Today’s capitalist crisis caps thirty years of especially divisive economic development in the US. Real wages stagnated and are now roughly at the mid-1970s level. Over the same period, labor’s productivity soared, yielding employers’ record revenues and profits from1980 to 2000. Income and wealth inequality returned to late nineteenth century levels. That divisive economic development generated the economic crisis. Now, the so-called “recovery” further deepens the inequalities and divisions. Crisis and recovery have provoked a return of the much-repressed consciousness of class, class divisions, and class struggles. In turn, renewed class consciousness now also shapes the unfolding crisis. To borrow the last line of Eric Schocket’s Vanishing Moments, once again class consciousness expresses “our resilient desires to comprehend our misshapen existences and to struggle – collectively – to a postcapitalist future.”

Eric M. Schocket Memorial Lecture on Class and Culture