Why Don’t Working People Want to Be Working Class Any More?: Class Identity and Education in 21^st Century Australia

Abstract

Contemporary Australian workers appear reluctant to identify as working class. The article argues the inadequacy of structural explanations of declining working class consciousness, such as the claimed broadening and flattening of the middle class. Instead, it explores the interacting roles of economic conditions and worker education in the decline in workers' class identification. The educational focus is on the decline of those informal popular education institutions that in Britain and Australia until the mid-twentieth century had aided the articulation and transmission of class identity through programs of literacy and literature, autodidacticism and political activity. Recent hard times have not been sufficient in themselves to trigger a revival of class consciousness, without the help of some vehicle of working class political self-education. The popular media have thus been able to step in, co-opting the icon of the independent battler -a non-collective symbol of traditional longing to escape oppression. Recent promising efforts to build a collective identity around the term 'working people' fall short of fostering class identification.

Socialization and inequality: A biographical approach to the working class in Portugal

“…This absence is due to a process of historical dominance and deprivation, as well as individualization trends currently promoted in the mass culture, which have been fostered by the media and educational systems (Hoggart, 2009;Merlyn, 2007). Individual choices, abilities and efforts are stressed in order to explain pathways, especially among young workers, while working-class members tended to characterize themselves by deficits -especially, a sense of shame in their lack of education -and by an intention to make up for them through self-improvement (Biesta et al, 2011) and oriented towards their children.…”

“…Besides, these cultural trends are anchored in material and symbolic gains, as well as expectations about the opportunities for their children. 8 The current economic stagnation, increasing unemployment and erosion of the welfare state by neoliberal policies therefore engender polarization trends (Sassen, 1998;Sousa Santos, 2010) and may produce an upsurge in class consciousness, if associated with some emerging vehicle of working-class political self-education (Merlyn, 2007).…”