I come from a class-conscious/social-climbing sort of family.

The blond guy and I often argue about class. He thinks his parents were working class because his grandparents went broke in the depression. I argue that they were still middle class because they had university degrees/post-secondary education.

I'm interested to know what markers people use to delineate classes. The three I tend to look at are:
1. Education
2. Economic status
3. Line/type of work

[ 24 November 2003: Message edited by: Zoot Capri ]

I'd consider my folks middle class, as my dad has a professional degree (engineering). I remember a time when we were lower down in the middle class, but I think that being a professional carries more social status than an entry level income would otherwise suggest.

Nevertheless, since having gone out and made my own living, I have become a pretty solidly working-class fella, with working-class ideas about the way things should be done.

I'm gonna try for an uptown girl
She's been living in her white bread world
As long as anyone with hot blood can
And now she's looking for a downtown man
That's what I am

And when she knows what
She wants from her time
And when she wakes up
And makes up her mind

She'll see I'm not so tough
Just because
I'm in love with an uptown girl
You know I've seen her in her uptown world
She's getting tired of her high class toys
And all her presents from her uptown boys
She's got a choice

Uptown girl
You know I can't afford to buy her pearls
But maybe someday when my ship comes in
She'll understand what kind of guy I've been
And then I'll win

And when she's walking
She's looking so fine
And when she's talking
She'll say that she's mine

She'll say I'm not so tough
Just because
I'm in love
With and uptown girl
She's been living in her white bread world
As long as anyone with hot blood can
And now she's looking for a downtown man
That's what I am

Uptown girl
She's my uptown girl
You know I'm in love
With an uptown girl

My uptown girl
You know I'm in love
With an uptown girl
My uptown girl
You know I'm in love
With an uptown girl
My uptown girl

Because my dad was in a union, we lived a comfortable lifestyle and I don't remember wanting for anything,(except during two long strikes...) We lived as well as my middle class friends. However, I think my culture was very much working class. My parents were highly class conscious and political, so I remember spending time at the Union Hall, and NDP campaign offices and learning a general 'eat the rich' type attitude at a fairly young age.

[ 25 November 2003: Message edited by: Skye88 ]

I don't come from a rich family, but my parents were kind of like you and your husband, Zoot - solidly middle-class, owned their own home, made a very comfortable combined income. Neither had university educations, but one completed a long course and the other a short course in computers from college, which helped them get the jobs they wound up with that paid them not too shabbily. We were all voracious readers in my family, all valued education, and I guess you'd say that our family through the generations has been "upwardly mobile" from working class to solidly middle class.

Well, I guess until it got to me. Dropped out of high school and worked for minimum wage for a few years. So what did that make me at the time? I definitely identified as working class then, not that I could have put it that way since I definitely didn't have much in the way of class analysis at the time. But my coworkers detected a difference. I came from middle class parents. I spoke in a middle-class way. I was seen as a "brain" among my coworkers because I loved to read (particularly reading the paper from cover to cover every day). So I think there was some "social capital" at play there. I was low-income, low-educational level, but having been raised in a middle-class home with a relatively high income level, I grew up in a middle-class suburb instead of a low-rent area, in an owned house instead of a rented apartment, with a family who valued education and white-collar pursuits.

I'm fucking sans coulottes all the way, and god damned proud of it too.

You know, we can play all the games we want with words concerning the economy, but the bottom line is that someone has to wrest something from the earth, and someone has to take that stuff and turn it into something someone needs for the economy, for society, to work.

If you're not involved intimately with that, well, you owe us that does.

There's a whole industry out there that will tell you otherwise, to keep farmers, miners, factory workers feeling that they owe their existance to those that occupy the value added end of the economy, but don't believe it.

[ 25 November 2003: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

My father's family is more upwardly mobile; my grandparents grew up in farming communities and ascended to the middle class (he was a banker, she was a primary school teacher and then stayed at home); my father worked factory-type jobs to put himself through university and law school. My mother and her siblings don't really have that kind of drive; my mother is the only one who went to graduate school and only two of her four brothers completed their undergrad degrees.

I grew up in what was more or less a champagne-socialist atmosphere - my parents never identified as working class (that would be pretty presumptuous and silly) but never voted for lower taxes for themselves either, and their stance on most political issues is classic NDP. But they put a really high premium on taste (educated middle-class taste), sniff about people they disapprove of that "they don't read," and throw a lot of support behind the arts, particularly opera, which is, generally speaking, not a working-class entertainment (although I think a lot of its reputation for inaccessibility is undeserved, but then I would think that).

[ 25 November 2003: Message edited by: Smith ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:
You know, we can play all the games we want with words concerning the economy, but the bottom line is that someone has to wrest something from the earth, and someone has to take that stuff and turn it into something someone needs for the economy, for society, to work.

If you're not involved intimately with that, well, you owe us that does.

