Tag: class

In This Romance Novel The Bourgeois Hero Is Lectured By Two Proletarian Women On His Abandonment of His Parents Money (without redistributing it, which is bougie as fuck)

but also is ultimately a fantasy about being rescued from the proletariat by a bourgeois man, and given respectable status.

I suspect this mythology combined with the idea of the slut (something proletarian women are stigmatized as being) being the kind of woman you don’t marry, allows bourgeois men sexual access to proletarian women but precludes the possibility of social mobility through marriage.

IDK just a thought.

They also often serve as morality tales about the importance of maintaining the performance of respectability and propriety, but also often disseminate certain elements of proletarian culture and morality.

I’ve been trying to articulate why I think femininity is necessary to the revolution for a long time

and I think I finally got part of it, which is that masculinity is hegemonic in idealized and romanticized images of labor and is kind of the “bone” capital threw male labourers (especially white male) so they’d throw the rest of us under the bus.  

Like construing manual labor as romantic and the work of “real men” as well as using it as the hegemonic image of labor itself both denies women and other working class people in non-masculine fields the label “worker” (which can help undermine class consciousness and solidarity) and also serves as a way for male workers of this sort to see the bourgeois as insufficiently masculine and thus inferior so they can feel comfortable in their subordinate position (sort of)

Also keeping hegemonic masculinity and other power structures would prevent the formation of a truly revolutionary society, as if we say keep patriarchy, men will develop hierarchical power structures to maintain patriarchy, and if we keep white supremacy we’ll develop power structures to maintain it, which will lead to the recreation of a class system, I think.

BTW Downward mobility might be why I construct my identity

As very proudly proletarian, and in opposition to acceptable bourgeois femininity.  Like if I can’t wear where I’ve ended up as a badge of pride, I’m back to feeling like a failure for not managing to be college educated, middle class and respectable. 

I can’t be respectable, so I’ll be aggressively disrespectable.  Aspiration isn’t an option for me, I couldn’t do that with the deck stacked near perfectly for me, so I feel like that’s pretty much a “Not in a million years” for me now.

So like being aggressively “prole” and being proud of how hard I work, and of managing to keep struggling with shit even when life is scary and hard is kind of what I have in terms of an identity that allows me to keep functioning because it doesn’t make me feel like a failure for not achieving “more”

Anxiety Of Downward Mobility

Sometimes I think some of my upwardly mobile (going to college, with plans for careers in academia) peers in lefty stuff look down on me, because I’m downwardly mobile, and grew up with all these advantages but because of mental illness ended up dropping out of highschool and going to beauty school and then doing sex work because I couldn’t hack it as a makeup artist (partially because I was in a severely abusive relationship, and I was like 19 and on my own except for my abusive boyfriend and partially because heyo, I’m still mentally ill except now it’s worse cause trauma), sometimes it feels like “how dysfunctional and fucked up do you have to be to come from there and end up here.”

I know some people who’re educated and what not and choose to work prole jobs, and sometimes I think they also kind of look down on me because I haven’t read as much theory as them and because I didn’t “virtuously” choose this, I’m here because I have to be.

Like this isn’t a sob story or anything, but yeah, like I look at all the institutional advantage I had and wonder how much of a fuck up it makes me that I landed in this socio-economic bracket when I was so well positioned and like as much as I read and stuff, I often wonder why I couldn’t deal in school (I was homeschooled as a child which may not have helped) and feel like I’m not as smart or capable or together or something.

I know my parents love me, but I feel like a slime mold would be less of a crushing embarrassment and failure than I am sometimes.  

And yeah the money’s kind of okay now, but I worry about how many years of pretty enough I have left in me and then what the fuck will I do?

And then I wonder if I’m only a leftist because it lets me feel like what a fuck up I am isn’t my fault, and I’m not bad or lazy or what have you.

