The white working class

I’m wondering why, with median family income around $70,000 for a family of 4, you are using $40,000 of family income as the cut-off for low income. (Confusingly, family income and household income are very different statistics.)

All became clear(or, at least, clearer) when I discovered that US political discussion uses two very different (though correlated) concepts of “working class”.

Does it? Or is it simply that pollsters/researchers use the second concept (no secondary education) as a shortcut to create data sets? Because I’ve never heard a real person use it to mean anything other than the obvious meaning about actually working.

Actually, I think there is a slight error here. I think a better way to divide white preferences is by whether they live in a high or low ginni coefficient local society, divided into counties. There are more liberal rich white people in lower ginni areas while there are fewer working class/poor non-conservatives (in the sense that they don’t vote Republican automatically) in higher ginni areas. The education aspect is purely a function of the supply of jobs that requires such a college education, and the differential in ginni also tends to polarize political societies by pulling people who prefer an equitable society in one place and people who don’t in another.

Think of it this way, take two rural areas–one has the major state land grant college and the other does not (perhaps Athens, Ga with all the professors and garage rock bands, and Dalton, Ga with all the carpets and chicken houses), would education be an equally good means of separating how white people vote in Dalton and Athens? Or would it be the fact that Dalton has enterprises that can be owned and run by people without degrees, and which run on labor exploitation. People who also attempt to dominate the society of lower class whites through various social gatekeeping functions, like what church you belong to. Whereas in Athens has a broader segment of the economy where people make higher wages based on skill aquisition, and where it’s not so easy to exclude undesirables. White people are much safer and and feel more entitled to vote their interests in Athens. This is what that 81.7% support for Republicans among high earning, non-degree’d white folks represent, as an indication of the local industrial/social blend, more than any important connection between education and voting for democratic party members (who aren’t dixiecrats).

But that would require a much more explicitly redistributionist position than the Dems have taken for a long time.

Can it be that voters are better than journalists at figuring out what’s going on? I hate to retreat from misanthropy.

Not WP expert but the thumbnail wouldn’t look good bigger, you need a new thumbnail or you use the real pic. If your preferred interface lets you use HTML use and then change the 300 to whatever suits.

“More prosaically, it includes lots of small business owners”

Even more prosaically, a lot of them aren’t exactly business owners, but simply ‘self-employed’ or quasi self-employed, like salespeople on commissions. Listen to a talk radio station for a couple of days, and you’ll get a sense who they are.

As a native and 60+ year resident of the Carolinas, I wonder what the percentages are if you control for Region. Does the data set allow you to analyze the three groups of white voters by a geographic variable, such as the four geographic regions that are shown in many analyses of public opinion and voting data? (Don’t have any sample reports readily at hand, but I would expect to see at least some difference between white voters in the “South,” compared to “Northeast,” “West,” and whatever category would include the Mountain and Plains States — e.g., “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”)

There is actually a well developed if sometimes frustrating literature on all this:

See for example the American National Election series:

http://www.electionstudies.org/

also Gelman et al, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do
http://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Rich-Poor/dp/069113927X

and Mellow, State of Disunion
http://www.amazon.com/State-Disunion-Regional-American-Partisanship/dp/0801888166

Stonecash, Class and Party in American Politics
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Party-American-Politics-Transforming/dp/0813397561

Fiorina et al, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Myth-Polarized-America-Edition/dp/0205779883

I have some of the oddest conversations with Americans about “working class”. Most of them have absolutely know idea what it means, or at least don’t use it the same way I learned it. A friend of mine who is an anesthesiologist and the president of his hospital told me he was working class because he worked for his money.

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to ask Andrew Gelman for data and then go ahead and use it to make a pie chart.

This is good.

So, percentage of “voters” means of voting-eligible population, or registered voters, or actually-show-up-at-the-polls voters? And, income is individual, or household?

Don’t reckon conclusions will change in any case, but would help to be clear what we’re talking about.

I think what LP said is totally right. Wasn’t there a (in)famous instance in 2008 when some journalist interviewing Obama suggested that $250K was at or close to median family income? (Might be misremembering the details here, but it was shocking evidence of their seemingly insular existence.)

What’s weirder though is that sometimes “working class” comes to stand in for “white working class”. So it’s not just that, as someone else suggested, you never really hear about the non-white working class. That is, it’s not just that they’re not explicitly part of the discourse (as carried out by various self- and other-appointed experts, pundits, etc.), it’s that the very category seems to escape notice.

“It should be noted that in terms of their policies and records in government neither party has much to offer people with low incomes, who mostly vote for neither party.”

