Understanding America's Class System - Joe Bageant

[Alaya]

i like this joe bageant, he speaks truly and seems wise enough not to care all that much anymore

I think he's maybe like to stop caring but it's not in him not to care.

[semper occultus]

http://phibetaiota.net/2016/08/review-white-trash-the-400-year-untold-history-of-class-in-america/#more-120480

The Hidden Aspects of Race and Class in American History, July 26, 2016 by Herbert Calhoun

This book explains the unsavory fine points of our national identity by probing and then exposing the not so well hidden loose ends that tie the bottom half of America’s social hierarchy to the top half. It reveals that there is much much more to race and class than what we see at eye level. We learn here that the colonists who came to the Americas were very much a mixed bag.


Initially, the upper classes were investor friends of the British Crown, given concessions to search for gold and to find a non-existent water passage across North America to India. Later, they were made up of political and religious enemies of the beheaded King Charles I.

Jamestown was one of the many failures at finding gold or the non-existent passage to the East. And thus, only as an afterthought did the leaders decide to salvage their costly expeditions by killing two birds with one stone: England’s horrendous social problems of crime, poverty and street violence would be solved by shipping the poor off to America. Then tracts of Indian lands would be sold off to entice the many lost souls hoping to make a life in the New World. These lost souls thus mostly were tricked onto ships in large numbers under a number of unsavory land contract schemes, the most prominent of which was called the “head right system,” in which those who did the tricking were paid in 50-acre land parcels, and in which the contractees thought they would all end up as rich English gentlemen, with free land, slaves and tools, living a life of leisure. Of course, it was all a lie. Most of the founding fathers became rich by acquiring large parcels of land through land scams of the head right variation.

At the bottom of the heap were those of the poor and criminal classes, including children sold off by their parents, or shipped off for petty crimes, or just kidnapped off the streets. But they also included roguish highwaymen or pirates, vagrants, Irish rebels, whores, and convicts shipped to the colonies for a variety of crimes, such as refusing to be impressed into the army being in debt, etc. The progeny of these groups are today’s poor white trash.

The majority of those brought to America’s shores came as indentured servants, a British euphemism for “slaves.” And even the few that did later manage to either escape slavery, or win their freedom outright after long periods of indentureship, seldom owned more than just token amounts of the least productive and most remote land. Most ended up as “squatters” forced into Western territories to “squat” on Indian lands in violation of the Treaty of Paris.

The power of land, for most of American history, lay in being able to get married, “put down roots,” breed a large family of field hands, and then work the land with as many hands as possible. “Squatters,” despised by all sides, typically had none of these. Being the 17th through the 19th centuries’ version of transients, they were young, virile, aimless and restless single white men, ineligible for marriage and forced to keep moving West in search of better and freer land. These unattached single men, wanderers and squatters, were the “free radicals” of the American heartland.

In 1676, a petite English Gentleman, Nathaniel Bacon, in what was called the Bacon Rebellion, along with a contingent of a few dozen single white men, plus an assortment of an equal number of red, white and black slaves, rebelled against being pushed to the outer edges of the colonies, left in hostile Indian territories to fend for themselves. It was the only time in American history when the lower classes have combined to rebel against the upper class.

With lop-sided gender demographics favoring single white men (in the Caribbean, the male slave ratio alone was sometimes as much as 100-1), minimally marriageable women became a scarce resource. As the author notes, “women went to market with their virginity;” and marriage and fertility played a critical role in defining the shape of early American society. Any woman under 50, no matter how ugly, could find a husband in the top tier of colonial American society. “Breeding capacity became a calculable natural resource — commodified and exploited in the marriage exchange.” For slave women, the womb became an article of commerce; and slave children, like cattle, were transactional property.

James Cartwright has written a wonderfully important book, called “Violent Lands,” on the meaning of these lopsided gender demographics in which large numbers of virile young white men were unable to become stakeholders in frontier American society. He claims that this is why America became, and remains even today, one of the most “Violent Lands” in the world.

Thus, added to the staid and highly sensitive class hierarchy inherited from class conscious Britain, the reader can see why America became an incubator for deep race and class sensitivities, divisions and resentments. The “witches brew” of breeding, biology, race, backed up by Christian biblical text, seamlessly turned into an ideology of white supremacy, still the most enduring instrument on the palette used to shape colonial America’s social order.

