Working or Middle Class?

[WedTheBed]

What’s the difference between them? As in.. what does one have to be middle class that working class don’t have?

I was talking to my friend, and I made a comment about being working class which she looked at me in shock and said I’m not working class, I’m middle.. but I don’t know how. I feel like we don’t really have anything to show to be middle class?😂

light hearted* I’m just interested to see what people interpret.

Wrong.

Some of the people I hang out with are definitely upper middle class due to their up bringing and own jobs.

They like and actually prefer the WC items you mentioned, and in some cases e.g. panto and Shakespeare see both as of equal cultural value.

So becoming more individualist and not helping neighbours is "going up the ladder"?

Not a very good ladder is it.

I got elite! I think because we go to museums and high household income. Parameters probably need adjusting after 10 years. I did go to a red brick uni but first generation of my family to do so. I'd say I could pass for working or middle class, depending on who I'm with.

For that calculator to be even slightly accurate you need to input your 2013 income etc don't you?

No need to mark me I wasn't being serious :-)

According to this I am elite 😂

I am not sure about that, but I would say probably middle class. Own our home in leafy suburb in Home Counties, 2 professional jobs, 2 cars one of which is a ‘premium car’, we have a cleaner, travel a lot…

Agree, irs not about your parents, if so the definition would be what did your parents do. Any calculators would be about what did your parents do. Your class is uou. As an adult. Your parents class is theirs.

None of the presenters on LBC whether they are left wing or right wing would refer to groups of people feral.

One or two could refer to an individual who was a criminal and had done particular acts as feral.

According to this I'm established middle class... unless DH and I go separate ways and I'm immediately plummeted to emergent service worker as I'd be poorer. It's madness as I'm still me in the same job and with the same friends and interests.

I suppose I just won't be able to afford the theatre trips anymore!

@FourTeaFallOut not terrible written at all, its interesting to know I'm part of something by default that I've never considered.

• terribly, not terrible.

There are nice people and grunts in all walks of life, shouldn't that be more how we judge people not some moving "class" target.

Blimey , just did the calculator and it suggested Elite lol

Not having matching furniture is the biggest indicator of class for me

So which commentators do then?

Because I've not heard it, and being a feral myself, am quite interested in how feral is portrayed.

It's often said you don't change class but your kids do. So even after uni etc wc remain wc but their kids are mc. Can go the other way too.

I have a job in a traditional profession and people would laugh if I called myself anything other than middle class nowadays. But I come from a long line of miners, potters, plumbers and other doing skilled/semi-skilled full on manual work and labouring as far back as I've managed to go in my family tree. My mum did banking/office work and I was the first one to go to university and move out of the area. So definitely working class/LMC background which is absolutely a big part of who I am today.

Sociologist here, class in the UK has not so much to do with what job you do or even necessarily what jobs your parents did, but about identity and social and cultural capital (the knowledge, experiences, networks you can call on to navigate your way in society).

For example, Dh’s parents had jobs that are borderline wc/mc but he went to private school (lots of financial support from family and a bursary), he went to uni, has a business in a traditional ‘trade’ (if you were to look at him, you’d assume he’s wc because it’s manual and he comes home filthy), but makes well over £100k a year, even as a ‘poor student’ was travelling, taking part in sports that are quite mc (think skiing, diving, etc). All friends very mc due to social networks growing up and in uni.

It’s much more complex than just what you do for work, particularly as most of our socialising takes place outside of work, within family/via other family members.

The vast majority of civil servants have unskilled roles. Obviously there are exceptions but generally I’d say it’s a working class job.

I don't think you understand the civil service or how fast streamers work. Of whom about 50% come from selective state or private schools.

Declaring people 'feral' is dehumanising. Asserting that an entire group of people serve 'no useful purpose to society' is 1930s Germany territory.

On these threads when you do cultural comparisons they have to be called out for being shit otherwise foreign posters believe such stereotypes.

I think that a lot of people who identify as middle class are really upper working class. When the classifications for mc were split into two levels, wc should have been split into upper and lower as well. IMO, you need to have a solid family history in the professions going back several generations to be any kind of middle class. So many people graduate nowadays that going to university is not a marker of anything.

Surely civil servants are white collar workers, managers, accountants etc pretty middle class I would say. My dad worked in the civil service but it was in the mailroom and we were working class.

The old working/middle class divide is only meaningful culturally now. In my team at work we have people with degrees or without, with wealthy parents or without, whose holidays are cultural city breaks or all inclusive in English language resorts, who liked Blur or Oasis in the 90s. We all do the same job and earn the same - it doesn't matter, these are just cultural markers. The thing we should be concerning ourselves with is the divide between those of us who need to work for a living and those whose income derives from having money - cash investments, landlords etc. It doesn't matter what music you listen to if you're trapped paying someone else's mortgage.

But of course it suits the current ruling elite to set ourselves against each other rather than addressing the underlying problem, which is that there is not enough of anything to go round due to a small percentage of the population hoarding all the wealth and using that wealth to extract more and more from us.

I take the point about cultural capital, but class prejudice is baked into the very concept (not the concept itself but the definitions we fill it with). Who decides what's valuable and class-advancing 'culture' and what isn't?

Any 'class' concept implies a stratification of society into above/below that should be obsolete in our day (look at the language people are using on here re that (itself class-prejudice-ridden) BBC calculator - e.g. 'plummeting' down to service worker). I don't think we as a society should be keeping reinventing and breathing new life into these concepts.

I'm from a very working class background. My dad worked in a factory and my mum in a shop part time.

I still consider myself working class even though I've a degree and don't work a manual job.