Middle Class Self Loathing

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
^ sounds a bit like my experience - called 'posh' at school, grew up, went to Uni, met people who are *properly* posh. Actually not so much the uni I went to (although there were some pretty privileged people there, many were overseas students, and while filthy rich, nonetheless not really part of the class tradition peculiar to this country) but after meeting my girlfriend, who studied in Oxford and at one of the older/richer/snobbier colleges, at that.

In fact her experience was like mine but moreso, as her accent is if anything a bit plummier than mine (and I could plausibly present a programme on Radio 3) but that's just a result of her parents both having Oxbridge educations. But they were both useless with money and the family was often pretty much on the breadline while she and her siblings were growing up and she's not had any financial help whatsoever since she was 18, but has got used to people assuming she's loaded because of her accent. Which is an odd example of a class 'privilege' actually being potentially a disadvantage.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
The piece that really sticks in my mind was him writing about feeling his heart swell with working-class pride at the sight of obese mums passing their obese kids pies and burgers through the gates of a school at lunch break, thereby sabotaging that awful middle-class do-gooder Jamie Oliver’s healthy school meals programme. It’s like, following the collapse of heavy industry and most kinds of traditional manual labour, the best way for working-class people to express their class identity is by eating as shitty a diet as possible to spite ‘do-gooders’? It just struck me as amazingly puerile and nihilistic – and, quite frankly, snobbish. As if it’s somehow appropriate for working-class people to eat mass-produced crap. The sort of attitude a cartoon toff might have, but with the value judgement reversed – just like zhao used to do all the time with race stereotypes.

(BTW, I totally get the Jamie hatred. I think his healthy school meals crusade is largely earnest but his insistence on aping the diction and mannerisms of a 1950s cockney barrow boy despite having had a reasonably privileged upbringing is extremely grating.)

That isn't what he ACTUALLY said though is it?

K-Punk said:
Fearnley-Whittingstall exemplifies that combination of charm and bullish certainty which is characteristic of the English Master Class at their most winning and and their most irritating. Describing himself on the One Show as 'a posh boy with a farm' Fearnley-Whittingstall is more ingenuousness about his class background than Jamie Oliver, which meant that the resistance and class resentment his 'Chicken Out' campaign faced was different to that encountered by Oliver when he took on the problem of school dinners a few years back. Oliver was famously resisted by parents who passed fast food through the fences of schools that had converted to more nourishing meals, but whether this was an act of class defiance to bourgeois do-gooding or an act of entrepreneurialism, or some combination of both, was unclear.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I didn't say that's what he wrote, I said that's what stuck in my head. o_0

Either it was a different piece of his that I was thinking of, or I've mixed that article up with something written by someone else entirely. My bad.
 
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vimothy

yurp
Angela Nagle, The Scourge of Self-Flagellating Politics:

From the gospel according to Luke, “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” If we are to take Luke at his word, then there must be plenty of heavenly exaltation in store for Jeopardy contestant turned social justice columnist caricature Arthur Chu who once tweeted: “As a dude who cares about feminism sometimes I want to join all men arm-in-arm & then run off a cliff and drag the whole gender into the sea.” Or for those who, on the morning following the election of Donald Trump, took to social media to publicly humble themselves to their followers, expressing their intense inward-turned shame and self-hatred. Typical of the style, New Statesman editor Laurie Penny wrote: “I’ve had white liberal guilt before. Today is the first time I’ve actually been truly horrified and ashamed to be white.” Others expressed their self-disgust at being straight white males and assured followers that while they of course did not vote for Trump, merely looking like those who did required some readily self-inflicted penance.
 

Benny B

Well-known member
Lucky laurie penny's got her 'genderqueer' identity to fall back on when she's not feeling marginalised enough eh?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I think it's reasonable to consider middle class identity politics as a product of middle class self loathing though?

I think that's where its worst excesses of puritanical denouncement come from...
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
"If you think you are white, there's no hope for you."

Is that from "The Fire Next Time" or Ta Nehisi-Coates? The Baldwin book is full of wise quotables that haven't aged at all: "People can cry much easier than they can change" the one I recall immediately.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I think it's reasonable to consider middle class identity politics as a product of middle class self loathing though?

I think that's where its worst excesses of puritanical denouncement come from...

