
The comment by the former Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace that his critics are middle class women of a certain age has found much media comment. He has since apologised.
One person who identified herself as a critic was Kirstie Allsopp was outed by an irate Times reader as the daughter of an hereditary peer the sixth Baron Hindlip. By contrast Gregg Wallace continues to identify himself as working class although he was previously the owner of restaurants and multi-million pound grocery business. Both failed but Wallace has also had a successful broadcasting career spanning several decades. It might be suggested that supporting Millwall does not make you working class.
The socialist historian E P Thompson underlined that class was not a thing or a label but a relationship that happened between people. Allsopp may have come from an upper class background and Wallace from a working class one but as Marx noted social being determines consciousness
Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine-room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time – that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening. [74]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1965/english.htm


Leave a Reply