The media's interpratation of class.

[Pirate turtle the 11th]

What i say here is going to be discussing society and the media within the UK since i am unfamiliar with this topic when it concerns anywhere else then the UK.

So anyhow. I was thinking about the arguments against communism and the "everyone is becoming middle class" argument came to my mind. Now obviously this comes from the confusion that many people have as viewing quite a few jobs in the service sector as middle class professions. Most notable office workers , people who don't own the means of production but are not sacked in return for sitting on there arses at a computer all day.

Now obviously these people are proles but the media portrays them otherwise. This led me to come to the (obvious but it never clicked in my head) conclusion that instead of correctly portraying class as an economic issue it is instead portrayed as an cultural issue.

The media portrays the working class jobs as the ones that are also portrayed as being macho (firefighter , mechanic , steelworker , miner) now these jobs are working class professions for the most part.

Due to the physical aspect of many primary and secondary sector jobs this earns them macho status in the media and henceforth working class, so when the primary and secondary sector declines along with the jobs seen as macho it seems that the working class is shrinking when in reality its just that many members now sit at desks instead of going down the mines .

So Basically what we need to do as communists is to show that class is not defined by culture but by economics (relationship to the means of production).

[Pogue]

I agree. I hate this bullshit about their being a middle class - no one can ever define it anyway.

[8bit]

Agreed. Factory workers, mechanics, and other blue collar jobs are becoming less and less 'middle class'. Perhaps, 50 years ago, someone who worked on a production line doing factory work was middle class, but today the paradigm has shifted. As more and more can be done at a lower level through nonhuman labor, our occupations become more and more sophisticated.

Yesterday our middle class was undereducated and naive. Today our middle class is college educated and intelligent. Tomorrow they will be the State, and the day after tomorrow there will be no State.

[Agathon]

The trick seems to be to get those who have office jobs to identify with the upper middle class. That's why every single film that seems to come out has as a protagonist a lawyer, a journalist, a university professor, or some other "professional" (all of whom seem to get paid a lot more than their real world equivalents).

I hate it myself.

[rednordman]

I think sometimes its rather blatant that the media wants to sweep this whole class issue under the carpet a little bit. I suppose that it may just be a case of 'what ever jonny doesnt know, doesnt hurt jonny', in the medias eyes. After all in nowadays, its not that hard for even the more better off people to see the serious pitfalls within capitalist society. The world has taken a big hit with all this deregulation and subsequent ressesions that are following it. These are interesting times indeed.
The media and oligarchs/capitalists greatest fear is most likely that of a communistic uprising (or even simpler: change) , so it sort of makes sense that they would want even the most working class jobs to be portrayed as part of the broad privaliged class so they dont turn against them. This is why they use excuses of 'culture' and 'lifestyle choice' etc to take the emphasis of economic factors. I do think that most people know this is rubbish inside though.