This Labour Day weekend, I find myself thinking about the working class, the masses.
No, honestly, I do. Okay, I’m on the beach, but the folks around me lying on the sand have jobs they’ll be getting back to on Tuesday. They work. They would be classed as workers. But they’re not a homogeneous “working class,” they’re not conscripts in Karl Marx’s “masses.” The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers’ solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism.
Not everyone is happy about that, naturally. Read the whole thing.