The influence of class on values

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  • I know some people do try and leave their roots behind as they climb the social ladder but there are many of us who don't - who remember what it was like to be in a family that struggled to make ends meet; where foreign holidays were unthinkable; where the family car wasn't a flashy new thing but an old ropey jalopy kept going for as long as possible.

    It's a flipping good job some people continue to buy new cars, or where would my next 10 yr old one come from :smile: My Polish mate laughed when I said I wouldn't get on in Poland - the language is bad, but the skips are appalling - nothing but soil and broken bricks!

    I'd like to think that abhorrence of waste and resourcefulness is a working class thing, but I'm no longer sure - I've met some very posh people who are like that, and plenty of D/Es who throw things away like billy-o. My mate's council estate is a great place to scavenge, though some of the stuff might be a bit...warmish.
  • Leorning CnihtLeorning Cniht Shipmate
    edited April 8
    The thing is, I think in the UK, social class and material wealth are almost orthogonal. There are a whole load of cases where being wealthy is useful, but social class carries with it a form of social capital that's basically independent of wealth - the educated-sounding man with the RP accent might well be a lawyer, or a lawyer's brother, or have been to school with the Chief Constable, or otherwise have social connections with powerful people, even if he's not wealthy himself.

    Whereas someone with a strong regional accent, who doesn't sound so educated - well, he might live in a nice house and drive a nice car, but he probably doesn't know anyone of any consequence.

    I definitely have a waste-not, make-do kind of attitude. I'm fairly firmly middle class, but I get it from my parents, who grew up in the war / during rationing shortly after the war. Rather more of our house than my wife cares to imagine is taken up with things that might come in handy one day, or things that need just a little effort to fix and they'll be perfectly good. Like the pair of powered speakers that I'm almost certain just have a couple of blown capacitors, but haven't quite got around to doing anything with, but they'd be useful if they were working...

    And as is traditional, I'll refer to Sir Pterry again, this time on the subject of why rich people stay rich (because they never buy anything, because they've got whole attics full of old stuff that they can get out and use.)
  • finelinefineline Kerygmania Host, 8th Day Host
    I think a discussion around class that doesn't consider material conditions is somewhat futile, but this appears to be the form in the UK, so here we go again.

    I'm British, in the UK, and I was considering material conditions quite significantly in my post. They are crucial, and have a huge impact on how people are treated, how they see themselves, how they are able to approach life, etc.

  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    edited April 8
    I once lived in a bedsit in a converted cottage owned by a middle class widow. We were not at all the same sort of middle class. She was on the borders of upper. Her tertiary education had been finishing school, as far as I could make out, and she was a strong believer in women of my age wearing girdles. She gave me lessons on the correct way to apply perfume. Her friends wanted to teach me to be accepting of their dogs leaping up on me. Hunting and the Hunt Ball were involved.
    No books.
    Her husband had been of a Huguenot family which had at some time been involved in making Harrison type marine chronometers, of which she had one. After one of her middle class dinner guests had commented on it, there was a directed burglary which only took that one item.
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
    chrisstyles

    Glad you brought up material conditions. Moving into council housing was a step up in my childhood. Before that we lived in a rented 2 up 2 down with an outside toilet and a tin bath. For 10 years we lived from weekly pay packet to weekly pay packet, hand me downs and oft repaired clothing. Sufficient food for meals were challenging on Wednesdays and Thursdays. No holidays apart from a couple of days a year at the seaside My passing the 11 plus was a huge challenge to my parents for whom the costs of school uniform were a big deal. Things got better when my mum got a job working in a care home.

    You don’t forget what that was like, what a strain that level of poverty and insecurity was on mum and dad. You don’t take things for granted.
  • My class background is fairly solid lower middle class. My Dad's father was an estate agent, and probably considered himself to be a "self-made man", a tory and a freemason. My Dad got a scholarship to a fairly academic independent, then Oxford followed by theological college. My Mum's family were Welsh and English Methodists turned CofE, and were the archetypal large clergy family with no money. My Mum went to a state grammar in a county that still retains the 11+ even now but left with little to show for it between illness and a terrible phobia of exams. She trained as a nursery nurse and spent most of the next 30 years looking after her own and other people's children (and it's only now I have a child myself I realise quite how skilled she is).

