Dare You to Say it!

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The American media has this weird ability to make reality seem less real than it is. Whenever they hit upon something truly significant, they do so with a lack of perspective that neutralizes the subject matter, often enough by sensationalizing it. The latest example of this is the newfound sensitivity to the role of class in American life.

In their hands, class conflicts in America aren’t necessarily serious or systemic. They amount to faux pas, transgressions of ordinary etiquette, impoliteness when it comes to being sensitive about flaunting one’s wealth when those around you are having a hard go of it.

We need to think more candidly about economic disparity in the US, and we’ll have to go beyond the media’s opportunistic sensationalism.

There are three reasons why our new ‘class consciousness’ was inescapable this year. The first of them was the housing crisis of 2007, when it became increasingly clear that banks and other investors made a bundle through predatory lending practices. In the past, class conflicts arose when the rich got rich not through their ingenuity alone, but by exploiting the poor.

The second was the 2008 Presidential campaign, which produced such fodder for discussion as Sarah Palin’s $150,000 wardrobe, John McCain’s seven (or whatever) houses, and Joe the Plumber as a confused symbol for the classic American tax (read: wealth distribution) debate.

Finally, when the housing crisis cascaded into a full-blown recession and politicians began to tussle over how to get the biggest bang for the bailout buck, we were barraged with references to ‘Wall Street’ and ‘Main Street’, flimsy stand-ins for the owning class and the working class, and we were apprised of symbolic excesses like auto execs arriving into DC in corporate jets with outstretched hands.

Never before, at least not in my lifetime, has so much public attention been given to the stark realities and dramatic tensions between haves and have-nots. Cool. But, by the same token, when before has so much effort been put into talking about something without actually calling it by name?

Does it make you a socialist to say that classes and class tensions exist? Republicans employ sarcasm, make scare quotes with their hands and funny smirks with their faces when they recite words that people use to describe the realities they see or the questions they think ought to be pursued, like the fairest way for wealth to be distributed, like social responsibilities, community activism, the common good, the public interest, the progressive tax, corporate accountability, and regulation of the financial industry.

Looking back, America avoided workers revolutions like those in Europe and elsewhere for the following reason: the Fordist economy model made it possible for corporations to do well while providing a secure and sustainable living for workers, rather than by making workers sacrifice for the good of higher management and stockholders.

This was enforced, meanwhile, by the active role of government in limiting and regulating industry in order to secure benefits for the common worker. In the heyday of the manufacturing economy, a relatively well-balanced relationship between laborers, industry, and government existed and catapulted the American economy to prosperity.

As manufacturing disintegrated over the last three decades and was eclipsed by the telecommunications and service sectors, we have been witnessing the abandonment of the older commitment to labor.

Today’s employment trends mirror the mobility of global capital: jobs are increasingly temporary, ‘flexible’, part-time, and lack benefits. Wages have declined and costs have increased. Wal-Mart has become an icon for this new model of flexible employment that derives greater wealth for the owning and investing classes by shaving earnings and benefits from the working class.

We should stop bandying the Wall Street/Main Street distinction about, because it implies something that isn’t true: it implies that whatever tensions exist amount to differences of style and culture and tradition, rather than an economic conflict. The conflict that we need to be talking about is the one about how wealth is and ought to be distributed. It is a conflict between those whose labor produces wealth by making beds and manning an assembly line, and those whose access to capital gives them the advantage of making decisions about where the spoils wind up.

The conflict that exists today has very little to do with small town values versus big town values. The conflict between the rich and the middle and lower classes, between the investing class and the working class, takes place on Main Street as well as Wall Street.

Yes, a class struggle is being waged in American society. There. I said it!
Don’t just scratch the surface: Where We Stand: Class Matters

and The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin history)

and The Communist Manifesto: Complete With Seven Rarely Published Prefaces

KudoSurf Me!

Stumble It!

~ by Shane Waggoner on December 6, 2008.