Public Employee Press


Book review
Casualities of the affluent society

"Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America," a new book by Tim Wise, incorporates class and race analysis into his study of U.S. capitalism.

He first summarizes the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and income over the last 40 years, a period in which nearly all new national income has gone to the 1 percent. This deepened during and after the Great Recession.

African Americans and Latinos have been impacted by the effects of discrimination, even after the victories of the 1960s civil rights movement.

After looking at the widening class and racial divide, Wise analyzes how this economic travesty was sold to the public.

For most of our history, the working class and poor have been portrayed as being paid what they deserve with wealth going to those according to their abilities and hard work. Inequality is depicted not as not a fault of the economic system but rather individuals.

This narrative was shattered by the 1930s Great Depression in which the working class won changes in the form of unionization, Social Security, welfare, home mortgages, minimum wages and other New Deal guarantees, which, however, often excluded African Americans.

This formed a new consensus which persisted to the end of the 1960s with Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, which led to the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid.

Then the Nixon Southern Strategy played out on a national level, painted progressive gains as being abused by the African Americans and turned many in the white working class
away from progressive values and policies.

The Black population also has had to endure not only economic exploitation but decades of mass incarceration.

After years of an enduring a one-sided class war, it was only after the Great Recession and the weak recovery - which shattered workers' expectations of progress and tarnished their faith in the American Dream - that support for a renewal of workers demands against continuing inequality and unionization grew significantly.

Yet Wise cautions that in building a new movement, we must still counter the dominant belief in individualism and meritocracy by proclaiming that the growing misery of the working class and the poor is not our fault but rather that of the members of the dominant class, who succeed not by their virtues but by massive wage theft and anti-union activities, criminal manipulation of the securities market, tax avoidance and shaping the legal and political systems to further their agenda.

The Achilles' heel of worker solidarity is white racism, which continues to divide our class, impairing solidarity needed to form strong unions and a movement for social and political change.

Ken Nash,
Retired Librarian
DC 37 Education Fund Library