WORKING CLASS HEROES?

To the Editors of the Crimson:

I read Dan Swanson's review of The White Majority with a mixture of amusement and regret--amusement over his ridiculous distortion of economic realities and regret over the fact that many well-meaning people (especially if they have never worked in a factory) may believe him. Swanson portrays the lot of the white American worker as that of endless drudgery rewarded by measely wages. It may come as a surprise to him to know that the average Ford Motor Co. worker (not executive) earns $16,000 a year. Even with inflation, $16,000 permits a family man to look forward to a lot more than merely getting drunk on weekends. As a matter of fact, the vivid proof of the growing well-being and prosperity of the average worker is attested to by the summer spectacle of our highways--choked with the vacation-bound cars of the "oppressed" American proletariat.

Whatever Swanson's faults may be, inconsistency is not one of them. To match his imaginative (if not factual) diagnosis, he includes a suitable cure. What the workers require is more "militant class consciousness." Whatever he means by this Marxist jargon is not explicitly stated, but it indicates that he is as ignorant of the conditions of working people in socialist countries as he is of them in his own. For the Russian worker, certainly the most militantly class conscious of all, is denied the very right to strike. And surely even Swanson knows something about his living conditions. Lawrence Siskind '74