“Why do working class people vote against their own interests?” I’ve heard that question dozens of times from middle class activists trying to navigate the mysteries of social class and politics. I’ve heard it so many times — often more as a complaint than as an honest question — that I’m tempted to retort, “Why do middle class people vote against their own interests?”
After all, the Republican-leaning middle class has been hammered by Republican policies for quite some time. Just to remind us: Corporations are subsidized to export middle class jobs, as well as working class jobs, and consultants from Bain Capital can tell you how. Then there is Republican tax policy, by which the super-rich gain a larger share of the national income at the expense of the middle class. Still, a large part of the middle class votes Republican.
But this column is about working class politics. Let’s start, therefore, by distinguishing between “politics” and “elections.” For at least two big reasons, elections don’t teach us much about the political wants of workers.
In the first place, working class people tend to be deeply cynical about electoral politics. Most believe that the major parties can’t be trusted because of the 1 percent’s control. So a large percentage of working class people don’t bother to vote.
During the Great Depression the Democratic Party led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt did become the party of hope for workers, since it delivered substantially: Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and a favorable climate for unionization. The Democrats did that under enormous pressure from worker and small farmer movements that used widespread nonviolent direct action. Ironically, the historical memory attached to the 1930s and 1940s wasn’t the success of direct action but instead the effectiveness of the ballot box. And Democrats got the credit.
But that was long ago and far away. The Democrats have betrayed workers many times since. They failed to pass universal health care under Truman and failed to repeal the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which was a direct attack on organized labor. They betrayed white workers by deciding in the 1960s to fund the black-oriented War on Poverty from working class taxes instead of taxing the rich. More recently, we had working class boy Bill Clinton as a grown-up presidential candidate, promising labor to oppose the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) — and then, after a meeting with Wall Street, reversing himself. Clinton went on to champion the attack on the poor known as “welfare reform.” No one can quantify the amount of worker suffering caused by these two betrayals by one of their own. It might seem, therefore, that the working class people who don’t vote at all are actually the ones voting in their own interests!
But a lot of working class people vote anyway, despite a two-party arrangement rigged against them. My mention of President Roosevelt suggests one reason why, and I suspect that it’s rooted in people’s work life.
All of us who have worked in factories or other blue collar jobs, as I have, know that there are bosses and then there are bosses. Some are better than others — a bit more human, flexible and respectful, looking for a way to make a hard job easier. For those of us who chafe in routine and mechanical jobs, if that’s a job we need to take now, we prefer one with a decent boss.
Like bosses, politicians are not all the same. President Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to “get it.” He communicated to my dad a commitment to easing our lot even within the limitations of a depressed and depressing capitalism. Thus, working class people can develop preferences for one candidate over another and still hold an overall cynical view of elections and expected performance. They are not as likely as middle class people to project “savior” fantasies on candidates.
The vulnerability of middle class people to political infatuation reminds me of a parallel racial difference regarding President Obama. All the black people I know have been steadfastly loyal to him. That’s because they were realistic about our system. They didn’t join a romance with Superman Obama, and so could skip the disillusionment that afflicts so many white people I know.
Reading minds and exit polls
Ronald Reagan attracted many working class people, and I learned something about that when in 1984 the Jobs With Peace Campaign ran a referendum in a number of counties in Pennsylvania. Reagan won the state decisively. At the same time, we won our referendum by larger percentages than he did, with the proposition that the government should shift spending from the Pentagon to infrastructure, housing and other human needs — the opposite of Reagan’s stance!
We did exit polling. This was a typical interchange:
“Who did you vote for as president?”
“Reagan.”
“And how did you vote on the Jobs with Peace question?”
“I voted ‘yes.’”
Then, noticing my hesitation, the voter said, “Well, Reagan is a good man and a good leader, but you know he’s wrong about some things like out-of-control military spending, and in our state we really need that money for schools and stuff like that.”
In short, our electoral system is not set up to assist us to know what’s really going on inside voters’ heads; it forces choice among candidates, not values or directions or concrete programs. Just because candidates claim a mandate for this or that program doesn’t mean we have to believe them.
Sometimes middle class people will try to guess the minds of working class people through how they behave. The United States intervenes militarily somewhere in the world, for example, and flags appear in working class neighborhoods, but not middle class neighborhoods. Does this mean working class people are hawks?
