Working-Class Solidarity

The closest thing to a New Year's column you're going to get from me this year

Arnold Schwarzenegger being filmed for Pumping Iron in 1975 (LA Times via Wikicommons, CC)

About five years ago, a (former) friend was promoted to Professor at a Russell Group university. It’d been only about six years since he got his PhD. He’d flown through the ranks and we were all happy for him when he declared his success on Facebook. But you know what social media is like, and one or two of his colleagues pointed out a few of his advantages.

Specifically, he was an independently wealthy, able-bodied white man, married with no children and no caring responsibilities. He’d, furthermore, never had a job – not even a Saturday job – before becoming a lecturer. He’d been privately educated and privately tutored.

His response to this dose of truth was to curl out a stinking blog post directed at the people who couldn’t accept that he deserved his Professorship. It gave us a peep at his true character: a man who felt he lived in a perfect meritocracy and was bitter that others couldn’t accept he’d worked harder than they had.

Never before or since have I lost respect for someone so utterly and immediately.

He deleted the blog post fairly sharpish. And like many career-focused men, he’s now involved in his university’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives. He apparently fosters a public profile as a progressive voice on the political left (and seems to make nothing of the time he worked in an essay mill, writing papers for dishonest university students).

I thought about this former friend’s dropped-mask moment recently when I heard Arnold Schwarzenegger exhibit a markedly different attitude. The Austrian Oak was being interviewed by Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart for The Rest is Politics. ‘I was not a self-made man,’ he said, ‘but I was a creation of millions of people’. He didn’t make himself governor, he went on, his voters did. He didn’t make himself a movie star, film fans did. ‘It’s the people that make you that give you the power’.

The Governator could easily have thought himself the working-class equivalent of my former friend. You won’t find him saying that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, though. He wouldn’t have gone anywhere had it not been for other people, and he knows it. He also appreciates it.

Since gratitude is quite a New-Yearsy theme, I thought I’d follow Schwarzenegger’s example. Not that I mean to compare my piddling achievements with his ginormous ones, obviously, but I want to recognise that I’m a product of various kinds of support. Friends and well-wishers of different kinds effectively have given me what family, money, and social engineering gave my former friend. And I jolly well intend to acknowledge that.

The rest of this column is quite personal, so I hope you don’t mind my drawing a hospital-bed-like curtain around it, in the shape of a paywall!