To wonder why we are happy to define middle class but not working class?

[Argos]

This is continued from another thread but I felt it deserved it's own because it is something I would like to get views on! There was a thread on MN earlier this week along teh lines of what makes someone middle class and posters wrote long lists of their ideas on this.

Why when people define working class in the same way do they recieve lots of 's and patrionising comments?

I am not class obsessed, I just want to know why this is.

working class = working is too simplistic.

is the director of the department i work in working class?

i dont think so. i think shes firmly upper middle. highly educated, her family too were highly educated. entered the workforce at management level not lower than this. earns at least 50k

she lives in the country in a nice part of town
her children were privately educated
she owns horses
and wears expensive (to me)- yet modest fashion

Ilovemydog. Yes, WINE has become has become a bit of a class issue in recent decades. I dont mind drinking it. But I get abit miffed listening to wine buffs.

AKMD you worked hard on that analysis. Even liked the bit I didnt agree with.

TLD2 Yes, we must hang onto the notion that we are all human beings.

money doesnt make class nor intelligence

seen plenty of people with the former but as dim as tim

Agree with catgirl that income cannot make you upper-class, and with custardo that class is not closely related to income, or even to job. (Which royal/close royal connection complete with lofty title is it who is a carpenter/cabinet-maker, traditionally a low-status artisan job?)

I had never thought much about class before coming to live in England - the Irish class system doesn't really map on to the English one (no industrial revolution, apart from in NI, so middle class emerged much more recently - the important distinction for a long time was 'strong farmer' vs 'small farmer' because Ireland was so agricultural). But I found myself forced to think about it in England because of people being visibly gobsmacked by the presence of a working-class Irish woman doing graduate work at a V Prestigious and Socially-Elevated University. I was taken aback such prejudice still existed. It apparently wasn't possible to be clever and an Irish prole.

These days, I have a 'professional' job which would be thought of as middle-class by most people, and my partner (from the same background as me) and I have a clutch of degrees between us. We buy our bread at Borough market, read the Guardian, go to the opera, and mostly have friends from higher up the social ladder than us. However, we have very little money, and a tiny flat in a grubby bit of London. I still identify as working-class, he doesn't. We both remain close to our working-class families. It's all a bit complicated.

i believe i was brought up in a working class area by parents with middle class values and i am now middle class by my own definitions.
in my experience working class communities tend to value hard physical work above office work, tend to be suspicious of 'book learning' and value the 'real life experience' above degrees and qualifications.
they value community and extended family and tend to be more in touch with theirs than most middle class people, therefore not moving around the country much.

I am absolutely working class, have no desires or aspirations to be middle class.

I think class is a mixture of many things, shared values, history, beliefs. It cannot be classified by simply the amount of money you earn or where you buy your groceries.

So, in spite of my having 2 degrees, several houses, money to burn and a professional job, I am resolutely working class.

I class myself as transition class.

IE estate raised, degree and another coming along, read broadsheets and boys (3 / 4 anyway have 'MC' names (eg Sebastian), never spoke with a WC acent anyway (nor does my mother or sisters).... but I certainly don't feel MC, we might yet end up in council housing due to boy's SN but with own businesses, just may need specilaised housing...... I am somewhere in the middle.

Boys otoh apart from ds3 who is in an SNU attend / attended a vairy naice MC Church school, have posh accents and absolutely define themselves as middle class.

I think many people automatically assume that working class = chav underclass.

Where most proudly working class people would not identify that view. There has been a strong tradition of emphatically working class people striving to 'better themselves' by learning and self improvement (there were classes and access to higher education facilitated by the trades unions going back to the early parts of the last century for instance).

There is a certain pride about being working class imo, I think it is a bloody shame that in recent times it has become fashionable to clump all the working classes/chavs/poor into one lumpen mass and sneer at them.

To balance what GetOrf said, (equally stupid but in the opposite direction) I've found that is is also fashionable n some circles to define yourself as "proudly working class" when you have a degree and a professional job, and to sneer at "middle class aspirations".

Anything you do that is not exactly what I do is either pretentious or chavvy depending on whether or not I would secretly like to do it.

