![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI find I'm frequently getting riled up by the use of "but what about class inequality?" as a deflection from any other social issues, particularly racism. So I sort of want to rant about that, but also, I think there's something about class-based analysis that I fundamentally don't get, so I'm going to try being wrong in public and see if I can learn something from people arguing with me. Plus it seems timely for the May day bank holiday to talk about class and labour issues.
I'm usually broadly in favour of labour movements (not necessarily the Labour party as such) working towards more justice for working class people. It does seem credible to me that the UK, especially England, puts far too much importance on social class and a lot of our culture and major institutions are arranged to favour middle and upper-middle class people at the expense of working class people. This is a problem and it's unfair and Something Should Be Done. Granted.
But who exactly is working class? For much of the 20th century, there were large numbers of people who worked poorly paid manual jobs, with few legal protections against exploitation and generally poor life chances. I absolutely agree that those demographics needed serious political effort. But the thing is that we stopped being a manufacturing dominated economy in the 1980s, ie 40 years ago, and there are really very few people nowadays who were of working age when heavy industry was a significant employer. Nowadays low-paid and precarious jobs are more likely to be in retail and service industries, or care work, or the exploitative side of tech, and somehow people doing those kinds of jobs don't count as "working class" because they aren't primarily manual and often require educational qualifications.
There was a comment on Twitter to the effect of, if a barista making barely minimum wage on a zero hours contract, living in half a bedsit in a filthy HMO in London counts as "middle class" because he has a fancy beard and a vinyl collection, but a plumber who owns his own business and makes three times the average wage and fully owns a decent house in the north-east and buys a new expensive car every year counts as "working class", you don't have a class analysis, you have an aesthetic. It is true that class is about culture as well as income, but it doesn't make sense to define as middle-class anyone who does intellectual or emotional work, regardless of their financial status or access to social privilege.
The narrow stereotype of "the working class" seems to ignore the existence of lots of people who are in practice equally struggling, but either ignored altogether or seen as "bourgeois". A team leader in a call centre is counted as a "boss" and might well have a university degree, but they're still really precarious, with no real power over their working conditions and not enough income to cover basic expenses. Gig workers in retail, like packers and delivery drivers, might be seen as working class but policies that help factory workers with one single job for life and a mortgage aren't going to be useful to them. Gig workers who work in the arts or journalism or various kinds of piece-work based writing (copywriting, tech writing, translation etc) don't even count as working class. People who work for individuals as, say, cleaners or childminders, or people who work for agencies or temp banks, and are subcontracted to all kinds of different jobs, don't fit well into the standard paradigm of "workers" and "bosses". But those sorts of jobs are far more common nowadays than traditional industry jobs. I am not saying that it's wrong to want to improve things for men with steady, often even quite well-paid, manual jobs, because yes, they do experience discrimination and exclusion. But those people are very far from being representative of the contemporary working class.
There's a sort of image of "working class" that means men who have slight (but not overly strong) regional accents and drink beer and watch football and broadcast TV and wear flat caps. This is what people like Nigel Farage cosplay, and somehow he's seen as more "authentic" than other politicians even though he's just as rich and from a similar background to the people derided as posh and out of touch. Socialists, including many Labour supporters, automatically respect the dwindling number of people who fit that image. But not only is this a very dated idea of cultural preferences, it's tied to a very dated idea of the sorts of people who experience social disadvantage.
And the big unwritten rule about who is perceived as working class is that he's always implicitly white. Yes, he. Working class white women, if they're mentioned at all, are assumed to be the household members of the man with a manual job. The nuclear family supported by one male wage earner is in fact a much more middle-class structure than a working-class one, but when people talk about how we must do more for the "working class" they never mean working single mothers or multi-generation households supported by a combination of benefits and occasional casual work. A more serious problem is that this stereotypical working class man is assumed to be completely reactionary, is used as an excuse to justify all kinds of bigotry.
Nationalist protectionism and outright xenophobia against immigrants is justified as a working class value, even though the great majority of immigrants are themselves working class. Even outright racism is accepted as if racism were somehow helpful to the working class, which in practice is far more ethnically mixed than the middle class and certain more so than the upper class. The same goes for other prejudices. The "ordinary working class bloke" is assumed to have no capacity whatsoever to understand any kind of gender or sexual minorities, even though it's fairly common for coming out as LGBT+ to entail loss of class status so Queer people are on average lower in the class pecking order than their straight, cis, gender-normative peers. Disability rights are positioned as if opposed to workers' rights, even though ableism very often forces disabled people into poverty. This may touch on another issue, which is that class-based activism ignores the existence of people who are not working-class because they in fact cannot work. Either because there are no jobs they are qualified to do, or because of disability and ill-health, or because they cannot combine paid work with caring responsibilities, or because they are homeless or defined as illegal immigrants. But somehow homeless people and refugees aren't working class because... they don't work manual jobs?
