Class in the USA
Kevin Drum reports on the decline of labour reporting in US newspapers. The discussion thread has some interesting gems, too:
I’m still playing my one-note tune: The disappearance of “working class” from the American vocabulay forty years ago, and the substiution of “middle class” to placate the Cold War gods, bears its tasteless fruit. As an autoworker I was amused at this effort to blunt class consciousness. I am no longer amused.
It begins with perception. I remember my eleven-year-old daughter coming home from school: “We’re middle class, aren’t we, Daddy?” They got to the kids first, equating the working class with street sweepers and welfare mothers. Everybody else was middle class in the best of all possible worlds.
It’s a lie, of course. If you live off a paycheck you’re working class — no matter how much you may hate it. How can there be labor reporters if there’s no such thing as a laboring class? They disappeared us.
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