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

Tanya1982 said:
Robust debate is fine, and enjoyable. That’s not this. But I’m not looking for an argument, despite the accusation that I am (which isn’t robust debate, it’s a personal dismissal).
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So if you say stuff in here, you're expected to be able to back it up and if you can't, that's not personal dismissal.
 
Tanya1982 said:
But I’m not looking for an argument...
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I think I might have spotted the issue*...

It's ludicrous to suggest Pickman's model is on here all the time. He logs off every other Tuesday between 0315 and 0400 regular as clockwork.



(*TBF P&P is a different place to General and suburban. It's like bare knuckle boxing compared to folk dancing (except instead of hard as nails, incredibly fit and stupidly courageous pugilists it's populated by wheezy late middle aged and elderly revolutionary types and pale politics nerds. And of course wanky reformists.)
 
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danny la rouge said:
I’m not looking for an argument either, I’m just saying the things you say in that post show your understanding of the concept class is different to mine. That’s simply a fact.
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This was unhelpful of me. I should have taken the time to explain the differences. I think I felt I had explained my understanding many times over the years, but I realise Tanya1982 is new here and hasn’t heard it.

I’ll try to do so later.
 
Here goes.

I haven't really contributed to this thread because the question didn't apply to me. I don't come from a privileged class background.

It's important to point out, though, that class is primarily a relationship. Your class (one's class) is the relationship one has with the means of production. It is not the relationship your parents had. It is the relationship you have. This of course comes with caveats, not least that class mobility is limited. So the relationship your parents had with the means of production is likely to be the same as your own, but not necessarily so. It is not hereditary in the sense that many people seem to believe it to be.

The point of a class analysis is not to say people who went to private school are bad people, but to ensure clarity about what the structure of power in society is.

It suits capital for us to be confused about class, so they make sure that there is confusion on the matter. One misconception is that “working-class” describes white men who work in iron foundries, and another is that “working-class” is an identity. While neither of those is exactly wrong, they are not the full picture either.

Class is primarily an economic relationship. In the times when the powerful were those who had a monopoly on land, the ruling class was the aristocracy, and peasants and others paid tribute in rent, often paid in kind: a share of crops or livestock and in military service. It was easy then to see who had power and who did not. These days the powerful elite wants us to be less clear about that division, because if we realise that they have a monopoly of the wealth, but we have the strength of numbers, they fear we will use those numbers against them.

Working-class just means that you have to work for a living. You sell your labour power in order to survive. That includes those who work in retail, in catering, as care workers, baristas, bar tenders, call centre workers, cashiers, delivery drivers, cleaners, secretaries, janitors, teachers. What these people have in common is an economic relationship. They don’t own the “means of production”. The “means of production” could be a factory, a call centre, the machinery and infrastructure needed to produce commodities or refine raw materials, and so on, in other words the assets of the company you work for. Nor do they have ownership or control over the surplus produced. They work for a wage, and the profit goes to the capitalist. In short, class is about ownership. It is the division between those who own and therefore have power and those who do not own and therefore do not have power.

The powerful don’t want us to see that, though, so they’re happy for us to be confused. This is where identity comes into play. We all have identity. It’s impossible not to: we are social animals, and we create our sense of self through interaction with others. Our relationships, interests and interactions inform who we are.

Although class is an economic relationship, the power structures in society are maintained by a web of oppressions. Racism, patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia; all these forms of discrimination and oppression have been used by the powerful to maintain their power. For example, industrial capitalism was built on the labour of slaves in the cotton fields. This cruel violence was an economic exploitation, but it was rationalised by an ideology: racism. Sexism, on the other hand is what rationalises the role of women in the domestic setting as unpaid cleaners, cooks, carers, and so on, work which isn’t then paid for by the capitalist system. And so on. These stories about identities are used by capital to justify why people fulfil certain roles in society, to the continued benefit of those with wealth and power. Not only that, but all these identities can then be used to ensure that working class people don’t see their common cause. The fact that the hand of capitalism is behind all these oppressions is obscured and made to seem complicated if we are divided from each other, but also our ability to combine and fight back is weakened if our differences are played up.

