By there I mean the world that produced the song, "*Take this job and shove it."
Here is the world of Austerity.
Something happened over these 40 years. I believe Marv disagreed on this but what I think the last 40 years can be described as a period of unrelenting capitalist pressure to reduce the wage level.
And that pressure was responded to by -- nothing. The working class in effect surrendered without a murmur.
And I think that at the highest level of abstraction this whole process, and its inevitable results, are accurately described in the final chapter of Wages, Price and Profit. And if that is correct, then we cannot expect any serious struggle against capitalism until workers begin (with some success) to struggle against this process of immiseration.
Note: Immiseration is a relative not an absolute process. State Farm has cut down on its benefits: that represents relative Immiseration even for workers earning close to or above $100 thousand. The process affects all levels of the work force.
How all that happened and how steps can be taken to reverse it seem to me much more interesting topics than why Obama is such a creep.
Carrol