Class

OK I suppose this is a UK thing.
And it's 50% a joke and 50% serious.

What class do you think you are?

As a child I can remember my mother sitting me down and telling me we were "lower middle class".
We had a detached house in a village and i went to a private school on a scholarship place cos I was clever and my dad had lost his job.
i didn't get a degree and have been downwardly mobile ever since.
my grandads were a docker on my dad's side and an officer in the merchant navy on my mum's.

anyway, lower middle class.
posh people look at me in disgust because I have long hair/trainers.
people where i live (east london) think I am posh because I can talk articulately.
 

swears

preppy-kei
My dad's working class and grew up in Peckham. My mum's dad was a pro boxer, so she's quite posh but with working class roots. I grew up in a three-bedroom semi, which I think is the definition of lower-middle classness in the UK at least, went to a grammar school (the Wirral is one of the few places that still has them) so I can express myself reasonably clearly. I try to talk a bit more RP than when I was growing up because I think it sounds nice.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Mum/Dad lower middle class. Primary school pretty working class. Grammar school not so much. University even less so. Really didn't get on very well with the public school intake there... Um, I guess that makes me lower middle class then?

Question: Is class another hauntological entity in modern Britain? Only half erased, a spectral presence in all relations, but rarely, if ever spoken about in common discourse...
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
my family imigrated from China to the US in 1986. all 3 of us, me and my parents all lived in a tiny 1-bedroom apartment for several years before moving to a larger one where I could have my own bedroom. both mom and dad are PHD in quantum physics, top of the line scholars, but for those first few years before work-permits my mom was a maid/nanny for a rich family. now she is a lead research scientist at T.I. (texas instruments not the rapper), and they own a medium sized house in the 'burbs. for me public school all the way until art college, which I got almost full scholarship for (which I lost after the first year but that's another story).

so don't know what I am? is imigrant its own class? I guess I come from the lower class. but with history of higher education.
 
This is makng me well nosey...

Swears, who was your grandad the boxer?

Zhao, how does the education system work in China? Can anyone get a pHD if they have the ability or is there an elite who have access to higher education? Do you have to pay for it?

How did you get from China to America?
Are we talking mainland or Hong Kong? I am very ignorant and want to be taught but I imagine it is hard to get enough money to leave mainland China for most people.

Sorry for my ignorance.

When I was a teenager in the UK everyone got free higher education and a grant to help pay for living expenses. That is gone now, you have to borrow money and pay fees.
 

swears

preppy-kei
My grandad was a guy called Stan Rowan, died about ten years ago, was quite successful for a few years after WW2.
 

nomos

Administrator
i know (in part from being on this board for quite a while now) that class operates in britain as it does nowhere else. i don't think i'll ever grasp all of its nuances and codes. but in my 1st/3rd gen. canadian case: my mom and dad both grew up working class. their parents were depression era farmers on one side and proper slavic peasants (half of them) on the other. my parents went to uni and eventually found 'professional' jobs. so the trajectory of my youth had a lot to do with this very self-conscious transition from that background into a firmly middle class position. lots of 'not fitting in anywhere' issues, etc.
 
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tht

akstavrh
Question: Is class another hauntological entity in modern Britain? Only half erased, a spectral presence in all relations, but rarely, if ever spoken about in common discourse...

there is an abundance of discourse that's hardly sublimated, and even in metonymy it's commonly and acutely understood

and i think it's not just jamie t-oliver fucks who try to disguise the signifiers, sometimes i find myself talking in several slightly different accents in the same conversation with people who don't know me (so they don't get any closer!)
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
I grew up middle class of some sort, parents were both journalists, coming from working class Scotland and Hong Kong and succeeding on scholarships.

I kinda now think that what class you are is who your friends are.

And while we're on the subject of class, NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR!!

QUEENcopycopy.jpg
 
what does that mean then?

i looked up sublimated and metonymy but I still can't get any meaning from your first sentence.
was it a joke to illustrate how different ways of speaking set you apart from others?


don't know where your quote is from but the idea that class is "only half-erased" is silly. class has not at all been erased.


i was amazed the other day in the street i heard a woman angrily correct her little boy for dropping a t.
i was also shocked because he used "may" instead of the more common (and strictly incorrect) "can" which is pretty rare to hear these days at least in my circles.
it is rare to hear very well-spoken people unless you turn on radio 4. this woman and her kids sounded like the queen.
 
my last post as directed at THT, not mistersloane.

ms, i think you are quite right about class war with a small c and w, but the actual organisation have always seemed very silly to me, jumping straight into the trap set for them of thinking of themselves in terms of class.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
my last post as directed at THT, not mistersloane.

ms, i think you are quite right about class war with a small c and w, but the actual organisation have always seemed very silly to me, jumping straight into the trap set for them of thinking of themselves in terms of class.

