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

[mauvais]

I think the paper is quite interesting in that it explores one particular aspect of self-identification (self perception) of class and, as such, in this instance, I don't think it is overly productive to pore over definitions of class.

How can you self-identify as something if you don't know what it is? I mean, I know how you can, but do we care what those people think?

 

[butchersapron]

I think it's telling that the middle class researchers chose to use the term misidentify.

 

[hitmouse]

I think the paper is quite interesting in that it explores one particular aspect of self-identification (self perception) of class and, as such, in this instance, I don't think it is overly productive to pore over definitions of class.

I think where I keep getting hung up on is that the paper accepts the claim about "working-class... making up only 32% of the workforce". They're starting from a position where the working class is a third of the population and anyone outside of that third who claims to be w/c is an error that needs to be explained anway. I think it's inevitable that people who don't accept that framework are going to pick at it.

 

[chilango]

I think it's telling that the middle class researchers chose to use the term misidentify.

I though they were using "misrecognise" a lot. Which would be an interesting angle to take given they cite Bourdieu (albeit briefly).

 

[hitmouse]

I think it's telling that the middle class researchers chose to use the term misidentify.

Some great use of subjective (what people say about themselves) and objective (what the researchers say about them) in there as well.

 

[brogdale]

I think where I keep getting hung up on is that the paper accepts the claim about "working-class... making up only 32% of the workforce". They're starting from a position where the working class is a third of the population and anyone outside of that third who claims to be w/c is an error that needs to be explained anway. I think it's inevitable that people who don't accept that framework are going to pick at it.

Fair point.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Indeed. Which is why these indicators are not irrelevant.

I probably tend to dismiss the cultural indicators more than I should because in these discussions people always focus right in on them and get stuck, instead of seeing the structure. I want people to pull out and see the structure, and therefore get the cultural identity elements into perfective.

With respect though, they won't will they?

Not to have a go - I totally get your point and that your approach is more rigorous and probably more useful in a lot of ways but the other stuff isn't going away is it. And I don't think it's just because people are wrong about it - it does mean something important to people which is why it's so prevalent.

Not that I know how to do it but isn't a change in terminology or a similar different approach needed if you're going to make progress in understanding the distinction?

 

[butchersapron]

I though they were using "misrecognise" a lot. Which would be an interesting angle to take given they cite Bourdieu (albeit briefly).

You could go onto your other fav and say a gap has developed between the interpellation these folks have supposed to have internalised and their actual self identity (despite being happy to take the material advantages the position offers). I suppose, like misidentification is for the middle classes, interpellation is for the working class.

 

[hitmouse]

Also, not to keep harping on about the model the researchers are using too much, but it is quite funny to me that because they're using a model with no distinct upper/ruling/owning/boss class, the middle class are the class at the top and so they've had to invent this new category of "the intermediate class" to describe the class in the middle. If only there was some easier term to use for the class in the middle.

 

[chilango]

You could go onto your other fav and say a gap has developed between the interpellation these folks have supposed to have internalised and their actual self identity (despite being happy to take the material advantages the position offers). I suppose, like misidentification is for the middle classes, interpellation is for the working class.

Misinterpellation?

(Althusser is not a fave btw )

As it happens I mostly looki at m/c interpellation of signs of privilege.

 

[danny la rouge]

Also, not to keep harping on about the model the researchers are using too much, but it is quite funny to me that because they're using a model with no distinct upper/ruling/owning/boss class, the middle class are the class at the top and so they've had to invent this new category of "the intermediate class" to describe the class in the middle. If only there was some easier term to use for the class in the middle.

I once attended a book reading thing where the author James Runcie discussed his novel East Fortune. He described the family in the book (who live in a country house) as “middle class”. They were only middle class in the sense that their money was from commerce not aristocracy. That’s one of the problems we have: “bourgeoise” is “middle class” in that sense. ie not aristocrat.

