Joe Bageant's Memoir: Story of White Underclass Crushed By the Economy and Ignored By the Mainstream

'Cotton never saw much cash, and never got rich by any means. not on the ten-cent and fifteen-cent purchases that farmers made there for over one hundred years. Yet he could pay Jackson Luttrell for the tomato hauling -- in credit at the store. That enabled Jackson to buy seed, feed, hardware, fertilizer, tools, and gasoline, and farm until harvest time with very little cash, leaving him with enough to invest in a truck. Unger could run his tomato cannery and transform local produce into cash, because he could barter credit for farm products and services. This was a community economic ecology that blended labor, money, and goods to sustain a modest but satisfactory life for all. -- Rainbow Pie, by Joe Bageant (Portobello Books, 2010)

I don’t know where to start with Rainbow Pie, it’s a book of two sides, two faces even. On the one hand there’s Joe’s evocative, heartfelt nostalgia for a life destroyed by corporate capital and on the other, his anger and frustrations, rants on occasion, as if analyzing sets off an uncontrollable chain reaction to how capitalism destroys human beings and all in the name of free choice! It's a frustration many of us lefties feel, a sense of powerlessness made all the worse by the knowing.

Having read his first book 'Deerhunting with Jesus', I had already gotten a taste for his prose when it came to describing the community he grew up in, Winchester, Virginia on the edge of the Southern Appalachian mountains. His memories of life growing up in a small, rural community, essentially that of subsistence farming is really outstanding. Simple yet powerful.

"The frost was upon the pumpkin one morning in 1960 when Jackson Luttrell dropped the wagon bolt into the tractor hitch, then stepped up on the tractor's axle, easing himself into the cold, iron seat. He'd done it ten thousand times, but this day it took him three tries. Sixty Novembers in the fields exact their rightful toll, and he was more than feeling his age. Five minutes later, Jackson was down in his bottom land loading corn shocks onto the wagon. (You don't waste a big truck on light loads.) A skiff of snow covered the dark soil around the corn stubble, or 'stobs' as he called them. Every remaining stub of a cornstalk represented one whack of a hand-held corn cutter -- all fifteen acres, some 300,000 of them, wielded by either Jackson himself or neighbours with whom he'd exchanged such work for forty years.'

What Joe calls the white underclass, some forty-plus million Americans, who struggle to survive out of sight and out of mind of the urban middle class who not only manage capitalism but who also shape the kind of self-image people end up having of themselves. They are Marx’ surplus labour writ big, real big. They are the (former) heartland of the American Dream turned nightmare. A class turned in on itself and entirely ignored by mainstream everything.

To understand the source of Bageant’s anger, he takes us into the world of his parents, grand-parents, great grandparents, all the way back to 1755. Small farmers, manual labourers, trades people of all kinds, the people, the class that built America, along with the slaves of course. But as Joe points out, after Reconstruction, poor whites in the South didn’t get the vote either, excluded by lack of property or money, or both. Blacks got the franchise, briefly, then had it taken away.

But this seems to be a feature of US political life when every generation that comes along seems to be doomed to have to relearn the lessons of the past. Nothing gets handed down, passed on except the illusions. There is no continuity between the generations, something that also now afflicts the UK. The past that we 'consume' is an artifice, a sleight-of-hand, a concoction dreamed up in universities and media conglomerates' 'creative' departments.