Caught in the Whirlwind: Working-Class Families Face the Economic Crisis

The great recession has no doubt punctured American celebration of the unregulated market and generated anger at wealth disparities and shock at the loss of the American dream. Yet three decades of conservative dominance and political drift to the right have taken their toll. With the cooptation/destruction of vehicles for working-class resistance (especially unions, civil rights and community-based organizations), most working-class families are not engaged in collective action but are instead fending for themselves, desperately seeking ways to avoid the brunt of this crisis. Reliance on (and continued possibilities for) individual survival strategies tends to reproduce existing social divisions; these, in turn, undergird the prevailing populist response to the crisis. In this political discourse, where ‘Main Street’ confronts ‘Wall Street’, deserving Americans (aka ‘working families’) are caught between an irresponsible, self-serving elite and a dependent, parasitic (of colour) ‘underclass’. There are more and less conservative versions of the ‘Wall Street/Main Street’ discourse; however, they all share the assumption that self-sufficient family households are both sign and substance of the American ideal. The ideal of the self-sufficient family is of course a myth obscuring the many private and public subsidies that allow successful families to maintain standards of living, protect their children from harm, and transmit class and race privilege from one generation to the next. This ideal also justifies the continuing dependence of family households on the extensive exploitation of women’s labour. Women have kept working-class family households afloat by increasing their participation in waged work in addition to their unpaid labour, freeing both male partners/spouses, corporations, and government from fully supporting the work of social reproduction. Further, although some family households headed by women are able to make it financially, single motherhood is more often a ticket to poverty than to independence. Yet, insofar as single mothers survive even in impoverished circumstances, they often do so by relying on social networks that include their children’s fathers and other kin. Familial connections, in other words, are crucial to the reproduction of people and social class. Family networks are not inevitably or always conservatizing. When embedded in broader communities of resistance, they can be mobilized for collective action expressing expanded boundaries of solidarity. Outside such circumstances, however, because familial networks tend toward socio-economic and racial/ethnic endogamy, working-class survival strategies organized through family networks also tend to reinforce rather than transcend existing social divisions. In the short run, then, we can expect these divisions to retard the development of radical, anti-capitalist movements in response to what promises to be a long-lived slide, if not a continuing acute crisis, in working-class standards of living and conditions of work. On the other hand, the family survival strategies that have so far allowed a large part of the working class to weather the recent crisis and the decades-long attack on male workers’ wages as well as the dismantling of the ‘private welfare state’ comprised by employer-based pensions and health insurance, will inevitably run into their limits. Like the earth’s resources, there is a limit to the carrying capacity of the human body