Anna Patty; 'Class cluelessness' in Australia is not a white working class issue

Anna Patty writes that 'Class cluelessness' in Australia is not a white working class issue.

Dr David Burchell, who lectures on History and Political Thought at the University of Western Sydney, says traditional working-class people in Australia valued the respect they earned in their local community because they held down stable jobs and worked with their hands with some skill.

Dignity was found in hard work and in holding down a steady job and being able to support a family. But those values are not shared by the professional managerial class that live in city centres.

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However, the gulf between the traditional working class and professional managerial class has widened and the Australian Labor movement has drifted further away from socially conservative views held by the traditional working class, while embracing many of the more progressive social values held by the professional managerial class.

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The bread winner model family also remains robust among blue-collar workers. The traditional working-class vision for a stable job and nostalgia for the nuclear family continues to be the ideal for many working parents who barely see each other. They often tag team their child care, which can mean meeting in a car park to hand over the baby as one parent starts work and the other finishes.

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In Australia, class divisions are not simple. Watson says there is a divide between wage earners and the self-employed. That means tradies vote Liberal alongside other self-employed business people, fee-charging lawyers and other members of the upper managerial class.

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In Australia, the post-war professional managerial class had an interest in nation building including large infrastructure projects, including social housing during the Whitlam era. During the Hawke/Keating period that social infrastructure investment started to become dismantled.

Watson argues that when the professional managerial class developed its own strong economic interests aligned with the owners of capital, an antagonism with the traditional working class developed.

Emphasis Mine

There has always been a split between the ordinary proletariat and the worker aristocracy. The latter have always aligned themselves with the petite-bourgeoisie.