A primary school teacher in the audience admonished him: “get it right, she said. They’re upper class. We’re middle class.” She here indicated the audience. Cue uproar.

 

[Pickman's model]

I once attended a book reading thing where the author James Runcie discussed his novel East Fortune. He described the family in the book (who live in a country house) as “middle class”. They were only middle class in the sense that their money was from commerce not aristocracy. That’s one of the problems we have: “bourgeoise” is “middle class” in that sense. ie not aristocrat.

A primary school teacher in the audience admonished him: “get it right, she said. They’re upper class. We’re middle class.” She here indicated the audience. Queue uproar.

if there's one thing the middle classes are good at, it's queuing

 

[danny la rouge]

if there's one thing the middle classes are good at, it's queuing

Oh, ffs. Is it too late for me to edit?

Cue.

 

[brogdale]

Oh, ffs. Is it too late for me to edit?

Cue.

Don't worry Danny, I've always regarded anarchic speeling as a pretty good heuristic of being PFWC

 

[discokermit]

Posted this on the 63 UP thread, as just finished watching. There's a good essay looking at the series which makes the case - correctly IMO - that over time it showed how just many people resent their class-identity labels. It mentions: " As Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite argued in Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000, although class continued to matter—even as inequality worsened—people resisted labeling themselves by class; the very word seemed snobbish or blinkered. Most preferred to say they were ordinary, and yet they were still able to define complex identities for themselves. "

This is echoed in the massive Social Class in the 21st Century study - vast majority of people resent class stigmatisation. Its a major problem for a left that puts class consciousness and therefore class identity as its starting point, when people resent and try to escape the stigmas of all class identities. IMO the left can resolve that, not by abandoning class, but by finding new language for class-relationships that sidesteps old class stereotypes. The 99% was a failed attempt at that. I just dont think the terms 'working' and 'middle' cut it anymore if they ever did -as structural or identity categories - and maybe they did in the industrial revolution.

everyone i have worked with was working class, thought of themselves as working class and were proud of the fact.

 

[ska invita]

everyone i have worked with was working class, thought of themselves as working class and were proud of the fact.

well its worth being aware what mass surveys tell us of what the wider population are thinking, and trying to understand why a message of up the working class isnt resonating

 

[Sue]

well its worth being aware what mass surveys tell us of what the wider population are thinking, and trying to understand why a message of up the working class isnt resonating

Where is this message and who is it coming from?

 

[ska invita]

Where is this message and who is it coming from?

I take your point

 

[Cloo]

It goes all the way up the scale, like a lot of millionaire Tories who identify as middle class, and think middle class means two homes, privately-educated kids, 6-figure salaries all-round (and concurrent annual bonuses), fully flexible at-home childcare etc. I guess it's that 'not aristocrat' (even if married to one) thing that danny la rouge mentions. So of course they have a still less of an idea what working class is. No wonder they can't run a country for the actual people in it.

 

[discokermit]

well its worth being aware what mass surveys tell us of what the wider population are thinking, and trying to understand why a message of up the working class isnt resonating

when the message comes from middle class people with a track record of shitting on the working class it doesnt, no.

 

[seventh bullet]

Further complications included the changing "shape" of the economy.

A generation or two ago someone following my trajectory would be bourgeois as fuck with a nice big house, secure career, pension and investments. Significant social status and the autonomy and power that come come with that.

Now I do the same actual work for £14 an hour on a casual basis. if I'm lucky.

I'm on £12.35 an hour working an unskilled job in a supermarket, lol.

Yeah, the diffusion of managerial responsibilities throughout the whole workforce is a really interesting topic, and seems understudied, imo.
For instance, this article:

Shift supervisors definitely play a "managerial" function, but is useful to understand them as PMC?

