so i've lived in br*tain long enough to adapt to most of their weird ass ways, except the phenomena of class aesthetics, which still makes no sense to me. being on the spectrum doesn't help i guess, since it's mostly unwritten and subtle rules
which wouldn't matter really except that i'm trying to do organising. and i've been literally told to my face "well you're middle class so what the fuck do you know about our problems". a few times that was implied, one time word for word. and in that particular case i literally only had time to offer a leaflet, so i know it wasn't anything i said, just purely from looking me up and down
i'm an estern european immigrant working minimum wage?? i've no idea what am i doing to make people think i'm anything but working class. one of my comrades gets it too, but she's got a london accent, so she just accepts it like fair enough
i'm mostly just venting because it seems like such a stupid problem to have, but if anyone actually has any suggestions i could use that would be great
i don't dress fancy, especially not to organising. jeans and a tshirt. the most expensive piece of clothing i own is a £150 leather jacket. guess i look gay? people tend to assume i'm gay. nobody can really place my accent, they have to ask where i'm from, so i guess i don't have a generic eastern european accent. i can't imitate the local accept well, not without it looking like i'm taking the piss anyway. what else can i do
when i (fortunately briefly) lived in perfidious albion it always shocked me to what extent people pegged class signifiers and identity to what shop you got your groceries from, like they would use it as the primary determinant of your place in society
so i guess one thing is dont tell people if you buy shit from waitrose?
yeah exactly! it's so bizarre. i was once in a convo with a random guy who was boasting how his cousin worked in waitrose. it was very confusing
lol yeah i would believe it
i was living in a shoebox and making so little money that the guy at the bank laughed at me. but the local supermarket was a waitrose, and even though it wasnt noticeably more expensive than tescos i had to hide it from everyone like a dirty secret because otherwise theyd act like i thought i was better than them
i think the class hierarchy was something like iceland > aldi/lidl > tesco/sainsburys > waitrose > marks and spencer, and anything above tescos made you basically landed gentry in most peoples eyes
anglos and their consequences
innit!!!!
don't even get me started on people i knew at uni who would shop at lidl and call tesco expensive, only to then go on holiday to japan and post pics from their parents mansions
Lol this is oddly relatable as an American. In the local gated community full of CEOs’ summer homes, I’d get called a townie. Amongst my coworkers, I’d get called a rich kid for shopping at Wegman’s. But the CEOs’ families would all shop at Walmart. This was while I was making minimum wage.
uni
that'll probably be it
university here is almost exclusively for the middle class until very recently
yeah true, i went for free, but still. i don't generally bring it up though, since i have the world's most useless degree
quick primer then:
if your parents went to uni, you're middle class
if you went to uni, you're middle class
if you work a "profession" AKA anything that traditionally requires a degree, you're middle classit's less about actual material conditions and more about shared experience tbh, though going to uni gives you a huge leg-up on everyone else
in the areas we're organising you meet few full on reactionaries. most people here vote for Labour or SNP, or don't vote at all and are just extremely apathetic. a lot of hopelessness and "i've voted all my life and politicians keep promising shit but nothing ever improves so what's the point". thankfully this isn't england so you rarely meet devout tories
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-91-its-time-to-retire-the-term-middle-class
Listen to this and then use the knowledge therein to bully people that use that term.
i'll send this to a flatmate i had who once called brushing teeth before bed "middle class"
This is what zero materialist analysis does to your brain.
Edit: this is just bedtimes are authoritarian discourse but in a different flavor.
he wasn't even bizzare, it's the uk. you'll get called middle class for listening to BBC 4 instead of BBC 1
out of all the bbc radio stations radio 4 is definitely the most tory tbf
Wiping your ass is bourgeoisie decadence. Real workers use the shower head.
lmao, i am dying. i floss. does that mean i'm in the peerage?
I've seen all kinds of brainworms regarding the middle class / petite boug struggle session but this shit takes the cake lmao.
he also called me "european" for drinking wine. he was english. though actually he'd get angry if he saw me calling him english. he would say he was from yorkshire.
the br*tish think they already abolished the class system and aesthetics is all that's left
this is by americans, about americans and entirely irrelevant to the situation in the uk
The term is used the same everywhere to blur the lines of actual class conflicts so I don't think it's totally irrelevant.
middle class in the uk describes a distinct set of privileges and shared experiences
it is not the same
I mean, there are idiots with labor aristocratic tendencies due to wage/race/etc. And websites like this dunk on them constantly. But to assume based on how someone looks is fucking stupid.
@sima was your stuff openly showing ML imagery? Because WASPy-looking + ML = tankie to a lot of people who think "anarchism" or some kind of radlib NATO shit is the way forward. Lots of brainworms right now that a revolutionary state would only make life better for the privileged.