That conclusion ignores differences in class styles. Compared with middle class people, working class people are usually more demonstrative. They are also more likely to have family members serving in the military.
During the Vietnam war, polls indicated that the educational demographic most opposed to the war was people who had not finished high school. College graduates were overwhelmingly for the war until late in its terrible course.
To my knowledge the first national, mass membership organization to come out against the Iraq war was the AFL-CIO. Then, last year, they did it again, calling for a return of U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan. I know of no parallel action taken by national mass membership middle class associations.
The next time we see flags in neighborhoods, we might ask ourselves the style question. If 100 flags fly in a working class neighborhood of 1,000, there might be 600 households who are actually against that war, while in the no-flag thousand-home middle class neighborhood across town a large majority might support the war. Middle class people just aren’t so much into flags!
Working class legacies
How, then, can middle class people learn about working class political attitudes? One option is to get to know a variety of working class people and ask them. Another is to find out what working class organizations are taking a position on, like the AFL-CIO. Another is to read stories like mine about longshoremen refusing to load weapons for war and other stories of workers acting sacrificially for their values. Still another source is to read polls, although a frustratingly large number of polls that note gender and race and age don’t note class. And if they do, what’s their definition of “class?”
Of course, race may reveal something about working class attitudes, since such high proportions of African Americans and Latinos and indigenous people are working class. I remember a flash poll done after the United States invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983. While about 70 percent of the overall public approved, the number was reversed among black people: about 70 percent opposed.
Then there’s a kind of macro-historical way of weaning ourselves away from the classist conditioning we all experience, which amounts to conditioning against working class people. To counteract it we should ask: Had it not been for working class movements, what would our society be like? We should ask: In Sweden and Norway, where the working class took power and set the direction for a democratic society, what were the results?
In today’s United States we can ask, if the battered labor movement were not still a progressive force, then why is it so important to Scott Walker and the rest of the 1 percent to destroy the unions? The answer to that might lead more middle class activists to become allies of the class without whose politics our country would be a nightmare.
Surely Marx would have included “middle class” as part of the working class since they have the same relationship to the means of production.
Since you see them as separate and antagonistic, could you state what definitions you’re using? I haven’t seen that in the articles so far.
I have always taken “middle class” to be an invention of liberal politics as a way to reinforce “upward mobility”, supported by television propaganda.
Or there is the elitist view that the “working class” are the ones who get their hands dirty.
Working class? Middle class? Messy imprecise distinctions of dialog or labels which Divide and Conquer?
Our electoral system has roots of simplifying the complexities of choosing between A or B, and has lost its worth. The never official(1) two-party system limits and condemns the voice of the people through indoctrination bordering on coercive practice, I think.
Political parties are not founding entities, but have managed to take over federal, state, local governments whereby these parties set access rules to exclude the other parties in some way or another. This two-party system is a dictatorship. It’s reasonable to conclude this from such efforts as ‘class’ label creation, so groups of people form ‘from’ the whole, and House (federal) representational freeze via Public Law 62-5 (1929) which set the number at 435, instead of increasing our representation every 10 years as had been.
So, we choose a very small set number of people to manage law making for an ever increasing number of people which is then purposely fragmented into classes by these people running for office. Whether begun as such or not, it is real today.
(1) It’s not a part of any constitution.
I’m proposing an activist-friendly way of looking at and defining class that’s very different from the usual political ways of looking at it. The above column is the fifth in the series.
I’m glad Gerry and Eric are raising the question of definitions — you’ll be glad to see that I define pretty clearly in my September 11 column, “Do we mean what the politicians mean by ‘class’?”
I honor Marx’s pioneer work but as Eric will see I don’t find it the most useful to us now as we seek to organize a living revolution. And Eric will see that I find class arising from economic relations, not political parties.
I like a definition that helps me ORGANIZE! As I explain in the Sept 11 column, that means knowing that the economic functions that classes meet create class cultures that help us to understand each other across class lines. And to understand ourselves! We could call this the “functional definition” of class.
The class divide keeps us from combining to overthrow the power of the one %, and even prevents us from winning more modest campaigns on a variety of issues. That’s why on August 21 we published “How does class matter?” which includes statements that show significant differences among classes that, if we ignore, will prevent us from working well together.
