What constitutes under class?

[Invalidusername88]

Just reading about working class on another thread. It got me thinking about the term under class? What does this mean?

Also what class would you identify yourself as if you had to?

It's a well known sociological term that should be used in a sociological context. Those who use it to casually describe humans less fortunate than themselves have no class.

Let me guess, you are not actually effected by the 'underclass' as described in this thread so you get to 'other' by saying 'others' are 'othering'.

Gotcha.

I'm engaging in good faith here.

I come from a household with all of those markers. And yet, I'm here - despite a lifetime of people wanting to knock me back into my place, often successfully.

I'm not that special and unique. I can't be (even if DP thinks it, because he's going to be inherently biased in my favour, after all).

It feels very similarly to rants about skivvers on Disability and 'I can't be....one of my friends is (Protected Characteristic goes here)' to read 'well, they're not going to be on here, are they?', knowing that 'I see it as a descriptive rather than a derogatory term' is very much a polite way of saying 'I say what I see, I've got no filter and call it like it is' with the bonus of implication that anybody who disagrees is utterly wrong.

Because I am here - and I don't like being described as The Underclass.

Any term describing any class is by nature discriminatory. You are recognising the differences between people - discrimination isn't automatically negative.

I would describe myself as middle class and I don't feel superior to the underclass. I think I've been more fortunate through luck of birth, that's all.

Why do you think you're the underclass? You're on other threads talking with authority about bathroom remodelling and asking what to wear to work, so you have a job. You've said on here you took A levels and you write articulately, suggesting a certain engagement with education. Even your username suggests you're middle class.

Nobody is describing you as the underclass because you obviously aren't.

People without income, assets or savings and with no means of improving their situation.

How can you actually expect anyone with a low IQ to respect the society that rejects them.

Many disabled people actually work, are university educated, have professional qualifications, run their own businesses.
Of course people can be working class if they don't work or do you describe a sahm with a working class husband as underclass? How would you describe a middle class person who is being supported by a partner? Surely because they don't work and earn their own living they are under class as per your description?

It's a term that was used frequently on my sociology and social policy degree but more in the context of criticising its use and the associated prejudice.

I definitely would have been underclass before going back to education as an adult (and I suppose many of my extended family still are - travellers, long term unemployed, no qualifications, drink and drug abuse, violence, petty (and not so petty...) crime, social services involvement etc. Not all me but certainly prevalent in my family!).

I would still describe myself as working class despite now having a well paid professional career as tbh I think it's more of a mindset and related to your background rather than your current job and financial situation.

Because I grew up in a filthy council house (as in animal excrement on the piece of carpet in the living room and underneath the settee);

My mother had not worked since the age of 16 when she had her first child.
Had five children by two different men (one married).
One child had convictions for TWOC, theft and would take driving tests for others to top up his cash in hand jobs. The other 'good' one broke our next door neighbour's foot by riding a moped along the pavement after rebuilding it in the front garden - as the back garden was full of old furniture, fishtanks, metal things and various other detritus, including broken glass.
She hated education and told me I did because I didn't like being bullied for being poor/unsocialised/smart. I needed to be like my brothers and be good at sport.
That council house was given because my older sister nearly died of asthma. Of course, we don't mention that it would have been because of her allergies to house dust and animals (and my mother's allergy to housework).
There were direct links to organised crime through her first husband.
One brother was on a Child Protection plan until she managed to throw them off the scent.
Sister had her first child at 17 and ran for the hills with the baby at 18. One brother fathered a child at 15.
I fought to do A Levels with the help of my high school teachers because I didn't want to 'get a job at British Gas and buy the house off the council'. Completed those - just about, it wasn't as if I was going regularly with no money for the bus or clothes, pens, etc - whilst living in my first boyfriend's house as she refused to feed me in retaliation (and I had grown sick of being punched in the head, tbh). Crap results, fairly inevitably, and I then had my eldest at 19 because I needed somewhere to live and there were still council flats allocated to single Mums and I didn't have any money to apply to university.

