Rethinking class through the history of professions

[Extract] In recent times, class behaviour in Australian politics, as elsewhere, has seemed confused. In the face of neoliberal economic reforms, the ‘moral middle class’, as political historian Judith Brett saw them originally underpinning the conservative Liberal Party, transferred their moral fervour to issues supported by Labor or the Greens. The working class, by contrast, transferred some allegiance to climate-change-denying capitalists (Brett, 1993; McDougall, 2019). These developments had melodramatic parallels internationally.

...Changes in occupation structure, however, need not by themselves represent transformations in the nature of class and class conflict. Professionals, I will argue in this chapter, nevertheless constituted a class in and for themselves from the late 19th century to the present.