‘Workers’, by Peter Kennard
“Class War, Not Culture Wars!” I’ve heard this phrase – or variations on the general theme – doing the rounds a lot lately. Instinctively, it feels correct, but what exactly does it mean? Surely not George Galloway’s imbecile reduction (“workers, not wokers”), seeking to paint the struggles of minoritised (especially LGBT+) groups as an irrelevant bourgeois obsession. More perhaps, that power names and establishes difference the better to extract value and accrue more power. By which I mean that representational concessions in the arena of culture have not – cannot – dismantle the oldest axes of oppression. Identitarianism divides us, prevents us from recognising ourselves and each other as members of the same class cohort; it obscures our collective power. We live – all of us – under capitalism, our status as workers – as an economically disenfranchised and exploited underclass – is our source of underlying emergency. It could also be the source of our greatest strength.
To say that class is central is not to say that all other forms of oppression are marginal. It is to say that only the working class can secure lasting radical change; that it is the working class who are best placed to struggle against exploitation and oppression for all. Class struggle does not (or should not) marginalise (for instance) race or gender. Class struggle amplifies and lends weight to the struggle against racial and gendered oppressions. To bring these much-needed changes about requires mass solidarity and collective action. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: revolution happens by dismantling the seat of power, not the site of oppression.
For a big, obvious example we can look to what police themselves have characterised as the ongoing “national emergency” of violence against women and girls in England and Wales. According to the NPCC’s own statistics (released in 2024), around two million women are estimated to be victims of violence perpetrated by men each year. In January, the National Audit Office accurately described this situation as “an epidemic”. Clearly, representational triumphs in the area of gender have done little to impact the structurally misogynist logics of capitalism. We could apply this equally to the cultural representations of black, queer, or disabled persons.
Class and identity
Or, to put it another way, class is not like other forms or facets of identity. Really, it is not an “identity” at all, so much as a relationship to the means of production grounded in material conditions and economic reality. While often joyous and certainly welcome, no amount of cultural representation is going to change the material fact that marginalised groups control disproportionately fewer resources and therefore have less power, less access to justice, and fewer rights.
While class is absolutely also an affective experience, presenting it as an identity category per se serves the aims of power, allowing elites to construct marginality on grounds of choice, or “taste” or “style” (look at those cheap, chavvy clothes, haw-haw-haw!). Further, it sets the stage for middle-class hipsters to indulge in the nostalgic fetishising of working-class cultural signifiers, glossing real divisions by adopting the right argot, wearing the right clothes, listening to the right music. It’s a kind of self-serving symbolic solidarity, offering cultural reparations to violent social inequality. The disappearance of a caricatured “old working class” (white northern male in a hard hat and overalls) allows predominantly middle-class commentators to insist that we are now living in a post-class or classless society. Not so.
This has been on my mind in recent months, in particular its urgent meaning for cultural workers – especially poets. I’ve been thinking a great deal about what poetry can do to build a kind of collective class consciousness, and increasingly I find myself drawn to poems and poets focussed on the lived specificity of classed experience, our relationship to labour, to the law, and to the money-system.
Class and geography
For instance, ‘Metastasis’ by our new Soul Food Guest Editor, Nick Moss (welcome, Nick). Immediately, the reader is struck by the concreteness and geographic specificity of this poem. There are names I recognise here: the Stonebridge Estate (and its counterpart in Church Road) in North West London are working-class areas brutalised by austerity and riven by violence. Stonebridge, in particular, found itself the focus of the Met’s controversial Operation Trident, the stated aim of which was to target gun crime amongst London’s working-class black communities, but which often served to persecute, stigmatise and further isolate those same communities.
