Here’s your starter for ten in our Saturday slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
An easy question to ask, a rather harder one to answer. The news during the week about plans to change child benefit has seen many stories in the media about people on well above average income who are described as “middle class” rather than, say, “rich”.
Does this matter? Does “middle class” imply “not rich”? And is it not about money anyway (a point Millennium Elephant forcefully made earlier in the week)?
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13 Comments
Hah! I go with Marx’ definitions for the economic classes, ie that the proletariat work for a living (be it an hourly or yearly rate) and the bourgeoisie live on property and investments. In this schema, we can see that the proletariat now make up large parts of our economy and government, and some of them even get paid a decent wage. The bourgeoisie are restricted to professional landlords and stockbrokers, but they are still there. However, amusingly, the proletariat have control over the house of commons, since we now pay MPs a yearly wage; thus the people have taken over and we have had our rather quiet understated Marxist revolution 😉
More seriously, “class” in the UK is a purely cultural thing now. There are many people earning between £20k and £40k who are middle class, and plenty who are working class. It comes down to accent and personal self-determination; there isn’t really an objective distinction any more.
We can divide people up into ABCs and DEFs but ultimately we all have to go to work on Monday to get paid, even the politicians (sort of). Except the bankers, of course, who we can all hate together in our 21st century class war 😐
Ultimately, I think it is up to the top rate tax payees themselves to decide whether they are middle class or not. Just remember that they are a lot richer than the other 85% of the population.
The comfortable.
Or if you prefer to define it by what it isn’t, it isn’t working class and it isn’t Etonian toffs.
A more literate approach might be…
“Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.” ~ Gloria Stienem
“A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house : that is the true middle-class unit.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
“We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.” ~ George Orwell
Lib Dems have declared war on the Middle Class. As usual, Lib Dem Voice has gone on silent running with all the bad economic data.
Exports down in Sept, and Chris Huhne is changing his tune about the deficit, and still hasn’t recovered from that car crash press conference with Warsi.
Huhne declared that exports where healthy, how wrong he was.
I had always thought that being middle class was defined more by values and ideas than money eg the expectation that you would go through higher education. In my family this goes back more than 3 generations.
This perhaps used to have a wealth connection, but I think that has changed. Am sure there are many people in non-graduate jobs these days who earn more than teachers, although teaching was certainly seen as a middle class profession and to a certain extent still is.
The honest Middle Classes are really just the honest Working Class who have been lucky enough to have had the breaks.
“Does “middle class” imply “not rich”?”
Well, certainly £40k a year doesn’t imply “upper class”!
There never has been a single middle class.
Even in the good old days the poor were poor and the rich were rich, and the middle class was the bit in the middle, it was scarcely a well-defined concept – how did a country solicitor compare to the grocer who sold him his vegetables? They both possessed some capital, though not enough to live on rents; they both had control over the labour of others; but they had wildly different social status; the solicitor might dine with the landlord while the grocer might go down the pub with the farm workers….
Marx’s definition of class was in terms of control of labour and capital. Someone did a thoroughly Marxist analysis of modern Britain and put accountants in the same category as coal-miners; nothing more really needs to be said.
The best analysis of class comes from Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that every social group picks some defining cultural aspects and uses them to distinguish itself from everyone else and define its place in the social hierarchy. Makes sense if you think about how people in Britain actually define class – napkins vs serviettes, X Factor vs Strictly come Dancing, The Sun vs the Mail vs the Guardian, skiing holidays and Ascot vs gites in France and the Proms vs Ibiza and dodgy nightclubs, Top Shop vs Jermyn Street vs Camden Market vs catalogue shopping.
All of these things are far more relevant to your class position than what job you do or how much you earn.
You are
Chris Keating
“Marx’s definition of class was in terms of control of labour and capital. Someone did a thoroughly Marxist analysis of modern Britain and put accountants in the same category as coal-miners”
Perhaps Marx’s definition needs a little more thought. I’ve always thought that social class was a silly idea and have tried not to sort people into categories like that. In “the old days” it was simple. The upper class owned land and could live very well off the work of their tenants. The working class had all but nothing of their own and had to work if they wanted to eat. Whilst skilled labour were much better off than their unskilled workmates, they all lived hand to mouth, often renting housing and from their employer with most of their wage. The middle class were not simply those in the middle – there was a gulf separating them from the working class. Middle class families of the 18th century did very well paid jobs which allowed them to buy houses, not rent. They employed a couple of servants to cook and clean allowing them to live lives of comfort and ease. Crucially, they could afford to educate their children so that they too could have a profession.
Fast forward to the present time and the three categories now overlap. Many working class people own their own homes. Very few middle class people employ full time house keepers. The upper class was all but wiped out in the period between “the great binge” and two world wars, with the remainder being decimated by huge inheritance tax after WW2. What we have is a continuous spectrum and your position on which is more to do with your social attitudes than what your father did for a living. The old system doesn’t apply any more but we still use the terminology and typical occupations to separate working and middle class people.
Those who serve the rulers and will not rebel – because their circumstances are never as bad as the working class.
As someone who grew up abroad, I’m always struck by the fact that for Americans “middle class” is synonymous with what British politicians refer to as “hard-working families” (i.e. in British terms, aspirational working and lower middle classes); in British political parlance “middle class” implies a more privileged group. Perhaps the absence of aristocracy in America means Americans have fewer inhibitions about using the term “upper class” for privileged socio-economic groups whereas in the UK “upper class” is generally reserved for aristocracy and therefore non-aristocratric privileged socio-economic groups remain “middle class” (or at a push, “upper middle class”).
For a Liberal there can only be one definition, everyone who thinks they are. Its the same approach we use for Gay or BAME. Trying to define people “objectively” is for Authoritarians, its the first step on the road to The Death Camps.
Its still possible to measure class, by asking people where they place themselves- roughly its 4% Upper Class, 43% Middle & 53 % Working, on the last figures. There has been a very slow shift over time, about 1% moving from Working to Middle every 3 years.
@John Roffey
“Those who serve the rulers and will not rebel – because their circumstances are never as bad as the working class.”
In my experience, it’s the opposite. If a council wants to build a new development, but the residents in the area aren’t too happy about it, the working class won’t complain much, the middle class will take to the metaphorical barricades.
So, no. The middle class are the real revolutionaries 😉