    I recognise a lot of the things mentioned about manners: elbows off the table, compuTer not compyou-er, asking to leave the table at the end of a meal, a settee in the lounge rather than a sofa or couch in the living room or (horror of horrors) the front room, don't hold sandwiches with both hands, only monkeys do that. Put the sandwich down on the plate between bites. My siblings and I all went to state comprehensives and on to university, two of us are in assuredly middle class professional roles, the third in an admin management position.

    My wife's family is of slightly humbler origins but are probably better off financially. I might even say there's a slight generation slip, in that their socio-economic story (and associated aesthetic tastes) probably has more in common with that of my father's parents than that of my Mum and Dad.
  • SandemaniacSandemaniac Shipmate
    Barnabas62 wrote: »
    You don’t forget what that was like, what a strain that level of poverty and insecurity was on mum and dad. You don’t take things for granted.

    Gods, yes! I am the odd one out of the family - probably nearly diagnosable as being on the spectrum, went to special school as a result, and was channelled by the County Council educational department through a system that was designed to get you to university. As a result I've ended up in very much a white collar job, as a scientist, and (eventually...) own my own house - definitely middle-class. Whereas my parents were very much working class - Dad worked on farms and did labouring jobs all his life, the only suit he ever wore for work had worn shoulders from carrying coffins, Mum did odd jobs when we were kids, I especially remember her sweeping out piggeries.

    But I've a lot of values that come from my upbringing - I remember Mum saving to buy a carpet sweeper - not a hoover, that was too expensive, but a carpet sweeper - came home wiith it to find Dad had lost his job that day. I'll still save for things, and get terrible pangs of conscience when I do buy them. And I'll do as many jobs myself as I can to try to save money for the ones that I really can't do (I've had a whale of a time the last few weeks removing concrete from the back garden with a sledgehammer and pickaxe! - and people *want* my old concrete! I've given a load of it away, and people have come and collected it!).

    But I do find it odd - my brother has serious light fingers. He moans about the "f***ing pikies", but is as bad himself when it comes to liberating things not screwed down (I dread to think what he'd make of our local scrap collectors who are - gasp! - *brown skinned*), and appropriates stuff just for the sake of having it, he's got all manner of crap he'll never use. But in our neighbourhood, people leave stuff out on the roadside for people to take -stuff I'd never throw away because it still has life in it! My car is 16 years old with 96K on the clock because I won't throw it out until it's broken (like lots of other things).

    But what really, really bemuses me, I just cannot find a reason for it, is working class people voting for people like Johnson - expensively educated, never needed to worry about money, leading a life of privilege - "because he's like us" WTactualF?





  • chrisstileschrisstiles Shipmate
    fineline wrote: »
    I think a discussion around class that doesn't consider material conditions is somewhat futile, but this appears to be the form in the UK, so here we go again.

    I'm British, in the UK, and I was considering material conditions quite significantly in my post. They are crucial, and have a huge impact on how people are treated, how they see themselves, how they are able to approach life, etc.

    Sorry fineline, my post wasn't intended as a response to your own - but the general trend in such discussions as I've seen here and elsewhere (including in the media).

    Yes, obviously values and the privilege of education is real; but on the other hand it be very misleading in terms of what peoples material and generational interests are (Compare a 'working class' 50 yo BTL landlord who left school at 16 vs a 'middle class' 28 yo arts grad who has a insecure gig-style employment).

    Similarly I can relate somewhat to Barnabas62 / Sandemaniac, as I was also brought up in one of those archetypical large clergy/missionary families with no money, and I inherited the set of values that go with that kind of upbringing.
    But what really, really bemuses me, I just cannot find a reason for it, is working class people voting for people like Johnson - expensively educated, never needed to worry about money, leading a life of privilege - "because he's like us" WTactualF?