It’s true. Medicaid doesn’t do much for low-income people, other than ensure that they have reasonable access to health care. Medicare doesn’t do much for the elderly (many of whom, obviously, have low incomes), other than ensure that they can go tot hospital when they’re sick. And Obamacare won’t do much for working-class people, other than ensure that for the first time they’ll actually be able to get health insurance (subsidized by the state) even if they have pre-existing conditions. So the fact that Republicans want to scrap all of these programs doesn’t really matter.

= = = It should be noted that in terms of their policies and records in government neither party has much to offer people with low incomes, who mostly vote for neither party. = = =

Well, that’s an issue. The semi-rural, semi-industrial zones I discuss in my 2:48 benefit greatly from and for the most part are heavily subsidized by government programs – federal programs in particular. People couldn’t even live in those areas without the enormous federal subsidies to the oil industry in defense of cheap gasoline (which is not true of more dense areas). Then there are farm support programs, crop insurance, conservation and tourist development programs, disproportionate spending on rural highways compared to population, subsidies for medical clinics, rural doctor subsidies, … The list is as long as the hatred of gub’mint is deep.

Cranky

“It should be noted that in terms of their policies and records in government neither party has much to offer people with low incomes”

Besides preserving Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? Plus food stamps?

Cranky’s got the right ideas here. Especially:

“It is very hard to hear people you like and enjoy working with suddenly expressing this kind of thinking as you walk to lunch.”

Really. My father was safety officer for the chemistry department at a certain Massachusetts liberal arts college for years, and worked with the physical plant staff every day. He loved those blokes dearly, but was horrified at the “I don’t want my tax money going to them” attitude that he heard from them. (This was more than 10 years ago, though.)

The working class in the US is independent, ornary, and anti-intellectual. The only “working class” sort of thing I do is bowling (my Friday night league average is 210, which isn’t shabby for a 60-year old wimp), and I was really irritated with Obama for even thinking about picking up a bowling ball. He looked like a complete klutz, and it probably lost him votes. And it should have lost him votes, since it showed disrespect for the game and the working class. Sigh. I think that Obama is the best thing that could possibly happen to the working class, but there’s not a lot of love lost between them. Sigh.

simultaneous hatred of work safety standards and nannyism in general; strong dislike of unions; bitterness, distrust, and cynicism toward “the man” who personifies the employer; and hair-trigger willingness to file lawsuits should anyone actually get injured on the job

I nearly fell out with a good online friend of mine over the union thing – he knew where he came from (he told us once), his family survived the Dustbowl, and that was why he was proud to say he always crossed a picket line if he saw one… The only thing that stopped me being furiously angry was the time it took to put my jaw back in place. I know where I come from, as it goes – my father’s father survived the 1926 miners’ strike – and that’s why I never cross a picket line.

I’ll never understand that attitude – particularly if it’s accompanied by hatred of ‘the man’. The union is many things, not all of them good, but it’s not the boss.

In the words of Winston Churchill:

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=200753\story_3-5-2007_pg3_5

“Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death and those who are bored to death.”

39: nowadays you’d probably have to have a “fed to death” category in there.

“The Federal welfare state for working families consists of Food Stamps, disability payments, and Medicaid. ”

The EITC maybe? It’s something over $100 billion a year now isn’t it, just at the Federal level? Which might not be enough but it’s not quite chump change either, is it?

“I’ll never understand that attitude – particularly if it’s accompanied by hatred of ‘the man’. The union is many things, not all of them good, but it’s not the boss.”

No it is a club. A club that you are either “in” or “out”. Try finding an African American in the building trades unions of some large cities in the US. They aren’t there, but they’ll walk the line to keep non-union employers out who do hire blacks. See a fun article:

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/the-last-union-town/

To defend the “white working class problem” thesis, you might argue that the Dems, as the less rightwing party, ought to do better than a 50-50 split among this group if they were voting in line with their own economic interests, and obviously the politics of race and culture are playing a significant role here.

No, you just have to realize that historically the Democrats were the working class party and grabbed a much larger share of this vote. It was the backbone of their support. Now they have been hemorrhaging this bloc for years–hence the problem.

The most obvious illustration is Obama’s determination to keep the Bush income tax cuts for the first $250 000 a year of income, a policy that greatly benefits the middle class and the rich, but does little or nothing for those with less than $40 000 a year, whose income is taxed mainly through the payroll tax.

OMG no, it has nothing to do with the freaking Bush tax cuts. You people are so predictable. Get out in the world some, will you. The Dems historically had the support of the white working class because they were seen as being on the WWC’s side. This had nothing to do with any specific policy, but more with the rhetoric employed during the campaigns and off-seasons. The Dems lose with the WWC now because they seem to consider white people as a whole at best distasteful, and at worst the Grand Problem With The Human Race. They also have this problem with Christianity, which most of the WWC considers their religion even if they don’t practice it. They would rather extol the virtues of immigration-fueled diversity (racial and religious only) and Affirmative Action, and WWC types quite reasonably wonder where their party went.

