Class Ain't About How Much You Get Paid, It's About Being An Employee At All

Thinking about class is skewed by the fact it is mostly conducted by academics (salaried State employees) and journalists (salaried private sector employees). They want to think of themselves as special people, and so define the Good Class in such a way as to include them. Or at least, they think the Good Class should be defined so as to include them.

But it never is, and never will.

The Upper Class were literally the people towards the top of the feudal hierarchy. Kings, Lords, Bishops, Dukes, Princes, Viscounts, Earls, and Barons. There aren't many of those people left now. They people get their money from granting privileges, usually to merchants who kick back some of the profits to the aristos. Mostly the Upper Class has been replaced by the State, but that doesn't make Ministers and senior civil servants aristocrats: it makes them people who need to be carefully watched, lest they decide to shut down businesses all over the country, and then tax us to pay for it. It would be better if those people - the elected riff-raff - did think of themselves as aristos, because then they would have to accept noblesse oblige.

The middle class emerged in the 1700's (or pick some other date you like). My reference example is a ship's Captain who might make two or three successful voyages to the Spice Islands (or some other such destination) and, on the proceeds of his share of the profits, could set himself up with a nice house in Greenwich and never go to sea again. The middle classes had enough money that they did not need to work again, and made that money through commercial ventures rather than the exercise of privilege. The Middle Class do not need privileges to be granted by aristocrats, or today, the State. They make their money in the open market. Today's middle class are all those CEO's with seven-figure payoffs and share options, hedge-fundies, millionaire entrepreneurs, and anyone else who could afford to stop working now and live off what they have already made (don't count looking after your stash as `working', though it is).

The Working Class work, usually for someone else, and if they don't, they run out of money and into poverty or the Unemployment Exchange (whatever they call it now). A lot of workers make decent money, especially emergency plumbers and IT consultants, while quite a few have enough money in the bank to tell their current employer to take a hike (aka "f**k you" money). If you pay income tax on Schedule D (Self-employed) or Schedule E (Wage Slave), you're Working Class, and I don't care if you make six figures as an NHS paediatric consultant.

Retired people keep their class in the last few years of working. Children inherit the class of their parents until they leave education, when they enter the working class and work their way back up.

And then there's the Underclass, which we can think of as the people who can't or don't want to play nice with the economy and society. Honourable exceptions for the people who deserve honourable exception.

Very little is sillier than someone who calls teachers 'professionals', as if associating teachers with snotty-nosed twenty-eight year old Chartered Accountants in some way raises their status, when snotty-nosed twenty-eight year old Chartered Accountants are employees like any other.

But Bordieu? Cultural capital, social capital, economic capital and all that jazz. For one thing, those terms have been grossly de-valued. Here's Amanda Spielman (who she?) "By [cultural capital], we simply mean the essential knowledge, those standard reference points, that we want all children to have". Nope, Amanda, that's called 'The Basics'.

Bordieu was onto two things: the first was that certain cushy jobs required a certain kind of education, and the holders of those cushy jobs tended to want to mix with each other, make sure their children got that education, and other people's children did not, and also that their children only mixed with children whose parents also held those kinds of cushy jobs.

The second was that many jobs were, in the 1960's, taking a serious hit to their social status: teachers, civil servants, doctors, and other State-employee roles that had been lower-paid but respected. Those people were making themselves feel better about their declining status by pretending that the music they listened to and the books they read, and in some cases, the people they associated with, had an equal-but-different role in determining their class. If they read Proust, they should be in a higher class than those who read Asterix de Gaulle. Bordieu researched this in the 1960's, played it back to them, Owl of Minerva style, in his 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, and they made it a best-seller and got him a job at the College de France in 1982.

I think the whole thing was a huge irony. Look at these deluded people, thinking it matters if they attend the Cinémathèque Française.

Bordieu was the son of the working class. He knew class was way more structural than the size of a paycheque.

Which puts journalists (well-paid lackeys of rich corporations) and academics (less-well-paid lackeys of Governments) in the same group (Schedule E taxpayers with little or no f**k-off money) in the same class as couriers, cooks, bus drivers and data bashers like me.

Personally, if I was a courier, cook, or bus driver, I would take exception at being grouped with academics and journalists, who toil not, though they do spin, and that is their sin.