---

quote:

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Uptown girl

---

In between I have been min wage labourer, teacher, indepentdent business owner, entrepreneur
and constuction worker.

I now live on 1/2 the poverty level for an income, my husband is a labourer without a ticket. So I guess we'd be considered lower middle class.

I also work occaionally as a professional musician and soon to be artist.

I figure all this makes me a person of the world; having experienced everything from silver spoon to existing on food banks and charity. Although we struggle financially, we still support causes with out $ making things tight for us because we know what it's like to not have food or proper shelter.
I totally oppose my families position when they say I associate with "low lifes"...street people, mentally ill, prostitutes and skid row alcoholics and addicts.

[ 26 November 2003: Message edited by: windymustang ]

In retrospect, I realize that neither of my folks were so-called "educated" people. My mother was a nurse and my dad was trained as a locksmith, though he was disabled in a car accident when I was a baby so the only work I remember him doing was being a security guard. My mom was active in the nurse's union in the early '80s and had my father's health been better he probably would have continued in the factory work that he was doing when he first came to Canada and been a union worker himself.

That my parents were immigrants (well, my father was an immigrant, my mother the child of immigrants) there was a certain family pressure around class, though it wasn't called that. It was clear from early on that though my parents were workers, there was no way that I was going to be. I was destined for Better Things. I think that is a quite typical immigrant mind set; toil so that your children won't have to. Hence, I'm the first person in my family (even my extended family) to have a university education.

Being educated and a property owner land me square in the middle class (except for that thing about "enough but not too much money" - where's that?) and there it is I figure I'll stay, my work in non-profits, in the co-operative movement, in the alternative media and my NDP politics notwithstanding.

My dad's been a tradesman all his adult life. He's an accomplished ironworker/welder who often gets name-hired and called up off the list because people know him and like his work. He's never really been out of work in all my life for that reason.

My mom has a university degree and most of a master's, but never finished because of her family (my unsupportive dad, and us needy kids). She worked in greenhouses and ran her own business for many years. Most recently she' worked in an admin position at the University.

On my dad's side, my grandparents came to Canada with some resources, but not a lot of money. My Opa built up a steelworking business (he and my dad did the rigging for the big score board above centre ice in the Northlands Coliseum, fer instance), and later went on to be a cattle farmer with a very large, lovely house. They have a lot of money, and always had nice things, and gave us nice things. Because of them I was able to get through uni. without a lot of debt, and now my sister and I both have uni. degrees.

On my mom's side, my grandparents were a military family, living in France and vacationing in Spain when my mom and her siblings were kids, and then my granddad worked for a small film company and the CBC before becoming a carpenter (or maybe the other way around?). My granny also always worked, mostly in bookkeeping and clerical positions. They don't necessarily have a lot of money, but they have a beautiful home and they're comfortable.

But where that puts me, a university educated twentysomething working as a receptionist with aspirations for a career as an artist photographer and more debt than money to my name, I don't really know...

Both sets of grandparents in my family were farmers, transplanted from Nova Scotia to Alberta over a century ago. One great-granddad was a Polish, um, adventurer who was sometimes called a count -- I dunno.

My dad and one of his sisters were the first people in their family to go to university. He became a journalist, so I guess we grew up middle class, although on a lower-middle income. My mum was a nurse who had gone through a rough adolescence, learning to support herself through the Depression from a fairly young age, so it was extremely important to her to build a secure middle-class life after the war. She was -- still is, actually -- an extremely strong, tough person -- but all the manners and proprieties meant a lot to her.

Farming families -- at least, on the Canadian prairies -- had a special attitude to education, I think. I don't know how you would classify their stores of book-learnin'. Even those who never went to university were very well read, and the pressure on each new generation to swallow books books books whole just never let up.

quote:

---

So did that make me working class because of my income, or middle class because of my background? Even if we agree that it did make me working class (which is more how I would have identified myself at the time since I couldn't even begin to imagine having a job where I could earn an income even approaching my parents'), there is still a bit of a divide between people who were born working class, and people who come from middle-class backgrounds who get working-class jobs and therefore join the working class once they become an adult.

---

Which is why I say that class has to do with many more things than money/economic status.

I've noticed, too, that many middle-class people from middle-class backgrounds don't actively think about their own class. I've had my nose rubbed in my working class/lower middle class background, so it was easy to be conscious of it. There was some in high school (a counsellor who told me not to go to university, I wouldn't be happy their, as my mom and dad had a blue tint 'round their collars), but a lot more in university -- most of the students in fine arts seem to come from upper-middle to middle-middle class families, and the lower middles and working class ones take "something practical".

As far as social graces are concerned, those who want to move upward in class tend to be hyper-conscious of their table manners, etc. My mother and grandmother, for example, were extra picky about manners from a with or without class perspective, but still had working class attitudes in other respects. Mimicking the manners alone won't change what class you are. There's a whole constellation of attitudes, behaviour, social status within one's community... I just simplified it to three things for the sake of argument.

quote:

---

Farming families -- at least, on the Canadian prairies -- had a special attitude to education, I think. I don't know how you would classify their stores of book-learnin'. Even those who never went to university were very well read, and the pressure on each new generation to swallow books books books whole just never let up.

