Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class?

[Kevbad the Bad]

Which one? I'm from Bedfordshire, spent my whole childhood there. As it seems did whole generations of my family before me for hundreds of years, a family of agricultural labourers. Our small town was bitterly divided but between working class and the snobby middle class. There wasn't a lot of mixing which at least gave me an early introduction into what class may mean to some people.

Whoops! I meant Buckinghamshire, though the village of Lavendon is near the county borders.

 

[planetgeli]

Whoops! I meant Buckinghamshire, though the village of Lavendon is near the county borders.

Well I've just learned Lavendon is Buckinghamshire. I thought it was Northamptonshire because I used to cycle through it from Bedford to Northampton, so I do know it.

I remember it as extremely posh, much, much more posh than Sandy where I'm from.

 

[cloudyday]

It is good, isn’t it? I haven’t read it all, but have similarly been dipping in and out.

he's very good/easy to read for someone like me who needs something to accompany reading Marx. I got waylaid last year and had to put it down for a bit, need to get back to it.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Well I've just learned Lavendon is Buckinghamshire. I thought it was Northamptonshire because I used to cycle through it from Bedford to Northampton, so I do know it.

I remember it as extremely posh, much, much more posh than Sandy where I'm from.

Bits of it are certainly posh now, and neighbouring Olney is dead posh. When we went there a few years ago I saw several Lamborghinis and a Rolls Royce in just the one afternoon. But back in the day much of the area was dirt poor. It's now considered commutable to London.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Always is a very big word here, but even if true, would that stop people looking to maintain their social privilege from exploiting the situation? Making it worse, deepening the divisions with lies and manipulation? Like always?

To clarify, when I wrote someone, I didn't really mean any particular person.

But when, finally, a large number of people at the bottom of the pile finally put their identity differences aside and organize to win better terms and conditions for their entire Class .. what better way to destroy that than by reminding them, But wait, aren't you all different kinds of people?

So yes, capitalism has a lot to do with it.

I'm not saying that all these possible differences are a good idea, just that the processes of differentiation predate and are independent of capitalism as such. Those at the top, and some on the way up, will certainly use and exploit difference to their advantage. Not disagreeing with you there.

 

[mojo pixy]

Fair enough, but it's probably a hot issue now because of the prominence 'identity' politics has. It suits that paradigm and its neoliberal proponents to treat 'working class' as just another identity. It doesn't suit that paradigm to see Working Class (or indeed Professional-Managerial Class, imo a better term than Middle Class) as categories that transcend identity.

 

[krink]

I've really tried to follow this but I'm just getting more confused. I think I'll just stick to what I know - I'm getting ripped off, I'm doing the work but still got fuck all and I'm not happy about it. And the reason it happens like this is because the only way I can survive is by selling my labour because all the stuff I need to live is owned by some other cunt.

 

[Pickman's model]

Well I've just learned Lavendon is Buckinghamshire. I thought it was Northamptonshire because I used to cycle through it from Bedford to Northampton, so I do know it.

I remember it as extremely posh, much, much more posh than Sandy where I'm from.

Sandy sticks in my mind as where the rspb were based, may still be. Always imagined it as a mini Sahara, with sand dunes stretching nearly to the horizon

 

[danny la rouge]

I've really tried to follow this but I'm just getting more confused. I think I'll just stick to what I know - I'm getting ripped off, I'm doing the work but still got fuck all and I'm not happy about it. And the reason it happens like this is because the only way I can survive is by selling my labour because all the stuff I need to live is owned by some other cunt.

That’s basically it anyway.

 

[Steel Icarus]

Imagine an upper-middle class privately educated academic dropping his hot takes on the class system now. Wouldn't get the time of day round here would he.

 

[krink]

That’s basically it anyway.

Haha! I just you a pm while this was being posted

 

[MickiQ]

I've really tried to follow this but I'm just getting more confused. I think I'll just stick to what I know - I'm getting ripped off, I'm doing the work but still got fuck all and I'm not happy about it. And the reason it happens like this is because the only way I can survive is by selling my labour because all the stuff I need to live is owned by some other cunt.

