[Peace-discuss] Galbriel Kolko on the American working class

[David Green]

 From Main Currents in Modern American History, "The American Working Class: Immigrant Foundations" (1976)
For those who managed, for reasons of either sentiment or class, to stay within the complicated stratified entities called ethnic neighborhoods--which after the 1950s became the symbolic cultural and shopping centers of second and third generations, now barely literate in their parents' tongues, living in aseptic communities within driving distances of West and North Ends everywhere--the Wasps' urban renewal bulldozers began delivering the final coup de grace to the vestiges of an internecine working-class structure which tragically had never developed a culture and politics appropriate to its own objective situation.
That ethnic willingness to transcend the suspicion of nationality toward nationality, save perhaps when it came to their common fear and hatred of blacks, at no time emerged during the 20th century to help lay the basis of genuine unity from which class consciousness could overcome racial and ethnic identifications. Ethnic workers saw their grievances in an ethnic focus, which was essential to the very existence of political machines. Yet most ethnics were in reality primarily individuals and families, too preoccupied confronting their anxieties, conflicts of values, nostalgia, and private tears to politically or intellectually transcend the compulsive prejudices of their own nationality or religion. Such marginal socialist ethnic groups as arose, above all among Jews, German, or Finns, were scarcely efforts to escape their particularist culture but rather transitional assertion of values temporarily useful in the diaspora and thereafter to become almost exclusively social and ethnic in function. It was not, surely, a creed they transmitted to their children.
Hence the temporary working class became the permanent working class with its own historically unique style and goals, lumpen people in a lumpen society, with that instability and frequently successful absurdity and triumph of demagoguery that often sways all American people. It is in this context that the trade-union movement and the political expressions of the American masses evolved in the 20th century, compounding the nation's problems while so far depriving it of the promise of real solutions.

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