Defining janitors with 401K’s as “capitalists” is a kind of social promotion comparable to the elevation by progressives like Teixeira and Abramowitz of shoe-store clerks who dropped out of college into the “mass upper middle class.” Genuine capitalists derive most of their income from the return on their investments or savings, not from labor. By this definition, there are hardly any capitalists in the U.S. Most of the rich are the “working rich,” who derive most of their income from wages or professional fees, not from investments. We are a nation of wage earners, some paid well and others poorly.

— The fantasy of a vast upper middle class [via]

As I became older and more involved in community based action, I discovered that people were motivated to take action against Capital based on the conditions that were imposed upon them by class society. Slowly, as I came to class consciousness, and I grew to see that in punk, not only was class largely not discussed; there was a lack of looking at one’s relationship in class society. Meaning that if you put on an Aus-Rotten record you might get schooled on what the US was doing in Columbia, but you’re weren’t going to hear about the singer’s work and why it sucked. Punks largely didn’t talk about being without money or working – perhaps this was because of the class composition of punks, or perhaps it was just because of the cultural tradition of many anarcho-punk bands.

—

The Problem with Hip Hop: Patriarchy, Proletarians, and Revolutionary Culture

This article is interesting but I think that its more interesting to think about why (anarcho, crust, etc) punk doesn’t talk about class very often.

The tricky thing with socioeconomic class is that there are poor shop-owners and wealthy wage-slaves.

— Alex Bradshaw commenting on Tea Parties & The White Working Class

Since businesses often rely on being able to exploit migrants as a permanent underclass produced by criminalization, what happens if there is no criminalization based on migration status (or very little, since there will still be some “illegal” people)? Would migrant workers still be cleaning the toilets in office buildings like so many insist the rich should be appreciative of? What I’m getting at here is, if reform legalized most or all of the migrants in the country, would the migrants’ wages and conditions improve since they are not subject to the lack of stability caused by criminalization? Or would precarity be created (or does it already manifest) in some other way? Why would businesses/capitalists allow for a more equal work force? Which leads us to ask if there will still be exploited workers, and the answer is yes, as we know that plenty of “legal” people are currently exploited. I would argue that business just wouldn’t allow something like mass legalization to occur in the first place- at least not without other benefits to the businesses themselves (as an example, over 2 million undocumented migrants were granted amnesty in 1986, but there were also stipulations that while employment of “illegal” migrants was outlawed, businesses didn’t have to verify the documents that they received and they could also participate in temporary worker programs. There was also an increase in the use of sub-contractors). But in the unlikely scenario, we must imagine that something else will be used to divide people so as to continue exploiting labor through low wages, long hours, the lack of safety protections, and that may take the shape of new ways to criminalize people, or encouraging further racial division, or something to that effect.

— The Best Immigration Law is No Law at All

What troubles me is the decision of what constitutes one as middleclass. There seems to be a general contempt for anyone who has a mortgage, yet a fetishization of anyone who sweats while they work. Defining those who have a 401k, a mortgage and a family as the petit-bourgeoisie becomes precarious when people realize that unionized autoworkers, welders, coal miners, refinery workers and the like make damn good money. Their fingers are on the pulse and levers of production and their hands are what keeps capitalism churning. Is this the mythical working class of the Marxist stripe? The workers, who once conscious, will seize those very levers and bring the state to a screeching halt? (this is not to reflect my opinion of the hollow concept of consciousness raising, but merely pointing to the mystical image of your average community college certified 22 year old welder)
And how about the poor? Do they fit into this revitalized analysis?
They work service jobs and various other forms of unsteady employment. Even if they went on a classic general strike, occupying their workplaces, all that would be achieved is temporarily halting the service and hospitality industry. They have no bargaining chips like organized essential labor. The levers they hold in their hands are simply to, what is the equivalent of, the electric rear view mirrors of your car. Even if the motor stopped you could just roll down the window and move it with your hands, it just might click a little bit.
So the question remains. If your definition of working class is based on the relationship to production then it must be said that what many people have been calling middle class is, in fact, the working class. If your definition has a salary cap then it must be said that those who work the lower eschalon service jobs do not have the capacity to halt production, which would mean that your perception of revolution must either A) Not come from the working class seizing the means of production, lets face it, 12 baristas taking over Starbucks is useless. B) Come from middleclass as well as working class essential proletarians seizing the means of production.

