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Thinking about the mismanagement of the disaster is now something I have to leave to other people. Not that I don't think about it, but that I shouldn't, because it gets personal when I think about my son going into that and what could happen to him because of it. So -- since I'm trying not to think about it, I'm trying to replace all New Orleans thoughts with rebuild thoughts. I just started doing this but I'm going to make a discipline of it.
So.
On the radio they had an extensive interview with a member of a very large family from the Ninth Ward -- almost thirty people, who owned, by her reckoning, nine houses among them. One of the things she wanted to say was that to portray her neighborhood as poor was inaccurate: her family members were all professionals, mostly in public service. She said that was the character of her neighborhood, almost all black professionals. That is, they were in law enforcement, they were project managers in state agencies, things like that.
It's time to get honest about class.
First of all, I want to expunge the word "underclass." It's demeaning, dishonest, and disingenuous. It's obfuscatory. I don't even want to go backto the old word "lumpenproletariat," which is about the same (although I retain the riught to call myself, at least jokingly, "lumpenintellectual"). The very poor -- the usually unemployed (let's drop "habitually unemployed" too -- it sounds like they're snorting poverty through an unemployment check, which of course they don't get one of, having been unemployed for more than six months) -- are members of the working class. They are the reserve army of the working clas (I'm sure I didn't make that up. Where did I get that from?). Their status is an essential part of the capitalist long-term strategy: their existence keep the working class fragmented, and provides a lever for ratcheting down wages, benefits, and protections. In times when an expanded workforce is needed, they provide new workers to be discovered and trained in magnanimous gestures that just happen to cost very little (notice how similarly the very poor at home serve to the way that new workers in undeveloped countries do). So get that: the very poor are a part of the working class.
Now. Categories, and category names, are invented by people to understand things, to express things, to prevent alternate understandings or expressions . . . and "middle class" is a category which has been defined in such a way as to confuse the relationships between the working class and the owning class. Because we use that term in the US to mean plumbers, teachers, low-level county clerks, Burger King managers, and also -- owners of large car distributorships, board members of corporations, directors of companies, and middle-to-large scale investors. It's not meaningful the way we use it. People used to call Angela Davis' parents "middle class" and use the label to question her credentials as a social critic (really). Other times some clearly rich, powerful, influential person gets called "middle class" in order for that person to seem all folksy and "just like us" and not like they have so much power and connections that their world is not ours.
I don't know how "middle class" can be resurrected as a meaningful term of any use in discussing real world problems. It probably can be made to mean something somehow, but the world in which we live right now doesn't seem to have a middle class in it that I can understand. I am reminded of an old longshoreman nicknamed Seagull (because all he did was "eat, shit, and squawk," according to his colleagues), who my mother met while working at a fishpacking plant and incidentally participating in the organizing drive there: he used to, according to my parents, punctuate conversations with a tendentious repetition of "THere's just two kinds of people, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie." I don't mean to be tendentious, I just honestly can't see how the term can be of any use in political, social, cultural, economic, ecologial, or any other discussion I can imagine taking part in at the moment.
So. Now I'm ready to talk about what I want to talk about today, and I'm just about out of time. I guess I'll continue this late tonight, but here's what the theme will be:
The health of a community depends on the state of its working class. Planning for a healthy working class should be the organizing focus of community planning. A no-brainer, right? No.
So.
On the radio they had an extensive interview with a member of a very large family from the Ninth Ward -- almost thirty people, who owned, by her reckoning, nine houses among them. One of the things she wanted to say was that to portray her neighborhood as poor was inaccurate: her family members were all professionals, mostly in public service. She said that was the character of her neighborhood, almost all black professionals. That is, they were in law enforcement, they were project managers in state agencies, things like that.
It's time to get honest about class.
First of all, I want to expunge the word "underclass." It's demeaning, dishonest, and disingenuous. It's obfuscatory. I don't even want to go backto the old word "lumpenproletariat," which is about the same (although I retain the riught to call myself, at least jokingly, "lumpenintellectual"). The very poor -- the usually unemployed (let's drop "habitually unemployed" too -- it sounds like they're snorting poverty through an unemployment check, which of course they don't get one of, having been unemployed for more than six months) -- are members of the working class. They are the reserve army of the working clas (I'm sure I didn't make that up. Where did I get that from?). Their status is an essential part of the capitalist long-term strategy: their existence keep the working class fragmented, and provides a lever for ratcheting down wages, benefits, and protections. In times when an expanded workforce is needed, they provide new workers to be discovered and trained in magnanimous gestures that just happen to cost very little (notice how similarly the very poor at home serve to the way that new workers in undeveloped countries do). So get that: the very poor are a part of the working class.
Now. Categories, and category names, are invented by people to understand things, to express things, to prevent alternate understandings or expressions . . . and "middle class" is a category which has been defined in such a way as to confuse the relationships between the working class and the owning class. Because we use that term in the US to mean plumbers, teachers, low-level county clerks, Burger King managers, and also -- owners of large car distributorships, board members of corporations, directors of companies, and middle-to-large scale investors. It's not meaningful the way we use it. People used to call Angela Davis' parents "middle class" and use the label to question her credentials as a social critic (really). Other times some clearly rich, powerful, influential person gets called "middle class" in order for that person to seem all folksy and "just like us" and not like they have so much power and connections that their world is not ours.
I don't know how "middle class" can be resurrected as a meaningful term of any use in discussing real world problems. It probably can be made to mean something somehow, but the world in which we live right now doesn't seem to have a middle class in it that I can understand. I am reminded of an old longshoreman nicknamed Seagull (because all he did was "eat, shit, and squawk," according to his colleagues), who my mother met while working at a fishpacking plant and incidentally participating in the organizing drive there: he used to, according to my parents, punctuate conversations with a tendentious repetition of "THere's just two kinds of people, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie." I don't mean to be tendentious, I just honestly can't see how the term can be of any use in political, social, cultural, economic, ecologial, or any other discussion I can imagine taking part in at the moment.
So. Now I'm ready to talk about what I want to talk about today, and I'm just about out of time. I guess I'll continue this late tonight, but here's what the theme will be:
The health of a community depends on the state of its working class. Planning for a healthy working class should be the organizing focus of community planning. A no-brainer, right? No.
no subject
Having never lived in the States, all I can say is that the British and American class systems seem quite different. However what you say above definitely applies to the British system, which has evolved over countless years, has many subtle divisions and is constantly mutating. One could study it for many years and still not understand it fully. It varies by region too and is quite different in an urban area and a rural one. For instance land ownership and being part of an old established family still counts for a lot in the area where I work but would cut no ice in the trendy dockside apartments converted out of old warehouses that appear in cities as diverse as Manchester, Salford and Cardiff where things like where you work, how much money you earn, what car you drive and how you furnish your home would be more important.