Re: Re: class in the US

[Joel Blau]

Yes. Even William Julius Wilson, who legitimized the term in The Truly Disadvantaged   renounced its use in an American Sociological Association presidential address circa 1990. Popularized by Ken Auletta in his 1982 book The Underclass, the term originally described 4 categories of people: 1) long welfare recipients; 2) violent street criminals; 3) hustlers; 4) drunks, released mental patients, and homeless individuals. No one on the left should use it; it just gives a fancy social science cover to a long tradition of terms describing the "unworthy poor." For anyone who is interested in this whole subject, see a fine book  called The Underclass Debate, edited by Michael Katz (Princeton Univ.Press, 1993).

Joel Blau

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>>Or perhaps they are right. The working class is seen as and is a
>>>class in the
>>>middle between the capitalists and the underclass.
>>>
>>>Rod
>>
>>What's the definition of the "underclass"?  Poor people of color?
>
>...with loose morals and a propensity towards crime. The Atlantic
>has Nicholas Lemann's classic article on the topic at
><http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/poverty/origin2.htm>. A concept
>not unrelated to "The 'dangerous class', the social scum, that
>passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old
>society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a
>proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it
>far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue." Or,
>"the lumpen proletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply
>differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground
>for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of
>society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans et
>sans aveu [men without hearth or home], varying according to the
>degree of civilization of the nation to which they belong, but never
>renouncing their lazzaroni character...."
>
>Doug

I hope the term "underclass" will get dropped at least from leftist
discourse, if not from _The Atlantic Monthly_.  Luckily, not many
people use the term "lumpen proletariat" any longer.

Yoshie