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The Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

Noam Scheiber New York Times
Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55 percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher among younger college graduates. That may help explain an upsurge for organized labor.

All the Clever Books Are of No Help to Me Here

Sebastian Bähr Transform! Europe
My parents are fading right before my eyes – but leftists only exist in my world, not theirs. My powerlessness in the face of my father’s situation reflects the current inability of the societal left to play a meaningful role for the exploited.

tv

Happy 20th Birthday, Trailer Park Boys

Aaron Giovannone Jacobin
This year, the Canadian TV show Trailer Park Boys turns twenty. The program’s refusal to patronize its marginal, working-class characters was key to its comedic and popular success, and won it a special place in our hearts.

books

Masters and Servants

Gaiutra Bahadur Boston Review
Situated in modern India, an Indian writer reflects on the still extant disparate roles of masters and slaves as parts of a vestigial system of imperial and racial capitalism, where to be a master was alleged to be a total provider, and to be a servant was not a job but a total identity.

labor

Class Brought to Life

Nicole Aschoff Jacobin
The dominant neoliberal consensus today is that class, race, and gender are just issues of identity. The dominant narrative claims that none of them are structural forces worth bemoaning. None of them have the power to determine our life chances if we don’t want them to. To the contrary, it is the invisibility of the structural dimensions of class, race, and gender that defines current social relations of power
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