I’m a British novelist and my fourth novel, The Spoiled Heart, came out—in the U.K., U.S., and elsewhere—in the spring of this year. It’s a novel vexed with questions of class and race, with wondering which of these, for my characters, is central. I wrote a longish essay to make my own position clear and to speak candidly about how the left, including the publishing left, fails the poor and the working class. In the U.K., however, none of the many left-leaning outlets and journals I approached would carry the piece and thereby illustrated one of my points: the creative industries and their cognates have no interest in thinking about economic injustice. I’m grateful and relieved that nonsite.org stepped forward and has given this essay a home.

***

Age 29, Leicester Library

Interviewer: ‘You’ve a question for Sunjeev?’
Woman 1: ‘Yes. You have your Muslim character – I forget his name – touching his mother’s feet as a mark of respect. No Muslim would do that. It’s a Sikh thing, a Hindu thing. You’re Sikh, yes?’
Woman 2: ‘I’ve seen it happen once or twice. But only in Pakistan. Never here.’

My interviewer wondered why that would be, and a conversation followed about cultural exchange and how and why some cultural practices have altered or not between England and Pakistan. Is the truth created from a collaborative act of constructing meaning in a provincial library worth allowing the writer to slip up? Is an open conversation between many ordinary readers with their many ordinary stories preferable to one between a single writer and a single authenticity reader? Or is there only objective truth? I don’t know.

*

Twelve years later, one of my international publishers asked if my new novel, The Spoiled Heart, could go to an authenticity reader. They were looking for a black reader’s response to an episode in my novel where a working-class young white man is mistakenly accused of racism by a rich black student. I agreed to the request, wondering what an authenticity reader would say about how class and race interact. The episode that my publishers wanted the reader to give their particular attention to hews to an incident at the elite Smith College, in America, in 2018, where two poor, white staff members were sacked, without evidence, when a black student believed she’d been unfairly targeted.

I thought the whole affair at Smith was outrageous, but also illuminating.

The episode showed how little power the employee has against an employer who wants to preserve its reputation and financial security at all costs. I felt it odd that the left – here in the guise of the American Civil Liberties Union – fell in behind the employer and did nothing to help the employees. Interesting, too, that a prosperous member of a racial minority considered herself part of the oppressed class.

When I received my authenticity read, I was struck that the reader did not in fact speak about class, or about my rich black student’s immense class privilege. What they wanted to ensure was that any other reader of my novel should clearly understand that the student would have been the victim of actual racism at several points in her life – that the student’s experience of racism should be respected as the exclusive lens through which her actions be understood. I think this is only partly true – her experience of racism does in part drive her vendetta, but she also has no conception of the power that her class privilege gives her; she doesn’t even conceive of herself as privileged; quite the opposite. The authenticity read, like the real-life incident at Smith College, was, I thought, an example of how much anti-discrimination is central to the left’s conception of social justice, and how completely the social justice conversation has been emptied of any class politics.

*

When the creative industries speak of the importance of authentic and accurate representations, and of avoiding harmful ones – setting aside what we even mean by those terms, setting aside, too, the question of community gatekeeping – are they advocating that what matters most in terms of social justice is anti-discrimination, a commitment to not perpetrate acts of cultural harm, or disrespect? And is focussing on respecting identities, along with representing identities, a way that publishing, however well-meaningly, fails to talk about class?

*

Age 7, Derby

Eyes fixed on the screen: ‘There’s one of us on the telly!’
Feet thundering down stairs. Siblings, cousins, neighbours. Adults, too, faces now a blur. Mum rushing from the kitchen, grill-pan still in hand. An Indian surgeon was on the news, summoned for his expertise. ‘He could have worn a nicer suit,’ someone said. ‘Showing us up.’ Later, Dad came home from his job repairing TVs, ate in silence, then went back out to drive his taxi through the night. Before the year was out, he would lose his repair job with neither pay, notice or explanation. Thatcher was unconcerned; as would be Obama; as would be Sunak. The surgeon’s level of concern is unknown.

