Sunday, April 27, 2025

Anti-Capitalism & Poverty

 “Trash – A Poor White Journey” by Cedar Monroe, 2024

This might be seen as a personal follow-up to Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash,” which was a history of working-class ‘white’ people in the U.S.  Monroe writes this as a sort of anti-capitalist memoir, as Monroe also grew up poor and ‘white’ on the Washington state coast.  It was in a situation of abuse, shame and poverty, with an unhappy father who raised vegetables while working in a warehouse.  The family practiced a primitive ‘home schooling’ – if such a thing is really possible - in the white nationalist religious context of Quiverfull. 

250,000 people die each year from poverty and inequality in the U.S., the 4th highest cause of death.  66 million ‘white’ people are low-income or poor in the U.S., out of 132 million low income or poor across most ethnicities.  A total of 10 million do not have stable housing.  These are the stark facts behind the lower end of the U.S. class structure.

Monroe’s county in Washington State, Grays Harbor, was first seized from native Americans by the U.S. government, privatized, then logged over by Weyerhauser and is now one of the largest meth centers in the U.S.  Monroe is gay, while some of her relatives were not ‘white,’ which helped Monroe break from the isolated religious world she was brought up in.  Monroe flipped her conservative Baptist upbringing by becoming an Episcopal Church deacon after going through Divinity School in Cambridge, MA.  Instead of ‘whiteness,’ Monroe also flipped that script, ministering to working class and poor native Americans, Latinos, European-Americans and African-Americans back in her home county. Monroe mentors those she finds in trouble as a deacon and ‘tells their stories’ in this book.  But Monroe has still not lost an identification with ‘whiteness’ as a main theoretical axis.

Monroe’s time at the university in Massachusetts showed that middle-class liberal European-Americans looked down on working-class ‘whites’ as stupid, dangerous and lost.  Monroe only found kinship among African-American professors who understood the class ramifications of being working-class in a bourgeois context.  Monroe understands that classism is key to the oppressive narratives of capital, easily denigrating ‘rednecks,’ ‘white trash’ and ‘trailer trash’ as inferiors, something done by both main bourgeois parties.  This strategy is used to demonstrate the personal failures of poor ‘whites’ and to separate them from their class brethren.   Note:  *I use ‘white’ not as a real descriptor, but as an easy identifier.  Monroe believes there are separate races when there is only one – the human one. Skin color and physical features are not ‘races,’ no matter what racists or liberals say. 

The Locals

Monroe discusses potlach and communal traditions of the local indigenous tribes, among them the Quinault, where private property is not sacred. 40% of the reservation is now in tribal hands, when before it was in the single digits. Many of the poor in Aberdeen, the biggest town in the county, are indigenous. Local tribes, with few resources, do more social service work than the County government, while also protecting salmon and preparing for sea-level rise.  It seems native Americans are one of the few organized grown-ups in the county.  Monroe describes the homeless encampments along the Chehalis River in Aberdeen, which have their share of addicts, sex workers and the mentally unstable, but also its own women leaders and creative types.   The city regularly bulldozes or destroys their living structures, while the local poor do what they can to survive. 

Monroe mentions that one out of 15 kids in the county are taken by family services and put into foster care or adoption, due to problems with a parent like addiction.  The poor in this county lose their children on a regular basis to this racialized process.  Then there is youth incarceration, which is high in Washington State.  The schools can commit children to juvenile court; parents use physical violence on their children; the juvenile jail puts kids in solitary for long periods of time; the judge in court is cruel.  What does this all do to future adults?  Nothing good. 

Monroe recounts incidents of widespread police violence against homeless, minority and poor people, some of whom have parole violation warrants. Monroe notes that some hard-up light-skins, including some in Monroe’s family, joined the police or prison guards and end up disciplining darker-skinned poor people.   Monroe spends a lot of time visiting jails and prisons to tell their stories, especially local indigenous people locked up on a regular basis.  White supremacist prison gangs like the Asatru Folk Assembly and the Klan organize inside prisons trying to get all ‘Caucasians’ to join for protection.  She notes that some Latino prison gangs accept whites now, so that is not the only route anymore.

