Dan La Botz: What Happened to the American Working Class?

[Jimmie Higgins]

http://www.newpol.org/fromthearchives?nid=179

I think he overstates some of the problems with a working class that is less based on manufacturing and other changes to the US workforce, but overall a overall thought-provoking overview of recent working class history in the US and the challenges we now face.

[ckaihatsu]

Steven Greenhouse, labor writer for The New York Times, surveyed a group of academics, union officials and labor activists who suggested that the reasons for the passivity of the U.S. working class were the American ethos of individualism, the workers' self-conception as part of the middle class, and the general weakness of the labor unions.[3] While there is some truth in all of those, the explanation has to be sought in deeper structural changes in American capitalism and the working class itself as seen in historical perspective.


I think we can't ignore the privileged position that U.S.ers enjoy as a result of being paid in world-backed U.S. dollars, with the Cliff Notes to cultural imperialism embedded in their DNA.

Since I'm a subscriber of the neofeudalist position I think we should see the slightest casual invocation of American culture as being equivalent to flashing a spellbinding platinum membership card -- playground politics are what's enduring through all of the political and financial turbulence and this conditioned nationalistic pecking order is a socially crude one, though pervasive by being the default if all of the other yardsticks have become blurry by comparison.


Chris




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[AmericanRed]

The article by Robert Fitch on the structural deficiencies of U.S. unions in the latest NEW POLITICS is even better -- and more important -- than the one by La Botz. Check it out -- it's at the NP homepage.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The article by Robert Fitch on the structural deficiencies of U.S. unions in the latest NEW POLITICS is even better -- and more important -- than the one by La Botz. Check it out -- it's at the NP homepage.

Here's the link.
http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=178

It's long and I only revleft while I'm at work, so I'll have to give it a read later.