No. Not in my anecdotal experience in how responsibility is distributed and the status and reward given, anyway. Such roles are so much part of the routine workforce now it appears to be inaccurate to describe such people as 'proper managers,' at least in my line of work and our relationship with people on the shop floor. It is often collaborative, and the cultural aspects of shared class experience and backgrounds does help in that. For potential organisation they aren't the definite 'enemy,'

They have little in the way of significant power over people who are, in my eyes, only lower down the pecking order because the 'team leader' is standing on their tiptoes. I have noticed the gradual downgrading and dilution of management positions over the years with lower pay. I have noticed this happening simultaneously with the well-paid, higher status management roles that remain being fewer as well as being harder to access via the shop-floor route. It's more 'professionalised' now.

 

[Steel Icarus]

I don't even know my relationship to the means of production.

 

[Steel Icarus]

Second cousins or something, idk

 

[discokermit]

i am avoiding the means of production since it has broken my brain.

 

[danny la rouge]

I don't even know my relationship to the means of production.

5 pages of “do me!”.

 

[ska invita]

Further complications included the changing "shape" of the economy.

A generation or two ago someone following my trajectory would be bourgeois as fuck with a nice big house, secure career, pension and investments. Significant social status and the autonomy and power that come come with that.

Now I do the same actual work for £14 an hour on a casual basis. if I'm lucky.

another thing that stood out a mile from the 7 UP series was pretty much all the working class participants who left school without going to uni and got a random job and a partner also got a mortgage on a house immediately , failing that a council flat.

 

[hitmouse]

No. Not in my anecdotal experience in how responsibility is distributed and the status and reward given, anyway. Such roles are so much part of the routine workforce now it appears to be inaccurate to describe such people as 'proper managers,' at least in my line of work and our relationship with people on the shop floor. It is often collaborative, and the cultural aspects of shared class experience and backgrounds does help in that. For potential organisation they aren't the definite 'enemy,'

They have little in the way of significant power over people who are, in my eyes, only lower down the pecking order because the 'team leader' is standing on their tiptoes. I have noticed the gradual downgrading and dilution of management positions over the years with lower pay. I have noticed this happening simultaneously with the well-paid, higher status management roles that remain being fewer as well as being harder to access via the shop-floor route. It's more 'professionalised' now.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'd tend to think. Someone approaching it from a perspective that started off by ticking off responsibilities listed on a job description might have a different answer though.

 

[brogdale]

Further complications included the changing "shape" of the economy.

A generation or two ago someone following my trajectory would be bourgeois as fuck with a nice big house, secure career, pension and investments. Significant social status and the autonomy and power that come come with that.

Now I do the same actual work for £14 an hour on a casual basis. if I'm lucky.

Agreed; the neoliberal turn away from concessions based on the diminishing fear of system competition has certainly effected that sort of 'expectation management', but the only genuinely bourgeois aspect I can see there is the 'investments' (possibly also private pension) bit. The rest look like very healthy aspirations for working class folk.

 

[seventh bullet]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'd tend to think. Someone approaching it from a perspective that started off by ticking off responsibilities listed on a job description might have a different answer though.

I think it's important to adjust the target sighting when identifying what is happening and the divides created. Management exists, yes, but it's up there somewhere and increasingly out of reach. At the lowest level? Not even entry-level anymore with a 'career' track? Nah, I pity some of them. Doing what's left over from the streamlining and gutting out of management and transforming such roles once performed by someone in a well-paid position into a downgraded task to be distributed and performed by an ordinary bod. 'Team leaders' are monkeys that get a few extra nuts.

 

[hash tag]

This, so much. I never went to Uni and have never worked a "professional" job, but if I go anywhere north of Birmingham I get called "posh" because of my accent. I know that I'm a proletarian in the Marxist sense, but that's not the definition the media uses.

I was once accused of having a posh acccent once by someone who either came from Weymouth or St Davids, one. Can't remember which now.
If you are looking at the cross over of working class people who don't need to get out of bed (and who might own dozens of buy to lets), a footballer or
manager would fit in quite well.