This is the most insightful analysis of current society I have ever seen.

 

[Serge Forward]

Yes krink that is basically it. Reading Marx's Capital or its various abridgements (eg Cafiero or Engels) is a worthwhile thing to do but not essential. The long and the short of it is... what you said. And if every working person (whatever class they happened to identify with) had that understanding, then we'd be somewhat less fucked.

 

[ska invita]

I've really tried to follow this but I'm just getting more confused. I think I'll just stick to what I know - I'm getting ripped off, I'm doing the work but still got fuck all and I'm not happy about it. And the reason it happens like this is because the only way I can survive is by selling my labour because all the stuff I need to live is owned by some other cunt.

Understanding being a prole is the easy bit - who feels it knows it - Marx almost unnecessary for that
But the bit I think is unclear and problematic is the middle class category

Can someone do a quick up-to-date Marxist list of the modern jobs that form the bastard agents-of-capitalism middle classes please?
Does it still include academics, teachers, social workers, engineers, and nurses, like it used to when i first started reading about class? Even though those jobs often pay less than skilled manual work? But they're so classed because they supposedly "perpetuate and reproduce capitalist culture and class relations"?

What about film editors?
Gigging musicians? Is there a scale of success? When does it switch form working to middle?
Police? Do they not "perpetuate and reproduce capitalist culture and class relations"
Gastropub chefs? Michelin star chefs?
What if you're a firefighter?
What if you get promoted and become a firefighter lieutenant?

My wider family on my mums side had a lot of coal miners in it as it was a solid coal mining region for miles.
Of course if you work there long enough you move up the ranks, and there are ranks to go up. Are all the ranks working class positions, or do you become a middle class miner at some point over the years as you get promoted?

 

[ska invita]

Yes krink that is basically it. Reading Marx's Capital or its various abridgements (eg Cafiero or Engels) is a worthwhile thing to do but not essential. The long and the short of it is... what you said. And if every working person (whatever class they happened to identify with) had that understanding, then we'd be somewhat less fucked.

Things is there's "working-poor" and "working-comfortable." Again going back to 7Up, Tony the east end boy drives a black cab with his wife, has a nice house, they can afford a family, and went on to buy a villa in Spain with a pool <voted Tory all his life. The revolutionary call of Workers of the World Unite falls on deaf ears with people like Tony.
Tony thinks he's working class, I think he's working class, but I guess for Marx he's a petty-boojwah...and thats where it all gets muddy.

 

[planetgeli]

Sandy sticks in my mind as where the rspb were based, may still be. Always imagined it as a mini Sahara, with sand dunes stretching nearly to the horizon

Yep, you've mentioned the two things it's known for (the only other is being on the A1).

RSPB still there. And we indeed had a sand dune. a massive hill of sand (one of the only hills in Bedfordshire) about as far away from the sea as you can get (almost). Just the one, mind. Though in many ways the town is a sleepy desert.

 

[Serge Forward]

Things is there's "working-poor" and "working-comfortable." Again going back to 7Up, Tony the east end boy drives a black cab with his wife, has a nice house, they can afford a family, and went on to buy a villa in Spain with a pool <voted Tory all his life. The revolutionary call of Workers of the World Unite falls on deaf ears with people like Tony.
Tony thinks he's working class, I think he's working class, but I guess for Marx he's a petty-boojwah...and thats where it all gets muddy.

Not really, to paraphrase someone (possibly Marx, can't remember)... it's not what the working class is, nor what it thinks it is, but what it must become.

Also, with Marx, it's not so much the type of job you do, how horny-handed you are, it's about the economic relationship.

 

[ska invita]

Not really, to paraphrase someone (possibly Marx, can't remember)... it's not what the working class is, nor what it thinks it is, but what it must become.

Tony is likely a Petty Boojwah according to Marx, not working class. Goes with all sole traders and self employed does it?

 

[Serge Forward]

See my addition: "Also, with Marx, it's not so much the type of job you do, how horny-handed you are, it's about the economic relationship." Though Tony could well be "petit bourgeois".