In general, I'm willing to support policies that go against my direct interests in order to help people who are worse off than me. It's not my favourite policy, but I'm willing to entertain the idea of paying higher tax so that the government has more money to spend on improving things for working class people. The problem is that the things I'm told are good for the working class just don't seem plausible. It's not good for the working class that the Labour party or trades unions should only ever have white, male leaders, partly because a narrowed selection pool leads to worse leadership, but mainly because the working class includes lots of women, lots of people of all genders and from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds, and there's no good reason why a (usually middle class) white man is best placed to represent their interests. But more seriously, Brexit is as far as I can see entirely bad for working class people, in most cases more damaging to working class people than middle class people. Especially if you include immigrants in the category of working class people, but it's terrible for purely British working classes as well.
And it's all areas of policy. Education is the worst; we have this situation where education is a huge driver of social stratification and barely helps at all with social mobility, and people who care about class issues agree that this is a big problem. But the left wing solution seems to be that we should ban all high quality education, because schools that promote academic attainment, or have extraordinarily good pastoral care, or have good facilities and equipment, are only good for middle class people and bad for working class people. Education beyond the legally required minimum is suspicious, and elite universities are automatically anti-working class, and subjects that are primarily academic or arts rather than vocational are on the wrong side of the class war. Modern, evidence-based and learner-centred pedagogies are middle-class too, all education has to be reduced to Gradgrindian warehousing or it's biased against the working class. (One of my moments of utter despair during the Brexit debate was seeing ostensibly left-wing people argue that the only people who benefit from EU membership are people who speak multiple languages, and the only people who speak multiple languages are privileged alumni of posh schools. Because immigrants don't count as working class, apparently, and because access to languages not only is a privilege, but should be a privilege reserved only for the elite few.)
There's lots of other things that are similar, though. Environmentalism is somehow classist, even though climate change affects people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Public transport is classist, because if trains are overpriced and unaffordable now, and buses are so badly run as to be unusable, that's not just the way things are but the way things should be and trying to improve the situation is an attack on the working class. If there is a class divide in culture then that should be maintained, not dismantled – rather than making theatre, opera, classical music etc more accessible to people from all backgrounds, and more affordable, we should get rid of these highbrow, middle class activities.
Much of this is right-wing lies. The dreadful Sewell report, cherry-picking and misquoting evidence to suggest that there's no racism, of course, only socio-economic differences which just happens, by total coincidence, to affect some Black and some Asian people more adversely than white people. The people who pipe up, but what about the white working class? every time there's some initiative to tackle racism, but never actually do anything whatsoever that would be good for working class people. I have a direct interest in this: I worked on a project to improve equity and success at university, and I have personally adapted a project that was primarily about racial inequalities to also look at and hopefully help white working class men, who are also disadvantaged at university. So it especially annoys me when I get the whataboutery, the "nobody cares about white working class youth" stuff!
And yet it does really seem like a lot of left-wing people also buy into this frame. They perceive the working class as monolithically white, and assume that only middle class people can ever have multiple intersecting marginalized identities. And yes, the language of "marginalized identities" is middle class language, but that doesn't change the fact that many (possibly even most?) working class people are also women, are also Queer, are also disabled, are also immigrants, are also racialized. Mentioning that is dismissed as identity politics or undermining class solidarity. But it's no use having labour movements that are also racist and homophobic and xenophobic.
My tentative conclusion is that it's partly a generational divide. In recent years UK politics has got really age stratified. Older people tend to vote for right-ish tendencies including Brexit, and younger people either don't vote at all, or vote for left-ish tendencies and green stuff. If left-wing parties assume that they have to hate foreigners and Queer people to court the supposed working class vote, then younger, basically left-leaning people won't vote for them. But possibly the reason they assume this is a good trade-off is that working class means (white) people who have poorly paid manual jobs in industry, and almost all those people are 60 plus by now. Which means that not only are they more likely to hold values that are becoming very old-fashioned, but also come from a generation where education was much more narrowly available, and low education is also correlated with more parochial and nationalist views.