Eh, not much you can do about that. Honesty is important, and you sound cool as your honest self. Maybe it's a locational thing? England seems to divide itself into all these weird subcultures that go down to individual neighborhoods in some towns.
I'd do some research on neighborhoods to find other people who work min wage and find a way to open conversations with the fact you work minimum wage yourself to immediately establish an empathetic connection. Tbh, though, most tend to not like leaflet people in general.
she/her
I see your problem. Everyone knows the only working class people are burly men who drive their F-150 to their job at the smokestack factory or the coal mine.
i'm a lesbian so i'm sort of like a man? i'll work on the burly part and the F-150
skip the f-150 and just devote all that effort to becoming even burlier :arm-L: :hexbear-lesbian: :arm-R:
I never got this tbh. The most hardcore working person I know (sadly a chud on most things) is a super butch woman engaged to a woman (I won’t assume bi vs lesbian, haven’t asked) who hauls heavy shit better than me despite having been blown up once. Hardcore burly prole women exist and it’s about it time society gave them respect.
End rant, your humorous insight awakened my latent anger at the attitude you made fun of
It’s always been nonsense, just a bunch of cultural signifiers instead of actually focusing on someone’s relationship to the means of production. Definitely something the media consciously does.
You need to wear a one-piece boiler suit or dungarees (with one strap loose) and a dirty white undershirt, a hard hat and a really big wrench, spanner or pickaxe. Make sure you wear beaten to shit steel cap boots, and drive around a white van, or alternatively, a Range Rover, but you have to incessantly talk about doing 'ighly illeguhl activity
you joke but i had a conversation with a guy who was trying to convince me working class didn't exist anymore since they closed all the mines. the only working class jobs he conceded still existed were builders and plumbers
It just speaks to how fucked our collective understanding of "class" is where skilled journeymen tradespeople and owner-operators are considered "working class", when those same people can have employees working under them and also be literal millionaires if their business is successful enough.
And hang a Cross of St. George from your window.
Little Englanders.
Okay so first off, over here we all hate ourselves slightly more than we hate each other. What that basically means is we've settled on a whole raft of shared cultural ideas around class etc. that are specifically designed to make us as miserable as possible.
If it wasn't class it would absolutely be something else but the key thing to remember is that it's a bit different from say, white superemicists thinking they're the master race or whatever (though we have way too many of those too) the point is you have your class identifiers, what you drink what you wear, where you go on holiday and what you do and by god you had better be miserable about it.
It's all designed like that, our whole country is one huge generator of low grade misery and grumbling. If you go to one of those stately homes that's privately owned and not done up by the national trust for tourists, a swanky middle class restraunt or an estate you find a similar thing. Everything there is designed to make sure you can't be happy there.
Look at our sitcoms. Fawlty towers, peep show, whatever. Most of the time its about a person or people just silently dying and screaming inside as life just smashes them into the dirt over and over. We don't like them out of a sense of shaudenfraude. We like watching them because we recognise it and we approve. That is, to us, how it is supposed to be. Endless low grade misery.
Don't sweat the weird class thing we do cos even understanding it is just gonna make you miserable. It's what it's meant for.
just say, "oi mate, I 'avent any work since Maggie Fatcher closed down me mine" and then take a bite of pork pie
i'm vegan, but something tells me biting on a vegan pork pie is not gonna help me here
Try lying? Lack of accurate taste aside most vegan meat looks real.
I will second lying. I had a coworker who I really needed to do a one-on-one with because they were a social leader. They were big into MtG, so I binged the wiki and the subreddit to learn enough to act like I played and that was my in
As a hardcore mtg nerd, I both respect and feel fear at this. If my mono U control tempo can be understood by a pseud how am I supposed to feel superior to the RG timmies? Become a vorthos? God no, I have some self respect
I don’t either, mainly because nobody is willing to play twice against my absolute cancer to the point of being born in a superfund site deck lmao
How does mono blue even get enough mana to even start doing anything before turn 3
As a nascent organizer I'm curious about this. Like did you use the pretext of a game of mtg to do a 1on1?
It was more that we didn’t have anyone already working with us who knew them well. Management had silo’d several departments from each other, but we still knew that this person could absolutely fuck us over if they weren’t on board. So it was more like finding a pretext to have a conversation in the first place. They were real consistent with their lunch breaks, which they’d take in the break room, which had like 3 cameras in it. And that was the only place we could “run into” them. Management even had different entrances and exits for different departments. So we had a thin window to start making friends with them.
I started taking breaks at the same time and building shitty decks while I ate. They couldn’t resist offering assistance to a noob who was building some absolute cringe. So that was the basis for the relationship and after a certain point, I kinda sighed and said, “can we meet up sometime to talk about some work stuff?” and then I could start the actual one-on-one. They ended up being a really cool person and I think they’re gonna be a big asset
In retrospect I probably could have seen if they played at any game shops regularly, but I wasn’t comfortable enough to know whether talking shop at a tournament would have been weird or something
Claim to be bad at cooking? Blame the EU for restricting good honest English farmers from raising good cattle and “just you wait, the next seasons beef is going to be when the shackles come off from the effects of brexit”
Yay I helped /s. Least useless white male up in here /s.
