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This is really interesting, especially the "If I'm not rich I must be poor" mentality.
Like in theatre, because a lot of middle-class people have chosen a sector with a lot of financial precarity, they feel further away from their peers who went into law or finance. https://twitter.com/rosie_col_/status/1353640798009630721
Like in theatre, because a lot of middle-class people have chosen a sector with a lot of financial precarity, they feel further away from their peers who went into law or finance. https://twitter.com/rosie_col_/status/1353640798009630721
So they sense a closeness to the financial precarity of the working-classes and co-opt the identity. What they're saying is they experience financial precarity, but they're doing in a way that's clumsy and centring themselves.
I think shared experiences of immediate financial precarity is something the WC and MC can collaborate on, and organise around, but it also has to recognise differences in safety nets and background.
Really my gen, who went to school under Tony Blair complicated things even further because our entire young identities were largely a forced assimilation into the middle-classes but without any of the financial background or safety net.
So, often people try and invalidate my working-class identity because I use big words, and I work in theatre. But, that's just another way that class oppression happens, to invalidate the voices that have found a seat at the table because we don't present as the MC expect us to.
Middle-class gatekeepers fawn over "real working-class" artists (people who largely present as either very post-industrial or very "urban" - not my word) because their saviour complex says that negates their privilege more.
But really, as soon as those people are forced to assimilate into middle-class markers with those opportunities, they are discarded. BUT, their class background never goes, they're not suddenly able to compete on a level playing field with MC peers.
It's like a talent development pipeline that aims to position middle-class people, who have an experience of precarity and don't consider themselves rich, at the centre of class struggle.
But that won't succeed because the middle-class have too much to lose (unlike the working-class) to be truly radical, and not enough privelege to do they want (like the rich) without consequence.
Obviously there are exceptions and I think the three-tier class system is nearly useless now but...yeah...let's get better at language.
