Class

[teamsaint]

Middle class people feel guilty about what they got, they feel they don't deserve it, so they slag off things like grammar schools. Working class people don't have any worries like that. So we can see grammar schools for what they are - something that promotes merit, NO MATTER WHAT YOUR BACKGROUND IS! We should embrace and celebrate liberating things like this!

Just to be serious for a moment, there is a good discussion to be had on this. It wouldn't be hard to find widely varying (and well informed) opinions pro and anti, from both Middle and Working class folks .

[Nick Armstrong]

It's a good thing that "middle class" doesn't cover a huge range of social/financial status, or you would really have had your work cut out!!

[Nick Armstrong]

no worries, but I was having a go, !

I thought it was rather elegant, sainty, and did wonder if Beefy had picked up on the irony...

[MrGongGong]

It's called social mobility - it's not a bad thing. He isworking class, in a sense. You don't have to view class in a crude economic deterministic way.

Humm

He is also (even though he is a mate) a bit of a knob about it

Being a professor at a UK university is a "success"

He has pesto in the fridge,,,,,,,,,,, which maybe means something ?

I don't think for many of us there is a "class" system any more
I wrote my first reply to this from the staff canteen at the ROH, it did occur to me that most of the people there with me were any different to myself , technicians, dancers, players in the orchestra, pianists , cleaners as well as a smattering of people who many here would know
so is the idea of "class" relevant ?
it would seem to have little to do with money ...........

[teamsaint]

I thought it was rather elegant, sainty, and did wonder if Beefy had picked up on the irony...

I know for a fact that he has his people go over stuff. The Friday AM briefing would have flagged it up !!

[Beef Oven]

Humm

He is also (even though he is a mate) a bit of a knob about it

Being a professor at a UK university is a "success"

He has pesto in the fridge,,,,,,,,,,, which maybe means something ?

I don't think for many of us there is a "class" system any more
I wrote my first reply to this from the staff canteen at the ROH, it did occur to me that most of the people there with me were any different to myself , technicians, dancers, players in the orchestra, pianists , cleaners as well as a smattering of people who many here would know
so is the idea of "class" relevant ?
it would seem to have little to do with money ...........

GG, what are you on about? Being off-the-wall in music and art is one thing, but............

[teamsaint]

Beefy does not seem to be doing much by irony or emotional intelligence at the moment. He seems not to have gotten over not having an inside toilet when he was a kid.

we had, and I am not making this up, and inside AND an outside (in a house built in I guess the late 50's/early 60's).
I think this allows for a rather classless or cross class approach to life.
There may be a thesis in this.

Edit: Beefy would a new avatar help you refocus your emotional whatsit, perhaps?

[Richard Barrett]

No they are not. sadly, this sort of thing does not fit in with your world-view so you deny it.

No doubt you have some facts with which to support such a categorical statement. My "world view" is informed by such sources as this OECD report:

http://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/49849281.pdf

which tells a rather different story. To quote some of its main findings:

"Low mobility across generations, as measured by a close link between parents’ and children’s earnings, is particularly pronounced in the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States and France (...) Across European OECD countries covered by the analysis, there is a substantial wage premium associated with growing up in a higher-educated family and a penalty with growing up in a less-educated family, even after controlling for a number of individual characteristics. The premium and penalty are particularly large in southern European countries, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg and Ireland (...) The influence of parental socio-economic status on student achievement in secondary education also differs across OECD countries. It is particularly strong in the United States, France and Belgium (...) n European OECD countries, students from a higher-educated family are more likely to achieve tertiary education, while there is a probability penalty associated with growing up in a less-educated family. (...) the probability of achieving below secondary education is on average 18 percentage points higher for children whose father had below upper-secondary education compared with those whose father had upper-secondary education." And so on.

[Richard Barrett]

I don't think for many of us there is a "class" system any more
I wrote my first reply to this from the staff canteen at the ROH, it did occur to me that most of the people there with me were any different to myself , technicians, dancers, players in the orchestra, pianists , cleaners as well as a smattering of people who many here would know
so is the idea of "class" relevant ?
it would seem to have little to do with money ...........

This is exactly what I meant in remarking: "Serial_Apologist uses the only unambiguous definition of class that exists. Discussing class on any other basis usually leads to people talking at cross-purposes."

