Home and Away (2020)

Book Review from the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Home For You Here: a Memoir of Class and Culture by Adam Theron-Lee Rensch (Reaktion Books £14.95.)

Rensch was born in rural Ohio in 1984 and spent much of his childhood in a mobile home that had been moved from a trailer park after his family were evicted for not paying rent in protest at conditions there. He became a university student, and much of the book, which includes both personal and more general accounts, deals with the conflict between being a ‘white-trash kid’ and a ‘liberal intellectual’. His family did not have much money but they did have fun, his mother tells him, while Rensch came to owe $160,000 in student loans.

Rather than a characterisation in terms of physical or mental labour, he is keen to offer a material definition of class, based on ownership of resources: the capitalists control and allocate economic resources, while the working class have to sell their labour power in order to live. Even so, there are some unclear references to the middle class, which seems to consist of small-scale capitalists. Working-class life in the US has become increasingly pressurised: the minimum wage has nowhere near kept up with inflation, leading to widespread poverty. In 2016, around 30 percent of wage-earners had an annual income of less than $15,000. Credit cards are used to fund spending, resulting in total household debt exceeding total disposable income.

Some of Rensch’s friends died young, one through suicide at 33, one of a heroin overdose at 34. His father died after a fall, aged just 46: an unemployed widower with ‘nothing to his name but time’, who drank and gradually became less liberal in his politics (‘between losing his job to the economy and his [second] wife to cancer, my father had become a reactionary’). The difference between failure and (relative) success is often just due to luck.

In rural areas, there is very little rented accommodation available, hence the need to buy a house and the extent of predatory lending to enable house purchase; hence, too, the ubiquity of subprime lending and the resulting crash of 2008. It is hard for people to leave the rural US, as doing so requires considerable time and money, including having a reliable car so you can look for a job. In small towns, churches ‘provided a crucial sense of belonging’.

The book offers a well-told account of inequality and the lack of social mobility. Rensch acknowledges that he does not have an easy solution, though he does refer to ending the tyranny of wage labour. And ponder this: ‘admiring the beauty of poverty and despair is easier than trying to change it’.

Paul Bennett