The Making of the Western Affluent Working Class: Class and Affluence Through Postwar Public Discussions and Academic Interpretations

Abstract

In this chapter I provide an analytic overview of the academic and public discussions on postwar Western affluence among the blue-collar working class. Using popular sociological interpretations, widespread media narratives, and influential political rhetoric as empirical evidence, I highlight how impactful public narratives of the working class are constructed, deconstructed, or reconstructed during the period of the so-called affluent society (1950s to early 1970s) and the age of deindustrialization (from the mid-1970s onwards). Focusing on the Western experience, the study draws parallels between different nations, from North America and France to the Nordic countries. I argue that even though societal and cultural realities change drastically throughout the West, portrayals and interpretations of the working class are constructed with analogous structural narrative materials.

Introduction

The first decades after World War II are often labeled the Golden Age of Western industrial capitalism.¹ The 1970s marked an end of this period of “endless prosperity,”² but the essential phenomena of that time—welfare states and rising standards of living—have continued to affect the Western experience ever since. For decades, the unparalleled economic progress has been a topic for vivid public debates, in which contemporaries have analyzed the societal impact of postwar affluence. Some have, for example, promoted the idea of the classless society, while some have emphasized more the stratification and injustices even in the so-called welfare state/affluent society. In this chapter, I analyze Western societal narratives, emphasizing the concept of social class. I ask how general, widely spread public portrayals and academic interpretations of the working class have been constructed, deconstructed or reconstructed since World War II.

As empirical evidence, I use popular sociological interpretations, widespread media narratives, and influential political rhetoric from the 1950s to the 2020s. These are collected mainly from North America, Great Britain, and Finland, but also from France and (West) Germany. Finland—usually seen as a Nordic welfare state—is selected as an empirical case study because of my own academic specializations. These discussions are highlighted from current research paradigms, but I have also revisited the original texts. I claim that selected discussions construct a general narrative for the postwar Western working class, and they both reveal the changes in social positions and occasionally further these changes. Simultaneously, I argue that strong mediatization of the class experience has become one of the dominant features when speaking about contemporary class consciousness.

The key concepts of this chapter are narrative and experience. Here, experience does not mean authentic, unproblematized individual experience, but more a culturally and socially constructed mediating category, which is nevertheless still lived through memories and embodied feelings.³ I emphasize the impact of different societal narratives conveyed to the public sphere—especially during the contemporary era of mass media.⁴ During the analysis, I follow the basic definition of master narrative and counter-narrative, where the first indicates the normative, even hegemonic state of being and the latter represents the resistance. The individual societal experiences are partly created through both of these forms of storytelling.⁵ Overall, this study analyzes first and foremost general societal narratives—even generalizations—which are spread through media and can be claimed to have a distinct impact on members of the contemporary working class—especially in a sense of understanding one’s own social position.

Indeed, working class is a subject for the selected narratives. Here, it is seen as a general concept covering non-college-educated blue-collar workers and agents with a similar social background outside working life. In other words, it is a concept covering a specific social group based on economic and social positions.⁶ The focus of the study is mainly on the male-dominated manufacturing labor force, because most of the selected public discussions focus on this demographic. However, the diversity of the concept of working class is highlighted at the end of this chapter.

The concept of the affluent society provides a context for the analysis. The term was coined by American economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his celebrated book Affluent Society (1958). In Galbraith’s grand theory, during the 1950s the United States entered the era of material affluence and abundance, especially in the sense of private consumerism. The book was a highly influential study in the field of economics, where Galbraith developed his Keynesian views on how public spending should be increased in addition to private spending for the sake of national progress.⁷ However, the concept of the affluent society soon detached itself from Galbraith’s theories and took on a life of its own. It became a general term describing the Western societal reality.

It should be noted that the concept of the welfare state is connected to the concept of the affluent society. “Welfare State” as a term has been used in political and academic discussions every now and then since the mid-nineteenth century, but it has been an impactful rhetorical tool only since the 1940s.⁸ Then, it was first associated with the postwar British society and the new progressive social and educational policies of the Labour government, which strongly emphasized rhetoric such as “the equality of opportunities” and “meritocracy over heritocracy.”⁹ In general, the welfare state describes a society wherein the state has a somewhat crucial role in its citizens’ opportunities in the fields of education and social well-being,¹⁰ while affluent society emphasizes material abundance.