Its truly a weak hand to play there, because how do you reach a point of the middle-class being willing dismantlers of class, if that's what your goal is, without a recognition that their beneficial status has been at the expense of others? Identity/Role Conflict manifests via being estranged from one's supposed community, and that can fall along lines of race/sexuality/gender/faith and so on. As one's middle-class is not necessarily equatable to another individual's middle-class, this weighing of social positioning creates the insane tension of "I want to be further, I can't get further, how can you say I've come so far?"

The inherent problem of Identity Politics is solipsism and its tie into one's desire to protect one's self, and such a paradox is not inherently beholden to the middle-classes; puritanical denouncement can come from the lower classes in reactionary conservatism and fear and the middle-classes who weigh the liberalist politics with their guilt lash back, and the endless cycle persists.

To tie the worst aspects of identity politics to the middle class when they're IF ANYTHING a problem tied into people's individual battle against their sense's of 'self' (not to get into psycholo-drama), leads to the notion that in attacking our identities sociologically... Not even necessarily the ones we're upholding consciously, but the mantles we're presumed to take upon ourselves, that others whom are our peers accept... we're striving for an authenticity in the wake of not having the authenticity of victimhood.

No doubt there's an inherent sloppiness when people use "____-splaining", "____ privileges" as ways to invalidate something along moralistic lines. But that comes from a failure of education either on the source or the recipient, the recognition that these concepts are being used as tools in practice as verbal/logistical Self-Defense Mechanisms rather than demonstrations of critique. If you tie that issue to the Middle-Classes, evidences of guilt as there may be, you risk painting the issue of these identity politics as a "Middle Class Issue" which puts us into the corny idea of the issue of identity being a 'luxury'.

Not saying you yourself or anyone in the board is arriving at that conclusion. Just that its a path I see rounding back into older BAD arguments in how it erases the questions of identity of anyone in the lower classes who might be reactionary and self-loathing at any stage or in some direction.
 

luka

Well-known member
To breed an animal with the right to make promises is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?
;)
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Its truly a weak hand to play there, because how do you reach a point of the middle-class being willing dismantlers of class, if that's what your goal is, without a recognition that their beneficial status has been at the expense of others? Identity/Role Conflict manifests via being estranged from one's supposed community, and that can fall along lines of race/sexuality/gender/faith and so on. As one's middle-class is not necessarily equatable to another individual's middle-class, this weighing of social positioning creates the insane tension of "I want to be further, I can't get further, how can you say I've come so far?"

The inherent problem of Identity Politics is solipsism and its tie into one's desire to protect one's self, and such a paradox is not inherently beholden to the middle-classes; puritanical denouncement can come from the lower classes in reactionary conservatism and fear and the middle-classes who weigh the liberalist politics with their guilt lash back, and the endless cycle persists.

To tie the worst aspects of identity politics to the middle class when they're IF ANYTHING a problem tied into people's individual battle against their sense's of 'self' (not to get into psycholo-drama), leads to the notion that in attacking our identities sociologically... Not even necessarily the ones we're upholding consciously, but the mantles we're presumed to take upon ourselves, that others whom are our peers accept... we're striving for an authenticity in the wake of not having the authenticity of victimhood.

No doubt there's an inherent sloppiness when people use "____-splaining", "____ privileges" as ways to invalidate something along moralistic lines. But that comes from a failure of education either on the source or the recipient, the recognition that these concepts are being used as tools in practice as verbal/logistical Self-Defense Mechanisms rather than demonstrations of critique. If you tie that issue to the Middle-Classes, evidences of guilt as there may be, you risk painting the issue of these identity politics as a "Middle Class Issue" which puts us into the corny idea of the issue of identity being a 'luxury'.

Not saying you yourself or anyone in the board is arriving at that conclusion. Just that its a path I see rounding back into older BAD arguments in how it erases the questions of identity of anyone in the lower classes who might be reactionary and self-loathing at any stage or in some direction.

I'm a bit taken aback that you've replied at such length to a one-liner of mine and I'm afraid I can't do this justice right now but will try to soon!

I think for me the key thing is that middle class people shouldn't be leading the struggle for a better world anyway. Sure they should take part in it. And perhaps yes, some psychic gymnastics have to take place before that happens. But they should not use their privilege to push to the front of the queue and dominate struggles, meetings, discourse.

Sometimes it is sufficient to say "how can I help?" instead of loudly braying that you're ALSO oppressed because you a genderqueer jewish anarchist (who happened to go to public school and Oxbridge) like someone who has been mentioned upthread.
 
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