Tag: Working Class

Is The Working Class Disappearing?

The idea of the ‘crisis of the working class subject’ takes the analysis one step further, saying in effect that class consciousness has declined to such a degree that the overwhelming majority of working class people have no consciousness of themselves as part of a class that has its own interests other than those of the ruling class; using Lukacs’ distinction the working class is a “class in itself” but no longer a “class for itself”.

The idea that the working class is no longer a “class for itself” is an exaggeration, but like most caricatures is based on aspects of reality that workers have to identify and integrate into their strategy and tactics. Consciousness, especially mass consciousness, is a dynamic factor that is subject to change and sometimes, in periods of crisis, is subject to abrupt shifts. So any attempt to capture and interpret mass working class consciousness is likely to be partial and one-sided. Before we get into the detail of that we have to say something about the changing structure of the working class.

John Major in 1996 argued that “we are all middle class now” – in other words working class living standards have risen to such a degree that the difference with middle class people have become blurred. However Cumbria University academic Phillip Bond has recently argued the precise opposite – the ‘middle classes’ are being forced into the working class.

“The facts are astounding. Contrary to the delusions of the free-market fundamentalists, the Reagan revolution has come at a great cost to the working and middle classes. In the US, the top one per cent have seen a 78 per cent increase in their share of national income since 1979 with the bottom 80 per cent of the population experiencing a 15 per cent fall.

Wage earners have coped with this structural shift by taking on unprecedented levels of debt, working more and asking their partners to join the workforce. Family life has suffered; children see less of their parents than at any time in the last 100 years and since nobody has any time, civic life has virtually vanished.

Class consciousness may have declined in Western countries, but a decline does not denote an absence. To truly become a ‘class for itself’ the working class, has not just to fight for its immediate interests but to fight for an historical alternative.

So my answer is–NO!  The working class is not disappearing, it is however, in a coma.  The current economic crisis may be the jolt needed to bring them out of the vegetative state.

Subprime: And The Walls Came Tumbling Down

If you have been hiding under a rock then you may not be aware of the problems facing the financial markets. The foreclosures, the sub-prime collapse or any of the accompanying tragedies. Goldman-Sachs, Countrywide, Merril Lynch, Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros all are indicators of the collapse of the financial markets.

One subprime industry analyst wrote in 1997: “Due to wide economic swings, massive layoffs and regional recession, as well as increases in the divorce rate and the high number of business failures over the past 10 years, the subprime market has mushroomed.” Furthermore, the analyst continues, approximately 45 percent of second-lien subprime mortgages were used for debt consolidation.

As cited above, and surely many more that the interested reader will find on the Internet, provide empirical evidence that most of the criticisms of subprime mortgages made by politicians and the press today, looking for at least partial answers to the current financial catastrophe, have been around since the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the origins of subprime mortgages are linked to a rise in poverty, unemployment and a decrease in the quality of life for working-class families. Something that NO politician wants to admit. These reports reveal how subprime mortgages were designed to exploit the most vulnerable sectors of the population.

To summarize: The subprime mortgage originated as an instrument devised by finance capital to replace bad debt with new loans to people who had lost their jobs or had suffered wage cuts and needed cash to continue feeding their families. In exchange, bankers got a security—i.e., guarantee—on the borrowers’ homes. In other words, banks “traded” risky, unsecured debt for a new loan backed by the guarantee that if a borrower failed to pay the mortgage, the bank had the legal means to repossess the family home. Once again, I will say what no one wants to say, it was about the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the middle class. It is all about—GREED!

Now is there a solution? Yes there is, bu there is no silver bullet that can fix it in a short term program. This will take time and effort to repair the damage that greed has done to the economy. The really bad news is that it is gonna hurt.

What Is “The Working Class”?

The struggle for the votes from the working class has never been more openly discussed. In the mainstream media, we’ve heard the phrase “working class” far more than the classless phrase “middle class” in recent weeks. This is new feature for national elections.
“White working class voters” were crudely characterized as the “lunch bucket” crowd, and they, we were told, supported Hillary Clinton. After her primary wins in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the pundits focused on that voting cluster as explaining the results. “White working class males” were similarly lumped into Hillary Clinton’s column.

“Women” were for Clinton. The term was used sometimes to describe working-class woman, but neither their class relationships nor their ethnic backgrounds were ever mentioned. They were portrayed strictly as a gender vote. A significant percent of these voters either belong to labor unions or would if it were possible.

When the phrase “Black voters” is used, the phrase working class is never applied. These voters live a non-class bubble, the media experts told us. Yet, far and away, the largest percent of Black voters fit the traditional working-class definition. Pundits also never talked about the fact that millions of African American voters are women. The media assigned African American voters to Barack Obama without hesitation. Ironically, however, Obama was typically characterized as having difficulty appealing to working-class people and women.

