Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

While there are numbers of Euro-Amerikan , ,- ..232!
and historically -brief contradi'ction of proletarian class
conflict within the settler garrison has been ended. Just as
in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the U.S. oppressor na- I-
tion is again a non-proletarian society that is purely
capitalistic in character.
~hird-world ouuressed nations and national minorities as
- -- - -
"America has a working class majority." This implies
about settler society what is not true.
qd
A more subtle distortion is to focus on Euro-
Amerikans, but to determine "class" by sorting each individual
man and woman into different occupational
lets the revisionists claim that "the majority of white
Americans are working class."
This approach denies the "sensuous" reality of
ferent circumstances and had different reiations to the
owning and ruling classes. "(1) It is our task to discover
and explore the tangible class formations that have their
own existence in material life (completely independent of
our investigation). The revisionist distortion on the contrary,
seeks to arbitrarily concoct statistical categories, fill
them up (on paper, anyway) with abstract individuals -
and call this "classes." This is just bourgeois sociology
with "left" rhetoric.
The U.S. oppressor nation is a patriarchal settler
society of some complexity. In general Euro-Amerikans
exist in family units, with the class identity of the family
primarily dependent on the husband or father. We should
say that we neither advocate this situation nor see it as eternal.
It is the prevailing reality at this time, in this century,
and it is our task to understand it.
The revisionist methodology comes up with conclusions
like: "all secretaries are in the clerical sector of the
working class." That sounds reasonable to many. Factually,
however, it isn't true. For example, if a young Euro-
Amerikan woman works as a secretary, came from a petitbourgeois
family background, is married to a professional,
lives in an exclusive white residential suburb or "arty" urban
community, shares in a family income of $30,000 per
year - is she working class? Could she be working class
but her husband and children petit-bourgeois? Obviously,
such a person would, in the actual social world that exists,
be solidly flourishing within the petit bourgeoisie.
This is not such a far-fetched example. Fully 25%
of Euro-Amerikan women employed as clerical-sales personnel
are married to men who are managers or professionals.
17% of the wage-employed wives of male
managers (includes small retail businesses) are blue-collar
workers. (2) due to the patriarchal nature of Euro-
Amerikan society, most women from the middle classes
are forced, when seeking employment, to accept nonprofessional
clerical and retail sales jobs. This does not
necessarily change their class identity. One study shows
that roughly one-third of all secretaries under 30 years of
age are graduates of colleges or junior colleges. (3) This is
commonplace knowledge. We have to describe classes as
they exist, not define them as concocted categories of our
making.
We can gain a better idea of this patriarchal settler
society's class structure by looking at Euro-Amerikan male
occupations alone. While this is nowhere near as accurate
as conducting social investigation, actually going out and
surveying the masses in all aspects of their lives, it should
help us see the general outlines of the class situation.* This
outline is not a full class analysis, we must caution; for our
purposes here we do not need to separately delineate the
big bourgeoisie, regional and local bourgeoisie, and the
varied middle classes (small business proprietors, salaried
,46 managers, land-owning farmers, professionals, etc.). All