For example, I don’t think I have ever once seen the term “black working class” in mainstream politics/culture reporting.

Could it be because blacks vote as a uniform bloc for the Democrats across the spectrum of class? I think we might be on to something.

It’s individualist, believes in hard work and rewards for hard work, and is against anything big: big corporations and big banks, yes, but also big government and big unions.

That must be why I always hear so many right-wing populists calling for a scaling back of our insanely bloated military.

Oops…

MQ @ 36: “The Federal welfare state for working families consists of Food Stamps, disability payments, and Medicaid. These are crap programs. Cheap, undignified, impossible to live on alone and diminish rapidly with any earned income. Medicaid is the best of the lot but is mostly limited to single women with children and disabled old people. Obamacare will improve things somewhat but two years after it was passed essentially none of it is implemented.”

I think that removing the means testing from food stamps would be a good start towards expanding the American federal welfare state. If that was in place for 5 years, it would be politically impossible to ever repeal it. And it would provide real financial relief to the working class (those who are currently making more than the miserably low threshold for eligibility).

mdc 09.10.12 at 9:21 pm

“It’s really insidious. For example, I don’t think I have ever once seen the term “black working class” in mainstream politics/culture reporting.”

This might be going into to race/ethnicity/gender, but it’s important – I’ve seen media people make claims about how the Democrats would have lost except for minority votes, or women, etc., but the ‘white working class men’ are never used in the same way. Instead deficiencies there (if they exist) are considered to be deficiencies.

BTW – John, I’ve seen a breakdown somewhere showing white/black differences in some belief, by region. The white southerner group was radically different from the white/NE/MW/MW group.

The degree to which the general public, the media, and politicians regularly confuse social class with economic class cannot be overstated.

There is an enormous difference between a young person from an UMC family who is earning $30,000 a year and a young person from a LMC family who is earning $30,000 a year.

The differences include but are not limited to:

– the UMC kid’s ability to be on his parents’ health insurance (since they are more likely to have jobs WITH health insurance) — of course, ANY young person can be on his/her parents’ policy until age 26, but it’s a cold benefit to young people whose parents don’t have jobs with health insurance

– the UMC kid’s ability to develop a credit record thanks to his parents’ co-signing for a credit card while he was in college

– the UMC kid’s ability to rent a better (safer, closer to work, more stable, etc.) apartment thanks to his credit record

– the UMC kid’s ownership of a functional, reliable car due to hand-me-down from a parent or relative (thus enabling him to commute to a wider range of better jobs)

– the UMC kid’s ability to have a cell phone contract (as opposed to a prepaid cell phone), thus meaning that potential employers can always reach and/or leave messages for him.*

There are a million more examples, of course, but I think it’s worth spelling out just what a lot of these social class differences are. Of course they overlap with economic issues but are certainly not limited to them.

*I cannot overstate how significant this is. The number of times I have tried to reach poor and working-class people and could not because they didn’t have minutes on their phone is innumerable.

Tom Hurka 09.11.12 at 1:15 pm

” The left has always ignored the existence of right-wing populism among lower-income working people. It’s individualist, believes in hard work and rewards for hard work, and is against anything big: big corporations and big banks, yes, but also big government and big unions. It’s more closely aligned with right-wing political parties not just on cultural issues but also on economic ones. Though by no means the only view among working people it’s a very common one and illustrated by many of the anecdotes reported upthread. Unfortunately working people don’t always think the way left academics think they ought to think.”

As has been pointed out, this is wrong. The right-wing attitude loves big corporations and big banks – note that even after the Great Financial Collapse, minor efforts towards restoring part of the regulated system under which these people grew up under were bitterly opposed. It loves big government when it comes to big subsidies (for them) and big violence (towards those they hate). As for rewards for hard work, it’s never had a problem with a CEO getting paid richly for f*cking things up, or a team own getting a shiny taxpayer-paid stadium.

I’ve seen six-figure incomes described as “middle-class” on this very site, which is batshit crazy.

Steady the Buffs. A six-figure household income is plausibly middle-class. That’s, say, a police sergeant and a part-time schoolteacher.

Let’s not forget the Republican expansion of Medicare. Yes, it was overly expensive and as badly managed as anything in the Bush administration, but it was also the biggest expansion of federal benefit in years. Obamacare actually reduces health care expenditure but covers more people. So if we go by actual policies, the Republicans have massively expanded the welfare state and the Democrats cut it! Neither one is really representing the working class.

rea: It’s not a coincidence. Baptists and Methodists, and also fundamentalists, found a home in the rural, newly industrialising, Midwest and South with small scattered cities. Each new religious movement in the US moved to the frontier. By contrast the moderate mainline faiths stayed in the wealthy areas of New England and spread only to other economic centers.

