Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

XIII. "KLASS, KULTURE &
KOMMUNITY' '
"A UE international officer said, in November
1968, to a group of shop stewards and local union officers:
'For the past two years, as you know, we have
been having widespread discussion in our union on the
general feeling of rebellion, cynicism and disgust among
young workers. Let's examine, now, why these young
workers coming into the shops today feel and act as they
do.
'When this young guy starts getting his weekly
paycheck it looks pretty good, but not for long. Soon he
buys a house with a thirty-year mortgage. He puts some
furniture in the house. He buys a car, a refrigerator,
washer and dryer. A TV - likely a color TV. On top of all
that, his young wife is pregnant again.
'As the monthly bills start piling up, his pay
envelope looks ridiculous. He sees no reason at all why
America, the richest country in the world, can't give him a
job that will provide him with all of the necessities and
some of the luxuries of life - and what's wrong with that?
He is frustrated, he is mad, he is ready to fight the
Establishment that fails to give him what he needs."
Matles & Higgins, Them and Us.
" 'I'd like to tell you why we are troubled ... First,
we are tired of being politically courted and then legally extorted.
Second, we are sick and tired of institutions, both
public and private, not being responsive ... Third, we feel
powerless in our dealings with these monoIiths. Fourth, we
do not like being blamed for all the problems of Black
America. Fifth, and perhaps the key, we anguish at all of
the class prejudice that is forced upon us.'
"The speaker is Barbara Mikulski, a thirdgeneration
Polish-American from Baltimore and there is
little question but that she speaks for millions of the inhabitants
of what Peter Binzen calls Whitetown USA ...
"People forget that, in the metropolitan areas,
twice as many white as non-white families live in 'official'
poverty, and of course many Whitetowners don't quite
qualify for that governmental distinction. They are poor
but not poor enough ... The Whitetown husband and
father works hard as a truck-driver or turret lathe operator
or policeman or longshoreman or white-collar clerk -
perhaps at more than one of these jobs - to buy and hold
on to his fourteen-foot-wide house and new color television
set.
" 'The only place we feel any sense of identity,
community, or control is that little home we prize,' says 1145 Babylon.
Mikulski. 'But there again we feel threatened by Black
people.' "
Carnegie Quarterly, Fall 1970.
Euro-Amerikan workers are absorbed, as are
Boer-Afrikaner workers in Azania, into supra-class settler
communities where the petit-bourgeoisie is leadership and
the labor aristocracy is the largest and most characteristic
element.
There is a distinct and exceptional Euro-Amerikan
way of life that materially and ideologically fuses together
the settler masses - shopkeeper, trade-unionist and school
teacher alike. The general command of bourgeois ideology
over these settler communities is reinforced by the
mobilization of tens of millions of Euro-Amerikans into
special reactionary organizations. Those Euro-Amerikans
who are immiserated or heavily exploited are not only still
commanded by loyalty to "their" Empire, but are
submerged and disconnected amongst the far larger, heavily
privileged mass of their fellow citizens. These "white
poor" are truly the lost; the abandoned remnants of the
old class struggle existing without direction inside