I specifically point out how middle class people (according to my definition of “middle class,” not Romney’s) reduce their own effectiveness as activists (“Middle class confusion about class war,” Aug 28).
And the pay-off of the functional way of looking at class is huge. Just read my story of the coalition of middle and working class people that stopped U.S. weapons from going to Pakistan when it was committing genocide against the Bengalis in 1971 (“Opening ourselves to the realities of class,” Sept 4). The Global Nonviolent Action Database has a number of cases in which significant change — even overthrow of dictatorship — has happened because middle class and working class people learned to work together.
The fact that we have in the U.S. so many single-class organizations and movements must be a joy to those who would oppress us. A historical study of the more successful progressive movements in the U.S. found that they tended to be cross-class!
So if you would like your cause to be more successful, read my series. It offers tools for getting out of your class assumptions and learning how to work more effectively with others. Warning: the series invites you to question your own assumptions!
George
Thank you. I’ve seen the need or usefulness in bringing together different groups with their different agenda’s, but do share a commonality of “Something is very wrong in the foundations, and the current practices, of our governments and businesses, whereby joining together to increase numbers and coverage of issues, thus lend more weight to this point of common contention.”
Pipe Dream? Perhaps. Aiming for an ideal society, I think is a pipe dream. Not that an attempt can’t be made, it would, I think, need to be a simple model covering the basics of a – To Be Determined – standard of living including a standard for the respect of the Earth too, also To Be Determined.
However, and in addition, there are folks out there who don’t voice their displeasure’s often or loud enough to be heard unless they are close to you. There are these people, barely audible, from different backgrounds, different incomes, and educational levels, who do see, as we generally see, the same troubling trends away from a mutual society.
Thank you. I apparently missed that one. It might have helped to use that one as the introduction to the series. The series makes much more sense to me now.
Your definitions don’t change the marxist definition, and they are far more useful for organizing.
Now I’m going to have to re-read the earlier ones.
I take the division to refer to blue/pink-collar versus white collar. Are you paid by the hour or salaried?
White collar jobs are typically salaried, though there are contractors/consultants who have hourly rates (generally pretty high ones to make up for the instability of those career paths). They tend to include some sort of benefits, like paid time off or health insurance. They tend to involve spending a lot of time at a desk or talking.
Blue and pink collar tend to be hands-on, physical labor jobs. Pink collar refers to the low-paying jobs typically regarded as feminine, like cleaning houses or being a nanny. Pink tend to be paid less than blue (nanny versus welder, for example).
Having been a machinist in manufacturing for the last 32 years and
before that a farm worker and orchardist, I have a good understanding
of class divisions. I’ve hired and fired and been hired and fired.
I listen to KBOO, community radio in Portland. Today, on Per Fagerins’s show, “Fight the Empire”, he had on an author I’ve never
heard of who said that in the early ’70’s, a memo was written by a
Supreme Court appointee that I’ve also never heard of, that said that
corporate America must form organizations to destroy unions, to break
the power of the working class and regain momentum for the ruling class. Post WWII America gave too much power to workers and allowed
them to have a say in how things were done. I can’t blame it all on
corporate America, Watergate, the evil Viet Nam war and Richard Nixon’s resignation turned it all upside down. We lost faith in our
ability to affect decisions on a national level,even though victories
in civil rights and anti-war demonstrations proved that what people
wanted mattered as long as they are willing to sacrifice to make themselves heard. Somehow, we need to regain a sense that what we,
meaning working class and middle class Americans want,matters in the
determination of policy.
Good input.
Part of our diminished ability to affect decisions nationally, is from the House of Representatives stopping our representational increases in 1929, Public Law 62-5. The House was designed to continually increase in members so that we could still be heard. Numbers varied in the Convention of 1787 between 30,000 to 50,000 per rep. And today it’s ~700,000.
As I heard an economist on CSPAN2 say today, 9/22/12, and I paraphrase, but also came to a related conclusion with his, is that we need to extend democracy to the workplace more so, than the current dictatorial system we have now.
It’s simply the teamwork aspect extended to equalize decision making and compensation more so. After all, slaves do not enjoy their fate, I reason.