In the UK at least, defining “economic middle class” now needs regional categories because housing (or housing + commuting) costs really do change the thresholds.

Not sure how that stacks up in the USA. Suburban housing seemed largely cheap, if rickety last I looked and petrol (gas) prices were lower all round.

That’s, say, a police sergeant and a part-time schoolteacher.

Not unless the police are absolutely coining it these days. An Inspector and a full time head teacher, maybe.

Better to divide the parties into judgemental and welcoming.

And divide the citizens by religious ferver.

Despite the teachings of their various religions, most hard core zealots of all income levels love to judge their fellow citizens, and there’s usually a judgemental party willing to point fingers at the wrong sort of people for them.

Re K. Healy upthread:

Yes, the pie chart is actually easy to understand, assuming one reads “percentages after each group give the proportion of that group voting R”. Heaven forfend that data should be visually represented in a way that people can readily grasp. We wouldn’t want the working class to be able to understand it, would we? ;)

p.s. haven’t read Tufte.

John, I’d use a bar chart in place of that pie chart.

W. Ladd:
The slices are basically proportional to the percentages given on the right, which is what matters, IMO. The purple slice representing “all non-white” should be a bit smaller, that’s the only problem I see. The numbers really don’t “add up to two pies” — you take the pie as a whole as representing 100 percent of the Republican vote and the slices as representing the relative contributions of the groups to that vote. Works fine, as far as I can see. (But maybe I’m just stupid when it comes to these things.)

@Tom Hurka (44): “The left has always ignored the existence of right-wing populism among lower-income working people. [List of stereotyped beliefs]”. You know, I can only see through my own eyes, but this sort of argument by stereotype seems awfully pointless to me. “The Left”; “The Right”, as if those terms meant anything particularly useful, rather than one thing here and a different thing over there. Stereotypes are helpful for people who want to make snap decisions about someone and are too lazy to actually think about that person as a human being. I’ll pay Mr. Hurka the compliment of assuming that he’s lazy rather than not very bright, but come on, Tom – do you actually know all that many “lower-income working people” about whom you speak so confidently, or are you just blindly accepting whatever you hear from people who have an axe to grind? For that matter, do you know all that many people who are part of that faceless mass you refer to as “The Left”? I’m not counting those people who are “some of your best friends”, either; I mean real people with whom you have real conversations. For what it’s worth, 15 years ago, I thought of myself as solidly middle class, with my family income of about $45K for a family of four. We had enough left over every year to do things like car repairs and house maintenance, and a week’s vacation. Now, my family income of about $48K for a family of four means I’m solidly down in the ‘working poor’. Every month is an exercise in bill-juggling, I haven’t had a week’s vacation in more than 3 years, and we’re just trying to take care of the absolutely desperate repairs because we can’t afford to fix things properly. I’m a crap handyman, but I’m the only one we can afford. Admittedly the Democrats aren’t what Democrats used to be, but the Republicans have spent the past decade and a half looting the country, and all they promise is more of the same. I could hardly care less about ‘gay marriage’; that doesn’t take money out of my pocket or put me out of a job. Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and all the other merry band of Monopoly players did that, and are still doing it. They’ve turned me from a solid Republican into damned close to a Marxist. This “lower-income working person” has discovered to his surprise that he has solidly left-wing populist beliefs, but I can’t say that “The Right” has ignored that sort of phenomenon. Heck, “The Right” seems to be taking it seriously, judging by the widespread efforts by “The Right” to prevent us “lower-income working poor” from voting.

The “working-class”, however you may define it for the purposes of correlating with demographic variables, is composed of people at the lower reaches of the continuum of income, education and status: they are followers. Politically, they tend to get paired with people, who seek to dominate them; that pairing is the formula for right-wing authoritarian politics.

Just because you are low-income and low-status doesn’t actually make you naturally submissive. Trust me on this, I come from the ruling class, and our lives would have been a lot easier over the last few centuries were this the case. (They were pretty sweet all the same, of course.)

62: That’s, say, a police sergeant and a part-time schoolteacher.

Not unless the police are absolutely coining it these days. An Inspector and a full time head teacher, maybe.

I think you’re significantly underestimating how much the police make, yes.

According to the US Department of Labor, a police sergeant earned between $58,739 and $70,349 in 2010. The BLS adds that “For high school teachers, median salaries in 2007 ranged from $35,000 in South Dakota to $71,000 in New York, with a national median of $52,000.” So take a slightly-above-average sergeant on $65k and half an average NY high school teacher, and you’re into six figures.

