Harder Times: Undocumented Workers and the U.S. Informal Economy
Many of the informal economies operating in the world today are the offspring of globalization and need to be understood as such. The economic and social prospects for people engaged in informal employment-sometimes referred to as “precarious” and “off-the-books employment”-as well as their families and communities, are substantially inferior to those associated with formal employment, and the current boom of informal economic activity bodes ill for all working people | more…
The Retreat from Race and Class
As the twentieth century started, indeed at almost exactly the same moment that W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the “color line” would be its great divide, Eugene Victor Debs announced that the socialist movement that he led in the United States could and should offer “nothing special” to African Americans. “The class struggle,” Debs added, “is colorless.” As the century unfolded, the white Marxist left, schooled by struggles for colonial freedom and by the self-activity of people of color in the centers of empire, increasingly saw the wisdom of Du Bois’s insight and tried hard to consider how knowledge of the color line could illuminate, energize, and express class struggles. We would increasingly turn to other passages from Debs, including one expressing a historical insight that he could already articulate in the early twentieth century but that his colorblindness kept him from acting upon: “That the white heel is still on the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized. The history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.” | more…
Hurricane Katrina: The Race and Class Debate
Following Hurricane Katrina, many people sought to answer the question of whether its social effects and the government response to the country’s biggest natural disaster had more to do with race or with class. Media images broadcast from the Big Easy showed nearly all those left behind to suffer and die were black Americans—it looked like race. However, those families most able to afford homes in safer flood-protected areas and that had resources to evacuate easily suffered much less than poorer families, which seemed to make it more a class issue. There was no denying that those left behind were mostly poor and black. As public debate escalated amidst increasing allegations of lawlessness among the evacuees, white and conservative Americans vehemently fought the idea that racism had caused the extreme levels of black impoverishment and slowed the government response | more…
Women and Class: What Has Happened in Forty Years?
By Mark Brenner
Forty years ago this summer, a group of women and men came together to form the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW’s mission was to fight for gender equality through education and litigation. While not the only group fighting for women’s rights, it quickly became one of the best known and largest. Today, NOW has over a half million members and over 500 chapters throughout the country. NOW was founded at a time when women were entering the paid labor force in increasing numbers. NOW had its critics: many said it ignored race and class, others said it was too focused on liberal feminist legal strategies like passing the Equal Rights Amendment. Numerous other organizations representing working-class women and women of color developed, including the Coalition of Labor Union Women, 9to5, the National Organization of Working Women, and the Combahee River Collective. Together with a myriad of other groups these organizations helped build the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s | more…
The Pedagogy of Oppression: A Brief Look at ‘No Child Left Behind’
The origins of the current standards-based movement in public education can be traced back to the early twentieth century when curriculum theorists like Ellwood Cubberley and others attempted to align school curricula to the needs and demands of the U.S. economy by developing a scientific approach to designing and planning them.1 From the 1950s to the 1970s, with the Cold War in full swing, the “back to basics” movement gained momentum in teacher education programs and graduate schools of education. Supporters of the movement were determined to ensure that school curricula reflected not only the ideologies and political views of the dominant social classes in the United States, but that they also prepared students for employment in the growing military industrial complex to defend the country against the so-called communist threat | more…
Class: A Personal Story
I was born in 1946 in a small mining village in western Pennsylvania, about forty miles north of Pittsburgh, along a big bend in the Allegheny River. The house in which I lived during my first year of life had neither hot water nor indoor plumbing. It was a company house, and my grandmother had purchased it for $1,000 from the mining company after the town had ceased to be a company town, thanks to the United Mine Workers. A small coal stove in the living room heated the entire house | more…
Six Points on Class
1. We need to change the understanding of class in the United States, going from the division of “rich and poor” to the division of “worker and capitalist.” | more…
Remembering John Kenneth Galbraith
