14 September 2017

Organizing the new working class

working conditions, working class

[Photo: ‘Working Conditions’ by Kap, Spain, 140111]

By Alexander Kolokotronis
Source: RoarMag.org.

Editor's Note
I offer this article to readers because it pissed me off on multiple levels.  OK, I am from the working class (kind of – more like the lower class but who’s counting?). Given that, it kind of got me when someone starts talking about organizing the working class – isolating in on the white working class no less. All right, part two. I know that there are all kinds of socialists and socialism, but there seems something oxymoronic about libertarian socialism. Lastly, I’m sorry, but the the term “identity politics” just ticks me off. It is right up there with “politically correct”. They are both that party of code phrases that white, heterosexual ,generally males, use to demean the efforts of other groups. I’m sorry, but “white” is just as much “identity politics” as any other race.
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9 January 2016

The Wages of Whiteness is Early Death

Migrant Mother, working class

By Paul Street

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he white working class has never had it easy in American history. It’s been viciously exploited, disrespected, deceived, divided, repressed, and otherwise and generally abused from the United States’ colonial origins through the present day. If you want to glimpse some of what I mean, read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Harriet Arnow’s stunningly beautiful and tragic novel The Dollmaker – a harrowing tale of an Appalachian family’s migration from Kentucky to Detroit during World War II. And listen to the following passage from the great U.S. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs’ statement to a federal judge readying to sentence him for violating the Sedition Act in 1918:

“At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day…I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.”

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10 June 2015

Flipping the Script: Rethinking Working-Class Resistance

MonumentToWorkingClassTildenWikiBy Henry A. Giroux

[Monument of the Working Class in Haymarket, San Francisco. Photo: BrendleSignature.] [dropcap]I[/dropcap] have often thought about when that moment came in which my working class sensibility turned into a form of critical class consciousness. For most of my youth, I was defined by ruling-class types and mainstream institutions through my deficits, which amounted to not having the skills and capacities to do anything but become either a cop or firefighter. For many working-class youth, this is standard procedure. We are told that we are too angry when we display passion, and too dumb when we speak in the restricted code. Our bodies for both sexes were the only cultural capital we had to define our sense of agency, either through an expression of solidarity, over determined masculinity, or through a commodified and sexualized notion of the body. The message was always the same. We were incomplete, unfinished, excess and disposable. For many of us that meant a life governed by poor schools and never escaping the wide reach of the criminal legal system.

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