Given this heterogeneous social composition, complex location within the production process and contradictory relationship to political power, the moral culture of the urban poor is necessarily complicated. It is well known, for example, that defiant anti-system sensibilities compete with the urban poor's complicit involvement with predatory power. The group also exhibits norms, both law-abiding and outlaw in character, that link them to a wider set of social values in Jamaican society. Communal sentiments and norms of mutuality are articulated with powerful countervailing tendencies. These latter include social cannibalism and beggar-thy-neighbour strategies, particularly in times of extreme need and partisan conflict. Though the poor may be badly victimised by parasitic rule, many within their ranks have nonetheless preyed on their kith and kin in the urban ghetto.

Alternatively, socially militant strata of the poor, using renegade and outlaw tactics, have directed their hostility against predatory power. Such acts of defiance have won sympathy from other contingents of the poor who morally underwrite these acts of uncivil anti-dominant class outlawry. Alienation, anger and deep frustration with the condition of their lives cause many among the poor to lend tacit and active moral support to the defiant ones among them.

Still, it should be remembered that when this anti-system alienation collapses into violent crime, murder and theft from the hard-working poor, it does also elicit harsh retaliation and biting moral disapproval. Many among the poor, especially the respectable and hard-working strata, are outraged by this behaviour. They typically are embarrassed by its occurrence within their community, and unqualifiedly reject the abandonment of what is seen as a violation of an older moral standard among the community.

These scandalised contingents of the urban poor find such outlaw structures of defiance, "disgraceful", and regard them as a transgression of an older community standard of dignity, marked by hard work, uplift and sacrifice. These contingents of the poor reject the criminal extremism of their marauding peers; they are threatened by it, and inveigh, as militantly as their social betters, against a descent into rapacious and anomic behaviour that target hapless members of the society, whether poor or well-to-do.

CONTRASTING DISPOSITION

These contrasting dispositions highlight the protean nature of popular moral culture with its simultaneous possession of defiant, oppositional practices, and restraining moral sensibilities borrowed from a wider system of shared values in Jamaican society. These dispositions indicate not only that the poor are capable of resorting to crimes against each other and their social betters, but also that they are not immune to the wider network of norms and values in Jamaica. This network of values has become increasingly complex since the 1970s, and has been characterised by an erosion of the disciplinary moral leadership of nationalist leaders and their civic allies. The expansion of predation, aggressive violence and rejection of public authority among all groups confirm this loss of dominant class authority.

It is therefore not surprising that the moral culture of the urban poor reflects tendencies within a shared Jamaican moral and political culture. That culture includes aggressive personal dispositions and resort to violence as a means of resolving disputes and securing advantages. It contains intense individualism as well as a self-seeking and status-consciousness preoccupation with consumer materialism as measures of achievement and social recognition. This protean moral orientation adopts a pragmatic outlook on politics based on necessity and short-run advantage, rather than on any sustained commitment to radical politics or utopian ideologies. Finally, this moral culture among the urban poor includes a deeply ambiguous disposition toward blackness and related Africanisms as the basis for the civilisation-identity of Jamaicans.

Thus, contrary to the widely held view that the social actions and moral sensibility of the rebellious poor are outside the pale of Jamaican culture, these shared traditions, in which the poor participate, show that what the rebellious poor do politically ought not be regarded as moral aberrations inflicted upon a civilised society by a criminal and barbaric class. Rather, much of what the rebellious poor do, and the moral sentiments they exhibit, should be regarded, in part, as expressions of the banal, everyday attributes of a widely shared social sensibility in late twentieth-century Jamaica.

SHARED TRADITIONS

Notwithstanding these shared traditions, the customs of the urban poor, and the politics of this group are not all identical to those of other social classes. Distinctive group experiences, peculiar to the urban poor, do separate them from other classes and give their customs a specificity of their own. The dispossessed group's role in production, and its material circumstances and social experiences, informs their political dispositions and moral sensibilities, setting the urban poor apart from other classes and strata within the Jamaican social structure.

Part of the distinctive social identity of the urban poor is closely related to the group's tenuous relationship to the system of production and its inability to provide employment for job-seekers from the poorer classes. A historic and persisting feature of the Jamaican economy has been the chronic unemployment and underemployment of urban unskilled labour, and the casualisation of these castaways from the ranks of the employed labour force. Jobless-ness, economic insecurity and poverty have been the lot of generations of the urban poor, and few other classes in the urban milieu share this condition of chronic deprivation and marginality.

Few groups in Jamaica know the misery and frustration of the socially conscious but impoverished sector of the urban poor. Moreover, not many Jamaicans know what it means to be homeless in the inner city. While many among the urban poor do find shelter in modern facilities and enjoy public amenities, the vast majority of the poor live with inadequate shelter or homelessness and a lack of privacy.