[lbo-talk] meanwhile, the US working class......

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Dec 20 08:24:46 PST 2004



>snit snat wrote:
>
>>Also, does anyone know the numbers of desire for small business ownership?
>
>I got it from Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Weber Cannon's The American
>Perception of Class (e.g., pp. 86-87). They argue that the petty
>bourgeois aspirations (their phrase, not mine) of the U.S. working
>class don't necessarily reflect a lack of class consciousness -
>they're aware of getting screwed by the boss - but "self-employment
>- however remote a possibility - seems to offer a more realistic
>chance to escape from working-class subordination than does a
>socialist transformation."
>
>Doug

Being self-employed in the United States must be tougher than being self-employed in Europe, Canada, or Japan, as the US doesn't offer universal health care. Do American workers aspire to be small business owners more than European, Canadian, and Japanese workers do? If so, there is an interesting contradiction: the petty bourgeois aspiration is the most prevalent in a country where being petit bourgeois is tougher than most comparable countries. -- Yoshie

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