@ John R (72):

I don’t know how it’s stereotyping to say lower-income working people don’t all have the same view but some have a different, more right-wing view.

My comment was directed at JQ’s claim in the OP that if the Dems don’t do better than 50/50 among these voters it’s (i) because of racial and cultural issues and (ii) because the Dems aren’t redistributionist enough. I was saying that a good number of these voters are anti-redistributionist, on philosophical grounds. Not all of them, of course, but enough to help explain the 50/50 split. And that’s what’s being explained, not some uniform voting behaviour that might validate a stereotype but the actual 50/50 split.

Tom Hurka: Adorno, Horkheimer? Lots has been written about working class support for fascism and social democracy by leftists.

What I found most interesting about this article was author’s implied conjecture that the uneducated higher wage earning whites would be better served by voting Democrat than Republican. As I imagine, that particular demographic is primarily composed of small business owners, whose businesses are largely niche enterprises. Small businesses can be profitable without the need for a professional job or a high level of education. Additionally, small businesses are particularly vulnerable to tax increases, and conversely profit from tax decreases; a longtime mainstay of the Republican party. Thus, I would be willing to suggest that these higher wage whites with lower education may in fact truly be best served by voting Conservative.

@TomHurka Very true.

@Uncle Kvetch Well, at least big military doesn’t spend most of its time telling them that everything they do, say or think is wrong. Big business sort of does, big media definitely does and big government sometimes seems to be founded on that premise.

54: The right-wing attitude loves big corporations and big banks

Two words, dude: Gordon Kahl.

46: That must be why I always hear so many right-wing populists calling for a scaling back of our insanely bloated military.

I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of militarism in white working-class communities. Yes, the military is responsible for a huge amount of entitlement payments, and yes, many of those weapons systems are too expensive, and the $800 hammers are a scandal. But the military (to these folx) is, (a) a necessary bulwark against Communism, illegal immigrants and terrorists, (b) a chance for young people to prove they are worthwhile members of the community, by doing very hard work for moderate pay, (c) imbued with tradition and honor. Here’s the thing: A lot of those people know first hand that the military is not really so much about those things, as it is about a lot of boredom and goofing off and wastefulness. But like all of us, they’re looking for meaning, for justification, for a sense of community.

I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of militarism in white working-class communities.

NP, there’s nothing in your comment that I would disagree with. I was taking issue with Tom Hurka’s characterization of right-wing populism in the US as “anti-big government.” It is only such if you accept that very peculiar Reaganite definition of “government” that excludes the military, law enforcement, and any other governmental function that right-wing populists happen to approve of.

ajay – fair enough, I thought you were talking about this country and counting in £s.

67 and 68: The pie slices show the proportion of all R voters that belong to each group, which adds up to 100%. The figures in parentheses are the proportion in that group voting R.

I made exactly this point, albeit in slightly different language, @70.

NP 84: I don’t see that you are explaining anything. You could probably sustain the “tradition and honor” show a lot cheaper but I don’t see anybody clamoring for a return to small-government military traditions. Of course, the Military-Industrial Complex is imbued with ideology but the economic fundamentals are still what counts.

Also, and not just to Ajay,

I personally do not like the use of “six figure income” to mean “just barely above $100,000”. The median number in the six figures is not 100,000, it is 549,999. Someone making $100k is not at all in the same class as someone making $900k. If you mean a little over 100k then say “a little over 100k” or “just barely in the six figures”, or at least “in the one hundred thousands” (but never say “in the hundreds of thousands”).

The EITC maybe? It’s something over $100 billion a year now isn’t it, just at the Federal level? Which might not be enough but it’s not quite chump change either, is it?

yes, that’s a good point, sorry I missed it. EITC expansion might be the single best Democratic initiative of the past two decades in this area. But the EITC doesn’t reach very far up the income scale, it’s a working poor program more than a middle-of-the-middle class program. I think for married couples with kids it stops around $40,000, and you’d only be getting $1-2 K up at that income level.

Child care tax credits are useful as well.

Add Obamacare to this package (which really does offer substantial subsidies for insurance) and you have something but it’s still pretty threadbare on the cash end. Doesn’t come close to making up for the larger failure of our economic system.

piglet, LFC: oof! So the pie slices are scaled proportionally to group size as well as propensity to vote Republican? That pie is total Republican vote? That’s totally odd: usually the numbers you show are the ones you graph.

