# Can America ever again have a social class of economically independent producers? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 25, 2014, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919 "2014-04-25T03:01:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/1 "2014-04-25T03:01:58Z")
From [this Salon article](http://www.salon.com/2013/11/17/americas_angriest_white_men_up_close_with_racism_rage_and_southern_supremacy/) excerpted from [_Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era_](http://www.amazon.com/Angry-White-Men-American-Masculinity/dp/1568586965), by Michael Kimmel. > [@](#): > > On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class. > > That’s certainly what I found among them. Most are in their mid-thirties to early forties, educated at least through high school and often beyond. (The average age of the guys I talked with was thirty-six.) They are the sons of skilled workers in industries like textiles and tobacco, the sons of the owners of small farms, shops, and grocery stores. Buffeted by global political and economic forces, the sons have inherited little of their fathers’ legacies. The family farms have been lost to foreclosure, the small shops squeezed out by Walmarts and malls. These young men face a spiral of downward mobility and economic uncertainty. They complain that they are squeezed between the omnivorous jaws of global capital concentration and a federal bureaucracy that is at best indifferent to their plight and at worst complicit in their demise. > > And they’re right. It is the lower middle class—that strata of independent farmers, small shopkeepers, craft and highly skilled workers, and small-scale entrepreneurs—that has been hit hardest by globalization. “Western industry has displaced traditional crafts—female as well as male—and large-scale multinational-controlled agriculture has downgraded the independent farmer to the status of hired hand,” writes journalist Barbara Ehrenreich. This has resulted in massive male displacement—migration, downward mobility. It has been felt the most not by the adult men who were the tradesmen, shopkeepers, and skilled workers, but by their sons, by the young men whose inheritance has been seemingly stolen from them. They feel entitled and deprived—and furious. These angry young men are the foot soldiers of the armies of rage that have sprung up around the world. Now, what can be done about all of that, I wonder? It does not appear possible to reverse globalization. Can America, ever again, have what Thomas Jefferson envisioned, a working/middle class of persons who have some economic independence by virtue of owning the productive property they work? That matters. My mother’s father was a sharecropper who eventually saved enough to buy his own land. The family was always poor – but even throughout the Great Depression they always **ate** well, because they could grow their own food. I think some part of a nation’s resilience is based on having a non-trivial number of people who can get by no matter what happens. See [Distributism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism), formulated by lefty Catholics in the late 19th/early 20th to provide an alternative to both socialism and capitalism. > [@](#): > > According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right[4] and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism), a few individuals (plutocracy), or corporations (corporatocracy). Distributism therefore advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership[5] and, according to co-operative economist Race Mathews, maintains that such a system is key to bringing about a just social order.[6] > > Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism,[7][8] which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitative.[9] Thomas Storck argues that “both socialism and capitalism are products of the European Enlightenment and are thus modernizing and anti-traditional forces. Further, some distributists argue states that socialism is the logical conclusion of capitalism as capitalism’s concentrated powers eventually capture the state, turning it into socialism.[10][11] In contrast, distributism seeks to subordinate economic activity to human life as a whole, to our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our family life”.[12] But, the industrial side of it is necessarily based on small-scale craft-and-cottage industries; I’ve never seen any explanation of how any large-scale industrial enterprise – and in many industries an enterprise must be large-scale to be at all efficient – could be organized along Distributist lines. I’m one-third of the way through Kimmell’s book now. Really fascinating. Kimmel’s thesis is that AWM have bad reasons to be angry (a sense of “aggrieved entitlement”) and good reasons to be angry (economic marginalization/dispossession), but in either case their anger is misdirected – they are “sending their mail to the wrong address”; whoever or whatever is to blame for their troubles, it is not minorities or immigrants or feminists or biggummint. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/2 "2014-04-25T03:24:41Z")
[As Greg Brown put it:](http://www.lyricstime.com/greg-brown-just-a-bum-lyrics.html) Some people live to work, work to live Any little tremble and the earth might give Ya can’t hide it in a Volvo or a London Fog Can’t hide it in a mansion with an imported dog **No matter how we plan and rehearse, we’re at pink slip’s mercy in a paper universe** And we’re afraid that we’re just a bum Someday when all our stuff is gone and we’re left without a dime Time ain’t money when all ya got is time And we can see us standin on the corner with our nine-day beards and our bright red eyes Goin, hey hey hey hey hey hey hey Hey hey hey hey, come on and listen to my story man hey, hey hey hey hey, ah hey ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/3 "2014-04-25T04:55:30Z")
