[Marxism] The absence of real forces [was: The low point]

[Sayan Bhattacharyya]

On 8/4/07, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
>
> If you do not accept that the bulk of the working class now comprises
> white-collar clerical, technical, administrative, and professional
> employees - and that these are potentially as capable as previous
> generations of workers of acting in accordance with necessity in defence of
> their interests in a crisis - then you would have every reason to be
> pessimistic about the prospects for social change in advanced capitalist
> society.
>

The Missing Class

by EYAL PRESS

[from the August 13, 2007 issue of _The Nation_]

FUll: <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/press>

Sociologist Katherine Newman is best known for her richly documented,
fine-grained portraits of the working poor. In books such as No Shame
in My Game and Chutes and Ladders, she has chronicled the experiences
of low-wage workers struggling against formidable odds to lift
themselves out of poverty. [...]  In her forthcoming book, The Missing
Class, written with Victor Tan Chen, Newman has turned her attention
to the travails of the "near poor," a vast pool of workers who are
neither officially destitute nor comfortably middle class. Recently,
Nation contributing writer Eyal Press caught up with her at her home
in Manhattan.

Who are the "near poor"?

The near poor are people with household incomes between $20,000 and
$40,000 a year for a family of four, or 100 to 200 percent of the
poverty line. And there are actually almost twice as many of them as
there are people under the poverty line--57 million in the US. They
represent, on the one hand, an improvement, forward motion, the
promise of upward mobility. But their lives are not stable. They truly
are one paycheck, one lost job, one divorce or one sick child away
from falling below the poverty line.  [...]

Full: <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/press>