…Cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy security…
…[The middle classes] are the new proletariat, like factory workers a hundred years ago…
…Anyone earning less than £300,000 a year scarcely counts. You’re just a prole in a three-button suit…”
These lines from J.G. Ballard’s 2003 novel Millennium People were thought-provoking, yet not wholly convincing 21 years ago. They have, however, become more and more plausible with the passing of time. In a development whose causes and significance have been obscured by the reign of identity politics, the middle classes have been struggling to resist downward mobility and proletarianisation. It’s felt especially by the young as graduates have found themselves saddled with increasingly oppressive debt burdens while education and housing costs are soaring. Meanwhile, offshoring and automation have meant that middle-income jobs have become scarcer — resulting in something referred to online as “the overproduction of elites”. It’s a trend in which, according to a 2019 OECD report, “the middle class looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters”.
