first in a mexican restaurant in the mission and then at diana’s place we dig deeper into class in america. starting point: the absence of reflections and political positions and strategies grounded in class as a social conflict. while it so obviously profoundly structures this society. while there is a language and political struggle and intelligence about race, gender, sexuality. speaking about race indeed often contains and addresses class matters. but mostly not as such, and it remains inadequate to get a grip on the class structure of this society. perhaps there’s something about the disappearance of the industrial working class in this country, but that also doesn’t do the trick: there’s an army of lumpenproletariat<\/i> all over the place (notably in america’s army).<\/p>\n
we already pondered upon how we were immediately attracted to the kind of marxist groups that we don’t necessarily have much affinity or patience with at home (i mean, i remember the brief moment of concern when at the first meeting of the Students and Workers for Justice someone of the lovely group wrote “All Wealth is Created by Labor” on the black board.), but the attraction lies in the recognition of the fact that class profoundly shapes this society – an acknowledgement which is generally quite rare. <\/p>\n
so what’s up with class in this place? the ideology of the American Dream, with its principles and abstract promise that everybody can transcend the conditions in which they were born, can climb at least a few but potentially many steps up that ladder. a hegemonic ideology which leaves space for revendications about gender and race inequality or discrimination: it is possible to create some kind of a consensus around the fact that everybody’s access to that ladder should be equal, and that whatever holds specific (groups of) people back, outside of the will and responsibility of the individual, is unfair and should be eradicated. clearly not all feminist, anti-racist and civil rights political claims function on those (liberal and equal opportunities) grouds, but a part does. class struggle, however, doesn’t really function on those grounds, “class discrimination” (or “class pride”…) is kind of besides the issue. instead, a strong political perspective on class requires such a dissociation with the American Dream and vision on social antagonism and struggle (the end of “win-win” situations)… does all of this mean that the American Dream still works? let’s just say that its blatent failure in the daily lives of most people isn’t (yet) translated in scattering the ideological hegemonies. there’s much burn-out and drop-out and seeking healing and especially silence silence silence. i guess that means it still works…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
first in a mexican restaurant in the mission and then at diana’s place we dig deeper into class in america. starting point: the absence of reflections and political positions and strategies grounded in class as a social conflict. while it so obviously profoundly structures this society. while there is a language and political struggle and … Continue reading “class”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}