Meddlers, keep your hands off the working classes
This week, the Power Commission - set up by a charitable foundation to investigate voter apathy and the widening gulf between the British government and the people - presented a series of lukewarm recommendations aimed at stopping the perceived democratic rot. Power should be handed back to local government, it suggested; the voting age should be dropped to 16; citizens should be able to initiate public inquiries - oh, and more women and people from ethnic minorities should be encouraged to stand for parliament.
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But such measures will do no good at all. British democracy is in dire straits and voter turnouts are at historic lows not because people have tired of its virtues. Rather, it is because the mediating institutions that glued ordinary citizens to government and the state - the trade unions as collective representatives of labour - were demolished or fell away. We are still dealing with the aftermath.
The traditional working-class institutions that buttressed relationships between citizens and the state in most western democracies were smashed 20 years ago after the intellectual victory of Thatcherism. Who could have predicted that today, governments and social policy wonks would be sifting through the debris to put them back together? A good deal of the coded vocabulary that oils the wheels of social policy and public life today is based on avoiding the idea of the working classes - giving rise to the concepts of "social exclusion" that dominated last week's policy launch by Tony Blair, prime minister, the supposed "alienation" of citizens from government, the "social capital" that so many academics deem is necessary to make communities work.
For most of its history, representative democracy in western countries has depended on organised religion and organised labour to introduce it to its electorate and divide that electorate up into political parties. In the absence of those mediating institutions, politicians, desperate for initiatives to supplement the fragile system of representative democracy, seem happy to involve all sorts of specious lobby groups in their decision-making. Through commissions, focus groups and consultative bodies, western governments seem increasingly keen to hand at least a vestige of power back to the people; but too often, there is no one there to receive it.
Karl Marx first envisaged the working classes as a spectre that had not yet come fully into existence, but which unnerved society even before its arrival. By contrast, our 21st-century affection for the workers looks more like kitsch and nostalgia. We are haunted by the absence of the working classes from political debate, and routinely pay lip service to their memory. In Britain, two cabinet ministers - John Prescott and John Reid - are among various politicians who owe their continued political existence to their working-class credentials - credentials that are wheeled out regularly to remind the Labour party of its past.
In the last US general election, George W. Bush triumphed in part because his Texan homeboy patter spoke better than John Kerry to "ordinary people" - the workers, in other words. The ghost of working classes past can also be seen in British culture. Soap operas such as Coronation Street and EastEnders usher us into life in mythical working-class communities. We want to live among the workers - it helps us feel part of something. Whisper it at the board meeting, but many employers know they might be better off with a strong and organised group of employees too.
The working classes still exist, but they have mislaid their political and organisational voice. The priggish, middle-England puritanism of many Labour parliamentarians, who refused to exempt working-men's clubs from a smoking ban (a ban that does not apply to parliament itself) has only re???-inforced their alienation. An organised working class is the tried and tested guarantor of representative democracy - the best way to stimulate its political renewal would be to call off the non-governmental organisations and the do-gooders and leave it alone. The working classes are accustomed to being remade and reshaped as both technology and the economy change, and can even withstand being dashed occasionally against the rocks of modernity. They will renew themselves if left to their own devices. After all, if they did not exist, we would have to invent them.
The writer is director of talks at ???-London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, where a month-long series of talks and events, Whatever Happened to the Working Class? begins on March 6
少管工人阶级的闲事
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周，权力委员会(Power Commission)提出了一系列不冷不热的建议，旨在阻止民主被锈蚀。权力委员会由一个慈善基金会成立，任务是调查选民的冷淡情绪，以及英国政府与民众之间日益加大的鸿沟。该委员会建议，权力应交还给地方政府，投票年龄应降至16岁，公民应能发起公开质询――噢，还应鼓励更多妇女及少数族裔民众竞选国会议员。
但此类措施根本于事无补。英国民主陷入了空前的困境，选民参选率创历史新低，并非因为人们听腻了它的优点，而是因为连接普通民众与政府和国家的中间机构，即作为劳工集体代表的工会，被解散或消失了。我们仍然在应对其后果。
20年前，在撒切尔主义取得理性胜利后，在大多西方民主政体中维持公民与国家关系的传统工人阶级组织被打碎了。当初谁能预料，如今政府与社会政策策士会从废墟里进行筛选，要把它们重新拼凑起来？如今，许多给社会政策和公众生活的车轮上润滑剂的法规，其立足点都是要避免工人阶级的观点――这导致了“社会排斥”（social exclusion）观念的出现，该观念在英国首相托尼?布莱尔(Tony Blair)上周的政策发布中占据了大量篇幅，也导致了所谓的公民与政府“疏远”（alienation）的观念，以及诸多学术界人士认为社会运作所需的“社会资本”（social capital）观念。
在西方国家代议制民主的历史上，大部分时期都依赖有组织的宗教和有组织的劳工来把代议制民主介绍给选民，并将选民划分为不同的政治党派。在不存在那些中间机构的情况下，政客们迫切需要完善脆弱的代议民主制度的方案，因此他们似乎乐于让各种华而不实的游说团体参与他们的决策。西方政府似乎日益热切希望，至少要把一丁点权力通过委员会、焦点团体与协商团体交还给人们。但很多时候，没人想要这些权力。
卡尔?马克思(Karl Marx)率先将工人阶级设想成一种幽灵，当时工人阶级尚未完全出现，但还出现就已令社会大为紧张。相比之下，我们在21世纪对工人的热爱，看上去更像是媚俗和怀旧。我们为工人阶级在政治辩论中的缺席而困扰，并例行公事般地为工人阶级的过去说几句空泛的好话。在英国，有许多政客都是由于他们的工人阶级背景才得以继续政治生涯，内阁大臣约翰?普莱斯科特(John Prescott)和约翰?里德(John Reid)就是其中两位，他们会定期秀一下这一背景，好让工党记得它的过去。
在上一次美国大选中，乔治?W?布什(George W. Bush)的胜利多少是因为在“老百姓”(也就是工人们)看来，他的德州土话说得比约翰?克里(John Kerry)更动听。在英国文化中，也能看到以往工人阶级的幽灵。《加冕街》(Coronation Street)和《东伦敦人》(EastEnders)等肥皂剧，带领我们走进了有些神秘色彩的工人阶级群体的生活。我们想和工人们生活在一起，这有助于我们找到归属感。虽然只是在董事会上私下交流，但许多雇主知道，有一支强有力且有组织的雇员队伍，他们可能会赚更多钱。
工人阶级仍存在，但他们把自己在政治和组织方面的发言权放错了地方。许多工党议员身上自负的英格兰中部清教徒作风，只能让他们更加被疏远。他们反对工人俱乐部免于遵守禁烟令，但议会自身却无须遵守该禁令。有组织的工人阶级是代议制民主久经考验的守护者。刺激工人阶级对政治重新感兴趣的最佳办法，是叫停非政府组织和空想社会改良家，然后别管这个阶级。工人阶级习惯于随着技术和经济的改变而被再造或改造，甚至能经受住与现代性岩石的偶尔撞击。如果对他们不加干涉，他们就会自我更新。毕竟，如果工人阶级不存在，我们还是得创造出工人阶级。
作者是伦敦当代艺术中心(Institute of Contemporary Arts)座谈主任，为期一个月的系列座谈和活动――“工人阶级究竟发生了什么？”(Whatever Happened to the Working Class)将于3月6日开始
