The Muddled Middle Class Who Don't Know What They Are

It seems the bewildered casualties of the post-Tatcher education system still believe that class means talking proper and not naming your children after brands of champagne. People who still need to ask:

'Are there such things as upper, middle and working class, or whatever, culture, and, if so, what do they consist of, and does it matter?'.

Let's try explaining again how it works.
The bigger the factory you own, the more middle class you are. The less you control the means of your survival, the more working class you are.
So a collier's factory. his capital, are his muscles and his pick, if lucky. He is therefore more middle class than someone who only 'owns' his muscles. It is the sum of his capital assets which can be used to directly create productive work. His pick is his production line and distribution system in one. His 'factory's' orders for labour come from the mine owner, just as his orders for coal come from the wholesalers and the market forces beyond.

But the miner is less middle class than the grocer who sells him his food from his own shop, however modest. He is also less middle class than the tradesman with a highly marketable skill (and his own tools, ideally) who has a lot of time invested in learning his trade. A lawyer is a tradesman, what makes him more middle class than a carpenter is his clientelle - and the fact that like most of the so-called 'professional classes'* he is also paid to tell lies.
The bigger the capital investment, the more insulated the individual from the whims of the market, and the higher up the social scale the individual progresses. The less the individual can invest, the less he 'has to show' for his work, the more he is vulnerable to the needs of others, and the more he needs to work with others to defend what few rights he does enjoy and try to secure whatever advances for his class are achievable.
And so on and so forth, Mr Rockefeller. Surely even trained journalists at the Sun could understand that, inasmuch as they can read, that is.
How depressing after more than a century of state education and one of the most dramatic, publicised and illuminating economic crashes of all time to still have to explain that money means power, and that the strong are more powerful than the weak. I blame the parents.

* 'The Professions' - as in a specialist craft or skill which often comes with a uniform and often consists of being 'economical with the truth'.
Lawyers, the clergy, the military, politicians, the press, and even doctors.

Lewis Hamilton's Lost Uncle Tom

The first and youngest black Formula One champion, on the eve of the first black president of the Unites States. Clearly, all complaints of racism and class-barriers are nothing but self-indulgent, patronising nonsense. Here is a black working class boy who achieved an ultimate goal by sheer hard work and the support of his family. So why can't They all do it? Obviously because they are lazy, shiftless and feckless, and are imprisoned by state pampering.
And so Lewis Hamilton's great sporting achievement becomes a stick to beat black boys with. That is the function of the sporting Role Model. To convince everyone that life is a competition, and all can win it.
But life isn't sport, strangely enough. And Lewis Hamilton would have never been heard of if the state had not pampered him with education and health care, and the anonymous, underpaid people who worked in those professions hadn't, on balance, done their work almost as well anyone about to become a billionaire for driving a car in circles. The Carole Malones and John Gaunts and other media bitches have always offered sport as a route out of, and therefore a validation of the class system. 'There is the door, why don't you use it?' The entertainment industry serves the same purpose, ostensibly demolishing class and race crimes at a stroke. Minstrelsy was very popular, for a while.
Before the desperate gutter press seize on this as another justification for gross inequality and for their denial of the class structure and for slashing the dole at a time of rising undemplyment, they should remember that exceptions only sometimes prove rules, they never make them. That Lewis Hamilton's triumph is built on such a vast network of labour and support, from midwife to wingnut-maker, as to be almost meaningless as a heroic sporting achievement which can be paraded as a Triumph Of The Will. This is Formula One Motor Racing we're talking about, which is more of a mobile country than a sport, with cars instead of an army, and a large amount of political and economic clout. And the days of the death-defying gladiator-driver are gone. The driver should have a knack for driving fast round corners, enough of a nasty streak to not worry about putting others at risk, and be good at games of Chicken.
But in fact, what we really need are more and better-paid midwives and fewer, poorer Formula One Champions. At least they would live here.

Prescott Among The Chavs - Working For Cunard!