The other thing is that it's a kind of masculinity anxiety. I made it a kind of parenthetical that working class people are assumed to be male. But it might be a bigger deal than I'm assuming. The old working class was male-dominated, not that women didn't work, but they were less likely to have the kind of industry jobs that form the central idea of what the working class is. Now the majority of the people with bad jobs are female, low status health and care work, service jobs and so on. Lower status men are more likely to be unemployed and living with their parents, than working manual jobs and heading households. And the labour rights movements haven't adapted to that, because a lot of people feel somehow threatened by this new, female-dominated world. Backlash against LGB and trans people seems to fit well with that, but it's also the case that causes like environmentalism and social welfare programs are seen as emasculating.
So I'm a woman, I'm bi, I'm from an immigrant background, I belong to an ethno-religious minority. I am ok, even happy, with accepting loss of some privilege as a middle class person in order to make things fairer for working class people. But I'm not willing to support white supremacy, because that is morally wrong. And it's wrong and harmful for working class people too.
I'm usually broadly in favour of labour movements (not necessarily the Labour party as such) working towards more justice for working class people. It does seem credible to me that the UK, especially England, puts far too much importance on social class and a lot of our culture and major institutions are arranged to favour middle and upper-middle class people at the expense of working class people. This is a problem and it's unfair and Something Should Be Done. Granted.
But who exactly is working class? For much of the 20th century, there were large numbers of people who worked poorly paid manual jobs, with few legal protections against exploitation and generally poor life chances. I absolutely agree that those demographics needed serious political effort. But the thing is that we stopped being a manufacturing dominated economy in the 1980s, ie 40 years ago, and there are really very few people nowadays who were of working age when heavy industry was a significant employer. Nowadays low-paid and precarious jobs are more likely to be in retail and service industries, or care work, or the exploitative side of tech, and somehow people doing those kinds of jobs don't count as "working class" because they aren't primarily manual and often require educational qualifications.
There was a comment on Twitter to the effect of, if a barista making barely minimum wage on a zero hours contract, living in half a bedsit in a filthy HMO in London counts as "middle class" because he has a fancy beard and a vinyl collection, but a plumber who owns his own business and makes three times the average wage and fully owns a decent house in the north-east and buys a new expensive car every year counts as "working class", you don't have a class analysis, you have an aesthetic. It is true that class is about culture as well as income, but it doesn't make sense to define as middle-class anyone who does intellectual or emotional work, regardless of their financial status or access to social privilege.
The narrow stereotype of "the working class" seems to ignore the existence of lots of people who are in practice equally struggling, but either ignored altogether or seen as "bourgeois". A team leader in a call centre is counted as a "boss" and might well have a university degree, but they're still really precarious, with no real power over their working conditions and not enough income to cover basic expenses. Gig workers in retail, like packers and delivery drivers, might be seen as working class but policies that help factory workers with one single job for life and a mortgage aren't going to be useful to them. Gig workers who work in the arts or journalism or various kinds of piece-work based writing (copywriting, tech writing, translation etc) don't even count as working class. People who work for individuals as, say, cleaners or childminders, or people who work for agencies or temp banks, and are subcontracted to all kinds of different jobs, don't fit well into the standard paradigm of "workers" and "bosses". But those sorts of jobs are far more common nowadays than traditional industry jobs. I am not saying that it's wrong to want to improve things for men with steady, often even quite well-paid, manual jobs, because yes, they do experience discrimination and exclusion. But those people are very far from being representative of the contemporary working class.
There's a sort of image of "working class" that means men who have slight (but not overly strong) regional accents and drink beer and watch football and broadcast TV and wear flat caps. This is what people like Nigel Farage cosplay, and somehow he's seen as more "authentic" than other politicians even though he's just as rich and from a similar background to the people derided as posh and out of touch. Socialists, including many Labour supporters, automatically respect the dwindling number of people who fit that image. But not only is this a very dated idea of cultural preferences, it's tied to a very dated idea of the sorts of people who experience social disadvantage.
