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

Didn't Thatcher literally try and destroy all facets of class signiture, so that the 5 house puce landlord can be working class?

Not everyone has be 'at heel'.

They've ground it down so that there is the soiled unworthy mass and the energetic elite, grabbing.
 
Magnus McGinty said:
Some believe they did, yes.
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I think that a big error a lot of the left has made (weirdly considering they think themselves materialist) is that thinking relationship to asset ownership doesn't matter. If over the course of your life you gradually get to the point of owning a house without mortgage and you have an okay pension (living off the labour of others through proxy stocks and shares ownership) then you have changed class. I think either one of those things changes your position in society quite a bit, both at once is quite major because you have material security through asset ownership. I don't really understand why Tories understand this perfectly well (hence boosting housing assets and pensions to protect their vote), while the 'materialist' left largely ignores it. Doesn't matter what job you did, whether you were management, what your acccent is, whether you went to university, if you end up living on asset ownership you have changed class, if you want to use class in any meaningful economic sense. And yes, this does mean that a lot of people change class in our society through the course of their lives. Does this map to the 'working class' and 'bourgoisie' of Marx's time? No, it doesn't, and that's why some people are confused when I say this. I think someone as sharp as Marx would be very confused by people trying to use the same categories as him in an utterly changed economy. I think we should have a category of something like 'lower middle class' of people who reach the point of living on assets, but without the ability to command others much through that (that would be the upper middle class).
 
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As for people who are landlords, don't get me started. Not only are they living on asset ownership, but they have significant control over others while exploiting them - they are in fact moving into the upper middle class. The idea of 'working class' landlords is gibberish. Some people obviously have mixed incomes, some salary income, some landlord income, but hopefully we can all cope with mixed class positions or god help us all.
 
Too much attached to cultural signifiers rather than position in the workforce. Hence why you get loaded bosses doing performative WC stuff, pretending to be into football etc.

plus people pick and choose their history, remember a mate going on about his grandad down the pits a bit too much. Personally I could choose to be the son of a pub barman and hospital cleaner, or the son of a paint chemist/manager and a school librarian. Both are true. Which one gets me more WC points?
 
Brainaddict said:
As for people who are landlords, don't get me started. Not only are they living on asset ownership, but they have significant control over others while exploiting them - they are in fact moving into the upper middle class. The idea of 'working class' landlords is gibberish. Some people obviously have mixed incomes, some salary income, some landlord income, but hopefully we can all cope with mixed class positions or god help us all.
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A friend of mine lives in a flat in Croydon in a low rise private block. His landlord's property portfolio consists of that single flat. I find it very hard to believe that a landlord owning one one bedroom flat is bumping up the class ladder to the point of moving into the upper middle class. Middle class, I'd certainly grant you. But umc? Maybe your notion of class needs refining.
 
Pickman's model said:
A friend of mine lives in a flat in Croydon in a low rise private block. His landlord's property portfolio consists of that single flat. I find it very hard to believe that a landlord owning one one bedroom flat is bumping up the class ladder to the point of moving into the upper middle class. Middle class, I'd certainly grant you. But umc? Maybe your notion of class needs refining.
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In this position you're exploiting people and have significant control over their lives, while making an income from assets. If this isn't a defining thing about your class then we're not using economic relations to define class. And what I just described is not the same as just living on assets through pensions. How do we name the distinction then? So sure, you can quibble about the exact categories and where the line falls, but I don't think it's just my notion of class that needs refining.
 
