I know the failure rate is high.
But a person could fail more than once
and still make it eventually. The real
issue I think is mobility. We know there's
a lot of immobility. Make it numbingly simple.
Suppose you have a 90 percent chance of getting
nowhere, and a 10 percent chance of getting
somewhere. Somewhere in the ether is the chance
that joining the revolution will get you somewhere.
All I'm saying is that discounting the 10 percent
chance out of hand is nuts, assuming you would
like to appeal to intelligent persons.
This oversight I think is one of the fatal flaws of
socialism, broadly speaking.
You hit the nail on the head, accurately and sharply. The essence of this question resides in the actual class mobility of the American people since the Second Imperial World War. In America we hardly consider it, but to the rest of the world, it is one of the salient facts of American life. Shackled by the hangovers of feudalism, it is very difficult for a European worker's child to enter the bourgeoisie, and almost impossible in Asia and Africa.
Since the Second Imperial World War, a rapidly expanding economy in our country needed managers, scientist and technicians. The education system opened up and the children of the workers flooded into universities. Many of them, or their children, went on into the bourgeoisie or at least lived a bourgeois live style. To the workers it seemed as if there were no classes since the class boundary cold in fact be crossed.
A postwar bit of Jewish humor - yes I enjoy Jewish humor especially delicatessen jokes, makes the point.
"What is the difference between the President of the Garment Workers Union and the President of the American Psychiatric Association?" Answer: "One generation."
The rest of the puzzle for this unique development lies in the imperial relations and its interactivity with the indescribable poverty of the neocolonial world. The imperial relations has tremendous moral implications but cannot be reduce to simply a moral judgment. Unless one wants to lose sight of how people actually think things out based on heir life cycle. To this colonial worker the poor of American seems bourgeois. Imperialist bribery has been very good to the American people. It impoverished the world and this process has come to an end as such.
I am very familiar with those "Marxist" - maybe without quotes, who have spent a lifetime explaining the "national wages" of the Northern worker of the US as a product of the excretion of surplus value from the workplaces in the Northern industrial centers only. Why argue with such people who are basically chauvinist?
It is true that we are dealing with a specific and peculiar history of the development of industrial society in America, that is unlike the evolution of the industrial system of commodity production in Europe or anywhere else.
In the successive quantitative stages in the development of the industrial infrastructure, one could make it in America, which means survive better than in Europe or the colonial/neocolonial world. People did not make immigration to their first choice because it was more difficult to live.
Even those who did not "leap" to the head of the American Psychiatric Association, saw their lives improve and this includes the largest section of the 11 million sharecroppers liberated as a class and converted into modern proletarians.
Is America a Great country?
Of course.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times and that is our eternal paradox (contradiction). He who belittles either side of this paradox is quickly regulated to the ash bin of history.
Melvin P.
Aye Mike, I am ready for that honorary degree and Vegas ...I mean Arizona ... its the climate man.