    Support for Johnson - and the Tories more generally - is concentrated among the old so there are obviously many people who enjoyed all the benefits that Barnabas62 enumerated earlier and came to a different conclusion as to whether future generations should benefit in the same way.
  • Barnabas62 wrote: »
    chrisstyles

    Glad you brought up material conditions. Moving into council housing was a step up in my childhood. Before that we lived in a rented 2 up 2 down with an outside toilet and a tin bath. For 10 years we lived from weekly pay packet to weekly pay packet, hand me downs and oft repaired clothing. Sufficient food for meals were challenging on Wednesdays and Thursdays. No holidays apart from a couple of days a year at the seaside My passing the 11 plus was a huge challenge to my parents for whom the costs of school uniform were a big deal. Things got better when my mum got a job working in a care home.

    You don’t forget what that was like, what a strain that level of poverty and insecurity was on mum and dad. You don’t take things for granted.

    Damn right!

    When my dad quit the pub, he was in his 50s and took out a mortgage for the first time in his life. To pay the bills, he worked double shifts on the buses - we barely saw him and when we did he was bad-tempered because he was so knackered. Life only got better when my mum was able to return to work after raising four children.

    As kids we knew what our parents were going through. We were aware that our friends at the grammar school were going abroad on holiday, whilst we had a week at Butlins if we lucky (and we weren't always); we knew that the car that was older than me had to be kept on the road because there was no chance of getting anything else. I don't remember any of us children complaining, though. This was simply how life was.
  • finelinefineline Kerygmania Host, 8th Day Host
    @chrisstiles - yes, that is what I was getting at in my post, that it is a combination of things, intertwined, and that education in itself, while enriching, and while providing more opportunities, doesn't automatically put someone from a poor background on the same footing as someone from a well-off background.

    Something I have observed among people from humble beginnings who have become comfortably off is there can be two opposite extremes in how they see themselves. Some see themselves as firmly working class regardless, and don't acknowledge any significant class differences between themselves and those who are still living on a very low income. And others wish to completely remove themselves from the working class, to see themselves as above that now, and they can sometimes be snobby and act superior towards the people they used to be like, to try to indicate they are no longer in this position. In my very limited observations, it can be more often women in the latter group, perhaps because for women getting ahead in society is already harder because of gender inequality. Women are more often mocked for being of a low social background, whereas in men it can be more admired, as a sign of rugged toughness.

    I tend to think someone who has moved up the social ladder doesn't fully fit in either category, though people do easily become more like the people they hang out with. I think of the scene in Educating Rita, where Rita realises, after trying so hard to better herself educationally, that she doesn't fit in with educated society, so she goes to the pub to be with her working class friends and family and realises she no longer fits in there either - she has become a kind of hybrid.
  • SandemaniacSandemaniac Shipmate
    Agreed - Dad didn't marry until he was 40. Mum kept goats because of the sickly kid with appalling eczema (yours truly) - Dad fed and watered the goats before he went to work, did a hard day's manual labour (as he had since he'd left school, at 14), came back, and worked in the garden to feed us. He sweated blood to raise his family. And the decrepit old cars we ran... the BMC 1100/1300s that failed the MOT with subframe rot each and every year...
  • SandemaniacSandemaniac Shipmate
    Re-reading my contributions, I can picture others starting to read this thread and then realising that there are four yorkshiremen in the room.... It's not intentional!
  • LuciaLucia Shipmate
    As far as class goes in British society, the Great British Class Survey of 2013 suggested 7 groupings based on people's economic, cultural and social capital.
    Great British Class Survey
    I wonder if this gives a more nuanced view of different groupings than just considering income?
    I think I fall fairly firmly in the "established middle class" of this grouping structure.
    I can see that my cultural tastes fit with my middle class status, as do the majority of my social contacts. Perhaps they are on to something that class is more than just the money you earn or even where you live, but also what interests you, how you chose to spend your leisure time and who you have social contact with. Of course there are always going to be some people who confound the cultural expectations of their class but I suspect that others in their group might find their tastes somewhat incomprehensible.

  • Lucia wrote: »
    Of course there are always going to be some people who confound the cultural expectations of their class but I suspect that others in their group might find their tastes somewhat incomprehensible.

