current affairs | Sean Scalmer

SEARCHING FOR THE ASPIRATIONALS

ASPIRE: To have a fixed desire, longing, or ambition for something at present above one; to seek to attain, to pant, to long. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Aspiration is ambition. Those who lack, aspire. The rich (who already possess so much, so easily) know little of longing or fixed desires.

How does ‘aspiration’ become ‘aspirational’? Logically, all of those who aspire should form part of an ‘aspirational’ grouping. This is not the case, however. Somewhat paradoxically, the term is only applied to those who have achieved rather than desired; who possess, rather than seek. Enjoyment of material comfort (which actually implies the extinguishment of important ‘aspirations’) has somehow become the precondition of the ‘aspirational’.

Precisely, how are ‘the aspirationals’ identified? As has often been noted, the term defies easy definition. Its most common associations are something of a grab-bag. Politically, it applies to swinging or uncommitted voters, as well as to new Liberal voters. Sociologically, it refers to those who work in particular occupations (specifically, as skilled tradespeople, mid-level clerical workers and blue-collar workers with specialised skills); but also to the self-employed; and, at a more general level, to any of those workers who have gained class mobility from the ‘new economy’. Attitudinally, it applies to the greedy; but also to ‘moral traditionalists’ (who apparently believe in patriotism, community-mindedness and hard work); and even to the “fickle, unpredictable, anarchic attention-deficit, do-it-yourself, self-willed, suspicious and self-indulgent”. The label has also been applied to ‘youth’; to the Australian ‘people’ as a whole; to those who choose ‘private services’ (like schools and hospitals); to citizens who desire consumer goods; and to residents of new suburbs (and often large houses) on the fringes of Sydney and Melbourne.

In short, the ‘aspirationals’ are imagined in a range of contrary ways: young (but also approaching middle age); identified through patterns of consumption (but also associated with certain occupations); self-employed (but also salaried); selfish (but also community-minded); uncommitted (but also tied to the Liberal Party); particular (but also embracing the nation). Political scientists charged with compiling an Australian Survey of Social Attitudes have recently formulated an ‘aspirational index’. It reflects this messy profusion. ‘Aspirationality’ (as distinct from ‘aspiration’) is associated with certain activities over the past five years: buying an investment property or shares; renovating your home; moving your child from a government to a private school; consulting a financial planner or a share adviser about future finances; buying a plasma television or home entertainment system; establishing or buying a small business; taking up private health insurance; seeking new qualifications to improve job prospects; getting a better-paid job through promotion or changing employers.

Still, whatever the term lacks in coherence, it makes up for with popularity. Following its application in Britain, the language of the ‘aspirationals’ entered Australian political parlance in 1998. It implied moderation and modernisation. Conservative strategists in NSW argued that ‘aspirational’ Sydneysiders would reject strongly redistributive policies. John Della Bosca (then general secretary of the NSW ALP) suggested that Labor’s support for a wealth tax had spooked this unfamiliar grouping of voters, and had thereby cost the Party victory. Similar arguments were proffered in 2001. In particular, an angry critic from the backbenches, Mark Latham, offered a strong rebuke to Labor’s leadership. As he saw it, the ALP had ignored a vital presence in contemporary society:

working-class aspirants who are looking to the Labor Party to reward their effort and provide rungs . . . on the ladder of opportunity so they can do better for themselves and their families.

Latham’s political career represented a sustained (and largely unrequited) courtship of this grouping. By the end of 2004, his many speeches had made the ‘ladder of opportunity’ and the ‘aspirational worker’ wearily familiar to most voters.

However, Latham’s defeat did not at all banish the term. Indeed, his linguistic obsessions may be one of his few legacies. After the fall, the problem of ‘why Latham failed to inspire the aspirationals’ became a staple of newspaper commentary. Occasional columnists continue to muse on ‘aspirational’ greed. For his part, John Howard has recently proclaimed his own ability to reflect “the needs and the aspirations” of the residents of Western Sydney. Alexander Downer has promised that the current government seeks “aspirational target[s]”, while Labor eminences, such as Paul Keating, criticise the failure of the ALP to connect with the “self-employed, small business voter”.

In short, the ‘aspirational’ phenomenon has been a central object of political discussion for nearly a decade. It remains significant. The very definitional excess that accompanies the term – the incoherent lumping together of consumption, work, attitudes and groupings – is actually an expression of its tactical importance. Like ‘the community’, ‘the people’, or ‘the battlers’, representing the ‘aspirationals’ can be a powerful ideological claim. Political centrality produces discursive abundance.