In this chapter, I follow a temporal order. Firstly, I construct a general portrayal of the affluent working class using widely influential sociological inquiries from the 1950s and early 1960s. Secondly, I highlight counter-narratives from the “Radical Sixties” that challenge the idea of the affluent society. I also present key elements of the so-called conservative backlash, a political rhetoric questioning the liberal and progressive policies. Simultaneously, I highlight the economic backlashes against the affluent working class from the mid-1970s onwards, and how political conservatism started to attract struggling blue-collar workers. The study is mostly based on Anglo-American discussions, but I argue that the main claims can be applied to most Western industrial societies.

Rise of the Affluent Working Class

Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm have emphasized the changes in British class culture during the postwar era. For them, collective aspects have been the defining characteristics of working-class culture since the nineteenth century, when workers—mobilized by the labor movement—embodied a counterculture lifestyle distinct from the “hegemonic culture of the bourgeoisie” or “privatized lifestyle of the middle class.”¹¹ But it was in the 1950s when the relatively closed working-class cultural sphere started to open and change its form, or—as the contemporary Richard Hoggart would argue—it was the period when pure British working-class culture was “corrupted” by mainstream consumerism.¹²

Then, relative affluence among the Western societies inspired the so-called embourgeoisement thesis among sociologists. The thesis and the public discussion around it claimed that during the postwar period, the Western working class had integrated with the middle class to the extent that the historical class conflict had faded from societal reality. During the early 1960s, sociologist Ferdynand Zweig—among others¹³—argued that technological changes, full employment, welfare state policies, and material affluence had produced a brand-new social class—the “New Working Class”—separated from the traditional class of resistance. Zweig claimed that class distinctions would eventually vanish when manual labor blended economically and socially into the white-collar middle class.¹⁴ A vivid example of this was the American suburb, the modern residential area outside the city centers for white- and blue-collar workers. The middle-class lifestyle of the suburb, financed by consumer credit and mortgages, was seen as the last step of working-class embourgeoisement.¹⁵

During the 1960s, the embourgeoisement thesis was criticized by the renowned British sociologist John Goldthorpe and his affiliates.¹⁶ Goldthorpe claimed that embourgeoisement is an exaggerated hypothesis. However, he did not deny “a process of normative convergence between certain sections of the working and middle classes”—especially in the sense of the privatization of the working-class lifestyle.¹⁷ Indeed, the popular claim was that even though the working class would not merge into the middle class, the modern lifestyle would change the class experience, and the most visible welfare state phenomenon—expanding educational possibilities—would provide youth from a working-class background “endless” possibilities to succeed in the new “society of meritocracy.”¹⁸

The postwar affluence was seen as a phenomenon spreading all around the West. Finland offers an empirical case on how the narrative of affluence has affected one of the smaller nations in the Western cultural sphere. Finland had a relatively small urban working-class population during the first half of the twentieth century. The narrative of the full-scale wage-based society emerges in the public discussion as late as the 1960s. Before that, the heart of the nation was still seen partly in self-sufficient peasantry. Indeed, it was the 1960s and 1970s when the nation experienced the spectacularly rapid urbanization, industrialization, and expansion of welfare state policies.¹⁹

During the 1960s, glimpses of the embourgeoisement thesis also appeared in the Finnish public discussion, even though Finland was still seen as a country just heading toward affluence. Then, it seemed that especially the Communist Party of Finland—one of the most impactful in Europe²⁰—needed to defend the Marxist immiseration theory against the narrative of affluence.²¹ Indeed, communist rhetoric on the economy started to slowly lose its explanatory power and political appeal when European socialist states did not provide similar standards of living for their citizens compared to the Western capitalist states.²² In 1967, sociologist Jouko Siipi emphasized the positive progress in his book Ryysyrannasta hyvinvointivaltioon (From Poverty to the Welfare State). The book celebrated Finland’s fifty years of independence and at the same time provided a depiction of the societal atmosphere: Finland was above all an upcoming affluent society where poverty affected foremost a shrinking class of smallholders. For Siipi, the great future of the nation lay in the industrial and service sectors—and in the liberal market economy.

