> the left have lost touch with the lower classes
How do you define "lower classes"? If you mean household income then quite the opposite is true: https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2016-party-identific...
How do you define "lower classes"? If you mean household income then quite the opposite is true: https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2016-party-identific...
This is false. Labour is undergoing a reversal in the policy of the blairite years where they tied their mast to corporate/NGO elites and decoupled themselves from unions. Unions now have a lot more power (including official voting power / influence over the NEC) in the Labour party than they ever have and corporate influence has waned almost completely.
We've got better things, more urgent things to spend money on that nationalising utilities etc. (we can control them through regulation anyway)
If that would be true, the level of service wouldn't have degraded to the point nationalization is a reasonable (and popular) proposal.
Could you stop working permanently today, continue to thrive & not experience a change in lifestyle?
if the answer is 'no', you're still working class.
'class consciousness' includes these three categories:
- Working - Managing - Ruling
The managing class is there between the ruling & working classes, doing it's job to tell you what to think & tell the ruling class how you're responding to leadership.
"middle class" is essentially white collar
"upper class" really means the aristocracy/ long-term establishment. Even a CEO making millions a year would be called "upper middle class" unless they came from an old established family.
At first I was incredulous, but then when I reflected on the fact my own [modest, developer] earnings likely seem to [for example] folks working in retail as disproportionately large as my doc's seem to me, and then considered the huge difference in lifeways between my doc and some of my other friends who live entirely on the interest / dividends from financial instruments [i.e., they don't have to go in to work in the morning] , I understood his perspective and now mainly agree with it.
In terms of emotional stress this is worlds away from the toil of the middle class, especially someone making $100,000/year or more.
I grew up poor--like, food stamps and having your furniture thrown out on the street during an eviction poor. Being upper middle class as an adult, one thing I do to relieve the stress is keep my "plan B" in mind. I have more than enough savings that if I had to I could buy a double-wide trailer in the sticks, send the kids to public school, buy a bait shop, and get by just fine. That makes a world of difference, but it's not an option available to the working class. If you're working class your only choices are poverty and the status quo.
A software engineer like myself, or a doctor making $600k/year thinking of themselves as working class, kinda blows my mind. It's not like the working class believe that they're the only ones who work hard.
It is about spending, and a lot of doctors - despite their high incomes - are in debt with no savings - and equity in the house is 5% as anytime it gets more than that they take out a home equity loan for the difference.
Which is why doctors can feel like they are barely making it: with their spending habits it is a good thing their job is in demand.
No matter how much money or wealth one has, one almost always feels like they're stuck in their situation. That's part of the human condition. And expenses rising to meet income is also typical, at least in the U.S. But different classes of people have objectively different sets of options available to them, regardless of whether they appreciate those options or not.
Also, $600k/year is a ton of money. I make half that and carry a mortgage, apartment lease (temporarily, hopefully), partial second apartment lease (mother), and office lease all in San Francisco, in addition to paying down $130k in law school debt, as well as typical family expenses (two young children). To blow through $600k/year this doctor must have some serious issues. I can only assume the doctor's home is several million dollars, so even at 5% equity a double-wide trailer and bait shop should be well within his reach. But, again, regardless, this doctor has unfathomably more options than a typical working class family. (As do I, for that matter.) To compare the situations is borderline obscene.
Also, to clarify in case he's reading this: I didn't intend to [and don't believe I did] imply that this particular doctor engages in reckless spending, lives beyond his means, is in financial trouble, or etc -- simply that he considers himself working class for the reasons originally noted
It's not surprising that relatively wealthy people self-identify as the good guys. But that doesn't mean we should indulge or lend credence to destructive equivocations that put working and wealth in opposition. We already have a catch-all, no-hurt-feelings, ambiguously safe category--middle class.
Anyhow, FWIW, I've been upvoting both of you because I [feel like I] appreciate what you're saying. I'm mostly objecting to the doctor's sentiments, and the notion that we should sympathize with them. The sentiments are self-serving and socially destructive. That doesn't make him a bad person, but I feel like the sentiments should be called out for what they are.
This is the problem with the check-your-privilege movement. If disempowered groups think they can shame the empowered into giving up power, they're seriously deluded. What will happen--what is happening--is that the wealthy and powerful will self-identify as the disempowered. So I'm not saying that this doctor should "check his privilege", so to speak, but neither should he be doing the exact opposite by willfully denying his privileges. And that's why I say such sentiments are destructive. With privilege comes responsibility; if you can deny the privilege you can shirk the responsibility, such as a civic mindedness that emphasizes constructive cooperation across all groups, and particularly the financial and political participation of those with financial means. If everybody thinks they're not wealthy enough, that it's only the other guy that should pay more taxes, etc, well then we know exactly where that road leads. We shouldn't vilify or shame the privileged (the notion that we can shame people into civility is preposterous), but neither should we condone the privileged pretending that they're not. Those are two sides of the same coin.