    It's interesting that you think of a group. My contacts seem to break down into silo groupings connected to the things I do (or the places we go, especially when my kids were in primary school), which don't intersect much or at all. In most of them I am probably 'that odd fella that goes to church'. I probably overestimate my evangelistic impact.
  • Re-reading my contributions, I can picture others starting to read this thread and then realising that there are four yorkshiremen in the room.... It's not intentional!

    Agreed! But these were the things that shaped us - more than we knew at the time and perhaps more than we realise even now. And if you were lucky enough to be in a family that didn't experience such things, I think that it is hard to really understand what it means.

    Another example - if there was a school trip to (say) France, I never even took the letter home to my parents. I knew, without being told, that they couldn't afford it. More than that, I knew that if they found out about it, they would fret (especially mum) and see if they could scrounge together the money to allow me to go - and I didn't want them to have that stress or feel that they were letting me down. This was in sharp contrast to a lot of my friends at school, who looked upon such trips as an entitlement.
  • SojournerSojourner Shipmate
    Sojourner wrote: »
    Yes your last comment implies that he might have been a toff playing as a prole

    So in your view of the world, "toff" vs "prole" is determined by bank balance?

    Give it a generation or three to iron out the vowels and refine the tastes

    You commented inter alia

    The giveaway with your description of your plumber mate is that he talked posh

  • SojournerSojourner Shipmate
    Telford wrote: »
    Sojourner wrote: »
    Fine not to be ashamed of your origins but are you really “working class” now?

    Once working class always working class does not necessarily apply

    If you indeed are what you say, you are indeed a rare beast on this resolutely bourgeois vessel!

    My father was a foundry worker and so was his father. My other grandfather was a car worker at Austins. His father was a miner.

    But you were neither

  • Dave WDave W Shipmate
    Re-reading my contributions, I can picture others starting to read this thread and then realising that there are four yorkshiremen in the room.... It's not intentional!
    Phew! I'm glad it's not just me, then. (So many yorkshiremen!)
  • LuciaLucia Shipmate
    Lucia wrote: »
    Of course there are always going to be some people who confound the cultural expectations of their class but I suspect that others in their group might find their tastes somewhat incomprehensible.

    It's interesting that you think of a group. My contacts seem to break down into silo groupings connected to the things I do (or the places we go, especially when my kids were in primary school), which don't intersect much or at all. In most of them I am probably 'that odd fella that goes to church'. I probably overestimate my evangelistic impact.

    By group I meant the class group that you fall into by this classification rather than group of people we know.
    My experience is that although I meet people from all walks of life, I find that the people I tend to gravitate towards to spend leisure time with socially are people who would fall into a similar class group. I probably should branch out more...
  • TheOrganistTheOrganist Shipmate
    edited April 9
    Why are some Brits obsessed with class? The insistence on trying to pigeonhole others, or cling onto past class resentments, is not only pointless but corrosive. Surely a far better use of the time, energy and sheer thinking is to see how we can make life better, fairer and happier for everyone?

    I don't think its class that influences values but imagination, choices and upbringing.
  • ArethosemyfeetArethosemyfeet Shipmate
    edited April 9
    Why are some Brits obsessed with class? The insistence on trying to pigeonhole others, or cling onto past class resentments, is not only pointless but corrosive. Surely a far better use of the time, energy and sheer thinking is to see how we can make life better, fairer and happier for everyone?

    I don't think its class that influences values but imagination, choices and upbringing.

    Class is part of upbringing. Nobody is suggesting that class is a genetic inheritance.

    Class exists, and it is foolish to pretend it doesn't. Putting a name to the set of views and values associated with a particular upbringing is a useful shorthand, and refusing to use the shorthand doesn't make the phenomena it describes disappear, any more the the French government's refusal to acknowledge race and religion make those (and the discrimination associated with them) disappear.
  • finelinefineline Kerygmania Host, 8th Day Host
    I think any systemic inequality causes people to think about it, particularly the people who are disadvantaged by it. In the same way, white people sometimes say black people are obsessed with race, and straight people say that gay people are obsessed with sexuality and shoving it in people's faces. And of course men often think women are seeing gender inequalities and gender-based assumptions which they are convinced don't exist. When you're in a more privileged group, it is easier to be less aware of how these systems work, and your experience just seems like the norm.
  • ForthviewForthview Shipmate
    That's why I say that anyone who works is working class and leave it at that..
  • BoogieBoogie Shipmate
    fineline wrote: »
    I think any systemic inequality causes people to think about it, particularly the people who are disadvantaged by it. In the same way, white people sometimes say black people are obsessed with race, and straight people say that gay people are obsessed with sexuality and shoving it in people's faces. And of course men often think women are seeing gender inequalities and gender-based assumptions which they are convinced don't exist. When you're in a more privileged group, it is easier to be less aware of how these systems work, and your experience just seems like the norm.