If the messiness of the term is frustrating, then perhaps disciplined comparison will clarify matters. First, the ‘aspirationals’ are invariably contrasted with the traditional working class. Mark Latham has often used the term ‘aspirational workers’, implying that this collective is a special fragment of the working class. In fact, most uses of the term suggest a direct rhetorical opposition. Aspirationals are new, the working class is, so the argument goes, very old; aspirationals work in the ‘new economy’, the traditional working class is a creature of blue-collar industry; aspirationals consume, the old working class is thought to have gone without; aspirationals are mobile, the working class is stationary; aspirationals ‘aspire’, those who are not ‘aspirationals’ are (quite offensively) assumed to lack such drive. If this group is a part of the working class, it is most often understood as a kind of proletarian antipodes – an inversion of traditional working-class experiences, prospects and hopes.

Does this mean that being ‘aspirational’ is simply a synonym for being ‘middle class’? This is the hopeful view of some contemporary Liberals. Peter Costello has argued that aspirational voters were “discovered by Robert Menzies nearly fifty years ago. He called them the forgotten people”.

Certainly, there are important similarities. Both terms represent an alternative to the harsh polarities of traditional class analysis. Like the aspirationals, Menzies’ forgotten people were associated with ‘the home’. They were also ambitious and active – “lifters”, not “leaners”, and marked by a strong moral sensibility.

However, the differences are perhaps more obvious. Menzies’ forgotten people formed the middle grouping of a tripartite class structure. Sandwiched between the “rich and powerful” and the “mass of unskilled people, almost invariably well organised”, they were benighted and beset – victims of a “false” “class war”. In contrast, the ‘aspirationals’ are depicted as powerful rather than powerless, ascendant rather than assailed. These are the winners of contemporary Australia; neither the rich nor the poor currently threaten their health. The upstarts are explicitly linked to the changing economy. Unlike the middle class, they do not inhabit the old professions, but the new workplaces of IT, or the edgy vigour of small business. ‘Aspirationals’ are mobile; the ‘forgotten people’ are fixed.30 Menzies’ constituency was associated with order and learning; the ‘aspirationals’ suggest change and brash materialism. This is a coltish grouping, reflecting a disordered, risk society.

Perhaps this is a ‘lower middle class’? The term was first applied in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. Like the aspirationals, this is a lumpy category. It has always included diverse occupations, straddling small-business people and white-collar workers, shopkeepers and clerks. Conventionally, members of the lower middle class are thought to embrace the family and reject collective struggle. They quest for individual advancement. Their dogged pursuit of self-improvement often seems vulgar and affected to the privileged. In short, this is an aspiring group, as Rita Felski has argued:

It [the lower middle class] nurtures aspirations that distance it from stereotypes of working-class identity and that in turn appear pretentious and banal to those higher up the social ladder.

However, important differences also exist. Traditionally, the lower middle class is presented as feminine (or effeminate). The archetype is ‘the gent’: small, effete, unmanly. In contrast, ‘aspirationals’ are masculine. The act of aspiration is associated with “ardent desire” and rising up; tradesmen and technical workers are frequently advanced as examples. The lower middle class has traditionally been ignored; the aspirationals, however, are courted politically and their values (whatever they might be) widely endorsed. Members of the lower middle class are usually presented as victims of anxiety and shame, “tortured by a constant struggle to keep up appearances on a low income”. In contrast, the aspirationals enjoy a new wealth; their houses are large, bold, and self-confident. Political leaders from the lower middle class have often modulated their speech and hidden their origins; Mark Latham gloried in colloquialism and proudly acclaimed his suburban milieu. As a result, the label of ‘lower middle class’ fits poorly. If this grouping departs from the conventions of working-class behaviour, it equally overturns the typical dimensions of the lower middle class, as well.