This is why I am critical of what identity politics has become. This criticism is widely misunderstood. We should of course oppose all these forms of oppression. We should of course celebrate the diversity of identity that enriches human existence. But when those who are fighting back against oppression divide the working-class into identities who they say cannot understand each other, then the working-class is weakened and the capitalist class is strengthened. Although it was intended as a way of addressing issues of representation in the revolutionary movement, identity politics have become an impediment to emancipatory politics: the restructuring of capitalism that led to neoliberalism, and the political strategy of the right in co-opting emancipatory movements and substituting the language of equalities for the language of freedoms: these developments have completely scrambled everybody’s political language. Emancipatory politics was manoeuvred into territory we didn’t realise we were now operating in.

We are divided into our different interest ghettoes and supposedly cannot understand each other’s oppression unless we have experienced it.

And that’s when working-class as an identity comes into play. If we cannot recognise ourselves as the white male iron foundry worker, then we are less likely to take common cause with a category we think describes that person. “It’s not just bosses who oppress me, it’s also racist white working-class people. I do not see myself in that category”.

It has also become impossible to discuss class without the cultural signifiers of class overshadowing the economic relationship that defines it. People will start talking about what they eat, what their interests are, and so on. These cultural signifiers are important. We don’t have the space to properly discuss “cultural capital” here, but it has a role to play in how power is maintained. Marxists will be keen to discuss “base and superstructure” here, too: the ways in which the economic structure of society is maintained by its cultural aspects (and vice versa, in a feedback loop). However, the idea that you are not working-class if you eat avocadoes and read Charles Dickens is mistaken. That is a category error. That is not what being working-class means. This is the error Urban75 often talks into.

The powerful want us to believe “we are all middle class now”, hoping we mistake access to an exotic diet for power in our lives. To imagine that by eating humus we have climbed a social ladder. The implication being that you might be an Uber Eats delivery person, but you sometimes have sushi for lunch, so you can’t be working-class.

The UK is no longer an economy of heavy industry. People do not typically work in steel works or coal mines any longer. But traditional blue-collar jobs are not the only working-class jobs. Care workers, bar tenders, cleaners, flight attendants, call centre workers are all occupations that working class people find themselves in. The economic relationship is the same. Their surplus value is still extracted by the bosses.

I speak now for those of us with a class struggle politics. As revolutionaries we need people - people like us in jobs like ours - to know we are speaking to them. We need people to understand what being working class is, and to identify themselves with it. To value our class’s strengths, its creativity, its autonomy. This is sometimes called “self-valorisation”, but it just means that communism is not to be seen as not as a some-day-to- be-achieved utopia but as a living reality to be nourished in our own working class communities, and whose growth only needs to be freed of the constraints placed upon it by the norms manufactured by the social mores that benefit and maintain the ruling class. To do that we need to nurture working class unity, working class belonging.

We need to hear and amplify working class voices, but we also need to help our fellow workers see our class as it is, and yes that it might be black, gay, trans, and that their jobs include delivery driver, gig economy worker, office worker, education worker. This is not to say that class is important, but race or gender identity isn’t. This is to say that when we understand the history and structure of society, we need to look at the material circumstances people are in. It doesn’t matter whether the Home Secretary is white or Asian. It doesn’t matter whether a CEO is a man or a woman. What matters is the material circumstances of the mass of the population. And we respond to that by saying that what is missing is proper democratic control in the hands of the masses, which means cooperation governed by solidarity; direct democracy; needs being met rather than wealth being unequally hoarded; and realising that through common ownership and control of the means of production. We need to overturn ownership as the basis for power and control and replace it with humanity as the basis for control.
 
danny la rouge said:
Here goes.

I haven't really contributed to this thread because the question didn't apply to me. I don't come from a privileged class background.

It's important to point out, though, that class is primarily a relationship. Your class (one's class) is the relationship one has with the means of production. It is not the relationship your parents had. It is the relationship you have. This of course comes with caveats, not least that class mobility is limited. So the relationship your parents had with the means of production is likely to be the same as your own, but not necessarily so. It is not hereditary in the sense that many people seem to believe it to be.

