A growing discontent: class and generation under neoliberalism

The problems of young people are a direct result of the emerging new class settlement.

Three stories

Angry - but at what?thump, thump … thump, thump, THUD

It’s 1 am, and that’s the noise of my upstairs neighbour in Mile End, Jack, banging on my ceiling with an unidentified heavy object. He thinks he’s being kept awake by the sound of the extractor fan in our bathroom that’s linked to the light switch, but we’ve brushed our teeth in the dark for some six months now. This time, I’m fairly certain the noise is from the spin cycle on the new neighbour’s washing machine. They work unsocial hours and haven’t cottoned on to the fact that their appliance shakes the entire building.

In my encounters with Jack, a professional in his late twenties and from a relatively wealthy background, it’s slowly dawned on me that his anger is representative of a broad social trend. His territoriality is an expression of lost privilege. He compares the noise our fan makes to that of an audience member at the proms jingling coins in his pocket or people talking through an opera he went to on holiday (‘I just listen to Radio 3 now, I can’t bear it’, he says). He is cultured, and he expects to sleep blissfully ignorant of his neighbours’ night-time sorties to the loo.

Jack’s sleep-deprived rage may be directed at me, but what he’s really angry about is beginning his adult life, making a home and starting a family in material conditions that are unacceptable given the standards he’s been acculturated to expect. Specifically, his class-based expectations of privacy are not being met. It’s a rage I admit I’ve felt myself at times, although I’ve tended to direct it at landlords and profiteering estate agents.

In the 1970s and 1980s, middle-class, young parents in London could mostly afford to buy whole houses or live closer to the centre, and if they were renting would expect their money to go a long way. Probably around half of Jack and his partner’s salaries will go on rent and bills, making saving to buy a house difficult, and currently that’s money spent on a flat in which he can’t even get a good night’s sleep. The five-apartment building we both live in was a house converted at the start of what has become the long house price boom since the recession of the early 1990s, shortly before the 1997 laws on soundproofing were introduced. The whole building is probably only slightly larger in size than the house Jack was brought up in.

Jack’s frustration is shared by many young, normatively successful people across the country. It is an expression of collapsing middle-class ‘entitlements’ - that you can do everything right, work hard, get good grades, land the right job and still not get the disposable income, job security, pension or, yes, housing that you benchmark against your parents experience as ‘doing ok’.

Much has been written about the decline in prosperity and security of the global North’s young middle class, in Europe known as the 1000€ generation. In places like Italy, Spain, Portugal and above all Greece, the crisis hitting young people, and increasingly not so young people (this is a problem that was already emerging before the economic crisis of 2008), is unprecedented. Across the western world, there is a collective double-take happening for those born since roughly 1980, as the comforts of life once taken for granted in a ‘developed’ nation become difficult to obtain and competitively rationed. On current socio-economic trajectories, it seems likely that this is increasingly going to become the reality in most places in the world.¹

So Jack’s complaint is of an increasingly common kind, and signals something in the wider shifts that are going on in our society under neoliberalism. The middle class - which grew rapidly in the second half of the last century - are now seeing...