Början på en klassresa

Abstract

The article is part of a larger study of which the purpose is to describe the "class traveller's" situation from a highly subjective inside perspective: I'm writing about myself. One starting point is my name, Ronny. Ronny is an Anglo-Saxon name not found in the generation before mine. However, in my generation, i.e. the one born in the middle of the thirties, there are several Anglo-Saxon names taken from films and weekly magazines: Roger, Roy, Willy, Benny, etc. The name demonstrated modernity. A part of modernity was also the dawning of possibilities in a society of education, something my parents realized. My class journey did not entail any break with the family. Instead it formed part of an unexpressed but strongly present social strategy, not least due to my parents' close association with the popular movement, where studies and reading were considered important. My experience thereby differs from the theory in Mats Trondman's recently presented thesis, Bilden av en klassresa, in which an important reason for breaking away from one's class is problems in the parent—child relationship. On the other hand, my situation agrees with other observations in Trondman's thesis. The class traveller has no natural place in any environment, he/she is both emigrant and immigrant. The change of class, however, did not just cause estrangement. It also made life richer. The access to two worlds also yielded a distance to both, a distance which made reflexion and, in the long run, self-awareness possible. The Self did not merge with the environment in the obvious way possible within the class, it differed from the surroundings, vulnerable but also aware of its existence.