Brainaddict said:
In this position you're exploiting people and have significant control over their lives, while making an income from assets. If this isn't a defining thing about your class then we're not using economic relations to define class. And what I just described is not the same as just living on assets through pensions. How do we name the distinction then? So sure, you can quibble about the exact categories and where the line falls, but I don't think it's just my notion of class that needs refining.
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you're saying that the landlord of one flat in croydon is basically the same class as richard benyon, whose benyon estate covers hundreds of houses in hackney. it's the same thing as if you have a person who owns one shop or one pub and ekes a living out of that and then you saying they're the same class as mohammed al fayed, or the sainsbury family or tim martin. it's fucking ludicrous
 
Pickman's model said:
you're saying that the landlord of one flat in croydon is basically the same class as richard benyon, whose benyon estate covers hundreds of houses in hackney. it's the same thing as if you have a person who owns one shop or one pub and ekes a living out of that and then you saying they're the same class as mohammed al fayed, or the sainsbury family or tim martin. it's fucking ludicrous
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As I said, we need to think about mixed class positions. How can we not? That means there are gradients within class.

Also someone who is such a large established landowner (usually through inheritance) that they have political as well as economic power, like Benyon, would be upper class in my book.
 
Brainaddict said:
If over the course of your life you gradually get to the point of owning a house without mortgage and you have an okay pension (living off the labour of others through proxy stocks and shares ownership)
Click to expand...

Using your ‘materialist analysis’ 63% of the British population is either middle class or aspires to be via their ownership of a house. You don’t define an ‘okay pension’ but if you can we can examine whether, in fact, more than 2/3 of the population are or aspire to be middle class.

As Tony Blair once put it, ‘we’re all middle class now’….
 
Hate to go #notalllandlords but there's a significant minority who are just people who've had to do some maneuvering to hold onto a home that should 'belong' to someone whose in long term care, people going through nasty divorces, etc. The same way the stock market holds everyone's pensions hostage, the rental market holds a lot of vulnerable people hostage. You can't claim someone whose rented out a house so they can afford the literal extortion of care for the elderly is middle class. They're just being exploited by the people profiting off the care system, as is the tenant.

Whether the landlord involves understands this, and is proactive in doing as little harm as possible, is a different question.

My sister lives in a (relatively) wealthy area in an otherwise down on its luck bit of Birmingham. The amount of empty houses is shocking, like the equivalent of what you get with retail units up a high street. The arseholes who own these houses are class traitors imo. Just full on hoarding houses they've inherited, often while they have a sibling who grew up in the house who wants to move in (or often whose entitled to money from the sale or something).
 
Smokeandsteam said:
Using your ‘materialist analysis’ 63% of the British population is either middle class or aspires to be via their ownership of a house. You don’t define an ‘okay pension’ but if you can we can examine whether, in fact, more than 2/3 of the population are or aspire to be middle class.
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That sounds about right tbh. I'd add in that roughly 50% of the population now enters higher education. The meaning of having a degree has changed.

I think the point I'd want to make about that is that as the 'middle classes', or at least those whose lives contain aspects of middle classedness (I think BA's notion of mixed classes is a good one), have expanded, so what you might call the class privileges of those in that bracket have shrunk. Uni education is a decent illustration of this, I think - while half the population now goes to uni, that half of the population is also now left with a potentially life-long debt to pay off and often not great employment prospects.

Perhaps the US understanding of the term 'middle class' is more useful here? In the US, it doesn't carry the connotations of being comfortably off that it perhaps still has here.
 
muscovyduck said:
Hate to go #notalllandlords but there's a significant minority who are just people who've had to do some maneuvering to hold onto a home that should 'belong' to someone whose in long term care, people going through nasty divorces, etc. The same way the stock market holds everyone's pensions hostage, the rental market holds a lot of vulnerable people hostage. You can't claim someone whose rented out a house so they can afford the literal extortion of care for the elderly is middle class. They're just being exploited by the people profiting off the care system, as is the tenant.

Whether the landlord involves understands this, and is proactive in doing as little harm as possible, is a different question.

My sister lives in a (relatively) wealthy area in an otherwise down on its luck bit of Birmingham. The amount of empty houses is shocking, like the equivalent of what you get with retail units up a high street. The arseholes who own these houses are class traitors imo. Just full on hoarding houses they've inherited, often while they have a sibling who grew up in the house who wants to move in (or often whose entitled to money from the sale or something).
Click to expand...

