youth” (1986), he was pains to recognise the class conflict underlying the fluctuations in social policy towards young people. We will see later that this work had a positive impact upon a trade union response to the threat to the supposed ‘soul’ of Youth Work. But I shall argue that this example is exceptional. The truth is that across this period of class turbulence, Youth Work was no more than a spectator at the drama unfolding before its eyes. Despite its claim to be a source of social and even political awareness, as an institution, as a profession, it contributed very little to the class struggle of those years. Complacently it shrugged its shoulders back then. And this clavicular compliance was not by chance.

From this point I’ll try to give some substance to my sweeping assertions. So I’ll note what I see as the glaring absence of a class politics ‘on the side of young people’ within most Youth Work, using the example of Training and then drawing largely on my own history refer to initiatives which sought to bring a class struggle or at least a class-conscious dimension to the work. This is not, I hope, personal indulgence. It means no more than that this history is the history I know best and in my time I made a great deal of arguing for a revolutionary socialist practice – witness a pretentious piece , ‘Youth Workers As Character-Builders: Constructing A Socialist Alternative’

4 (1986). I’ll return in my conclusion to where I stand now and the critical question of the relationship between class, gender, race and sexuality.

So let us start my opinionated historical helter-skelter in the realm of Training.

TRAINING

I’ll turn first to the training of the full-time professional. The liberal-social – democratic inspired training of the first full-time vanguard in the 60’s, with its notion that class dilemmas were melting away, focused on supporting young people stripped of their class, gender, race, sexuality and disability. The emancipatory potential of this training’s emphasis on a person-centred critical process was diminished greatly by its failure to root its subjects (both youth workers and young people) in the relations of class, in relations of power. My own training as a primary teacher in the same period (65-68) mirrored the same illusion. As far as class went, my sole memory is that of being lectured on Bernstein’s theory of elaborated (read sophisticated middle-class) and restricted (read backward working-class] codes of expression. Indeed the thrust of my Higher Education seemed intent (in retrospect) on undermining my very sense of being working-class. It possessed no idea that the working-class had created its own History.

From the 70’s onwards I came into contact with full-time qualifying courses either as a visiting lecturer, a practice-based supervisor or as an external examiner. In all these roles I found myself arguing for the inclusion of a Marxist understanding of class. My special pleading in Youth Work circles contrasted strongly with the situation in many Social and Community Work Departments, where prominent academic Marxists such as Peter Leonard, Paul Corrigan, Paul Willis and Jim Kincaid held court. In 1980 I did an MA in Community Work Studies at Bradford, where, for example, I was encouraged to write a Marxist critique of Herbert Gintis the American co-author of the Open University reader, ‘Schooling under Capitalism’. Bradford was rife with a creative energy and tension around ‘the unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism’. But, in my experience, apart from isolated heretics such as Frank Booton, Tony Jeffs and Jean Spence in the North-East, this was not at all the case within Youth Work academia.

In this context it is not perhaps surprising that, even when Youth Work training was being radicalised, class was seen as much less significant than gender and race, and later sexuality and disability. If class did get onto the agenda, it was via a sociological analysis (stressing status, occupation and culture) rather than a Marxist model of political conflict. Indeed, much later, in 1997, when I was lecturing briefly at the Manchester Metropolitan University, I found myself forced to argue for the inclusion of a session on ‘Class’ in the opening Social Divisions module, seen as a political cornerstone of the course. My own feeling is that the necessary shift in the make-up of the staff in the institutions through the 80’s and 90’s saw the recruitment of men and women, black and white, gay and straight, whose ideological priorities were gender, race and sexuality. By and large, class was not prioritised in the same way, dashing hopes of an integrated analysis. Indeed to talk of class, to be a Marxist became less and less chic, even more so as post-modernism’s superficial sophistication gained in prestige.

