It’s that time of year again. Where I sit in new classes with new people, and I’m supposed to be learning new things. Our teachers this year are pushing us to start thinking about topics for our final dissertations next year. My mind is a whirlwind. I can’t seem to get hold of a subject that I care enough about to write ten to twelve thousand words on.
We’ve done Mao’s China, the history of British capitalism, and work and economy in society. That was all interesting, so out my league, and yet something I took on with great fervor and curiosity. University is supposed to get us talking about these topics on a deeper level. For instance: What is the difference between family capitalism and gentlemanly capitalism? Why was the Cultural Revolution of 1911 such a war on ideology? How has the traditional workplace structure changed to accommodate young minds in the postmodern workforce that continues to emerge today? All questions I feel like I can confidently answer.
But one question I’m still grappling with is: Why are we still referencing Bourdieu? This is Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist. His take on social class is to date one of the best explanations for the stratification of society. From education, to housing, to the myths of meritocracy, Bourdieu has divulged it all. Even in 2019 we had LSE (London School of Economics) sociologists, such as Friedman and Laurison, conduct interviews to uncover how privilege reproduces itself. But the framework remains, as they say, Bourdieusian. Our understanding of social mobility and capital feels almost immobile.
Yet I feel it doesn’t quite fit the new model of young people today who are affluent in their own way.
Our understanding of social mobility and capital feels almost immobile.
Yet I feel it doesn’t quite fit the new model of young people today who are affluent in their own way.
Not just financially, but politically, intellectually, and culturally above and beyond these Bourdieusian ideals of what it means to be working, middle, and upper class. I can’t spend an entire article criticizing Bourdieu; after all, it is because of him that we understand class and its ramifications the way we do. I also can’t spend an entire article pretending I didn’t wish we had some original thought.
Who was the first thinker, the first person to see class for what it was? I go to a Russell Group university, I have my student loan, I work part time, but it’s nice to be able to spend freely and know that my parents can and will support me when I need it. I am so lucky to have my views widened by the community of academics, and by friends doing other courses.
Nevertheless, I do wish young people, with our aim to eradicate class, weren’t so discouraged from forming our own original thoughts. Academia is one of those places where once you make your statement, it either must be cited as someone else’s work or you must be credible enough to own it all on your own. But of course knowledge breeds knowledge. Everyone is inspired by something. I wonder now if I can have my own original thought. Not an argument against something that was said by a white man in the nineteenth century, but my own original take on social change. Built from my own experiences and unique outlook. Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher, distinguished between critical thinking and simply criticizing. There is a whole lot of critiquing in sociology — and it has been that way at least since I began learning the discipline for my A levels. If only instead of just producing the same studies to prove the same theories, we could expand our thinking.
Postmodernism is an increasingly endearing concept for me as I think there is so much more to life than crude economic factors for explanation. Social media has really made it look like money grows on trees. Of course, I know this isn’t true. I could go ahead and cite some British Sociological Association statistics for how economic inequality manifests and has been a stable factor for centuries. I feel like there’s a little more to it now, though — a cultural factor that’s harder to boil down to just our habits and dispositions (which, of course, depend on our class origins). My lecturers like to warn of “anomie,” social instability caused by a breakdown in our social norms. I find this funny. As if this isn’t our reality already.
The more we know about each other, the less linear our understanding of class, position, and opportunity becomes. If I can get famous from doing a dance to a certain sound online, then does it really matter what our “common sense” understanding of my middle-class background is? If I didn’t put my privilege to use, go to university, and enter a professional occupation or academia and instead simply capitalized on the attention of others, am I really middle class? Isn’t it more middle class to have the chance to make money off my silly little dances anyway? It’s a paradox whichever way you spin the wheel of opportunity. There is a new kind of affluence and opportunism among young people. I don’t mean affluent financially, I mean affluent in the sense that we are acquiring social capital at alarming rates.
There is a new kind of affluence and opportunism among young people. I don’t mean affluent financially, I mean affluent in the sense that we are acquiring social capital at alarming rates.
Rates that entirely contradict Bourdieu’s ideas that social capital is accessed by an elite and striven for by those who weren’t born to it. Social capital is seemingly the most powerful tool in our arsenal today. It has always been about who you know, not what you know, but the big three (economic, social, and cultural capital) aren’t looking all that dependent on each other anymore.
Marx, Gramsci, Bourdieu — they all set the stage for our understanding of how we operate within a system of exploitation. However, I feel like now there must be something between the exploiters and the exploited. The opportunistic who do not expect a reward. The young people who are class-conscious but don’t identify with any of the categories we are so used to placing one another in.
The concept of an Original Thought, one that can define the outcome of this postmodern cultural reset. Where we once saw an elite, a proletariat, and a gray-area middle, I now see an opportunistic generation that doesn’t fit in. That doesn’t want to fit in. Social class today is perhaps not about a collective belonging but invoking a sense of differentiation from each other, defining class in terms of who you are not.