The poem’s opening image, of a ‘Ghetto bird’ (police helicopter) ‘spyin in the sky all night,/ Blades slicin up the air’ makes an explicit link between the gang-related violence of the estate, and the state-mandated violence of the law. While ‘Blades slicin’ is first and foremost a literal description of the helicopter’s rotary blades, it also implicates the apparatus of law-enforcement in a general atmosphere of violence through use of working-class (Stonebridge) vernacular (‘blades’ to stand for ‘knives’, the dropped ‘g’ from ‘slicin’ etc.). The relationship between street and state is further enforced through the deft use of internal rhyme to create a chain of sonic association between police/ state surveillance (‘spyin’) and street-level violence (‘slicin’). The merging of sound is something the poem plays with through the line ‘The acoustics round here are fucked up’: the architecture of the estate literally creates a disorienting soundscape of ambient threat, the centre of which it is impossible to discern. So too on a figurative level are the lines between cause and effect blurred.
The second stanza is ‘An’ if you know you know.’ To those who do not know, there are places within the poem that may puzzle (‘dotty’ as slang for a firearm, ‘cunch’, for “going country” or crossing county lines for the purposes of criminal/ gang-related activity such as moving money, guns, or delivering drugs). In this context, the line can be seen as a provocation: this poem is speaking to its community. It is a form of coterie address that challenges the implied middle-class audience for a work of literature. This matters. The poem isn’t content to make a subject and a spectacle of urban working-class life for a presumed middle-class readership, rather it presupposes a community of working-class readers who will know, passionate readers who share the poem’s lived experience.
In the third stanza surveillance, violence, and economic injustice are constellated around the grim spectre of gentrification, which emerges here as both an economic and territorial strategy that operates to legitimate the containment and displacement of working-class others. Moss, of course, puts it far more dynamically, invoking the ‘CCTV’ and ‘armed response’ units that work to coerce and corral (especially black) working-class citizens within ‘the boundaries of the killing zones’. The line that struck me the most forcefully is ‘Confine our dirt to Church Road’. In using the language of hygienic separation between the middle and working classes, Moss exposes the dehumanising rhetoric that so often underpins relations between the two. More than this, the sonic affinity between ‘dirt’ and ‘church’ and the juxtaposition between these opposing concepts creates a striking image of sanctuary profaned (by working-class bodies), of sanctuary become a prison, or a trap (for working-class people). Further, the description of Kilburn as ‘colonised’ (emphasis mine) by ‘minor celebrities’ brings to the fore the colonialist (elitist, white-supremacist) undercurrent of gentrification, a resonance uncomfortably enhanced by reference to ‘plantation shutters’. In this stanza, the fraught intersection of race and class is laid bare.
In the final stanza, music and literature are used to signal to a world beyond the closed circuit of ‘South Killy’, but here even the hopeful promise of ‘Forever Young’ is twisted to signal the end of a pre-adolescent life by violence, and the expansive freedom offered by ‘On the Road’ is reduced to the dangerous errands of criminal activity. Here, the poem pivots into direct address with the question: ‘Who would fuckin choose to live this this?’
In the context of this question, Moss’ final cancer metaphor has added power: put starkly, cancer is a disease, and no one chooses disease. It’s a deceptively simple idea, but one that up-ends the prevailing (white middle-class) perception that poor – and especially poor black – communities are where violence is from, and not those whom violence happens to. The poem functions as a demand to disentangle cause and effect, to get to the root of the problem, the ‘primary cancer’ which is economic injustice, which is the capitalist class system.
Frank, Jane and class consciousness
The second and final poem I want to share takes an entirely different tone, and comes from the late Fred Voss, who sadly passed away on the 27th of January. I wanted to share this poem – one of my favourites – in honour of Fred, not only because I find it to be a beautiful distillation of long comradeship, but because – to return to my earlier point – it shows how class consciousness and class solidarity can be the spur to empathy, understanding, and even tenderness between oppressed and exploited people, even when the nature and forms of their exploitation are very different.
