From:
Category: Life
Date: 21 June 2005
I think we should re-classify this class because it’s losing its specificity. “Middle class” has become an insult more of originality than of economy. It’s almost guaranteed that most people bemoaning the middle classes are middle class themselves. It has just become a bi-word for boring or ‘conventional-alternative’, ‘conventionally-educated-with-conventional-value-system’. The middle-classes go to Wimbledon? Well so do working class people who can afford it (and a lot of people who self-identify as ‘working class’ earn more money than people who self identify as ‘middle class’, making it clear that this is not purely an economic category). The best Wimbledon seats are actually taken by the aristocracy. ‘Middle Class’ is a rather convenient term for artists and intellectuals who are always slagging off the middle classes, because they can’t bear to think that they may actually belong to this class, and might not even be particularly transgressive.
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