Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

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

Sasaferrato said:
It matters because the landlord is getting an income from the property, in percentage terms, as house prices rise, so do rents to maintain the landlord's profit.

House price rises don't matter so much when the landlord has held the house for twenty years, but for someone buying now, the same standard of property needs a bigger rent to sustain the % profit. This then becomes the rent for that type of property, so the 20 year landlord raises their rent to match the new landlord. The 20 year landlord's % profit is of course huge in comparison to initial outlay, the new landlord not so much.

Really must aaaaarrggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh
Click to expand...

I wasn’t referring to landlords let alone defending them. We were discussing working class home owners.
 
Sasaferrato said:
Now, I must give up the joyous pastime of posting on Urban, and go to the gym. I'm sitting here naked, post shower, and Mrs Sas is telling me that if I don't move now, certain appendages are going to be used as marbles. :eek:
Click to expand...
There is just so much wrongness in this post that I just don't know where to start
 
'We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just stick our hand in the next guy's pocket.”
Click to expand...

Thats the most accurate description of British Business in the 21st century Ive heard.
Its a bit shit when your one of the millions at the far end of that line of pockets
 
The ironic thing about some of the idiot ideas on this thread ( let’s get people renting to see people paying their mortgage as their enemy, to simplify) is that most real world successful revolutions, unlike the ones in the Puffin Big Book of Revolutionary Fairytales, were organised and run, and in many cases faught, by people who would definitely be considered’the middle class’ if not often mixed with the ‘bourgeoisie ’. In the same way as most revolutions don’t come when the society/ economy is at rock bottom, but when things have started to get better. It’s fairly basic history.

Marx knew this BTW.
 
Sasaferrato said:
Aye, Edinburgh is an outlier in this respect.

Now, I must give up the joyous pastime of posting on Urban, and go to the gym. I'm sitting here naked, post shower, and Mrs Sas is telling me that if I don't move now, certain appendages are going to be used as marbles. :eek:
Click to expand...
Top image. Thanks for that!
 
Sasaferrato said:
Aye, Edinburgh is an outlier in this respect.

Now, I must give up the joyous pastime of posting on Urban, and go to the gym. I'm sitting here naked, post shower, and Mrs Sas is telling me that if I don't move now, certain appendages are going to be used as marbles. :eek:
Click to expand...
Marbles...? Tennis balls surely..
 
Ah, I am totally on board with looking at home ownership as a class marker purely because we are currently living in an insane asset bubble. When annual equity rises creates more material profit than wages (which it certainly does in my part of the UK) then home -ownership should absolutely be considered as a middle class phenomenon. I get that there are a number of people on here who are buying/own their own, no doubt modest properties, but a refusal to take the current skewed and frankly insanely unsustainable asset inflation around ownership of property, as a class distinction, is just disingenuous. I also see that potential profit is basically meaningless since one has to live somewhere, but the property market is untethered to any actual wages or ability to get on it (13 x average salary for a mortgage in my town...whereas only 30 or so years ago, the average mortgage was around 3x wages/salary). Home ownership has basically been a bribe to counteract wage stagnation...as Brainaddict infers...and under current conditions of artificially skewed supply and demand, with property as a prime 'investment opportunity, it would be odd to fail to consider home ownership as an essential distinction in definitions of social class.

Afaic, the solution is obviously the abolishment of private property and a programme of state funded housing as a human right.
However... the current social engineering in council house properties, as with any rentals which rest on social contracts such as 'behaviour', is dubious and has significance in power relations. I can be evicted from my supposedly secure tenancy if I am deemed an 'anti-social risk'...regardless of whether I have paid the rent or not. These restrictions do not pertain in a situation of home ownership...so I recognise the complexities of using home ownership as a simplified class descriptor...but nonetheless, this should indeed be part of a materialist left analysis, (I think).

Confession - I own a small wood, which I bought for 32K, 10 years ago. It is currently valued at around 75K which means I have 'earned' 4K a year from simply owning this material asset. It isn't unusual for a small family home to increase in value more than 30K a year, in the wealthy and privileged town where I live...but even houses in the NW have become wildly disconnected from the 'real' economy of wages and earnings.
 
Last edited:
I’m a renter but, given the choice, I’d rather be a home owner and mortgage free in retirement than still having to find rent money which potentially could mean me not retiring at all.
To call that middle class and something that should be opposed as being materially bad for the working class is mad if you ask me.
Owning your own home isn’t the problem, but how properties continually rise in value definitely is. But I don’t think the answer is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
 
Magnus McGinty said:
To call that middle class and something that should be opposed as being materially bad for the working class is mad if you ask me.
Click to expand...
I don't think anyone is saying that. We're talking about class as a process of differing relationships with the economy, and not making moral judgements on house ownership by individuals, just saying that the partial alignment of many people with the economic goals of the rich (assets over wages) is causing a problem and should be faced on a collective level.
 
