Thatcherism and "classless society"

[promethean]

What was the reasoning behind the rhetoric of "classless society" that was promoted by Thatcher and her cronies, including Prime Minister Major, during the 1980s and 90s? Was this another occasion where reactionaries appropriated Marxist rhetoric to promote their anti-working class policies?

[Kiev Communard]

What was the reasoning behind the rhetoric of "classless society" that was promoted by Thatcher and her cronies, including Prime Minister Major, during the 1980s and 90s? Was this another occasion where reactionaries appropriated Marxist rhetoric to promote their anti-working class policies?

Actually, that was not a "Marxist" rhetoric, one could say that their ideological model of "shareholders' society", where everyone would supposedly have had a right of acquiring private property and participating in its profit was actually a weird transfiguration of ideas of Jacobins who sought to alleviate the poverty by distributing private property among everyone, not socialisng it, in fact persecuting early communists in France. So in certain irony of history British Conservatives used and distorted the rhetoric of their one-time chief ideological opponents :D.

[Hit The North]

Well Thatcher's governments, like all Tory governments, including the present one, rode into power on a paradox. There is always a strange disassociation between their rhetoric and their actual policies. Sometimes this is because they suffer from an ideological blindness, at other times it is a conscious attempt to ideologically gloss over problems. So Thatcher opposed the state in her rhetoric but centralised and strengthened its powers in her policy. She denied the effects of social class on individuals and argued that it belonged to old thinking but pursued policies that extinguished chances for social mobility and made poverty more deeply entrenched. She talked about creating a land of opportunity and then she boosted unemployment and created a 'lost generation' of unemployed youth. She took away peoples jobs and then called them lazy. She talked about the good sense of running the economy like a housewife prudently runs the household budget and then she deregulated the financial sector and created a huge bubble of personal household debt.

So it is always best to treat any Tory government as a walking contradiction and not believe one fucking word they say. :)

[Lunatic Concept]

Does it mean crushing the working class and exporting labour and industry abroad so we can all be "middle class" consumers? :thumbdown: