k-punk

Is my shared apopletctic rage at bendy buses (from the different perspective of a cyclist squished almost daily going over waterloo bridge by the bastards) compromised by my being brought up in a middle class environment?

I find the article you quote as abhorrent as you, but surely kollectivity should mean embracing ideas from all backgrounds (other than evening standard columnists, of course), regardless of the titanium constraints imposed by constant reference to class boundaries, or is that just my false consciousness?

There's also a strongish argument for blogging as the apotheosis of middle-class activity, concomitant with the exponential growth of leisure time enjoyed by the monied classes. Yes, you can counter-argue that it's a free, open-source, democratic opt-out from cycles of production and consumption but whilst the majority of bloggers remain middle-class WASPS with day-jobs it's a little harder, no?

in east london the new bendy buses are loved and adored. you see, those buses are completely free, for anyone with a sense of initiative.

You don't need much initiative luke.... Gilligan interviewed one person who said 'maybe they'll close down because no-one's paying.'

Jay,
the class point you raise is important. I am a straightforward Marxist in many ways. I see class as a question of affiliation, not background. To become-proletarian it is necessary to decode your own class background --- even, no especially, if you come from a working class background. (I think we shd distinguish being working class from being proletarian.) Anyone committed to the destruction of the deadening power of English Master Class (EMC) and its partners in EU2 is proletarian as far as I'm concerned.

The only advantage that the working class have over those from the middle class is epistemic. Like women and non-whites, the working class see the Dominant Operating System how it sees itself, but also - and this is crucial - from outside. The bourgeois seldom sees class. cf Potter's Nigel Barton.

This also gives me an opportunity to say what I think Cold Rationalist Marxist-Spinozist kollektivity involves. It is precisely not an aggregation of individuals, a giant liberal compromise... it is a decoding of individual subjectivity by Reason into a Femmunist collective subject...

i ahve a new theory on what it takes to get a column in the standard (with the exception of old-guard writers like sewell, lewis smith, maschler - all of whom to varying degrees i like) is to be a high-profile fuck up. gilligan, i ask you. it seems all that matter s now is that people know your name regardless of whether you're actually any *good* at your job. there are at least three other examples like this in the paper (gilligan by far the most extreme) but i used to work with two of them and don't want to be completely unemployable just yet. mainly it's ES magazine that riles me though. funnily enough, i pitched them a story on the declining standards of modern butlery one bored lunchtime a few weeks ago. i got no reply (which may or may not have something to do with the fact that i made it read like i was emailing from prison) but the very next day i opened it and lo and behold, a piece on how tricky it is to deal with the help these days!

re the hitman, this viewpoint really is par for the course for the strandard and at least the writer is not mentioning my neighbourhood this time

There have been bendy buses and external ticket machines in Geneva for a long time and the system works well.

FWIW, I like standing in the bendy bit.

I too studiously read that issue of the Standard and laughed very hard at the poor woman who'd spent all her money on a pointless education for her darling muppets.

You know, the only really true thing about the whole public/private education thing in the UK is that people who go to comprehensives (like my becoming-ever-more-proley-though-mostly-rural-cow and field-class-self)and make it to university do much better than those who went to private/independent schools.

This was clearly borne out in my experience at Thatcher's fav uni, as all the private school kids (despite making up only 7 percent of pupils overall made up all of my course, minus 3) were bloody rubbish. They weren't interested in the subject at all and whined when they had to read stuff. They had been taught how to trot answers out like well-trained little pups, but had no desire of their own to learn more than they 'needed'. The fools! Still, you get what you pay for...sure they'll all make fine City drones once they come back from India....

Great to hear from you Nina! Hope everything ok out there....

Yes, this is true.

On Jay's point: I think some of this is a little odd. Most of l the bloggers I know are on that strange class cusp between the working class and the middle class. If they went to university, they were probably first generation. Some didn't go. More interestingly, most are in part-time work.

The idea that the middle class have increased leisure time is frankly odd. Most of them seem to be working themselves to death, don't they? Certainly that's the case with the full-timers at work; the last thing they want to do, especially if they've got kids, is engage in intellectual discsussion or read!