Put more directly, America’s founding generations saw good breeding and race as God’s way of establishing white supremacy as nature’s “taken for granted” class hierarchy; and ever since the days of the Puritans, American elites have frowned upon both race-mixing and upward mobility for the poorer classes. Both were seen as threats, either to the menial labor force, which the plantation owning elite depended upon for their very existence; or, to the white supremacist social order, underwritten and mandated by the biblical story of ham, which meant that blacks would remain slaves at the bottom of the pecking order in perpetuity.

Imported slaves and immigrants, either through indentureship, apprenticeships, debtors prisons, or due to indictment on criminal charges, prison-work release programs, etc., have all been forced into long-term arrangements for free, or nearly free, and always grossly unfair wages. These discrepancies between “fair” and “grossly unfair” wages have always rebounded back to land owners, or to big businesses’ bottom line as obscene and unsavory profits.

Inequality, denial of the right to vote or to own land, all followed logically from assumptions of superior breeding and race superiority assumptions. Submission to those at the top of the societal hierarchy was regarded as a natural condition of humankind in early America. The Christian Bible was the final authority that reinforced these notions and poured them into the mainstream. By teaching that some were born to rule, while others were born to submit and obey, breeding, and the biblical story of ham, had placed poor whites, as well as those with black skin, at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy.

Arkansas White Trash: A True Story

At the age of nine, I learned about this bottom-most tier of our society first hand a block from the Arkansas River where I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Just below us — both figuratively and literally — down the sloping banks that literally slid right into the water, lived poisoned snakes, eels, gar and cat fish, turtles, bullfrogs, and an odd assortment of white people, who, though it was never said so openly, frightfully were the true wretched of the earth: These were Pine Bluff’s “poor white trash:” authentic rednecks in the flesh.

The shanty town of jerry-rigged huts made of corrugated tin, cardboard and scrap wood, that they had fashioned as homes, had sprung up over night. It was a racially homogenous tribe of “bruised fruit” and “day old” bread peddling white folks. Daily, in push carts and horse drawn wagons, they sold to us, nearby blacks who lived just up the hill, food-stuffs that had been savaged from grocery store dump bins. These petite entrepreneurs were a curious and motley sort, having to defer to blacks — if for no more reason than to encourage us, their only customers, to buy their “rank” produce.

But here’s the catch: Whenever we bought it, they surely knew that we did so only out of pity for their dismal plight. Yet, curiously, other than interacting at their peddler’s stations, and playing ball with two brothers around my age who would occasionally come up the hill, we maintained a silent modus vivendi that served as an invisible shield between our two radically distinct subcultures. While most of my neighbors were working class blacks, sprinkled with a few college educated professionals, like my stepfather, Carl Redus, the white tribes that lived under the hill, were barely literate, and by anyone’s social reckoning, had fallen well off the deep end of America’s socio-economic grid.

…That is except for two things that I still vividly remember:

First, during the school year, a school bus headed down King, would disappear beneath the sloping hill stopping just short of sliding into the water to pick up a couple of handfuls of shanty town redneck kids. It would then proceed clear across town past several black schools to the nearest white school where they were then deposited.

Second, and this came as quite a shock to a nine-year old black kid, almost without fail on the weekends, noisy redneck parties would occur down under the hill. Rival redneck tribes living farther around the river bend, would come to party, and invariably before Sunday morning rolled around a humongous fight would break out, and things would turn very violent and ugly indeed.

Somewhere in the wee hours of Saturday night, I would be awaken with ear-shattering noises, when literally all hell broke loose in shanty town. The sky would light up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July. Bullets would be flying every which way. Shanty town huts would go up in flames, and residents would be running up the hill and screaming as they fanned-out in every direction. It was like a mini race riot, but involving only one race, the white race.

And then, over the flaming carnage and the war-like din, one could hear puffing up the hill, a loud desperate banging on our neighbor, Mr. Harris’ backdoor. In a blood-curling southern drawl, that is still unforgettable — literally a life-and-death scream — I could hear an older white man say: “Harris! Harris! Oooh Mr. Harris, please Harris call the law! Call the law Harris! Please call the law!

