The Myth of Class Mobility

We delve into why social mobility is a lie and who stands to gain from it with Professor Lisa McKenzie.

Words by Danielle Pender

Growing up in the North East of England, I was always aware that the people I grew up amongst were classed as something different. The way we spoke, the food we ate, the clothes we wore, the houses we lived in and the jobs our parents did or didn’t have set us apart from other groups of people. As a child, I couldn’t name it, but I was aware that this other group of people were classed as something “better” than us. 

They drove big cars, went on overseas holidays, spoke in a different manner, ate food that came with a dressing and owned houses on the “posh” estates. Their lives were aspirational – even if they were also the source of much ridicule.

The class system is so ingrained in British society that no one had to point these differences out to me. I innately understood what it all meant at an early age, even if I couldn’t fully articulate it. I understood what it meant to better yourself, to move up in the world, to get on, and as I grew up, I saw what happened to those that didn’t.

For this month’s digital edition dedicated to the theme of movement, we wanted to explore the very British fetish with class mobility. We wanted to explore what social mobility actually means, whether it’s ever really possible and what this obsession with class mobility masks on a deeper level.

To get into all of this, we spoke to Professor Lisa McKenzie. Originally from a small mining village outside of Nottingham, Lisa had her first child at 19 and worked in factories throughout her twenties and early thirties before getting her BA, Masters and PhD. She now lectures in Sociology at Durham University and is often hailed as a working-class success story – a narrative that Lisa rejects on the basis that one person’s success or struggle doesn’t represent the fate of a whole demographic. Instead, her words on the individualistic nature of society and our infatuation with merit act as a warning to us all – ignore the class struggle at your peril.

How would you define the working class and the middle class?

The definitions have shifted, but Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist philosopher, talked about the class system in relation to your proximity to different types of capital that break down into four areas.

There’s economic capital, which speaks for itself. It’s what you own, what you earn, what you’ve got in the bank, what stocks and shares you own, your family wealth, all of that money stuff.

There’s cultural capital, which is education, the things that you do culturally, how something's culturally valued in society. So if you engage in those things with high cultural capital, then as an extension, you're valued.

Social capital is your networks, who you are connected to and what those networks can do for you. So, if you go to a private school and everybody in that private school goes on to get jobs in high paid positions, then you’re plugged into an influential network that you can reach out to for help.

I’m networked with the darts team across the road. So they might let me know when the sandwiches are ready, which is very different to being networked to a law firm in London where I’m going to get an internship straight out of uni.

The last one is symbolic capital. That's what happens when all these things come together. It’s position, status, that sort of thing.

Your relationship with those different things determines your class position and your ability to be mobile or completely immobile.

What is class mobility?

The definition used in policy and education is that we accept that society is not equal, that people are born into different economic, and cultural classifications (as defined by sociologists and policymakers) and that there is movement from one class to another.

Would you say the mainstream perception of class mobility is of working-class people move up to the middle class?

That's one reading of it. There’s one idea that the working class are at the bottom of society and that to “improve their situation”, they need to “better themselves” and move up into the middle class.

My critique of this is that if we're talking about real mobility and movement, then there should be equal amounts of middle-class people moving down and working-class people moving up, but that doesn’t happen because the middle classes do everything in their power to stay where they are.

The reality is that social mobility and class mobility is a myth. It's a lie.

Why do you think that it’s a myth and a lie?

Because this myth of social mobility is based on the idea that we live in a meritocracy; if you work hard and apply yourself, you can achieve great things, but that doesn’t take into account all of the disadvantages of class.

The word “meritocracy” was originally coined by social scientist Michael Young; he wrote the 1945 Labour Party Manifesto, started the Open University and founded Which magazine.

He was very interested in inequality. He wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy, a satirical reflection on a dystopian society where people are defined by their achievements rather than the class they were born into. Michael Young was trying to warn us against this idea of a meritocracy, now it's a real thing, and people don't know where the word originally came from or that it was meant as satire.