The poem’s set-up is simple: ‘Frank and Jane’ are drinking tea one Sunday morning, reminiscing about their working lives. This quickly descends into a kind of competitive tit-for-tat, a game of one-upmanship in a hierarchy of blue-collar suffering and endurance. While this is done gently, and with humour (‘Frank is feeling/ especially noble’, he is ‘waiting for Jane to nod in awe/ and sympathy’), the point Voss is making is a serious one: it is a wonderful wheeze on behalf of the bosses to pump us up with false pride for submitting to the very machinery that sickens, maims, and exhausts us.
While we’re encouraged to be proud of how strenuous and difficult they have made our lives, and while we’re wearing the marks of this weathering as a badge of honour, we’re not looking for alternatives to this masochistic pact, experiencing sympathy with others who suffer differently to ourselves, nor interrogating where we might better commit our energies. Which sounds like a lecture in exactly the way Voss’ poem does not. By using the back-and-forth of quoted speech, Voss gives the poem structure, pace, and above all else, verisimilitude. This feels like a real argument, a real couple. As readers, we believe in Frank and Jane, we are invested in their lives.
Because we are so invested, the poem’s descriptions of the profound somatic effect of labour on the bodies of these two workers has real impact. I am struck by the way in which Voss distils the noise and the violence of the work environment at both the steel mill and the go-go bar, especially with regards to noise. Even the couple’s bosses ‘scream’, and their assault on the ears identifies them absolutely with the mechanical apparatus of exploitation. This acoustic onslaught is in direct contrast to the quiet domestic setting Voss creates, but through lines such as ‘Frank grips his teacup as hard as a sledgehammer’ we understand the imprint that such works leave on a life, both physically and psychically. While the peace of Frank and Jane’s Sunday morning is a kind of redoubt erected against a world – and a system – that uses them both cruelly, it is a vulnerable space. The couple know this. Romantic intimacy is not an escape from the forces that beset them, although it does offer a moment of strengthening respite.
Another thing that stood out to me about the poem, is Voss’ use of numbers (’30 tons of steel’, ‘4 pitchers of beer’, ‘2-ton drop hammers’, ’10 hours with no break’). There’s something about this kind of numerical representation that contributes to a sense of the couple as transformed by the work process into mere cogs in an indifferent machine. Capitalism is forever attempting to represent itself as a kind of impartial mathematical exercise, principally via the expedient of reducing human bodies and lives to faceless economic units. Voss’ poem exposes and refutes this logic by playing the cold impersonal numbers against vivid descriptions of bodily strain and fatigue. It’s a subtle strategy, but such an effective one. These numbers serve the double function of introducing the stark language of the workplace into lyric space, where they stand out as indigestible to acts of nostalgic poeticising. This world of work, this world governed by the uncaring calculations of time and finance, is real. The poem – and by extension all poems – is not exempt from that reality.
This is a militant poem. Its tenderness makes it no less so. And it is tender. There is great beauty in the final few lines in which a litany of caring domestic gestures perform both an inversion and a redress to the poem’s other lists, of drills, air compressors, and furnaces. In this context, the final line ‘a beautiful comrade in arms’ becomes not only an expression of revolutionary solidarity, but the embrace of long-established intimacy. Voss’ intimacy does not offer the privatised romantic “escape” so beloved of western capitalist mythmaking. It is, rather, a love rooted in socialist sympathy, in recognition of each other as members of the same class cohort, as part of the same struggle despite their exposure to very different form of (gendered) oppression.
Which is where I came in: class solidarity unites us. It is, above all else, an act – a work – of love. Given that this is my last column for a while, I’ll leave you with this note of hope: that while the ruling elites are desperate to keep us atomised, powerless, pessimistic and apathetic, believing that there is nothing we can do to meaningfully resist the destruction of the planet and its people; while they attempt to divide us along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and beat us with the stick of “individual responsibility”, capitalism is itself creating socialists.