---

My grandfather, who was not a farmer, was very well-read, which was amazing, considering he had only a few years of formal schooling before Barnardo Homes shipped him to Canada as cheap farm labour at 14 years old. Education was incredibly important to him. He challenged me, pushed and encouraged reading, learning of any kind. I think that having at least one of us get a formal education was a very real step away from being the lowest of the low in the working classes.

[ 25 November 2003: Message edited by: Zoot Capri ]

Even this is somewhat problematic, though, when the sum value of employee pension funds around the world are estimated to be around 13 trillion dollars. That is in comparison to a total world GNP of about $28 trillion and a world-wide value of stock-markets of about $23 trillion. (all figures circa 1999).

quote:

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I'm interested to know if anyone would identify as "upper class". Is that even what it's called? How does one achieve that rare social position? Can you earn it (i.e. is it just about money?) or do you have to be born into it? Can one have a high social status without the supporting income? I'm thinking of the many European nobles, Prince This and Duchess That, who have the title but no money. Since we don't have a "proper" North American nobility, does class at the upper end simply equal money?

---

I don't think it's quite that, although it's hard for me to put my finger on it; I wouldn't classify people like Mel Lastman, for example, as "upper class," although obviously he has the wealth. I would say upper-class status has something to do with growing up with the expectation that one will not (or at any rate should not) need to work for a living (and neither will one's spouse, lest one point out that middle-class women grew up expecting this until quite recently). Of course, being in this position requires one's family to have (or have had) massive amounts of accumulated capital, which tends to put one in a privileged position in politics, industry, etc.

The children of the professional middle classes grow up privileged and many expect to inherit substantial sums of money from their parents, but not enough to make work unnecessary from a financial standpoint.

I use the marxist catagories of worker, Petit Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie to define class postion.

For definitions see:
Marxist Encyclopedia

For some pretty angry, feel-good, working class writing (if maybe not the best analysis) see: Class Warfare In The USA And Rebuilding A Militant Working Class

[ 25 November 2003: Message edited by: Mick ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Michelle:
Where do teachers fall?

---

Working class.

One thing that's quite funny about our modern N.A. culture is that so many people (especially while growing up) consider themselves to be middle class. I remember thinking this as a kid, but my father worked as a garbage man and my mother was a postie. My partner's parents are both factory workers and yet somehow my partner considers the family unit middle class.

Personally, I could care less where I or the people I know and meet fall in a social status system. At the same time it always makes for an interesting discussion given that there is always disagreement on what the categories are...and then there is disagreement on which factor's should be used...of course, if that can be settled there is always disagreement on how much weight to give to each factor...

[ 25 November 2003: Message edited by: clearview ]

quote:

---

I tend to see class as being determined largely by your relative proximity to the levers of power in a capitalist economy. Principly, ownership and/or control of large sums of capital generally qualifies you as a member of the bourgeois. Everyone else, in one way or another, are workers, because they ultimately work for the people who have the wealth.

---

Isn't this a bit simplistic?

How does this apply to the growing "third sector economy", primarily made up of people working for non-profit organizations, co-ops, etc... I have worked in non-profit community organizations for most of my employment history, and I never felt I worked for the people who have the wealth. But I never controlled large sums of wealth either?

Similarly, how do you see government and para-governmental workers (hospital workers, teachers, municipal workers)?

quote:

---

Isn't this a bit simplistic?

---

Deliberately so. I think the relative level of control a person has over their own work is a useful way to define sub-classes of workers. However, I think the more fundamental dividing line in our economy remains the amount of control a person has over other people's work. That's the basis of the class struggle.

Your point about the "third sector" is more interesting. It depends on how you conceptualize it. Are non-profits just institutionalized charity? A more efficient, privatized alternative to the welfare state? That analysis links the new development of the "third sector" right back to the old capitalist objectives of reproducing the labour supply and salving social discontent.

There is also the prospect that the "third sector" is something else, though. An embryo, perhaps, of a new and different kind of economy incubating within the womb of capitalism itself?

This is a whole other debate. Although it does also impact on whether you classify the third sector workers as plain old "working class" or as something different. Based on what I know about actual working conditions in many non-profits, though, I'm personally still comfortable grouping these workers with the rest of the working class.

I note, though, that while I would define the vast majority of people as "working class," the fact is, most posters so far have identified themselves as middle class. Does that mean my theory is wrong? Or is there something going on here between subjective and objective definitions of class?

[ 25 November 2003: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

quote:

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There is also the prospect that the "third sector" is something else, though. An embryo, perhaps, of a new and different kind of economy incubating within the womb of capitalism itself?