I can't take Class War seriously either, but their stickers are the bollocks.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Class War is still going?!

That's hilarious. Me and my mate's used to read it as teenagers, like a political version of Viz. Can't believe thy're still out there.
 

mms

sometimes
my mums working class with aspirations and my dads lower middle class.
i was brought up a few years on an estate before my parents bought a house, that was later repossesed when my dad lost his job. Both my parents live in places where the council pays the rent, my mum 2 bed semi which belongs to a private landlord, my dad lives in council accommodation. neither have worked for a long time in a long term job, my mum was very ill and can't work and my dad was pretty much told he was too old to do any jobs he went for.

i got a scholarship to a private school for music after my mum paid for me to have singing lessons, this was after i sung in the school nativity play and people were well impressed, which confuses things a bit class wise, but it was a cut price education a quarter of the fees.

my brother is a tree surgeon, he cuts down trees for a living and my sister works in next at the moment.
i'm the most middle class in my family as i own a place with my girlfriend and have an office job and went to a private school for a while, then uni so i guess this is how people would see me, personally i couldn't give a fuck.

i've got mixed feelings about the private school i went to, it was much better than the state school i went to after but it was unequal, richer kids got priviledges. saying that when i went back to a state school after the private school kids treated me with a great deal of inverted snobbery.
 
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polystyle

Well-known member
The *hitty thing was going from what we all felt was some US 'upper middle class' mode and falling on down to a lower mid class thing !.
With father being in the Pentagon (Hd of communications in Vietnam war, working on then secret 'Monet') , mom gone early on (brain hemo) and just my younger brother and myself dealing, we had our big suburban house in Vienna, N Va (old claim to f was 'home of AOL')
, piano in side room and not at all horrible.
But being it was the '70's , Dad went and remarried and choose to follow his new wife into ...
the 'Mall photo business' (used to be 'the family' would go and get their photos done , duff blue backgrounds , traveling from area hotel to hotel for wkend photo sessions, little real $).
Bam, there we went down the tube.
Sure, the new huge house in Oakton (another N Va. suburb) was grand ,
neighbors all x- CIA, NSA , classmate's dad wrote this big expose on his former's the CIA, big woods in the back and side to go and get lost in , camp out in getting into all kinds of good mischief.
But adding a Southern Baptist and her three sons ('tabs' on back of collar shirts, penny loafers types) into our mix was, well not a great move !
Hollowed out the bank account , had them depending on the veggie garden and borrowing part of my 'moving to NYC' $ a few weeks before I was set to light out for the territories.
Class anger ? ... 'private war' too !
 

Leo

Well-known member
facinating how things change, sometimes in such small increments over long stretches of time that you don't notice until you stop, step back and reassess where you are now versus 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc.

and other things don't change at all. my parents were born during the depression, and that mentality stayed with our family well after my dad got a decent blue-collar job, bought a house and raised the kids. and it stays with me as well, to this day. by the time i was 27 years old, i probably earned more than my dad ever did and have continued on an ok financial path, but i still feel obligated to eat leftovers, take the subway instead of taxis, turn off the lights and down the heat when not in the room, buy new clothes only when the old ones start to fall apart, etc. i think the $$ i splurge on music is the only thing that would upset my mom!

i find this depression mentality is at the root of most everything i think and do...not a matter of being cheap per se, but instead, as i like to say, "fiscally conservative." i'll spring for a european vacation or new computer, yet can't bring myself to pay $1.09 for a can of tuna fish if there's a different brand for $.89.
 

Chris

fractured oscillations
I started out lower middle-class, but I was raised with an upper-class level of education and sensiblility. My father's a Lutheran pastor, but an ex-hippie, liberal-intellectual descended from poor German immigrant roots. Since his parent's generation though, his family have been well-educated and upwardly-mobile (his mother is now married to a retired Oxford philosophy professor, she herself is a writer). My mother is of Appalacian descent (hillbilly). Her father started out dirt-poor, living in the mountains of Kentucky, became a bluegrass musician, and ended up well-off in his later years raising a family in a small country town. In contrast to the standard Kentucky tradition of being plain-spoken and humble, my mom, like my dad, got her Masters degree, and comes across as well-educated and upper-class, without a trace of an accent. She's now a librarian. Currently they live in Slovakia where my dad teaches religious history and my mom's helping re-organize Bratislava's main library.