*

The argument goes that because too many industries have long been the exclusive domain of white males, and because diversity is a good thing, representation matters when it comes to opening up these elite spaces to everyone; in effect, that it’s better if elites, and elite spaces, are neoliberally diverse and not neoliberally non-diverse; in effect, that it is an intrinsic social good for poor non-whites to see rich non-whites in elite spaces – because it certainly isn’t the destitute black woman benefitting from that diversity scheme with Goldman Sachs. Indeed, a recent study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research found that diversity schemes largely benefitted ‘under-represented minorities from higher socioeconomic backgrounds’. We need only look at Barack Obama and his actions following the 2008 crash to see that having a non-white ‘representing’ in the most powerful position in the world doesn’t necessarily deliver anything positive for the poor and working class, of any race. When Obama gave succour and protection to rich bankers and allowed the poor to go to the wall, and in some cases to jail, he behaved like the neoliberal he always was; he behaved in line with his character and not with whatever misguided hopes and wishes people might have projected onto the screen of his race.

Closer to home, in 2022, Azadeh Moshiri bagged a role as a BBC journalist by making use of a social mobility charity’s diversity scheme. Azadeh Moshiri is the daughter of the billionaire owner of Everton football club. Well, there you go – a diversity scheme, a social mobility scheme, favouring the super-rich non-white under some misguided notion that representation was akin to equality, that representation was in some sense correcting a social injustice.

In publishing there is a central commitment to both author diversity and to diversifying the workforce. It seems to be working. According to the Publisher Association’s 2022 workforce survey, the ethnic diversity target has been met, and gender and LGBT diversity is also robust. The same survey also warned that ‘socioeconomic background continues to represent major barriers to inclusion’, with two-thirds of respondents being from a ‘professional background’ and almost 20% privately educated. So the workforce is getting more diverse, but no more equal; as are the writers, if judged by the proofs swinging through my letterbox. Prep-schooled minority writers. Non-white writers who ‘live between’ London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Hong Kong. This should all come as a surprise to precisely no one: publishing has always been a rich person’s game. Of note, is that publishing’s central commitment to representation has resulted in an industry complicit in the idea that representing elite minorities is part of the fight against social injustice. When, of course, in our society, no matter your race, your gender, your sexuality – no matter your identity – if you’re the scion of a billionaire, if you’re from a family wealthy enough to educate you at our most expensive schools, if you flit between the world’s richest playgrounds, then you are not, in any meaningful sense, a primary victim of social injustice – you are, in fact, its embodiment.

To reiterate, diversity is a good thing; equality is even better, and without recourse to economic justice, diversity risks delivering socially conservative solutions that alter the identities of the rich, but do nothing to redistribute wealth. Disempowering the rich – and not diversifying the rich – is what ought to be at the heart of any left-wing politics. But making economic justice – that is class – the centre of left politics requires us to rethink how we currently conceptualise questions of class and of solidarity.

*

Age 16, an industrial laundry in Chesterfield

Eddie (18): He’s paying you what? But that works out at – shit, two-fifty an hour?
Me: You get more?
Eddie: I get double that, man. He’s such a fucking racist.

Eddie had a word with the manager’s boss, who apologised to me and then doubled my pay. I was pleased I now earned the same as Eddie, that I was no longer being singled out. I worked harder the next day.

*

“If Black people make up 13.2 per cent of the US population, then Black people should make up somewhere close to 13 percent of the Americans killed by police” – Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning

Non-white people are disproportionately poor. This is true. Non-white people are disproportionately homeless. This is true. Non-white people are disproportionately murdered by the police. This is true. Today, these injustices primarily reflect contemporary [racism/something else] – please choose.

White people are the majority of the poor. This is true. White people are the majority of the homeless. This is true. White people are the majority of those murdered by the police. This is true. Today, these injustices primarily reflect contemporary [racism/something else] – please choose.