By the late 1970s and especially in the 1980s, the narrative of the classless society—or the society of the middle class—reached a somewhat master narrative status in Finland.²³ Especially during the 1980s, some twenty years after the vivid American and British discussion about the affluent worker, Finnish ethnographic and sociological studies noted a strong convergence between social classes.²⁴ The viral phrase of the decade, “to be born in Finland is like winning the lottery,”²⁵ sums up the societal atmosphere. In Britain, similar rhetoric can be found in the year 1957, when the Conservative Prime Minister at the time, Harold Macmillan, famously declared: “Most of our people have never had it so good.”²⁶

Overall, the origins of the contemporary narrative of the affluent worker can be located in the postwar discussion about class distinctions, which academic scholars provided and media formats spread throughout the West. There, the profound idea can be understood as an updated version of the “American Dream,” where the freedom of the frontiers was replaced by the concrete dream of conformity, the right for everybody to have equal material wealth to a certain extent.²⁷ The individual societal experience was reflected in this claim, which can be seen as the main ingredient for the postwar master narrative.

The Counter-Narrative on Poverty

The affluent worker was not a definite depiction of the postwar labor experience. In many cases, the experience of affluence was relative even within the skilled workers,²⁸ and—above all—the “New Working Class” was a concept describing Caucasian, blue-collar, often unionized men. Part-time and low-paid service sector employees, unskilled workers, migrants, ethnic minorities, and people outside working life did not receive the promise of the above-mentioned master narrative. During the 1960s, their life stories produced counter-narratives that strongly questioned fundamental ideas of affluence.

Still, in the late 1950s John Kenneth Galbraith declared that poverty in America was no longer “a massive affliction [but] more nearly an afterthought.”²⁹ The claim was highly premature, and it has been removed from later editions of the Affluent Society, but it depicted the societal atmosphere well. However, during the early 1960s strong counter-narratives against the idea emerged in the public discussion. One of the most widespread media narratives was a television documentary, Harvest of Shame (CBS, 1960), which shocked America with its portrayal of oppressed migrant agricultural workers. Other influential documentation was Michael Harrington’s book The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962)—a direct attack against the popularized concept of the affluent society.³⁰ It has been said that both of these social documentations affected the agendas for the War on Poverty that was launched by President John F. Kennedy and continued by his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson.³¹ Indeed, Harvest of Shame and The Other America have become staples in the American collective memory, and during their notable anniversaries, they are often revisited with the question: Has anything changed?³²

In The Other America, Harrington—a well-known democratic socialist—calculated that there were a significant number of poor people—forty to fifty million—in America.³³ Similar observations were also made in Britain during the early 1960s, where the claim was that the postwar welfare state policies had not banished poverty, but the relative poverty rate had rather increased.³⁴ In America, the poor mass included elderly, non-white, single parents, unemployed, underemployed, sick, and residents of rural and urban slums. Harrington’s significant conclusion was that the poor form their own social class distinct from the organized working class, and—for the first time in history—this poor population was a minority in a society. Because of its minority status, the modern underclass was relatively invisible to the “middle classes”—the petty bourgeois and affluent workers. The poor experienced the world from their closed living environments, were unorganized, and often suffered from systems of racial segregation.³⁵ These claims constructed a pure example of a counter-narrative that revealed the oppressive side of the master narrative. It can be claimed that the public portrayals of poverty deconstructed the narrative of affluence.

Harrington also claimed that the welfare state policies—established during the 1930s Rooseveltian New Deal era—had failed the poor and provided a social safety net mostly for “the middle third in the cities, for the organized workers, and for the upper third in the country, for the big market farmers.”³⁶ When analyzing the societal experiences, perhaps the most important concept Harrington popularized in the context of the United States was the culture of poverty—a concept formerly associated with the works of the anthropologist Oscar Lewis.³⁷ For Harrington, the culture of poverty produced communities with a lack of faith in the future and a lack of faith in democracy. In other words, the poor were not attached to society.³⁸

Later, Harrington claimed that during the progressive era of the 1960s, it seemed that the American poor could be politically organized as part of the contemporary New Deal coalition with the civil rights movement, young academic social activists, and labor unions. However, during the dramatic events at the end of the decade (the Vietnam War, the failures of the Johnson administration, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy) the momentum was gone, and the coalition scattered.³⁹ Similar coalitions arose, for example, in France and Italy, when the ambitions of student radicals and organized labor overlapped briefly with progressive programs during the late 1960s.⁴⁰

