Several months ago, the political-science academic and newspaper columnist Eoin O’Malley referred to a high-profile case of people fleeing mandatory hotel quarantine as having probably “elicited a lot of tutting in many middle class mouths”. Despite the absurdity of the criticism (as a university lecturer and the son of a distinguished politician O’Malley isn’t the most obvious representative of the proletariat), the remark puzzled me, largely because I’ve no idea what “middle class” means in contemporary society. Who, I wondered, is middle class and who is working class, and what are the moral implications that each label entails?
Historians Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, argue that the middle class is broadly defined by the possession of capital that allow its possessors to escape the absolute want and dependence of the working/lower classes, but lacking the security or freedom of the upper classes. The English sociologist Mike Savage, also influenced by Bourdieu, elaborates on this idea in his book “Social Class in the 21st Century”, and divides capital into three distinct subgroups: economic, cultural, and social. This three-way division is then explored at length by Savage who ties capital to knowledge: economic capital includes qualifications and experiences that improve earnings, while social and cultural capital are different forms of knowledge in the sense that they relate to who you know personally or what you know about broader society. In other words, capital relates to little more than a capacity to exploit educational opportunity in its various guises. Given the post war expansion of free (or heavily subsidised) secondary education in western Europe, contemporary discussions about class thus largely seem to be centred around certain attitudes to education rather than any concrete demographic signifiers (interestingly, Ruane, Todd, and Savage all acknowledge the vagueness of the concept in contemporary society, despite analysing it in depth). To put it another way, are class differences today little more than a variation on the simplistic sports science distinction between responders and non-responders, with the middle classes best understood as those most amenable to increased training and conditioning, while the working classes are best understood as those who aren’t?
Have class distinctions always been so fuzzy? In Richard Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy”, his work of “autobiographical social anthropology” about his childhood growing up in Hunslet in Leeds in the 1930s, there is a clear sense in which being working class involves more than just an attitude to education. Some of the more obvious signifiers of working-class status that Hoggart identifies are those of being tenants rather than homeowners, being paid weekly, being employed for labouring or manual work, having very few (if any) savings, being frequently reliant on short term credit, and not having attended full time education beyond the age of 15. Essentially, the picture painted is one where absolute want and dependence usually became realities if the man of the house is not providing (either through choice or incapacity), with the horrifying conclusion to such a predicament usually involving the family unit being broken up upon entering a workhouse. As the family was for most people at that time the basic unit of social organisation it was hardly melodramatic for people potentially exposed to such fates to have regarded them with genuine existential fear. In such situations, every day was fraught with risk, with the possibility of serious injury or chronic alcoholism taking hold being entirely realistic bogeymen.
As a result of these realities, Hoggart argued that this exposure to the risk of absolute want and dependence did create distinctive attitudes. Significantly, these were heavily linked to education, with working class people developing a set of attitudes to cope with their continued exposure to the risk of want and dependence if they failed to gain access to extended education (extended education generally entitling them to enter salaried, non-manual employment). The foreclosure of this possibility (usually by some form of academic selection) resulted in the development of a sense in which they were a class apart, marked by their limited educational attainments and a suspicion of broad abstraction, as well as their speech and dress habits.
Ultimately, Hoggart argued that the consequence of this social sorting was that a class emerged which came to regard itself as an “us” that was at odds with a “them”, with the relationship between the two characterised by mistrust: a “mistrust accompanied by a lack of illusions about what “They” will do for one, and the complicated way – the apparently unnecessarily complicated way – in which ‘They’ will order one’s life when it touches them.” In other words, this class relation was defined as a power imbalance between those who wielded authority (usually that of the state) and those who instinctively distrusted this authority. As Alison Hanley puts it in her introduction to “Uses…”: “What ‘they’ have going for them, and which others are denied, is a sense of belonging to the public and national as well as the domestic and local real, of having a voice that will be heard, of being able to explain oneself to someone who might cut you dead if you don’t do it correctly.”
But is this conceptual framework (now of pensionable vintage) still relevant, as Hanley argues? The paramount importance of the family and dread of the workhouse are both now difficult concepts for many people to fully engage with (myself included). More prosaically, the material signifiers identified by Hoggart no longer seem quite as distinctive as they once did. Consider just two of these: third level education participation rates in the West have risen dramatically over the past 30 years, while rates of home ownership have generally been falling (from a very high level) during the same period. Beyond this, Hanley’s sense that there are still many significantly sized communities in the West deprived of a meaningful voice or collective identify seems difficult to sustain in the age of social media. Voices that might once have effectively been suppressed by civic society leaders and newspaper editors have now found homes and formed communities online under the blithe supervision of the digital leviathans. Indeed, the fieldwork completed for Savage’s book shows that it’s clear that many of those at the bottom of the capital holding distribution are intensely self-aware about their position within this hierarchy and are fully aware of its implications. Considering all the above, it seems reasonable to ask: has the general increase in consumption and improvement in living standards since (at least) the 1950s undermined the utility of “working class” as an explanatory concept?
Given how old his book is it seems obvious that it would be foolish to use Hoggart’s signifiers as a criterion for determining who is and isn’t working class in contemporary society. The problem though is that, as Hoggart’s description shows, it’s a concept freighted with deep meaning in the sense that it explained much of how politics was organised in many countries in the west. If the working class as an idea was previously synonymous with those who lacked significant economic, cultural or social capital, what happens to the concept of “working class” when education levels and home ownership levels change so dramatically, as they have done over the past 40 years. Obviously, it might be argued that “working class” still means something since, as Savage shows, there are those who are still deeply impoverished in all those types of capital. Against that though, Savage’s work shows that the numbers actually meeting that criterion are quite low, and certainly not sufficient to build broad based political programmes that could potentially rival those of years gone by.
It seems to me that there has been a massive increase in the number of articles and books dealing with the theme of “class” identities over the past five years. As far as I can tell though, few writers engaging with such themes seem to notice just how slack the basic concept is: everyone seems comfortable with using terms like middle class and working class, but no one seems able to offer definitions that connect these terms with their past functions as useful explanations of political allegiance. In the absence of such definitions, it seems odd that these labels still have such purchase. The view expressed by a former teacher in Savage’s book, that class is now less hierarchical and more exclusionary, might explain some of their popularity, so that class labels are now for many little more than terms of abuse or approbation to be thrown around with abandon on social media (think “boomer” or “snowflake”). As a concept for explaining contemporary society class is both hugely emotive and very slippery (this no doubt explains its appeal to both professional and amateur opinionators). In contrast, it was historically invaluable for politicians and reformers as a concept in explaining the evolution of western society, . What a pity that the opinionators seem to have a monopoly on its use these days.