> On Aug 23, 2026, at 01:15, hari kumar via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> http://ml-review.ca/aml/BLAND/WBBSIZECLASS.html
Thanks Hari. Bland updates the "orthodox" Marxist definitions for mid
20th-century British society. Here are some observations of US society in the
21st century.
1. In the 1920s US, Herbert Hoover established the US housing industry and laid
the basis for a US "asset society." Franklin Roosevelt extended that to the
white, Christian working class through New Deal policies and laid the basis for
the proletarian asset society. I have been told that James Cannon saw a big
problem for the left in this development in the 1950s and 60s; he was adamant
that SWP members not own houses. Today, it is a conservative weight on working
class activism, spawns reactionary anti-tax and anti-poor activist, and it
distributes people across wide areas that complicates mass transit and
reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. US workers are divided according to home
ownership, quality of home and number of homes owned.
2. The deskilling of many and upskilling of a few adds to the stratification of
US workers. This is another source of stratification of the US working class.
3. A sector of the US working class has stood at the engineering origin of
global supply chains that terminate in Asian factories. This does give a sector
of the US working class a stake in neoliberalism if not US imperialism.
Increasingly, however, US corporation are outsourcing their design function to
cheaper engineers in China, India, and other locations.
4. At the other end of the class spectrum are the working poor and the
homeless. The ~50% increase in their numbers since 2010 has further complicated
the picture of US working class composition.
>From the street curb of the bottom 10% to the corporate design center that
>employs workers in the top 10% of the income ladder, the range today in the US
>is considerably more complicated than anything Lenin wrote about.
thanks, Mark
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