http://readingfanon.blogspot.com/2012/09/demeaned-but-empowered-social-power-of.html
Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica
Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004).
Obika Gray has made the political role of the urban lower-class in Jamaica his central subject. His earlier monograph, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972, dealt with urban working class politics in the early years of independence. This book, by contrast deals with a vaguer category, “the urban poor”, in Marxist terms, the poorer urban working class and the lumpenproletariat.
Gray’s central thesis involves a dialectical relationship between what he calls the “predatory state” and a lower class that resists the norms that state seeks to impose by erecting its own values of “badness-honour”, a rival standard to the middle-class nationalist values promoted by the state.