Why Don't Working People Want to Be Working Class Any More?: Class Identity and Education in 21 st Century Australia

Abstract

Contemporary Australian workers appear reluctant to identify as working class. The article argues the inadequacy of structural explanations of declining working class consciousness, such as the claimed broadening and flattening of the middle class. Instead, it explores the interacting roles of economic conditions and worker education in the decline in workers' class identification. The educational focus is on the decline of those informal popular education institutions that in Britain and Australia until the mid-twentieth century had aided the articulation and transmission of class identity through programs of literacy and literature, autodidacticism and political activity. Recent hard times have not been sufficient in themselves to trigger a revival of class consciousness, without the help of some vehicle of working class political self-education. The popular media have thus been able to step in, co-opting the icon of the independent battler — a non-collective symbol of traditional longing to escape oppression. Recent promising efforts to build a collective identity around the term ‘working people’ fall short of fostering class identification.