As multiple sirens howled in the distance, headed in our direction, soon everything would go completely silent, as the paddy wagons, fire trucks, ambulances and stretchers would arrive. Through my bedroom blinds, I could see parties alien to us, bleeding being carried away on stretchers or handcuffed, being hauled off to hospitals and jails. It was a sight to behold!

The only way we found out what happened in the dark down that hill, is the next day, Marshall and Leonard, the two brothers who occasionally played baseball with us, shamelessly would arrive at our backdoor, in search of food, clothing, bandages, medication, etc. And in exchange for a free breakfast, and a “care package,” we would invite them in to give us the low-down on the fighting that had just taken place.

They never came to our front door and never had enough racial pride to turn down our breakfast invitation, or the “care package” containing black hand-me-down clothes and assorted goods that we invariably gave them. And thus, the brothers, bruised and scraped, seemed to find it cathartic to be able to unload the gory details of the “redneck wars” of the previous night.

What they told us was unsurprising. Invariably the wars were about personal slights, turf encroachments, and men from the wrong side of the river banks “hitting on” women from the right side. Add to this, the occasional hell-raising redneck males, generally on edge and armed: disgusted with not having a secure and respected place in society, and having imbibed too much liqueur, and the tableau of causes of the redneck wars is complete.

This book, “White Trash,” is the first time I have ever seen in print the whole story of people like my river bank redneck friends, Marshall and Leonard, who I later learned both ended up in Reform School, which in Arkansas was the surest training-ground for ending up in adult prison.

The themes exposed here by this author, run true, and vector directly from the banks of the Arkansas River straight through American history like the jagged edges of the St. Andreas fault.

What this author has uncovered, is, that like race, class too is an unacknowledged independent variable that is also America’s most enduring fault line, one that when taken together with race, creates a reality coterminous with American culture itself. How she was able to skillfully separate race from class, and then put them back together again, when clearly they seem virtually inseparable, is part of the beauty of this fine treatment of both subjects.

In short, throughout American history, (including today’s race to the bottom of the global labor pool), America’s social pecking order has depended on maintaining in a steady-state, two racially separated poorer working classes at the very bottom rung of the social ladder. Since Bacon’s rebellion of 1676, rationalizing these two groups as inferior, and pitting them against each other, has proved quite sufficient to keep the ideology of white supremacy in place, and the price of labor at rock bottom. Ten stars.

[NeonLX]

^^^^I bought that book a few weeks ago but haven't started reading it yet. As the descendant of white trash myself*, I am eagerly looking forward to digesting the book!

------------------------------
*Oh, who am I kidding? I'm still white trash through and through.

[PufPuf93]

It is a shame that Joe Bageant was not that far into having a respected public voice when he caught a rapid cancer and passed away in 2011, not long after most of this RI thread was written.

[MacCruiskeen]

It was a sad day when Joe Bageant died. His website is still a goldmine, though, and a very useful resource for anyone struggling to fathom the current Trump-Clinton clown show.

Chosen almost at random, from Dec. 2010:

... I'm no social scientist. If in my travels and experience in American life I see that tens of millions of Americans being screwed silly by a handful of chiselers at the top, or if I see one percent of Americans earning as much annually as the bottom 45 percent of Americans, then that 45 percent is an underclass. When I see a 70-year-old man on his second pacemaker limping through Wal-Mart as a "greeter" so he can pay at least something on last winter's heating bill this month, then he is part of an underclass. When I see the humiliated single mom waitress tugging downward on the ridiculously short red plastic skirt she must wear at the Hooter's type joint so her crotch won't show, she's part of an underclass of humiliated and socially oppressed people. Screw the hairsplitting about who qualifies as underclass and what color they are. Just fix it. Or reap the consequences.

We're finally starting to hear a little discussion about the white underclass in this country. Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified of falling into it. Frankly, I hope they do. We've got room for them. All the lousy, humiliating jobs have not yet been outsourced. The Devil still has plenty for them to do down here.