I think there’s a lot of romantic nostalgia in the viewpoints described. A putatively independent farm family typically takes out a crop loan every spring and prays that the sun and the rain will cooperate enough to let them pay the loan back in the fall. And even straight-up subsistence farming is no guarantee against starvation; as a fictional example, think of the farm family in _The Good Earth_ that had to migrate to the city to survive a famine. Western industry has displaced traditional crafts and family farms by providing better opportunities. Western society used to be 99% farmers, but our ancestors all fled the farm as soon as a chance do something else presented itself; not because they had to, but because anything at all, even the drudgery of a factory, was better than farm life. Remember, too, that that’s what “globalization” really is: the former farm workers in poor nations doing exactly the same thing that earlier generations of Western peasants did, leaving the farm and taking jobs in industry in pursuit of a better and less burdensome life. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 12:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/4 "2014-04-25T12:44:09Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Now, what can be done about all of that, I wonder? … > … > I’m one-third of the way through Kimmell’s book now. Really fascinating. Kimmel’s thesis is that AWM have bad reasons to be angry (a sense of “aggrieved entitlement”) and good reasons to be angry (economic marginalization/dispossession), but in either case their anger is misdirected – they are “sending their mail to the wrong address”; whoever or whatever is to blame for their troubles, it is not minorities or immigrants or feminists or biggummint. Minorities or feminists are not to blame for the decline in family-owned and small-scale businesses, and no one blames them. As “biggummint”, I don’t know what that is. But big government certainly is. Since Obama took office, the federal government has gone on the attack against [organic farmers](http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/22/nation/la-na-food-safety-20140223), [truckers](http://www.nationalreview.com/article/365403/governments-war-long-haul-truckers-lee-habeeb-and-mike-leven), [airline pilots](http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370895/pilot-shortage-made-congress-jillian-kay-melchior), [bakeries](http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/23/the-fda-wants-to-ban-berger-cookies-the), and [meat producers](http://www.salon.com/2010/04/26/usda_testing_end_local_meat/), just to name a few. The government spent hundreds of billions of dollars propping up big banks but not small banks, with the unsurprising result that the big banks have gotten bigger while many small banks have disappeared. The government has required that almost all Americans fork over a large chunk of their income to the health insurance industry. They’ve driven up the cost of gasoline by continuing to expand the ethanol requirement. And of course these things are not unique to the current administration; big government has always been the enemy of small business. If we want to help small farms and other businesses survive and prosper, here’s what we should do. (1) Cut regulations, which prevent them from doing business. (2) Cut taxes, which make them less financially viable. (3) Cut mandates, which make them less financially viable. (4) Cut government handouts to major corporations, which will make it easier for small businesses to compete with them. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/5 "2014-04-25T14:00:47Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > I’m one-third of the way through Kimmell’s book now. Really fascinating. Kimmel’s thesis is that AWM have bad reasons to be angry (a sense of “aggrieved entitlement”) and good reasons to be angry (economic marginalization/dispossession), but in either case their anger is misdirected – they are “sending their mail to the wrong address”; whoever or whatever is to blame for their troubles, it is not minorities or immigrants or feminists or biggummint. I don’t know why you’d find that fascinating. You’ve talked about it for years. It’s been a standard hang wringing issue on the left for like 30 years. But here’s the thing: white working class men _aren’t_ secret progressives. “But they should be!” Yeah, what’s the matter with Kansas, bro? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/6 "2014-04-25T14:57:38Z")
> [@marshmallow](#): > > I don’t know why you’d find that fascinating. You’ve talked about it for years. [shrug] The book does tell me a lot of things I didn’t know – not economic, but sociological. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Nylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/77aa72/32.png) [@Mr.Nylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Nylock)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/7 "2014-04-25T15:46:34Z")
Who are these people really? They are the people who were too dense, too rigid too untalented to change with the times. Few people in the area my dad grew up in stayed on the farm, they mostly did other things, most of them went on to lead much more comfortable and prosperous lives and became professionals. All the farms are gone for the most part. The people who did not leave the farm and go on to do other things were generally the least capable. I will not say this is 100% true, bad luck and circumstances can bring anyone down no matter how capable, but if you are going to look at this group as a whole they are not best and brightest but the worst and dimmest. This is why they will not align themselves with other groups in the same circumstances, they are in a different boat. They have not been discriminated against the same way minorities have - and in fact probably many minorities would wonder why they are not more successful. This is something rarely talked about, but it has been my experience that minorities see non-minorities who are not prosperous differently, the thought is that there is something wrong with them if they are not more successful. So, in short, the forces keeping this group of “angry white men” from being more prosperous lawyers doctors engineers etc. are to a much greater degree internal rather than the forces keeping the population of minorities from having those opportunities. I think distributism would not solve the problem really, you would just be giving stuff to people who would screw it up and blame other people. ---
**Author:** ![ThisUsernameIsForbidden](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b4bc9f/32.png) [@ThisUsernameIsForbidden](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThisUsernameIsForbidden)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/8 "2014-04-25T18:37:56Z")
Why not? But how do we “spread out the means of production”? ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Nylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/77aa72/32.png) [@Mr.Nylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Nylock)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2014, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/9 "2014-04-25T19:40:11Z")
