"Class Dismissed" - Week 3 Assignment

With Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign highlighting issues of income inequality and popularizing the idea of the 99%, class and class consciousness have come back to mainstream political discussions. Amidst the widespread attacks on organized labor in so-called "right to work" laws, and lack of coverage of pro-labor issues/demonstrations in the mainstream media, these political movements were very important. I feel that continued focus on issues of class are extremely important right now, and so these images are my attempt to highlight a few cultural examples where issues of class have been reframed by society to obfuscate the issue. The popular cliche of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," is part of the fundamental mythology of the American Dream, and yet ignores the harsh economic realities that most workers face. That contradiction is immediately flanked by another economic reality: that while wealth creation for the working class is flat, wealth creation for the top 1% (a nod to the rhetoric of Occupy and Bernie) has increased dramatically. The last image was intended to reflect the way in which late-capitalist America has subtly shifted discussion of labor and class from that of collective workers rights and struggles to that of collective consumption. Wages may not have increased (relative to inflation) since the mid-seventies, but working class consumption has grown immensely, fueled by predatory lenders offering usurious "pay-day loans" and sub-prime mortgages. The media frames discourse of the economy in terms of "growth," but the growth they refer to is growth of consumption, growth of profits, not the growth of wages.

--Bill Russell