Early death through suicide, medical neglect, violence, disease, alcoholism, exposure and overdoses are the wages of poverty in Grays Harbor County, which is mostly white.  Monroe tattoos the names of the dead on her body like a ‘holy rosary,’ while spending much time at hospitals attending to contacts and friends.  Hospitals are underfunded, under-staffed and difficult to reach without good transport.  Funerals are frequent and Monroe is involved in many as a chaplain.       

Aberdeen, WA homeless encampment

POLITICS

So on to politics:  Monroe posits that white supremacy materially hurts ‘white’ people too, inhibits working-class unity, allows the rich to run everything while poisoning its believers.  Monroe has a basic understanding of capital through private property in land and its source in labor and nature exploitation, resulting in commodification of everything.  This extends to the role of the state, the police and the laws which protect Weyerhauser’s private land, a firm that still owns 40% of Grays Harbor County.  Fell one tree on their holdings and you have committed a crime, much like ye olde English peasant who snares a rabbit for dinner on his laird’s immense estate.  Nothing has changed in that respect, especially for the homeless.  Monroe reports on a legal struggle with the city of Aberdeen to protect the land along the River for squatters, which resulted in some land near city hall set aside while shelters along the river were bulldozed again.

Local whites came out to terrorize the homeless and their allies like Monroe in some of these confrontations.   

Monroe’s solutions other than holy oil?  Very little of what she talks about involves ‘white’ people working.  Monroe centers the book around the homeless, and while it is well known that many homeless work, this is not shown. This book is about the ‘poor,’ a concept that is fuzzy about economic roles, but the implication is that they don’t work except selling drugs or in petty theft.  Monroe describes little political action involving these folks, as most are too busy trying to survive.  Monroe draws ire advocating for clean needles and Naloxone with the local city council and health authorities, but it seems to be a lonely fight. 

Monroe advocates a new Rainbow Coalition, the present Poor People’s Campaign led by Reverend William Barber and the Young Patriot Party of yore. The PPC talks about ‘low wage workers’ not just poor people.  Monroe thinks it might take another 500 years “to fully end this system” so it seems progress is not really forthcoming anytime soon.  Monroe’s church opened a community center centered on ‘lunch, pastoral care and occasional events,’ pursuing ‘education and narrative building.’  Monroe’s church also opened shelters in church parking lots, then inside a church after vigilante threats were made against them and the homeless.  Monroe began to carry a loaded gun for protection. 

Most of Monroe’s activism is social work and charity.  One march in town was held, and was opposed by threats.  3 acres of land were rented to form a CSA to provide vegetables to the hungry, and was later bought by the diocese as a permanent farm.  Monroe titles a chapter “Healing is Revolutionary” which works as a feel-good narrative but it doesn’t really undermine the system at its root. Liberation theology has to be taken to its logical conclusion to actually achieve liberation.  Monroe and the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia’s work could be an adjunct to mass class struggle at some point, but now it salves the multiple wounds of capital.  

Monroe’s work linked up with several local indigenous Nations, which is a huge plus.  A true mass movement will link other organizations, like unions, labor, left parties, community rights and single-issue groups in a united front against capital, on a national and even international scale.  Monroe would not oppose this, as she supports alliances of some kind.  Without that unity poverty will continue.  Certainly the concept of an anti-capitalist united front is still far off.  Is it a daunting task which may be beyond the ability of the working classes and anti-capitalist Left in the present moment?  I have seen some begin to turn towards this concept given the reactionary assault by Trump forces, but it is slow going, as liberalism and socialism do not mix in the end.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “poverty,” ‘poor,’ ‘white trash.’ 

And I got the book at the library!  May Day has many books on poverty, homelessness and the like.

Red Frog / April 27, 2025

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