> [@ThisUsernameIsForbidden](#): > > Why not? But how do we “spread out the means of production”? They are pretty spread out all ready; all the professions listed in the OP are service professions with abundant private practices, or situations where the professionals involved often have an ownership stake in the firm. Production has changed, we produce services now instead of sweating in a field all day raising soyer. It’s a welcome change for most. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2014, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/10 "2014-04-29T22:44:14Z")
This just in! Small town hicks upset that their obsolete businesses no longer economically viable! Blame Negros, Jews and Chinamen! I did some quick research. There are actually a lot of small businesses out there. > **[18 Amazing Facts About Small Businesses In America](https://www.businessinsider.com/facts-about-small-businesses-in-america-2011-8?op=1)** Some interesting facts: There are 28 million small businesses in the U.S 70% of small businesses are owned and operated by a single person Small businesses employ 57% of the country’s private workforce 77 million people that make up the US small business workforce 60 to 80% of all new jobs come from small businesses So there are obviously a lot of opportunities for Americans to be financially independent. However, Distributism is largely nonsense. It is not economically viable to have a significant fraction of the US population running self-contained farms. > [@BrainGlutton](#): > > …the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Boat shoes and seersucker jackets? What is it casual Friday? In Savannah? In 1920? ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2014, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/11 "2014-04-30T01:55:09Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Boat shoes and seersucker jackets? What is it casual Friday? In Savannah? In 1920? The author, Michael Kimmel, is a gender studies professor who has never worked a day in his adult life off campus. His entire career has been in the field of “men’s studies,” essentially writing one book after another about how he sees men and masculinity; his continued employment and such fame as he possesses is predicated on the assumption that men are facing some barrier to their masculinity, so he HAS to come up with threats to masculinity or there’s no reason for him to be paid money. He’s writing sociology mumbo jumbo to entertain other sociologists, and I doubt he would really know anything about modern industry and business. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2014, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/12 "2014-04-30T02:01:43Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > The author, Michael Kimmel, is a gender studies professor who has never worked a day in his adult life off campus. His entire career has been in the field of “men’s studies,” essentially writing one book after another about how he sees men and masculinity; his continued employment and such fame as he possesses is predicated on the assumption that men are facing some barrier to their masculinity, so he HAS to come up with threats to masculinity or there’s no reason for him to be paid money. > > He’s writing sociology mumbo jumbo to entertain other sociologists, and I doubt he would really know anything about modern industry and business. Ah that makes sense. His whole article and the OP strike me as “ways for me to show contempt working-class whites in such a way that I feel good about myself and morally superior and get to pretend I’m progressive.” Sort of in the vein of [PeopleofWallmart.com](http://PeopleofWallmart.com) where you can laugh at poor people and feel like you’re striking a blow for the progressive cause. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2014, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/13 "2014-04-30T15:43:14Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > The author, Michael Kimmel, is a gender studies professor who has never worked a day in his adult life off campus. So fucking what? That is never the sort of thing to detract from an academic’s credibility on his subject of study. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2014, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/14 "2014-04-30T16:01:10Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > So fucking what? That is never the sort of thing to detract from an academic’s credibility on his subject of study. Of course it is. It doesn’t prove him wrong, but a total lack of experience in industry and commerce absolutely does raise reasonable skepticism about one’s ability to comment on that field. It is a perfectly legitimate point. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2014, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/15 "2014-04-30T16:18:42Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Of course it is. It doesn’t prove him wrong, but a total lack of experience in industry and commerce absolutely does raise reasonable skepticism about one’s ability to comment on that field. It is a perfectly legitimate point. Kimmel is perfectly qualified to diagnose emotional reactions he observes among American AWM as being symptoms of (among several other things) their sense of economic dispossession; and one need be only a journalist (which Kimmel also functions as, in this book), not an academic, to see that that dispossession is a real thing even if their sense of “entitlement” to possession is false. However, Kimmel does not pretend to be an economist and does not presume to offer any policy **solutions** to the dispossession-problem. Discussion of such is what this thread is for. And, of course, there might be none; not every problem has a solution. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2014, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/16 "2014-04-30T16:20:45Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > His whole article and the OP strike me as “ways for me to show contempt working-class whites in such a way that I feel good about myself and morally superior and get to pretend I’m progressive.” :rolleyes: That is not what the book is about and **certainly** not what the OP is about. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2014, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-america-ever-again-have-a-social-class-of-economically-independent-producers/686919/17 "2014-04-30T17:40:03Z")
Lets suppose everyone gets their 40 acres and a mule, or whatever. You think the people who get Alaska are going to be happy that they didn’t get the Napa Valley?