'Middle class' is a con

[NapsForAll]

Concept taken from Gary Stevenson:

There are only two classes. The 'owning class' and the 'working class'.

'Owning class' primarily get all their money from investments and assets, and properties and land. They don't have to work, and they have so much wealth that their money makes money. They don't get taxed on that huge huge amount of money. The UK has 156 billionaires and 45,000 people that have more than 100 million.

The working class is everyone else - the rest of us. Yes there are spectrums within it, but we are ALL people who have to work to get money, and if we don't work, we can't live.

AIBU to say that the term middle class has been invented to sow division, and we are being ROYALLY played by identifying as middle class? It would make more of a difference to our lives and society if we focused on wealth taxes, not who claims child allowance or disability support.

YABU - no, smaller class divides are part of British politics
YANBU - yeh we are literally owned by the rich people in our society. Let's all start calling for a wealth tax.

How many more of these fucking wah wah the rich have ruined my life bullshit threads must we suffer?

You don’t have to suffer any. Off you pop now 👋🏼

The more I think about the one's who go on about class don't appear to have any class regardless of what class it is, it doesn't affect or change anything is just makes some people play the endless victim whatever people call it

Actually I agree with you @NapsForAll.

I always agree with Gary Stevenson too, he talks a lot of sense.

This is Marxist analysis. That’s not an insult. But Gary Stevenson didn’t invent it, Marx did about 150 years ago.

By this logic all pensioners are “owning class.” They don’t work for their income - so would be in the same category as a retired hedge fund manager living off his wealth. But putting Mabel with her NHS pension in her council flat in the same category as Mark on his yacht with his £100m of liquid wealth is obviously absurd.

It’s not true that the “owning class” doesn’t get taxed. Investment income is taxed. Capital gains are taxed. Income from trusts is taxed.

Where are the responses to your OP going? Because this feels very much like a piece of research.

And who is Gary Stevenson?

So what do we call people who don’t fall into Owning Class and aren’t working either? Could be pensioners, disabled people who need benefits to live, etc

All of these ‘the wealthy are shafting you, that’s why your life is so bad’ conspiracy theory threads are tiresome.

I suggest you do some reading. A lot of reading. Because if you think that a medical consultant at the top of his/her career, married to a QC are likely to be broadly similar to that of a binman married to a care assistant, other than that both sets work for a living, I'd suggest you think again.

🤣 it's not conspiracy theory, it's an actual conspiracy based on the lie that with the right mindset and enough work ethic anyone can be rich. And it just ain't so, no matter how much you bluster.....

No he doesn’t. He’s a lying false prophet with a CV even more ‘enhanced’ than Rachel Reeves. He just harps on about the wealthy while looking like he’s trying to strain something out.

I don’t agree.

historically there is a big difference between societies like medieval Russia where you were either a landowning fighter or a peasant and societies like Victorian England where there were lots of people in the middle.

the concept of the middling sort or the middle class is useful.

i’m not sure there are societies today that just have the two extremes and don’t have the middling sort but it’s a useful concept.

Wealth should be capped at £10 million. No one needs more than £10 million. A 100% levy on wealth above £10mil would generate hundreds of billions of pounds. We could actually sort out the country, pay everyone a decent salary, invest in infrastructure, education, healthcare and so on.

Firstly, I think it is factually incorrect. A quick google suggests around 4,000 people in the UK are worth over £100m, not 45,000.
And yes, all the "the rich ruined my life, they pay no tax, they are all greedy grabbing, none tax paying, thieves, profiting off slave labour" threads ARE tiresome. "The rich" are not a homogenous group, any more than "the poor".

I disagree

Both working class and middle class have to work, true, but the middle class usually end up with houses, pensions and money left over for inheritances, whereas the working class survive week to week.

That is a genuine big difference.

The middle classes were literally the ones in-between nobility and peasants. They were land owning farmers, small business owners, the Bourgeoisie as identified by Marx and French revolutionaries.
They are still there, still in the middle between few massive land owners in nobility and tech billionaires and working people with no capital beyond their home. The 50s British and American definitions around home ownership, private schools and cultural bits have been diffused.

Are you saying there’s only 4000 houses worth a million in the Uk?

Obviously not. The op refers to 100 million.

Equally this same argument is used by middle class people to gloss over working class issues.

This is another post to rile certain people. Some wealthy use tax avoidance schemes, but you know they don’t all do. The top 1% of earners/ wealthy, pay quarter of all the tax. Therefore we rely heavily on this demographic. They are already paying for the rest of us.
Now when you say that the rest of us all work to pay tax. That’s simply not true. There are only 21.6 million workers in this country. So the rest are either the under 18s, retired, or are on benefits.
And who cares what class you or anyone else is?
The World is your oyster, so it’s up to the individual.

That depends on your classification of rich.

I know people who started out in very, very humble beginnings, hand me down clothes, very basic food, one caravan or no holiday a year, small terrace house, maybe rented, maybe council owned.

They now live comfortably in 5 bed detached houses, spending freely on food and wine and having 2-3 foreign holidays a year. Not necessarily private school, designer clothes rich, but definitely more than comfortable lovely lives.

They would consider themselves rich, and from hard work and good choices.

I don't agree

In The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt he looks at how people vote and what drives their choices. A lot of it comes down to aspirational voting. People vote for what is in the best interests of where they want to be in society rather than where they actually are.

It was a really interesting book. I think a lot of what it comes down to is how individual and group identities are constructed. As much as we think that we are in control of who we are the majority of factors influencing our identity to others and to ourselves are beyond our control and often can't be objectively observed by ourselves.

I think overall class sorting systems are chaotic and useless. If we want to look at social changes, problems, trends it is probably one of the least helpful metrics. It isn't clearly defined, changes over time, place and perspective. The one situation in whih class is useful is when someone is looking to divide a population or ragebait in some way.

And they are now very sadly in the minority.