America, the Country and Myth

one frequently hears these days that socialists cling to a stereotyped picture of American life. Failing to see the subtle and even gross changes that have taken place during the past few decades, they focus on an abstraction called “capitalism” and thereby neglect the variety, the complexity, the rich substance of American life.

Perhaps. Like everyone else, radicals are mortal, and like everyone else they suffer from the shell-shocks of modern history. But let me abandon the impersonal “they” and speak in the uncomfortable “we.” Often enough we do treat such abstract—yet useful because abstract—categories as “capitalism” and “class struggle” as if they were real objects or persons rather than tools for analysis. And in doing so we may fail to notice the many changes that have taken place in the structure, as in the quality, of American life, changes that do not, I think, add up to the removal of capitalism as a ...