 

[equationgirl]

Define membership of the "working class" income?, employment type?, wearing a flat cap and calling everyone luv? having a strong northern accent?

You forgot 'having a whippet or a greyhound', 'going to bingo/the dogs' and other crap identifiers.

 

[ska invita]

When I think of my uncle who started a small flower shop with his wife, to me he was always working class not a petty-booj trader.

I really liked this short essay by anarchist James Scott - page 84 in the pdf if anyone fancies it, called Two Cheers for the Petty Bourgeoisie - a convincing positive take - stood out to me as its not something I've ever seen written before.

https://libcom.org/files/James-C.-Scott-Two-Cheers-for-Anarchism_-Six-Easy-Pieces-on-Autonomy-Dignity-and-Meaningful-Work-and-Play-Princeton-University-Press-2012.pdf

....given any reasonably generous definition of its class boundaries, the petite bourgeoisie represents the largest class in the world. If we include not only the iconic shopkeepers but also smallholding peasants, artisans, peddlers, small independent professionals, and small traders whose only property might be a pushcart or a rowboat and a few tools, the class balloons. If we include the periphery of the class, say, tenant farmers, ploughmen with a draft animal, rag pickers, and itinerant market women, where autonomy is more severely constrained and the property small indeed, the class grows even larger.

What they all have in common, however, and what distinguishes them from both the clerk and the factory worker is that they are largely in control of their working day and work with little or no supervision. One may legitimately view this as a very dubious autonomy when it means, as a practical matter, working eighteen hours a day for a remuneration that may only provide a bare subsistence. And yet it is clear, as we shall see, that the desire for autonomy, for control over the working day and the sense of freedom and self-respect such control provides, is a vastly underestimated social aspiration for much of the world's population .

I cant argue with this:

From the Diggers and the Levellers of the English Civil War to the Mexican peasants of 1911, to the anarchists of Spain for nearly a century, to a great many anticolonial movements,to mass movements in contemporary Brazil, the desire for land and the restoration of lost land has been the leitmotif of most radically egalitarian mass movements. Without appealing to petty bourgeois dreams, they wouldn't have had a chance.

Marx's contempt for the petite bourgeoisie, second only to his contempt for the Lumpenproletariat, was based on the fact that they were small property holders and therefore petty capitalists. Only the proletariat, a new class brought into being by capitalism and without property, could be truly revolutionary ; their liberation depended on transcending capitalism.

However sound this reasoning in theory, the historical fact is that in the West right up until the end of the nineteenth century, artisans-weavers, shoemakers, printers, masons, cart makers, carpenters-formed the core of most radical working-class movements. As an old class, they shared a communitarian tradition, a set of egalitarian practices, and a local cohesiveness that the newly assembled factory labor force was hard put to match. And, of course, the massive changes in the economy from the 1830s onward threatened their very existence as communities and as trades; they were fighting a rear-guard action to preserve their autonomy.

As Barrington Moore, echoing E. P. Thompson, put it:
"the chief social basis of radicalism has been the peasants and the smaller artisans in the towns. From these facts one may conclude that the wellsprings of human freedom lie not only where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes about to take power, but perhaps even more in the dying wail of classes over whom the wave of progress is about to roll."

Theres a lot more points made in the essay

Pre-captialism, being part of the independent petty-bourgeoisie was de rigeur. The proletarian class was created by dispossessing the petty-bees and forcing them into wage labour. Its only right working class people want that autonomy back.

Today I think the widespread working class aspiration to become petty-b is most often an expression of freedom and autonomy. If a skilled worker sets up their own business/sole trader/self employed/whatever they're rarely trying to make a go of becoming a capitalist, they just want a degree of dignity and freedom from the oppression of work (I just wish they wouldn't charge so much when the boiler breaks down.)
Trading isn't capitalism - its existed for thousands of years before capitalism came along.

This is one area where for me anarchism kicks in and I go a different path to Bolshevik class analysis. To me in the majority of cases i consider small scale petty-bees as part of the the same working class as me as a prole. Id rather a future of independent workers than every petty-bourgeoisie area of work being nationalised and state controlled.