I then went on to start adult life as a single teenage mum on benefits.

However, I was bored and wasn't a fan of poorly paid jobs that required money for travelling to work, fancy clothes, and cultural capital I just didn't have. So I read (when I didn't have a boyfriend who hated books so much that he literally burned them) and watched interesting programmes (when there wasn't a boyfriend threatening to put the TV through if I insisted on watching stuff that wasn't 'normal' like EastEnders or Big Brother).

I started studying with the Open University whilst I was going insane with boredom once the youngest child was in school Nursery (the kids were on FSM, naturally) and I was on Disability benefits due to Psoriatic Arthritis. I got random jobs to pay the bills, frequently bouncing from job to job and frantically learning stuff as I went along. I'd go from having a job with a large bonus because I'd worked out the system to game my numbers to scrubbing shit off the toilets in the Executive Suite in the local council offices, a job got for me by the next boyfriend's Mum, then into Insurance, then Engineering firms, then the NHS, then education. With periods of Income Support in between.

I've recognised kids in schools I've worked in because I've got stories I can't share with them about their parents running from a fully armed Police raid. I can still spot a plain clothes unit on surveillance from 500 yards and can describe the visible signs of substance abuse from intimate knowledge of what people look like and behave on it.

I also know what it feels like to be bounced off every wall in my old flat, have my old dog (a bull breed and was absolutely lovely) scare off intruders with a low growl at my side, been assaulted on my doorstep for shagging somebody's brother and know that people who go progressively louder and more 'local accent' when angry are scared shitless when you go quieter and nearer RP because that's the accent that the bad guys have in movies. Especially when you time it so that they have that thought and only then do you move towards them. If I meet somebody at work who has a similar background to me, we can go from being all nice and proper to discussing what it feels like to be stabbed or put through a glass window at school, to the horror of anybody who has had a more pleasant early life.

I am absolutely over the moon that both my kids have degrees and one is just starting on a PhD whilst also in her first job as a Lecturer. Not bad, considering the way she would not engage in school at all and left with fewer qualifications that I did 25 years previously. Slightly irked that it won't be with my surname, but I wasn't really that attached to it, what with it not being my father's name in the first place.

Just because I benefitted from non judgemental teachers to the tune of A grades at GCSE, BCC at A level and a nice printout from the OU - oh, a hefty dose of sheer bloody mindedness in always getting back up when some fucker punches me down (literally as well as figuratively) - none of that changes that I was and until the last few years as I've been promoted, very much part of the Underclass.

Nice to know that I do a fair to middling pass at being middleclass, though. It was always the dream to not be assumed to be scum before I codeswitch back to my origins.

I'm working class, worked all my life (now mid 60s) but then 2 years ago, had a serious illness which has left me unable to work (I get PIP so am classed as disabled). I certainly don't feel I'm in any way "underclass", and I object to anyone thinking a disabled person fits into the same category as someone who CHOOSES never to work.

I get what you're saying but I was 'underclass' after I became unable to work. Not in the multi-generational sense other PPs are talking about, but social & economic exclusion was bad enough for 5 years.

The deleted post wasn't saying that disability itself makes you 'untermensch' - she lumped it in with a couple of other characteristics that can leave people unsupported, ignored and excluded long term. I think that's right. It's probably even worse now than it was for me, with the government going out of its way to reduce access to both medical and financial assistance.

I know this. I work full time and have a serious, life-long disability.

It's also not my description and I'm not the person you quoted earlier. It's a sociological term and I was responding to a previous poster's comment.

Are mooncups middle class? What sort of San pro would the underclass use? I need to get back down to my station [lighthearted, obviously]

Toilet tissue nicked from any public loo and stuffed inside you, since you ask. And if the actual roll is removable, that can be taken home. Hope that helps. This is not a recommendation but something that applies to many.