In 1960s Finland—in the waves of youth radicalism and social movements—the public discussion also pointed out the faults, stratifications, and injustices of rapid modernization. The social rights of alcoholics, the homeless, convicts, and people with mental illness were at the forefront in the struggle against poverty. Poverty was also seen as a problem in the closed, relatively small communities of Romani people and those in old, decayed, working-class quarters.⁴¹ However, the actual pockets of mass poverty were mostly hidden inside the smallholder communities all over the sparsely populated nation. During the latter part of the decade, the crises of ineffective smallholding exploded into the Great Migration from rural areas to the boom towns and abroad, especially to Sweden.⁴² In the grand narrative, the assimilation of hundreds of thousands of rural residents to the urban working class and middle class was a success, even though the rootlessness of the first-generation urbanites was highlighted.⁴³ In the 1980s, Finland was an example of a nation where traditional portrayals of poverty were almost exclusively replaced by deeply individual descriptions of social exclusion in mainstream public discussion.⁴⁴

Fall of the Western Affluent Working Class

The narrative of blue-collar affluence started to change during the mid-1970s, when the Western working class confronted economic backlashes through automatization and early modern globalization.⁴⁵ Indeed, the manufacturing industries started to shrink throughout the West.⁴⁶ The aftermath of the early 1970s oil crises created a crisis narrative, and the decade was soon seen as a watershed between the Golden Age of industrial capitalism and “something else.”⁴⁷

From an American blue-collar perspective, the decline of the Midwest industrial areas strongly questioned the narrative of the affluent worker. The popular concept of the “Rust Belt” was coined by the Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984, when he announced that “Reagan’s policies are turning our industrial Midwest into a rust bowl.”⁴⁸ An earlier grand moment for the crisis narrative was “Black Monday” in September 1977, when an industrial town in Ohio—Youngstown—suffered enormous industrial layoffs in one day. After the shutdown of the city’s two mills, the master narrative of the affluent worker was strongly challenged: The promise of a secure social position was gone, and it was replaced by the fear that anyone working in manufacturing could lose his/her job.⁴⁹ Gradually “Black Mondays” and “Rust Belts”—not to mention the rise of Japan as an industrial powerhouse and struggles of the automotive industry in Detroit⁵⁰—started to replace the concept of the affluent society in the working-class narrative.

During the early 1980s, especially the concept of deindustrialization was introduced to the public discussion.⁵¹ In addition, Michael Harrington addressed the topic and highlighted new forms of poverty. In 1985, he pointed out the changing narrative of the affluent worker:

The first, and perhaps most dramatic of the new groups, are the blue collar unionized workers. These are workers, many of them forty to fifty years of age, who have lost their jobs because of plant shutdowns. Three or four years ago, they were making $30,000 to $40,000 per year, and yet today they are confronted with a bleak question: Who wants a forty-five year old ex-steelworker? […] They bought the American dream – lock, stock, and barrel – and they thought that they had it made. Suddenly, these proud people are out of a job, and they find themselves down at the union hall getting a basket of food.⁵²

Indeed, from the 1980s onwards Western manufacturing labor was threatened with the prospect of ending up “on welfare”—a derogatory phrase connected to welfare recipients—as globalization shaped the job markets. Simultaneously, in West Germany the narrative of the “Two-Third Society” emerged. Social Democrat politician Peter Glotz popularized the concept, which was used to describe a nation where one-third of the population is left out from the common lifestyle, mostly due to unemployment and economic structural changes. The narrative claimed that there is a danger that this large minority can never achieve average living standards.⁵³ In America, the so-called neoconservatives—a term coined by Michael Harrington in 1973⁵⁴—used the concept of the culture of poverty to prove the failings of American federal welfare programs, and they intentionally created a conflict between the racialized poor (the “Other America”) and the affluent blue-collar working class.⁵⁵ This conflict started to escalate when the economic backlash against the blue-collar workers actualized. Indeed, the economic backlash did not create a sense of solidarity between the struggling blue-collar working class and the “Other America.” As Michael Harrington claimed, the former assembly line workers kept their affluent identity, and when asked, they “told you that they were middle class.”⁵⁶

