Separate Realities: The Dream and the Iceberg - Scarecrow Press

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Figure 2.2. Class-Power Network Model
Separate Realities 87 see, the corporate practices and public policies that emerge from these structural linkages weave legitimation, co-optation, distraction, and coercion into a dense organizational web that sustains the new class system’s inequalities. Members of the new working class find themselves targets of the dominant power networks depicted by the model. Specific public policies, programs, business practices, and cultural ideas maintaining and legitimating superclass interests, the corporate empire, and class inequalities in the new class system are routinely and repeatedly directed at working-class members (and privileged-class consumers) through the four basic social institutions shown in the model. For members of the working class, the cumulative effects of lives lived under superclass-dominated social institutions encourage public acceptance of class hierarchies, extensive corporate power, and the inequalities associated with these arrangements. Oligopolistic corporate control of the economy (e.g., aerospace, auto, electrical, media industries), corporate-funded bashing of big government (Rush Limbaugh), and corporate-media sponsored celebrations of the free enterprise system (e.g., Fox News Channel) produce patterns of ideas and experiences that constantly remind the working class that private businesses are “good” and public enterprises are “bad” (or at best inefficient). 210 In short, working-class behaviors and attitudes are shaped in ways that promote public acceptance (ideological legitimation) of class inequalities. Such outcomes ensure that the distribution of capital resources in the new class society remains relatively unchallenged and unchanged—with a small number of highly rewarded positions reserved for members of the privilegedclass top diamond and those in the new-working-class bottom diamond restricted to positions with much lower rewards. Alternative Class-Power Networks Of course, the top portion of figure 2.2 is only part of the story. At the bottom of the figure we find an alternative class-power base grounded in new-workingclass activist groups. The labor movement, along with other progressive groups, such as many women’s rights, civil rights, environmental, and gay rights organizations, form the heart of three overlapping alternative power networks. These alternative networks challenge, with varying degrees of vigor and with limited resources, the strategies, policies, and messages of the dominant power networks within the economy, the state, the media, and the schools. The alternative-network dimension of our model underscores the point that we do not equate superclass dominance in the economic, political, and cultural arenas with total control. On one hand, inequalities embedded in the new class society are largely maintained and legitimated by the actions, policies, and ideas orchestrated by superclass-sponsored and credentialed-class-managed organizations within the dominant power networks. But on the other hand, these activities and ideas are subject to challenges by alternative-power-network actors in
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Separate Realities: The Dream and the Iceberg - Scarecrow Press

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