Fr tho, Felix from chapo is the modern Diogenes. “Just like lie bro, smoke some weed on a faux leather couch while playing dark souls on a muted tv as you phone bank for John “mad dog” McDonnell. They don’t know you aren’t a guy with a diamond white pickup and a single degree of separation from that guy was a bouncer that does crime.
the English tongue lacks taste buds, but they have extra cells in their eyes to distinguish between shades of beige, so as long as it can pass visual inspection you should be fine
You tell em what you know about their problems. What do you know about their problems?
yes of course, that's what i try to talk about. i'm not standing there arguing about how not middle class i actually am haha but it just hurts :deeper-sadness:
no, i'm very much working class. minimum wage, no property, under £1000 in my bank account. that's the point of this thread, that british class aesthetics make it difficult to express that, unless you know the very arbitrary rules. because despite being indisputably working class i come off as middle class because i floss or whatever
Greet people by saying “oy guv” instead of “hello there my good fellow” and you should be fine.
Don’t be like me, I was door knocking for Corbyn here in the states and made the mistake of saying “hmmm see here old boy, have you considered the strong loyalist tradition in (don’t doxx me bro) we must show loyalty to the crown and hold up her majesties democracy”
How do you introduce yourself? Maybe try "Hi I'm sima, I'm a [whatever minimum wage job you work] in your neighborhood..."
If they really are just making a bad assumption and would otherwise talk to you, that might clear it up. For the rest, you can be more confident that they don't want to talk to you from the jump and are simply inventing a rationalization.
that's a good idea. now that i think of it i'm not in the habit of actually introducing myself at all, unless they ask. i just go straight to like "hi would you like a pamphlet we're from so and so party and we're doing a campaign about so and so". but doing it in a bit more personal way now seems better, even regardless of the perception issue
Its probably partially that they assume you are a student, being european and left wing and young. I suggest you drop out if you are attending university, or if you have already graduated, just give up on organizing entirely because that stink will never come clean.
It probably actually would. Definitely would've made the difference in 2015 and 17, young canvassers got that a lot more as I recall
ITT: americans, so many americans lmao
oh, and some fucking "barrel and suspenders" dipshits
and to top it all off, the fucking "british have bad teeth" yankoid projectionThis is a fascinating topic because in America you only really get hints of British class :brainworms: when people from the UK are complaining about it.
Okay but the fact remains that it is a term that obscures actual class differences even in the context you stated.
it only obscures marxist class differences if you are unfamiliar with the uk landscape
most of us use both in their intended context
the traditional middle class are part of the proletariat, but they have certain privileges that people from the traditional working class did not, and do not haveto explain as best as i can in my current state:
traditional working class means blue collar work, no university education for you and your parents, working a trade or so called "low skilled" labour
traditional middle class means white collar work, university educated, your parents probably were too, working a professionnow, there are a lot of traditional working class that make more money than the traditional middle class, but the difference is that the trades are either:
- relatively safe, but ruin your body eg. plumber
- relatively easy on your body, but have the very real danger of sudden death eg. electrician
both are part of the marxist working class, but to not acknowlege the differences is ridiculous
pretty much, yeah
though there are some differences, but it's the best idea of it yeah
Not British, but what comes to mind:
It'd seem over the top to me, but maybe if you have a work uniform, wear that?
Observe how the people you talk to are dressed and just rip one of them off?
Buy new wardrobe at thrift store? Try to look "normal"
damn, a uniform would be a good shout. my gf is doing food delivery at the moment, and people seem to be put at ease immediately by the recognisable bag (or, in some cases, enjoy an obvious reason to feel superior to you)
On a serious note, if there's time, you can just ask people why that matters.
the few times when it came up, the idea was generally that you're middle class => you represent the establishment => the establishment doesn't care about me => you don't actually care about me, doesn't matter what you say. we were talking to this one guy that just kept repeating that we're going to go back to our cozy office with our moneybags party boss. we said we were communists like three times, but there was no getting through to him, he made his mind up. so we just listened to him complain about moneybags for a while
Ah... those folks probably aren't worth trying to talking to if you aren't going to see them more than once. They just want to talk at you instead of talking to you. I can see the frustration in that.
yeah that true, that's why we picked just a few areas and do them repeatedly so people keep seeing us.
i remember an old photographer guy telling me how he'd photograph people on the street. not approaching them directly, because they're likely to just tell him to fuck off. but just sort of hang around for a while. so they see him, get used to him, and eventually just go "oi! photo guy!"
