--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I assumed you were using the word "underclass" to
> mean the working
> class. But I was wrong.
The problem is that the nature of working class has changed quite significantly during the past hundred or so years, whereas the concepts of class either did not or became heavily influenced by cultural identities and became divorced from relations to work and production. Thus people who make their living by selling thier labor power include both a supermarket clerks, janitors, waiters etc, as well as software engineers, teachers, doctors, analysts etc. However these groups are popularly considered two different 'classes' - the 'working' class' and the 'yuppie' class. Another popular misconception is that "working class" includes every poor person regardless of his relation to work and production (i.e. workers as well as lumpen, homeless, criminals etc. Many populists and "activistists" (as Doug and Liza aptly labeled them) hold a noble-savage notion of class that relies almost exlcusively on cultural identities associated with low socio-economic status and exclude professionnals and middle class.
Since these notions are pretty popular, I tried simply to say that "organizing working class" today does not mean "rabble rousing" (which was the case in the past), but organizing most of the middle class, professionals, technicians, sales people, knowledge workers, government employees, and the dreaded "yuppies."
Wojtek
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