The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25 unleashed the largest civil rights protests in the U.S. since the 1960s. As millions took to the streets in cities and towns across the country, the coronavirus death toll topped 100,000 with still no federally coordinated national plan in place to address the crisis. COVID-19, together with repeated police violence targeting people of color, has revealed deep veins of structural inequality and racism.
As the national debate began to focus on radical changes proposed to address these ills, commentators and politicians (without ever uttering the words “working class”) extolled the heroism of what they referred to as essential, frontline workers in all sectors who were risking their very lives to provide basic goods and services to a beleaguered nation.
In the following conversation with Between The Lines’ Richard Hill, Michael Zweig, professor of economics emeritus at Stony Brook University in New York and author of the book, “The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret,” addresses the question as to why class consciousness and workers’ struggles are largely absent from political debate in America today. Here, he suggests that the multiracial character of the mass protests, together with signs of worker militancy in the face of the pubic health crisis, may point toward the emergence of a broad-based working class movement demanding systemic change at all levels.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: Well, when I wrote “The Working Class Majority” in the late 1990s, 20 years ago or so — it came out in 2000 — people said, “You can’t use the word ‘class.'” I mean, even labor leaders and liberals and leftists said, “Oh, you can’t talk about the working class because that’s too 19th century, that’s too Karl Marx. Forget about it. No one will listen.”
Well, people are increasingly paying attention that there is a working class that we didn’t “need” to understand – that the working class is multiracial. It’s multinational. It’s men and women. It’s not just white men, which a lot the media represents the working class these days (as): “We’re just talking about white people.” Black workers are “black.” They’re not workers. Women workers are “women.” They’re not workers. No, the working class is that whole mix of people in one economic situation in the country.
You know, if you go back to the earlier part of the 20th century, classes were very well understood in this country. There was class unity and class consciousness among workers and certainly among the capitalists, too. They’re very conscious of their class. But it was often socialists and communists promoting the understanding of class and class conflict in class consciousness.
And in the Cold War, following World War II, those attitudes were completely destroyed in the labor movement. They were driven out of the labor movement. They were driven out of academia. They were driven out of the popular culture with the Cold War. And so, the idea of “class” and the “working class” and “class antagonism” disappeared, or was so deeply buried that it was not part of the mainstream of American life.
I do think that that’s starting to come back, the idea that the working class is a united or can be a united political presence in the country. White and black and Hispanic and men and women and gay and straight and Asian and Native American. All workers confronting on economic and a political system that’s stacked against them and run by people who also need to be named.
You know, if we have class consciousness, it’s not just workers. We have to be conscious that we have to be understanding that there’s a working class. We have to be understanding that there’s a capitalist class and that that class of people, maybe 2 percent of the population, or even less, who are in authority – those are the people who have to be gone to in their system. And their values and their sense of what’s right and wrong is what has to be challenged and overturned.
RICHARD HILL: Michael, I wanted to get your reaction to something that I heard Rev. William Barber say the other day. He said, the people in the streets, they have a much broader agenda, even if they’re not specifically articulating it in the little snippets of interviews you get in the heat of battle. But he said, what’s really being called for here is a third reconstruction. And he sort of delineated the planks of that. And he said, “This is a fight against racism. It’s a fight to restructure our economy so that we don’t have 48 million people living in poverty. It’s a fight against ecological devastation. It’s a fight against the war economy where our military budget is $700 billion or more a year. And it’s a fight against religious nationalism.” And I think that sort of echoes what you were saying before about this sort of rainbow coalition of people whose interests are really in common, but have not really, until this moment – this historical moment, when you see this multi-racial, multi-generational battle in the streets going on – really has not coalesced in this fashion.
MICHAEL ZWEG: It is, I think, such an important understanding that when we confront police brutality, we’re confronting white supremacy. We’re confronting systemic and systematic racism. But racism doesn’t just exist all by itself.
Race historically, and racism and white supremacy has been bound up with slavery and goes all the way back to the origins of the American economic system. We’re dealing with systems that intersect economics: race, politics, culture, religion. All those things are bound together. And I think what Rev. Barber is trying to do and what people who are working with him are trying to do, is to draw those connections and to build a social movement that isn’t just siloed off into one area or another, but really takes the whole thing forward all together, step by step.
For more information, visit the Center for Study of Inequalities, Social Justice and Policy, (formerly the Center for the Study of Working Class Life) at stonybrook.edu/
