On September 22^nd , Politico reported on how rank-and-file union
members were snubbing Biden for Trump. Perhaps inadvertently, the second
sentence reveals what kind of trade unionist this means: “To
rank-and-file members in some unions, especially the building trades, it
doesn’t matter. They’re still firmly in Donald Trump’s camp.”
Historically, construction unions have operated as a white-only job
trust and would be naturally part of Trump’s hard-core support. While
Anthony DiMaggio debunked the myth
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/16/93450/> of Trump’s
“blue-collar” populism in CounterPunch, Democratic Party pundits insist
that unless it connects with these types of workers, it will lose to
demagogues like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump.
Just hot off of OR Books press, David Roediger’s “The Sinking Middle
Class: A Political History
<https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/the-sinking-middle-class/>” digs deep
into the origins of this line of thinking and concludes that it is time
to put it to rest. Despite the book’s title, the subject is a
demographic that academics and journalists describe interchangeably as
the middle-class or the white working-class. Since Black people tend to
vote overwhelmingly for Democratic Party politicians, Roediger’s chief
concern is to interrogate how this obsession developed.
Roediger has been writing about race and class in the U.S.A. ever since
his 1991 “The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class” that paired him with Theodore Allen and my good friend,
the late Noel Ignatiev. For these three scholars, the task was to
explain how the white working-class could identify with ruling-class
values. Speaking for myself, I always attributed that to the phenomenon
Karl Marx described in “The German Ideology.”
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,
i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at
the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the
means of material production at its disposal, has control at the
same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby,
generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental
production are subject to it.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/09/25/the-sinking-middle-class/
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