The hard and necessary kind of labor that requires muscle and bone may command our respect, but it is the inventive, imaginative kind that attracts our admiration.
The assembly line and the efficiency expert are American inventions, too, but they represent the dark side of our relationship with labor, the reduction of man to machine.
For Americans, labor tends to be an activity rather than an identity, what we have to do rather than what we are. We have balked at efforts to reduce us to just economic categories: capital or labor. Instead, we look on both as just different aspects of ourselves at different times. We may go broke from time to time, or hit it rich, but we refuse to be considered part of any permanent class -- upper, lower or in-between.
Unlike Europeans, we tend to view labor as a means to an end, maybe a stage that one passes through on the way to becoming just another anonymous millionaire, certainly not "our station in life." This is entirely too fluid a society for anybody to be assigned a permanent place in it. Everybody's got something else going: The little investment on the side, the private start-up after business hours, the extra shift at the plant, the new invention or rock band that we're putting together out in the garage....
Every man an entrepreneur! The phrase "working class" rings foreign in our ears despite all the efforts of those who would like to pigeonhole us. We never did pick up European phrases like The Masses, the proletariat, the underclass. ... We're much too varied, too individualistic, even quirky to let ourselves be labeled. Much as our intelligentsia (another un-American concept) would like to put us all in little boxes. We keep getting out, wanting to make our own decisions, even our own mistakes.
Indeed, one of the most powerful arguments that can be made in this country against even the most entrenched institutions -- whether the welfare system or farm subsidies -- is that they'll result in the creation of a permanent, dependent class.
In American society, community is a good word, but dependence a bad one. We're all for Social Security, having contributed to it, but resist having to go on relief. We are happy to help others stand on their own, but resent freeloaders. We associate labor with freedom, not servitude. Which is another reason slavery, the curse and bane of our history, could not last.
The idea and reality called class exists in this country as it does in any other, but we don't like to acknowledge it, which may explain our remarkable social mobility. Myths shape reality much more than the other way 'round. Our myth is called the American dream, with its hope/illusion of equal opportunity for all. If we believe in that dream, it needn't remain just a dream. If we don't, it'll never become a reality. Maybe that's why, though ours is not a classless society, it also is not a class-bound one. Happy Labor Day.