---

As a unionized "third sector" worker life can get very interesting.

The management of my organization would consider itself generally "working class", would vote NDP, be broadly-speaking pro-union and don't get paid all that much more than the workers do. They in turn report to a volunteer board of directors...which again would consider itself "progressive" in politics, working class etc.

However in the workplace, make no doubt about it, the managers are indeed "managers" who very much control what goes on in the workplace.

quote:

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Originally posted by radiorahim:

However in the workplace, make no doubt about it, the managers are indeed "managers" who very much control what goes on in the workplace.

---

Therefore they are a lower strata of the Bourgeoisie.

Can they hire, fire, or discipline a worker?

quote:

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Originally posted by Michelle:

Does that include the chronically unemployed or people on social assistance?

---

No, it doesn't, and here's why.

I have no problem putting more into a society than what I take out, in terms of both time and money. There are natural disasters, there are bad turns of luck. We are a social animal. Our evolutionary success is due to cooperation and having a significant number of us willing to put more than take.

So, maybe there are career malingerers on the bottom end of the economic scale, in fact I don't doubt that there are. But they don't concern me much, it's the cost of doing social business. And it's not that great a cost in the end, compared to others.

Where I get working class chauvanistic is when I'm asked to support the real social tapeworms: The speculators; the gouging professionals; the do nothing aristocracy that believes the working class should support them because they are somehow superior due to birth, ability to inherit or marry well, and not because of their contributions to the nation; and lastly but not leastly, the self proclaimed "self made" capitalists that never miss an opportunity to manipulate the tax system by bribing politicians, and who elbow the powerless away from the help they need so they can feast on the tax dollars-- then lecture the rest of us on how we should buckle down and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

[ 26 November 2003: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

I think my parents are still fairly progressive. They're both vegetarians, will buy hybrids for their next cars, agree with me on a lot of points about the economy, support a higher minimum wage, etc. I think they would probably fit in with the Green Party.

Now, however, in terms of income and employment, I'm firmly lodged in the blue-collar working class. In fact, there was a time not too long ago when my economic situation collapsed to such a degree that I undoubtedly qualified as a fully-fledged member of the underclass -- that terrible purgatory where your every ounce of energy is devoted to somehow stretching out those few measly dollars in your pocket all the way to the end of the month. Counting every goddamn penny. A terrible experience, and one I seem to have thankfully lifted myself out of, and hope never to repeat.

On the other hand, I'm educated to the point of wretched excess, having spent many, many years sporadically pursuing my meandering, on-again-off-again postsecondary career. And my intellectual and artistic interests are broad enough to encompass many things which are generally considered to belong to the "upper class". I've been known to while away the time at my working-class job listening to Bartok or Schoenberg compositions, or reading arcane books on economics or quantum physics.

quote:

---

I note, though, that while I would define the vast majority of people as "working class," the fact is, most posters so far have identified themselves as middle class.

---

I agree with you conditionally rd. Since I was of professional level of education to become an academic and now am on disability pension, I think I qualify as working class as I have a measly income and am married to a blue collar worker. I also am preparing to launch a new career which I can operate within the parameters of my disability from home. The downside of this is that if all collapses, I won't only be unemployed, single and lonely, but poor and disabled. So there are some exceptions in your def. as Michelle(?) pointed out.

Originally posted by Tommy_Payne:

quote:

---

Where I get working class chauvanistic is when I'm asked to support the real social tapeworms:
...your whole statement Tommy

---

I always thought of myself as poor, which is funny looking back, since there were always much poorer people everywhere around us. I guess I figured that people who weren't poor didn't have money troubles, and it seemed like we always did. My mother and stepfather worked like dogs, gradually clawing their way up the ladder but never quite getting their heads above water. In Newfoundland, that's a tough thing to do.

When they finally gave up and declared bankruptcy, they owned four or five different pieces of property, none of which they could really pay for. Maybe it was just bad planning, but they tried awful hard.

My mother's father was a salesman who eventually opened a little cigarette shop. Not a booming business, but doing better than most people in St. John's, I think. When WW2 happened, however, it was like he had struck oil. All of a sudden, USian soldiers were everywhere spending their USian dollars, and many of them at my Poppy's store. The family catapulted into the upper class, sending my mother and her siblings off to fancy boarding schools in Nova Scotia and buying a big new house. They were the first kids in their neighbourhood to have a television set.

So my Mother grew up considering herself well-off but it was all short lived. Poppy drank his money away after his wife died and the family fell apart. Her older siblings were off at school or married but her and her younger brother were just left to their own devices at an early age. They ended up with the local hippies, where she married my dope-smoking, unemployed biological father from a poor irish catholic background and found out what real poverty was all about. She was nothing but working class from then on. I don't think she minded that specifically. Moreso the fact that all that hard work never really got her back the lifestyle she always hoped she'd have. No doubt this formed the class consciousness that she passed along to me.