5 Over in the area of part-time youth worker training, as a fledgling tutor in 1974 I walked into the same battle about Class. In Lancashire the Bessey model of part-time training ruled. As far as I could see, those organising and delivering the course thought that Power had something to do with the Electricity Board. Collision was inevitable. Accusing the staff team of ‘class treachery’ was not perhaps one of my more astute tactical observations. Later, as a Training Officer in first a metropolitan then a county council from around 1978-85, I was involved in a number of efforts to introduce a class struggle dimension (not forgetting gender, race and sexuality) into the curriculum. The first effort was based on an experiential model, in which the raw material of the course was supplied by the members’ biographies. It was pretty scary stuff, as we delved deeply into workers’ personal lives. Yet whilst we were to review and criticise this process savagely, its premise that the consciousness of the worker is at the heart of the Youth Work relationship seems to me still to be utterly correct. As a consequence, though of our self-criticism, I was involved then in a more structured approach, still using biography as a starting point, but with a greater emphasis on teaching people ‘how to listen and chat’ coupled to specific ‘lectures’ on the ‘issues’. In neither of these cases did anyone contest the content of the courses directly. In retrospect, for a time, those hostile to this attempted politicisation of the work tended to keep quiet in public, intimidated perchance by our ideological confidence and big gobs! Our opponents contented themselves with undermining the courses on the shop-floor, confident in the conservatism of the workplace itself. Thus, whilst the training experiences were unpredictable hot-beds of argument, in tune with our views of what Youth Work ought to be, their impact on evening-to-evening practice was severely constrained. And, unsurprisingly, these attempts to shift the focus of training were shelved with relief, sooner or later, as the principal movers passed on.

On the other side of the coin I must mention being involved as an external with the Sheffield Community Work Apprentice Scheme from 1987-90, a product of Sheffield Council’s flirtation with municipal socialism. To the consternation of senior local government officers the Scheme sought to recruit to the course “activists committed to acting in the interests of the class”. Brave and noble sentiments indeed. Under the guidance of Jan Docking, a Marxist-Feminist out of the University of Warwick’s Social Work course, where both Peter Leonard and Bernard Davies were tutors, the Scheme grappled seriously with tensions around class, gender and race, particularly as the composition of the students reflected the old Labour movement in the Steel City, the growing confidence of working-class women and the rise of a critical, combative Black presence in Sheffield. Sadly the 87-90 course saw the demise of this grounded and innovative venture.

So to put it bluntly, my contention is that Youth Work training since Albermarle, scattered instances aside, has never confronted class issues and class politics from a critical, working-class point of view. By default its class agenda has colluded with the ideology of the ruling capitalist parasites.

ARGUING AND THINKING

On the wider front than just training, I want to dwell on what used to be a favourite pastime, ‘arguing endlessly about what we were doing, what we would like to do and what others ought not to be doing’; the arenas within which purpose, policy and practice were discussed. These debates were dismissed by their detractors, the ‘doers’

6 as indulgent navel-gazing. However, through the late 70’s and 80’s this internal debate within Youth Work saw a range of attempts to influence it from a working- class perspective. These compromised articles, pamphlets and books written with class struggle in mind; individuals and groups intervening in staff meetings, in-service training and in the trade unions/professional associations; and even the organisation of independent discussion outside of the system. It was a rich period of argument bedevilled by the question of how many people, what percentage of the Youth Service workforce were actually involved in this ferment. And we would do well to acknowledge that this deepening of the debate was involved intimately with the climate of political tension created by the living struggles of working-class women and men, working-class youth across that period – health workers, local government officers, fire-fighters, steelworkers, miners, Asian women at Grunwicks, black and white young people in Brixton and Toxteth.

The space to argue critically was opened up by working people refusing to lie down in the face of capitalist provocation. And, inspired by this reality, individuals and groups within Youth Work put in their pennyworth in different ways.

As mentioned earlier, Bernard Davies produced a series of influential pamphlets beginning with his ‘Part-Time youth work in an industrial town’ [1976] through to the book ‘Threatening Youth’ [1986] which sought to stress the significance of class relations and conflict for Youth Work. In particular his writing was catalytic in the CYWU’s resistance to the attempted colonisation of work with young people by the Manpower Service Commission. Indeed I was Chair of the Community and Youth Workers’ Union’s MSC Working group, which monitored and opposed the Commission’s attempts both to undermine wages and conditions and to impose an explicit employer-led agenda on practice with young people.