Call all of this anecdotal evidence. You won't be the first. I was on a National Public Radio show last year with a couple of political consultants, demographers as I remember. One, a lady, was obviously part of the Democratic political syndicate, the other was part of the Republican political mob. The Democratic expert said dismissively of my remarks, "Well! Some people here seem to believe anecdotal evidence is relevant." Meaning me. I held my tongue. But what I wanted to say was this:

Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There's no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need. We can see the guy next door who's drinking himself to death because, "I never did have a good job, just heavy labor, but now I'm all busted up, got no insurance and no job and it looks like I'll never have another one and I've got four more years to go before Social Security." He doesn't need scientific proof. He doesn't need another job either. He needs a cold beer, a soft armchair, some Tylenol PM and a modest guarantee of security for the rest of his life. Freedom from fear and toil and illness.

And furthermore, Sister, we cannot see much evidence that other, more elite people's scientific analysis of our lives has ever benefited us much. When you're fucked, you know it. You don't need scientific verification.

I wanted to say that on the radio. But I didn't. The little white guy mojo voice in my head told me not to. So I just laughed good naturedly. Like any other good American.

May God forgive me.

http://joebageant.net/?p=115

From Feb. 2005:

...

Everybody loves the Dalai Lama, but nobody loves po’ me!

Ain’t no wonder libs got no street cred. Ain’t no wonder a dope-addicted clown like Limbaugh can call libs elitists and make it stick. From where we stand, knee-deep in doctor bills and hoping the local Styrofoam peanut factory doesn’t cut the second shift, you ARE elite. Educated middle class liberals (and education is the main distinction between my marginal white people and, say, you) do not visit our kind of neighborhoods, even in their own towns. They drink at nicer bars, go to nicer churches and for the most part, live, as we said earlier, clustered in separate areas of the nation, mainly urban. Consequently, liberals are much more familiar with the social causes of immigrants, or even the plight of Tibet, than the bumper crop of homegrown native working folks who make up towns like Winchester. Liberal America loves the Dalai Lama but is revolted by life here in the land of the pot gut and the plumber’s butt. Can’t say as I blame them entirely, but then, that is why God created beer. To make ordinary life more attractive, or at least stomachable.

Whatever the case, helping the working poor does not mean writing another scholarly paper about them funded by grant money. That is simply taking care of one’s middle class university educated self. Yet the cause of dick-in-the-dirt poor working white America is spoken for exclusively by educated middle class people who grew up on the green suburban lawns of America. However learned and good intentioned, they are not equipped to grasp the full implications of the new American labor gulag — or the old one for that matter. They cannot understand a career limited to yanking guts out through a chicken’s ass for the rest of one’s life down at the local poultry plant (assuming it does not move offshore). Being born working class carries moral and spiritual implications understood only through experiencing them. It comes back to street cred. ...

http://joebageant.net/?p=674

[NeonLX]

My fave:

Pissing in the Liberal Punchbowl Again

...Ah, but lo and beshit, the Democrats have rescued us. If you can call running around like chickens with their heads up their asses while the Republicans did what they always do — get caught stealing the national silverware, while bombing the hell out of some miserable piece of dirt as a distraction, thereby self-destructing in 12 years as usual, but getting obscenely rich in the process.

Pardon my cynicism, but the view is pretty damned sorry from here in the cheap seats. From down here it looks like every Yankee liberal north of Virginia seems convinced they are now shitting in such tall cotton, that all they need do from here on out is foist Hillary Clinton on the many poor miserable bastards unfortunate enough to be called heartland Democrats because we don’t have the balls to become heavily armed libertarians. Nominating Hillary might just drive us to it.

http://joebageant.net/?p=484

[American Dream]

Class: an introduction



Introduction

The first thing to say is that there are various ways of referring to class. Often, when people talk about class, they talk in terms of cultural/sociological labels. For example, middle-class people like foreign films, working class people like football, upper-class people like top hats and so on.

Another way to talk about class, however, is based on classes' economic positions. We talk about class like this because we see it as essential for understanding how capitalist society works, and consequently how we can change it.

It is important to stress that our definition of class is not for classifying individuals or putting them in boxes, but in order to understand the forces which shape our world, why our bosses and politicians act the way they do, and how we can act to improve our conditions.

Class and capitalism

The economic system which dominates the world at present is called capitalism.

Capitalism is essentially a system based on the self-expansion of capital - commodities and money making more commodities and more money.

