• 62749.29
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• chrism
• Monday, 30 January 2012 16:42:38 GMT

fair point fola

must be the old school statist leftie in me that wants to believe that central control is the best way to run these things! to be fair though, the state support i'd like to see would mostly be devolved to local levels. centralised government is always going to be too far removed to really see what people need (and when your government is made up of the poshest and richest in society it's beyond hope!!).

o'know: by the definition i used i'd definitely say your average teacher is working class, heads would be middle class and the cut off probably doesn't just kick in at principles but would catch other senior school managers.

farmers, if they own their own farm or employ anyone outside their immediate family would definitely be middle class, and large scale farmers are definitely ruling class.

• 62749.30
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• observer
• Sunday, 05 February 2012 17:30:42 GMT

anachronism of class

It's such an old red herring to say that class definitions are anachronistic or out of date or inapplicable to a modern society. You look at what people do, economically, analyse it, and classify (no pun intended) accordingly. Maybe there's a few slightly harder cases these days, but, really, not that many.

I'm not saying class definitions can be used, by themselves, to justify socialist or Marxist conclusions, but I don't see any cogency to the charge that they're not coherent premises in socialist arguments.