Let's have a class thread! It'll be fun!
- Thread starter ymu
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Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Precisely what I wanted. Thank you.
I didn't even think about the term 'apolitical fool'. The 'fool' refers to the 'apolitical', not the brain capacity. It is ambiguous and pointlessly insulting. Point taken on language too. The problem of spending too much time talking to deadly serious lefties is that you forget how normal people use language.
I was an 'apolitical fool' until my 30s, apart from some enthusiastic marching on Gay Prides in the 1980s for friends who had suffered horrific abuse for no good reason. I remember having to leave the room sharpish the first time someone (sincerely) called me comrade because I could not hold down the belly laugh that welled up, and I really, really respect the guy for the great, principled, union activist he is, so there was no way I was going to let myself be a prick over union dialect.
So yeah. I'm part of the problem. Educate me, Urban.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Post them up then! I'm not desperate to reinvent the wheel if there's a perfectly good explanatory definition of class already out there in perfect circular form.
fortunately, with your help, I have seen the error of my ways, repented and opened the door to the path of redemption.
Steel Icarus
we move
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Working class: me
Middle Class: anyone who earns more than me
Upper Class: Craphats, monocles and estates
I jest of course, but class definitions aren't clear cut and easily pinned down in a linear fashion. Posh but poor, wealthy but working class of habit? Is it cultural habits addresed or are we looking at it purely in terms of economics. Relationship to the means of? I don't think there are glib one-size-fits-all answers .
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
When I was young, and before I even really understood a lot of politics, I used to categorise it as:
The haves;
The have nots.
I belonged to the latter
As time went on, I think I then developed a conscious on the lines of:
Those that have to work for someone else, to keep a roof over their heads (which I suppose encompassed blue and white collar - I didn't really analyse any deeper that than then);
Those that run and owned the businesses where the rest of us work;
The upper class with lots of wealth - didn't work, the aristocracy.
And then not long after that, my mum shoved a copy of Marx in my hands
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Nah, you don't get that point.
I don't vote. I am undoubtedly a fool but apolitical I think is stretching it.
Turning out to vote for the least worst option in order to confer the status quo some legitimacy is the politics of Zimbabwe, not a modern democratic state.
I don't want political democracy (ha!) more urgently than I want economic democracy. I'll waste my time fighting for shit I believe in, thanks very much.
southside
Banned
I've wound myself up about class in the past and there is a devide, even between blue and white collar workers.
I think I've got as far as I'm going to in terms of career because I'm not that well educated, I'm Joe average and there is a finite career path for people like me. I've done quite well considering some of my short comings. I don't like snobs wheather they be intellectual or social, I don't feel that comfortable in a yuppie's pub but as a rule they are nice people and don't really cause anyone any trouble. I prefer to be around people that are from the same sort of social standing because I find that I don't get judged as much and I feel more comfortable in that surrounding.
Class doesn't matter? I think it does to a degree anyway.
Most middle class people I know say I'm rough around the edges but that's ok.
I think I've got as far as I'm going to in terms of career because I'm not that well educated, I'm Joe average and there is a finite career path for people like me. I've done quite well considering some of my short comings. I don't like snobs wheather they be intellectual or social, I don't feel that comfortable in a yuppie's pub but as a rule they are nice people and don't really cause anyone any trouble. I prefer to be around people that are from the same sort of social standing because I find that I don't get judged as much and I feel more comfortable in that surrounding.
Class doesn't matter? I think it does to a degree anyway.
Most middle class people I know say I'm rough around the edges but that's ok.
Callie
Pivoting
What context are you planning to use this ymu? Whatever definition you have people will argue against it. I'm just confused as to what you want it for? I would have thought any discussions about issues effecting working class people or whoever can be had without having a definition of classes. Can't they?
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
The ascension of the bourgeoisie proper into wealth and influence distributed dynastically in a manner previously reserved to the aristocracy, the expansion of the p/b and a corresponding re-branding of (relatively) wealthy working class as p/b
or something. My brain is fried today.
CyberRose
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If class is your role in society, and if the bourgeoisie expanded into the roles previously held by the aristocracy (and considering the aristocracy as it was when it had power is now extinct in the West) then does that mean the bourgeoisie are both middle class and upper class?
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
oxford not sufficient then
Fuck no! I did PPE two years below Cameron, two years above Osborne, lived next door to fucking Jacob Rees-Mogg in my first year and was in a tutor group and initially friendly with another new intake Tory (who isn't posh enough to deserve naming) but increasingly distant as he put his love for Thatcher above his massive capacity for rational thought.
How in hell is Oxford going to be able to teach me anything meaningful, except that when my generation get their turn at power, we are going to have to fight off upper-class braying nincompoops who literally slobbered over portraits of Thatcher hung up in their bedrooms and held parties to gaze adoringly at her authoritarian beauty.
It taught me that this was coming, and that I could walk into a massively well paid job that I was disastrously under-qualified for just because I got into university with a bunch of moronic sociopaths. But only if I was willing to be surrounded by said bunch of moronic sociopaths for the rest of my natural.
