What do we talk about when we talk about class? Is it economic or is it cultural? Is it the working poverty of a nurse and single mother in Washington County, Pennsylvania, whose household is poisoned and small homestead ruined by fracking? Or is it the identity politics of a white Wisconsinite flying a Confederate flag from his pickup truck a short drive from the Canadian border? Is class an open wound in American life, evident in Bernie Sanders's denunciations of “the billionaire class” and Donald Trump's images of “American carnage,” or is it the country's secret shame, constantly shuffled aside with reassurances that poor Americans are simply “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” as John Steinbeck put it?
For Karl Marx, whose 200th birthday passed this year, class named a person's role in the way a society wrests its living from the earth and divides the value. Class described the difference between a sharecropper and a plantation owner, between the enslaved person being worked to death in a Caribbean sugar field and an investor living in London on dividends from the sugar trade.
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