PPS - I also wrote that the stats I cited only tracked the past 35 years and did not reveal the more dramatic shift from previous generations when the industrial workforce dominated.
I can draw on my own background, which I expect mirrors that of many older comrades on the list to help illustrate it. I was the first to go to university. Growing up in the 40's and 50's, neither my parents, my brother, or any of my uncles and aunts did. Neither did any from my friends' families. Even by the 60's, when the demand for post-secondary graduates had swelled, most of my childhood and teenage friends did not go on from high school to university but mainly into white collar clerical and sales jobs. It was only after the university-educated baby boomers had kids of their own in the 70's and 80's that the college-age population really exploded. We too easily underestimate the abruptness and magnitude of the change and its implications for contemporary class analysis and political strategy. For one thing, the preponderant weight of this new college-educated generation of salary earners puts the lie to the notion that the DSA is just a bunch of privileged kids who do not belong to or are unrepresentative of the working class - a sentiment expressed by the DP establishment and echoed by some on the Marxist left. The militant mass organizations of the19th and 20th century trade unionists and farmworkers who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade, dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid are no longer with us and there is no clear path ahead to whether and how they can be rebuilt. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42409): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42409 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120177484/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
