Sherman Alexi "Class" is a story about a man who tries to return to his roots but then finds he has outgrown them. In the beginning, I thought he was rather a shallow person. He uses his Indian heritage to impress women. Then he marries Susan whom he seems to like very much. He tolerates her infidelity because he wants to keep her. But when tragedy comes, and he sees his wife suffering, and realizes she's been pretending all along to love him, he runs from her and attempts to experience "his people," native Americans at a seedy bar. What he learns is that they no longer will accept him because he has moved up in class.
The story makes it seem like a person can easily change their class just by working hard and "fighting" their way up. I'm not so sure it is that easy to cross class lines. A person can get an education and make a lot of money, but class is more than that. In a way, class is an unreal thing in the sense that it is purely a mental construct. We believe in class and talk about it and place ourselves within the so-called class structure. Once we accept that we are members of a certain class, it becomes deeply embedded in our consciousness and is difficult to change because it becomes part of who we think we are. We learn to behave in a way that coincides with the class we think we are.
It may be just as difficult to move downward as upward. I know a woman who moved to a small farm town where the people all spoke a rural dialect. Because she spoke Standard English, the townspeople didn't trust her. They thought she was showing off and trying to lord it over them. Perhaps they never would have accepted her, except she married a man from the town. They trusted him, so they accepted her. Although she said she tried, she was unable to speak as they did, so she never did really fit in. I imagine that's how Running Eagle feels, like he just doesn't quite belong.
Each brings the evidence to light by utilizing a different set of sources, one slightly more personal and narrative than the other but both clearly expressive of the expansion of the ideals of America as a "white" masculine society of working class people that needed and obtained voice through ideals that attempted, at least to some degree to skirt the issue of race. Race was represented in both works
Working Class in England First published in English in 1892, Frederick Engels' The Conditions of the Working-class in England in 1844 was a firsthand account of the everyday conditions of workers in a recently-industrialized England. Engels' book provides an ideal primary source for understanding the effect of the Industrial Revolution on English society, because a Engels is careful to contextualize his discussion of the working-class in 1844 Manchester with a
Working Class Surname What was life like in the 19th century for the working class? The conditions of towns were often very dreadful in the early 19th century. However, there came an improvement. The gaslight saw its first London light in 1807 at Pall Mall. Coming to the 1820s, many towns started introducing gas lighting in streetlights. In the early 19th century, most of the towns were untidy and dirty, overcrowded, and
White working class Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves in a social order that was fundamentally reorganizing itself. The railroads stitched the nation together at the same time as they began to wrench people and communities out of their rural or agrarian ways of life. The abolishment of slavery meant that agriculture needed to be altered within the south, and it drove many Americans to
Labor-management (or capitalist-working class) relations and class conflicts were central elements of Marx's analysis of capitalism. Conflict between the classes characterized the 19th and early 20th century by and large, yet when one conducts a web search using the key words "labor-management relations" a diverse range of images of labor and management today arise. On one hand, the union that represents federal employees posts a memo on its website (http://www.opm.gov/lmr/LMR_memo.asp)
Marx�s Dialectical Historical MaterialismMarx�s position on dialectical historical materialism and the importance of the economic system was that materiality deserves its primacy of place in the discussion of ideals. Ideals should be connected to materialism and not an independent subject, such as in the Hegelian ideal. Marx (1873) believed that �the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.