My stepfather came from the middle class, it always seemed to me, but was the black sheep of the family, hanging out in that same hippy scene. Unlike my real father, however, he was a hard worker, so together they tried to make a go of it. They bought and sold houses, started several businesses, worked at a wide variety of jobs. Somehow they were always in the hole, staring into the abyss. The most stable period was my late teens when my stepfather worked for eight years or so as a weather observer on the oil rigs. Were we middle class? It never felt that way to me. I had to get student loans to go to university, and didn't really spend money on anything but comic books. On the other hand, we did own our own house, which was more than a lot of people around there could say. But then they went broke and ran off to BC to start all over and escape their creditors.

Myself, I've always been broke, up until recently, but that was more because I hated working and did it as little as humanly possible (which is less than you might think, even without the social safety net). Maybe I subconciously thought there was no point in trying, seeing how it worked out for my parents. But my long years of grinding poverty had their value too. You learn a lot about what is and isn't necessary and what you really want from your life. I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me, as the saying goes.

quote:

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But my class consciousness is still lower class, not even working class, really. I spent most of my adult life among the fringes of society. The bottom-feeders. Well, maybe the top of the bottom feeders. The dropouts and underacheivers. It's a unique perspective, to be sure.

---

[ 26 November 2003: Message edited by: Skye88 ]

quote:

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I note, though, that while I would define the vast majority of people as "working class," the fact is, most posters so far have identified themselves as middle class. Does that mean my theory is wrong? Or is there something going on here between subjective and objective definitions of class?

---

I don't think your theory is wrong, only that there's so often a clash between 'objective' notions of class, and subjective experience. I agree, most people in North America could reasonably be described as working-class, and yet most of those same people would likely describe themselves as middle-class.

Barbara Ehrenreich is particularly good on this subject, though as I've mostly read just her magazine journalism I'm not sure where to point you in her books (you may well have read her already, of course). "Nickel and Dimed," her story of trying to make it as a minimum-wage working in the Florida Keys, was widely excerpted and fairly well-reviewed.

Something else to consider is that working-class people may well be under-represented on a forum like this one.

[ 26 November 2003: Message edited by: 'lance ]

Sara said:

quote:

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I think a more apt description would not be related to proximity of wealth, but rather how much control a person has over their work. Two people working in the same sector, in similar jobs could have totally different working conditions (control of workload and tools, arbitrary or aggressive supervision, worktime flexibility etc..). Even if these two people had the same salary, they could be considered to be in different social classes because one is treated like a human being who can take responsibility, who can be trusted ie a "professional", while the other is treated a a number, someone who can't be trusted to be productive without harsh measures, basically treated as no more human than a robot.

---

And I agree.

The question of teachers' class location is more complex than you suggest in your response. As a teacher, I would dearly love to believe we are working class. Clearly we are in terms of the conditions of our work and the lack of control we exercise in meeting the needs of students. However, it a pretty conservative profession, too, although politicized in the fight for public education. The material conditions of teachers' personal lives and self-designation of class, show them as having one foot firmly in the material conditions of the middle class, but experiencing the kind of control the working class has long endured in their work. Some teachers, often in leadership positions in the teacher unions, recognize this contradiction, but many rank and file teachers do not. Current class analysis takes the view that teachers have a 'contradictory class consciousness', the view put forward by analysts like Erik Olin Wright.

I take the position it is not always a good thing to take too structural a position when looking at class.

This is a great thread, btw, and I am really enjoying the richness of the many responses it has encouraged. At some point, when I have time, I may post some thoughts on my own family's class journey.

I think she defines the middle class as people whose jobs are basically telling others what work to do, while the working class are those who actually do that work; middle-class work is also more likely to require academic training of some sort, because middle-class occupations tend to run on the notion (if not always the reality) of expertise. Hence a lot of historical working-class resentment of the middle classes; Mister Capitalist might own the company you work for and be behind a lot of the problems you encounter there, but you don't deal with him every day; you deal with Mister Manager.

quote:

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:
I'm fucking sans coulottes all the way, and god damned proud of it too.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mick:
I use the marxist catagories of worker, Petit Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie to define class postion.

---

Personally, I think it's really worthwhile to add in "co-ordinator" as a separate class, the way Michael Albert does.
That is, people who don't own small businesses, like Petit Bourgeois, don't control capital, like Bourgeois, but do control people in some way. Administrators, managers, and certain people with heavy educations and expertise who decide how stuff is going to get done, such as architects and so on, really seem to form their own class which behaves differently from workers and differently from owners. Admittedly it's kind of a bridge class--in most societies they're the piece the owners use to control the rest of us. But it's there, and it's a sizable segment; I think adding them gains more in explanatory power than you lose in complexity.

quote:

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:

Where I get working class chauvanistic is when I'm asked to support the real social tapeworms: The speculators; the gouging professionals; the do nothing aristocracy that believes the working class should support them because they are somehow superior due to birth, ability to inherit or marry well, and not because of their contributions to the nation; and lastly but not leastly, the self proclaimed "self made" capitalists that never miss an opportunity to manipulate the tax system by bribing politicians, and who elbow the powerless away from the help they need so they can feast on the tax dollars-- then lecture the rest of us on how we should buckle down and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

---

quote:

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Administrators, managers, and certain people with heavy educations and expertise who decide how stuff is going to get done, such as architects and so on, really seem to form their own class which behaves differently from workers and differently from owners.