MQ: Mortgage deduction? We can go back and forth all day on who it helps and hurts, but as it stands someone making $40,000 can live in a much nicer house thanks to paying with pretax dollars for it. I’m also not sure what the salience of this point is: West Virginia and Northern Virginia are both suckling at the federal teat, and yet they have very different politics. Think of all the tea partiers on Medicaid.

Watson, the pie slices are scaled to the absolute number of R votes out of each group. The figures in parentheses are the relative propensity to vote R within each group. Those two distinct measures scale similarly because JQ chose four groups of roughly equal size. But they are not conceptually the same.

I’ve always seen data showing that lower income people tend to vote blue and higher income people tend to vote red. A number of writers have noted the apparent contradiction in which poorer people tend to vote blue, but poorer states tend to vote read. Of course, this is just cause and effect, since blue states have blue policies, and blue policies lead to higher income overall. The reds may dominate the white, male working class, but a lot of this is their dominance of poorer states, not poorer people.

Also, the big class divide in the US is between the exempt and the non-exempt employees. The former are typically better educated, better paid and get a salary. They are sometimes called the middle class or business class. The latter are typically less well educated, more poorly paid and get paid by the hour. They are usually called your working class. Sometimes hourly employees may wind up with higher annual salaries and better benefits than salaried workers, but hourly employees are always vulnerable to getting fewer hours. In contrast, salaried workers are vulnerable to pressure to work longer hours. This shows up in a lot of BLS and hourly time use data.

Certainly, that’s not everyone’s response. But, it does tend to make one feel powerless, abused, lied to, cynical and resentful. And, the result may be bloody-minded, passive-aggressive resistance, at best, and a high degree of conventionalism coupled with aggressiveness to deviants and out-groups, rather than legitimate authorities, who may, at least, ostensibly, be both trusted too much, and regarded cynically.

I think there’s a cultural – and, more importantly, a historical – difference here. In the US, overtly political labour organisation was tried and failed – or rather, it was defeated, repeatedly, most recently I guess around the time of Wilson’s Red Scare. In Britain, not so much. Even in 2012 we’ve got a union congress talking about a general strike (I fell off my chair when I heard that, admittedly).

The kind of passive-aggressive mentality you describe (“we know our place… those bastards don’t appreciate us…”) is familiar to me from British experience, but it’s patchily distributed. Anecdotally, I think it’s much commoner down South, where work was much less thoroughly proletarianised in the 19th century, and hence much less thoroughly unionised in the 20th – a lot of people’s grandparents would have been in domestic service or shop work rather than in factories.

106 “I entirely agree that high income, low education whites (eg successful small business owners) are voting in line with their interests…”

They don’t have to be high income and successful; they could be poor, they could be struggling. You may not be doing well as a petite bourgeoisie, but, as long as you are not a wage worker in the private sector, you are not a part of the working class. Not in the marxist sense, anyway. Also, of course, the government employees, all those revered cops and teachers, they are not a part of the working class either. Nothing’s wrong with that, they just aren’t.

“By the way, Southern white Democrats turn out to be rather scarce.”

Except in some places where remnants of the pre-Civil-Rights-era order still persist, and all the white people are nominal registered Democrats who vote Republican in federal elections.

If you don’t own the “means of production”, that means capital goods aka stuff you can get some profit from (including buildings, bonds and expensive degrees) you are part of the “working class” in a marxist sense.

Degrees? Really? Well, virtually no white collar workers are working class, then, because they have expensive degrees. Even plumbers aren’t working class, because you need to be trained to be a plumber, and that costs money.

State employees and bureaucrats most certainly existed in the 19th century and were a topic of interest for Marx…

Maggie@110
How cynical!

” in this sense it is also in his political interest that public schools hire more teachers and pay them better”

I don’t think this is an example of class interest, this is just a tactical calculation. By the same token, it would be in his interests to limit the number people who can obtain a teacher’s diploma.

Maggie 110: “They [lower-income people] don’t understand how powerful the rich are, because they don’t have a good grasp of the sums of money involved.”

To expand on that, Americans consistently and vastly underestimate the wealth of the rich and the degree of inequality.
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/14/weve_been_brainwashed/
http://www.ucimc.org/content/americans-vastly-underestimate-wealth-inequality-support-more-equal-distribution-wealth-stud

@ajay 122

First, he would not be “a capitalist”, but middle class, because he would have his income due in a big part from labor; second, apparently we have very different ideas of what “expensive” means. I stated quite clearly that, once a certain level of education becomes widespread enough, it ceases to give “rents” and it becomes a “cost of reproduction”, so that neither high school diplomas nor most degrees are anymore a form of capital in the whealty quarter of the world – but they were capital in 1860, when only children of whealty families could afford them.

