NYT: A Working-Class Party Without Many Workers

The dramatic growth of the Democratic Socialists of America - from 6,000 members a decade ago to 120,000 by latest count - has drawn national attention in the mainstream media, most recently in the attached New York Times article by Thomas Edsall which does a deep dive into the DSA’s social composition.

Edsall’s piece reflects the widespread misconception defining "working class" in relation to education and income rather than the labour market, confining it to only one third of the US working age population. The hidden prejudice behind this methodology suggests the working class consists only of the lowly and undeserving poor with interests separate and apart from the mass of the industrious (mainly white ) “middle class" population.

The DSA base is disproportionately white and college-educated and is therefore considered to be outside the class, even though most are salaried professional employees concentrated in the education, healthcare, government and other service sectors of the economy. Though they are still the most recently arrived and best-paid stratum of the working class, their job prospects, working conditions, and living standards are also now in decline and subject to the same crisis of un- and underemployment and unaffordability affecting wage and salary earners further down the income ladder. As the article acknowledges in passing, "the D.S.A. has awakened a key constituency, the universe of young people with college degrees struggling to find rewarding work, the so-called precariat.”

It could have added that their radicalization and movement to both the left and right within and outside of the traditional governing parties is a generalized phenomenon and source of some concern to the political Establishment across all of the advanced capitalist countries.


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