Class isn't easy to define these days. "Middle class" has always been a term of insult, whether from the proper working class or the Evelyn Waugh/Alan Clark tendency. And yet, in most generally understood contexts, the great majority of us are middle class. Is the definition: own your own house, albeit mortgaged to the hilt? (If so, Thatcher played that brilliantly with the council house sell-off.) Work in some sort of management function? (More or less, perhaps, but lots of people get promoted into something like that without their economic position being seriously altered at all.) Don't smoke or put sugar in your tea? Take a bit of an arsey approach to colleagues or neighbours? (Again, difficult to define.) Give a shit about your children's education? (Balls - many indisputably working-class people do that.) Ever switch the telly off? (No Chinese person of any class ever does that.)
My friend The Exile has a good definition of working class: regarding work (or, as he rightly describes it, "bastard work") as something one does purely for the money. A real worker does not involve him/herself in the central problems of the organisation: employer's profits, employer's problems. The real worker will not do an extra stroke without being paid: if close of play is 5 o'clock, you are in the pub at 5.01 washing the taste of work out of your gob with a foaming pint. That is looking more appropriate than ever these days; so many people are expected to put in loads of extra unpaid hours out of fear that someone might think them "lacking in commitment", and are quite prepared to betray their friends, partners and children in order to appease their bosses. That, I suppose, is a good enough definition of "middle class" these days. But I took the "working-class" approach even when I was a senior manager in the public sector. No-one got any unpaid overtime out of me. And now I am living off my invested redundo payment and don't do a bloody stroke of work, I still maintain I'm one of Keir Hardie's paladins.
But I won't forget meeting an IWCA (Independent Working Class Association) man at a gig in London, and offering him a place to crash as he didn't have one. We went to my place in a black cab, and he was a bit taken aback to find it was a five-bedroom detached, where I was able to offer him a couple of glasses of decent malt, and even more so to accidentally wake up my Slovak au-pair while looking for the loo. But don't worry, Mark; I lost the whole bang shoot in a divorce.
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2 comments:
Not quite - what you have described is an aspect, not the full gig.
I take the view that class is symbolic, and that one class exists in opposition to another. We self-define ourselves, but that sense of self identification is bolstered by the way other people treat us. Put simply, if Joe Soap thinks of himself as belonging to one class, and other people accept his definition, then it confirms his original evaluation.
Yes - but what if Joe Soap thinks of himself as belonging to one class, and some others don't accept his definition? I have a vision of a lot of basically sound people squabbling endlessly on a prolier-than-thou basis. There's people who'd even disqualify you for having been at Oxford, never mind me.
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