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quote:

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I'm working class in the sense that I'm in a union, have bosses, am not the boss of anybody, and control no capital. And politically I think in working class terms, and think a lot more people would be well served by doing so than actually do.
Culturally I'm not working class at all. I'm a big fan of post-secondary education and "useless" knowledge, like philosophy and whatnot, I'm fond of classical music and spend much of my time with my nose in a book. My parents grew up poor, but put each other through university and became librarians. My grandparents were an odd mix; on my dad's side my grandmother was a prole from Glasgow, my grandfather a staunch trade unionist from Sweden. My dad was an intellectual from at least high school, and nobody in his family understood him at all.

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Odd bit of working-class history, or perhaps not so odd... At different times, union leaders and such have felt that their job was about more than just organizing, fighting for better conditions etc., but about educating themselves and their memberships. I'm thinking mostly of Britain in the 19th and into the 20th centuries, when "working men's clubs" would include lending libraries and the like, or when presses would produce cheap "Everyman" editions of the classes, aimed at working-class people.

quote:

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I sit on my butt in an office. So does my wife, and between us we can make ends meet,

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*bad skdadl, bad skdadl*

About labour unions and education: A century and more ago, many unions here and everywhere in Europe, I suspect, had strong traditions of building an entire worker-culture, and their notions of what that culture could be were often very broad. In Italy, eg, Antonio Gramsci began writing a Dante column in the communist newspaper he published because he believed that Dante belonged to all Italians and he wanted to see working people reclaim their heritage.

I have fuzzy and probably confused memories of the trials that occurred in Winnipeg at the end of the General Strike -- I'm sure someone here can correct anything I say on that score -- but I remember reading the courtroom speeches of some of the leaders of the strike, and they are astonishingly learned and accomplished performances.

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I have fuzzy and probably confused memories of the trials that occurred in Winnipeg at the end of the General Strike ...

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skdadl, I hope you appreciate the fact that I'm a gentleman and so was able to resist the temptation to make one or other very obvious joke...

[ 27 November 2003: Message edited by: 'lance ]

Touche, 'lance.

Definitions are neither right or wrong; they are an arbitrary shorthand that make an analysis simpler to explain. What do we do once we've decided upon a certain classification based on certain criteria?

[ 27 November 2003: Message edited by: Oliver Cromwell ]

My position is that there is no such thing as a "middle" class, the concept of a "middle" class - a class that's nuteral between the working class and that exploiting class, is Bourgoiuse propaganda. It's deliberatly desigend to blur the higher strata of the working class with the lower strata of the Bourgoiuse. That way class struggle is contained within a broad segement of the working class who actually think that they're not working class!

There's a lot of myths about being working class (like you can't work in an office and still be a worker, or you have to be swinging a sledgehammer to be a real worker), or that working people don't also have intellectual and 'high-brow' pursuits.

Mick and Tommy, this is getting a little trying, since Michelle's answer to you is the second time this point has been made.

There is lots of evidence in many posts above that, while people are perfectly aware of the classical Marxian categories of class -- which are also Victorian English categories -- they are finding them pretty blunt instruments for interpreting shadings of power and income relations in C21 North America.

No, the North American use of the term "middle class" does not equate with the strict definition of the bourgeoisie. But to many of us, it seems just phoney, and actually kind of uppity, for most North Americans to claim that they are part of the classical proletariat.

So what are we? That was the question. Some of the classical categories apply, I think: we know who the big bourgeoisie are, and petit-bourgeois is still useful. But that still excludes most of us, who are yet not proletarians.

My 2 cents anyway.

1) Don't like the marx definitions, too vauge - there's lots of class pressures around that they don't cover.

For instance, ngo workers tend to come from the middle class, get paid working class/lower middle class wages, and look down on working class people

or a good looking working class girl could marry up to the middle class and be looked down on.

and then there's office clerks and stenos. tend to come from middle class backgrounds and get paid crappy wages for "white collar" work....

and there are a lot of tensions between differing stratifications in the working and middle classes... a lot of internalized crap...

2) For myself:
dad's a cop, mom was a secretary at the royal bank.

Dad made enough money to make us middle-middle class, until ATMs were created... sadly there wasn't a huge resurgence of ludditism, and my family fell to lower-middle class (but had just bought a 1/4 section and built a $300 000 house on it and were really house-poor) my family ate nothing but no-name, wore discount store clothes when it wasn't hand-me-downs, and generally stopped buying stuff until I finnished highschool.