The legacies of colonialism, empire and slavery have resulted in non-white people in countries like the UK and the US being disproportionately among today’s poor and working class. Regardless of whether you think it’s racism – or something else – that’s the primary factor which, today, keeps those non-white people poor, we should all agree that it’s an impoverished species of social justice that demands not that no one, of any identity, be poor, or homeless, or murdered by the police, but that people are only poor, homeless, or murdered at a rate in line with their demographic proportions – that the problem effect every group fairly. But that is not equality, that is diversity, and the two are not the same though the left too often conflates, even equates, the two.

“The focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the animating principle of a left politics, it is a politics that lies entirely within neoliberalism’s logic” – Professor Adolph Reed, Jr

*

Age 43, Hamiltons Gallery, W1

Nick Waplington’s photography exhibition. Life in the Broxtowe estate, c.1990s. It is mostly poor white families. I see the box of Happy Shopper – ‘Happy Crapper’ we called it – washing up powder. I see the exact same flimsy, tinselly Christmas decorations that used to hang across our wall. I see the little boy in the same stonewashed jeans I wore. I feel that all of it is voyeuristic, artless, far too eager to explain itself. And unbearably sad. I do not move for a long time. And then I have to leave for my Bloomsbury hotel, where friends are waiting to toast the publication of my new novel. I’ve been able to come up with products enough people want. I have not been discriminated against. I’m doing okay out of neoliberalism’s logic.

*

In their collection of essays No Politics But Class Politics, one of many arguments Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr make is that neoliberal morality consists of promising that everyone, regardless of their identity or background, deserves a genuinely equal opportunity to become rich. But they go on to point out that, if we today, under our current economic structures, had this perfect world where no one is discriminated against, then the overall level of poverty, of disparity, wouldn’t change – because someone still has to change your grandma’s nappy, flip your burgers, wipe your street clean. All that would change is that the poor would be unimpeachably diverse, as would be the rich, as would be everyone in between. The rich would even consist of the right number of people from a working-class background. And, you never know, maybe the burgers, too, would be flipped by the correct proportion of the formerly class-privileged. But, crucially, the person flipping your burger could never complain, in this perfect meritocracy, that discrimination prevented them from becoming rich – they had their chance, they just didn’t have what it takes. And anti-discrimination, including socioeconomic anti-discrimination – let’s get some poor people into the mix – does nothing to alter any of that economic injustice.

The issue, therefore, is not that we need to stop representation from benefiting elite minorities – that’s just representation in its most indefensible form – but that we need to stop believing that representation, or, more broadly conceived, anti-discrimination, should be our foremost social justice commitment. Without a prior grounding in a politics of economic equality, all anti-discrimination boils down to is the neoliberal promise that people should have an equal opportunity to escape poverty; rather than trying to get rid of it. To quote Michaels: “My point is not that capital always or even usually lives up to its promises; it’s that we shouldn’t turn the job of the left into trying to make sure that it does.”

Yet, looked at this way, asking capital to live up to its promises is what the publishing industry was doing when its response to the murder of a poor black man was to call for greater representation among its own elite ranks, for new prizes, for diversity consultations, even for more black writers of autofiction, that most Thatcherite of genres. Neither is stronger racial representation among FTSE 100 CEOs, or improving diversity in private schools, or greater racial equity in, let’s say, high fashion, any kind of answer to the harm done to an oppressed class. Even if not by intention, its effect is only to entrench the status of the privileged.

*

“The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental” – C L R James, The Black Jacobins

*

We should not stint in our commitment to anti-discrimination: no one should be discriminated against. But, as James said, anti-discrimination should not be at the centre of our conception of social justice; it should not be ‘the animating principle’, as Reed has it, as indeed it currently is. What should be at the forefront of social justice is a commitment to economic equality, to universalism, to the question of class. Ironically, though many staunch anti-racists argue against a politics that centralises class over race, a universal class-based politics would – unlike the left’s current approach – not only help all of the poor and working class, but disproportionately help non-white people, simply because historic racism has resulted in non-white people being disproportionately represented among today’s poor and working class.

