by Robert Jensen
Most politicians pledge to work for the working class, or sometimes for working families, a less Marxist-sounding label. Meanwhile, scholars struggle to define the category. I won’t assess the political posturing or adjudicate definitional disputes, but my work experience—spanning six decades and a wide variety of jobs—illustrates why the claims of working-class authenticity that are prized in today’s politics are so fraught.
Once upon a time, the working class was understood as people in capitalist economies who don’t own the means of production and must sell their labor to owners. But as economies grew more complex, anomalies piled up. What about managers who aren’t owners but make lots of money doing the bidding of owners? What about technical employees whose specialized skills give them bargaining power? What about small-business owners of modest means who hire employees? Turns out there are lots of “contradictory class locations.”
I’ve never been a manager, had any specialized technical skills, owned a business, or made big money, but my class status is rife with contradictions and conundrums.
Work history
My paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Denmark, was a blacksmith in a small town in North Dakota, but my father had no interest in the family trade. After a lackluster college career on the GI Bill, he got a job as an insurance adjuster—a white-collar working-class job for which he wore a shirt and tie to the office but got paid like a laborer. My mother, whose family had a similar trajectory, stayed at home with four kids until we were all in school and then took a series of low-paid office jobs.
Although I didn’t’ realize it at the time, money was tight in our family. I didn’t get shiny new things, and family vacations were low-budget affairs that involved staying with relatives or in a borrowed camper. We always had a house and ate regularly, and I didn’t feel poor, but I knew the difference between myself and the affluent kids at school. Read more »



AI is collapsing barriers in scientific disciplines, most notably in math. An 87-year old conjecture named the
1. The Odyssey
Sughra Raza. Fly Paper (sunset series). Late July, 2026.






Zeno’s Conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo is the story of one such man suffering from talking too much (to himself). Zeno is a person with deep interiority, long meandering monologues, and feeling. However, despite his never-ending rhetorical skills and eccentricity—having gone through the tunnels of his mind many times over—he ironically enough lacks a conscience. He fails in health, in love, in his addictions, and in business. Rumination and ceaseless inner conversation do not produce moral clarity for Zeno. Instead, his often-comical interior life is insidious because his obsession with sentimentality and grand justifications prevents his self-actualization. And so, he lacks a real moral center. However, he does not fail to be incredibly entertaining as a personality.



