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Middle class anxiety

I know what you mean. But if you are working class you'll have experienced this othering all of your life.

I've experienced it at times - less so since Uni (makes you middle class - that does).
If you live in some working class areas you won't experience it that much because you don't run into many midde-class people.
 
This has got to be one key strand of MC angst; austerity was no threat to their wealth/asset defence as it specifically targeted 'others', but they've been told for 3+ years that Brexaggedon could impact their investments/pension plans/portfolios and assets. Added to which there's the threat to their (& their offspring's) cultural capital. That Erasmus scheme year in Leiden etc. I suppose some MC also see that they're jobs/positions are next line to undergo the neoliberal 'transition' and that their kids are less likely to enjoy the glittering prizes of their own generation. Easier to blame the racist thickoes than the system that they've invested in.
 
This has got to be one key strand of MC angst; austerity was no threat to their wealth/asset defence as it specifically targeted 'others', but they've been told for 3+ years that Brexaggedon could impact their investments/pension plans/portfolios and assets.

Most people I know who I'd call middle-class are very much against post financial crash austerity.
What I always find crashingly naive is the way some of them think things were all sunny uplands up until 2007.
 
Most people I know who I'd call middle-class are very much against post financial crash austerity.
What I always crashingly naive is the way some of them think things were all sunny uplands up until 2007.
it's always been shit but sometimes you need wellies and sometimes you can get away with wearing trainers or even flip-flops
 
Most people I know who I'd call middle-class are very much against post financial crash austerity.
What I always crashingly naive is the way some of them think things were all sunny uplands up until 2007.
Maybe, but whether or not such folk expressed those opinions, they were able to discern that the class-war austerity had not been declared against them. They clearly don't feel the same about the outcome of letting the racist thickoes vote. Remember, 750 billion of them marched through London about it.
 
For me there is a big difference between the imminent recession and the last one.

The last one was a result of global economic events and upheaval. You can argue about whether austerity was the appropriate way to deal with it, but it was a huge, global economic event that tipped us into recession. It was kind of inevitable and all we could do was weather it as well as possible.

This one coming is happening too soon after the last one when we haven’t had time to settle down yet. Recovery is still fragile and people on a personal and national/collective level haven’t manage to rebuild. And this one self inflicted. It’s not the global economy which tanked last week, it’s the pound. Everyone remembers how shit recessions are, and we get to enjoy another one...

Plus there is an emotional element too. As well as the loss of freedom and options and so on, (which is horrible) and I am repulsed by the voices being amplified. In many middle class lives you can kid yourself that the upper classes are just a picturesque irrelevance in their crumbling stately homes with receding chins and receding chins and receding influence. But they are back. All over the news, sneering about 14th century battles and ww2 in an appeal to the ugliest most stupid impulses of British nationalism.
 
Maybe, but whether or not such folk expressed those opinions, they were able to discern that the class-war austerity had not been declared against them. They clearly don't feel the same about the outcome of letting the racist thickoes vote. Remember, 750 billion of them marched through London about it.

This is the bit of the Venn diagram that encompasses class-aware middle-class Remain voters who think racist thickoes were just given the vote?
750 billion seems optimistic.
 
*unpacks deckchair*
Whiney middle class twats whining about other whiney middle class twats. with zero self awareness.
Urban 75 always giving you something to laugh at.
 
Firstly, the middle class adopts the role of the narrating class of politics and culture in Britain, on the basis of its certainty that what it thinks is influential and important and has agency. This has been their prevailing view, outside of economic matters, for 50 years, but has been confronted head on by Brexit.
...true, but to say again, Brexit has been a narrative of the middle class as much as anything else...the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Express are papers of/for the middle classes. The problem with talking about this in terms of class is that you cant map attitudes onto a (already deeply flawed) map of the working & middles classes. The middle class narrative that's against the EU is doing just fine and far from being confronted by anything is swimming along nicely. A quick tour of the home counties makes this clear.
 
This is the bit of the Venn diagram that encompasses class-aware middle-class Remain voters who think racist thickoes were just given the vote?
750 billion seems optimistic.
Didn't need to be that "class-aware" to see that it was the disabled & other work-shy degenerates that were paying for the crash...whilst their own shareholdings/property portfolios were doing very nicely.
 