[LeMartinPecheur]

Here the Guardian plays statistics.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datab...ty-data-charts

Do I detect behind the Guardian's article, and some of the subsequent postings, the standard assumption that aside from class and its inherited wealth, all levels of humanity are pretty indistinguishable? Everyone is equal, made of the same stuff, so failure to achieve equally must be down to that one key difference, class? And must therefore self-evidently be a violation of human rights?

It does seem to be a universal assumption, very egalitarian and therefore very PC. But is it actually true? A recent article told women who wanted successful children to look for a partner with brains rather than one with the perfect body: fathers' brains were the best predictor of their children's success (= prosperity?) in life. Doesn't this make sense? Don't brains run with genes? Isn't this going to be a big factor in social mobility? Could it be that the working classes, or even more specifically these days the long-term non-working classes, aren't very successful at mating with brainy genes, not least because they haven't yet learnt to value them?

Oh God, I've just thought of a new conspiracy theory that might just make sense. They haven't yet learnt to value them because they're taught to chase other things. Modern capitalist society is cunningly designed to force the proles to worship genetically very unsuccessful false gods (Justin Bieber, Katie Price, Strictly..., Big Brother, Sun page 3 girls - I could go on) and continue their genetic choices in a way that won't produce too much competiton for the existing elite! And it might be working, bar the problem that the proles tend to produce larger families... And as the riots of a couple of years ago showed, a bit more cohesion and sheer weight of numbers might just overthrow the splendid exsisting arrangements. Good job the Olympics and rotten weather have kept the lid on things since!

OK, I've got a teeny bit whimsical in the last para, but the first one does seek to make a serious point. I accept that the Guardian's stats seem to show that we in the UK are worse at social mobility than most other countries, which will have pretty similar distributions of intelligence. So there must be something that could be given a tweek here. But what exactly?

PS I count myself as pretty much a prole, though one showing some success at social mobility, probably due to grammar school and Uni education

EDIT I was slow in writing the above and didn't check the contributions posted while I was thus engaged. In the meantime Richard Barrett has played the intelligence/wealth correlation card ahead of me. So at least I can now share the politically-correct flak with him

[Cornet IV]

[QUOTE=LeMartinPecheur;277641]Do I detect behind the Guardian's article, and some of the subsequent postings, the standard assumption that aside from class and its inherited wealth, all levels of humanity are pretty indistinguishable? Everyone is equal, made of the same stuff, so failure to achieve equally must be down to that one key difference, class? And must therefore self-evidently be a violation of human rights?

Of course! There is a delightful speciousness to this view. Just another extension of blame transference - after all, nothing could possibly be my fault.

Perhaps if the human rights and equality nonsense was discarded in favour of something like The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings., some evolutionary (as opposed to engineered) social progress might be made but it should be accepted that "class" is a precept endemic in any social grouping and to deny this is to place oneself with the pseudo-science trendies whose influence has been responsible for much unnecessary muddying of the waters. I think back to George Brown, Bessie Braddock and Manny Shinwell; I did not necessarily share their political views but I empathised with these people and certainly understood why they felt as they did. I have no such empathy with the likes of Blair, Brown, Mandelson and their ilk who espouse alien philosophies for the sake of political convenience or personal aggrandisement. I wonder if this is a function of elevated class status.

[Beef Oven]

[QUOTE=Cornet IV;277656]

Do I detect behind the Guardian's article, and some of the subsequent postings, the standard assumption that aside from class and its inherited wealth, all levels of humanity are pretty indistinguishable? Everyone is equal, made of the same stuff, so failure to achieve equally must be down to that one key difference, class? And must therefore self-evidently be a violation of human rights?

Of course! There is a delightful speciousness to this view. Just another extension of blame transference - after all, nothing could possibly be my fault.

Perhaps if the human rights and equality nonsense was discarded in favour of something like The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings., some evolutionary (as opposed to engineered) social progress might be made but it should be accepted that "class" is a precept endemic in any social grouping and to deny this is to place oneself with the pseudo-science trendies whose influence has been responsible for much unnecessary muddying of the waters. I think back to George Brown, Bessie Braddock and Manny Shinwell; I did not necessarily share their political views but I empathised with these people and certainly understood why they felt as they did. I have no such empathy with the likes of Blair, Brown, Mandelson and their ilk who espouse alien philosophies for the sake of political convenience or personal aggrandisement. I wonder if this is a function of elevated class status.

