[lbo-talk] Middle Class

[turbulo at aol.com]

aI know that human agency isn't your strong point, but how do you 
expect to develop a class-based politics if people are filled with 
mystifications about the class nature of the society they belong to? 
This isn't a matter of "agitational slogans," and since it's an 
attempt to take seriously the role of social psychology in politics 
it's hardly anti-theoretical. If a lot of people shy away from the 
term "working class," don't you think  you've got a problem on your 
hands? Or are you just waiting for that sudden, inexplicable, 
never-to-be-rushed lightning moment of enlightenment?

Doug

               *******

 
I know the social democratic mind has a hard time digesting this, but history has known sudden leaps--both in society--revolutions, they are called--and the necessary leaps in consciousness that accompany them. Maybe it's been so long sinch such an event has taken place that we tend to forget they ever happened. But progress will never happen unless large numbers of people disabuse themselves of backward ideas. And the notion that they are middle class is one of the most backward and paralysing ideas American workers are beset with. It is embedded in many other reactionary notions--that money and social status are an indications of personal worth, and that the social hierarchy is therefore legitimate, for instance. But it is also deeply implicated in notions of race. White poor people think they're midddle class because they're not part of the underclass, which happens to be guess what.There is nothing to be gained by capitulating to backward consciousness.    
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