What Social Class Do You Belong To?

Can you change your "class" by virtue of education alone? I don't know. But it must be a factor. Perhaps "educated working class" fits you....?It probably suggests that if you have any children they will be raised with what are generally considered middle class attitudes towards education and knowledge.Perhaps one's education has a more telling effect on the class of one's offspring? I don't know.

..oh shit...

You can get from working class to middle class through education and making money, but you can't get to the real upper class unless you're born into it. You really need a blood line.It's best demonstrated by this comment from a real toff about a self made multi-millionaire (ie, sniff, from trade) - The Right Honourable, Lord Michael Heseltine CH PC; who was also the deputy Prime Minister."The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy his own furniture"

That'd be me.

Sounds like the character description for David Brent.- Oni

For marxists there are three classes: the working class, the capitalist class and the small entrepreneurs (including farmers).The working class - term that causes the most confusion - involves everyone who works for a salary. This includes blue colar factory workers, white collar office workers, everyone working for the goverment etc. To belong to the working class says (for a marxist) nothing about your level of education, nothing about the kind of work you do. You work for a boss who pays you a salary. The working class is also the class that does not own its working tools.The entrepreneurs are the small shopkeepers, the farmers, the very small businesspeople. The own their working tools, they don't work for a salary, but live from what their business earns them.The capitalist class is the class that owns the very big majority of the working tools: they own the factories, the offices and sometimes big parts of the farming land. Basically they don't get their income from their work - in contrast with both former classes - they get their income from what they own.As such I belong to the working class.

This is a distinction of no real practical use, though. If you're a consultant who doesn't bother to open his own practice and does all his work as an employee of the NHS, you can make £100,000 a year, which means you're richer than many capitalists. Yet you would be in the same class as a minumum wage earner stacking shelves at Tesco. I don't see the use of such a classification.

Poor in America.Rich in Indonesia.

As the label implies, it's a job-based classification, not an income classification.

What about a carpenter who owns his tools but works for wages?

I don't think David Brent would consider himself middle class. He would instead think of himself as some sort of working class hero. Someone who (in his view) exemplifies what you can achieve if you work hard and have natural talent.You too could be a manager in a Slough based paper firm if you just have the talent and desire to succeed in life....