Classy
This recent delightful bit of fan mail
Whats the problem? During your next middle class socialist dinner party I am sure the network will look after you. Stop whining and stop trying to give the impression that you and your ilk ever suffer in the same way that real working people have to deal with real unemployment. You are a joke. We, the real working class (not the people who don't want to work) despise you and your type. Just go away we don't want you.
got me thinking. People are still terribly obsessed with class, aren't they? For the record, I don't hold socialist dinner parties. I don't know what socialist dinner parties would be. Would everyone have to collectively make the dinner, or get state-provided meals rationed out for them? Maybe. Who knows? But I think the point my correspondent was making was that I am not allowed to be unemployed, by dint of not being working class; that somehow everything's all right for me, because of class - the spectral 'network' will look after me somehow.
I see this kind of working-class hero self-flagellating bullshit all the time from people supposedly 'on the left' or who aren't. That somehow you can't really understand how things really are unless you were born in a shoebox on the M1 and lived in a fucking Hovis advert for all your life; that if you didn't live in grinding Ken Loach poverty for your entire younger years you must have been gallivanting around on a punt in a straw boater in a cream-coloured blazer like Nigel Havers or someone out of Brideshead Fucking Revisited, or something.
Maybe it's true. Maybe I have no idea what unemployment is like, because I'm not working class. But that kind of arbitrary dividing-up of people isn't spectacularly helpful, I would suspect. I've never claimed to be some kind of class warrior. I've never said I have had anything other than a very pleasant life. I didn't go to private school, but I wasn't being brutally murdered in my beds in a crack den either. You know, I was middle class. And I'm quite happy with that. I don't have to try and pretend to be something that I'm not in order to really be able to understand; I try and use something called empathy. I read things and talk to people, and try and understand things that way. Call me old fashioned. I should be sending abusive messages about other people instead, clearly.
No, I'm not a fucking champagne socialist metropolitan elite who secretly hates the working class. But the obsession with class is what makes everyone less likely to get what they want. If you're looking for authentic class struggle, you won't find it here. But I've never said that it is here. What I have said is that being unemployed is unpleasant and difficult - and it's not easy to pay a mortgage when housing benefit doesn't cover it, but of course YOU WOULDN'T KNOW THAT because you're too busy being working class about it - at least that's what I'd say if I were being as wilfully unpleasant as others are to me. But that would be to miss the point. Guess what? Unemployment is shit, whatever 'class' you think you are. I'm sorry if you feel that people like me are intruding on your monopoly of suffering. But that's just the way it is. White collar workers are being shat on from a great height nowadays, just as much as everyone else. Get used to it, because it's not going away.
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August 25th, 2011 - 14:29
I bet your correspondent gives really terrific interview.
August 25th, 2011 - 15:08
“We, the real working class . . . ” LOL! How wonderful that the working class has someone to speak for them!
I’m with Marx: I don’t own the means of production, I sell my labour for money, therefore I am working class. And so, dear Steven, are you. And you’re welcome at my dinner parties any time
August 25th, 2011 - 18:11
I can’t quite work out which badly articulated angle your fan is coming from. You’re not working class because you aren’t working, and you weren’t even when you were, but he is because he is working, and even if he’s not because he *wants* to, unlike you because you’ve posted about wanting to work when you don’t have to, because your mortgage is paid by the fairies apparently?
My butler can’t work it out either…
August 25th, 2011 - 19:40
Class will always be an issue as long as those unelected, undemocratic, chinless wonders sit atop us from their glorified council houses; the problem i have with the issue is that the boundaries seem to have been blurred. I know of a handful of individuals who work in retail- shelf fillers most of them- who regard themselves as middle-class and vote tory!
What the f*ck is going on out there?!?!
August 25th, 2011 - 22:41
Brilliant.
August 26th, 2011 - 08:10
Beating the people with the people’s stick, methinks. That old ‘book within a book’ describes the cause all to vividly, but you have to take it for what it is: bullshit by proxy.
August 26th, 2011 - 08:25
or trolling, possibly trolling.
