The dynamic poverty of the U.S. working class

Editor’s note: Workers World is in its 50th year of publication. Throughout the year, we will share with our readers some of the paper’s content over the past half century. Below are excerpts from an article by one of the party’s founders and leaders, Vince Copeland, published Jan. 29, 1971.

Every worker in the United States, without exception, is poor. Compared to somebody else or something else, every worker, employed or unemployed, is deprived—and millions are living in misery and desperation.

How, in the richest country in the world, can such a thing be so?

First and foremost, the U.S. workers are the poorest in the world in relation to the mountains of wealth amassed from their labor—past and present—by the plutocratic ruling class.

Second, the workers are poorest in contrast to what they had yesterday (if they are unemployed, or if they are working at the same wages while inflation drives up their cost of living)—or in contrast to what they expect tomorrow from a system that literally promises them the moon and gives them a stone.

Third, they are poorest in contrast to each other—divided and thrown against one another, not only by race, sex, and nationality, but by piecework wages, false differentiation of skills, uneven rewards for difficult labor and constant reshuffling of incomes by the uneven pressure of their own better or worse organized strength and the sudden furies of recession, depression and/or automation in the ever expanding and contracting capitalist economy.

Every one of these factors is eventually reflected in the workers’ minds—now faintly, now sharply and violently, although hardly ever fully articulated or understood, and much more reflected in sudden action than in long cogitated thought.

Dynamic degeneration

The poverty of the U.S. workers is more dynamic because the U.S. capitalist system, more dynamic in its rise, is also more dynamic in its degeneration than the capitalist system of any other country, not to mention earlier social systems, which were static indeed in comparison.

Degeneration, of course, is not usually thought of as “dynamic,” but that is only because the degeneration of previous empires—unblessed by capitalism—took long centuries to consummate, whereas modern capitalism degenerates by expansion, contraction and explosion—all compressed into decades, and on occasion into far shorter periods.

The old systems did not rouse their own slaves to revolt against themselves with nearly the efficiency and thoroughness of the modern capitalists. They could not call into existence the strikes, general strikes, proletarian revolutions and colonial uprisings with anything like the power and frequency that modern capitalist imperialism can do.

This was largely because those systems could not organize the slaves into such powerful battalions under one roof. (General Motors alone has 340,000 slaves under its corporate roof today, for instance). And it was also largely because those systems could not arouse the expectations of their slaves, whereas the slaves of modern capitalism can see before their eyes the enormous production they are responsible for.

And if the modern slaves cannot see the full potential of their labor, unleashed from the restraining chains of the capitalist wage slave system, they can at least see the goods they feel they themselves are supposed to possess as part of the “American Way of Life.” And when they are in danger of definitively losing these goods, their anger is aroused over some “small” loss like no slaves of the past—even those infinitely more oppressed, who were so often unable to fight for life itself. ...

Absolute poverty

There are a great deal more people in the $0 to $5,000 [household income] group than there are in the $10,000 to $15,000 group. This alone is a most crushing refutation of the theories of “people’s capitalism” and the “affluent society.”

Obviously in a country where according to its own reactionary government, a family of four needs $12,000 a year to live “moderately,” the families with incomes less than $5,000 are living in dire poverty. And they are 28.1 percent of all households, or one-third of the working-class families.

This one-third are automatically dissatisfied with their lot, since everybody they see around them is better off than they and without any sound, rational reason that convinces them that this situation has to be.

All too often this group is weak and less able to fight for higher income in ordinary conventional ways. But they are capable of great explosions nonetheless. The Black rebellions, which bring the dynamism of national liberation to the class struggle, come mainly from this group. But there are many more of the group yet to be heard from, and there can be utterly no doubt that they will be heard.

The households with an income of $6,000 a year (less than a gross of $120 a week) are also living in abject poverty, especially if there are any children.

Those getting between $6,000 and $8,000 may rightly be called the “Middle America” of the working class. They have one-third of the country’s households below them and about the same amount of households above them—within the group that can be remotely considered working class.

Now those who make up Middle America of the working class are not the fat, complacent little stockholders. (If they buy their company’s stock out of their paychecks, they have to turn it in and sell it at every household crisis). These are not the people who argue about the mountains or the seashore when they finally go on a vacation.

These are not the Middle America of the columnists and the writers of sweetly deodorized magazine stories. These are the Silent Majority—the real Silent Majority, which includes the poorest—who are silent because they are choked and strangled by the octopus of capital.

But are not the highest-paid slaves—the $10,000 to $15,000 group, assuming they are all workers—content with their lot? Are they not a triple-plated bastion against rebellion, a solid protection for the capitalist upper crust so many of them dream of imitating?

Not at all. They are already showing signs of extreme dissatisfaction. True, they are the ones who have fallen most heavily for the bosses’ propaganda, the TV ads and the installment sales talks. But that’s just the point.

They are more committed to the so-called American standard of living than anybody else and in some ways less able to live up to their own desires than anybody else. When their actual living standard is even slightly reduced, due to inflation, slowdown of the economy, unemployment, etc., they can become the most dissatisfied of all.

The multiple job family

And they are not necessarily twice as well off materially as a family getting half as much money. Their income usually derives from two or more in the family working. (There are now 20 million married women with jobs outside the home.) The extra expenses and the emotional strains of this relationship cannot be stated in statistical terms.

But these, too, enter into and add to the dynamism of poverty in the working class.

Furthermore, in a country where $25,000- to $50,000-a-year scientists and executives can be thrown onto the $75-a-week unemployment lines, any and every category in the whole table of working class groups shown—that is, 83.3 percent of all families in the country—can be uprooted from even the most conservative rut by the sudden winds of capitalist instability.

The inevitable struggle

In spite of the chauvinism of so many of the U.S. workers toward their sisters and brothers in the U.S. colonies, they too must and will challenge the wealth and power of their own U.S. masters, who incidentally are the masters of the super-oppressed colonies, too. Thus the U.S. workers will help—knowingly or not—break the chains of the superoppressed and superpoor at home and abroad.

The possibilities of their doing this are in the long run greater, far greater than they seem, because of the dynamic poverty they undergo and because of the class power that is theirs.