I stopped trying to do well in school in grade 11, as I thought I wasn't going to make it to university financially (but my average was still 88%) I did go for a few years, racked up a big debt, and dropped out to start a soup-kitchen...

I met up with a single mom (she came from the same type of family situation I did) with a lot of debt, and we now have a family... $60,000 in debt, she's staying home with our second child... I work a 'white collar' jobs on contract (and "internships") making $8/hr. our family income is about $15,000 a year. We're both white, and we've both got years of university under our belts, but no degrees.

Despite our skin color and our background and our education, I think we are very working class. It's hard not to think that when you're raising a family of 4 on $15000/yr, no? and we sell IWW/socialist literature (see the website).

No our parent's don't bail us out, but they do buy us stuff for the kids (jackets, clothes, and occasionally food) when we need it.

3)

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Originally posted by Michelle:
I would use one more marker, Zoot. I'd use family background too, what I have heard called "cultural capital" or "social capital". For instance, what would you call a "black sheep" from a prosperous family? What if you grew up in a rich family but dropped out of high school and worked full time for crap wages - but had a family who could possibly bail you out if you ever became totally desperate?

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MCR's : middle class refugees. there's a lot of them in anti-globalization activism

It's a term for kids who think that there is something romantic, glamourous, or just plain trendy about being poor. The rich kids who dumpster dive (taking stuff away from those who do need it), and live poor for political reasons. It's a slur directed at people who are taken in by the rise in crimethinc inspired sillyness/dropping out.

(I'm not one - there is nothing romantic about not eating so your kids can)

[ 28 November 2003: Message edited by: terra1st ]

[ 28 November 2003: Message edited by: terra1st ]

The thing is, when you look at income distribution, it becomes almost comical. The genuine bourgeoisie is so tiny and yet controls so much of the wealth -- what sense are most people to make of that?

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Originally posted by terra1st:
MCR's : middle class refugees. there's a lot of them in anti-globalization activism

It's a term for kids who think that there is something romantic, glamourous, or just plain trendy about being poor. The rich kids who dumpster dive (taking stuff away from those who do need it), and live poor for political reasons. It's a slur directed at people who are taken in by the rise in crimethinc inspired sillyness/dropping out.

(I'm not one - there is nothing romantic about not eating so your kids can)

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Actually, when I said "black sheep from prosperous families", I wasn't talking about ones where it's the whole Thornhill-kids-begging-on-Queen-West-to-be-trendy thing. I'm talking about people like me, who dropped out of high school for whatever reason, and worked full time for minimum wage. I didn't do that because I was a wannabe or thought that being poor was romantic. I did it because I hated high school and wanted to work instead.

I'll always have my skin color or sexuality (I'm straight) or education to fall back on...

I figure I'm working class, but I've got lotsa privilidge (even if I can't spell)

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Originally posted by JimmyBrogan:
It's all about defining where your interests lie. The problem with people who are actually working class thinking of themselves as middle class is that all too often this inaccurate perspective leads to supporting other people's interests and not your own.

If people had a proper idea of where they stood on the socio-economic scale I believe they would be more likely to vote for their own interests, instead of proping up the tools of capitalism. At the very least they would have a clearer idea of where their interests lie.

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If people insist on using the term "middle class" there needs to be a common diffinition of that term - otherwise it's impossible to use as an analytical tool.

My father came to Canada as child labour (a Barnardo Home Boy)and my mother was the daughter of a sex trade worker. Marginalization and powerlessness were inter-generational influences in the shaping of my family's culture and world view, along with my own. While outwardly it would be easy to classify me as middle class, along with my capacity to talk the talk of the middle class, I believe I am still quite working class in my psychological makeup, political views, antagonism towards authority, disdain for middle class monoculture, and comfort level with working class people. In a nutshell, I would classify (if that is really a useful thing to do with the contradictions of human experiences; I don't especially think it is)my consciousness and social values as still being very much working class.

My answer to the question of people's self-awareness of their class location is that they have only a superficial understanding of class identity (usually seeing themselves as middle class) based on the class propaganda fed by the schools, the media, and their immediate social network, but it frequently ignores the realities of the ravaged lives left in the wake of market fundamentalism, tax cuts, and the meritocratic performative culture we live in (and from which many who enjoy a middle class lifestyle directly benefit) that is part of the middle class embrace of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

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and we sell IWW/socialist literature (see the website).
...I'll always have my skin color or sexuality (I'm straight) or education to fall back on...

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I know that this is completely off topic, but I find this situation very disturbing.

Originally posted by Michelle:

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I didn't do that because I was a wannabe or thought that being poor was romantic. I did it because I hated high school and wanted to work instead.

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Originally posted by Mick:
I challenge all of you who are using the term 'middle class' to write a coherent definition of that term that most people on this board agree with.

