Customer Reviews

The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret (ILR Press Book)

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This book is a 5-star read for anyone interested in the interrelationships between class and political power in the U.S. today. Zweig has the ability (unlike most professional economists) to penetrate mounds of statistical data and present their key elements to the reader in clear, jargon-free prose. He is particularly effective at showing how terms like "working class", "middle class" and "underclass" have often been distorted, sometimes by those with a vested interest in making us misunderstand the relationship between our working lives and our class status.

This is a well-written book about the economic system of the United States. The author examines the U.S. class structure and explains why ordinary people should care about it. The obvious audience for this book will be working class activists, union members, and others interested in challenging big-business domination. Zwieg's book would also be a good read for students of economics, political science, or sociology. "The Working Class Majority" deserves your attention.

Class-talk is mostly nonexistent in the U.S. We as a rule hear that most of us are in a vast middle class and share similar experiences, expectations, and opportunities. The author of this book punctures that notion and counters with the reality that capitalistic society is very much defined by distinct classes: an elite and small capitalistic class, a large working class, and a middle class of professionals, entrepreneurs, and managers that reside between the other two. His key point is that it is not income that defines the classes: it is the exercise of power. An elite capitalistic class dominates and controls our society culturally, politically, and most basically in workplaces and corporations. It is that exercise of power that sets capitalists apart. The working class is essentially powerless by comparison with the author's middle class exercising varying degrees of power depending on actual position held.

The author identifies several approaches that obscure the existence of classes. One is that we gain our identity primarily as consumers. As consumers we are told we are "sovereign," that is, empowered. Of course, the systematic manipulation by advertisers is an agenda of disempowerment of consumers adding to the domination already occurring in workplaces. Another myth is that people freely change positions (upward mobility) within a vast middle class. In other words, class does not largely determine life's chances and successes even though there is substantial evidence to the contrary. To further deny the reality of classes in American, talk of class is discredited by elites as foreign to America, or at least as an ideology of the past. While this book is not about media domination of American culture, the author does attribute to the media a role in obscuring talk about class from mainstream American culture. That point should have received greater emphasis.

The author contends that the recovery of the lexicon of class is essential for the working class to understand and to deal with the forces at work in society. It is the power of capitalists to control the economy that has seen working class wages decline and stagnant over the last twenty-five years while income and wealth has been redistributed upwards. It is not the mythical "invisible hand." The folding of capitalists into the "rich" obscures the exercise of power. Entertainers are often rich but seldom wield any power. In addition, in a sociology devoid of the exercise of power, the poor are construed as lacking moral fiber and not as less fortunate members of the working class. The poor are a convenient target for the anger of working class communities or families who have suffered various dislocations or dysfunctions. Power wielding economic elites remain hidden and free of blame.

The larger purpose of this book is to not only educate the working class about power dynamics but to inspire a revitalization of working class political activity. Any realistic assessment of the working class' ability to form independent organizations to counter the think tanks, political parties, trade associations, university support, and the corporate media, all directed by the capitalistic class, is simply lacking. The absence of class-talk is not a recent phenomenon. Even traditional working class organizations like labor unions have been content with sacrificing worker power for material benefits. It is most difficult to fathom the working class overcoming the efforts of educational institutions, the media, and other elitist directed bodies in their quest to obscure the dynamics of American society. Nonetheless this book is another wakeup call for the working class. Hopefully it will make its way into the hands of those for whom it was written.

"The Working Class Majority" came out at a time when formidable economic forces, such as corporate mergers, globalization, recessions, and tax-cuts for the wealthy, had been punishing the American working class with unprecedented impunity, a phenomenon that has forced politicians, media, and learning institutions to intensify their efforts to deflect people's attention from whatever gets them to talk about social classes. Such a concept many thought died with the Berlin Wall and the anachronism of the Soviet system, not to mention the American labor's hey-day before and during the Depression, but Zweig contends that whether it has been in the past or the present, knowledge of class relations has proved paramount to understand how society really functions.

In his class relations study, Zweig found that the United States is neither a 'class-less' country, as the most enthusiasts picture it, nor is it predominantly middle-class, with few prominences as Bill Gates and Ross Perot at the top and few lazy, welfare-supported people, sometimes called the 'underclass,' at the bottom. Instead, the majority of Americans are in the working class, which Zweig estimates makes up 62 percent of the U.S. workforce.

By giving an alternative to the conventional definition of classes, Zweig's thesis mantains that is not solely income and living standards what determines the social position of people in society but rather to what extent they participate (power) in setting the pace and priorities at the workplace and how much they can influence the decision-making process of producing goods and providing services. In other words, the role at the workplace and the means by which an income is earned to afford a certain living standard, Zweig argues, is what defines a person's class.

Zweig divides social classes in the United States into three layers: the capitalist class, or big business layer, the managerial class, and the working class, which makes up the majority of Americans. Zweig separates these three main classes and provides detailed, yet easy-to-grasp analyses about their various subdivisions and roles in society. By adding multiple government and independent sources as well as statistics on U.S. labor and business, Zweig arrives at the conclusion that the majority of Americans are in the working class.

Zweig's book is a wake-up call for the most under-reported, yet largest segment of the population. It is a must-read for all citizens who still believe that cementing a strong working-class culture helps to strenghten democracy in our society.

Zweig's book is an empirical and analytical tour de force. In rigorous fashion he outlines the current class structure of the US in terms of power and control in the workplace. He proves the continuing relevance of class analysis in an era when most Americans consider themselves middle class, and he aptly describes the class war which the "ruling elite" has been precipitating on the working class. The book is clearly written and convincingly argued, and should be accessible to a wide audience.

Zweig makes a really good point. Whereas society determine the classes based on a family's income and their possesions he breaks it down to three main classes, the Capitalists class, the middle class(which includes lawyers, doctors, financial analysts and etc..) to the working class shich can include workers who may make more than those of the middle class. For example, a lawyer or a doctor fresh out of school will make the same amount of money for the first couple of years as a union worker or even more. Lawyers, doctors ect. are placed in the middle class because of their title and education, not their income.

This book opens up your eyes and makes you see things in a clear and broader sense.

The only negative, I am not comfortable with his writing. There are times he presents one topic and goes off in a tangent the next two lines.

This is excellent book that really triggers thought about the distribution of wealth and power in the United States as it is now. Most workers see themselves as "middle class" instead of "working class". Basically, the point of this book is that when the majority of the working class--people Zweig describes as having minimal control over what they do at work (not just factory workers)--they lose the ability to pool their political power and use it to reform the economic system in their favor.

If one defines premises the way one wants, one can come to almost any conclusion.

This book asserts that anyone who isn't a manager, professional or entrepeneur is part of the "working class," with all the historical baggage the term carries. Since the author defines the "working class" in such a way that it is the majority of the population, and since it doesn't vote the way the author believes it should, there must be a conspiracy that uses a variety of malign tools to deprive this majority of its right to redistribute the goodies to itself.

This bit of semantic legerdemain permits the author to ignore the economic and social miracle which has occurred in the U.S. and most of the West in the last century: In 1900 the vast, vast majority of us lived in what we would today consider to be dire poverty. Now, almost all of us enjoy a level of wealth, security, leisure...and autonomy...that our great grandparents only saw in their dreams.

Zweig disparages the system that produced this result...and can't explain why it did not occur in the workers' paradise which took his ideas a bit too literally.

There will always be people who can't see the empirical evidence that's right before their eyes. Fortunately, when they publish their views, the reading public generally conspires to keep their ideas a well kept secret.