I passed. A surprising number do. They were a despised and much derided minority. They were so extremely shit for anyone with the misfortune to be in earshot or chucking distance that OUCA got closed down by the Tory party and has to reemerge as OUCS. A resolutely working-class student in my year got seriously injured in my resolutely toffish college garden by some oik chucking a newkie brown bottle into a crowded garden, in the dark, on a beautiful warm summer night where everyone was out to enjoy the relief that it was finally fucking all over bar the results.
No one ever got done for it, but a very nasty rumour got started that it was the 'Workers' - their name for the group of resolutely working-class, fuck you toffs and fuck you if you talk to a toff students. Everyone knew it was the exact opposite. We knew roughly where all the players were before it got dark. An orchestrated attack with the choice of beer brand the final cunty touch.
I had the best friends I ever made in my life at that college. And it was partly the siege mentality they imposed. You don't even see a lot of it without hindsight. They bully there like they bullied at Eton because they were born to be bullies.
I hated the fucking place, and the single over-riding factor in us living on a boat now is that my dearest friend and colleague got a job there and said I had to move with her. "Fuck that. We'll cruise the canals within commuting distance and I'll be there whenever you need me."
My partner can't take it there at all. The racism is unreal. It's just too white to be a real place. It isn't.
And they teach you fuck all of value unless it's how to screw people over from the cabinet table.
The tutors are mostly great (obv
), but that's because they have to deal with these cunts every day, and put up with it when a kid from inner city Newcastle gets kicked out because she failed a meaningless first year exam in a subject she never needed to study again because they gave her patronage but no fucking support for weak maths skills. Her tutors in the other subjects were furious but helpless. Meanwhile a kid who managed to fail fucking first year history gets to retake because his dad said he'd build us a new boat house.If there's a thread of decency in you, it will teach you that all that glitters is not gold, or how to get your revenge by fleecing the bastards by being a fuck of a lot better at their game than they would ever have the diligence or nowse to be.
Which has its compensations, I suppose. But it ain't worth it. I struggled to care about my finals, I've just suspended my DPhil because ... I want to just fucking publish the papers, not jump through stupid hoops and the fees they charge for no reason are astronomical so fuck letting them tick away. None of the academics know how the system works because it's impenetrable. If you think you can probably do something, the quickest way to find out is just to do it and see what happens. The undergraduate courses are dire - the colleges teach independently so getting changes to a syllabus ... just doesn't happen. Outside of the sciences, the courses haven't changed in centuries because no one could ever quite face the trauma of trying it. Post-graduate teaching is much, much better - but the overall 'calibre' (ugh) of the students much, much lower because if you have funding they'll bite your hand off.
Fucked up.
Coming from a family of manual workers and growing up in an inner-city shithole, I always feel a marked sense of superiority whenever I have to spend time in the company of middle class people.
Mrs L comes from a lower middle class family (mother a primary school teacher and her dad a farm manager) and she and her siblings actually defer to me on most things 'life.'
Working class is better. It's just the way it fucking is.
Fedayn
Well-Known Member
CyberRose
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Not sure if the phrase "lower middle class" is allowed on U75?
CyberRose
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Don't think it was a phrase used by Marx nearly 200 years ago!
Don't think it was a phrase used by Marx nearly 200 years ago!
Lowerr middle class: most university and polyversity students nowadays.
Upper middle class: posh students who are like students used to be.
I'm currently surrounded by "real" working class people (unlike me, and even more unlike many of the self proclaimed WC of U75), and I have to say that if they are anything to go by then the working class is mostly comprised of moronic, sub-par intelligence, feckless dunces with a penchant for farting at the breakfast table. I'm not saying they're representative of the WC in general, but neither are you sunshine.
Steel Icarus
we move
It's a start, but I reckon a lot of people would have trouble being in just one.
I lived with my grandparents til I was 6. Both head-teachers, one from a mining family just like our new queen of hearts, one from a m/c pen-pushing family. My mum was there, too, and didn't have a job. So I had in effect 3 parents. Loads of books, toys, etc.
Then my mum got married to a high-pressure water gunner; we moved into a council house, for which I was later taken the piss out of by my peers. Free school dinners, clothing vouchers, eventually both parents jobless. But my mum was getting a cheque for £250 a month from my grandparents; they bought my folks a car, and me a BBC model B, and paid for us to go on holiday.
And I messed up school, and college, and went on the dole, and married an office girl; she got promoted a few times, I got a job and got promoted a few times; we bought a house, and got pissed every minute we weren't working.
And now here I am again, no job & doing a degree because my mum left me nearly 50 grand & the wife's a Head of maths. I'm working class as far as I can tell, and as far as I'd describe myself, but I must admit to feeling a bit of a fraud. I dunno.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
I thought I'd explained that in interminable detail in the OP. More fool me, eh?
We need to raise a rather more substantial army than these isles have ever seen before, and language barriers ain't helping the cause.
CyberRose
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You're preaching to the converted there mate!
_angel_
.
Not for much longer probably tho! I wouldn't have gone to college if I was going to be charged £9k a year.
This is what tories want all students to be.
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