Both tories and labour are after the "old voters" when they play the class
card - people aged 80 who voted for the one party all their lives.
Sally Evans
http://www.poetryscotland.co.uk
http://groups.msn.com/desktopsallye
http://www.myspace.com/poetsallyevans
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 1:12 AM
Subject: Working Class v Middle Class (was Re: New beats (???))
> <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
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.'
> (Harry Partch)
>
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