In 1978 the National Youth Bureau published ‘Realities of Training’, a searching Marxist interrogation of the claims of Youth Work training, written by Steve Butters and Sue Newhill. Given Youth Work’s suspicion of theory, this remarkable piece of work (read by – well, I’ve only met 4 people and a stray sheepdog who’ve devoured its pages) would have had little impact – its concluding proposal was that a Radical Paradigm for Youth Work must be founded on the emancipatory potential of a working-class youth contesting its subordinate position in society – except that:

Extraordinarily, the Brewers’ Society sponsored NYA initiative, the Enfranchisement Project (1980-82), under the influence of Andy Smart, Alec Oxford and Steve Bolger, adopted Realities’ 5 Models of Youth Work as the basis of a critical dialogue with youth workers across 50 Authorities and Voluntary Organisations in England and The Six Counties.

The Models were:- a) Character-Building b) Cultural Adjustment – c) Community Development - SOCIAL EDUCATION REPERTOIRE [SER] d) Institutional Reform – e) Radical Paradigm

7 The history of this remarkable project needs a workshop all of its own, but perhaps some other day. [Ironically, when I got to Durham, I discovered that Graham Griffiths from Bradford was leading a workshop on the relevance of the SER for today. Good on him, decent minds think alike?] For now, the Radical Paradigm in a revised version argued:

It’s no good being naïve about the police, the school system or youth unemployment. Too many campaigns and pressure groups overlook the ways in which these institutions reflect the interlocking systems of capitalism, patriarchy and racism. If we are really going to make a difference to young people’s lives then we have to work with them to overthrow these systems. For us as youth workers this will involve consciousness raising and political action. For some of us the way forward lies in building alliances with the organised working class in their historic struggle, not for more crumbs, but for the whole bloody bakery. Others of us see the labour and trade union movement as so deeply sexist and racist that our commitment is to a programme of radical self-emancipation, breaking down conditioning and de-legitimising authority. For us the usual channels are a con, which we may choose to exploit but we reject the cosiness of reform. Real change means struggle and conflict

Heady stuff indeed! Anyone involved in this experience could not fail to be moved by the stark and complex differences it illustrated between youth workers. Initially I was part of the Wigan working group, but my most emotional experience came on a Leicestershire Community Education staff training weekend, where staff were asked to situate themselves in different rooms according to their political/professional allegiance to one of the five approaches to working with young people. The exercise forced workers to identify their ideological commitment. It was painful. Tears flowed. Whatever its faults, it remains one of the few courageous efforts in Youth Work to cut through a self-congratulatory ‘do-goodery’; the illusion that we’re all in the same game; to confront people hiding their politics under a tarpaulin. It posed the right question from a class outlook – ‘In Whose Interests Are You Doing This Work?’ Some took up this challenge.

As perhaps an eccentric example it led in Leicestershire to the creation of a workers’ group, SYRUP (embarrassingly Socialist Youth Workers Revolutionary United Party!), made up of socialists, anarchists and feminists. The group met regularly in people’s homes, in people’s own time, to discuss policy and practice, the strategy and tactics for change. It was instrumental in winning support for one of the part-time workers’ course mentioned earlier, which proposed: ‘Helping young people makes sense only if we have a firm grasp of how a young person’s class, her gender and her race influence the choices available in making sense of her world.’

In my opinion, at that time and now, such groupings which refuse professional boundaries, bringing together part-time and full-time youth workers, community tutors, officers, YTS instructors and Connexions advisers, and, if possible, administrative staff are critical to developing collective, oppositional practice. This particular East Midlands group drew much energy from its involvement in supporting the Leicestershire striking miners, the ‘Dirty Thirty’. In significant contrast I remember arguing in 1984 with leading feminists within Youth Work who refused to

8 be involved in the dispute, citing the sexism of the miners – thus tragically cutting themselves off from all the possibilities of working with the women, the young women of the Great Strike.

The Leicestershire grouping and others I’ve been involved in, particularly in Wigan in the late 70’s, desired and invited support from fellow travellers. Indeed the Wigan CYSA (as it was then) in 1981 organised independently a conference ‘Youth Work & The Crisis’ in Manchester, which, impacted upon the unionisation of youth workers and perhaps even contributed to the birth of ‘Youth & Policy’. After all, it was Frank Booton who described the gathering of 40 or so people as ‘an historic event’! This acknowledged, the overtures of these groupings fell largely on stony ground. I am saying no more than that a wider network of youth workers committed to organising a collective ‘socialist’ practice never materialised.

