Bad taste, no class – with Dan Evans

Think to the Simpsons.

You have Mr. Burns, national capitalists.

He owns a power plant.

He's got people like Smithers.

as is sort of lackeys and then you have like a couple of professionals and then you have uh this sort of manual working class people like you know your homers and and and lenny and things like that um but no that's massively changed since the 70s and 80s a huge de-industrialization um capitalism is totally global you know we've sold off all our industries everything's owned um by international firms you know i don't even know if there are like national capitalists but you know firms have got more complicated huge amounts of money into advertising um massive expansion of the state bureaucracy um massive expansion basically of service work and not many people working in what we might call productive work like manufacturing making commodities more and more people are involved in circulation of those products selling them and more more people involved in like your health your health care is one of these i think the biggest biggest single employer in wales at the moment like working in health and social couch is crazy you know a lot teaching um public sector i mean if you look at some of the stratification analysis you've just got about a million different types of occupations and like you know any attempt to theorize all this is necessarily going to be imperfect because there's a huge amount of uh work experiences more and more people bounce between jobs so it's really just like trying to find a heuristic which can act as a shorthand to explain that that's my caveat but i think that the way to understand this you've got to theorize this bloated middle class so i think on the one hand you've got the professional managerial class which is the you know your key standards of this world is a theory that's Barbara and John Ehrenreich came up with in the 70s, and this idea that you have basically a group of people that are essentially managing the state on behalf of capital, you know, and they can work as social workers, they can work as teachers, they can work as sort of managers in industry.

I mean, we won't necessarily get into some of the problems of that theorization because you're grouping together professionals and managers.

But let's say it's people who have sort of almost got like a supervisory or technical role, doctors even, people who are very well remunerated culturally, uh tend to be sort of hived off um live in nice semi-detached tasteful you know leafy suburbs uh you know traditionally but then i think that below that sort of group um you have essentially a group of people that defy easy categorization.

And I think that what's happened is the growth of the lower middle classes.

And the technical term in Marxist sense really is the petty bourgeoisie.

So I class...

This is having two fractions.

And the first one really is this idea of the small self employed.

Now, since one of the defining features of what Thatcher did to the economy was basically to fracture it, you know, de-unionization, de-industrialization, the decline in manufacturing, massive decline in manufacturing, which is sort of accelerated by Blair.

And in its place, you have like a massive rise of small self-employment, you know, people who were basically working for themselves and owning their own music production.

And this was actively pushed by Thatcher.

And so what's happened is I think self-employment went from like a million at the end, I think the end of the 70s, and it's now around 5 million.

It's a huge, huge growth of people who work for themselves.

you know, loads of internal diversity within that sort of cohort.

You can,

you know,

personal trainers, you know, the gym, just looking at the gym I used to go to in the centre of Cardiff.

Now, I mean, like every single personal trainer is there, is self-employed.

So I remember I sliced my hand on one of the machines and I was asking, you know, it wasn't that bad, but I was just pissing blood everywhere.

And I said to one of the lads, I said, have you got just a plaster? And he was like, oh, he said, we're all self-employed.

And like literally none of them could find the medical the medical box and and if you look at every building site now it's not just you know it's not like one big firm it's been massively fragmented into loads of tiny little subcontractors you know what might be five six people working on every specific bit of a building site And that's been replicated across the country, you know, massive writing, sort of small tradesmen.