I’ll unpack that a little: according to the Living Wage Foundation, around 6.1 million workers in the UK are in insecure work, and a little over half of low paid workers earning below the UK Living Wage are in insecure work. This category increasingly includes cultural workers and academics. Which is a dire situation, but one that could give rise to the kind of mass solidarity we need to see in order for meaningful change to take place. Poetry can – and is – bringing this solidarity, this compassionate class consciousness to the fore. Not only through its detailed attention to working-class lives, but through its tender regard of each other.
Metastasis
By Nick Moss
Ghetto bird been spyin in the sky all night,
Blades slicin up the air; got our windows rattlin
Like a junkie in a drought.
The acoustics round here are fucked up.
The streets all curve and cross,
Sound bouncin from brick to brick,
So you can hear the Air Support comin,
But never quite catch where it is.
Another AM in the PM
An’ if you know you know.
A 14 year old with a dotty,
Fucked up on dirty Sprite and skunk weed,
Burned the man next to the man
And that man was a civilian.
Dumps the ped and the .12 gauge in the Union canal ,
Knows you get no prizes forprizes for comin up short.
The CCTV and the armed response
Police the boundaries of the killing zones.
Confine our dirt to Church Road, Stonebridge
And South Killy; away from the streets
Colonised by minor celebrities and high-end air b&b.
Baked cherry walls and box sash windows.
Outdoor misting systems.
Plantation shutters.
“Forever Young” playing through an open window.
Now dreamtime’s over if you make your teens,
“On the Road” replaced by goin cunch.
Who would fuckin choose to live like this?
Metastases being chemo’d by a primary cancer.
Solidarity in Hard Times
By Fred Voss
On Sunday morning when Fran and Jane are having tea
and Frank is feeling
especially noble recalling his days in the steel mill he says,
‘I used to shove 30 tons of steel a week
into the mouth of a white-hot blast furnace…’
waiting for Jane to nod in awe
and sympathy but Jane is recalling her days in the go-go bars
says,
‘I used to carry 4 pitchers of beer in each hand
all night serving the drunks…’
‘The 2-ton drop hammers used to smash down on the concrete floor so hard
it quaked like an earthquake and I could barely walk
and my stomach rose
and my heart leaped…’
Frank goes on
waiting for Jane to realize the immense ordeal he has endured
and survived
but Jane says, ‘My legs were so tired after serving beer
and go-go dancing
for 10 hours with no break
I had to crawl up the stairs to my bedroom at the end
of the night…’
Frank grips his teacup as hard as a sledgehammer
and sticks out his jaw and says,
‘The drills and the air compressors and the furnaces
and the drop hammers
were so loud men who worked that steel mill 20 years
shook constantly
in their fingers and jaws…’
But Jane fires back,
‘Those rock bands were so loud I couldn’t hear for an hour
after I left work.’
Frank is about to slam this teacup down when he stops
and realizes
Jane’s bosses screamed at her
just as much as his bosses ever screamed at him
he realizes
he’s been stared at
by drugged-out knife-carrying biker machinists
but Jane had drunken crazy men leer
and flirt with her bikini fringe
for years
he can’t win
and Frank gives up and moves over in bed
and snuggles up to Jane and puts his arm around her
while contentedly sipping hot Earl Grey tea and says,
‘We’ve had it pretty rough,’
and smiles.
In America the unions might be busted
and socialism a dirty word
but at least Frank gets to be married
to a beautiful
comrade in arms.
Nick Moss is an ex-prisoner, published poet, reviewer and playwright. His debut collection Swear Down was published by Smokestack Books. His new book Shooting to Kill was published by Culture Matters earlier this year. Nick will be taking over from Fran as editor of Soul Food.
Fred Voss (8th July 1952 to 27th January 2025), was a great American poet of work. A machinist for 35 years, he had three collections of poetry published by Bloodaxe Books, two by Culture Matters including Robots Have No Bones, and the book from which ‘Solidarity in Hard Times’ is taken is Someday There Will Be Machine Shops Full of Roses, which was published by Smokestack Books in 2023. Rest in peace, power, and solidarity, Fred.
