Joseph Catron wrote:
>
> The first step to radicalizing any portion of the apocryphal "middle
> class" will be to convince it that there's no such thing. As long as
> Democratic politicians, union leaders, and other apparati of the
> ideological control apparatus keep braying about it like it's their
> Holy Grail - and the fictitious "middle class" keeps listening - I
> hold out little hope. (And Chuck, Jim and others can attest to my
> historical hatred of the imaginary "middle class," which was as
> justified as any hatred of a social construction.)
The 'existence' of what Joseph appropriately labels the _apocryphal_ middle class is one of the core ideological supports of capital in the u.s.; only racism is a more serious barrier to any kind of working-class unity. And yet leftists themselves simply cannot bring themselves to drop that vicious and false label from their ordinary conversation. Moreover, it always seems at least that every time some marxist or other leftists talks about "workers" the implicit (and often explicit) image of "workers" referenced is an image that applies to only a small sector of the working class, while excluding the majority of u.s. workers from that class.
If class is a social relation _not_ a life style or an income bracket, then a political analyzis of the u.s. working class must attempt to ignore all the differences in life style, occupation, income and _try_ at least to identify what are the shared factors in working-class life (around 90% of the population) and which of those shared elements might be the basis for political action at some point in the (near or distant) future. What can unite Walmart workers, university professors, the unemployed, retired workers, central-city youth, 'illegal' immigrants, miners, IT consultants, loan officers, automotive engineers, airline pilots, clerical workers. . . .?
Nothing now is the obvious answer, but now slips continually into then, it is an ureal and politically useless category. We have to analyze _potential_ under as yet unforseeable future conditions. For leftpolitical theory only the future is real.
Carrol