Yeah, I know, pbsmooth but firstly, I didn't think I was 'ranting" and secondly, it only seems fair to admit to my own interests/bias in an analysis of material assets and social class.
I don't own a house though...and have opened the wood to anyone who wants to be in it (unlike most of my neighbours who still display 'private land' signs.
 
Magnus McGinty said:
If they built more housing and/or made it illegal to own a property that remains empty it would be a start.
Click to expand...

Again, homeowners will often fight bitterly against new houses getting built near them. So you can't sit on the fence there. You're either on the side of those without homes or those with homes.

Granted some homebuilding projects are shit and opposed for good reasons, but that's not least because nobody in politics has any interest in or ideas about effective urban planning. Because they're all on Team Homeowner, a team which fundamentally doesn't want new homes built.
 
A380 said:
The ironic thing about some of the idiot ideas on this thread ( let’s get people renting to see people paying their mortgage as their enemy, to simplify) is that most real world successful revolutions, unlike the ones in the Puffin Big Book of Revolutionary Fairytales, were organised and run, and in many cases faught, by people who would definitely be considered’the middle class’ if not often mixed with the ‘bourgeoisie ’. In the same way as most revolutions don’t come when the society/ economy is at rock bottom, but when things have started to get better. It’s fairly basic history.

Marx knew this BTW.
Click to expand...
Good to see there is still some future salvation for people who have been 'leeches of unearned income' ie had lodgers
 
A380 said:
The ironic thing about some of the idiot ideas on this thread ( let’s get people renting to see people paying their mortgage as their enemy, to simplify) is that most real world successful revolutions, unlike the ones in the Puffin Big Book of Revolutionary Fairytales, were organised and run, and in many cases faught, by people who would definitely be considered’the middle class’ if not often mixed with the ‘bourgeoisie ’. In the same way as most revolutions don’t come when the society/ economy is at rock bottom, but when things have started to get better. It’s fairly basic history.

Marx knew this BTW.
Click to expand...
True, and therein lies another problem. Can you imagine how effective the black liberation struggle in South Africa or the gay liberation fight in America and Britain would have been if the respective leaderships were white, straight well meaning types rather than those at the sharp end? Who would it have been able to mobilise? Or speak for? In who's interests would it have acted?

Yet, nobody bats an eyelid at the persistent middle class tail wagging the working class dog.

Given everyone is now middle class landlords I suppose we needn’t worry though…
 
Smokeandsteam said:
True, and therein lies another problem. Can you imagine how effective the black liberation struggle in South Africa or the gay liberation fight in America and Britain would have been if the respective leaderships were white, straight well meaning types rather than those at the sharp end? Who would it have been able to mobilise? Or speak for? In who's interests would it have acted?

Yet, nobody bats an eyelid at the persistent middle class tail wagging the working class dog.

Given everyone is now middle class landlords I suppose we needn’t worry though…
Click to expand...
Hate to tell you this, but a lot of people in the South African campaign, especially early on, were white and well meaning ( and a fair few English) Read London Recruits - will check the details when I get home.

ETA home now, it’s actually London Recruits, Ken Keable.

I knew a few of them when I was a kid, not that I knew what they had got up to at the time. And was more interested in if they were going to give me sweets.

History isn’t simple.
 
Last edited:
A380 said:
Hate to tell you this, but a lot of people in the South African campaign, especially early on, were white and well meaning ( and a fair few English) Read London Comrades - will check the details when I get home.

I knew a few of them when I was a kid, not that I knew what they had got up to at the time. And was more interested in if they were going to give me sweets.

History isn’t simple.
Click to expand...
That's true but that isn't what Smokeandsteam is saying
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

R
Oceangate's Titan. The Bayesian yacht. Why do the deaths of rich people matter more than poor people?
5 6 7 8 9
Replies
241
Views
7K
bcuster
bcuster
hitmouse
Class background and the arts
Replies
1
Views
341
killer b
K
YouSir
Class in Academia
2 3 4
Replies
118
Views
4K
Funky_monks
F
N
Why do right-wing populists succeed?
2
Replies
45
Views
2K
nightowl
N
Bingoman
Conservatives delete their twitter account lol
Replies
27
Views
768
ska invita
ska invita
Back
Top Bottom