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6 hours ago
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In his critical reflections on the Marxist definition of the working class (My life in class limbo: am I working class or insufferably bourgeois?, 2 April), Daniel Lavelle wonders how a cleaner and a Premier League footballer could be deemed as part of the same class. They shouldn’t be, because they’re not the same class. Unlike the cleaner, the Premier League footballer doesn’t depend on his wage to survive, because he has probably accumulated enough wealth to do so even if he stops playing football tomorrow.
Being working class is not simply about selling your labour, but having to sell your labour to make ends meet. If you have other sources of income that could cover that (profits, savings, inheritance, dividends, rent), then you are not working class. It’s less about, therefore, whether you own the means of production or not, and more about whether you own the means of self-reproduction or not.
Interestingly, Lavelle himself comes closer to a Marxist standpoint towards the end of the text: “I have come to believe that you are either making money from your work or you are making it from someone else’s. It’s that simple.” It really is; and that simplicity can come in handy to researchers of class, making it easier to operationalise and measure. But it can also be helpful for the left, for at least two reasons: first, it allows for a more inclusive and broader conception of the working class as a political subject around which a project of social transformation can be built; second, it undercuts the “cultural” understandings of class that enable rich people like Alan Sugar to – as Lavelle correctly points out – pass off as working class when they’re nothing of the sort. In an age of populist politicians who often perform this “down to earth” act, recovering the materialist approach to class seems particularly relevant.
Dr Vladimir Bortun
Lecturer in politics, St John’s College, University of Oxford
Daniel Lavelle’s discussion of class rings true for me. I have a degree, am a homeowner and own a car. I also work in the gig economy in event hospitality and write – both are mercurial jobs. My family were all working class, though my parents had professions (aviation engineer and scientist). Furthermore, one of my parents was from the Soviet Union and the other lived abroad most of their adult life, and they simply didn’t believe in, or refused to acknowledge, Britain’s class system; indeed, only of late have I decided I must be middle class.
However, in my job I work at many affluent houses with many Oxbridge kids (as their part-time work) who have had everything handed to them. Catering a £30,000-plus 18th birthday party, where the parents hobnob and the children talk like adults, is a common occurrence in these circles. By seeing this, I understand that something far more deeply ingrained exists in British society. There is no ladder to the echelons of these elites; you’re either in or out.
What the article doesn’t bring up is how sex adds to class disparity (eg unequal pay for women, who still take on the majority of unpaid domestic labour). For me, it is only my partner’s tech job that allows me to thrive and not just survive.
As the article concludes, most of us are in it together. However, on the train, squeezed in like sardines, you won’t glimpse the elite in first class. They’re in private cars, in business class jetting around the globe, working from spacious home offices in mansions unseen. Their kids are either getting a first-class education behind fancy old walls, trekking across Asia, or at their parents’ pied-à-terre on Lake Como.
K Dudley
Wallingford, Oxfordshire
Class has always played a part in my life, from my childhood in a prefab and then another council house to my current easy lifestyle. I have a home in England and another in France. I have a son who has an MA from Cambridge and I spent my own career as a computing lecturer – all very middle class, you might say. However, I have a husband who “dropped out” of a stressful career to work as a wood turner and neither of us is university educated.
We are property-rich, through our own entrepreneurial efforts, but income-poor. I still have a working-class accent and I still lack the easy confidence of my privately educated friends. In fact, I don’t really fit in any camp, but I know where my roots are. I know what has shaped the way I see the world and my politics. Maybe it is possible to change your class, but only by rethinking who you are and the values that shaped you.
It isn’t the superficial trappings of life that make a person working class or middle class. It is the upbringing and experiences from birth to adulthood that create the person you grow up to be. I can socialise with my middle-class friends, but I will never think like them. I will never see the world from the viewpoint of a privileged upbringing. Many of them think “working class” is an outdated concept. It is not. Working class is not whether you work for someone else who profits from your labour, and it has nothing to do with what job you do or whether you actually work. It is the circumstances you are born into that define who you are and how you think.
Rosemary Cordell
Churt Farnham, Surrey
I fully agree with Daniel Lavelle. I too have been obsessed with class all my life, having grown up on a council estate in the 1970s and being the daughter of a milkman and a mum who was a dinner lady. I went on to university to get a degree in economics and a master’s, only to be told at interviews “people like you don’t become solicitors” and “with your accent our clients wouldn’t trust you”. I went on to be a teacher and still am, but am in limbo class-wise, having nothing fully in common with either class.
Julie De la Cruz
London