Why are these myths so pervasive?

Look at the people who need these myths to survive and what's at stake. 

The middle class dominates higher education systems, media, cultural industries, politics, and business. So they need to believe they got there by their own merit, not because of the privileges they were born into.

When we’ve got this false belief of meritocracy, then we don't have to worry about things like inequality. The other side of this is that it’s your fault if you haven’t achieved anything because you weren’t good enough. So it blames the individual rather than the broader system.

Meritocracy has led to the demonisation of working-class people for not being “good enough”. It has meant that the middle class will hold their ground by any means necessary because they believe they got there by merit.

Would you say that by focussing on moving up in the world and encouraging people to better themselves, it allows the lives of working-class people to stagnate?

The working-class people at the bottom can only see one route out of a life they’ve been told is meaningless, and that’s to aim for the middle classes. There's not another narrative where we’re not demonised. By focussing on social mobility as the answer, we never have to deal with the issues. We never honour the lives of working-class people with real dignity.

With zero-hour contracts, stagnating wages, and inadequate housing, there’s a constant precarity that means there’s no time for a social life, a cultural life. You’re just running to survive, to stand still. On top of that, we’re told it’s your responsibility to change that because we live in a meritocracy, and if you can’t, it’s a reflection on you. That narrative is so damaging.

The individual redemption story of a working-class person doing better for themselves is rolled out repeatedly as proof that it’s possible.

I get it all the time because I came from the mining community, left school at 16 with no qualifications and worked in a factory for 10–11 years. And now I've got a PhD, and I'm a lecturer at the university. But that’s only one story, and it’s not the common story of most working-class people.

For a working-class person to move up within a social structure, it takes so much work and so much effort to overcome the barriers in their way. We can put all of this money into improving state schools and raising aspirations, but if you’ve got a middle class that uses everything at their disposal; all of their advantages, all then insider knowledge, all of their networks to hold on to their position and power then where is there to move up to?

What do you think is behind the desire to romanticise the working-class?

At the moment, everybody's working class, aren’t they? You've got all these very posh journalists on Twitter arguing with each other about who's more working-class. Whose great-grandpa was more working-class than the other?

Or there’s the obsession with working-class fashion, but only when it’s not on a working-class body because to be working-class means you’d have to deal with all of the very real disadvantages that come with that.

Using a council estate as a backdrop for your fashion shoot causes actual harm. You can’t just consume the superficial aspects of someone’s life for fun and ignore the realities of that life.

Every single one of us read class all the time, and the middle-class benefit from that reading. It’s seen as fun to wear big gold hoops and a tracksuit to go shopping at Selfridges, but if you were a real working-class person dressed like in somewhere like Selfridges, you’d get followed around – and this is why talking about class in Britain is important.

What were your thoughts on the Tory report on the fact that white working-class children were doing worse in school and referenced the use of the term “white privilege” as one of the issues?

Division is the best way to conquer. What happens is when you start to codify dissent and make groups distinct? Where does it end? We always talk about communities that are so separated, but the people making those statements don't usually live in those areas.

I used to live in St Anne’s in Nottingham, where there’s always been a lot of migration, a lot of white working-class living alongside the West Indian community.

There have been flashpoints and skirmishes over race and resources as new people move in, but over time, that community has built itself up into what it is today. It’s very economically poor but racially, ethnically and culturally, very rich. There are lots of areas like this where people are living together. Local governments should address those communities as whole communities rather than as separate groups.

This is the main problem with class in Britain; you always need to demonise certain groups of people.

What is driving the need to demonise certain groups of people?

It's a really, really old tactic, but it's always worked. It was initially the poor law that classified the deserving and the undeserving.

For example, under the poor law, if you were a mother and your husband had been killed through his job, and you had three small children, then the guardians may take pity on you because it's not your fault. But if you were a mother without a husband, then you’ve brought that on yourself. So shame is attached to that living experience, and you’re to be demonised.