Why then do cultural and political elites, on the left and the right, insist on keeping the social justice conversation so intensely focussed around questions of identity, discrimination, and culture? It’s always tempting to reach for Upton Sinclair’s witticism that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”, because it is true that conceptualising social justice principally in terms of anti-discrimination serves the neoliberal status quo; it’s also true that diversifying the workplace is much easier than democratising the workplace, much easier than fighting for widescale redistribution and for a more egalitarian society. And maybe self-interest and laziness do in large part explain the actions of those left-wing individuals who, say, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, switched the conversation towards greater racial representation in elite spaces. However, I’m also minded to recall another writer:

“We live in capitalism; its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings” – Ursula Le Guin

To us, a world built around the principles of universalism is utterly unimaginable; that being so, demanding that the pain simply be more equitably shared, rather than addressing the pain itself, can come to look like the only solution; demanding that everyone have an equal chance to wear the crown, rather than toppling it, can seem like the only choice. This is especially the case now that the collapse of solidarity politics means we no longer – purposefully, politically – even speak about class in this country, let alone organise to address it.

*

Age 12, my first invitation to a school-friend’s birthday party

The dad (opening the front door): (silent)
Me (gift in hand): Spencer’s party?
The dad: I’m sorry. No.
Me: (silent)
The dad: There’ll be no need to come here again.

He was a former miner, then Tesco shelf-stacker, now dementia-raddled. I sometimes wonder what was in his I’m sorry. Was he, on some level, sorry that it had come to this? That what should have been a shared struggle against our joint poverty had somehow ended up with him inflicting his pain onto a boy that, thirty years later, still can’t get it out of his head? I’m sorry, too, I want to say.

*

In Not So Black and White, Kenan Malik makes the point that the demise of solidaristic power, coupled with the rise of an identitarian social justice framework, has resulted in a political muddle, with us trying to tackle the problems of class with the tools of culture and identity, because politically they’re the only tools we’ve now got. So even when we think we’re addressing class, we’re failing to do so, because we’re ignoring class’s relationship to capital and instead thematising class as a cultural identity. We start speaking of ‘classism’ and of the ‘white working class’ – not the brown or black working class, because brown and black people already have their cultural identity; the point now is to give the working class one. But class is not a cultural identity, it is a system of exploitation. Discrimination defines the victimisation faced by non-whites, by queers, by women, and though no doubt working-class people are discriminated against for their class, that is not what defines their victimisation – what defines their victimisation is that they are everyday exploited for profit.

*

Age 18, Imperial College Sikh Soc

Week one, still hanging around with my (white) room-mate, a guy who’d seen me move in with my belongings packed into empty crisp boxes, who’d heard my dad saying he needed to get back in time to close up. A brown girl approached us, smiling, saying she ran the society but had to rush off to orchestra practice.

What you play? I asked, determined to not be shy around girls anymore. This was London.
Violin. You?
Nothing, I said.
Where you from?
Kind of near Sheffield.
The North?
Oh, well, it’s more Midlands, really.
She laughed. You haven’t got a corner-shop as well, have you?

I didn’t hate her. I hated my room-mate. That he was standing right there. Stopping me from lying. Embarrassed for me.

*

There’s a chapter in Walter Benn Michaels’ treatise The Trouble with Diversity, where Michaels analyses an episode of Wife Swap in which a rich wife and a poor wife exchange households. The wives and husbands all learn lessons from the experiment. And what do they learn? They learn not that it’s better to have money than to not have money, no, but that – as both couples are given to understand – “the poor deserve to be treated with ‘respect’.” That is, as Michaels says, “What the commitment to diversity seeks is not a society in which there are no poor people but one in which there’s nothing wrong with being poor.”

