My class convenience store: What class means to me

What does class mean to me? What doesn’t class mean to us? 

Class is the shelf you are put on in a capitalist supermarket. And your “shelf” affects everything in your life: what you eat, where you work, your financial stress and even your love life. But from what I've managed to see through my cute little rose-tinted glasses that desperately need polishing, the higher the shelf the better, apparently. Class means to me that it’s set in stone, along with your gender and race – a part of your identity. Class can be a great thing, especially if you look good working as a middle class mechanic and pull off a white vest as well as Marlon Brando. It can make you desire more and work harder, that temporary stress can be motivating to keep fuelling your financial fire. However, the reality is, drum roll, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The working classes are struggling and people are turning to food banks, while the aristocratic greedy fat cats live lavishly, yet bored. Class has always been a societal battle whether it’s in 1890s Norway or Britain in 2024 – all across the world we have struggled.

In our society today, we see the cost of living go up and the will to keep surviving and paying your expensive bills go down. More people rely on universal credit and shelters. It's not just. In fact, universal credit and personal independence payments (PIP) are the nails and bolts that keep the shelves for the working classes together in our societal supermarket. 

We are priced according to our shelves and we are held back from passion and desire because of having too little money. In life, why are we even living like this? Money is just an object, an idea, just like the life we humans pretend and force ourselves into. Judith Butler once said that “gender is a performance”. I’d like to agree with Judith but, looking at it, I think our society is a forced performance – a show put on by those who put themselves there, the government. They direct our lives as much as our heart pumps blood and that makes them diabolical stage managers in the performance of our lives. 

So, now I've had my philosophical rant, why should you care? Well, the answer is quite amusing. Class affects everyone, for better or for worse. We are all contained in the packaging of our class identity. If you ask me, we should throw those bourgeois fat cats a trip outside to sit and think about what they’ve done. Then we should all sit around and eat cheap Asda noodles from the foodbank and figure out a way to dismantle the shelves we sit on. Of course, preferably, I’d rather be sat on a soft, recliner chair than the cold, hard shelf where we’re told to sit still and look pretty.