Or, if you prefer this formulation:
There are differentials in wages between “skilled” and “unskilled” labor, due to the fact that skilled labor is less easily substituted so that skilled workers have a better bargaining position.
But the term “skilled labor” doesn’t really refer to a particular set of skill, but to the rarity of those skills VS demand: for example if A is very good at latin, while B is very good at ancient Greek, but there is high demand for latin teachers but not for greek teachers, A will count as “skilled” and will have a nice wage, while B will count as “unskilled” and have a sucky wage.
Thuse the value of “skill” depends on the proportion between the supply of this skill, usually due to education, and the “demand” for the same skill.
Hence, if there is a substantial barrier of entry to a certain title, such that most people can’t get it, those who get that title will count as “more skilled” and thus enjoy a rent, counting as capital, whereas if some other title has small barriers of entry it usually won’t give a rent, and thus won’t count as capital.
If some set of skills, like reading and writing, become ubiquitous, they don’t even count as skills, so that a job that requires the ability of read/write will be counted as “unskilled labor”, and people who cannot read or write will not be “working class” but “undersocialized” (at least from this point of view), so that the cost of learning to read and write becomes part of the normal “cost of reproduction” of the working class (ie, working class parents will usually refrain to have kids if they think that it will be impossible to teach them to read and write).

Owning a lot of capital makes you a “capitalist”, but usually even a very good title is not “a lot of capital”, it is small capital that makes you “middle class”, since to become “a capitalist” you need capital in the thousands of times the average monthly pay.

Also – I don’t know in other countries, but I’d definitely say that italian plumbers (the ones who own their shop) are higer middle class or more.

The OP classifies people according to income and education. Neither measure has any direct or necessary connection to Marx’s definition of a proletarian, which is someone who owns no ‘capital’ and has to sell his labor power to an employer in order to survive. You can try to ‘update’ (i.e., change) Marx’s definition by, e.g., calling expensive degrees ‘capital’, but I think the end result is just to muddy the waters of the discussion.

or were their skills somehow routinized and moved into the tools of production in all cases; or what?

I suppose everybody has their own Marx, and mine is as wrong as anyone else, but a lot of this thread seems to me to have too much methodological individualism.

It’s social labor, a commodity, and not really attached to a person. A CEO, a bookkeeper, a lathe-operator, these are positions, not people. Labour-power is abstracted in order to be commodified. To me a CEO, to the extent he performs general duties for a salary is a worker, and as a shareholder or serves capital he is a capitalist. Management wears two hats. But to be honest, I don’t think of capitalists and proletarians, as I understand it, the proletariat becomes such only at the point and to the degree it becomes self-aware of itself as proletariat instead of sellers of a commodity, and dialectically aware of labour-power as a commodity and freedom, at which point it becomes revolutionary.

The “class struggle” is a dynamic process in historical materialism, not a static disequilibrium.

Etc.

Phil @ 109: “In the US, overtly political labour organisation was tried and failed – or rather, it was defeated, repeatedly, most recently I guess around the time of Wilson’s Red Scare.”

If by “overtly political”, you mean the Wobblies and organizing politically around an expectation of overthrowing capitalism in a socialist or Marxist revolution, I suppose that’s sorta kinda true, but obscures vastly more about American political (and labor) history than it reveals. Broadly, organized labor has won some and lost some, with the deregulation of transportation under Carter and the fights over globalization of trade under Clinton marking some very big losses. The National Labor Relations Board, under Bush, was almost comically determined to deny basic fairness to labor.

Historically, labor organization has spanned a pretty broad spectrum in the U.S., ranging from the “unskilled” industrial unions (CIO) and service sector unions (e.g., grocery clerks or hotel workers) through the “skilled” trade unions (AFL) up through the “professional” associations, like the American Association of University Professors or the American Medical Association.

Woodrow Wilson, you may recall, was a Democrat, and, as a thorough-going authoritarian, he was hostile to the Wobblies, but he delivered for labor, generally. During the 18 months of war-time control of the economy, Wilson chose to resolve the previous 15 years of labor unrest in favor of the workers, and real wages rose in the U.S by around 50%, a fantastic gain for so short a period. Which gain, of course, was largely reversed in the Harding deflation. In the 1930s, under FDR’s benign gaze, industrial unions managed to reverse the pattern of all previous depressions, and steadily raised real wages. Some of the most successful unions were radical ones — most notably the west coast Longshoremen.

Culturally, of course, the U.S., unlike the U.K., did not have a centuries-old hereditary, landed aristocracy dominating its elite, and the national ideologies of republicanism and popular democracy, which gave names to the two great political parties might suggest a different sort of cultural division than the division of whigs and tories, which clearly excluded the common working man.

