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

The39thStep said:
"The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is not to change it but to interpret it more "
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There is a point to the discussion in terms of how you create change: any large scale movement of 'ordinary' people to change society has to be a cross-class movement, not a movement of one class.
 
Brainaddict said:
There is a point to the discussion in terms of how you create change: any large scale movement of 'ordinary' people to change society has to be a cross-class movement, not a movement of one class.
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I can't think of any example of change where it has just been one class.
 
This might seem a strange place to link to, but unherd of all places has a decent article today about Starmer. Ignoring the silly headline, the piece makes a decent point about the tension within Labour about what it means to be working class. Is this class the object or the subject of political action? Is it an unfortunate condition from which people need to be helped to escape, or is it a section of society that needs to be empowered? For New Labour and Starmer, it's really all about the former, isn't it? Despite the fact that these jobs will continue to need to be done, anyone actually doing them ought to consider it their goal to move on to something else, something 'better'.

Comrade Starmer has never had class

I don't think these tensions can ever completely go away. Social mobility is a good thing. Why not aspire to something else? But the modern 'progressive' language of 'equality of opportunity' has a contradiction at its heart. Who will do the work once everyone has taken the opportunity to move away from it?
 
I’ve not been convinced for a while now that “social mobility” in the sense that it is used by modern politics is a good thing, actually, for precisely the reasons you mention. That Dan Evans YouTube interview that’s been floating around urban recently does a great job of going into it more deeply.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
This might seem a strange place to link to, but unherd of all places has a decent article today about Starmer. Ignoring the silly headline, the piece makes a decent point about the tension within Labour about what it means to be working class. Is this class the object or the subject of political action? Is it an unfortunate condition from which people need to be helped to escape, or is it a section of society that needs to be empowered? For New Labour and Starmer, it's really all about the former, isn't it? Despite the fact that these jobs will continue to need to be done, anyone actually doing them ought to consider it their goal to move on to something else, something 'better'.

Comrade Starmer has never had class

I don't think these tensions can ever completely go away. Social mobility is a good thing. Why not aspire to something else? But the modern 'progressive' language of 'equality of opportunity' has a contradiction at its heart. Who will do the work once everyone has taken the opportunity to move away from it?
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The thing about equality of opportunity is the pejorative stance it allows taken against those who don't rise, who may not grasp the opportunity, who may not want the opportunity
 
Magnus McGinty said:
It’s easier to get on the property ladder (an asset) in the north than the south.
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I think you're being a bit vague with terms like 'easier', and for that matter north and south. Are you saying that there is a higher percentage of house owners in the North than in the South East? Clearly the larger assets owned are in the south east. But to confuse things, the largest concentration of working class people in the UK is also clearly London and its important not to forget that in some North-South identity battle. More rigor please! :p
 
chilango said:
Is it?

Sure, property prices are lower. What about wages and employment?
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Yeah, it is. Wages are lower, but not that much lower. House/flat prices are many times higher in most of the SE.

Random city in the north, Leeds. Looks like you can buy a decent flat there for £100k. If you look at how much most people earn - say, people like teachers, electricians, plumbers, etc - how many people in those kinds of jobs could potentially afford a mortgage for a flat like that compared to many places in the SE, not just London but also places like Brighton?
 
Home ownership is more prevalent outside London (these figures are last year) In London wages are higher but house prices are much higher, In the North East houses prices are lower but wages are much lower. Everywhere else tends to meet somewhere in the middle. My son and his girlfriend (now fiance) bought a house in the East Mids in 2021. He works in IT, she's a nurse, they bought a detached house with three double bedrooms just outside Nottingham, needed some work but basically sound. I suspect we would talking pokey flat if at all in London.

  1. East Midlands – 69.4% home ownership
  2. West Midlands – 68.7% home ownership
  3. South East– 68.5% home ownership
  4. East of England – 68.2% home ownership
  5. South West – 67.7% home ownership
  6. North West– 66.5% home ownership
  7. Yorkshire and the Humber – 65.2% home ownership
  8. North East – 60.8% home ownership
  9. London – 50.9% home ownership
 
The39thStep said:
"The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is not to change it but to interpret it more and use it as an opportunity to show your politics are more pure and you are better than everyone else…”
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ska invita said:
I'll let brainaddict speak for themselves but I agree with "Assets change your class position. Fin."

To what extent your class position changes is a matter of degree depending on the extent of asset owenership and nature of position within the workforce. Also it is impossible to consider British class structure without including globalised workers outside of our borders who are integral to British econmic structure (Chinese and Indian sweathshops etc etc). That changes the overal percentage ratio a lot.

The problem comes with trying to force the ever increasingly complex and stratified class position of any one individual (potentially complicated by the class positions of their immediate co-dependent family) into a three teir class system. Partly what I liked so much about Dan Evens Petit B book was how it shined a light on such a massive part of the class structure that was basically invisible in plain sight to most people.

Working Class with no owned building assetts and Working Class with owned building assetts are two different categories. There will be many shared conditions and there will be conditions which aren't. Airbrushing out those differences will also lead to airburshing out why allegiances and common political positions become harder to achieve.

It may seem unwieldy to have around 30 (a number picked off the top of my head) still-broad class positions, but I think thats whats necessary to be accurate and avoid weird assumptions and miscategorisations.
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And of course the ruling class tremble to their very core when they see everyone else divide themselves into 30 different broad class divisions.

I mean divide and re worked so badly for their Victorian ruling class equivalents when we ( the UK) used that approach to subjugate and rule the Empire…
 
Brainaddict said:
From this article about the book Why are Brits on £180k so sad?



Which brings us back to the initial title of the thread. I really think the left is as responsible for this situation as anyone. Its discussion of class over the years has been crashingly lacking in nuance and as invested in cultural signifiers as anyone else.