    This.

    And, in my view, the monarchy doesn’t help. It bolsters, encourages and reinforces class and privilege from top to bottom.



  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
    Having a bad reaction to a COVID-19 second jab so I’ll be brief. fineline is right. The particular systematic equalities caused by classism are felt keenly if you’ve been on the receiving end. And the same thing applies to the other ‘isms.

    I’m not obsessed by classism but I don’t ignore its continuing impact and reinforcement of inequalities.
  • Forthview wrote: »
    That's why I say that anyone who works is working class and leave it at that..

    It's a tempting point of view for those of us in relatively well paid employment, but it's a definition that makes working class meaningless as by that definition even Boris Johnson is working class (adopting a sufficiently generous definition of work, anyway). It also removes a class identity from those who can't work due to being disabled, or who have retired.
  • MooMoo Kerygmania Host
    Speaking as an American, I have a question. If someone who had always been middle class suffered economic catastrophe such that they would always be poor, would they still be considered middle class?

    I ask because I have known several such families in America.
  • SojournerSojourner Shipmate
    Genteel poverty is alive and well
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    There used to be a category 'distressed gentlefolk' to describe those not only brought up to wealth and privilege but of good breeding (ie they had inherited the W and P from a sufficiently long line of ancestors) but now impoverished. Popular literature of the first half of the 20th C was usually sympathetic to them, authors ensuring that attractive young women cruelly compelled to actually work were duly rewarded with a financially secure husband.

    (Or, if not marriageable, would at least be shown manifesting inherent nobility and self-sacrifice eg Sorrell & Son)
  • HeavenlyannieHeavenlyannie Shipmate
    edited April 9
    It is an interesting point, because when social mobility is discussed there is usually an assumption that it is all upwards but that is clearly not the case. When I discuss social class and identity in the classroom (on a module on young lives, parenting and families) this often comes up, usually mentioned by women who have been divorced and found that they have gone down the scale due to financial constraints and resultant changes to their standard of living.
    I've moved from D to B band and while I acknowledge that I am now middle class, my perspective on life is seen through the eyes of someone who was once working class and whose relatives still are. In my case it brings with it conflicts of identity and relationships but also empathy for different perspectives.
  • ForthviewForthview Shipmate
    I would certainly say that Boris Johnson is 'working class' I would never vote for him but I am sure that he is doing quite a bit of work behind the walls of 10 Downing St.
    Just as there is only one 'human race' the idea of 'class' should be left aside as a relic of the political struggles of the 20th century. We are all part of that one human race. Yes,there are inequalities and those in the so-called Western world are immeasurably better off than many in other parts of the world.. That being said there are many challenges which we have to face to make things better and more equal, but, to my mind ,it is not helped by dividing people into 'classes'. I am retired but I still see myself as a citizen who happens to be retired rather than a member of the 'retired class'. I have problems with walking but I see myself as a citizen who has some health problems rather than as a member of a 'disabled class'.
  • finelinefineline Kerygmania Host, 8th Day Host
    For instance, the book Oliver Twist portrays the orphan Oliver, who spends his childhood in poverty in a workhouse, to be a higher class of person than the pickpockets he joins, with more sensitivity and moral scruples (as well as miraculously not having a Cockney accent despite growing up surrounded by people who do). It is revealed at the end that his mother was of a higher social class - a relative of the wealthy and genteel family that the pickpockets tried to rob, and this is seen as explaining why he is different.
  • SojournerSojourner Shipmate
    You have a charitable view of Boris

    I suspect that ( as we say in Oz) that he would not work in an iron lung
  • Ethne AlbaEthne Alba Shipmate
    Working class ..... and .... toff.... don’t usually sit in the same sentence .