Well that’s odd, why was my posting the definition of “underclass” deleted because someone took offence to the definition including their demographic? It’s an outdated term, but we cannot discuss history of sociology as the OP asked along with all its bigotry without being deleted that is ridiculous.

@MNHQ why did you delete my post? It broke no talk guidelines whatsoever. Every other poster has posted the same sort of definition because that is the history of the term.

FFS that was the definition of underclass when it was first coined in Victorian times (not the 1980s as some are saying it was). The term has a long and bigoted history. I made it clear in my post that it is not my opinion or views but it is the definition of the term.

Thank you. I was posting the definition of underclass and listed all the demographic groups included when it was first written about by Victorian sociologists, ie Mayhew’s studies on the London Poor, which did in fact include anyone too disabled to work. There were a lot like this in Victorian times due to the lack of health and safety in factories & mines & longshore work at ports also the lack of workers compensation when workers were injured in accidents making them disabled. Not even military veterans disabled in the various wars of the British Empire were supported by the state. These poor were referred to as the “beggars and cripples” of the underclass in the Victorian texts that included them in the underclass.

The lack of state support for anyone injured at work (made disabled) or born disabled is one of the main reasons why workers unionised to fight for health and safety regulations and why the NHS was created. They didn’t only unionise for better pay- but for safer working conditions and that was always linked to industrial accidents that left workers paralysed, missing limbs, and unable to support their families.

Underclass is an outdated term that tried to rebrand itself in the 1980s, didn’t work imho and eventually died out at the turn of the Millenium. It’s not a term that should be resurrected in any way.

Name changed for this reply because it's deeply personal. This is me. I grew up in a single parent family, my siblings are/were drug addicts who were in and out of prison and I was the quiet studious one who dragged myself through school and went to Uni. Now have a professional job, a high salary and a lovely four bed detached in a very MC area.

It was hell. I didn't belong. I was different. I was surrounded by people with complex MH issues, personality disorders and terrible relationship skills, I suffered a lot and developed raging CPTSD that has made most of my adult life very difficult.

What most people don't seem to realise is that it isn't by choice that people end up in this situation, it's a combination of very poor decision making, systemic lack of support and very tragic life circumstances. Most benefits class people are very traumatised individuals surviving miserably any way they can, passing that trauma down to their children because they don't know any better.
It's absolutely horrible.

I was posting the definition of the term underclass when it was invented by Victorian sociologists who borrowed it from Sweden. You took offence for no reason. The term underwent a bit of rebranding in the 1980s by American sociologists but it still didn’t erase its bigoted roots and isn’t a term that is used anymore.

If I knew you’d get offended by a definition of a historical term, I’d have posted “no such thing as an underclass” because that is the view today.

Underclass is a dead term for good reason, but when it was in use it did refer to anyone too sick or disabled to work. That’s just a historical fact.

In my opinion, no one chooses to never work except those of the upper class who have no need to work.

I also did not write ‘untermensch’ in my post at all or allude to Nazi Germany. My post was 100% the British Victorian definition. Some other poster introduced untermensch later on in the thread.

“untermensch” isnt even a translation of or remotely comparable to the concept of ‘underclass’ as it translated more accurately as ‘subhumans’ (under-men, with men referring to mankind)

Underclass means to me.

No qualifications at all

Unemployed with no previous work history or intention to work...(people unable to work through illness or disability not included obviously in this)

Engaged in anti social behaviour

Excessive use or addiction to drugs/alcohol

"Poverty of ambition" said Aneurin Bevan. As described above, you can't aspire to the unknown or unachievable. 13 years of Tory government and the main areas of growth have been in the impoverished, in every area of life, services underfunded or removed from those who need them most leading to increased despair, addiction, homelessness and crime. What an achievement. Those responsible must feel very proud that history will remember them. Looking at you, Rees Mogg and your lickspittle lackeys.

You’ll know when you meet them & you won’t enjoy it.