And the big unwritten rule about who is perceived as working class is that he's always implicitly white. Yes, he. Working class white women, if they're mentioned at all, are assumed to be the household members of the man with a manual job. The nuclear family supported by one male wage earner is in fact a much more middle-class structure than a working-class one, but when people talk about how we must do more for the "working class" they never mean working single mothers or multi-generation households supported by a combination of benefits and occasional casual work. A more serious problem is that this stereotypical working class man is assumed to be completely reactionary, is used as an excuse to justify all kinds of bigotry.
Nationalist protectionism and outright xenophobia against immigrants is justified as a working class value, even though the great majority of immigrants are themselves working class. Even outright racism is accepted as if racism were somehow helpful to the working class, which in practice is far more ethnically mixed than the middle class and certain more so than the upper class. The same goes for other prejudices. The "ordinary working class bloke" is assumed to have no capacity whatsoever to understand any kind of gender or sexual minorities, even though it's fairly common for coming out as LGBT+ to entail loss of class status so Queer people are on average lower in the class pecking order than their straight, cis, gender-normative peers. Disability rights are positioned as if opposed to workers' rights, even though ableism very often forces disabled people into poverty. This may touch on another issue, which is that class-based activism ignores the existence of people who are not working-class because they in fact cannot work. Either because there are no jobs they are qualified to do, or because of disability and ill-health, or because they cannot combine paid work with caring responsibilities, or because they are homeless or defined as illegal immigrants. But somehow homeless people and refugees aren't working class because... they don't work manual jobs?
In general, I'm willing to support policies that go against my direct interests in order to help people who are worse off than me. It's not my favourite policy, but I'm willing to entertain the idea of paying higher tax so that the government has more money to spend on improving things for working class people. The problem is that the things I'm told are good for the working class just don't seem plausible. It's not good for the working class that the Labour party or trades unions should only ever have white, male leaders, partly because a narrowed selection pool leads to worse leadership, but mainly because the working class includes lots of women, lots of people of all genders and from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds, and there's no good reason why a (usually middle class) white man is best placed to represent their interests. But more seriously, Brexit is as far as I can see entirely bad for working class people, in most cases more damaging to working class people than middle class people. Especially if you include immigrants in the category of working class people, but it's terrible for purely British working classes as well.
And it's all areas of policy. Education is the worst; we have this situation where education is a huge driver of social stratification and barely helps at all with social mobility, and people who care about class issues agree that this is a big problem. But the left wing solution seems to be that we should ban all high quality education, because schools that promote academic attainment, or have extraordinarily good pastoral care, or have good facilities and equipment, are only good for middle class people and bad for working class people. Education beyond the legally required minimum is suspicious, and elite universities are automatically anti-working class, and subjects that are primarily academic or arts rather than vocational are on the wrong side of the class war. Modern, evidence-based and learner-centred pedagogies are middle-class too, all education has to be reduced to Gradgrindian warehousing or it's biased against the working class. (One of my moments of utter despair during the Brexit debate was seeing ostensibly left-wing people argue that the only people who benefit from EU membership are people who speak multiple languages, and the only people who speak multiple languages are privileged alumni of posh schools. Because immigrants don't count as working class, apparently, and because access to languages not only is a privilege, but should be a privilege reserved only for the elite few.)
There's lots of other things that are similar, though. Environmentalism is somehow classist, even though climate change affects people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Public transport is classist, because if trains are overpriced and unaffordable now, and buses are so badly run as to be unusable, that's not just the way things are but the way things should be and trying to improve the situation is an attack on the working class. If there is a class divide in culture then that should be maintained, not dismantled – rather than making theatre, opera, classical music etc more accessible to people from all backgrounds, and more affordable, we should get rid of these highbrow, middle class activities.
Much of this is right-wing lies. The dreadful Sewell report, cherry-picking and misquoting evidence to suggest that there's no racism, of course, only socio-economic differences which just happens, by total coincidence, to affect some Black and some Asian people more adversely than white people. The people who pipe up, but what about the white working class? every time there's some initiative to tackle racism, but never actually do anything whatsoever that would be good for working class people. I have a direct interest in this: I worked on a project to improve equity and success at university, and I have personally adapted a project that was primarily about racial inequalities to also look at and hopefully help white working class men, who are also disadvantaged at university. So it especially annoys me when I get the whataboutery, the "nobody cares about white working class youth" stuff!
And yet it does really seem like a lot of left-wing people also buy into this frame. They perceive the working class as monolithically white, and assume that only middle class people can ever have multiple intersecting marginalized identities. And yes, the language of "marginalized identities" is middle class language, but that doesn't change the fact that many (possibly even most?) working class people are also women, are also Queer, are also disabled, are also immigrants, are also racialized. Mentioning that is dismissed as identity politics or undermining class solidarity. But it's no use having labour movements that are also racist and homophobic and xenophobic.
