An interesting side-finding from this moan about the difficulties of the working class in penetrating the arts establishment:
Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society
Study shows the proportion of musicians, writers and artists with working-class origins has shrunk by half since the 1970s
There are fewer people of working class background coming up through that arts sector, entirely true. But the reason this is true is, as the paper itself says, because there are simply fewer people who are working class:
This reflected a similar decline in the number of people with working-class origins, according to the paper in the journal Sociology by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37% of the workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21%.
We can vaguely be serious about this if we wish. Adam Smith’s work can be read as that emergence of the bourgeois as a force in society. Deirdrie McCloskey’s reading is that subsequent development is actually the triumph of those bourgeois values - it’s when society started to operate to them that society started to expand and succeed. Greg Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms” has as its rough structure the idea that the bourgeois outbred the proletariat and so, by Lamarckian inheritance, the bourgeois values spread through the society. They’re all telling much the same story that is.
We can be slightly less serious about it and note that Marxian and revolutionary demand from a century back, that insistence upon the elimination of the bougeoisie. Well, not entirely from a century back, it seems to live on at Comment is Free. The actual outcome seeming to be entirely the opposite. The working class is being, through social mobility, entirely absorbed into the bourgeois. That’s the actual outcome of the class war. The result of this is that all that stuff about power to the workers, the proletariat should be running the country, is nonsense. Not only is the working class not the majority any more - democracy does mean the power should be with the majority and thus with that bourgeoisie - we’re getting close to the point where there isn’t a working class at all.
Being entirely unserious, we win by assimilation into the Borg.
Sadly, it’s also necessary to be entirely serious about this. Because despite the fact that according to objective conditions there is no working class left to take power and revolutionise society that’s not going to stop the intelligentsia from demanding that event. Meaning we’re still stuck with Comment is Free for the immediate future.