Time For The Fourth...

It's interesting to note that social class, even to this very day in the UK, still has a hierarchical nomenclature still spoken and written about seriously. We as a population are still being pigeonholed by the media, the commentariat and the authorities as falling into one of two major societal divisions, each of which is further divided into sub-classes. Even now in the twenty-first century, you will be placed into one of the following categories according to this arcane and frankly bonkers system: A, B, C1; C2, D, E. You can see where this thinking both comes from and where its natural conclusion is. Roughly translated this equates to the rather more direct and offensive hierarchy of Aristocracy, Upper Class, Upper Middle Class; Lower Middle Class, Working Class, Lumpen Proletariat, that prevailed well into the late twentieth century, and a mode of thinking which we had hoped been broken by now. Indeed the phrase 'economically inactive' still persists to replace ' the lumpen proletariat': which is even more inaccurate and misleading than the original Marxist term itself. Indeed, we persist in this mythology, with class divisions now still firmly in place, albeit from the more modern perspective of sheer wealth vs. the rest of us.

The sad fact is that it was always the case that wealth and the self-created privilege that maintained it was always the historical driver of the class structure. The glad fact is that via the struggles of the various Socialist movements of the last two hundred years or so [and much further back before 'socialism' itself was a thing], we have turned our backs [largely] on meek afrit deference to 'our betters', having realised that it's simply money and education that hold those demarcation lines between us. There was never any doubt that native intelligence, self-education and collective organisation would raise the 'lower' classes out of their abject situation. And it did; creating an equitable welfare state out of the chaos of wartime Britain, building on centuries of dogged determination to escape from 'given' history and to build a new, fairer future for the population.

The tragedy is that this improvement in living standards, health and welfare didn't reform people's thinking about their place in the world. It bizarrely reinforced the old order by the reintroduction of that 'order' to political power, and bringing 'aspiration' into the equation. When the Tories took the government in 1979, their 'new' society [sorry: according to Thatcher society didn't exist] was sold on the basis that we could all aspire to a better life [subtext 'social climbing', implying leaving behind others], despite the fact that life had been steadily improving for the 'lower' half of [actual] society for more than two decades. The myth that was actually being flogged was one of 'class mobility', a patrician gift of a change in status and an escape from a life [class] that was originally foisted upon the population by the ancient system of inherited privilege and the ruling classes themselves. Bread and bloody circuses all over again. They took back control and most people now have devolved back into a rather docile - in many cases actually supine - mode of thinking: hence the rise of the far right yet again in our history. Cultural 'certainties', militarism, 'national' identity, etc., etc., ad bloody nauseam. Again [blog posts passim] the fault lies with our generation in its failure to adequately educate our children and grandchildren in the lessons of history, and choosing rather to focus on 'aspiration' and spurious goals of 'social improvement', when the truth of a generalised, institutionalised socialism [not state communism] was staring us in the face: the very legacy that we owe to the many on whose shoulders we stand, now sadly betrayed by our apathy.