We’ve just kept on perpetuating that law over the years in various guises directing it at different communities through the years.

It’s a massive diversion tactic; if we're looking at this group over here and hating them, we’re not looking at the people in power and holding them accountable.  

It’s in the interests of those in power to distract from how unequal our systems are. For example, I work in a university. These are spaces created, built and formed by middle-class values for middle-class people. So, when working-class people or people with an identity that intersects race, class and gender go into these spaces, they're at a disadvantage. But rather than looking at the structural nature of these institutions, we focus on why the individual can’t fit in. We don’t look at why these environments are aggressive or toxic or unfriendly or welcoming to specific groups of people.

At the minute, there’s a lot of talk about decolonising the curriculum, which obviously needs to happen, but it never goes so far as to analyse the class structures and how that intersects with race, gender, sexuality because if we talk about class, the whole system will break down.

Do you think that class mobility is ever really possible?

No. Because nobody really wants it to be. For real social mobility to happen, the middle classes would need to take up less space, and that’s never going to happen.

Last year there were a lot of conversations/protests in response to George Floyd’s murder demanding that white people do more to actively fight racism and to take up less space, but many pointed out that some white people don’t want things to change, they don’t want to give up their individual space or power. This feels very similar to what you’re saying about the middle-classes holding space. 

In Britain, there are so few black academics. Some universities are trying to become more diverse, but that’s just to create an illusion of diversity. They’re not really working towards an actual robust structure where different people are supported and can thrive. Again, this just puts a lot of pressure on those individuals who have to try and operate in a hostile environment.

Collective and structural change is not the narrative anymore because that’s threatening to the status quo. It’s about the individual now. Collectivism is threatening to the middle class because they’d have to give up some of their power, some of their assets. They don’t want to do that, and sadly I don’t see that changing.

I'm an anarchist. I’m interested in what is outside of the system. What new systems can we build because it’s not going to happen from the inside? Look at the main political parties. All of the working-class voices get smothered misrepresented.

Do you believe there’s such a thing as a class traitor?

No, I don't go for class traitor stuff. I don't like it because it's not our term.

I might have had a very different attitude to this 30-40 years ago because my dad was a striking miner. Everybody who crossed the picket line and went to work was seen as a class traitor. But I still have a difficult relationship with that because I don't see the world as that black and white.

The world is very complicated, and the structures and the systems are so rigid that people are making decisions not based on any of their dreams or principles or values but on necessity. I'm not going to stand here and sort of judge another person for their choice on survival or necessity, so I don't like that term.

I don't like “working class hero” either because both are equally damaging to working-class people. Both are trying to rigidly define what it means to be working class, and we haven't made those definitions somebody else has.

For me, it's about working-class voices coming through telling their own stories without the middle-class commentary so that there aren’t people out there wondering, “what did I do wrong? Am I a villain? Am I a waste, man? Am I a good person? Did I redeem myself?”

Why do you think the Tories have been in power for 11 years when things in the UK have been so bad for so many people?

The biggest story isn’t that the working class have started to vote Conservative. It’s that only 49% of the population voted. A lot of people just don’t believe in the system anymore.

I also think the Labour Party don't represent working-class people anymore. They've taken the piss out of them for years and years. They've lost connection with working-class people. They just don't understand what has happened to these communities.

At the same time, the Labour Party is absolutely jammed packed with middle-class people keeping hold of their own positions. Stand aside, get out of the way.

The thing that the Tories get right is that they represent their constituents well. They have traditionally represented the middle-classes, and they’ve catered to their individualistic wants very well, whereas Labour has done an absolute shit job of representing the working-class.

It comes back to that idea of the middle-classes not wanting to give anything up. They don’t want change, so why would they vote for anyone else?

Ignore the class struggle at your peril.

READ OTHER STORIES IN THIS MONTH’S MOVEMENT ISSUE