I can but touch on too the impact (at least on some Youth Services) of the agit-prop theatre groups of the late 70’s and 80’s, exemplified by the Red Ladder Company, all of whom toured around community and youth centres and other local venues performing plays with an explicit class struggle content. I don’t know if anyone has tried to write up this history. By the end of the 80’s this movement was on the retreat alongside the retreat of the working-class as a whole.

Wondering about all of this leads to the always tricky question of practice. What has gone on, what does go on in the actual encounter between youth workers and young people?

PRACTICE

All the examples I have given, of aspiring to encourage an engagement with class politics, are dogged by the classic but often sidestepped issue in Youth Work touched on above: what really goes on in practice? This dilemma is not at all particular to what I’ll call ‘class struggle youth work’. It shadows all Youth Work practice, whatever its ideological inspiration. I can only speak for myself and this may reflect my deep-seated inadequacy as a youth work manager. But not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve usually known bugger all about what has really been going on! The best I’ve been able to do is to trust what I was told was going on and persuade my bosses of its overwhelming merits. Thus all my reports to the Education Committee put the best gloss on the practice under my jurisdiction – given that to paint a less beautiful picture, to be publicly self-critical, would endanger funding, jobs, etc.

But to return to a class-conscious practice: what can we point to on the ground? Sadly we cannot know about all the minor and myriad moments of intimate practice, within which a youth worker and young person(s) stumble into a conversation about trade unions, the police, the difference between Blair and Cameron, the Iraq War, the G8 or whatever. And neither we, or even the youth worker and young people involved, are sure what on earth these little critical dialogues might mean today, tomorrow, or in a few years’ time. There are no guarantees of their significance.

However I’m not trying to dodge the question therefore of what a class struggle politics practice might lead to on a collective and visible level. My best understanding is that self-consciously class-inspired initiatives have been thin on the ground. I had a

9 close involvement with a Young People’s Co-operative, which itself tried to reach out nationally to similar projects, but got little in the way of response.

In terms of work with informal groups, some workers stimulated by the struggles of the time took young people to concerts/gigs with an explicit political message, in the days of punk, to demonstrations like the ‘Right to Work’, ‘A Woman’s Right To Choose’, Anti-Nazi League Rallies, and so on. Forgive the nostalgia, but, once I bumped with my ‘kids’ into a youth worker with her ‘kids’ at a Tom Robinson gig in Salford. We po-goed in solidarity to the strains of ‘Power in the Darkness’. We were buzzing, but what it quite meant is another matter? At which point I can only note that up to this moment of light relief, my depiction of ‘class struggle youth work’ has sounded pretty heavy and daunting, hardly a chuckle and hardly likely to catch on! As for now, I’ll have to do another session on how to be a fun-loving, yet serious worker, always up for a laugh, but always up for a critical chat!

In terms of young people making contact with industrial struggles, youth workers have been shy of turning up on picket lines with youth groups. You might exclaim for obvious reasons, just think of the risk-assessment issues! But it is interesting to talk to Tania (who’s here) about her experience on an Anti-Road Campaign in the mid-nineties, where while teachers visited the camp with their pupils, youth workers were strikingly conspicuous by their absence. What might this suggest?

But the crucial litmus test of practice, where a class struggle outlook is concerned, seems to me to be where the control of policy and resources is contested by young people on behalf of all young people, whatever their gender, ethnicity, sexuality or disability. It may be an expression of my compromised past, but I’ve only been involved in over thirty years in a few pieces of practice where young people took on both the profession itself, the Council’s officers and the ruling politicians. One was a struggle over their control of a Youth Centre, their right to decide how it was run. The second was a struggle to set up a Youth Council, which from the start was highly critical of the Youth Service itself and the local State. The third was a struggle to defend a Youth Service against cuts in the 90’s, culminating in the biggest demo in Wigan for nigh on twenty years. In the first two cases the initiatives were closed down and the workers disciplined. Perhaps the third only just deserves to be in the frame as youth workers themselves were very much to the fore and the struggle did not spill over into the occupation of youth clubs by young people, into direct action.