If people insist on using the term "middle class" there needs to be a common diffinition of that term - otherwise it's impossible to use as an analytical tool.

Good luck.

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Originally posted by Mick:
I challenge all of you who are using the term 'middle class' to write a coherent definition of that term that most people on this board agree with.

If people insist on using the term "middle class" there needs to be a common diffinition of that term - otherwise it's impossible to use as an analytical tool.

Good luck.

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Sure thing. Right after you give a definition of "working class" that everyone can agree upon.

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Originally posted by Michelle:

Sure thing. Right after you give a definition of "working class" that everyone can agree upon.

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Okay, the common definition of the term 'working class' is that it's made up of the Lumpan and Proletariat classes as well as people (usually women) who do unpaid work such as child-rearing and housework (I include them in the Proletariat although a super-exploited strata of it. However I wanted to be clear that the term working class includes them).

The above is a pretty common Marxist definition. I wasn't trying to be "pugnacious" about anything, but a similar common definition doesn't exist as far as I know for the term 'middle class'. If folks who use the term middle class could provide one it would help the discussion in my opinion.

Marx's politics and organizing focused primarily on the industrial proletariat for two reasons: they formed the largest segment of the "working class" in mid- to late C19 Europe, so he really did have their interests at heart; but also, given where they worked, it was easiest to imagine organizing them.

There is still something of an industrial working class in Canada, but it has shrunk seriously here as elsewhere in relation to the work force that is dispersed in places much harder to organize than a factory or a mine.

As we've all agreed, those workers so dispersed also break down into layers different enough in terms of income, working conditions, and autonomy to require much more careful description than the classical terms allow.

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Barbara Ehrenreich is particularly good on this subject, though as I've mostly read just her magazine journalism I'm not sure where to point you in her books (you may well have read her already, of course). "Nickel and Dimed," her story of trying to make it as a minimum-wage working in the Florida Keys, was widely excerpted and fairly well-reviewed.

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It may be a little late to return to this, but the Columbia Journalism Review recently included an excellent, in-depth article about Ehrenreich including much of her bibliography.

Link - Class Warrior: Barbara Ehrenreich's Singular Crusade

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By the latter part of the 1970s, theoretical questions about left-wing strategy — and the shortcomings of classical Marxist theory — were very much on Ehrenreich's mind. In 1977, in the journal Radical America, she and (first husband) John published an essay entitled "The Professional-Managerial Class," which was so controversial on the Left that it generated a book-length symposium, published in 1979. The essay was a portentous work of high theory in the Marxist tradition, and it stands as the Rosetta Stone that helps to translate the subjects she has written about through the years. "Why was the Left," the Ehrenreichs asked in the symposium, "especially the white Left, which emerged from the '60s, so overwhelmingly middle class in composition . . . ?"

It was an intriguing question. If not the proletariat, what class spawned young left-wing militants? The "professional-managerial class" ("PMC" for short), which the Ehrenreichs defined as "salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production" — teachers, social workers, psychologists, writers, managers, engineers, foundation employees, etc. The essay endeavored, in a Sisyphean way, to remove the obstacles — condescension and elitism among them — that had historically impeded solidarity between working-class people and the PMC. The essay concluded that building a mass movement which seeks to "alter society in its totality" would depend "on the coming together of working-class insight and militancy with the tradition of socialist thinking kept alive by 'middle-class' intellectuals."

That mass movement never materialized, and Ronald Reagan ascended to the presidency. But Ehrenreich worked to keep socialist thinking alive. She did so with her journalism and her activism. In 1983 she became co-chair — alongside Michael Harrington — of Democratic Socialists of America.

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The only thing I've read of Ehrenreich's is Nickled and Dimed, but I think I am going to check out some of her earlier work, now. Also of note from the article, an influential coalition of conservative students, academics and politicians in North Carolina have labelled Ehrenreich a "radical socialist" and the book Nickled and Dimed as "a classic Marxist rant... [that] mounts an all-out assault on Christians, conservatives and capitalism."

[ 01 December 2003: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

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Also of note from the article, an influential coalition of conservative students, academics and politicians in North Carolina have labelled Ehrenreich a "radical socialist" and the book Nickled and Dimed as "a classic Marxist rant... [that] mounts an all-out assault on Christians, conservatives and capitalism."

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Originally posted by windymustang:
Your website shocked me terra1st. I don't understand what you are trying to do. The info I linked on had a lot of man HATING in it, I presume since you are in a heterosexual relationship either you or your partner is a man. How can you promote hatred of men?

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exactly which part promoted hatred of men?

the feminist literature?

the pro-choice stuff?

the stuff about concensus decision making?

or was it the union literature?

the environmentalist stuff can get a little out there, but it's all got it's redeming qualities...

I don't know what you are thinking of with that statement....

(PS, I'm a straight guy married to a wonderful woman - and we've got 2 boys.)

[ 01 December 2003: Message edited by: terra1st ]