Why the Working Class is the Special Class

The Economist is apparently under the sway of the dreaded ‘labor metaphysic’:

Nevertheless, the unions are far from a spent force: the 7m Britons who still carry union cards remain, collectively, an important social movement (by comparison, only around 4m people attend church once a month or more). Concentration in the public sector has helped to preserve their power. Strikes by transport workers can cause chaos if commuters are unable to get to work. A recent two-day walkout by workers on the London Underground, for example, caused widespread disruption in the capital; one estimate, from the London Chamber of Commerce, put the cost to firms at £48m ($75m) a day. A full-blown rail strike would be much worse. A walkout by teachers would require millions of parents to stay at home minding their children; binmen could leave the streets as filthy as some were in the “winter of discontent”; and so on.

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Seminal Works and Genealogical Promiscuity

Faulknerian:

A term I understand to mean any story with long sentences, two narrators, italics, and incest, which is superficially more difficult to read than the feature section of USA Today.  If it is a second novel set in the same fictional county as the author’s first, or involves the killing of a large nonaquatic animal, any two of the previous provisions may be waived.  All novels concerning Mississippi, of course, are automatically Faulknerian.

Craig Werner, Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse, p. 53.

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