Free The Inspector-General of Misconception by Frank Moorhouse

Fisher where he describes the play as holding a mirror up to the bourgeoisie. ‘The bourgeoisie – that frustrating, uncomprehending human barrier to change and reform …’
    We may not know what precise social division is being described here but we know that what lies behind the use of the term ‘middle class’, is contempt.
    From what perspective or social standpoint do those who use the term see life?
    It could be used by those who feel excluded from what they imagine as an unfairly privileged middle class above them. If this were so, it would be a simple, and perhaps understandable, expression of resentment and envy.
    But this Office doubts that the writers who use the term are really looking ‘up’ at the class above them with resentment.
    It is more likely used by those who feel that they are by attitude, values and intellect above what theyimagine as a middle class and are thereby looking ‘down’ at the fabled middle class.
    It certainly implies the existence of other classes above and below. However, we rarely, if ever, hear attacks on the opinions, values or styles of the lower classes and never hear of the upper classes (maybe ‘the wealthy’ have replaced the upper classes, or the A List – both equally sloppy social categories).
    We occasionally hear people boasting a ‘working class’ background but we have not yet brought charges of Inverted Boasting against them.
    The one exception on record of a reference to the lower classes is that of the fine commentator, David Marr, who has said in evidence that the lower classes (or was it ‘the Communists’?) are characterised by putting out their milk bottles unwashed. That was when we had milk bottles. Perhaps the lower classes disappeared with the milk bottle.
    Our Office does have some complaints before it though, of the occupation of ‘street sweeper’ being used as a bottom rung on the social ladder.
    Recently, a news story was published about a solicitor who worked as a street cleaner.
    The axis of this story was the juxtaposing of the two occupations within one person and the implication that readers would find this polarity astounding. Except those readers, that is, who are street sweepers or those whose parents were street cleaners and who, consequently, might miss the ‘delicious’ point of the story.
    There have been references to an underclass inAustralia. The expression is used in the US, and as usual we feel we should try it out on our society to see if it fits or not.
    The underclass, by definition, is below every other ‘class’ and is used in the US to describe those who have fallen out of the economic and welfare system.
    But in a welfare state such as Australia, together with its remarkable network of private sector social service organisations, it is difficult to see how an underclass could exist except perhaps one made up of those who refuse help or who have deliberately distanced themselves from help (in the US this behaviour has been identified as a strange and intractable part of the underclass).
    Which is not to deny that there are people who find themselves on the poverty line.
    To return to the expression ‘middle class’. It could, we suppose, mean a statistical band of the population with middle incomes (that is, around a point equidistant from the highest and the lowest incomes). But while this might tell us about middle bands of income, it does not tell us about the behaviour or values of people with such incomes.
    We now call Raymond Williams, social analyst and author of the book Keywords , as a witness on this matter. He says, ‘ Class is an obviously difficult word … both in its range of meaning and in its complexity … and where it describes social division.’
    It surely is.
    In Marxist sense, there are ‘wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords’. Marx also added in the lumpen proletariat(bohemians and others