From establishment to anti-establishment

Michael Roberts Blog

I’ve been reading a few new books recently. The first is The Establishment by Owen Jones (Allen Lane, Penguin books). I reviewed Jones’ first book, Chavs, a perceptive account of the way the media turned the concept of the working-class into a bunch of feckless, benefit-seeking layabouts or ‘chavs’ (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/the-working-poor/). As Jones showed, the ruling class and their lackeys in culture want to obliterate the idea of the working-class in society, in a way that reduces social strata to just the middle-class (with just the elite above and ‘chavs’ below). Jones applied to this Britain but it had gone just as far in the US, where the term ‘working-class’ has totally disappeared and every politician and pundit now refer only to existence of the ‘middle class’, when they mean working-class.

Jones’s new book is a well-written, even racy, account of how the British ruling class…

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