This doesn’t happen by magic, but by human labour. For the work we do, we're paid for only a fraction of what we produce. The difference between the value we produce and the amount we're paid in wages is the "surplus value" we've produced. This is kept by our boss as profit and either reinvested to make more money or used to buy swimming pools or fur coats or whatever.

In order for this to take place, a class of people must be created who don't own anything they can use to make money i.e. offices, factories, farmland or other means of production. This class must then sell their ability to work in order to purchase essential goods and services in order to survive. This class is the working class.

So at one end of the spectrum is this class, with nothing to sell but their ability to work. At the other, those who do own capital to hire workers to expand their capital. Individuals in society will fall at some point between these two poles, but what is important from a political point of view is not the positions of individuals but the social relationship between classes.

The working class

The working class then, or 'proletariat' as it is sometimes called, the class who is forced to work for wages, or claim benefits if we cannot find work or are too sick or elderly to work, to survive. We sell our time and energy to a boss for their benefit.

Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.

Class struggle

When we are at work, our time and activity is not our own. We have to obey the alarm clock, the time card, the managers, the deadlines and the targets.

Work takes up the majority of our lives. We may see our managers more than we see our friends and partners. Even if we enjoy parts of our job we experience it as something alien to us, over which we have very little control. This is true whether we're talking about the nuts and bolts of the actual work itself or the amount of hours, breaks, time off etc.

Work being forced on us like this compels us to resist.

Employers and bosses want to get the maximum amount of work from us, from the longest hours, for the least pay. We, on the other hand, want to be able to enjoy our lives: we don't want to be over-worked, and we want shorter hours and more pay.

This antagonism is central to capitalism. Between these two sides is a push and pull: employers cut pay, increase hours, speed up the pace of work. But we attempt to resist: either covertly and individually by taking it easy, grabbing moments to take a break and chat to colleagues, calling in sick, leaving early. Or we can resist overtly and collectively with strikes, slow-downs, occupations etc.

This is class struggle. The conflict between those of us who have to work for a wage and our employers and governments, who are often referred to as the capitalist class, or 'bourgeoisie' in Marxist jargon.

By resisting the imposition of work, we say that our lives are more important than our boss's profits. This attacks the very nature of capitalism, where profit is the most important reason for doing anything, and points to the possibility of a world without classes and privately-owned means of production. We are the working class resisting our own existence. We are the working class struggling against work and class.

Continues at: https://libcom.org/library/class-introduction

[American Dream]

Asian Dub Foundation - Colour Line

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTxeS50kk-0

Today the colour line
Is the power line
Is the poverty line
Racism and imperialism work in tandem
And poverty is their handmaiden
Those who are poor and powerless to break out of their poverty
Are also those who by and large are non-white, non-western, third world
Poverty and powerlessness are intertwined in color, in race
Discrimination and exploitation
Feed into each other today,
Under global capitalism
We are back to primitive accumulation
Plunder on a world scale
Only this time, the pillage is accompanied by aid, sustained by expert advice and underpinned by programmes and polices that perpetuate dependency
The IMF, the World Bank, Structural adjustment programmes
General agreement on tariffs and trade-gatt
Are just a few of the organizations, schemes, projects
Which under the guise of developing the third world.
Plunder it
Trade agreements and commodity price fixing, patients and intellectual rights
They lock them into paralytic dependency
There is no such thing as illegal immigrants,
Only illegal governments
Today, the colour line
Is the power line
Is the poverty line

[semper occultus]

The one subject that seemingly gets overlooked in today’s political discussion is the issue of America’s class divide and the rise of White Trash America. It’s a divide that has been in the making for a long time. Nancy Isenberg, the author of “White Trash,” tells WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman in this week’s podcast that, at best, we’ve had a “democracy of manners.” Not only has White Trash become politicized, low income Caucasians have moved to the center of the debate.

Isenberg explains the history of this issue and that even Ben Franklin hoped that the size of the country would flatten out the class system. But it never happened.

In fact, the explosive ideas of eugenics and of a “cognitive class” have never really been far from the surface.

Today’s politics seem to be bringing all of this out into the open — even if we’ve been reluctant to talk about it.

http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/10/14/taboo-subject-class-election/