My Frankenstein essay

[rogue_lettuce]

Don't make the mistake of thinking class is not dependant on personal capital. It is, regardless of attitudes and habits, money dictates class.

I just think the whole question of 'class' is best avoided as it's such an unweildy concept. You either have to go down a hardline materialist, objective scientific approach, whereby you set income bands which determine what class you are (or perhaps working capital bands? or inheritance bands? or...), which treats everyone of a given financial income as identical, OR you end up asking difficult questions.

If someone comes across as upper class, has a title, has a posh accent, wears smart clothes, listens to classical music, plays the cello, etc... But they only earn 30,000 a year, what class are they? What about a bloke who's won the lottery but lives in a council house, without spending any of his money on anything, swearing like a sailor and wolfwhistling at girls in the street, reading The Sun, etc?

Anyway, I thought one's class was determined by one's relationship to the means of production, NOT by how much money one has? But I can't remember whether what author it was that I noticed was so keen on that.

 

[Mrs Magpie]

You do realise the fact you've put this essay online may leave you open to a charge of plagiarism, don't you?
I spend a lot of time feeding phrases into google to catch GCSE students out.

 

[kopelgep]

I just think the whole question of 'class' is best avoided as it's such an unweildy concept. You either have to go down a hardline materialist, objective scientific approach, whereby you set income bands which determine what class you are (or perhaps working capital bands? or inheritance bands? or...), which treats everyone of a given financial income as identical, OR you end up asking difficult questions.

If someone comes across as upper class, has a title, has a posh accent, wears smart clothes, listens to classical music, plays the cello, etc... But they only earn 30,000 a year, what class are they? What about a bloke who's won the lottery but lives in a council house, without spending any of his money on anything, swearing like a sailor and wolfwhistling at girls in the street, reading The Sun, etc?

Anyway, I thought one's class was determined by one's relationship to the means of production, NOT by how much money one has? But I can't remember whether what author it was that I noticed was so keen on that.

True- but we need to remember forms of cultural capital: So whilst someone may not control investment capital (used to pay wage earning workers and extract their surplus value by alienating their labour) there certainly exist other forms of capital, for example the ability to speak in a certain accent or understand certain canonical fields of cultural information. This is where the materialist argument gets stretched into the whole notion of immaterial labour of course.

 

[Dillinger4]

You do realise the fact you've put this essay online may leave you open to a charge of plagiarism, don't you?
I spend a lot of time feeding phrases into google to catch GCSE students out.

Oh dear. I would be very very careful regarding plagiarism. I got done for it myself and ended up with zero for that module.

Also, I don't know if anybody has said this, but you seem to have a very loose grasp of Marxist literary criticism, as I understand it.