Precarity and marginality
Expulsion from spaces.
The expulsion of precarious people from spaces is, in theory, obvious. The impoverished population is continuously displaced from central spaces, not only physically but also symbolically and conceptually. Beginning with physical spaces, and as we will discuss in more depth throughout this project, the most impoverished and precarious population is pushed to the periphery and the limits of cities. On the one hand, this occurs through neoliberal economic regulations, for example by ignoring social demands for rental regulations. Thus, while rents in stressed areas continue to rise (increases that the working class experience in our own bodies), citizens are forced to leave their homes in cities that are now completely gentrified, moving to their outskirts. This is how circles of poverty are generated around urban centres. In turn, these circles, inhabited by a large part of the working class, receive the least attention from public administration. Public transport is cut back, streets are less maintained, local commerce is made precarious, and the streets fill with police and repression because, being away from the centre, the systematic violence of the state becomes less visible. All this occurs while the working class itself, pushed out of urban centres, must go to these cities to work.
Cities are increasingly expensive and inaccessible. Inflation is a punch to the stomach for the entire working class, and access to basic resources such as food, water, electricity, and leisure becomes more and more complicated for us. The opportunities that cities offer depend, first and foremost, on living in those cities. This is why such opportunities are often also inaccessible to us. This is why the expulsion of the working class from urban spaces is not only violent and cruel but also a subtle way of preventing the social advancement of the working class. The discourse of meritocracy falters when we encounter the current situation of the impoverished population. There is no merit in the systematic favouring of the upper and bourgeois classes, and there is no equality of opportunity in the systematisation of the displacement of the poor to the limits and outskirts of cities, in the systematisation of evictions, and in the discrimination of spaces for the working class.
Expulsion from culture.
As Fernando Latorre Andrés (2015) explains, the use of symbolic violence by the upper and bourgeois classes against the working class creates a cultural alienation within the citizenry. This alienation results in social differences becoming naturalised and cultural differences between the elites and the working class being diluted. Latorre also comments that “ideology depends to a large extent on cultural production, therefore it contains effectiveness within social conduct” (p. 60). Such cultural productions are generated by forming a “cultural denominator that allows all classes to go together in a kind of consensus” (p. 60), and this would be the basis for maintaining the status quo of representative democracy. Latorre also discusses how, simultaneously with the exponential growth of capitalism becoming increasingly latent, progressivism was born, which in turn would join social democracy, allowing the working class access to education. This, however, is not a way of democratising power and access to new opportunities, but rather functions as a filter by the upper classes.
“The same phenomenon occurs later in the workplace; the employment requirements of the job serve both to select members of the elites, who share the culture of the elites, and, at a lower educational level, to hire lower and middle-class employees who have acquired a general respect for the values and styles of the elites. Thus education is a means for the inheritance of class and for the selection of new responsible members for higher occupations” (Kerbo, in Latorre 2015, p. 61).
It is in this scenario that we can understand how we are systematically expelled from the creation of culture or, at the very least, how it cannot be under our control; we are relegated to elite culture. While this statement may be ambiguous, we can certainly agree that all those aspects of culture related to the lower classes are labelled as vague, vulgar, or even as hillbilly. This creates an environment in which the alienation of the working class generates a rejection of its own culture, while yearning for that of the elites.
In this sense, with the working class alienated and aspiring to become a class it cannot reach, the local cultures of places are lost, as languages, dialects and accents, artistic expressions, cultural events, and other cultural forms of the people are demonised. Thus, the working class finds itself in a cultural limbo, in which it rejects its own traits while desiring a culture that not only does not belong to it but from which it will only receive crumbs. This is how the working class, made precarious and marginalised, is expelled from culture, both from its own and from the one it pursues.
Liquidation of responsabilities.
And it is relevant to denounce these violent and cruel actions against the people. Working-class culture, popular culture, is the foundation of our way of life. Our languages, our dialects, our accents, our artistic expressions, our cultural events. Our cultures must be controlled by ourselves, horizontally and democratically, and the pertinent responsibilities regarding the destruction of our spaces and our own traits must be liquidated. We must identify who is responsible for this destruction and this devaluation; we must place our own traits at the centre of our ways of life and expression, and generate the necessary and appropriate critiques from the strength of our communities.
While the queer movement should be the first to generate a critique of culture and its foundations, it must also be the first to recognise the culture of the working classes (which is, after all, also its culture) and to demand a reflection upon it, rejecting alienation and the control of culture by the elites.