    No matter how we try to make them.
  • SojournerSojourner Shipmate
    Is that because the twain don’t meet?
  • ForthviewForthview Shipmate
    But should they not meet ?
    Should we stick with 'class enmity' which bedevilled the 20th century or should we at least try to move on ?
  • SighthoundSighthound Shipmate
    edited April 9
    I recently came upon a very interesting posting (not on here, natch) from a chap who still lives in the area where I grew up. He was very hung up on whether you called your mother 'mum' or 'mam'. According to him, anyone using 'mum' was a snob, even if they lived in the same street as him and had no more money. I gathered he was a shelf-stacker, and in his philosophy, if you were a shelf-stacker you should be content with that. Any higher aspiration made you a 'snob' and a sell-out.

    I don't think it was a parody, but these days it gets increasingly difficult to be sure - there are so many people out there expressing opinions that look like parody prima facie, but turn out to be genuine.

    I was a working-class lad who got to grammar school and hated it because I could not stomach its 'culture' which was one of outdated bourgeois conformity trying (and failing miserably) to ape the Eton of 1911. They failed miserably to destroy my love of learning though - to a large extent, I educated myself through extensive reading in Manchester Central Library, not least when I was 'wagging' school - my technique for avoiding the bullying thugs, not all of whom were teachers.

    I have never 'fitted in.' I am too educated and interested in learning to fit in with a 'working class' which seems now devoted to the Sun, football and endless tins of lager. I am equally out of place among the typical middle-class culture of petty aspiration and mindless conformity. I suppose I am an intellectual eccentric. I have long since given up caring. Those who like me, like me and the rest can foxtrot oscar. Now that I am retired I can be me - I no longer have to pretend and I love it.

  • finelinefineline Kerygmania Host, 8th Day Host
    Working class simply doesn't mean anyone who works. That is not a definition of it in today's society - that is more like someone taking it literally and misunderstanding. While there is a bit of variation in which jobs get categorised as working class, prime minister is never included! It is about manual labour, unskilled work, working for an hourly wage.
  • SojournerSojourner Shipmate
    Sounds like a first year trainee nurse circa 1972
  • finelinefineline Kerygmania Host, 8th Day Host
    Also, @Forthview, surely the point about removing a class identity from disabled people was not about disabily being a class - no one said there was a disabled class - but about the fact that working class people can be disabled and not work (in the same way as middle class people can be disabled and not work). Therefore, if you simply define working class as people who work, then working class people who don't work because of disability no longer have a class. The point is surely that working class is a lot more complex than your definition.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    fineline wrote: »
    It is about manual labour, unskilled work, working for an hourly wage.
    I thought skilled manual labour was working class if anything was.
    The Marxist definition was people who work for other people without having any power over their terms of employment.
  • Forthview wrote: »
    I would certainly say that Boris Johnson is 'working class' I would never vote for him but I am sure that he is doing quite a bit of work behind the walls of 10 Downing St.
    Just as there is only one 'human race' the idea of 'class' should be left aside as a relic of the political struggles of the 20th century. We are all part of that one human race. Yes,there are inequalities and those in the so-called Western world are immeasurably better off than many in other parts of the world.. That being said there are many challenges which we have to face to make things better and more equal, but, to my mind ,it is not helped by dividing people into 'classes'. I am retired but I still see myself as a citizen who happens to be retired rather than a member of the 'retired class'. I have problems with walking but I see myself as a citizen who has some health problems rather than as a member of a 'disabled class'.

    I'm sorry but this just sounds like "all lives matter": true but utterly anodyne when it comes to tackling the structural inequalities in society. We're not dividing people into classes, we're recognising that class is an emergent feature of our society that can't be ignored. Just as ignoring race hands power to white supremacists, ignoring class hands power to the capitalist class (the history of the last 40 years in the UK should tell you that).
  • Ethne AlbaEthne Alba Shipmate
    Anyone else looked at the Great British Class Survey linked by Lucia upthread?