John Prescott's examination of 'class' looks like being a real dog, and will only really attract the attention of the BBC bashers railing at the license fee being lavished on the 'personal prejudices' of a politician they hate. Same lame old dog. By the same token, why is anyone paid to present any Tv programme? It's a nonsense.
The real issue is how much of a dog's breakfast Prescott will make of presenting the simple realities of class, which are the same now as they have been since Arkwright's first mill started rolling.
The less power you have over your destiny, the more working class you are. As the excellent 'Coal House' recently illustrated, a collier owned his mandrill, and that was about it. That was the extent of his capital, and did little to protect him and his family from the vagaries of the global marketplace, and offered as little hope of escape to more security.
The grocer of the small business class who supplied his family with food would have had to borrow some money to set up, and therefore be more 'capitalised', and therefore be a little more secure, but not much. His wholesale suppliers would have been proportionately more in control of their own destinies, and those of others, and so on until you reach the Rothschilds and Murdochs of this world.
It's not rocket surgery, John. Nothing to do with how many designer labels anyone wears, or what they sound like, or how much land their great-grandparents owned. Simple a matter of knowing where the next meal would come from. Or to update it a little, how to pay the mortgage or hang on to your pension.
 Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that John Prescott's politics are about as genuinely radical as a tea cosy in Tunbridge Wells, the fact is that any genuine examination of class realities and political truth is probably only to be found in the more obscure depths of Open University modules. The BBC as such steers well clear of questioning the prevailing assumptions of consumerist politics. Of course, things may have to change now that we know what a lie they were.
 It will be interesting to find out if Prescott knows the story of George Orwell's experience on the liner bringing him home on leave from the Imperial Burmese Police Force. Orwell recounts how he was ashamed to see a steward or midshipman making off guiltily with the remains of a pudding from the table of the first class passengers, like a shifty child. The fact that this skilled craftsman, with the lives of many in his care had been reduced to this indignity helped Orwell to make the decision to resign from his imperial post while on leave, and become a writer. If he does know this story, how would Prescott relate to the steward? Especially as he has hardly retained much dignity himself in the last ten years.
 10pm.
What becomes clear very soon in this programme is that class is almost completely defined in terms of manners, appearance and habit. His visit to a country house gent concentrates entirely on the indefinable refinements of privilege, the phoney modesty of what is known as 'taste'. Prescott earns a ticking off for the "fucking great chip on your shoulder" from his lordhip, who declares his irritation at people who 'make it more important than it really is. And another from Simon Hoggart who accused him of being 'classless' and 'not comfortable in his own skin.' Both leaning entirely on the essentially pre-industrial definition of class, the one favoured still by those furthest up it. The one which states that 'class' is irrelevant. That everything is simply a matter of 'being considerate to others' and other variations of 'playing the game', and the fact that a merchant banker is worth a thousand sewer mechanics is nothing to get 'a chip on your shoulder' over.
Manners don't matter, class represents an injustice, and is therefore very important to those at the sharp end. Those uncertain of their futures. To them, their class is something to escape from, not try to refine out of existence. The problem is that when they get as far away from it as possible, their definition of class changes to defend their new role as beneficiaries of the same injustice they once hated. It again becomes about culture and 'identity', not economic role. Something completely 'complex, subjective, and non-sensical' as the idiot-narrator informed us.
Prescott proved something by apparently not having heard the term 'chav' (or pickey'). And when enlightened proved even more by being instantly and thoroughly disgusted ("arrogance beyond belief"). When introduced to three working-class teenage girls, he asked them what it meant. They threw together some words - 'Burberry' - 'labels', but were clear that class was 'not about how much money you've got, but what you're doing.' They hadn't heard of Gordon Brown, or know what Parliament loked like; thought teachers were 'posh people' and been expelled from school for fighting with them. They sounded a bit like voices from Mayhew's rookeries, but after a free dinner reflected that 'it was really nice to socialise... And I hope that if he takes away one thing, it's that there's no such thing as the Chav Class.'
Suddenly, they knew the word socialisation'. And knew what they were missing. They obviously know what 'alienation' means, even if they've never heard the word. But what Prescott showed was that it doesn't take a PPP contract to break it down, just human contact.
In spite of these little glimpses of reality, the general prospects for rest of the series aren't good. The direction is clear, use the antiquated, subjective, middle-class definition of class, and all will be well. It creates the 'complexity' which TV film makers love, which means they can justify a longer series, and do more location shoots to illustrate the endless parade of paper cut-out cartoons masquerading as 'issues'. And if one of the cartoons happens to be a labour politician from working class 'roots', so much the better.
Anyone wanting a clear illustration of class should go straight to 'Coal House' and avoid this soap opera about the death of Blairism. This will be no more enlightening about class than the BBC's pathetic recent defence of racism was about race or class.