The point of a class analysis is not to say people who went to private school are bad people, but to ensure clarity about what the structure of power in society is.

It suits capital for us to be confused about class, so they make sure that there is confusion on the matter. One misconception is that “working-class” describes white men who work in iron foundries, and another is that “working-class” is an identity. While neither of those is exactly wrong, they are not the full picture either.

Class is primarily an economic relationship. In the times when the powerful were those who had a monopoly on land, the ruling class was the aristocracy, and peasants and others paid tribute in rent, often paid in kind: a share of crops or livestock and in military service. It was easy then to see who had power and who did not. These days the powerful elite wants us to be less clear about that division, because if we realise that they have a monopoly of the wealth, but we have the strength of numbers, they fear we will use those numbers against them.

Working-class just means that you have to work for a living. You sell your labour power in order to survive. That includes those who work in retail, in catering, as care workers, baristas, bar tenders, call centre workers, cashiers, delivery drivers, cleaners, secretaries, janitors, teachers. What these people have in common is an economic relationship. They don’t own the “means of production”. The “means of production” could be a factory, a call centre, the machinery and infrastructure needed to produce commodities or refine raw materials, and so on, in other words the assets of the company you work for. Nor do they have ownership or control over the surplus produced. They work for a wage, and the profit goes to the capitalist. In short, class is about ownership. It is the division between those who own and therefore have power and those who do not own and therefore do not have power.

The powerful don’t want us to see that, though, so they’re happy for us to be confused. This is where identity comes into play. We all have identity. It’s impossible not to: we are social animals, and we create our sense of self through interaction with others. Our relationships, interests and interactions inform who we are.

Although class is an economic relationship, the power structures in society are maintained by a web of oppressions. Racism, patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia; all these forms of discrimination and oppression have been used by the powerful to maintain their power. For example, industrial capitalism was built on the labour of slaves in the cotton fields. This cruel violence was an economic exploitation, but it was rationalised by an ideology: racism. Sexism, on the other hand is what rationalises the role of women in the domestic setting as unpaid cleaners, cooks, carers, and so on, work which isn’t then paid for by the capitalist system. And so on. These stories about identities are used by capital to justify why people fulfil certain roles in society, to the continued benefit of those with wealth and power. Not only that, but all these identities can then be used to ensure that working class people don’t see their common cause. The fact that the hand of capitalism is behind all these oppressions is obscured and made to seem complicated if we are divided from each other, but also our ability to combine and fight back is weakened if our differences are played up.

This is why I am critical of what identity politics has become. This criticism is widely misunderstood. We should of course oppose all these forms of oppression. We should of course celebrate the diversity of identity that enriches human existence. But when those who are fighting back against oppression divide the working-class into identities who they say cannot understand each other, then the working-class is weakened and the capitalist class is strengthened. Although it was intended as a way of addressing issues of representation in the revolutionary movement, identity politics have become an impediment to emancipatory politics: the restructuring of capitalism that led to neoliberalism, and the political strategy of the right in co-opting emancipatory movements and substituting the language of equalities for the language of freedoms: these developments have completely scrambled everybody’s political language. Emancipatory politics was manoeuvred into territory we didn’t realise we were now operating in.

We are divided into our different interest ghettoes and supposedly cannot understand each other’s oppression unless we have experienced it.

And that’s when working-class as an identity comes into play. If we cannot recognise ourselves as the white male iron foundry worker, then we are less likely to take common cause with a category we think describes that person. “It’s not just bosses who oppress me, it’s also racist white working-class people. I do not see myself in that category”.

It has also become impossible to discuss class without the cultural signifiers of class overshadowing the economic relationship that defines it. People will start talking about what they eat, what their interests are, and so on. These cultural signifiers are important. We don’t have the space to properly discuss “cultural capital” here, but it has a role to play in how power is maintained. Marxists will be keen to discuss “base and superstructure” here, too: the ways in which the economic structure of society is maintained by its cultural aspects (and vice versa, in a feedback loop). However, the idea that you are not working-class if you eat avocadoes and read Charles Dickens is mistaken. That is a category error. That is not what being working-class means. This is the error Urban75 often talks into.