But then I remember that that’s capitalist “personal responsibility” wank, and that Marx said that the petite bourgeois will be absorbed by the proletariat and that no one deserves to have to worry about bills 

You are middle class though, no? Your parents are wealthy and you are a small business owner and homeowner with enough money for plastic surgery, many clothes and expensive perfumes. That is not working class under anyone’s definition.

lorire-dorable:

thepeacockangel:

lorire-dorable:

thepeacockangel:

My parents are wealthy, however I am one of three and by the time they go there won’t be much left. I’m self employed (sort of, technically I’m classed as an independent contractor by a company really ought to be my employer, I do not employ anyone and I do not own my own means of production ) and clothes and plastic surgery are business expenses, they are things I need to do to work.  It is similar to say truck drivers who receive what appears to be a very large paycheck but when you subtract maintenance, fuel and so on, it is much smaller. I make a Semi-okay living but there are a lot of expenses to doing what I do, equipment, having to look a certain way or I wouldn’t be able to work, and so on. Are dock workers working class? Cause they make like twice what I do a year and have benefits. As to perfume, I get a lot of gift cards.

Working class isn’t just about a paycheck, it’s a relationship to capital. Middle class is a silly and deceptive category, when Marx defined the bourgeoisie as the middle class it was as owners of the means of production, above proletarians and below the aristocracy. I do not make a living by owning stuff instead of doing stuff, I am not an employer or in any of the professions (doctor, lawyer etc). Sex workers are generally classed as lumpen proletariat.  Because I lack the capital to own the means of production, I am a proletarian. Because my work is unstable and has no (and in fact may have negative) social capital I am a lumpenproletarian.

This whole thing smacks of “BUT YOU’RE NOT REALLY POOR IF YOU OWN A CELLPHONE” logic (I’m not living in poverty but “You’re not working class if you own nice clothes and perfume” comes from the same logical place)

In terms of modern socioeconomic classes, a middle class person is someone who can save, invest, and get through a small crisis (suddenly needing a new laptop, taking a pet to the vet, missing ten days of work for the flu) without serious lifestyle disruption. Homeownership and the ability to afford surgery are definitely markers of being middle-class socioeconomically. There are a lot of cultural aspects to it, too, but it’s mostly the psychological and material benefits of relative stability that separate the middle class from the working class socioeconomically, if not in Marxist terms. 

I have 36 bucks in my bank account and haven’t been able to take a day off work since January of 2014 and I’m late on my mortgage because I had to get my wisdom teeth out and couldn’t cam in addition to doing phone work… so no, also like models of class that lump educated professionals in with secretaries are a bit silly.  Like I think you’re getting “Not poor” confused with “middle class” you can be working class without living in poverty.  Working class includes people living in poverty, but isn’t exclusively them.

Other people define it as those without college degrees (which is a silly definition if you ask me, but what do I know, I’m a highschool drop out)

I’m working class, not underclass or working poor.  There are more gradations than you’re using and this is silly.  Sex work can be defined as pink collar (it sure as shit ain’t white collar)

Zweig, Michael (2001). The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. New York, NY: IRL Press.ISBN 0-8014-8727-7.

Thomas B. Edsall (June 17, 2012). “Canaries in the CoaMine” (Blog by expert). The New York Times. 

I didn’t intend that to be a judgement on your class status, and I’m sorry if it came off that way. Having several markers of middle class status doesn’t mean you’re middle class, and obviously I wouldn’t know. I just wanted to point out the differences between the way Marx conceptualizes class and the way it functions currently as a social category as well as an economic one. There are so many factors in determining someone’s class status that it’s very possible a secretary who has access to intergenerational wealth is socioeconomically ‘above’ a recent law school grad with limited access to other sources of money and capital. The difference between working poor and working class is also murky. Like, I totally agree that there are a ton of gradations, and I also agree you can’t pinpoint someone else’s status without taking any number of factors into consideration. 

To me the modern definition of “middle class” feels like neo-liberal nonsense to get the more well off parts of the working class to align themselves with the petite bourgeois (which is of course against their class interests), and the line between working class and working class poverty is murky, and like I think that discussing the effects of poverty are absolutely vital, but I also think even better off working class people understanding themselves as working class and different from petit bourgeois and so on, and having more interests in common with the working poor is also vital.  To quote the IWW constitution:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.