<snip>
Anybody out there willing to define, describe---specify---wot "working"
class means to them, to any of us, to UK'ers, to USAmericans, to
Australians, to Italians, to Finns? [JP]
<snip>
My serious and considered view is that in Britain 'working class' is now
almost entirely a polemical term, when it isn't just an item of false
consciousness. With Britain's two main political parties now firmly and
indistinguishably neo-liberal in practice if not in preaching, both (though
most commonly New Labour because of the history of the party it destroyed)
play the *Working Class* card, albeit in different ways, because they know
it induces reactions. And *affect* is what is wanted rather than (say)
change.
But it was always a baggy term, inclusive both of those retaining jealously
guarded skills and those progressively deskilled through automation. Now,
like 'ethnically British', a card also used by New Labour ('British jobs for
British workers'), it asserts something about origins in a rather delimiting
way.
Although conventional British wisdom holds that the 'middle class' is
expanding, I think that this term too now means extremely little. On the one
hand freelance work of various sorts (outsourcing, agency working, what is
often figleafed as 'consultancy' and so forth) has blurred the distinction
between the two erstwhile classes both in terms of economic relationship to
an employer and in terms of overall wealth. On the other the shift towards
*immaterial labour* has increasingly deskilled the 'middle class'
professional in quite fundamental ways.
Once again the curious result of all this is that political arguments in
Britain (a sort of 'immaterial labour' in itself) are now not about social
realities but are matters of pure presentation. So the 'precaritization' of
great chunks of the former 'middle class' goes more or less undiscussed
whilst the local benefit which some members of the former 'working class'
have undoubtedly received as a side effect of this process is frequently
presented as upward class mobility, which is something it is not.
CW
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'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.'
(Harry Partch)
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