The road on which I live is a lower-middle-class place. It's full of retired policemen, golfers, family businesses and an ex-mayor of the town. Infact, my French teacher lives here! All very respectable, all very cosy. All the houses look the same. There's two greens; one walled area where teenagers play cricket or football with their mates' dads on Sundays, and another area that should never under any circumstances EVER be walked on by anybody.
No room for drunken youths here. If you live in this road you are the backbone of Britain. It's a place where people say "Morning" to you when you walk to school. It's a place where teachers and pupils joke about how it's both their last days at the end of term. It's a place where your kids can go outside on their bikes and scooters without the fear they'll be on drugs by the age of ten.
At the bottom of my road, though, there is a dark dark alleyway. Through the dark dark alleyway is a small cul-de-sac. It's as though someone took my road, stepped on it, fed it to the dog, and then had the dog urinate on it. It's a hillbilly roost. Here, you're lucky if the kids aren't on drugs before they pop out of their mother! It's as inbred and as dirty as Texas. The ground is a gigantic ashtray. The buildings look as though they've been dragged from Baghdad. The grass is overgrown and choked with knee-high weeds.
I used to walk through this area with my mother on the way to pre-school or primary school up until the age of about nine. The image was burned into my brain of strange staring women with fat bulging from every orifice with incredibly greasy hair and dusty round cheeks. I've been through their once since, and I kept my head down and walked as fast as I could. I couldn't help but notice, however, an eight-year old boy be kicked out of his house by a crying mother and walk around smoking what didn't smell like tobacco. It didn't stop there - he then offered another cigarette to a girl on a bike who looked younger!
It's amazing how seperate the two areas are. Seperated by three metres of wood and tarmac, and yet two completely different worlds. So different infact that the ex-mayor once proposed to the council of having the alleyway bricked up!
Of course, the council didn't like the idea. I don't see why that should stop us! I'd like to meet with the ex-mayor in the dead of night and assist him in bricking up the alleyway ourselves. Yet, I wouldn't stop there. I want to create a three mile high wall around the entire cul-de-sac, cutting it off from the rest of the world. Then I would flush out the area with napalm, before returning it to civilisation, clean, and ready for a fresh start.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
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Marx called these people the lumpen proletariat (lumpen is German for rag, so literally the ragged working class). Dependent on the state (and therefore interested in its continuation) they have no economic power and are, therefore, of no use to anyone. Marx identified swindlers, thieves, prostitutes and their pimps as typical members of the lumpen proletariat.
Politically the lumpen proletariat are counter-revolutionary and reactionary (i.e. right wing). So best of luck in bricking them in.
Hmmmm, interesting piece. I love the tendentious remarks; very entertaining, and quite typical of the sort of vitriol we require in order to shake the 'Middle Class' you so aptly describe, out of their complacency.
As an aside, according to the class definitions which Marx ascribed to those subject to his analysis, the Middle Classes would have been considered to be a stratum of the Proletariat.
Mr. Newton is obviously trying to upset you here, after all, wouldn't you favour maintaining a solid portion of reactionary members of the suffrage? You are, after all, a Conservative!
Moreover, if you don't, and I expect its because you feel that these people are dependent on the New Labour State and therefore keen to defend it, then you will be demonstrating your Thatcherite credentials so very well, as Disraeli would have been keen to keep these people on side, with his 'two cities' talk in his novel 'Sybil'. Long live One Nation Toryism!!
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