    And if so, what you thinking about it??
  • ForthviewForthview Shipmate
    The structural inequalities which undoubtedly exist in society are not necessarily removed by shouting out 'Black lives matter' nor indeed 'All lives matter'.
    There is, I suppose, a place for slogans but shouting out a slogan is only a beginning for a radical transformation which has to come from doing more than saying.

    I can recognise that there are many levels of society and in that sense different 'classes' of society. None of us have had any control over the earlier lives of our parents. We are right in many cases to be proud of what our parents have done for us and to hope that our children in turn will thank us for what we have done for them. It may be trite but I think that it is at least of equal if not even of greater importance that we have had a loving family to teach us and nurture us when we were young, more important than any 'class' into which we might have been born.
    In saying that I do not forget the many children who are not born into loving families and whose lives have been blighted because of that.
  • finelinefineline Kerygmania Host, 8th Day Host
    edited April 9
    Dafyd wrote: »
    fineline wrote: »
    It is about manual labour, unskilled work, working for an hourly wage.
    I thought skilled manual labour was working class if anything was.
    The Marxist definition was people who work for other people without having any power over their terms of employment.

    I was saying these as two separate things, though they can overlap, of course. Plus I was talking about the scope of things working class can be understood to cover, and how Prime Minister doesn't fit into any of these!
  • ForthviewForthview Shipmate
    What if we don't take the Marxist definition as the only acceptable one and say that there are those who work mainly with their hands, but also their intellect as well as those who work mainly with their intellect but also with their hands ?

    Even in the German Democratic Republic which was a sort of 'classless' workers' society there were divisions between the agricultural, manual and intellectual workers.(there were of course those horrid, greedy, grasping capitalists but they were all outside of the 'classless' Society of the German Democratic Republic. on the other side of the Wall in Berlin which protected that society from the evil exploitative capitalists on the other side.)

    Just as the German Democratic Republic has vanished from the map of Europe with its socialist good and capitalist bad, we should, in what purports to be a genuine democratic state, try to get rid of 'class' and value people for who and what they are regardless of whether they are 'toffs' or 'proles'.
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    My first thought about that survey is that I absolutely hate the use of the word "elite" in that context. Elite should, in my opinion, refer to a quality in the person referred to, as it would if referring to an elite athlete. It carries the idea of being better than others, not more wealthy than others, not of having by chance been at an elite university, not of having inherited a position in society.
    It's a hangover from the idea my grandmother was supposed to have learned, that "carriage folk" were better than her and God had caused them to be born in that stratum of society to show that they were better, and she should curtsey to them to recognise that she knew her place. She didn't, as I may have related before, buy the idea, or do the curtseying.
    That tranche of society needs another word. Obviously they would not accept "parasites".
    It also didn't refer to the person who has been admitted to an elite university where he persists, again and again, with no trace of an ironic reference to the Pythons, in declaring obstreporously that he is working class, his family has always been working class, and he is more working class than anyone else in the room. And votes somewhere to the right of the Tories.
    None of which attitude I detect above, by the way.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    Forthview wrote: »
    we should, in what purports to be a genuine democratic state, try to get rid of 'class' and value people for who and what they are regardless of whether they are 'toffs' or 'proles'.
    Why should we get rid of 'class' if there is no such thing as 'class'?
    If there isn't a classless society then in order to get rid of class then one has to talk about it. Just declaring that there's no such problem and we shouldn't talk about it seldom makes a problem go away.
  • jay_emmjay_emm Shipmate
    fineline wrote: »
    For (as well as miraculously not having a Cockney accent despite growing up surrounded by people who do). It is .
    Semi Tangent.

    Village (satalite) workhouse. Seventy + a bit miles Barnet side of london.
  • Ethne AlbaEthne Alba Shipmate
    edited April 9
    Oh curtsying to the The Lady of The Manor was still around in my childhood. Rural England , 1969. Her Uppittyship stopped the cart and questioned me concerning “ manners”. Then appeared at school on Monday morning to complain!

    The headmistress explained that we had recently moved to the area.

    My father hit the roof, spectacularly so.
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