“playing subordinate roles” — an ill-considered phrase, since it isn’t subordination, per se, that feeds “class consciousness” or any other stunted, cracked awareness of shared political self-interest, but the narrow horizons and precarious passivity of both the follower and many leader (“management”) niches in the industrial/post-industrial honeycomb — something vaguely like, but broader and more diffuse than alienation from the product of one’s labor.

If by “overtly political”, you mean the Wobblies and organizing politically around an expectation of overthrowing capitalism in a socialist or Marxist revolution, I suppose that’s sorta kinda true

I see the suppression of the Wobs as the very last gasp of the political unionism that never really took root in the US (going back to the Knights of Labour) – some socialists held out hope for Lewis and the CIO, but I think they were quite rapidly disappointed.

I think you hugely underestimate the difference between British and American society in this respect. Under Labour, trade unionists consistently criticise the government’s failure to give real power to the working class and talk about socialism. Under the Tories, trade unionists consistently attack the government’s anti-working-class policies and talk about socialism. Most union members aren’t socialists, but that level of political confidence and defiance is symbolic of – and rests on – a much broader sense that we, collectively, don’t have to take what they give us. A defeated union movement and a pro-business union bureaucracy set a very different tone for working people.

bob mcmanus:
Somehow what I visualized when I read that was some kind of special chair or room where workers can sit for some specified period of time to be fitted out with the “skills” (call them what you like) they’re to need for their new position. Is the complaint that schools aren’t turning out qualified workers that the kids who took bookkeeping can’t sit long enough in the room, they think what employers need is something a little different? I mean, come on. That sounds like exactly the Clintonesque “just send them back to the community colleges, we can retrain them” policy that’s worked so well up to now. This is supposed to be Marxism you’re talking about?

Maggie and Tom Hurka make excellent points about the contradictory, often incoherent beliefs in the American working class. The low-paid, hourly worker who bitches about his/her powerless while hating unions is so common as to be unremarkable. Anti-union sentiment has always been particularly strong in the South. It’s a combination of extreme individualism (I’ve worked for everything I’ve got), general ignorance, and dislike of educated elites. The fact that their family may get government benefits doesn’t enter into the equation. The strongly held idea of a work ethic, whether it’s actually practiced or not, lends itself to racist stereotypes of urban blacks on welfare being the core of the Democratic party.

As for the military, it’s the only vehicle of upward mobility for many in job-poor areas. Being a enlisted man is an envied position. It also ties into the Southern military tradition and patriotism, mostly blind, in general. Liberal disdain for the military is widespread and further alienates the working class. The anti-war activities of the Vietnam era were taken personally among rural whites and working stiffs. These are people who are proud to send their kids off to war. What the war is about is irrelevant, it’s Support Our Troops without qualification.

The above is pretty scattered but it’s very late at night and a glass of wine didn’t help. But like Mr. Hurka I do get frustrated by academics trying to analyze a population they have never spend much time with.

I have lived in rural Idaho, Colorado, and Northern Minnesota. Only in MN was there any noticable chunknof the white working class that voted Democrat, everywhere though the working class whites over the age of forty had started out voting for Democrats and then stopped. In ID and CO they hated the Democratic party and “Liberals” in general for being against their jobs, these were all people in Forestry, Mining, and Agriculture. In almost every ine of these cases they were sadly correct on local matters. In Northern Minnesota they found that the DFL was generally becoming more hostile to their culture, and in particular leisure activities and hunting and fishing, not always a leisure activity. In both Idaho and Minnesota many had family memories of actual violent labor clashes in which they were on losing side, but they now rationalized their political shift by claiming that the modern Democratic Party had betrayed them and now represented the “Bosses.” I am in mining, but not coal, myself so I can completely relate to fury at environmental regulation though I do actually understand the need for such things. But I am also a red diaper baby, and I was raised on the proverbial treachery of the bourgoise. I really don’t see a national Democratic Party that has much interest in the fate of the Western proletariat at all. The Republicans might not seem any better but they are far more eager to issue a mining permit, to build a needed road, and much less likely to revoke a fifty year old grazing permit.

@Maggie #110 Yours is the smartest thing I’ve read in this whole discussion. I’m white working class (originally) but educated and professional (editor). Most of my relatives never left our small town and have no idea what’s going on in the wider world. Their politics are knee-jerk racist and they’re prone to believe what they hear when it’s couched in terms heavy on the patriotic, pro-military (troops), anti-outsider groups (gay), and anti-union (because they only see the part where “they [the unions] take your money,” they have no concept of banding together with others for better benefits, etc., and they’re ahistorical in their thinking… about everything). On the issue of money, they’re proud to make as much as $36,000. People making $60,000 are “rich.” “$Millions” has no meaning.