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

I think the idea of seeing a situation and replacing the races with white people works for me. I’m not sure the actual scene, but if there were a group of white people dressed in hip-hop clothes with open drinks standing in my driveway after dark I would be both scared and pissed.
It’s quite ok to be classist. Honestly, I think you have to remember that the people in the all white neighborhoods don’t ever have to worry about this kind of guilt, and you do, so cut yourself some slack.

— sully75 commenting on How do I combat my knee-jerk racist responses?

The blunt reality is that for the last five hundred years on this continent, white working class people have been used by mostly white rich people to colonize for, kill for, work for, and then better the living standards of those same white rich people, all the while sacrificing our own needs, wants, aspirations, and even lives. It really is as simple as that. No one denies the history of what has happened at working people’s expenses. Wars, poverty, homelessness, wage slavery… these are all ills created by someone, and perpetuated by us… the same workers who suffer these ills.
For some five centuries we’ve been used by the rich among our own race to promote their agenda and suffered because of it. Yet, somehow, we’ve still been convinced that it is in our interests to protect the rights of the rich to own as much property as they can, to protect the right of the rich to even exist, to protect these same rich people who would just as soon see us die for their benefit.
The heart of the matter is that for these five centuries, we’ve been too busy fighting the people who should naturally be our allies against these injustices. The rich whites have used our skin color against us, have used our human nature of fearing living beings different than us against us… they’ve used us against us. They’ve blinded us with these racialist ideas of “white supremacy” and “white pride” and “white nationalism” into fighting other working people of other races, while they sit on the sideline and laugh.

— Of Tea-Parties and Patriots: Liberty for Who?

One of the strangest political processses of my lifetime is that when I was young, it was widely agreed that rich people had too much money and that something should be done about it. Now, it’s widely agreed that poor people have too much money and that something should be done about it. And this has taken place, not - as one might expect - while the poor have been increasing their share of income at the expense of the rich, but while the opposite process has been going on. So there’s an unending appetite for hate-the-poor stories, hate-the-public-sector stories as well as the hate-the-unions and hate-the-immigrants stories. Hate-the-banks didn’t last very long though.

— Best comment ever. [via]

That said, class isn’t just about struggles in workplaces between workers and bosses. The power of the dominating classes spreads outward throughout society, in their control over the state and media. Class struggles occur at the point of consumption, among tenants and public transit riders for example. Environmental justice struggles over pollution in communities of color or working class neighborhoods are also class struggles.

— What in the hell … is class struggle anarchism?

Anarchism with a class-struggle perspective” doesn’t mean it is “class reductionist” but that it disagrees with Bookchin and others who fail to see the continued reality and importance of the class structure that is at the heart of capitalism and the struggle that grows out of this. To change society, it’s not adequate to appeal to “humanity” or “citizens” in general, as Bookchin proposed. The capitalist and coordinator classes are also part of humanity but they are entrenched in maintaining their power and privilege. At the same time, the division of society along the various lines of oppression generates movements and struggles in opposition.
At its heart capitalism is a system of exploitation of people who are subordinated in the work process, and a continual resistance or tug of war ensues because of this… sometimes on a small scale, sometimes breaking out in large social events such as general strikes. Ultimately there is no liberatory replacement for capitalism unless workers are able to gain control over their own productive activities and potentials. If we take seriously the principle that “the emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves,” it’s hard to see how this emancipatory result is going to happen without a movement actively developed by workers themselves.

— Anarchism, Class Struggle and Political Organization