Roediger demonstrates that an obsession with a “middle class” is relatively new in US politics, starting with Bill Clinton’s attempt to win back the so-called Reagan Democrats. The efforts by the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party remain marked by covert appeals to white racism and the avoidance of wealth redistribution.
Bringing together lab workers, doctors, physicians assistants, maintenance staff at hospitals, those who construct our places of treatment and recovery, mental, dental and visual health workers with the class at large, and left movement organizations — all of whom have real interests in taking on this fight — could break the ideological and legislative lock-hold American capital maintains that persistently denies working class health, imposing misery and premature mortality.
The course provides a basic grounding for participants to pursue further study on their own or collectively. We’ll refer to new resources such as on-line and visual aids and current articles that illustrate capitalism’s developmental tendencies, which Marx calls its laws of motion. This highlights class is for women only. Everyone who identifies as a woman is welcome.
This reading group is taking a close look at Engels’ master work, to help understand how the formation of industrial capital and the industrial working class in the nineteenth century has led us to the current conjuncture in contemporary capitalism — characterized by growing inequality, increasing precariousness for nearly everyone except the capitalist elite, and incessant attacks on the most vulnerable — and explore its lessons for our revolutionary politics in the twenty-first century.