In Finland, the Golden Age of the wage-based society ended only in the early 1990s, when the nation suffered from a breathtaking recession. Then, deindustrialization shaped the national narrative. Long-term unemployment—a class of people living solely on income transfers—highlighted the tragedy of the “’90s recession.”⁵⁷ As in the rest of the West, it was the people without a college degree who suffered severely from the economic restructuring.⁵⁸ However, the Finnish crisis narrative was soon downplayed by the enormous growth of the high-tech industries led by the mobile phone manufacturer Nokia.⁵⁹ The narrative of the “Rust Belt” was truly actualized only after the global economic crash of 2008.⁶⁰ It could be argued that the Finnish counterpart to Youngstown’s “Black Monday” was September 3, 2013, when Nokia announced the sale of its mobile and devices division to Microsoft Corporation. The process that led to the deal together with numerous paper mill shutdowns created the contemporary narrative of declining manufacturing in Finland.⁶¹

Overall, the transition from “affluent worker” to “forgotten people of the Rust Belt” was downplayed in Western public and academic discussion during the 1980s and 1990s.⁶² The concept of the post-industrial society—a term popularized by sociologist Daniel Bell in the 1970s—overshadowed the concept of the industrial society in the mainstream media. Then, the working class was replaced by knowledge workers as the main productive agents in society.⁶³ The revival of the blue-collar working class as a political entity was actualized only during the new millennium, when a significant segment of the formerly affluent workers shifted its loyalty from the labor movement to more conservative, even far-right political forces. However, this conservative backlash had its roots as far back as the “Radical Sixties.”

Narrative of Working-Class Conservatism

Even during the 1950s, the idea of political embourgeoisement emerged every now and then in public debates, especially in Britain. Then, one of the driving forces was the lackluster electoral success of the Labour Party. In survey research, Must Labour Lose? (1960), Mark Abrams, Richard Rose, and Rita Hinden claimed that the decline of Labour was connected to the shrinking of the traditional working class. The authors emphasized that the Labour Party needed to attract also the middle class to gain electoral success.⁶⁴

During the 1960s, it appeared that left-wing parties across the West were redeeming their status as the democratic representatives of the working class, and, for example, John Goldthorpe and his affiliates denied the claim that the link between the working-class vote and the Labour Party had vanished.⁶⁵ However, in the United States—as noted earlier—the modern New Deal coalition did not last long. It can be claimed that the final phase of the labor movement as a mass movement in America can be traced to the early 1970s, when a strong wave of strikes swept over the nation—only to be confronted by shocks like Youngstown’s “Black Monday.”⁶⁶

During the late 1960s, the shift toward the new narrative of the working-class conservative appeared in the American public discussion. The US presidential election of 1968 can be seen as a turning point. Disappointments with the phenomena of the “Radical Sixties” (anti-war and civil rights protests, desegregation policies, and riots in different cities) and experiences of the unfairness of welfare policies created a protest atmosphere among white- and blue-collar Caucasian Americans. In 1968, a former Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, entered the presidential race as an independent candidate and flirted with anti-establishment rhetoric and more than borderline racist segregation populism. Wallace gained relatively strong support from the unionized blue-collar workers of the Midwest.⁶⁷ At the same time, the winner of the presidential race, Richard Nixon, underlined the division between “Rioters/Left-wing Radicals” and the “Silent Majority.”⁶⁸ The message was aimed mostly toward the affluent middle-class and working-class suburbanites.

At the turn of the decade, many blue-collar voters for Wallace and Nixon seemed to care more about “Law and Order” rhetoric than traditional economic issues, and for many, the Democratic Party was seen mainly as the party of radicals and minorities.⁶⁹ As contemporary commentators argued, the angst of blue-collar America—actualized through conservative support—was partly aimed at youth radicalism and policies such as affirmative action, but it also reflected the fear of losing a relatively affluent economic and social status.⁷⁰ In 1969, Pete Hamill argued in New York Magazine: “The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”⁷¹ This revolt was firstly associated with George Wallace and the 1970s waves of strikes.

