Hi Geof
"English working-class background "
Very interesting. What do you think is different between this social classes and the class system in France (which is vastly different) ? Did you find something similar such as “prolétariat”, “cols bleus” etc… ?
Thanks.
Actually I don’t think there is a great deal of difference.
I recently read Didier Eribon’s book Returning to Reims, which I loved - essentially about how as a young gay man the author felt he had to escape the homophobic culture of his working-class childhood - which was itself transitioning from the Communist Party to Front National - but returning many years later, after his father’s death, he comes to a deeper understanding of that culture, of what was negative in it as rooted in and explained by the working class experience of years of relentless and exploitative hard work, and - moreover - that his previous understanding of the nature of the oppressions he himself had suffered had been upside down: that, in fact, what he had always found hardest to deal with was not his sexuality, but his class background.
Hardly anything in the descriptions either of his working class childhood, or of his adult experience of living most of his life as a working -class person in middle-class milieus, would not fit the UK just as well.
Thanks for the answer.
Maybe a difference, I would say, is that in France the working class is represented by a party. It was indeed the PCF, and then the RN. One can identify them in the Commanuards and in the Gilets Jaunes (This is one of the most appreciated topic of Zemmour and Onfray, both of them coming from this social class +/-).
Whereas in UK, I cannot see a party representing this class specifically. Maybe I am wrong.
For example, you would not see that in France, or less:
" I find it quite curious that a lot of working class people seemingly hate left leaning middle class intellectuals(Without very much money many of them) and have a lot more respect and affection for right wing upper class people. "
The working class in France will “hate” the liberals (LREM) but will not have much more sympathy for the right upper class (LR). As far as I can tell, this is subjective of course.
Your opinion ?
There may be a difference in perspective here because I in my previous post, and Eribon, were talking about the experience of class difference in our lifetimes; over which the UK Labour Party has generally been the political representative of the working class there - and actually I believe still is, though in a changing world.
I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding of the nature of social class in the UK, which has a much weaker marxist intellectual tradition and tends to see social class not as a social relation, but as a sociological category - that old ‘ABC1…’ stuff, which is actually based on analysis over 50 years old. But capitalism has moved on, and so inevitably has social class.
In the UK moreso than France, much exploitation has moved from the workplace into finance (rents, debt, etc) (Piketty has described all this - and the reasons for it - the movement in developed economies of investment from entrepreneurs into rentiers - and his work on this, as far as I know, is not disputed). This is why younger people, in the UK, who generally have few assets whatever their occupation , support Labour, and elderly people - even many that were shop-floor workers - now mainly support the Tories.
Eribon sees French working class attachment to the FN or RN as superficial, incidentally, because not actually embedded in any institutions or social structures in working class communities - and I think this has a pretty exact parallel in the success of UKIP in the UK a few years ago - when it actually achieved similar vote shares to the FN. But all that support simply evaporated when the political scenery moved a little, because it never had any real depth.