Increasingly I think that the ability to acquire assets beyond your house (and sometimes I'm not sure about excluding that) is what makes you middle class, and that includes pensions over and above the state pension.

To then complain that this makes a binman middle class is sloppy thinking. Yes, the ability to sit around for 20+ years at the end of your life enjoying yourself without working moves people towards the middle class in political leanings. Not necessarily very far, compared to owning multiple properties and a share portfolio, but definitely and definitively it does move them in that direction. Does a working class person deserve a good retirement? Yes, absolutely, but it also makes them a bit less working class. It's the obsession with all sorts of identitarian nonsense (even among those who attack identitarian nonsense) that makes this so hard for people to swallow.

Assets change your class position. Fin.
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Do you actually know any retired council binmen?
 
A380 said:
He’ll be on in a moment to tell you sone of his best friends are bin men and they wear gor blimey trousers and great big hob nailed boots.
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Both of you appear to have missed the point somewhat.

I've met a few retired public sector workers who were trade unionists (as the binmen I've met have been), who vote Tory. And why not? It doesn't do them (as individuals) any harm now does it? Their pension's in the bag. The state pension is maintained by the Tories. They're quids in, and Labour's just for metropolitan liberal leftists these days. Hard work should be rewarded, just as theirs has been etc etc
 
Brainaddict said:
Both of you appear to have missed the point somewhat.

I've met a few retired public sector workers who were trade unionists (as the binmen I've met have been), who vote Tory. And why not? It doesn't do them (as individuals) any harm now does it? Their pension's in the bag. The state pension is maintained by the Tories. They're quids in, and Labour's just for metropolitan liberal leftists these days. Hard work should be rewarded, just as theirs has been etc etc
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So, by your calculations, other than you, how many working class people are in the UK at the moment?
 
Brainaddict said:
There is a point to the discussion in terms of how you create change: any large scale movement of 'ordinary' people to change society has to be a cross-class movement, not a movement of one class.
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If you want to argue this fine but let's be clear (i) it is not a new position (ii) it is, by definition, a break with socialism.
Ellen Meiksins Wood said:
In the Communist Manifesto, ‘true’ socialism is summed up thus: since socialism had ‘ceased to express the struggle of one class against another, … [the ‘true’ socialist] felt conscious of … representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
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Brainaddict said:
Both of you appear to have missed the point somewhat.

I've met a few retired public sector workers who were trade unionists (as the binmen I've met have been), who vote Tory. And why not? It doesn't do them (as individuals) any harm now does it? Their pension's in the bag. The state pension is maintained by the Tories. They're quids in, and Labour's just for metropolitan liberal leftists these days. Hard work should be rewarded, just as theirs has been etc etc
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So you know a few Tories. I'm not sure what that's supposed to demonstrate, TBH.

Serious question:

What percentage of retired council manual workers with 40+ years of service do you think get to "sit around for 20 years enjoying themselves" after they retire?

Most people I know in that position have significant work or lifestyle related health issues and many are unlikely to survive 20 years after retirement, far less be able to enjoy themselves.

Having a work related pension might be a life of cruises and foreign holidays for some, but the idea that it's a significant asset for everyone or that it somehow makes them less working class is nonsense.
 
andysays said:
So you know a few Tories. I'm not sure what that's supposed to demonstrate, TBH.

Serious question:

What percentage of retired council manual workers with 40+ years of service do you think get to "sit around for 20 years enjoying themselves" after they retire?

Most people I know in that position have significant work or lifestyle related health issues and many are unlikely to survive 20 years after retirement, far less be able to enjoy themselves.

Having a work related pension might be a life of cruises and foreign holidays for some, but the idea that it's a significant asset for everyone or that it somehow makes them less working class is nonsense.
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To the first point, it's supposed to illustrate that in retirement they have become structurally insulated from the public service cuts that bedevil their colleagues still working, and so can feel free to believe that both main parties might be on their side.

On the latter point, sure, it's a spectrum of movement towards middle-class-ness, and I used binmen to really underline that. Of course your're right that their assets are worth less (both in quantity and ability to enjoy them) than other public sector workers, yet they do have a different relationship to assets to, say, an outsourced cleaner in London who has such minimal pension coming their way that it might as well not exist.

What doesn't work is to say "But they are both working class and so they should feel their unity." If they don't feel the unity due to variance of opinion, well, that just happens sometimes, but what if they don't feel the unity because their relationships to assets are different? Are you just going to carry on saying 'they should feel the unity' till you're blue in the face?
 
Brainaddict said:
To the first point, it's supposed to illustrate that in retirement they have become structurally insulated from the public service cuts that bedevil their colleagues still working, and so can feel free to believe that both main parties might be on their side.

On the latter point, sure, it's a spectrum of movement towards middle-class-ness, and I used binmen to really underline that. Of course your're right that their assets are worth less (both in quantity and ability to enjoy them) than other public sector workers, yet they do have a different relationship to assets to, say, an outsourced cleaner in London who has such minimal pension coming their way that it might as well not exist.

What doesn't work is to say "But they are both working class and so they should feel their unity." If they don't feel the unity due to variance of opinion, well, that just happens sometimes, but what if they don't feel the unity because their relationships to assets are different? Are you just going to carry on saying 'they should feel the unity' till you're blue in the face?
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a lot of binmen are outsourced. as you'd know if you paid any attention to who collects bins. for example camden outsourced refuse collection to veolia in 2003
 
Pickman's model said:
a lot of binmen are outsourced. as you'd know if you paid any attention to who collects bins. for example camden outsourced refuse collection to veolia in 2003
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Yes, I think it was clear I was referring to a local authority employee with a final salary or career average pension. Those binmen exist too.
 
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