Similarly, the media declassed college-educated voters and never referred to them as working class, even though millions of professionals, professors, and other white collar workers are working class, are members of unions, or want to belong. By the way, many intellectual workers bring their lunch to work, too. The media put this group of workers into Obama’s camp, but, in so doing, some people derisively referred to them as elitist voters.

Then through mass media exit polling and others means the pundits laid out the voting patterns of various religious, racial and age groupings. Some reported a trade union vote but it was always unclear what that designation meant.

The media appears to be trying to explain voting patterns without a knowledge of the voter.

Unions At The Democratic Convention

The two main competing factions within the US trade union bureaucracy are temporarily setting aside their bitter rivalry to unite behind the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. One prominent feature of their intervention has been to attribute the lack of enthusiasm among their own members for Obama to white racism, a charge that they make no attempt to substantiate, and in fact is contradicted by polls that reveal growing anger and alienation among workers from the Democrats and the two party system.

Both AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Anna Burger, chair of the rival Change to Win union federation, addressed Democratic National Convention delegates Tuesday night. Both union factions are participating in a series of workshops, and other events throughout the convention designed to boost the Obama campaign. Their uncritical support for Obama and the Democrats further underscores the fact that these organizations have nothing to do with defending the real needs and interests of working people.

The speeches of the two union bureaucrats were carefully scripted and, especially on the part of Sweeney, laced with religious and patriotic references. Sweeney and Burger made almost no direct reference to the actual situation facing millions of working people—the slashing of jobs, the gutting of social programs, surging gas and food prices, widening home foreclosures, eroding wages—referring merely to the fading of the “American Dream.” Predictably, the union leaders avoided any concrete reference to questions of policy, limiting themselves to abstract calls for change. They made no serious attempt to explain how the election of Obama would actually improve the social situation of workers.

This silence is understandable given that the Democrats are presenting a social agenda consisting of a few ludicrously inadequate reforms, in no way commensurate with the magnitude of the unfolding economic disaster facing working people.

Poverty On The Rise

The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the official poverty rate in the United States rose in 2007 to 12.5 percent, compared to 12.3 percent the previous year. According to the bureau’s American Community Survey, last year 37.3 million Americans were living below the income level, which, according to the government, signifies poverty.

This is an increase of 800,000, or 2 percent, over the official poverty level for 2006. As damning as the official figures are, the real scale of poverty in the US is much higher. The government set the poverty cut-off point for a family of four in 2007 at $21,203. Such an income means outright destitution. Millions more Americans live in conditions that by any objective standard amount to poverty.

The number of children living below the official poverty line increased much more sharply in 2007, rising to 13.3 million from 12.8 million in 2006, an increase of 3.9 percent. According to the government’s figures, 17.4 percent of American children were in poverty last year

The official poverty rates for both adults and children are considerably higher than their low points in the 1990s. Between 2001 (when the official poverty rate was 11.3 percent) and 2007—a period of economic expansion marked by a massive accumulation of wealth at the very top of American society—the poverty rate rose by 10.6 percent. The rate for 2007 marked the biggest jump in poverty during an economic recovery in US history.

These figures constitute an indictment of American capitalism and both of its major political parties, which have carried out a ruthless policy of tax cuts for the rich, reductions in social programs, and deregulation of big business for the purpose of redistributing the national wealth from the working class to the financial elite and facilitating an orgy of corporate speculation and profiteering.

Can Obama Become A Working Class Hero?

All the speeches are over and Obama is now gonna have to become all things to all people.  PLus he has got to offer the working class an alternative.

This is an article from Harold Myerson of the Washington Post:

Barack Obama has the problem from hell. The very voters he needs to win this election, the white working class that has been descending into post-industrial post-prosperity for a couple of decades and the past eight years in particular, are angry. American finance and corporations have abandoned them for cheaper climes, and they blame the elites of both parties for their woes. Obama’s challenge is to become a voice for that anger without looking like an angry black man.

With Barack Obama heading the Democratic ticket and plainly having trouble with working-class whites, Greenberg returned to Macomb in July for a new generation of polling and focus groups. Macomb’s memories of Detroit’s racial convulsions in the ’60s and ’70s have faded somewhat, he found, but race is still a key hurdle for many residents. Their economic anxiety has skyrocketed – understandably enough, with the auto industry in shambles and not much coming along to take its place. Indeed, their No. 1 concern in Greenberg’s survey (undertaken for the Democracy Corps) is the offshoring of jobs, with rising gas, food and health-care costs running a close second. Their ideal presidential candidate, Greenberg says, would be an “outsider, middle-class” senator who expresses their anger at their betrayal by America’s economic and political elites.

This is hardly Obama’s only challenge, but it’s a crucial one. He surely needs to talk about his work organizing on behalf of displaced steelworkers in Chicago. And in case the depth of Obama’s challenge isn’t clear yet, Greenberg has one more factoid to vex Democrats: The second choice of the Nader voters in his survey is John McCain. Something for Barack Obama to think about as he prepares to address the nation.