When my father, Paul Sweezy, died at the end of February 2004, John Kenneth Galbraith, or Ken, as he preferred to be called, in- vited my mother to gather her children and come talk. He told us that the New York Times and other newspapers had called to in- terview him for Paul ‘s obituary but he had declined. He felt bad about doing so, but he said, their questions focused on political differences and that is not what he wanted to say about Paul | more…
June 2006 (Volume 58, Number 2)
By The Editors
In April 2000 Robert W. (Bob) McChesney and John Bellamy Foster joined Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy as coeditors of MR. In December 2002, while still coeditor of MR, Bob, working in close collaboration with journalist John Nichols and campaign finance reform advocate Josh Silver, launched Free Press, a nonpartisan media reform organization. From the start Free Press was unique in three ways: (1) it took on the entire gamut of media policy issues with the idea of building a unified grassroots coalition against the corporate-dominated media; (2) it sought to draw popular organizations into the movement for media reform, including organized labor, educators, feminists, civil rights organizations, and environmentalists (and was willing to ally with conservative groups committed to the principles of a free and open media system); and (3) it was dedicated to taking the offensive on media issues by sponsoring legislation in cooperation with members of Congress in an effort to change the status quo. By 2004 Bob’s growing responsibilities as founder, president, and board chairman of Free Press, in addition to his already arduous teaching, writing, and speaking commitments, compelled him to resign as MR coeditor, though he remains a director of the MR Foundation | more…
A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy
Imperialism is constant for capitalism. But it passes through various phases as the system evolves. At present the world is experiencing a new age of imperialism marked by a U.S. grand strategy of global domination. One indication of how things have changed is that the U.S. military is now truly global in its operations with permanent bases on every continent, including Africa, where a new scramble for control is taking place focused on oil | more…
Three Moments of the French Revolt
By Rémy Herrera
In quick succession in May and October-November 2005 and in April 2006, French society experienced three moments of what is clearly a major revolt against neoliberalism. To understand these new class struggles in France and where they might lead it is necessary to view these three moments of revolt together as part of a single dialectical movement-full of contradictions and hidden potentials | more…
Conditions of the Working Classes in China
By Robert Weil
This article is based primarily on a series of meetings with workers, peasants, organizers, and leftist activists that I participated in during the summer of 2004, together with Alex Day and another student of Chinese affairs. It is part of a longer paper that is being published as a special report by the Oakland Institute. The meetings took place mainly in and around Beijing, as well as in Jilin province in the northeast, and in the cities of Zhengzhou and Kaifeng in the central province of Henan. What we heard reveals in stark fashion the effects of the massive transformations that have occurred in the three decades following the death of Mao Zedong, with the dismantling of the revolutionary socialist policies carried out under his leadership, and a return to the “capitalist road,” leaving the working classes in an increasingly precarious position. A rapidly widening polarization-in a society that was among the most egalitarian-is occurring between extremes of wealth at the top and growing ranks of workers and peasants at the bottom whose conditions of life are daily worsening. Exemplifying this, the 2006 Fortune list of global billionaires includes seven in mainland China and one in Hong Kong. Though their holdings are small compared to those in the United States and elsewhere, they represent the emergence of a full-blown Chinese capitalism. Rampant corruption unites party and state authorities and enterprise managers with the new private entrepreneurs in a web of alliances that are enriching a burgeoning capitalist class, while the working classes are exploited in ways that have not been seen for over half a century | more…
The Unanswered Questions
By Anne Braden
When Anne Braden, who died last March 6, aged 81, began covering criminal justice for her hometown paper, the Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal, in 1947, it did not take her long to conclude that the real story was not the trials she saw but the class- and race-based injustices perpetrated by the legal system itself. Very quickly she and her husband, Carl Braden, a labor reporter for the same paper, understood that the system of white supremacy underpinning the segregation and violent intimidation and repression of African Americans was at the heart of a system of social control that supported the rapacious capitalism of the post-Second World War South. White supremacy created the climate in which the steel, automobile, and textile industries exploited a low-wage work force in a union-free environment. Segregation kept sharecropping farm labor in much the same condition as it had been since the end of the Civil War | more…