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The meaning of classes has been almost completely destroyed by a bunch of people who would be in debt if they missed a paycheck not wanting to admit they're working class.
There's no class solidarity among the working class because people who make 50k a year wanna feel superior to people who make 20k who wanna feel superior to people on medicaid.
Meanwhile rich liberals know not to do too much to rock the boat and won't actually meaningfully oppose the oppressive system that made them rich.
a bunch of people who would be in debt if they missed a paycheck not wanting to admit they're working class.
there's also the opposite problem of petit bourgeois exploiters wanting to pretend they're working class because they have a "job" which consists of owning a couple of laundromats and renting out a 2 bedroom suburban home to some tenants
insert Mao with laser eyes emote
I know someone who is in the process of inheriting the family business. It’s fairly sizeable so he’s making a ton of money. Despite the fact that he will be the owner/CEO, since it’s a business that’s in the trades he genuinely thinks he is “working class”.
But also, the situation in the US right now is that the working class really does more closely resemble the “sack of potatoes” than an actual political class.
So the “sack of potatoes” comment Marx made gets kinda misinterpreted as the context is sort of missed, like with his “opiate of the masses” comment. It’s not meant as a dig at workers’ intelligence or sophistication. He means a sack of potatoes is just a collection of individual potatoes and nothing more - putting the potatoes in a sack doesn’t turn them into something that is greater than the sum of the parts.
But not so with class. For Marx, the mission of the working class is become a class “in” itself to a class “for” itself. By developing class consciousness, workers are able to unite and enact their will upon the world. Whether or not someone is “working class” or not is kinda meaningless until workers are united and acting as a group. A big way this happens is literally by working next to each other and sharing in common struggles at the workplace.
But for the peasants or lumpen proletariat that Marx is talking about in the Eighteenth Brumaire, they are not really able to become a class for themselves because they are so atomized. A peasant’s horizon can’t extend beyond themselves or their immediate family. There’s no shared struggle, it’s everyone for themselves. Each peasant is just one potato in a sack of them, thus unable to act as a class.
And this is part of the problem that we face in the US. Workers are so atomized and separated from each other, that class consciousness is incredibly difficult to develop. Getting people to see a common struggle is hard when people aren’t actually struggling together.
Well said. The way people in America work farther apart from one another is considerably different than conditions that existed when much of our classical political theory was written at least a century ago. This proliferation of low-density workplaces must be taken into consideration when subsequent generations of political theorists try to come up with a way to organize that working class to be for itself.
Low density workplaces AND low density housing, too.
I agree. The housing is a good point.