The Melancholia of Class
by Cynthia Cruz
Repeater Books £10.99

ASPIRATION, assimilation, alienation and class are knottily intertwined in contemporary Western societies. Success is deemed to be synonymous with moving up assorted ladders – social, property, career – and, by default, leaving behind whatever defined your parents’ reality.

As Cynthia Cruz argues in her highly original polemic, which comes with the subtitle A Manifesto for the Working Class, the middle class disappear the working class in different ways: by assuming all the “typical” working-class jobs have gone to China; by thinking of the working class in anachronistic and gendered terms, as white, male and employed at a factory; and by seeing non-whites, who make up the bulk of shop assistants, drivers, nannies and construction workers in the US and in many areas of Britain, as a class apart, as something else. They insist there is no such thing as class, and that everyone can prosper, while simultaneously ensuring the vast majority of those born poor stay there.