They are really a section of the working class that has had stable, good-paying jobs. As the way of life of millions of these formerly stable working people is destroyed—those who had jobs, an education, relatively secure lives, and were active politically and in their communities—this recently dispossessed section of the working class is being pushed into insecurity and poverty.
Because of this, formerly secure people who are being thrown out of work, working part-time and contingent jobs, losing their homes to foreclosure fraud and their savings and retirement to financial fraud, are waking up to the fact that their interests haven’t been protected, addressed or heard. Today 50 million workers in the U.S.—1 in 6—are in poverty.
People who a few years back had skilled and middle management jobs, homes, and some savings and benefits, are finding themselves in food lines and living in their vehicles. This is the reality of the dispossession of millions of workers in the U.S., each with their own story, but all part of an irreversible historical process.
This appeal to the middle class is an attempt to confuse people and obscure common class interests.
It is also a coded way of dividing them from each other, based on what is most historically backward in American society—the false divisions of race, nationality and ideology. They are being told that their problems are their own fault, or the fault of some other section or color of workers. This is the formula for fascism.
These newly dispossessed workers, if they become conscious that they and the rest of the workers have common interests, have the skills and experience to pull the whole struggle forward, fighting for the interests of the entire working class. This is exactly why the ruling class is trying to mislead them. The capitalists want to prevent these newly dispossessed from turning against the system.
The dispossessed are at the core of a new class being created out of the antagonisms arising in capitalism between an economic system based on the exploitation of wage labor and labor-replacing technology.
Their demands for what they need to survive and thrive are in reality the demand for a transformed world where the sharing of the abundance we create is the economic and political norm. The future is in the hands of our people, we who no longer have a stake in the old exploitive order.