That Supreme Court Justice appointee you referred was, I’m certain, Lewis F. Powell. I call him the “father” of the current corpocracy because his “battle plan” memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spawned the collusion between big government and big corporations that have ever since been squeezing out the little people. We need a POW! battle plan in reverse with a U.S. Chamber of Democracy to knock out the corpocracy. To see what I mean please go to http://www.uschamberofdemocracy.com
Gary Brumback
FDR was the last “hope” of the ruling not working class. In 1932 the world was awash in worker led revolution against capitalism and their sham governments. In America workers were taking over factories and thanks to huge influx of immigrants, the radical left was a powerful “political” force. It was Roosevelt (& WWII) that turned American workers away from transformational revolutionary change toward obedience and acceptance of a more benign smiley faced capitalism. It also laid the groundwork for the current impotence of the U.S. left and passive malaise better known as progressive political movements. Thanks to FDR the workers and particularly their unions turned from militant revolution to obedient dependence on electoral politics and the state. It worked for about 40 years until Ronald Reagan brought in the counter revolution and began rolling back the “New Deal.” Sadly, most workers and their unions never figured out what was happening to them and their precious middle class lifestyles. Now the beat goes on with the current elections and the clear choice between corporate fascism and smiley faced capitalism. Operating exclusively within the narrow mental framework of the corporate shamocracy, workers and other progressives are obsessed with the relatively minor “differences” between Obama and Romney. Meanwhile, they blindly ignore the fundamental similarities that are dooming them to life under corporate fascism = the merger of state and corporate-financial power. And, preventing real transformational change, aka revolution from taking place. Progressives are so afraid of a Romney presidency that they have become little more than corporate electoral stooges. As Emma Goldman said, “if elections could change anything they would be illegal.”
Distinguishing between “politics” and “elections” was very helpful, but we also need to make some distinctions regarding what is a “worker.” Two hundred years ago, workers, were people living on small family farmers. The term as it is used now is one that is derived from the industrial revolution as a man who works in a factory or other large capitalist enterprise. Part of the riddle of worker politics is that what constitutes a “worker” is today a very different set of people. Just as New Deal made workers into the middle class, the changes in capitalist economics since 1932 have made the middle class into workers. Indeed, part of the failure of both unions and worker politics can be directly attributed to not recognizing what constitutes a worker in the modern corporate economy. Today most workers, at least in the U.S., don’t work in factories but for corporations. There are also a huge number of workers in what is euphemistically called the service economy. Until, the left can update its thinking on what constitutes a “worker,” its politics will remain hopelessly mired in the 18th and 19th Centuries. A good example of the “new” worker politics are efforts by some Occupy folks to organize fast-food workers in NYC. Occupy and the other global horizontal movements have also shown the way to a new “worker politics” for the 21st Century First by not relying on electoral politics and the state for transformational change and instead building worker direct democracy , aka worker cooperatives and ownership.
P.S. Pardon, in the above I meant to say 19th & 20th Centuries. Just as the our thinking about what constitutes a worker needs to be updated, it is perhaps more important to re-think the concepts of working and middle classes. Today’s corporate economy of the 1% and 99% puts the whole notion of “class” into question. I would at least ask whether looking at politics from a “class” perspective even makes sense anymore.
As Marina Sitrin in her excellent new book, “Occupy Language” makes clear, the language we use shapes how we think about things such as politics. Nowhere is this more evident than in “class” politics. The foundation of capitalist politics is the organization of society and the economy on a hierarchical basis. The whole notion of “class” is integral to this vertical organization. As long as we look at worker politics from a “class” perspective, we are invariably forced to adopt a hierarchical framework. Class is a concept that has been used with great effect to impose the capitalist way of thinking on society and to maintain the divisions that are so integral to patriarchal domination. Until we can move beyond looking at politics as class warfare, we will never be able to escape the hierarchical frame and imagine that another way of organizing society and the economy is possible (the horizontal way). That is the beauty and the power of the 99% metaphor – it moves beyond class politics.
@ Gary and Ed,
Good points, and I’d like to share what I learned recently.
Woodrow Wilson said the his acceptance speech in 1912, was that foreign markets were needed for American goods, which we were producing beyond the ability to consume. From the book
“A New History of Leviathan ‘Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State'”
EDITED BY RONALD RADOSH AND MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 1972
It’s worth reading.