Class in the USA

Posted Friday October 13, 2006 by Nick Caldwell in |

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.

Your Comments

  1. John Gunders writes:

    Things aren’t much different here. Do you remember this classic howler from Peter Costello:

    “Anyone who works is a member of the working class, right, anyone who works,” the Treasurer said. “This idea that you only work if you are engaged in manual labour – most Australians aren’t engaged in manual labour, but they work, they are workers and they deserve tax cuts.”

    The point is that when you can control the definition of terms, either by making them redundant, or by inverting their meaning, it’s only a small step to destroying the thing itself. In this case, tax cuts for people earning $80,000 a year were made to look like social justice.

    Posted: 13 10 2006 - 13:25 | Permanent link to this comment

  2. Nick Caldwell writes:

    Yeah, I meant to say something about the way that class discourse in Australia is similarly oriented, but couldn’t think of a good particular example. I sort of think the Costello remark is so risible on its face as to be a rather ineffective attempt, but who knows? I think there’s something a little more subtle about the way the discursive shifts are managed in the US. They’ve been doing it industrially for a lot longer.

    Posted: 13 10 2006 - 13:59 | Permanent link to this comment

  3. Lisa writes:

    Not so ineffective, Nick. Last time I tutored I was constantly commenting on “working class” in assignments because the students were using it almost exclusively to mean ‘someone who works’. Used in this way it effaces class-based interests and sets up a simple dichotomy between ‘those who work’ and ‘those who don’t work’ that reproduces the ideologies of the current economic and welfare systems.

    Posted: 23 10 2006 - 12:33 | Permanent link to this comment

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