We Need To Talk About Money

The advantages the middle classes bring to the job market often extend far beyond their financial resources, encompassing many of the intangibles that are part and parcel of their existence. They know the right people and use the right words, qualities that tend to be identified as confidence or even intelligence, but are more often than not simply a function of class. Their upbringings ensure that they’re well versed in the behavioural codes required to thrive in professional environments, and in possession of the right cultural references and good taste required for success in creative ones. As sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison point out in The Class Ceiling, their recent exploration of class and social mobility in Britain, this sort of cultural competency tends to be rooted in middle-class socialisation and inculcated disproportionately via a privileged, white, family milieu.’

Human beings are fundamentally lazy creatures. We are built that way by design, the laziness hardwired into our systems, a relic from our caveman days when conserving energy was a matter of life and death. And because we are lazy, we like to label people, to sort them into categories that fit neatly with what we already know of the world, before filing them away as quickly as possible. It makes life easier, being able to rely on shortcuts. Less thinking to do. No matter that few people fit neatly into a standard-issue box.

[Sheryl] Sandberg and those who followed in her wake became poster girls for a certain type of contemporary feminism, one that critics say is lacking in substance and scope, and focuses only on the needs of a narrow subset of already privileged women; a version of feminism that is toothless and apolitical and fails to challenge the injustice of existing power structures, aiming only to insert women at the top of them. This type of feminism, commonly referred to as neoliberal feminism, tends to overlook the aspects of feminist thought concerned with collective social justice that necessarily place it in direct opposition to capitalism. Exploring this tension, the academic Nancy Holmstrom explains it thus: feminists should be concerned with ending the oppression of women whatever the causes, be they sexism, racism or economic, or some combination difficult to disentangle. A feminism concerned only with ending the oppression of women based on gender would be a very limited version, far from the emancipatory vision at its core (italics mine).⁷ That feminism necessarily aims to eradicate any inequality arising from identity-based discrimination makes it fundamentally incompatible with capitalism, an economic system that not only creates inequality, but actually requires it in order to work properly. Inequality isn’t just an unfortunate side-effect of capitalism but rather the very basis of it, as essential to capitalism’s effective functioning as wheels are to a bike.