My tentative conclusion is that it's partly a generational divide. In recent years UK politics has got really age stratified. Older people tend to vote for right-ish tendencies including Brexit, and younger people either don't vote at all, or vote for left-ish tendencies and green stuff. If left-wing parties assume that they have to hate foreigners and Queer people to court the supposed working class vote, then younger, basically left-leaning people won't vote for them. But possibly the reason they assume this is a good trade-off is that working class means (white) people who have poorly paid manual jobs in industry, and almost all those people are 60 plus by now. Which means that not only are they more likely to hold values that are becoming very old-fashioned, but also come from a generation where education was much more narrowly available, and low education is also correlated with more parochial and nationalist views.
The other thing is that it's a kind of masculinity anxiety. I made it a kind of parenthetical that working class people are assumed to be male. But it might be a bigger deal than I'm assuming. The old working class was male-dominated, not that women didn't work, but they were less likely to have the kind of industry jobs that form the central idea of what the working class is. Now the majority of the people with bad jobs are female, low status health and care work, service jobs and so on. Lower status men are more likely to be unemployed and living with their parents, than working manual jobs and heading households. And the labour rights movements haven't adapted to that, because a lot of people feel somehow threatened by this new, female-dominated world. Backlash against LGB and trans people seems to fit well with that, but it's also the case that causes like environmentalism and social welfare programs are seen as emasculating.
So I'm a woman, I'm bi, I'm from an immigrant background, I belong to an ethno-religious minority. I am ok, even happy, with accepting loss of some privilege as a middle class person in order to make things fairer for working class people. But I'm not willing to support white supremacy, because that is morally wrong. And it's wrong and harmful for working class people too.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-03 11:57 pm (UTC)Environmentalism has largely been racist and classist though there are some changes afoot. The various environmental programs in universities are filled with white students. The discussions about preserving habitat or preserving outdoor spaces for recreation are typically fights that white people are heavily invested in.
More recently, environmental and climate justice has entered the conversation, and this is about not polluting environmental resources used by the lower classes and not putting polluting things into neighborhoods of people who have less political power. For example, there is a pipeline known as the Byhalia pipeline that is supposed to be constructed through Black parts of Mississippi and Tennessee, and there is local opposition to it that seems to be working.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 04:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 08:21 am (UTC)Funny how the whataboutery doesn't lead to any actual changes, isn't it? It's been reported on and off for at least most of the century that the lowest-attaining group in schools is poor white boys, but no government has actually done anything very effective about it. Tells you something about the purpose of whataboutery.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 08:33 am (UTC)The precariat can't organise because it doesn't have time and stability. It isn't a political force. Unionisation was the way the working class became a political force, and people under sixty basically haven't had that. And unionisation works much better in heavy industry than in coffee shops, because you have a large workforce in a single location.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2021-05-05 09:23 am (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 08:39 am (UTC)This isn't true for me professionally or personally, for what it's worth. But I think it's how it sometimes looks on the news, because working-class white people are "working-class", and Black and Asian working-class people are "poor" or "disadvantaged".
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 09:13 am (UTC)The people I've observed cutting arts and social sciences etc don't seem to be doing this from the left! rather than a corporatist managerial very short-termist view of what will fit into the job-market and a very limited notion of the value of humanities degrees. (Speaking as a historian of medicine, ahem...)
There's the longstanding fear of being cut off from one's roots/one's roots expressing the fear that one will be cut off by seeking education. (Numerous memoirs, novels, etc.) Also feeling of not fitting with the other students: I came across this A Bullingdon in reverse: how working-class student club is taking on elitism recently.
Having really recently been doing an oral history life-interview, I particularly wonder if I would, these days, even dare go to uni and take on a load of debt, because I realised how much my life was influenced by having grants and not graduating with student loans to pay off. (Being of a working-class family.)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 12:39 pm (UTC)ever had to go hungry because there was no food and no money for food
ever had to miss medication because there was no money for medication
ever had to stay in a dangerous/unsafe/violent living situation because no money for accommodation elsewhere
had to have extensive contact with Centrelink [social security]
went to a school that was under-resourced in both teachers and materials
and things of that nature...