The powerful want us to believe “we are all middle class now”, hoping we mistake access to an exotic diet for power in our lives. To imagine that by eating humus we have climbed a social ladder. The implication being that you might be an Uber Eats delivery person, but you sometimes have sushi for lunch, so you can’t be working-class.

The UK is no longer an economy of heavy industry. People do not typically work in steel works or coal mines any longer. But traditional blue-collar jobs are not the only working-class jobs. Care workers, bar tenders, cleaners, flight attendants, call centre workers are all occupations that working class people find themselves in. The economic relationship is the same. Their surplus value is still extracted by the bosses.

I speak now for those of us with a class struggle politics. As revolutionaries we need people - people like us in jobs like ours - to know we are speaking to them. We need people to understand what being working class is, and to identify themselves with it. To value our class’s strengths, its creativity, its autonomy. This is sometimes called “self-valorisation”, but it just means that communism is not to be seen as not as a some-day-to- be-achieved utopia but as a living reality to be nourished in our own working class communities, and whose growth only needs to be freed of the constraints placed upon it by the norms manufactured by the social mores that benefit and maintain the ruling class. To do that we need to nurture working class unity, working class belonging.

We need to hear and amplify working class voices, but we also need to help our fellow workers see our class as it is, and yes that it might be black, gay, trans, and that their jobs include delivery driver, gig economy worker, office worker, education worker. This is not to say that class is important, but race or gender identity isn’t. This is to say that when we understand the history and structure of society, we need to look at the material circumstances people are in. It doesn’t matter whether the Home Secretary is white or Asian. It doesn’t matter whether a CEO is a man or a woman. What matters is the material circumstances of the mass of the population. And we respond to that by saying that what is missing is proper democratic control in the hands of the masses, which means cooperation governed by solidarity; direct democracy; needs being met rather than wealth being unequally hoarded; and realising that through common ownership and control of the means of production. We need to overturn ownership as the basis for power and control and replace it with humanity as the basis for control.
Click to expand...
Can you define middle class?
 
danny la rouge said:
Here:
Post in thread 'Are these people middle class?'
https://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/are-these-people-middle-class.346881/post-14676967
Click to expand...
I can think of many people who imo don't fit into those definitions neatly. Would like to come back to the thread when I get a chance and post a bunch of work/ownership situations which I don't think fit into either and see what you and others think.

I think modern structural class positions have become much more complicated and contradictory and so the classic Marxist definitions struggle to contain the new reality.
 
ska invita said:
I can think of many people who imo don't fit into those definitions neatly. Would like to come back to the thread when I get a chance and post a bunch of work/ownership situations which I don't think fit into either and see what you and others think.

I think modern structural class positions have become much more complicated and contradictory and so the classic Marxist definitions struggle to contain the new reality.
Click to expand...
I agree that it's more complicated now, but I'd add that many such complications are smoke and mirrors that serve the same ends.
 
Serge Forward said:
I agree that it's more complicated now, but I'd add that many such complications are smoke and mirrors that serve the same ends.
Click to expand...
In a way, but since this has stemmed from a post of mine about Marx’s Capital, I should say there’s a funny thing that often happens when people discuss Marx. And I don’t just mean on here; it happens in the published media too. And that is that they say ‘but of course what applied then doesn’t apply now’, and so Marx’s analysis is out of date. But they never say exactly how. They don’t say what it is he said then that doesn’t apply now. That might be because they feel this just should be the case with something written in the 19th century, or it might be because they heard it said before and vaguely think it seems the sort of thing one should say. Like saying about Beethoven: “he was quite deaf towards the end, you know”.

There’s another funny thing that happens. People sometimes think that the examples Marx gives in order to explain his point are the point. So if he mentions weaving looms, he means only weaving looms. That somehow any economic structure involving weaving looms only applies to weaving looms, nothing else.

I’m pretty sure this will turn out to be happening here.
 
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