The landlord sector is woefully unregulated and unregistered and it really needs more monitoring. There are a number of people who operate in special circumstances like your sister but the vast majority of properties are owned by under 20% of landlords while the bulk of landlords got into it because its the best way to make money.



While almost half of landlords own just one property, half of private rented
sector tenancies are let by the 17% of landlords with five or more properties.
 45% of landlords have just one rental property. This represents 21% of the
private rented sector9. A further 38% own between two and four properties
(representing 31% of the sector). The remaining 17% of landlords own five or
more properties, representing 48% of the private rented sector.
 Ignoring the methodological differences, since 2010, the proportion of landlords
with just one property has declined from 78% to 45% or from 40% to 21% of the
sector. Meanwhile, the proportion of landlords with five or more properties
increased from 5% to 17% or from 39% to 48% of the sector
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Landlords most commonly reported that they had become landlords because
property was preferable to other investments and/or to contribute to their
pension.
 46% of landlords became a landlord because they preferred property to other
investments; 44% did so to contribute to their pension. Only 4% became a
landlord to let property as a full-time business.
 Although 53% of landlords bought their first rental property with the intention of
renting it out, 32% did so to live in themselves
Click to expand...
 
also, regarding getting a mortgage, people have little choice in the matter. As social housing options disappear, if they are able to get a mortgage, that's often the only chance they will have to escape the precariousness of private renting. Hence the rotten practice of part-rent, part-buy has expanded so much. It's a con - instead of just paying a social housing rent, you pay that plus a mortgage on top - but even knowing it's a con, it can still be the right thing for people to choose given the piss-poor set of choices available to them.

The choice isn't 'do you want to be exploited or not?'. At best, it's 'how do you want to be exploited?' And having a mortgage doesn't mean you're not being exploited.
 
Brainaddict said:
I think that a big error a lot of the left has made (weirdly considering they think themselves materialist) is that thinking relationship to asset ownership doesn't matter. If over the course of your life you gradually get to the point of owning a house without mortgage and you have an okay pension (living off the labour of others through proxy stocks and shares ownership) then you have changed class. I think either one of those things changes your position in society quite a bit, both at once is quite major because you have material security through asset ownership. I don't really understand why Tories understand this perfectly well (hence boosting housing assets and pensions to protect their vote), while the 'materialist' left largely ignores it. Doesn't matter what job you did, whether you were management, what your acccent is, whether you went to university, if you end up living on asset ownership you have changed class, if you want to use class in any meaningful economic sense. And yes, this does mean that a lot of people change class in our society through the course of their lives. Does this map to the 'working class' and 'bourgoisie' of Marx's time? No, it doesn't, and that's why some people are confused when I say this. I think someone as sharp as Marx would be very confused by people trying to use the same categories as him in an utterly changed economy. I think we should have a category of something like 'lower middle class' of people who reach the point of living on assets, but without the ability to command others much through that (that would be the upper middle class).
Click to expand...
Was it Lenin who described the British as a nation of coupon clippers?
 
Artaxerxes said:
The landlord sector is woefully unregulated and unregistered and it really needs more monitoring. There are a number of people who operate in special circumstances like your sister but the vast majority of properties are owned by under 20% of landlords while the bulk of landlords got into it because its the best way to make money.

Click to expand...
Oh no I didn't mean my sister is a landlord, just where she lives there's loads of empty houses.

I'm aware of the issues with the sector (I have previously been homeless, not sofa surfing, literally homeless) and know people in all sorts of awful housing situations, my own isn't great at the moment either, which is why I described people being 'held hostage' by it. Because it's a bad thing. I honestly think landlordism is the worst thing in the UK. It's where most of the care system's cash goes too, paying over the top rent.

