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The great WSC political poll

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    The great WSC political poll

    WornOldMotorbike wrote:
    These class distinctions and names really don't seem to add anything to the underlying discussion. In fact, they seem to detract from it.
    Hmm. There may be a case for that if what you mean is all that "I'm working class, me" stuff people sometimes go in for. But what's wrong with that isn't the notion of social class per se. I'm genuinely baffled by the fact that people think that notion is dispensible. In North America, the discourse seems full of proxy references to social class, yet no-one calls it what it is.

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      The great WSC political poll

      Norman Willis tried that 'look, I endearingly laugh at myself' trick during the strike, singing the very same song.

      'Hang! Hang! Hang the bastard!' was the chanted-in-unison-by-hundreds response to the question 'What shall we do with N. Willis?' at the end-of-strike social in Cannock Chase, however, so it obviously failed.

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        The great WSC political poll

        I was treating "class" in the old fashioned sense of the working classes and aristocracy and so on, which I still consider to be, broadly, redundant
        Yeah but no one else was, so what's your point. As has been pointed out, there is actually less economic/social mobility now than there was 30 years. The super-rich and their offspring are an 'overclass' with whom we rarely mingle and who - as we are seeing - clearly see themselves as able to do whatever they like.

        As long as so much work remains exploitative and badly paid, while others enrich themselves obscenely using the same system, class will exist. And politics will need to respond to that. And do so a lot better than it currently does, where it does the kayzer soze trick of trying to convince the world that it (class) doesn't exist. Because it suits the powerful to convince itself - and others - that it doesn't, while continuing to benefit from its existence.

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          The great WSC political poll

          At the risk of a mini-derailment, I think I need to clarify the Duke of Westminster stuff. It's not that I think it's cool that a hereditary toff has so much hereditary wealth; it's absolutely uncool. It's that he's merely a feudal vestige in what has long ceased to be a feudal dispensation. Class in Britain today is mostly not about Dukes.

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            The great WSC political poll

            Wa ayat al Urbi wrote:
            WornOldMotorbike wrote:
            These class distinctions and names really don't seem to add anything to the underlying discussion. In fact, they seem to detract from it.
            Hmm. There may be a case for that if what you mean is all that "I'm working class, me" stuff people sometimes go in for. But what's wrong with that isn't the notion of social class per se. I'm genuinely baffled by the fact that people think that notion is dispensible. In North America, the discourse seems full of proxy references to social class, yet no-one calls it what it is.
            Our class references are about what we consume (latte liberals), where we consume it (Starbucks vs. Tim Horton's) and where we live (tralier parks). We don't think of ourselves as being permanently tied to an identity because of who our parents were and where we grew up. We have social distinctions and a very definite hierarchy among them, but we also tend to think of them as being permeable in a way that the English do not think of classes as being permeable. And our party political system more or less reflects that - in both the US and Canada, the two main parties are coalitions whose voters are not easily pigeonholed on the basis of income or class.

            In actual fact, inter-generational income mobility is pretty low in the US - about what it is in the UK. It's much better in Canada, in part because of our immigration system which is unquestionably the best in the world. Socio-economic mobility amongst native-born Canadians is much, much lower.

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              The great WSC political poll

              Antonio Gramsci wrote:
              We don't think of ourselves as being permanently tied to an identity because of who our parents were and where we grew up.
              Sure, but I think that's pretty marginal, really, that "cred" stuff. It's a fairly new phenomenon; in former times, anyone rising out of the working class would generally have been anxious to shed all its trappings. It arises from a mixture of political leftism (the working class being, as it were, the good guys), nostalgia for a largely eclipsed proletarian culture and the whole youth culture, anti-Establishment dynamic.

              It's an interesting thing, and I'm not as convinced as you guys that it's a wholly bad thing, but it shouldn't be confused with any kind of real "class" discourse in politics.

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