Critical Education Articles Placed in the Teacher Staff Lounge While I Was a Teacher, Part Twenty-Seven: Homelessness and the Working Class

Hello everyone,

 

Attached is another article for the ESJ Ning. It is accompanied by the following:

 

 

Anthony Marcus, in his “The Culture of Poverty Revisited: Bringing Back the Working Class,” discovered that the concept of “homelessness,” like the concept of “inner city” and other such terms, hides the reality of class in the United States (and, undoubtedly, in Canada)—specifically, the reality of the working class and its conditions of livelihood. He engaged in a study for his dissertation on the supposed category of “homeless,” but found such a category meaningless, or rather it was a category created in part to hide the reality of life conditions of the poorer sections of the working class.

 

Marcus argues that the concept of “homelessness” has helped separate the rest of the working class as the “non-homeless”—the “other” that is supposedly living in bliss—from those who are homeless. Thus, social scientists are spared the effort to providing links between the working and living conditions of the upper echelons of the working class and the lower echelons–unlike Marx, who, in Capital , did provide such links.

 

Marx argued that the working class was as such poor, not necessarily because its income was inadequate (although that is true for the lower echelons of the working class) but because it lacked the necessary means for controlling its own lives at work. As a class, it is forced to engage in a contract of employment that results in the control of the lives of the workers at work by the class of employers. It is the interests of the working class which, ultimately, is opposed to the interests of the class of employers. The working class is poor by its very nature in that it is economically dependent on the class of employers and thus requires a continuous subordination of its wills, its bodies and its minds to the power and dicates of employers. As Geoffrey Kay argued, in his The Economic Theory of the Working Class, most workers in a capitalist society who loses her/his job will find, within very little time, that poverty in the sense of a radical change in her/his lifestyle will be the result. This economic threat often controls how workers behave—such is economic dictatorship based on class relations.

 

Poverty studies, however, have made it appear that there is no working class—and simultaneously that there is no class of employers. There is just “we” (the non-poor in general and those with homes in particular) and the “other”—the poor in general and the homeless in particular. Such an approach is nothing but pure ideology that hides the class nature of the world in which we live.

 

Poverty studies attempt to shame the “other”—us (those who do not consider themselves as poor), but the problem of poverty is not solved because the problem is posed incorrectly. Those who are poor—and the supposed “homeless”—are really part of the working class. They are not “the other,” but integral features of modern capitalist class society.

 

Marcus notes that before the Second World War, American workers were relatively class consciousness, but they evidently do lack class consciousness now (as do many Canadian workers). He attempts to explain the disappearance of class consciousness in the United States.

 

He discounts the explanation by many on the radical left that the post-war period was characterized by a compromise between organized workers and employers during a period of a brusk capitalist economic boom. I do not think he makes a persuasive case for justifying such a dismissal of that theory.

 

Marcus does offer an alternative explanation for the demise of working-class consciousness in the United States (which permitted the rise of “poverty studies” as the study of “the other” in an assumed classless society).

 

He points out that there was an independent working-class political party in the United States before the First World War—the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Before 1934, he implies, the interests of Moscow and the American working class coincided in that class struggle against the class of employers was emphasized.

 

However, its independence was compromised after the First World War because it followed the dictates of the Communist Party in Moscow, and the Communist Party in Moscow used other communist parties throughout the world to further Moscow’s own agenda.

 

However, in 1934, for instance, Moscow dictated that all communist parties engage in a popular front with parties that represented employers’ interests—in effect, abandoning the workers’ distinctive interests as a class. This policy emasculated the workers’ class movement and led, after the Second World War, to the persecution of communists and radical workers and the dissolution of class as part of the consciousness of most workers. The Democratic Party captured the more radical working class.

 

It was in this context that the poverty studies emerged in the 1950s—and hid class relations between the working class and the class of employers.

 

When the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, the Afro-American section of the working class (often, proportionately, the poorest paid section of the American working class) did not identify itself to any extent as working class.

 

When the economic crisis hit, the social supports useful for the poorer sections of the working class were eroded and only ad hoc solutions proferred; there was no overall  working-class organization or force to fight for a housing policy or employment policy to address the problem of “the other;”

 

The so-called social scientists had for a long time been silent on the issue of class, and they continued to be silent in the face of the increasing erosion of the supports of the poorer sections of the working class. They contributed, Marcus implies, to the blindness of Americans to the class nature of the United States. They accepted the permanence of capitalism without even being capable of identifying the class nature of capitalism. They considered the “poor” to be a permanent situation—like capitalism.

 

When the neo-liberal movement in the United States fired its first shot by firing the strikers of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981, the reformers were unprepared for the battle that was to come since they lacked any class analysis or militant organization to defend different sections of the working class—especially in the context of repeated economic crises.

 

Marcus provides an insight into how the neoliberals have played the different sections of the working-class against each other. In 1984, during the presidential campaign, he notes that the Democrat Walter Mondale argued for increased taxes of the middle and upper echelons of the working class to fund the safety net whereas Reagan argued to cut taxes. The middle and upper classes reelected  Reagan. Reagan then proceeded to dismantle the social safety net. This playing of one section of the working class (the employed) against the other (the working poor, the unemployed and the unemployable) has been one of the characteristic features of neoliberal tactics.

 

(As an aside, I was talking to a teacher at the recent AGM. That teacher explicitly took issue with those who receive social assistance. When I pointed out the Thompson family owned around $24 billion, the teacher’s response was that they earned it. The teacher obviously lacked a class perspective on the issue. How many other teachers lack such a perspective?)

 

Attacks on the safety net hit disproproportionately Afro-Americans since that is where they were, proportionately, more employed than were the white section of the American working class. (Marcus’ contention that the poor white working class formed a majority of the poor working class does not contradict the racist nature of poverty among the working class. The white working class forms a majority of the American population, and the absolute number of white working class individuals who fall below the poverty line results in the majority of all members of the poorer sections of the working class being white. However, the Afro-American section of the working class, relative to their numbers in the total working class, are disproportionately poor.)

 

However, instead of arguing on class lines for the preservation of the public-sector jobs, the “left” found itself routed and incapable of fighting the neoliberals since the “left” operated on the same terms as the neoliberals—classless terms.

 

The pro-capitalist Democratic Party and the centrist trade union bureaucracy have contributed as much to the situation that the American working class now faces as the neoliberal right.

 

Marcus condemns the silence of the “left” on the issue of class relations within capitalism. It is this silence that has contributed in no small measure to the present situation. The lack of any effective political organization in the United States that adopts a definite class attitude—a working class attitude—has led to the pitting of different sections of the working class against each other.

 

It is time to remedy that situation—in Canada as well.