Haha, that's funny because I'd only read the OP and the last post and now I see you have done exactly that further up the thread :o

I'll probably get flamed for this. But I think it's partly because since the collapse of industry in the UK the kinds of jobs that used to be done by the 'working' class don't really exist any more.

There are no shipyards; ports that used to need thousands of stevedores now work just fine with a handful of guys, some gantries and shipping containers. Manufacturing is mostly gone; mining is all but dead; farming is far more automated; efficiency drives left, right and centre replace manual jobs that used to need a human being with a machine. And with that change, the idea of the labouring classes, ie a large chunk of the population who do relatively low-paid but often skilled and specialised manual work, has become much more fragmented and problematic.

So whereas DP can talk about growing up in the industrial north, surrounded by friends whose parents worked in factories or at the docks, and describe the culture that went with that society, that's far less the case these days. People who are old enough to remember the mines being open will tell you that whole cultures died when they closed the pits.

If we're reluctant to try and define the 'working classes' IMO it's because that phrase dates from a time when industry and society in the UK was structured very differently and there was actually a labouring class that was homogeneous enough to define as such; that's not true any more.

People tend to pick the label they prefer for themselves (the label they prefer being chosen based on strange arbitrary historical reasons) and then label behaviours or values that they don't like as belonging to the class that they don't believe themselves to be a part of.

The first post here defining class is pretty shit.

Im working class, but I live in a 3 bed house on my own albeit rented, I pay more in rent than some do in a mortgage.

I earn a good wage.

I choose not to save but could save in excess of £400 a month if I choose to, I choose not to, I don't believe in saving when I work as hard as I do.

I drive a shit car becuase I choose to Im not hung up on cars, I believe as long as it gets me from A to B thats good enough.

Some of those who class themselves as middle class have a high volume of debt, buy because they feel they have to and not because they can, have less disposable income too!

My the accounts on here even though my son comes from a working class back ground he is now middle class because he is 24, earns in excess of £60k a year in his first job, and has a Maths degree.

I hate these class debates with a passion.

I agree with Ravening Wolef.

There is no such thing as class. There is such a thing as different cultures, but it's rather more like a Venn diagram than it is like a pyramid.

Fabby - your son has a maths degree and earns 60k in his first job? Wo - I never knew that - you have kept that really hush hush. :)

A multi-dimensional (more than 3D) Venn diagram as well, thinking about it.

I spent 5 years in the UK and never figured out the class thing.

Me too getorf

I am oxbridge educated, was a professional, now a writer. DH works in the city.
We have land, dogs, horses.
We read the broadsheets, listen to radio four and our DC attend independent school.

We are still and always will be, working class.

That would be one helluva venn diagram trillian

I don't look down/up (whatever) on middle classes, or think in some way that the working classes are superior, or middle classes are better or any of it.

But there are marked differences, and I think a lot of it is based on background.

And like word on the face of it I live a middle class life, but would never consider myself so.

That's because it hasn't actually made sense any time in the last 40(ish) years Morloth.

Back to the OP's orginal question - why are we happy to define middle class but not working class? I'd say it's because on MN when we talk about "X class" we are probably saying something nasty about it, and it's more socially acceptable to be nasty about a group who are considered to be privileged than it is to be unpleasant about an underprivileged group. See all the stuff people say about "bankers" - it's apparently ok to attack them because they are rich so it doesn't matter.

We are still and always will be, working class.

I think you mean you still do and always will call yourself working class.

Your class is dictated by your fathers job so if Daddies a lord but you work as a mechanic you are still upper class. Mind you we Brits do seem a little fixated on class and I don't think class has anything to do with a persos contribution to society or moral compass.

I think saying there's no such thing as class is ridiculous. As a UK-resident foreigner, it seems to me, coming to it from outside, to be a continual preoccupation in this society. I wish it weren't, obviously.

Agree though on the messy 3-D Venn diagram, rather than the neat social pyramid model, but I don't think that invalidates class remaining a force.

I say there is no such thing as class because the messy multidimensional venn diagram precludes the grouping of people into anything resembling the old working/middle/upper class.

It is more sensible to think of a number of different subcultures, many of which overlap.

The people who claim to be working class on this thread most likely have a number of different definitions of what that means, because they are using "working class" to define their own particular subculture and perhaps some related subcultures but they are also excluding other subcultures from the definition.