 

[danny la rouge]

Things is there's "working-poor" and "working-comfortable." Again going back to 7Up, Tony the east end boy drives a black cab with his wife, has a nice house, they can afford a family, and went on to buy a villa in Spain with a pool <voted Tory all his life. The revolutionary call of Workers of the World Unite falls on deaf ears with people like Tony.
Tony thinks he's working class, I think he's working class, but I guess for Marx he's a petty-boojwah...and thats where it all gets muddy.

Tony isn’t proletarian, and himself does not see his interests as lying with the working class (a term I’d see as wider than proletariat, and encompassing artisans and certain self employed trades and so on). In time of revolution much of the petit bourgeoisie may well throw their lot in with the wider working class. The point being where they see their interests as lying.

In revolutionary Spain, for example, many barbers were anarchists.

For some of my “career” I have been self employed (as a music tutor) and therefore technically petit bourgeois. I don’t think that precluded me from seeing where my interests lie, or which side the angels are on.

I very probably would not be seen as culturally working class, and I’m actually not interested in prolier than thou cosplay. But the point is the revolutionary potential of the working class and the economic analysis that entails is not (primarily) about cultural identity but about a systemic analysis of capitalism.

 

[ska invita]

Yes but for orthodox marxists the petty-bees are part of the problem, not the solution.
"scratch an anarchist on the surface you'll find a petty bourgeois underneath” is the old Communist adage
the aspiration for proles to become petty-bees is i think healthy from an anarcho-libertarian perspective, but is anathema to Communists - isnt that how it goes?

This is important in terms of how the broad left talks about class, and partly why the Tories win parts of the working class who are or aspire to be petty-bees.
When I see people on the left ask What Is Class and write/talk about it, I've never heard a class appeal to the petty-bees or people who aspire to be.

Also, what percentage of the UK population are propertyless proletarians (as opposed to the swathes of Marxist defined Petty-Bees and Middles Classes)? Around 15% at a guess. Whatever it is its no longer a revolutionary percentage. Yet I feel the message being banged out is often much the same one from a century ago when the percentages were very different

 

[ska invita]

Can someone do a quick up-to-date Marxist list of the modern jobs that form the bastard agents-of-capitalism middle classes please?
Does it still include academics, teachers, social workers, engineers, and nurses, like it used to when i first started reading about class? Even though those jobs often pay less than skilled manual work? But they're so classed because they supposedly "perpetuate and reproduce capitalist culture and class relations"?

What about film editors?
Gigging musicians? Is there a scale of success? When does it switch form working to middle?
Police? Do they not "perpetuate and reproduce capitalist culture and class relations"
Gastropub chefs? Michelin star chefs?
What if you're a firefighter?
What if you get promoted and become a firefighter lieutenant?

My wider family on my mums side had a lot of coal miners in it as it was a solid coal mining region for miles.
Of course if you work there long enough you move up the ranks, and there are ranks to go up. Are all the ranks working class positions, or do you become a middle class miner at some point over the years as you get promoted?

would really appreciate an answer to this -genuinely confused

...off to do some work

 

[danny la rouge]

for orthodox marxists the petty-bees are part of the problem, not the solution.

I’m not an orthodox Marxist (Marxist Leninist). Neither was Marx.

 

[Santino]

I’m not an orthodox Marxist (Marxist Leninist). Neither was Marx.

He refused to join any political movement that would have him as a member.

 

[danny la rouge]

He refused to join any political movement that would have him as a member.

Close but no cigar and glasses.

 

[Pickman's model]

He refused to join any political movement that would have him as a member.

he refused to join any club that would have him as a member

 

[Santino]

he refused to join any club that would have him as a member

yes that's the joke

 

[Serge Forward]

I realise "petty bourgeois" has long been a term of abuse on the left (especially with crap Marxists), but it really shouldn't be. There's no morality involved, it's merely an economic category, some are more proletarian, others closer to the bourgeisie, and as danny la rouge says, it could go either way when it comes to the crunch (er.. by 'crunch' I mean international proletarian revolution).