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The contemporary United States society is still to great extent stratified and thus can be described in Marxist terms. Primarily, it is characterized by primitive accumulation of capital, or the phenomenon of concentration of resources in the hands of relatively few citizens. For instance, only 1 percent of Americans belong to the top class with annual income above $ 1 million (Gilbert, p.38), whereas about 65 percent belong to the working class with annual income of $25,000 or below. According to Beeghley’s estimates, 5 percent of U.S. population can be categorized as “top class”, but his criterion is income above $ 500, 000 and university degree (Beeghley, p.21) and 67% fit all working-class characteristics including income $ 25, 000 and below and the lack of higher education.
According to Marx’s labor theory of value, “the more labor or labor time that goes into an object, the more it is worth” (Levine, p.64). This approach implies that if the factory spends $ 30 for materials and $10 for machine fuel and the worker produces a commodity sold for $ 100, the worker is entitled to receive $60 compensation. However, the existing discrepancy between wages and profits shows that working citizens are underpaid, i.e. the person from the scenario is likely to receive $10 wage maximum from the $60 profit. The remaining amount is distributed among process engineers, managers, company CEO and owners. In spite of this injustice, factory workers are not likely to quit or “rebel”, as the costly tools of production (e.g. equipment) are still owned predominantly by capitalists, so workers have almost no alternative options. Marx asserts that class stratification will be leveraged in case working class members unite and jointly defend their rights, but contemporary estimates show that only 7.5 percent of Americans have membership in labor unions (Levine, p. 73; Zweig, p. 152). The Employee Free Choice Act ostensibly protects the rights of all paid workers, but its actual effectiveness is extremely low due to the low number of “unionized” Americans. One more instrument of suppressing the lower class’s protest, used by capitalist economy, is unemployment rate (Therborn, p. 42), which is about 8-9 percent nowadays. Although the government takes certain supportive measures to help the “reserve army of labor” survive (Therborn, p.44; de Vroey, p.31), the amount of this welfare doesn’t actually motivate individuals to join the cohort of unemployed. The labor market competition, especially in production and service professions, is amplified by the current immigration policy, which consists in providing broad access to the country to international students and manual workers, considered inexpensive workforce. This inflow of workers, who expect lower wages, certainly allows capitalists and entrepreneurs to maintain compensations in their organizations at the same level. In fact, capitalists seem to benefit from the global class conflict, or form the struggle between wealthier and poorer countries for limited resources (de Vroey, p. 36; Brass and Van Der Linden, p. 94).
Although the vectors of interests of employers and employees have opposing directions, the development of class consciousness is prevented by means of the democratic political regime and mass communication. Democracy, in Marxist terms, creates the illusion of freedom, since it encourages and entitles all citizens to participate in governance through elections and feedbacks to regulations, but it equally protects the rights to free entrepreneurship and approves of the inconsistency between the profit the worker makes and the wage they earn (Zweig, p. 139). Mass communication and well-developed culture industry to great extent distract the majority of population from class issues; moreover, due to the fact that mass media are owned mainly by capitalists, or top class members, they tend to nurture the values which appear to be beneficial to the owners.
Works cited
- Beeghley, L. The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States. Pearson, 2004.
- Brass, T. and Van Der Linden, M. Free and Unfree Labor: The Debate Continues. New York: Peter Lang AG, 1997.
- De Vroey, M. Involuntary Unemployment: The Elusive Quest for a Theory. Routledge, 2004.
- Gilbert, D. The American Class Structure. Wadsworth, 2002.
- Levine, R. Social Class and Stratification. Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
- Therborn, G. Why Some People Are More Unemployed than Others. Verso, 1986.
- Zweig, M. What’s Class Got To Do With It? Cornell University Press, 2003.
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