Free The Inspector-General of Misconception by Frank Moorhouse Page A

with tenuous relations with economic production). But Marx also chopped and changed his usage of the term ‘class’.
    These days, the Marxist definitions do not tell us much about the people in those broad divisions. Those divisions are in no way a reliable indicator of behaviour or values or opinions.
    For instance, these crude class divisions don’t tell us that much about the voting patterns, recreational preferences, sexual morality, or even home ownership of those within those divisions. Nor do income differences predictably translate into behaviour or values.
    The Bureau of Statistics divides the population into five income groups and from lowest to highest, about a third of each group, for example, owns a house.
    The Bureau of Statistics divides the workforce into four groups defined by how they are paid: employers, self-employed, wage and salary earners, and unpaid family helpers (the continued expression ‘salary’ as distinct from ‘wage’ is quaint).
    It further divides the employed into eight groups: managers and administrators, professionals, para-professionals, tradespersons, clerks, salespersons and personal service workers, plant and machine operators and drivers, and labourers and related workers. There is an implied hierarchy in this listing which may in some cases have no relation to income. Some salespersons, for example, might earn a huge income while a theatre administrator might earn less than a machine operator.
    Statistically, there is no official ‘middle class’. Andperhaps statistically there is no suburbia.
    It may just be another of those mythical boundaries we make to help forge for ourselves a superior identity.
    Perhaps it is an expression used by people who fear they belong to a middle class and then, for whatever pathological reason, hold themselves in contempt.
    Or perhaps it is used by those who feel they once belonged to this fabled class and have fortunately escaped it. They are really then, pouring their scorn on their families from which they have escaped.
    And, as in the US, most people describe themselves as ‘middle class’. That usually means neither very poor nor very rich – but again, it tells us nothing much else.
    Interim Finding: We hold that there is nothing wrong with pouring scorn on one’s families from which one has escaped. But to extend one’s family into a social class and to condemn the lot is perhaps a bit unfair.
    What is going on in the frequent use of the term in arts criticism?
    Our Investigators believe that there is a suggestion in arts criticism that the arts has a role in speaking for the disadvantaged to the exclusion of those who are materially well off.
    Or that the arts has a role in giving a voice to those without a voice and that this fabled middle class already has a big voice (despite its inclusion at other times in the expression ‘silent majority’).
    In the opinion of this Office, one of the great functions of the arts lies in the paradox of ‘saying what the articulate cannot say for themselves’.
    Yes, yes, yes, the arts can also speak for those without a voice (although it is a safer course of action to allow those without a voice to find it for themselves and to then speak for themselves. What was once known as ‘the Left’ had to learn this the hard way).
    It seems to be implied, at times, in the use of the term, that this fabled middle class is devoid of all graces and intellectual capacity. Moreover, as in the above quoted examples, the suffering of those in this fabled middle class can never be authentic.
    Angst or tragedy is denied to this class.
    It would seem that the refusal of critics to grant the capacity for angst to their imagined middle class springs from a rather crude notion that having economic security or material comforts disqualifies a person from suffering or, at least, from the imaginative examination of the causes and nature of their