[MrGongGong]

[

Perhaps if the human rights and equality nonsense was discarded in favour of something like

I quite agree
We should get back to traditional old fashioned values , where none of this rubbish is allowed to infect the minds of our young people. If we scrapped the ridiculous anti-competitive laws that mean that we can't employ children to work in factories we might be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. People really need to know their place , we waste far too much of our money teaching the working class to read and write when they will have little use for it in later life.

"All things bright and beautiful" has the right idea ...........

REALLY ?

[Richard Barrett]

It's too early in the morning for this.

It's too early in the morning for X-rays of Homer Simpson's head as far as I'm concerned... I don't quite know what kind of answer that's supposed to be, but it seems to me that someone who would rate (presumably his own) "real life experience" as a more valid way to look at economic social mobility than an extensively researched article, indeed dismissing the latter as "pseudo-social science" (presumably without looking at the article), is hardly in a position to accuse anyone else of denying any evidence that "doesn't fit in" with their "world view".

Not having read Politics and Philosophy I hadn't come across such an explicit statement of Badiou's idea that, even though a class analysis of contemporary society would (if it was to be systematic and realistic) follow the structure proposed by Marx, and even though economic class as conceived by Marx is still central to the (dys)functioning of society, the solution to its inequalities needs to go "beyond" class politics. This seems to be an idea that various others, in the years since Badiou's book, are moving towards (Harvey and Graeber for example).

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

I think it is safe to postulate that the unpleasant responses on this thread show that some people have no class.

hhmmm but some have form eh?


S_A offers the definition of class as set by the relationship to ownership ... and then aserts that Social Staus is subjective when it is the single most potent variable [far more so than ownership of 'capital'] in studies of life development ....

i am with ahinton, Richard Barrett quoted good evidence [we can always find more] and it cannot just be dismissed because it contradicts one's views or can be readily maligned [no more yah boo was the initial post?]

we lack social mobilityin our society with increasing and already large disparities in income ... and this is literally lethal .... in such a society it is increasingly more difficult and less probable that any individual can bootstrap themselves in the manner of quite a few of us grammar school kids ...

the great paradox of equality is that one must be against it, it is not what nature provides, to achieve it requires a totalitarian enforcement ... yet we cannot bear inequality and must drive it down in all conscience ... i am impressed by Popper and Berlin, we can never reconcile everything but an open [in the sense of both discourse and mobility] society where the probability of any individual living a positive and self determined life is high, and certainly higher than in Britain currently, is what i would wish for ...

nor do i lay the blame at capitalisms door; put ten humans in a room for five seconds and there will be the beginnings of a status hierarchy; yet as Boehm argues it is the more egalitarian and cooperative hunter gatherers that adapted best ... we do have to contend with our primate nature and it would be naive anti reductionism to deny it ... but we are not prisoners of this, we have created a wide diversity social groupings ...what we have signally failed to do is to prevent the leading roles in our societies and organisations from being plundered by the greedy kind of dominant alpha person that our hunter gatherer forebears would have murdered [on Boehm's argument] .... the spoils have been set aside for the elite and their kind ... that is what the inequality and mobility data tells us ... in the process of resource capture the elite has developed ideologies of managerialism and its due rewards, and neoliberalism which allows these riches to be untaxed and their theft unpunished and the lower orders seen as authors of their own misfortune ...... [handy that calumny... we do not have to contemplate the removal of work from society by the elitesl; they ares addicted to forex gambling, the daily trade volumes are beyond staggeringly huge and forms the cash nexus at the root of our financial system .... and funded the deregulated jamboree of greed and crime we have all just experienced ]

there is an argument against using abstract concepts such as "class" to understand the social world, it does illuminate, but it ignores the specifics and the historical development and there is plenty that can be said about class relationships that are specific in their nature and history to the British, just as there are generalities developed by Barrington Moore on the origins of Democracy and Dictatorship across the world ... his work led to even more fascinating work on the Economic Origins of Democracy &c which you can read in draft here though it has been published and well received it is a thriving and prosperous middle class that leads to the most open and mobile societies, not the triumph of the proletariat and it is the evil dynamic of capital in Schumpeter's idea that upsets the stasis of moribund societies like ours but not East Germany in the 1960s .... that took a social uprising ..... if society is closed off and profoundly inegalitarian . like ours, then there will be anomie and frustration, death and illness among the lower orders, poverty and rage, until the rioting usurps the elite ... or their economic model collapses under its own weight ....

we face either or both of these possibilities it seems to me and that is why class matters

[i am a fan of Graeber, his Debt: the First Five Thousand years is outstanding .... his new book is reviewed here by Runciman}