It's the same way the stock market does a lot of damage but the challenge is that pensions are held hostage by it. So people say things like "fuck the stock market" but a lot of people have a misguided solidarity with the stock market because they're relying on it for their retirement and they don't understand they're basically being used as a human shield by people asset stripping the economy. It's a deliberate move to confuse the situation and make it difficult to combat.
 
So now we've established that house-owners are not working class, what other asset-holdings immediately elevate someone to the middle-class? A savings account at a bank? A car? An unreasonable quantity of books? A smartphone?

If you're an airline pilot on £100k living in rented accommodation near Heathrow with few possessions are you more working class than an employed office cleaner on minimum wage who bought their council house in 1996?
 
Anyway going back to the wider thread part of the problem imo is that we'll commonly use phrases like "upper middle class" "lower middle class" but don't label the same distinctions within the working class. There's definitely a group of wealthy working class people (eg doctors) and obvs with my background I subconsciously make a distinction of working class people from sheltered backgrounds (eg mom and dad are married in a house they've mostly paid off the mortgage on and the kids went to a nice comprehensive school far away from any knife crime issues). They're not not working class but they've got their own interests that don't reflect other working class groups, for example the possibility of class mobility
 
muscovyduck said:
Anyway going back to the wider thread part of the problem imo is that we'll commonly use phrases like "upper middle class" "lower middle class" but don't label the same distinctions within the working class. There's definitely a group of wealthy working class people (eg doctors) and obvs with my background I subconsciously make a distinction of working class people from sheltered backgrounds (eg mom and dad are married in a house they've mostly paid off the mortgage on and they went to a nice comprehensive school far away from any knife crime issues). They're not not working class but they've got their own interests that don't reflect other working class groups, for example the possibility of class mobility
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i don't know the people working in the professions eg law or medicine are working class - thinking here of solicitors, barristers and doctors
 
platinumsage said:
So now we've established that house-owners are not working class, what other asset-holdings immediately elevate someone to the middle-class? A savings account at a bank? A car? An unreasonable quantity of books? A smartphone?

If you're an airline pilot on £100k living in rented accommodation near Heathrow with few possessions are you more working class than an employed office cleaner on minimum wage who bought their council house in 1996?
Click to expand...
We're establishing the limits of the terms, no, more than anything? And that's surely where BA's notion of mixed classes comes in. Reality isn't a good fit for such crudely defined boxes.

Of all people, phildwyer was strong on this point, perhaps because he lived in the US, where this mixedness is more obvious. There's no contradiction in stating that in certain aspects of your life you are living off the work of others while in other aspects, others are living off your work. The balance between the two - plus of course the levels of your incomes - determine where you stand in the wider society's relations. tbh I think looking at a person's bank account and seeing how much money comes in each month is a decent place to start when determining such things.
 
Yeah, as fun as it can be to try and work out what class someone would be if they've voted tory but never eaten a viennetta, surely the whole point of class analysis is to work out collective class interests - as a renter, I have shared material interests with other renters, things like more protections for tenants and restrictions on what landlords can do would be good for me. The landlord of a single flat in Croydon might even be a nice and altruistic person who supports those things on principle, but their relationship to tenant protections or landlord regulations would be very different to mine, no?
 
hitmouse said:
Yeah, as fun as it can be to try and work out what class someone would be if they've voted tory but never eaten a viennetta, surely the whole point of class analysis is to work out collective class interests - as a renter, I have shared material interests with other renters, things like more protections for tenants and restrictions on what landlords can do would be good for me. The landlord of a single flat in Croydon might even be a nice and altruistic person who supports those things on principle, but their relationship to tenant protections or landlord regulations would be very different to mine, no?
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure there's a bit more to the concept of class than a massive collection of single-issue protest causes that people can analyse to see where they intersect for particular individuals.
 
platinumsage said:
I'm pretty sure there's a bit more to the concept of class than a massive collection of single-issue protest causes that people can analyse to see where they intersect for particular individuals.
Click to expand...
Not 100% sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me there?
 
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