If there’s one thing sociologists are obsessed with, it’s class. The reason is that class appears to be an accurate and useful representation of social differences and hierarchies. It also helps us trace some of the faultlines of society and understand the ways in which people cross or are hemmed in by them.
We instinctively know that class is not just about money
Like, say, ‘culture’ or ‘identity’, and hardly surprisingly given its ample girth, class is one of those notions that have escaped the confines of scholarship and made themselves very much at home in popular circles. And this is where the fun begins really.
Not that things look terribly promising. It seems to be the belief of most, especially in America, that everyone is middle class now. To be sure, quite a few well-groomed eyebrows were raised when David Cameron (Old Etonian and married to a baronet’s daughter, among other super-posh accoutrements) claimed that status for himself. Still, he did say it.
As did Joseph Muscat, again and again over nine weeks of campaigning. The credit for cutting Labour loose of its working class legacy probably goes to Alfred Sant. It was Sant, the mild-mannered bookworm given to leafing through Goethe when Parliament got too boring, who moved the party headquarters from a fortress overlooking the dockyard to a modern glass building in Ħamrun.
Sant’s work provided the foundations on which Muscat could build. I particularly loved the stacks of young people used by Labour (and the Nationalist Party) as backdrops at public meetings.
They all looked rather alike and certainly very homogenous classwise – all rather middle-class I’d say. And since we’re all middle-class now, effectively class-neutral and broadly representative.
One might be tempted, therefore, to draw the curtain on class, but for three things. The first is more pedantry than anything else really. It can’t be right for everyone to be, and/or call themselves, middle class. That’s because class is a relative term, rather like honour or wisdom. If being middle class is to mean anything, we can’t all be it.
The second has to do with that old haunt of class, sociology. Even as the David Camerons of this world were proclaiming the end of class by placing themselves in an expedient (politically at least) one, sociologists were busy calling their fluff.
For that lot, class still matters. Everyone who is anything in sociology has tended to say something about it, preferably something original and revealing.
That includes Fiona Devine, currently the Head of School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. (There is a local connection in that she served as the external examiner to our Department of Sociology for a number of years.) Prof. Devine was in the news this week as part of a team that has come up with something quite new about class in Britain.
It’s called the Great British Class Survey. Apparently, what makes it great is that it is about Great Britain, and that it is based on data provided by a staggering 160,000 respondents. A statistician’s wet dream maybe, only for reasons it would be boring to go into supplemented by a smaller but more representative survey of about 1000 scientifically-selected individuals.
For obvious reasons, it would be very wrong to import the Great British Survey and apply it wholesale to Malta. One would be better advised to consult the work of say Godfrey Baldacchino, Ronald Sultana, and more recently Marvin Formosa. Still, there are two things in particular about the study and its results that are worth thinking about in light of the local context.
First, the sociologists think that Cameron & co. are wrong. There are, in fact, seven social classes in Britain today and they range from the untouchable to the downright vulnerable; only two are described as ‘middle class’.
Of particular interest I think is the ‘precariat’ class which apparently accounts for about 15 per cent of the British population. No insignificant number, these are people who are in badly-paid and vulnerable jobs, and whose lives suffer generally as a result. And since everyone is middle class now, they are also completely under-represented politically.
I was talking to someone the other day, whose 21 year-old daughter had just been booted out of a job at a meat shop. The conditions were positively Dickensian: 12 hours a day Monday to Friday and 10 on Saturdays standing at the checkout or stacking shelves, no proper lunch break to speak of, all for €190 a week. When she presented a medical certificate asking for a few days off (her doctor was seriously concerned that her knees were being seriously damaged), her boss swore at her, fired her and refused to pay the salary he owed her.
Her brothers are in a somewhat better position. They’re as formally uneducated as she is but they happen to be good plasterers (that particular avenue is blocked to her – she’s a woman) and earn good money for that. They wouldn’t really fit into any of the Great Survey’s classes. They call themselves ħaddiema, meaning manual workers whose skills (snajja) may not be white in the collar but are often very well paid, in cash.
The second thing about the survey is linked to the third reason why class still matters. Drawing on earlier work, Devine and her team use three criteria to determine class: income, extent of social connections, and type and extent of cultural background and consumption. The last two are akin to what an old-fashioned toff might call ‘breeding’.
That’s precisely where class gets interesting. When Cameron said he was middle class, he probably meant he didn’t have the income of a billionaire or the estates of a duke. But his ‘breeding’ (by birth as well as osmosis) matches the latter’s and quite possibly trumps that of the former. Which explains the arched eyebrows: we instinctively know that class is not just about money. That also helps us understand why Muscat’s ‘middle class’ was mocked by many, privately and not so privately.
And yet his message sold, and how. It did so paradoxically because classes – all seven or more of them – still matter. It’s precisely because we are not all middle class now that the term, whatever it means, is so potent.
mafalzon@hotmail.com