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/how-much-do-docto...
Your average manager covering a small team of people (e.g. say a fast food manager or a retail manager) is still working class, they just happen to be one step higher in the hierarchy , with slightly more pay but relatively little power.
At least that's how I have always viewed it. My definition could be completely wrong though.
The way I learned, gentlemen could support themselves from the fruits of their investments alone and did not need to labor to afford their expenses.
You didn't need to have great wealth to be a gentleman, but you couldn't afford to rise in your station without it.
Which, when you look at it, is just another set of people trying to manipulate you into behaving the way they think you should. They say it's for your own good? So does everyone else trying to manipulate you.
Now, back in the day, the difference between working and managing was twofold: managers got paid more, and they were allowed (and expected) to think as part of their job. The workers were just robots made of flesh, but the managers were supposed to be able to think. Well, for all we (most of us) still have to work, we're more in the managing class, in that we get paid well and have to think. So trying to tell us that we should have "working class consciousness"... yeah, there's a reason why it doesn't feel to us like it fits.
>we're more in the managing class, in that we get paid well and have to think
The distinction which proponents of "class consciousness" talk about was never between thinking and doing, but between those who (loosely speaking) have nothing to sell but their labour power, and those who posses capital. The reluctance to view highly paid wage labour as a form of wage labour rests on misconstrued notions of what "working class" means in political theory (i.e blue collar workers, people who work with machines, etc.), notions drawn from romantic Soviet depictions of the worker (the strong, brave man with a hammer and sickle) and the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire".
There's been a lot of work since the 60s into trying to figure out why this notion is so prevalent. Perhaps it can be best summed up by Marcuse:
"If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population."
By definition middle class people work, it's in the middle between people who have to work to survive and the independently wealthy. However, the middle class has the capability to build wealth, own a home, retire someday, leave a little over for their kids to get their lives started. Working class people are often life long renters, would go bankrupt if they got cancer or any other serious medical illness, would be in significant financial strain if their car broke down, they very likely do not have the means to save up 6 months worth of expenses as a safety net.
Yes, these terms are rather antiquated, but with each and every passing year, there is an increasing distinction between the professional & managerial class (often referred to as the middle and upper middle class), and the precariat class (the working class). Also note that the former makes up ~34% of the population, and the later makes up 45% of the population, with the 1% on the upper end and the truly poor on the other end.
There's labor.
There's capital.
There's a class that has substantial dependence on both labor and capital, with neither clearly dominating their interests.
The first two, sure, match working and ruling roughly (many managers, though, in labor, and some, particularly at the executive level, in nearly pure capital.)
But the group in between pure labor and pure capital—the traditional “middle class” in capitalism—isn't really “managing” as a class, though it includes lots of managers. Also lots of white-collar professionals that aren't managers as such. And even a fair number of independent small business owners that aren't white collar professionals.
The middle class is a distinct class from the working class, but management isn't what distinguishes it. And it's not really a natural class ally of capital any more than of labor, and those on the labor side who attack it (either in its proper identity or as “management”) that way are acting in a self-defeating manner.
In fact, the Conservatives adopted a similar term in their campaigns of a few years ago "Working People". Apparently it didn't do them any good but it's worth pointing out.
I think Labour does understand working people and they understand working class people too - they just have lost touch their their working class roots and are middle class now.
It's interesting that in the USA "class" refers almost exclusively to wealth. In the UK "class" has a slightly different meaning and relates to everything from genealogy to which school you went to social grace. As an example, a "Lord" who went to Eton and comes from an old family will always be upperclass, even if they are bankrupt and worth less than nothing, with no income at all.
It's not quite a caste system as class mobility IS a thing but it's not simply wealth either.
I, his tenant had less money than him and am solidly upper middle class in lifestyle, from my foamy coffee drinks, to my Subaru, salary, education and occupation. We're the same age, and he has more dough, but he can't move in the circles I can, and his upside is probably capped at owning a couple of residential apartment buildings. He's also crippled from arthritis, and I'm not.
Most of the time, though, upper middle class people have more money than working class people.
It's more subtle than the UK system, but roughly speaking this is the model for the world. Professionals constitute a social class. The fact that professionals have mostly taken over the left wing parties and turned them into Blairite/Clintonite "who cares about the poors" neoliberal parties, the middle and working classes are basically in revolt against them. All over the world. Trump, Brexit, Giletes Jaunes and so on. It's not going to change until there are economic reforms which accrue some wealth to lower classes. This will almost certainly involve immigration reform (as in stop importing so many new residents and making labor so cheap), taxation (professionals can pay more tax) and economic protectionism for important unskilled labor groups. Which of course, the upper middle professional classes absolutely freak out about because it's against their class interests.