The withering of the working class - Cover Story

Commonweal, Oct 7, 1994 by David R. Carlin, Jr.

What follows is an unpleasant analysis that has no happy ending. I hate to write so pessimistic a piece, but what can I do? The Alcoholics Anonymous people say you have to admit you're a drunk before you can hope for sobriety. The born-again Christians say you have to admit you're a sinner before you can hope for salvation. Honesty about one's problems is always the first step. The following is intended as an exercise in social honesty. Although I have little or no idea what moves ought to follow, I trust that a recognition of our problems is always a good first step.

One of the advantages of the collapse of communism is that it will free us from the century-long myth that Karl Marx was a social theorist of the first rank. No question he was an important theorist, as would anyone be who was the official philosopher of the political movement that dominated most of the twentieth century. Important is one thing, top-notch something else.

But the post-cold war reaction against Marxian concepts can be carried too far. Consider the idea of class conflict. No doubt Marx carried this idea to unreasonable extremes, teaching that class interests are everything, the common good nothing, and that there is no moral limit to the means that may be used in order to make one's own class prevail in these mortal struggles. With very good reason we might not want to accept Marx's exaggerated claim, but it does not follow that class struggle is nonexistent or unimportant. In American society today, for instance, there are still a number of socioeconomic strata which, for want of a better term, may be called social classes; the interests of one class will often conflict with those of other classes; classes will tend to pursue their own interests; and generally speaking, those classes that have more or better resources--money, organization, education, numbers, control of the agencies of propaganda, etc.--will come out on top in these struggles. In sum, class conflict is alive and well in the United States, even though it is not about to plunge the nation into either civil war or revolution.

Yet to listen to contemporary political discourse, you would think we live in a classless society or something very close to it. There is a great deal of talk about conflict based on gender, race, and even sexual orientation, but hardly any talk at all about conflict based on social class. There is, I grant, a certain amount of talk about "the middle class" (as in the famous expression, "middle-class tax cut"), but since the great majority of Americans, with the exception of the very poor at the bottom and a handful of very rich at the top, consider themselves to be middle class, this hardly qualifies as genuine class analysis. When the middle class includes millionaires at one end and low-paid, nonunion, blue-collar workers at the other, the term has lost all real meaning.

Perhaps someone will say, "There is certainly class conflict in the United States, but it is overshadowed at the moment by far more serious conflicts between men and women, whites and blacks, straights and gays." But this is nonsense--nonsense on stilts, to borrow Jeremy Bentham's classic expression. Anyone who imagines that the male/female clash of interests is more serious than the rich/poor clash is out of touch with the real world. The white/black conflict has at least the prima facie appearance of being serious; but on closer inspection it turns out that much of what seems to be racial conflict is really class conflict, masked by the fact that a disproportionate percentage of African-Americans are found in the poorest classes.

When collisions of interest that are less pressing get all the attention while those plainly more critical get virtually none, one of two things must be going on. Either everyone has become very stupid, or someone is trying to distract our attention. The stupidity hypothesis is tempting; but we Americans, while perhaps a little more stupid than we used to be, are not quite that dumb. So the question becomes: "Who is trying to distract our attention?"

The first step toward answering that question is to rephrase it: "Is there any class (or classes) whose interests would be served by distracting attention from the reality of class conflict?" The answer: "Yes, of course, the privileged classes, the classes who are doing very well under the status quo."

It is never in the interests of the privileged classes to analyze society in terms of class interests, at least not publicly. They may engage in such analysis privately, of course--at the office, over dinner tables, in country club locker rooms. But if they were to do this publicly, it would only call attention to their privileges, to what would seem to many (though not to themselves) to be the unfairness of the prevailing distribution of wealth, power, and prestige. So it is best to remain silent about these things. But silence all by itself is never enough, for it leaves a vacuum that someone else might fill. Thus it is important to sponsor alternative, nonclass definitions and analyses of society and its problems. There are various ways of doing this. One way is to stress class cooperation, for example, how the higher classes help the lower classes to improve their situation. Another is to stress values that all classes hold in common, such as religion, nationalism, and sports. Still another way is, while acknowledging that society experiences a great deal of conflict, to focus attention on nonclass forms of conflict--race, gender, and sexual orientation.