Is This What Gramm Was Talking About?

The most recent data on home foreclosures give an indication of the human cost of the US housing market collapse. Foreclosure filings were up 53 percent in June from a year ago and bank repossessions soared 171 percent, as falling property values forced more and more people out of their homes.

According to RealtyTrac, in the course of June one in every 501 American households either lost a home to foreclosure, received a default notice or was warned of an impending auction.

Nationwide, more than 250,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice in June. Economists are predicting 2.5 million US homes will enter the foreclosure process this year, compared with 1.7 million in 2007. This spring, a Credit Suisse report estimated that 6.5 million loans would fall into foreclosure over the next five years, affecting more than 8 percent of all American homes.

Soaring gas prices are contributing to the woes of families that moved out of urban areas. “The housing beyond the sprawl is going to suffer another serious leg down because of high oil prices,” Peter Navarro, professor of economics and public policy at the University of California in Irvine, told the media. “A lot of people went out there to get cheaper homes, but this [gas prices] is going to take a big bite out of their mortgage.”

Meanwhile, the total of new homes that have been completed and are available for sale was up 35 percent in May over June 2006. The average length of time they have been sitting on the market unsold has climbed 136 percent in that period, from 3.6 to 8.5 months. According to Floyd Norris in the New York Times, the latter figure is the highest ever recorded by the government.

The working class is suffering enormously, and worse is still to come. A report from the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), entitled “The Impact of the Housing Crisis on Family Wealth,” paints a dire picture. Authors Dean Baker and David Rosnick make the point that average Americans have been the victims of “two extraordinary asset bubbles in the last decade,” a “stock bubble” that began in the mid-1990s and collapsed in 2000-2002, and the housing bubble, which began to deflate in 2006.

The housing bust threatens to spark a full-scale meltdown of the financial system. Two enormous US financial firms, Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (Federal Home Mortgage Corporation), are facing insolvency. The two government-sponsored, privately held companies currently own or guarantee some $5.2 trillion in residential mortgages, nearly half of all outstanding home loans in the US. In the nine months from July 2007 through March 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lost a combined $11 billion and are finding it increasingly expensive to raise capital to cover their losses.

It is increasingly likely that the American population will be forced to pay for the disaster brought about by years of parasitic and reckless financial operations. Standard & Poor’s reported this spring that a bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would cost US taxpayers $1 trillion, more than five times the amount of the savings and loan bailout (taking inflation into account) of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This is an indictment of American capitalism and its cult of the “free market.” The blind and anarchic operations of the profit system threaten the population with catastrophe. Society can no longer afford the rule of this corrupt, greedy elite, none of whose political representatives, Republican or Democratic, have any solutions for the crisis.

Editorial: Talking About The Working Class

I found this editorial on the People’s Weekly World website and thought I would get others opinion of it.

If Marx and Engels were around today, listening to the corporate media pundits on cable and in print, they might have started their Manifesto with, “A spectre is haunting the U.S. 2008 elections – the spectre of communism.” All of a sudden these folks have discovered the working class. Talk about the disappearing middle class.

Problem is though, corporate media has only discovered a caricature of the working class. Since punditry depends so much on “slice and dice” analysis, their “working class” seems to be only a very narrow section that they define as “blue-collar, white male workers.”
In fact working class describes the overwhelming majority in this country. Part of the problem is that class is not determined mainly by income. Sure, poor people are mostly working class, but so are most people who have “middle” incomes. Union jobs, skilled jobs, and most white collar jobs are also working class. Middle income people don’t live off the profits of other people’s work. If you are employed by a company that makes profits from your work then you are working class.

But the more worrisome problem with the pundits’ new discovery of the working class is an obvious racist bent. Implicitly African Americans and Latinos are poor people who supposedly don’t work, and only white blue collar workers are working class. As in, so and so candidate is getting the “working class” vote

In this “discovered” world Black, Brown and white workers seem to occupy parallel universes. In fact almost every workplace, every factory, every office is a multiracial, multinational beehive of interaction. One of the most important characteristics of working class is the social interaction and cooperation that it takes to get most work done – you have to work together.

People who work together also influence and learn from each other in many ways. African Americans and Latinos are overwhelmingly working class as are whites. Sure some are influenced by racist ideas, but in today’s world what binds workers together is much stronger than the negative influence of racism. Workers are bound together by declining incomes and a bad economy, by lack of health care, by high gas and food prices, and by rejection of a brutal and unnecessary war.

Barack Obama is getting a larger percentage of the total working class vote than any other Democratic Party presidential candidate since the 1960s. And that vote, united, scares the hell out of rightwing Republicans and corporate America.

About the only time any of these pundits give a crap about the working class is when they have to do some sort of political analysis and try to explain why a thing is happening.