My reference to occupations is serious, not at all flippant. Given the battering at different times over the last 30 years, if the Youth Service, if Youth Work was based on a politics of class struggle rather than compromise and capitulation, its history would be littered with martyrs – sacked workers and proscribed youth groups. This is not the case. This is not to sneer at the absence, it is eminently understandable, but it has its consequences.

And, thus, the offices of CYWU or UNISON do not display on the wall memorials to those sacked members, fighting alongside young people in defence of the Service, to whom we should all give respect. The work, we do not have such a tradition, such a history. This said, the one place, separate from practice with young people, where a class struggle politics had an effect, was in the history of the CYSA, then CYWU, from the late 70’s to the middle 80’s. Much happened across this period as incoming

10 workers, socialists, feminists, black activists, clashed with the existing ‘liberal’ membership. I remember a small group of us attending our first conference (1980) naively astonished at the Conference dinner as the top table resplendent in their dinner jackets, chains of office around their necks, were clapped rhythmically into the dining hall! A couple of pompous sexist speeches later we walked out in a righteous huff, precipitating a major row concerning our uncouth, ill-mannered behaviour. Our perhaps petty response aside, this altercation said a great deal about CYSA’s political outlook at that time. In the next few years, Right, Centre and Left engaged in a messy and acrimonious battle. The spoils went to the Left, and Roy Ratcliffe and I drew up a radical constitution for what was now the CYWU. I’ll mention but two of its proposals which were initially accepted, that were of what I might like to call a libertarian Marxist disposition.

 The General Secretary position, the only full-time post in the CYWU was to be an elected 3 year post, to be paid on JNC4 and to be renamed the National Organiser, under manners to the Conference, to the membership.  The creation of the right to caucus: “any group of like-minded individuals may organise together on a single issue or cause basis to pursue that cause or issue within the union, and furthermore any such caucus has the right to present to Conference the case for it to be funded and have a seat on the National Organising Committee”. To take perhaps the obvious contemporary example, it would mean that a Green Caucus, if supported by the Conference, might have an influential place, arguing its corner, at a National level.

Our report in the mid-80’s argued that the constitution should be turned upside down from a management orientation (in which power was imposed) to a democratic structure under the control of the membership [through which power was conferred under instruction from below]. In fact the gains opened up by the new constitution were short-lived. They were over-turned. The National Organiser has now been in his appointed job for nigh on 20 years and the understanding of caucuses narrowed to the right of the officially approved oppressed - women, black people, gays, the disabled- to organise autonomously. Evidently there is no such thing in CYWU’s eyes as class exploitation and oppression. I remember vividly being told by a black member I had no right to caucus as a socialist as I was not oppressed. I tried to put forward an argument on the basis of a class analysis, but the fearful conference of youth and community workers rejected this perspective overwhelmingly. Class was written out of the script, unless agreed by the union’s General Secretary.

ANTI-CLASSIST YOUTH WORK!?

One last throw of the dice before I conclude. Let me talk of the ‘isms’ – Sexism, Racism and Classism. There’s been a mistake hereabouts. For unfortunately neither Youth Work, Google, nor my Microsoft Word dictionary recognises the word ‘Classism’. Let’s leave this aside for the moment, there is little doubt that Youth Work has rightly recognised its responsibility to be anti-sexist. Whilst 40 years ago you would have found youth workers openly saying “a woman’s place is in the home”, this would be deeply frowned upon today. Similarly, 40 years ago you would have come across mainstream youth organisations that communicated the idea of the superiority of ‘white’ culture. From an anti-racist perspective this is rightly inadmissible and would be off limits today. None of which is to say that sexism and

11 racism have been cleared from Youth Work’s agenda, far from it. And yet what might being anti-classist mean?

Let’s return to Anti-Sexist and Anti-Racist practice in search of an answer.

An Anti-Sexist practice seeks to contest and indeed end the domination of women by men. It aspires to challenge this abuse of power on a personal level (e.g. prejudiced language, attitudes) and on an institutional level.

An Anti-Racist practice seeks to confront and indeed undermine utterly white power over black people. Again it strives to do so at a personal and institutional level.