A decade later the conservative backlash materialized through general elections. Firstly, Great Britain—after experiencing both Labour and Conservative governments struggling with recessions, cultural conflicts, problems in the education sector, and widespread waves of strikes—elected Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979.⁷² Before the elections, the “Winter of Discontent” created a widespread anti-union atmosphere throughout the nation. The populist narrative—endorsed by tabloid journalism—highlighted the vivid wave of strikes during the 1978/1979 winter as a testament of excessive union influence on democratic society. Thatcher successfully emphasized the “threat of the unions.”⁷³ During the same period, after the struggling presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter, Americans elected neoconservative idol Ronald Reagan as president and—as historian Kenneth D. Durr has noted—it was “the working whites, who put Reagan in the White House.”⁷⁴

Both Reagan and Thatcher emphasized economic deregulation, nationalistic rhetoric, traditional values, and actions against the organized labor movement and welfare state policies. Also, the narrative of the patriotic working people as the backbone of national glory was strongly highlighted. During their decade-long reign, it seemed that the parties of the left—still affected by the stigma of social radicalism and excessive moral liberalism—could not compete with the charm of modern conservatism in the eyes of a relatively large section of the working class.⁷⁵ Additionally, labor unions were given a militaristic reputation by the media and governments—most famously during the British miner’s strike in 1984–1985. The concept of the “Reagan Democrat” and the British concept of the “Essex man” were popularized as portrayals of the working-class voter who supported conservative leaders.⁷⁶

In Finland—an example of the so-called Nordic welfare state in this study—the traditional labor movement started to lose its countercultural roots during the 1970s. Then, a coalition of communists and socialists sat in Popular Front governments, the Social Democratic Party was mostly the party of the Prime Minister, labor unions had unquestionable societal and economic impact, almost the whole workforce of the nation was unionized, and the industrial and service sectors provided decent- to well-paid jobs for most of the population. From the early 1970s onwards, most of the establishment of the labor movement was part of the national power structure, which swore by the concept of consensus.⁷⁷

However, it was not the Finnish urban working class who were attracted to populism—it was the struggling smallholders. During the general elections of the 1970s, the agrarian populist Suomen Maaseudun Puolue (Finnish Rural Party) with its charismatic leader, Veikko Vennamo, gained strong support among the rural communities. The aggressive rhetoric of Vennamo focused on the concept of Unohdettu kansa (The Forgotten People), which resembled the Nixonian “Silent Majority.” The focus for the party was on smallholder communities with conservative and anti-communist values. The populism of Vennamo did not attract the urban working-class masses. The Social Democrats and declining socialist/communist movement received most of the working class vote up until the 2000s.⁷⁸ However, during the 1990s, the premises of left-wing politics changed significantly when the far-left party the Left Alliance abandoned communist traditions and the Social Democrat leadership leaned more toward free market economics. This was partly inspired by the Anglo-American rebranding of moderate liberals.

Indeed, during the 1990s, President Bill Clinton reinvented the American Democratic Party as more pro-globalization, pro-privatization, and anti-big government. The reinvention was successful—as was Tony Blair’s similar rebranding of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom.⁷⁹ It can be said that the late 1950s idea of the middle class as a backbone for social democracy was actualized. As cultural historian Thomas Frank has pointed out, the blue-collar working class was not a priority for the Clinton Democrats. It was seen that the wide range of the educated class—knowledge workers—were the established core for the Clinton coalition.⁸⁰ In his influential book What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), Frank portrays the contemporary working class as a social class with conservative values, but ultimately with a leftist economic understanding.⁸¹ During the 1990s, this class—threatened with globalization—was indeed the forgotten class in the narrative of the meritocratic/post-industrial society. Then, the “American Dream” was also rebranded to focus on education and talent. Those who had the brains for college deserved a better societal status.⁸²

Since the turn of the new millennium, the “Silent Majorities” of the local “Rust Belts” have voted more often for conservatives and right-wing populists throughout the West, while the growing class of knowledge workers has leaned toward the political left. In his book Capital and Ideology (French 2019, English 2020), French economist Thomas Piketty emphasizes this phenomenon and claims that “like the left-wing parties in France, the Democratic Party in the United States transitioned over half a century from the workers’ party to the party of the highly educated.”⁸³ Piketty points out that the same transition has also happened in a historical stronghold for social democracy, Sweden, and almost all over the world.⁸⁴ In Finland, working-class conservatism as a serious political entity was actualized during the 2010s with the contemporary political party Perussuomalaiset (Finns Party). It was a direct successor of the above-mentioned Suomen Maaseudun Puolue, but the party has lately transformed from agrarian populism to far-right populism, combining the narrative of the forgotten people with vicious anti-immigrant policies.⁸⁵