...true, but to say again, Brexit has been a narrative of the middle class as much as anything else...the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Express are papers of/for the middle classes. The problem with talking about this in terms of class is that you cant map attitudes onto a (already deeply flawed) map of the working & middles classes. The middle class narrative that's against the EU is doing just fine and far from being confronted by anything is swimming along nicely. A quick tour of the home counties makes this clear.

:pinky:
 
...true, but to say again, Brexit has been a narrative of the middle class as much as anything else...the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Express are papers of/for the middle classes. The problem with talking about this in terms of class is that you cant map attitudes onto a (already deeply flawed) map of the working & middles classes. The middle class narrative that's against the EU is doing just fine and far from being confronted by anything is swimming along nicely. A quick tour of the home counties makes this clear.

There are huge swathes of middle class leavers, it's true. But I'd argue they still possess the same characteristics, narrators, assumers and possessors basically. I would also say that this section of the middle class you are talking about - nakedly reactionary - have been raging about the working class and its fecklessness, yobbishness, its culture, its temerity not to die for decades.
 
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Longer for some than for others.
Absolutely. But lots of businesses that survived the last recession are now highly leveraged, spent their reserves to get through the last one and have no resilience. That means job losses this time round, which’ll kick a bunch of people just about hanging on over the edge
 
My daughter, a social worker, has just phoned me, incandescent with rage, after a 'congratulations' card has been handed around the office. 'Congrats on your new (bigger) house'. She witheringly mentioned how no-one ever offered her a card in the event of her moving to a different private rental. A huge uncomfortable silence ensued and mutterings of 'O well, what do you expect from N'. Her point, which none of them even considered, is, once again, the enormous gap between the mc, dual income, property-owning workers and the people who they are supposed to support...which is shaded by contempt and disgust at worst and condescending patriarchal noblesse oblige at best...without even a shred of shared solidarity.

In London, there will be wc social workers, because, even with a gloss of professionalism, it is a career which is not highly regarded...but in Tory Norfolk, the class difference is unbreachable.

She is submitting a little rage-y essay to 'Lumpen'.
 
My daughter, a social worker, has just phoned me, incandescent with rage, after a 'congratulations' card has been handed around the office. 'Congrats on your new (bigger) house'.

That's an actual thing?? Big house cards?
 
I was brought up definitely middle class, but as I so infrequently mix with middle class people, and went to a Polytechnic rather than a University, class wise I am in a rather dissatisfying limbo.
 
For me there is a big difference between the imminent recession and the last one.

The last one was a result of global economic events and upheaval. You can argue about whether austerity was the appropriate way to deal with it, but it was a huge, global economic event that tipped us into recession. It was kind of inevitable and all we could do was weather it as well as possible.

This one coming is happening too soon after the last one when we haven’t had time to settle down yet. Recovery is still fragile and people on a personal and national/collective level haven’t manage to rebuild. And this one self inflicted. It’s not the global economy which tanked last week, it’s the pound. Everyone remembers how shit recessions are, and we get to enjoy another one...

Plus there is an emotional element too. As well as the loss of freedom and options and so on, (which is horrible) and I am repulsed by the voices being amplified. In many middle class lives you can kid yourself that the upper classes are just a picturesque irrelevance in their crumbling stately homes with receding chins and receding chins and receding influence. But they are back. All over the news, sneering about 14th century battles and ww2 in an appeal to the ugliest most stupid impulses of British nationalism.

Sorry manter but what.

Regardless of it being a 'huge global event' it wasn't an act of god and the imposition of austerity on working class while capital bailouts and recovery went to the wealthy, the use of the crisis to drive deepening inequality, cut social spending, destroy the rump of post war consensus, can't be dismissed as arguing about whether 'austerity was appropriate'. The crisis was caused by them and used by them to enrich them at the expense of us. We, whatever that means, weren't ready then either. And the 'voices amplified' then were anti us, anti social spending, anti working class. For years and years and years.

I'm really not arsed about the idea of global or 'us', what us
 
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