This is precisely what we’ve seen happen now that our cultural industries, like publishing, have started treating class mistakenly as a cultural identity and applied to questions of class the same solutions they apply to dealing with questions of race, gender, sexuality. Publishing starts (again) talking about a politics of class representation, and, specifically, about bringing class into the intersectional framework. The issue here is that the problems of class (which are to do with exploitation) are fundamentally different from the challenges of, say, racism (discrimination) and the question of class should be treated as foundational, as the engine of genuine solidarity, not as a subordinate tagalong to other identities. We’ve also seen publishing begin to advocate for a politics of respect and celebration for working class lives, a kind of Pride for the working-classes. In the same way that we have anthologies for South Asian writers, and for black writers, and literary festivals for women writers, and for queer writers, we’ve started seeing anthologies and festivals for working-class writers, too.

The foreword to Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers explains that the book is “written in celebration and not apology”, and Classfest, a festival for working-class writers, was founded to create a space where working-class writers can have “their lives and books celebrated”. Elsewhere, the founder of Classfest explains that “People feel respected and validated and their self-esteem enhanced when they see themselves… reflected in books”. They may well feel respected, but that’s not feeding their kids.

The shame felt by the working class – that I felt, and still feel twinges of whenever I’m asked about my ‘background’ – is very real. And the call for respect and celebration – to not want to be made to feel ashamed – is easy to understand after years of being denigrated, of being made to feel like you and your family are losers in life, no matter the odds stacked against you. But it is also a terrifically misguided demand. To say that we should celebrate someone’s lack of financial means is to admit that you’ve given up on understanding how class operates. No doubt this isn’t the intention of such initiatives, but the effect on the culture is to inscribe a message that it’s fine for you to be exploited, to be under-privileged, to use the foodbank on a weekly basis, as long as I respect and celebrate you for it (and buy your books); as though it’s a lack of cheerleading and an absence of pats on the back that the working-class suffer from and not a lack of money.

If we must talk about respect, we could begin by showing poor and working-class people the respect of actually conceptualising their suffering in its accurate form. And if we’re speaking of authenticity, there’s nothing authentic about a class discourse that ignores class reality. In our society, to be poor and working-class is by definition to be unequal. Being poor is inferior to being rich. I am not a writer today because I was working class; I am writer despite the fact that I was working class. In our world, being working class, being poor, is by definition a great obstacle to achieving anything, and it’s not an obstacle we should be celebrating, but one it ought to be our primary objective to remove.

It is the ‘celebrating’ aspect of these working-class initiatives – disguising what the real issues are, mutating what ought to be economic questions into more culture-based ‘respect’ and ‘representation’ ones – that expose them as another identity focus by a left-wing industry whose logic remains squarely neoliberal. It’s a move that Nayan Olak, the protagonist of The Spoiled Heart, would deplore. A steadfast advocate of class-based politics who, like me, grew up in Chesterfield, a town decimated by deindustrialisation, he’s now running for the leadership of his union. His opponent, Megha Sharma, is a staunch identitarian and anti-racist, so full of a desire to combat every kind of discrimination that she determines to dig for Nayan his political grave. It’s a sad political truth that where the right roundly defeated and kneecapped the working-class, the left is now, respectfully, burying them.

*

I am not a writer today because I was working class; I am writer despite the fact that I was working class.

Things in my head: their sixteen hour days, seven days a week, for thirty-three years; Dad’s three jobs to get us through the recession; the assault over a fare that put him in hospital; the hammer underneath Mum’s bed when Dad taxied at night; her traipsing the market for my uniform; her sending me back upstairs to revise because ‘I don’t need help’; the near-bankrupting loan on the shop so I could study in London.

Will someone please tell me how to reply? That is the only question. Will someone please tell me how to reply to this continuing and worsening economic injustice? With representation and respect? With diversity committees and intersectionality? With a bestselling book about colonialism and assurances that we’re no longer talking to white people about race? With a discourse of white privilege, microaggressions, authenticity reads, trigger warnings and appropriation? With elite chatter?

Age 43, 25 April 2024, Waking up in my Bloomsbury hotel

Will someone please tell me how to fucking reply?

[ends]