Indeed, during the 2010s and 2020s, the conservative backlash—now rebranded as the populist backlash—has opened doors for so-called far-right movements throughout the West. The movements have emphasized the “Silent Majorities,” and they have gained strong electoral support from the aging and shrinking blue-collar working class.⁸⁶ For example, in Britain and France, the narrative of the working-class conservative has become an important part of the societal master narrative when analyzing the political identities of the 2020s.⁸⁷ Above all, the blue-collar working class as a social and economic group was recognized again as part of the Western grand narrative in 2016, when it gave significant support to former president Donald Trump and the pro-Brexit vote. Since then, the news media in the West has reported the suffering of the local “Rust Belts,” the realities of deindustrialization, and unequal aspects of meritocracy, among other phenomena, which could explain the rise of populism.⁸⁸ One recent example of the “Rust Belt” rhetoric—and a reprise of labor-oriented moderate left-wing rhetoric—was seen in March 2022, when President Joe Biden declared in the first State of the Union Address of his presidency that “it is time to bury the label ‘Rust Belt.’”⁸⁹

Conclusion

During the late 1950s, the “Western worker” reflected on his own living conditions in terms of the widely discussed idea of affluence and embourgeoisement. In the 1960s, strong counter-narratives questioning the affluent society emerged throughout the West in the form of social documentaries, such as Harvest of Shame and The Other America. The highly publicized fight for the rights of oppressed minorities was perhaps the most influential part of the 1960s narrative, but at the same time the fierce actions of the labor movement positively affected the living conditions of millions of workers. Briefly, it seemed that conflicts between the Caucasian working class, young radicals, and ethnic minorities would not escalate. It could be claimed that when living standards were vastly improving, it was easier to create a narrative of solidarity between different social groups.

This changed during the late 1960s, when conservative political rhetoric produced an effective counter-narrative against the social phenomena of the radical decade. The conflict between the “hard-working common man” and “welfare state recipients” supported by the “left-wing radicals” was successfully highlighted by the neoconservatives. Together with economic backlashes, this rhetoric resonated among the blue-collar working class. The experience of the political left abandoning the working class—the “Silent Majority”—was and still is widespread. Simultaneously, it can be said that there is no profound lived or embodied welfare state to be found within the master narrative of the affluent working class. The welfare state policies were—especially in the Anglo-American world—represented as something outside the living environments of the workers. In other words, the welfare state was for someone else. Even in the Nordic countries—where the welfare state has been a distinct feature of the national master narrative for decades⁹⁰—there are discussions on the intended recipients of welfare state policies.

It can be claimed that the experience of social class in the affluent society has not been actively realized in living communities or on a daily basis—as was the case with the theories of E. P. Thompson on the birth of nineteenth-century class consciousness.⁹¹ Now, class experience is made mostly through the mediatization of society.⁹² During the early stages of the era of mass media, the platforms were newspapers, widely circulated inquiries, narrative art, and television, while nowadays it is often social media. Public narratives are produced by different authors—for example, sociologists, economists, journalists, literary authors, politicians, and other public figures. This mediatization, combined with the privatization of the working-class lifestyle, has produced a contemporary field for the class experience where class consciousness is internalized globally from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, television, radio talk shows, and blogs—not in union hall meetings.

During the twenty-first century, the concept of the working class has been reinvented in the fields of academic and public discussion.⁹³ As seen in this chapter, the traditional narratives have been heavily male and Caucasian. Now, the traditional depiction of the frustrated male worker has been accompanied by new types of class portrayals. The intersectional approach—a term coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the late 1980s⁹⁴—emphasizes the power structures between class, ethnicity, and gender. The approach helps to reveal the modes of discrimination and privilege in the contemporary societies and, at last, the modern underclass is recognized as part of the working class.⁹⁵ For example, the concept of precarity—the heterogeneous social group of underemployed and low-paid service sector employees—is highlighted as a new working-class formation.⁹⁶ Overall, the blue-collar working class no longer represents the grand narrative of the social class. It has become a “traditional” mode of class positioning, sometimes even antagonistic toward the new class formations. Indeed, the making of the class experience was, is, and will be an ongoing process.