— Middle Class Is Anyone With An Ipod

try being a working class, black mother radical activist and find a midwife to mentor you because you really want to be a midwife to the marginalized. really. try it. its not just the money. its the way that (white) midwives look at you and talk to you. the way they talk about your neighborhood. your culture. the way that they dismiss racism as ‘really being about classism’. and classism about ‘really being about education’. and education ‘really being about trying hard enough’. when in reality, racism is about racism, classism is about classism. and while these issues intersect, we cannot reduce racism to classism. i have experienced racism in situations where i was class privileged and well educated from midwives.

— mai’a commenting on Stuff White People Like: Talking About Birth [via]

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

—

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education [via]

I’m intrigued by the use of Cleveland State as a counter-example

Other than that everything I read about higher education lately makes me feel despondent. Like, seriously, what am I even doing here?

Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that—well, that’s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you’re told.

—

Samuel Bowles in an excellent interview about income inequality in New Mexico published by the Santa Fe Reporter, Born Poor? [via]

ugh.

What if that fear went away tomorrow? What if we all assumed, just for a day, that everyone was doing the best they could to get by. What if we assumed, just for a day, that poor people aren’t poor because they are less worthy, less smart, less hard-working, or just plain less? Where would that leave us?

It would leave us with a lot of questions. It would leave us asking how things got to be this way and what forces are at work keeping them this way. It would leave us wondering about how those inequities relate to accidents of geography, skin color, and birth. It would leave us wondering if those inequities aren’t accidental at all. And it would leave us asking who benefits from us distrusting each other so much.

— Irrational Fears and the Status Quo [via]

The truth is that poverty, and everything connected to it, is a systemic issue, not an issue of choice. It’s a lot easier to make it to that parent-teacher conference when you have a good job with benefits and child care. And it’s a lot easier to have that good job when your parents could afford to get you into a good college, and when your family’s lived for generations in a neighborhood with access to public transportation and grocery stores — when you never had to learn about redlining. When the ground you walk on doesn’t make you or your kids sick, because your neighborhood has always had the political clout to keep that oil refinery from being built next door.

In other words: show me the school system with high test scores, and I’ll show you the neighborhood whose houses are worth enough for the resulting property taxes to pay for after-school tutoring programs.

— SC Lt. Gov. Bauer: Free School Lunches Encourage ‘Stray Animals’ to ‘Breed’ [via]

Fellow workers! The Industrial Workers of the World is going to organize the entire working class. What is the working class, fellow workers? The working class is anyone who has a boss and works for wages. Always remember, class is not defined by income level but by your relationship to the means of production. If you don’t own the tools of your production, if you don’t own your workplace, if all you’re doing is selling your labor energy to get a paycheck, it doesn’t matter if you’re a college professor or a ditch digger - you’re in the working class and better be proud of it. Why, the middle class is just a joke made up by the bosses to keep us fighting against each other.

— “Yours for the O.B.U.”, Utah Phillips, X342908; The industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years, pg vi. [via]

In the WSM we’re often asked why we spend so much time talking about the working class. Even the title of our paper, Workers Solidarity, seems a bit odd to some - why are we talking so much about workers? Isn’t anarchism for everybody? And aren’t we all middle class now? —— Questions like these are based on a misunderstanding of what class actually means. Being working class doesn’t mean being poor, working down a mine, or keeping pigeons, any more than going to college or working in an office makes you middle class.
The working class is, basically, everyone who has to work for a living, and the ruling class is the people that we work for. The middle class is a small group somewhere in between the two - not rich enough to live off the work of others, but still not entirely dependent on their own wages. The working class is important because of the society we live in today. Capitalism is based on an unequal distribution of wealth and power. A small minority of people control most of the world’s wealth, which means that they own the farms and the factories that produce all of the necessities of life. The rest of us have to work for them - and this, not the clothes we wear or the books we read, is what makes us working class. (Obviously, the working class includes the unemployed, and the partners and children of workers)

— Thinking About Anarchism: Workers Have the Power by Ray Cunningham