August 27th, 2011 - 12:36
Oh I know a group of people who don’t mind being unemployed – those with Fuckloads of money, enough that they can just live off the interest, aka the funemployed. As an employed man working on an industrial estate for long back-breaking hours I long to win the euromillions rolled-over-to-fuck jackpot and join em.
August 29th, 2011 - 17:00
Isn’t trolling supposed to make other people look stupid though?
August 29th, 2011 - 21:35
With the exception of the people who run blogs like this (which are great btw) many middle class Leftists are very annoying and as someone who is working class I find them out of touch with working class people.
Case in point being those far-left annarchists who come from privilaged backgrounds and pitch up at working class movements such as anti-cuts demonstrations and trade union marches with the soul intention of causing trouble, smashing windows and fighting with the police and doing all this under the warped belief that they are standing up for the working class….or “proles” as they call them.
Or those morons who smash the windows of buisnesses in protest at the piss poor wages they pay their employees under the belief they are doing their bit for the poor workers when usually what happens is the bosses of these buisnesses will tell their workers that they need to cut their wages to pay for the broken windows. DOH!!!
August 31st, 2011 - 15:46
Did you do a survey of `far-left anarchists’ or something? Because I don’t remember anyone providing membership details for groups like these. Or is this one of those “Well, everyone knows…” bits of information? Who says you have to be middle class to be a prick?
Additionally, since when has anti-cuts demonstration been a solely working class occupation? Being from a privileged background doesn’t suddenly revoke your license to be pissed off with the destruction of the NHS or dismemberment of the education system, as far as I recall.
The left should probably give up worrying so much about class, and start trying to sort itself out to stop (or at least provide credible resistance to) the country being raped by the Tories again. You should be pleased of support, regardless of its provenance.
August 30th, 2011 - 10:56
“We, the real working class …”
Who’s “we”, kemosabe? You got a mouse in your pocket?
August 31st, 2011 - 19:57
I hope you find a decent job soon, Stephen. Best of luck. As for the class warriors – they’re the bankers’ and other bosses’ best friends, always keen to divide the left. Wankers.
September 2nd, 2011 - 14:39
I’ve said it before, but…
Discourse about class in this country is hopelessly compromised by the fact that three different definitions are being used at once. 1, the American definition, where it’s all about income; 2, the Marxian definition, where it’s about whether you sell your labour; and 3, a nebulous definition based on cultural background.
This confusion allows rightwing tabloids to declare a policy they don’t like “an attack on the middle class” because it’s inconvenient for the bourgeois boss-class, knowing that their middle income readers will think “Middle class? That’s me!” even if the policy would actually benefit them. It allows obscenely wealthy Tory politicians to insist they aren’t upper class because they belong to the bourgeoisie as opposed to the landed aristocracy, and equally bourgeois Labour politicians to claim that they’re working class because their grandparents had factory jobs and they haven’t quite lost their accents. And, of course, it divides the working class against itself: if you define the educated sedentary worker as “middle class”, and tell him/her and the “real working class” that this makes them enemies, there’s a good chance that they’ll be too busy fighting a pointless culture war to notice when the boss class robs them blind.
I don’t believe that this confusion was engineered. It arose naturally. But it is fostered deliberately, and used to promote the interests of the very wealthy.
September 5th, 2011 - 14:49
I’m one of the Real Working Class (great band name, btw) and this tit can fuck off. When it comes to suffering, class is irrelevant. We all suffer the same.
September 16th, 2011 - 09:48
“Maybe I have no idea what unemployment is like, because I’m not working class.”
What a lovely oxymoron.
September 22nd, 2011 - 17:33
Some 35 years ago I was doing Sociology A level (I got an E!) and one exam question was ‘We are all middle class now. Discuss’. Too long ago to remember what I wrote. Nothing’s changed.
Anyway; I liked this: http://www.redmolotov.com/catalogue/tshirts/all/lower-middle-class-hero-tshirt.html
November 2nd, 2011 - 22:06
working class..were the divs who work for sod all..simples