^ I know this because it snowed 6 inches in Seattle and he was unaware until the next day
If you've never seen any of this, I would recommend "Kes" as a great place to start, also "Abigail's Party" as a satire of noveau-riche middle class aspiration, and "High Hopes" as a very moving examination of class aspiration and clashes of beliefs about social mobility in Thatcher's Britain.
Yes, and this is much less the case now. Changes to the economics of culture have closed a lot of doors. As well as the massive expansion of university, which magically conveys "middle class" status on people even if they are still heavily indebted wage slaves.
Lurking under a lot of this stuff are two nasty questions:
- whether the word "white" is attached to "working class", even invisibly
- whether people who are retired count as "working class", even if they are property owners with private pensions
That's by design, obvs.
That relative who dutifully donates to the SPLC, asks you your pronouns at Thanksgiving, and has an AOC 2028 bumper sticker? They're a Liberal. They have bourgeois, Liberal values. They can be valuable allies in a left coalition, but they are fundamentally not interested in class struggle, or possibly even find it abhorrent, and can be equally at home in a right coalition with race chauvinists and concentration camp boosters.
> It's probably also the primary reason for the rise of reactionary right wing parties.
Can we stop whitewashing their motivations constantly and blaming them constantly on the left? No it is not reason for that. Plus, your definition of labor must be quite ... selective aesthetic based to arrive to "it is about labor" conclusion.
How? She literally builds the case that one hundred years later there is more work to do and that Wolfe’s prescience only went so far. It’s a salient continuation.