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 03:19 pm (UTC)I think dad's story illustrates the way grammar schools worked for "social mobility" of taking a few bright working-class kids and giving them access to "middle-class" education (either my grandfather or great-grandfather was told by his father that grammar school wasn't for the likes of them) and giving them success at the expense of leaving their roots behind. And I grew up with a model where you went away to university and then found work somewhere and rather looked down on those who either didn't go away to uni (either not going or communiting to local one) or came back. I now wonder how much I missed out on by not being deeply rooted in a place. But by coming away, I have found my people (generally Queer people, and if not queer than geeky) in a way that I didn't have growing up. Is that a reason why Queer issues are seen as foreign to the "working class" because the working class are perceived to be members of rooted communities with strong family ties and people living round the corner from where they grew up and Queer people often find no place for themselves in those communities and leave for more fluid communities?
The Labour movement was also deeply patriarchal and white - see the women at Dagenham and the Bristol Bus Boycott where the unions weren't AIUI on the side of the excluded. But they did provide a political education to many and that education route doesn't really exist so much now, and it's harder to work your way up from the bottom and then get a union role and get into politics from there. At some point, with greater access to HE for everyone, people went of to get a uni education and then to management jobs. And concurrently with that Maggie Thatcher took on the unions and curtailed their power hugely. And then there was a tendency for unions to join together (so UNISON was formed in the 90s from other unions and Unite similarly) which brought some gains in influence (1 union speaking for lots) but I think probably lost a lot in connectedness to the workforce and in abilty to build solidarity and education of the issues. And now we're in the situation that it tends to be better paid occupations which are more likely to be unionised, and that can be quite an individualistic unionisation (so I'm a member of a Union** but have no idea if any of my colleagues at my place of work are also members of that or another union, though interestingly we did get an email a few weeks ago pointing us in the direction of said union after a staff meeting I missed due to leave). I know a GMB staff member who is involved in work to get more people from the gig economy etc into unions.
There is also something to be said about the role of right-wing media in all this. Where the unions used to provide information and education, now people get their info from the Daily Fail, Express and assorted online scaremongering places. There was always a part of the working-class that was socially conservative and knew its place and liked the safety of traditional roles. Unions often widened that perspective by bringing in academic analysis of the situation and uniting people around working for that. But now, those doing that work are perceived as middle-class do-gooders not working class people understanding their own oppression (even when they are working class people who've been to uni)
*Loans come into supplement grants in the ?late 80s, and tuition fees came in in 1998. I got a grant in 1997 as the year my brother and I overlapped. With the introduction of tuition fees came the loans where you paid back a proportion of what you earn over a threshold replacing the original loans where you paid a proportion of what you owed when your income reached a higher threshold.
**Two years ago I learnt the hard way why not being a Union member is bad idea.
(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2021-05-05 10:02 am (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 08:00 pm (UTC)In practice, it probably is more complicated than that. Here in the States, the capitalists (and the media) forever dangle the prospect that if a worker aligns themselves with the capitalists and champions their interests, at some point they might be able to change from being a worker to a capitalist themselves. (This happens at the same rate of any other statistically unlikely event, and even cursory investigations into how "self-made" wealthy people obtained their wealth often turn up that they already had wealth enough to keep failing until something succeeded.)
When combined with other messaging about how anyone other than a cis white man doing any sort of work is "stealing" that job from the cis white man and that anyone other than a cis white man using any form of public assistance is "stealing" that white man's money or is "undeserving" of that money, and you get the much more hyped clash of the (white) "working class man", who is supposed to represent the true soul and opinions of the country because he is ignorant but for what capitalists, churches, and conservative-leaning media tell him, versus the "educated liberal", who has been "indoctrinated" by hostile forces in the academy into (sometimes only very) occasionally questioning the messages of capitalism, church, and media.
Class warfare, as such, seems to simplify in the direction of "capitalists telling one group of workers that another group of workers are Different and Wrong, and they are preventing you from becoming capitalists like us. Take what you deserve from them, and pay no attention to what we are taking from all of you." And from that basic premise, all sorts of bigotry is condoned and put into being to try and divide people on issues that aren't "workers need to fight capitalists".
So when someone asks about "working class," they're asking about a whole bunch of different things and should really clarify what they mean, because there's a good chance when they say "working class," what they mean is "the interests of capitalists and their allies."
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2021-05-05 10:10 am (UTC) - Expand