My parents were usually relatively poor until later on as I was growing up, but mostly due to having to balance their education and vocations. As a pastor in training, my father's job required us to move constantly; I've lived in "good" and "bad" neighborhoods, in Germany, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Ohio, a farm in Nebraska (next to a small country church), and California, so I feel pretty rootless (the only connection in all of this was that my dad usually preached for German immigrant congregations, so there was sort of a Deutsche undertone growing up).

Despite sometimes living in lower middle-class areas, my parents hung out in intellectual circles, and I had the typical left-y, hippie-parent upbringing; public radio, liberal politics, lots of travelling and nature hikes, 60s music, folk, and bluegrass (my parents both have perfect pitch, which I inherited, my mom plays autoharp and has won awards at autoharp conventions and folk festivals LOL). I myself went to public schools, sometimes in middle-class areas, sometimes lower middle-class... in which case I sometimes got shit for coming across as educated (especially in California), so I struggle with the ambivalence of both admiring the working class and somewhat resenting them for their aversion to education. I was an art major in college, but dropped out due to drug problems, as well as for the realization that most art careers are in advertising, which I really want nothing to do with. I'm currently going back, probably to be a teacher, while producing, playing in bands, and working on the side. Kind of a starving artist I guess (well, fiscally lower middle-class for now), but definitely without a working-class mentality.

Unless you're particularly rich or poor in America though, class seems a bit more vague out here...
 
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swears

preppy-kei
re: class in usa

Doesn't the states have an upper class of snobby "old-money" families that aren't really gentry, but close?
 

alo

Well-known member
Class Borders

I think here in the UK we are experiencing the Land of Diminishing Returns.
Looking at most of the British posts here, and my experience in the wider world, the norm seems to be a descending from working class parental roots into lower middle class upbringing, and mine was no different.

My upbringing was probably made slightly more middle class by its location in the countryside- quite idyllic really; we spent most summers on the village football pitch as my mates Dad was the groundskeeper. (We used to take real pride in the quality on our nets- Always tight as possible, European style.) But then in the same village there was a huge cement works, with all the kids running about in the piles of dry cement and the polluted river, so there was a working class industrial shadow, but overall a cultural mix which always proffered the possibilty of escape. My comprehensive for example was mixed up quite a bit: Middleclass kids with horses, lower mid class kids and kids from the town estate all together.

Its funny how things have changed. In the last 10 years or so, my separated parents have become quite comfortable, although not without hard work, my Dad in particular does some punishing shifts at the frozen food factory where he works. However, as has been well documented in other sources, social mobility is starting to dry up, mainly due to the consolidating of wealth perpetrated by market fundamentalism, and exarberated by the lack of housing, (parents done well out of that) which has essentially created a widening chasm of wealth.

When it comes to ambition, i think a lot of our generation made the mistake of believing the: "You can be anything you want, go to University and make the best of yourselves" educational mantra of the 1990's. Now a lot of us, if not most of us, are stuck with 15 grand unpayable debts, essentially useless degrees, and the prospect of applying for all of the same cafe/call centre/ bar jobs that we could of applied for before University.

Now I live in Cornwall, which despite its natural beauty and heritage, is one of the poorest places in Europe, and has to be kept afloat economically by donations from the EU. Because of the huge influx of tourists every year, the disparity in wealth is often shoved in peoples faces (particularly from Londonites and yacht owners) and it is becoming more apparent that locals here are at the sharp end of the free market, with the second home phenomenon condemning most to a subpar British existence. (average Cornish wage: £9,500, average national wage: £22,000)

This pseudo-Labour Government has rolled over its social tradition to corporate business and let a market fundamentalism hold sway in which the obvious results is a widening of the economic gap.
In essence, the class lines may have changed over the last 20 years, but the ladder is now being pulled up due the consolidation of wealth.
Luckily/interestingly/guiltily for me, my girlfriend has been due a massive inheritance from her family that had early fingers in supermarket pies (sold the business to Lord Sainsbury)
and links to Abraham Lincoln. Because of that we are jumping onto 'dry land' with a house.
Very very weird and morally hypocritical on my part.
 

Chris

fractured oscillations
Doesn't the states have an upper class of snobby "old-money" families that aren't really gentry, but close?

Yeah... there are the political elite and big oil families and whatnot, but they're so far removed from the rest of the population... and that old, stodgy or preppy image has very little visibility or influence on pop culture (except when rappers like Jay Z dress preppy). If anything, Hollywood celebrity culture is the more visible elite and aristocracy here.

I actually live in a pretty upper-class sector of Orange County at the moment (which is one big, never-ending, oceanic suburb... it's hell, really), and if anything, the rich kids around here try to emulate lower-class hip hop culture. The upper-echelons of suburbia do that is. Metropolitan rich kids are more hipster-y... that whole spoiled, Vice Magazine-reading contingent.
 
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