Now, what about an Anti-Classist practice? Now it seems logical to me that such a practice seeks to oppose and indeed overthrow the domination of the working-class (widely defined) by the ruling capitalist class. It would attempt to do so on a personal level and on an institutional level.

Anti-classist practice on the personal level would differ somewhat from ant-racist/ant- sexist practise on the personal level. In the case of the latter, oppressor and oppressed, male/female, white/black, so to speak, rub shoulders together in the youth project, in the training group, in the staff meeting, and so on. They can’t get away from each other. Unfortunately, perhaps, because it would be therapeutic to give them some grief, members of the ruling class don’t attend in person the youth project or , as a rule, even become youth workers. Thus what an anti-classist practice proposes is that the attitudes and prejudices challenged are those that are within and against the class, those that undermine class solidarity and resistance. For certain, sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes will be questioned, but in addition all manner of stereotyping other young people according to which estate, neighbourhood, village or town they come from should be confronted.

Well, by now I think it is becoming clear why Classism and Anti-Classism aren’t a feature of Youth Work practice. Whilst introducing an Anti-Classism perspective would deeply enrich Anti-Racism and Anti-Sexism, it would create havoc, even chaos. If we are opposed to Capitalism, to ruling class exploitation, what do we do about Youth Work’s increasing involvement in preparing young people to be exploited on training schemes or in the workplace? Is this Anti-Classist practice? I would suggest otherwise.

Let me pose a final simple question. Would any youth worker vote for a Racist Party arguing for White Power or vote for a Sexist Party arguing for Male Power? So how come so many voted for a Classist Party, New Labour, utterly committed to the continuation of Capitalist Power? Not too surprising then that Classism is absent from the Youth Work vocabulary.

Perhaps I’ve tried your patience. In rattling on about the Class Struggle and its absence from the Youth Work vocabulary I risk being seen as a geriatric Leftie, trying stubbornly to resurrect the discredited idea that the class struggle is primary, the most important struggle, etc.

12 This is not my desire. My point is no more and no less than that the political struggle for equality, freedom and justice must have a rounded and interrelated sense of the relations of class, gender, race, sexuality and disability. None of them make proper sense without reference to each other. And the absence of a class understanding from most Youth Work is deeply damaging.

Because let me say, I would be happy never to mention the Class Struggle in a separate sense ever again. For the title of my Workshop could have been ‘Youth Work & Politics: The Relationship That Dare Not Speak Its Name’. By politics, of course, I do not mean tiresome gossip about who is going to replace Tony Blair as leader of New Labour’s authoritarian party. I mean the crucial issue of who has power, in whose interests do they use power, what power have we to change the situation if we disagree and so on. And, at this moment, I would ask these questions specifically in terms of Youth Work and the Youth Service  What power do youth workers have in terms of the purpose and content of the work?  What power do young people have in terms of arguing the case for what they see as their needs in a critical dialogue with youth workers and the State?

The crude, but correct answer is F-all! And at this juncture the profession, leave aside young folk, seems deeply reluctant to oppose this state of affairs. By and large youth workers seem to be doing as they are told. And this is a class and political question. There is the world of difference between a Capitalist system in which the greed of Capital is contested at every turn by Labour; in which the right of management to manage is questioned and rejected ; in which a male hierarchy is challenged in the name of Girls’ Work back 30 years ago AND a Capitalist system within which there is severely diminished opposition ; in which management does as it wishes ; in which the gains of the past, such as Girls’ Work and Black Youth Work, are divested of their radical edge, recuperated and rendered safe. In this latter scenario, which corresponds to the situation today, the powerful, their self-serving political and bureaucratic sycophants, and their ‘new managerial’ Youth Officers gain in authoritarian confidence?

To my mind the History of Youth Work and the failure of a Class Struggle perspective in the past challenges us to rethink and renew a political and organised opposition to the crap being visited upon us. We must declare that neither we nor young people are objects to be managed from above. We can be, if we desire, the subjects, the creators of History. It won’t be easy. It will be tough, but let’s start doing something together [which isn’t for a moment to forget our own internal dilemmas – gender, race and sexuality- but we do have the nous to sort it]. Forgive me invoking some old class struggle slogans, but it’s time to ‘Get off our Knees’. Once again it’s a time to ‘Educate, Agitate and Organise’!!

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