13th July 2024:
It’s common today to hear of the term working class being applied to anyone who needs to sell their labour in order to survive. I’ve just come from an eco-socialist strategy conference call this morning where the term 'working class' was used and applied in exactly this way. I was even told to be mindful of my language when I said that Extinction Rebellion (XR) are a white middle class block. Apparently, I am not allowed to say that. No-one had a problem with describing them as white, but apparently using the word middle class like that is dangerous, divisive, not in the common interest, not politically correct…
Well, let me just say for the record: XR are a white middle class block. Totally. 100%. You couldn’t get a more white or more middle class group if you tried. I mean, I am not insutling them by saying that, anymore than I would be insulting Black Lives Matter by saying they are a black block. It's just a description of their socio-economic mix. That is why they are not interested in the class struggle, or in working class emancipation, or in helping the homeless, or in anything other than maintaining the current system but with a lower carbon footprint. That is the white middle class agenda, it is an elitist agenda, the agenda of a section of the controlling classes, and that is XR.
Some people even said that, because there were working class people within XR, that XR are therefore not a white working class movement. I mean, seriously? How many working class people are in XR - a dozen, a couple of hundred, maybe a thousand? I can tell you, from having been involved in XR since 2018 from one end of the UK to another, that describing XR as anything other than a white middle class block is ludicrous.
Anyhow enough about XR, the real point here is this: am I the only one deeply uncomfortable about the term working class being used to describe people who are middle class? It seems to me that something really important is being buried here when that happens, like a systemic form of oppression that has been ongoing for centuries is swept aside under populist notions of, basically, we’re all working class, apart from the ruling elites of course.
What about the discourse that points out that the middle class ARE the ruling elites - what happened to that analysis? I mean don’t get me wrong, I can understand why the term working class might be broadened to include the middle class in order to build a more popular coalition, but at the same time you can’t just ignore centuries of systemic oppression wrought by one class of society upon another. At least, if you want to build a genuinely free and cooperative society, then you can’t just bury oppression and pretend that it doesn’t exist anymore, that is not the way to build a real popular movement. The way to build a real popular movement is to challenge people to overcome their class privileges and the harmful ways they behave as a result of their class conditioning, and in that way bring about a rapprochement within the social body from which a more cohesive movement can be built, one built on genuine social relations and not ones that have been forcibly imposed. That is a whole different tactic and method of movement building than the cheap populist version that basically says, hey, let’s forget about doing all that hard work, it will take forever, let’s just forget about class prejudice and class oppression and widen the term working class to include everyone apart from a tiny few, who we’ll call the ruling class or the ‘1%’.
When you widen the term working class like this you basically bury centuries of class oppression, and you ignore the oppression that continues to be meted out by the middle class to the working class, and that includes all the middle class people in socialist movements who prefer to whitewash the class struggle and pretend they are not part of it, and that they are working class as well.
What total nonsense. That is not how you build a free and cooperative society. I mean, why don’t all the ethnic peoples get together and widen the term ethnic to include whites, like the far right groups such as Patriotic Alternative do. In their literature they even call white people ‘indigenous people’. Talk about abusing the word indigenous. I mean, their ancestors some time ago may well have been indigenous, but those alive today certainly aren’t.
The point I am making here is that there is a large section of society who seek to make oppression go away by re-branding it so that they now fit within the oppressed category, and who then make out that they are oppressed, as opposed to the real story which is that they are the oppressors, and have been for a very long time. Patriotic Alternative and their use of the word indigenous is an obvious example, biological males who re-brand themselves as women and then attack feminists as ‘terf’s’ is another, but a less obvious example - at least to most people it seems - is the use of the word working class to include the middle class, as people who also have to sell their labour to survive.
I’m reminded of a Bob Marley line from the song No Woman No Cry:
'Cause, 'cause,
'cause I remember
when we used to sit
In the government yard
in Trenchtown
Oba observing
the hypocrites
yeah
who mingle with the good people we meet, ooh
I feel like this line belongs perfectly with middle class people who re-brand themselves as working class and then join socialist or anarchist movements and basically seek to wipe away not only centuries of oppression their class has meted out, but also the imperial mannerisms and ways of behaving that they themselves continue to act out, and which continue to oppress others, and which continue to control our movements because most people are so habituated to them that they go unchallenged.