On Dave's point about middle-class failures, I was going to mention the loathsome Amanda Platell (her columns in the Sat Times are disgustingly snobbish would-be Brit SATC nonsense -- there was a particularly noxious piece a few weeks ago in which she and her friends were distressed to find that a WORKING CLASS woman had won a competition and was polluting the ambience of their 'exclusive' gym) when lo and behold, Sphaleotas comes back with today's Standard -- and who shd be a featured columnist if not Platell.

"straightforward Marxist" - my arse!

Anyway - the bendy buses are a fine replacement as far as I'm concerned because you don't have to fold up pushchairs to get on them. They're called "the free buses" by many - maybe like "the free school" in the article... :-) plus you have the added bonus of maybe seeing the whole thing catch fire, which must rate as the all time number one excuse for being late for work?

Reading this post as someone from outside the UK I have to admit I was slightly confused. In my background the middle class do send their children to private schools for fear of a low quality education, but in this case many of their fears are completely valid. The American public school system has a tendency to pump out sub literate students who tend to be able to spit out answers but not even get close to thinking.

I'll freely admit that I don't understand the situation in the UK.

From the tone I'm gathering that state schools are completely satisfactory and private ones sub par?

My parents were lower middle class and sent me to a private school for 11 years. Under Bush they have gone from lower middle to actually poor and I have joined this proletariat you speak of.

To be fair, poor in America is middle class in the rest of the world.

Sorry for the subjectivity of my response.

John Eden... can we have some substantiation rather than just snorting rhetorical derision :-)? In what ways do I depart from straightforward Marxism?

Scarboi: it wasn't the fact that kids were being sent to private school that annoyed, it was the idea that we should FEEL SORRY for the woman (who has a spare 15 k a year) because 'state school kids' stood as much chance of achieving as her benighted brood...

What the private schools teach is essentially the same as what you get taught in Oxford and Cambridge; it's not much to do with content, it's a long program in how to be an impermeable, blandly confident drone, certain of yr place in the world, certain that you deserve it, certain that you have the right to tell others what to do and certain that it is perfectly acceptable that a class of inferiors clean up after you.

Such certainty is a terrible curse.

Punishment enough, as MES said.

sorry, if xpost a bit confused.. In terms of the increase of leisure time, i guess i meant a more long-term, incremental process than just the last ten or twenty years in which UK working hours have obv increased substantially.

I do think the bloggers-as-part-time-workers observation kind of ties into this, tho. ie bloggers representing an economic class that can devote more time to play (in the serious Derridean sense of course!) than work.

This economic class, then, wouldn't be identified in terms of affluence but by its conscious, self-proclaimed refusal to buy into generation transfable wealth creation; by insistence that intellectual capital exceeds commercial capital.

The problem, tho, is that stance has been compromised and co-opted through its uptake by about a million bored, stoned, middle-class grads refusing to get a job whilst loafing in daddy's flat in kensington.

I read the standard quite regularly for the horror value coming home from work. Amanda Platell's been a regular columnist for ages and always, always, always absolutely vile. She got the job just after helping Hague, as his personal advisor, to the worst Conservative gen election defeat in history and it was generally hilarious to read her attempting maladroitly to justify her unique combination of incompetence and ideological idiocy. I think even she might realise that she's z-rate, which does give me a peculiar sense of satisfaction.

plattell was a horrible journalist way before becoming a political failure and held down several jobs writing rubbish for quite a long time. seems her profile has risen the worse she has got - also see liz jones who almost tanked marie claire during her tenure as editor (disclosure: i worked with her for a while at the sunday times and, although a mental, i did like her). then there was the small matter of james brown standing in for maschler a few weeks ago! had it been the singer, it could have been funny - (godfather of sole reviews london's fish resaturants) but sadly it was loaded guy.

I think that your definition of middle class is bit wrong. I think what you mean is upper or upper middle class. Someone who can afford £15k a year to send their kids to a private school is slightly richer than your standard middle class! I realize that there is no exact definition of the classes, but what proportion of the UK pop is middle class - 30%, 40% , 50%??? Certainly most of them could in no way afford to spend £15k per per per year on a private school. I think about 5% of kids in the Uk go to priviate achool, so i would say that those 5% come from upper and upper-middle class backgrounds, not simply middle class backgrounds.

who said anything about derision? :-)

LOL, but seriously, was interested in how you thought my/ our Marxism deviated from the standard model though John...

Robin Goad, take yr point, but Rose herself classed herself as m/c --- and she's not an aristocrat, so wd qualify as bourgeois, no?