Put simply, none of the categories of traditional class analysis adequately describes the ‘aspirational’ class. Does that mean the history of classes can offer no clues as to its meaning or importance? Not at all. In fact, the emergence of the term follows a highly familiar pattern in class mobilisation. Even if the label is unfamiliar, the process of identification that produced it has been witnessed many times before.
In the late 1950s, many Australian intellectuals were also convinced that the class structure was undergoing fundamental change. At this time, ‘affluence’ rather than ‘aspiration’ was thought to be the new ingredient. Brian Fitzpatrick argued that the working class and professional clerical workers now enjoyed the same basic income. V.G. Childe felt that “the working classes as a whole have got what they want” (and jumped off Govett’s leap soon afterward). E.M. Higgins believed that “higher living standards” and “a changing class structure” had undermined radical workers’ education. Most famously, the historian Ian Turner sketched out a detailed vision of the new order. In a celebrated article, ‘The Life of the Legend’, Turner argued that the 1950s had remade Australian society. Consumer capitalism required budgeting, increased mass entertainment and pressured Australians to conform. This had transformed the traditional Australian character. Struggle, egalitarianism and independence were all disappearing – “smothered in the T-bones and television of the welfare state”. Riches, in short, had made radicalism rare.

By the 1960s, these observations had become a sociological cliché. The problem of the ‘affluent worker’ loomed as a major research question. The supposed existence of ‘embourgeoisment’ provoked angry polemical exchanges. Before aspirationals, there was affluence; before affluence, there was ‘respectability’. The division between the ‘rough’ and the ‘respectable’ in inter-war working-class communities has often been noted. It describes an equivalent segmentation of jobs, incomes and cultural habits. The respectable working class also aspired. Before respectability, there was ‘aristocracy’. Students of the nineteenth-century labour movement have frequently identified a stratum of skilled workers that enjoyed greater income than their fellows and (perhaps) also proclaimed a set of distinctive values. These workers formed an ‘aristocracy of labour’. Radical intellectuals have long disputed its form, origins and political import. Before the ‘aristocracy’, there were the ‘strivers’. Henry Mayhew’s first writings about the modern working class identified the “striving” poor as a distinctive category of the urban landscape of the 1850s.

In sum, the working class has always been fractured. Mobility and division is neither remarkable nor novel. The ‘aspirational’ worker is a newish label for an old phenomenon. It is also inadequate. As we have seen, it oscillates between the universality of a verb (the activity of ‘aspiration’) and the specificity of a solid noun (a particular sector of contemporary society). It is usually unspecified (a free-floating label) or over-specified (a thick description of jobs, tastes, attitudes and habits). The differences between small-business people and skilled blue-collar employees (both officially ‘aspirational’) are typically overlooked. The linking of ‘aspiration’ with a particular social grouping is both insulting and distortive.

Does that mean that the ‘aspirationals’ have nothing to teach us? Not in my view. Somewhat paradoxically, the ubiquity of the label demonstrates the continuing importance of class divisions. ‘Aspirationals’ are associated with mobility and (for their champions) with the healthy dynamism of contemporary life. Logically, such mobility should lead to freedom from class: the upward movement of individuals must make the categories of traditional class analysis outmoded. Class society should, so the argument goes, be succeeded by an individualised society of employees. Clearly, however, this has not occurred. The apparent mobility of ‘aspirational workers’ has simply produced a new kind of social categorisation. ‘Aspirationals’ have not escaped class identification; they have instead been fixed with a new kind of label. A class by another name still constrains as tightly. Those who use the ‘aspirationals’ to proclaim the myth of classlessness serve merely to propagate a new kind of class analysis.

Whatever its undoubted weaknesses, the primary contribution of this analysis also deserves attention. One hundred and fifty years ago, Friedrich Engels confidently announced the disappearance of the lower middle class. Today, the persistence of divisions and layers is far more obvious. In an environment where consumption is a major shaper of identity, this is likely to remain so. In-between groupings are not marginal. Whether ‘aspirational’, ‘affluent’, ‘respectable’, ‘aristocratic’, ‘striving’, ‘lower-middle’, or ‘forgotten’, they form a relatively permanent place in the class structure.

The views (and aspirations) of these groups are not necessarily conservative or grasping. Members of the lower middle class led the Chartist movement for democracy; the clerical salariat proselytised for socialism; and the independent miners of Eureka hatched a rebellion. Jack Lang was a real estate agent; John Curtin a journalist. In truth, those who dwell ‘in-between’ have often contributed to radical political change. Perhaps, if those dubbed the ‘aspirationals’ are ever allowed to find their own voices, this may happen once more.

Sean Scalmer is a lecturer in sociology at Macquarie University and Sydney editorial correspondent for Overland. His new book on social movements, Activist Wisdom, co-written with Sarah Maddison, will be published soon by UNSW Press. He would like to thank Monique Rooney, Terry Irving, Stuart Macintyre, Verity Burgmann, Murray Goot and Nathan Hollier for comments on an earlier draft.

Overland 180–spring 2005, pp.5–9