'The middle class'
Oct 25 2009 06:22
#32
Aye, they certainly do make things a little misty...when I was at school a teacher once asked who thought they were working class and who thought they were middle class. I put up my hand for middle class (what a wally!) my mum was a carer I think at the time and my dad a dodgy car salesman. While my mate who's dad was a financial director for River Island put up his hand for working class - "Cos we're all workers" I believe was his reasoning.
Oct 25 2009 11:53
#33
I think this is a very sticky question but one that is worth thinking about for a few reasons:
1. Quite a few working class people want to think of themselves as middle class (maybe the word has different connotations in different countries, I get the impression that in the States people think it means "not really poor", in England I think it means higher up the ladder than that) and they think this means they have aspirations and potential to "better themselves" or they think they are a "cut above" the neighbours who are stupid plebs. I think this way of viewing yourself CAN SOMETIMES have a direct connection to antipathy to class struggle, scabbing and grassing, siding with the boss etc. People could of course dump all these ideas straight away in the fervour of being personally involved in a good struggle. I have of course seen scabbing etc carried out by people who don´t aspire to be middle class at all.
2. I don´t know other people´s experience, but I had some problems at school after being seen to be voluntarily reading books- this was considered middle class and a bad thing. I think an antipathy to things like reading, learning another language, cooking food from other countries etc is quite big (though not universal) amongst working class people (in England anyway), and I think it is something which poisons our development as human beings.
The question of the middle class in terms of the power someone has in a specific workplace or a landlord or whatever is a very different kettle of fish from perceptions of someone´s class in terms of culture. A huge number of workers are now in some kind of ill-defined middle ground. They have some power to boss some people around to some extent. How this makes them react in the face of a strike etc is very unpredictable, I think.
When I was working with cleaners in the City some of them were supervisors. They got about 50p more an hour than the cleaners. They didn´t speak English, they were sometimes undocumented, they lived in exactly the same shitty accomodation. You could not by any sensible standard call them middle class. They were also shop stewards in the Union. This was not for them any kind of cushy number, with time off work etc, it was liable to get you sacked and maybe deported. However they did have a job which involved them checking other people´s work and forcing other people to work hard. How you conceptualise these kinds of jobs I don´t know, but I think it´s worth thinking about.
(I wasn´t a cleaner, I was teaching them English)
Oct 25 2009 14:19
#34
I think what you seem to be working from, killyerlandlords, is way more of an aesthetic definition of the middle class that has been pushed by the film industry, advertisements, all that pop-culture nonsense.
I think at various points in history, class definition may have been a lot more cut and dry (or maybe not, I wasn't really there. Any thoughts on this?). It doesn't seem useful or correct to simplify these complex relations anymore; while it would be nice to understand these things easily, I think if we actually wanted to look at them in a serious way we'd have quite a bit work ahead of us.
tina wrote:
Perhaps there's no sharp dividing line more of a foggy blur.Working class people have to work for a living.
Ruling class people get to make decisions about the rest of us.Perhaps the Middle class are just those in the comfortable middle.
I would agree that the line is pretty foggy, but the rest of that statement just seems like such a vast simplification. In America (the only place I can speak to from experience), folks that are considered upper-middle-class (often middle or upper management at companies, white collar workers, etc) often work 50, 60, 70 hour weeks. They make a lot of money, yes, some drive SUV's, live in the suburbs, waste quite a bit, many of these things are true. But this imagery is no more useful at this point in history than thinking about class composition in the 1950's America through the lens of "Leave It To Beaver." We're not going to understand a class by gazing at an idealized version of that class.
JW, I agree that the middle class is a sociological classification and that it very different than the capitalist class and the proletariat BUT does the concept of middle class-ness carry ideological weight, does it mystify actual class relations? I would say yes. For example, both of my parents work but view themselves as middle class rather than as workers even though my mom makes less than a $1,000 a month. I believe that this self-identification impacts the way my parents perceive class relations in society as well as how they would act when push comes to shove--against their actual class interest as workers. Of course this is all intellectual speculation.