Only the middle class and above think that Class isn't a thing any more.

[FindingMeno]

Just that really.
If you're working class it's as plain as the nose on your face.

Yes, your family history makes a difference to your experience. How you grow up affects all kinds of things about yourself.

But if you are a university educated professional you are not working class. Your children will have an even more limited relation to the working class.

It's not easy for anyone. We all have to work to further ourselves, and support our kids.

I don't have a magic wand... it's day in, day out effort.

@Budgies99 "It's not easy for anyone. We all have to work to further ourselves, and support our kids.

I don't have a magic wand... it's day in, day out effort."

But it's so much easier for some than others-simply by an accident of birth.

I don’t agree. I would class myself, if asked, as ‘educated working class’. The fact that I have four degrees and work in a professional field doesn’t supersede my upbringing, early experiences of the world, or being the first person in my family to stay in school past 14.

My outlook is too different to my MC and UMC friends and colleagues. When formative your experience of the world is one where, as in my household, there’s barely enough food, not enough other resources, and where your adults are very obviously comparatively powerless in the face of the world, you know you have to work it out alone with the odds against you. DH, from a similar background, similarly educated and now a CEO, still gets twitchy if we don’t have big stocks of basic food (dried pulses, pasta, cans of tomatoes, flour etc) in the house because there wasn’t much to go round in his house either.

We’re never going to have the same take on the world as our friends and colleagues who grew up with parents who understood how the world worked, and were able to make it pay them for writing books or arguing legal cases or researching plasma physics, and whose children, whatever else was going on in their lives, didn’t have to fill out forms for their parents or whose first lesson in how the world worked wasn’t ’don’t ask for anything because the money isn’t there’.

And no, supporting my children's education and making sure that they didn't miss any opportunities, even if they didn't choose to take them, was not day in day out effort for me. Because I knew what to do and how to do it and I knew I would be taken seriously.

@AtYourOwnRisk "We’re never going to have the same take on the world as our friends and colleagues who grew up with parents who understood how the world worked, and were able to make it pay them for writing books or arguing legal cases or researching plasma physics, and whose children, whatever else was going on in their lives, didn’t have to fill out forms for their parents or whose first lesson in how the world worked wasn’t ’don’t ask for anything because the money isn’t there"

Absolutely this. My son is the first man in my family for 200 years not to go to university. He was on a train he chose to get off. Not one he had to fight to get on.

But that's not what class is.

It's an economic category.

Where do teachers, nurses, police officers, social workers, physiotherapists, paramedics etc etc fit?

This could be my own upbringing. Brought up in a Northern mill town. Parents both manual workers in a cotton mill, so very traditional working class. Went to a direct grant school post 11+ and then university.
Parents were very respectable, church going, had good manners, taught good manners.
I had never been in a restaurant until I was eighteen. Holidays were day trips to Blackpool.
I have experience of my intelligence being under estimated because of my accent (which is more associated with comedians than academics). I have also been called posh in my home town.
I use all the serviette, settee, tea for evening meal etc words because that's what's familiar to me.
It irks to see the term "working class" conflated with fecklessness.
I don't really care where people think I fit but I do agree that it is only upper middle class people that think class distinction no longer exists.

It irks to see the term "working class" conflated with fecklessness

Yes definitely. The description of your family is very much what the working class is for me.

Oh my goodness YES!!

im having that very problem

No, it isn’t.

That's literally what it means.

What do you think it means?

@TempestTost "What do you think it means?"

It's a social construct. I've been rich and I've been poor. I have always been middle class.

This is like mistaking wearing lipstick for being female.

Class is the economic role you have in society. To some extent that correlates with wealth but it's not always a total match.

Working class people sell their labour, they don't have productive assets.

The capitalist class owns productive assets (like a factory) and employs other people, and they make money from the labour of others through that asset.

The middle class is a bit of a mishmash, but generally they don't employ others, or not many. They might have a small business but work in it as one of the main labourers (or only labourer.) They also might work for someone else, but have pensions and investments that mean they have a stake in the capital class - they don't rely totally on their own labour and savings.

There are also aristocrats and peasants which relate more to systems where land holding and farming are more important.

There are certain cultural things associated with these groups, because in many cases there is little movement between them, and they develop certain cultural and other characteristics. But that's not what class means. Your parents might have been factory workers, but if you now own the factory, you are not middle class.

I mean - this is the whole idea of the labour movement was about. And class is a foundational element in talking about economic relations.

It's not a social construct that some people are employers, and some are employees, and that the relation of those roles has significant impact on their economic and political power.

It's not a social construct that some people are employers, and some are employees, and that the relation of those roles has significant impact on their economic and political power.

Even in the way you define class, it still very much remains a social construct.

It's a material relation, which is quite different than a social construct.

I think this is a common point of confusing these days and it's why so many on the left have been sucked in by identity politics.

Here is an example of the difference:

Race is a social construct. There can, on the basis of that construct, be inequalities. But there is no inherent reason that the relation between say, Europeans and Africans, needs to be unequal, or the direction of that inequality. In 500 years, it could be gone, or Europeans could be an oppressed race, or something else. It's concept is fundamentally an abstraction with arbitrary boundaries.

When you look at class, you are looking at a concrete relation. A member of the working class, who can only sell his labour, is in a particular relation to the person who owns the factory. You could swap the individuals around, and the factory owner, because he is the person who owns the productive capital, will still have the same power relation to the person who he employs who has no capital or means to work unless someone else employs him.

Or look at the landowner vs the peasant who labours on his land. The landowner has something that can produce. If he has no one to work for him, he can at the least work on the land himself. The farm worker has nothing, he has only his own body, if no one will hire him, he will starve. So he is in a position with a concrete disadvantage.

That's not a construct, it's about the nature of the physical word.

@TempestTost you’ve taught me something new. Thanks!

Your user name really suits you Mary.

The UK is one of the most accepting countries in the world, it’s one of the easiest countries in the world to find opportunity.

A child does not need to be stuck in a ‘working class’ life. I’ve noticed that a lot of ‘working class’ people (using your description / definition), blame others for their life / predicament.

None of us can control what we’re born into, but many of us can change what we become.

It’s just many people don’t like to hear that, let alone accept it. That would mean taking responsibility for their own actions / decisions.

It will always be a thing. And in every human society. Humans are competitive, they are status-conscious and they create hierarchies wherever they go.

I’m not a snob - hate social snobbery with a vengeance - but yes, I am always aware of people’s social class. I’m being honest here. But being aware of it doesn’t mean I judge people positively or negatively on that basis.

I came from a wc/lower mc background and I do sometimes feel socially insecure but as I’ve got older I care less. I have lovely friends from we, mc and some upper mc backgrounds and we all get along. Everyone is happy to be themselves with no pretentions so all is good.

I don’t think it’s ever going to get better than that. Make peace with it and just give snobs and people who judge you for your class a swerve.

Equally many people who enjoy privilege and success don't like to be reminded of the head start they had. That would mean acknowledging that factors other than their own exceptionalism had a hand in it. And that all things being equal, they may well be working for the person currently working for them.

Oh yes. Agreed.

That’s an incredibly reductive take on social class.