So let me outline a little here exactly why there are distinctions between the working class and the middle class, and why defining working class as anyone who has to sell their labour is totally wrong, and ignores the real class oppression.
The middle class are the class that are privileged above the working class because they are willing to oppress the working class on behalf of the upper class. As a result the middle class are rewarded with entitlements to land, property, higher wages, and are accorded higher cultural status or rank within society, which in turn gives access to health, education, protection by the police and courts, and so on. The middle class have lived off these privileges for centuries and these privileges have been gained at the expense of the rest of society, the working class, or more accurately, the ‘good people’, that is , people who do not live off the fruits of others and oppress others but earn an honest livelihood.
I used to be a teacher, a livelihood that is typically considered middle class, except that I wasn’t middle class, because I never did the work of the bosses. In fact I went out of my way to protect the children under my care from the target driven insanity of the school system that the bosses (government, headmaster, school governors, etc) insisted must be driven into the children and that children must be disciplined to obey. In other words, kids in school must be driven to get an ‘F’ rather than a ‘G’ in their math or english exam simply because that improves the school’s score, not because it was good for the children. It wasn’t good for the children, it was terrible for the children, totally abusive to them, and I refused to do it. As a result I was eventually fired.
So while I was a teacher, I was never middle class, because I refused to enact the will of the bosses and oppress others. As a teacher I considered that my first and most primary responsibility was the welfare of the children under my care, not following the orders of the bosses.
That is the difference between the middle class and the working class, at least historically. The one class exists to oppress an entire other class, and does so for its own personal gain. Look at where the middle class live, look at their salaries, look at their level of education, look at their privilege, which has come off the backs of brutal oppression.
I refuse to follow any dictate that says ‘we are all middle class’. We are not all middle class, and I will not cooperate with movements who wipe away class oppression like this.
In another job I had to fend off the sexual advances of a female boss who had decided she had the right to abuse me because I refuse to have sex with her. As a result she used her position to undermine me, disrespect me, to put me down and attack me, again and again, to the point where I had to leave my job and go back on benefits to protect myself. She is middle class, and those are the typical ways that middle class people behave - they abuse their power over others, they have privileges that have been legitimised throughout their lives, and they are narcissistic (how else can middle class privilege be justified, other than to place yourself above the common lot of humanity?). I have faced it time and again in the workplace and also within social movements, where it is rife, whether anarchist, socialist or mainstream. In fact, the worst class oppression I have ever faced was within Earth First! - a supposedly anarchist network but which is in fact a white middle class block of privileged individuals (I was involved some 12 years ago, so it may have moved on somewhat by now, but I doubt it).
Being middle class is not about having to sell your labour, and nor is it about the type of job you do. Rather, it is about whether you directly collaborate with authoritarian bosses to oppress others, and then enjoy the privileges that the authoritarian bosses award you as a result of that oppression. These are the ‘hypocrites that mingle with the good people’ within our movements today.
Personally, I’m not going to stay silent, though I realise I am in the minority. Class oppression is real, but today it is largely buried and where it isn’t, it is watered down to the point of being a pale shadow of what it once was. The middle class are part of the ruling class, and not part of the liberatory class, and if they seek to become liberatory instead of oppressive, then it will not be by pretending that they are working class, but by doing the hard work of overcoming their privileges and their conditioned and harmful ways of behaving. That is a process that will take a decade and longer, and these are the kind of movements we need to create. The problem is - are there any middle class who are actually prepared to do that?
I think the answer is no, not at present, at least not in any significant numbers, and while that is the case, let’s not let the hypocrites wipe away class oppression with their rebranding, but let’s instead make sure that the class struggle is kept real, and that the hypocrites do not get to ‘mingle with the good people’ until such time as they recognise their hypocrisy and change their ways.