How do we come to our understandings of class? As bell hooks has argued, most of the pedagogy on such subjects is taking place at the level of culture, in the news, the films, the soaps, etc. For example, you learn from soaps like Eastenders that whatever class once meant, it is not an important structuring principle of people’s lives.

This is simply because the characters get by without ever having to confront such issues. Even if the accents are ostentatiously proletarian, even if all the clothing, cultural and environmental markers are carefully chosen to depict a normal looking working class suburb, even if the subject is ostensibly a working class ‘community’, the reality of class is never allowed to pervade the lives of the often cartoonish, scheming, semi-criminal fraternity that exists around Albert Square. People are rarely shown working, and inasmuch as they do work, it is usually in small businesses, stalls, and other petty entrepreneurial outlets. There is no social space where a clash between workers and management might take place. There aren’t mass redundancies, strikes, and wholesale social breakdown wrought by the closure of big local employers, which is a normal fate for urban centres in the UK.

What is true of Eastenders is not entirely true of Coronation Street, where there have in the past been regular scenes of class struggle in Mike Baldwin’s sewing factory, in one instance featuring a victorious strike which ended with the women workers marching into the ‘Rover’s Return’ pub chanting “the workers, united, will never be defeated!” Still, these are the exception. In contrast to the general suppression of class issues, there are regular homilies on race, sexuality and gender, though the soaps tend to handle these topics extremely badly. Eastenders’ depiction of socially conservative “Muslim thugs” beating up a gay character named Christian (yeah) is a recent, poor example of a storyline that trades on a progressive angle for reactionary ends. This is not unrelated to the invisibility of class. If there is no social background that structures various forms of oppression, they can merely be treated as unfortunate prejudices or cultural atavisms. This is, of course, excellent material for spurious controversy.

But the cultural product is also shaped by officialdom, by politicians and bureaucrats, by the academics and intelligentsia, by the think-tanks and literati. To put it crudely, today’s television writers were yesterday’s students, and their fantasies of a post-class, individualist consumerist society (in which an actual, functioning, working class community is somehow mysteriously embedded) will undoubtedly have been shaped by the pedagogy of the state…