Starved of Class Consciousness

I guess I’m just now in my early thirties beginning to realize how I, as an American who grew up at the end of the Cold War, was raised in world that was completely depleted of any and all real economic class consciousness. Viewed through the structural-functional paradigm, US society would have perceived any real study of communism as a contagious disease. From McCarthyism, blacklisting, and ultimately the threat of world domination and ComIntern subjegation, American citizens came to view disparate and wide ranging ideas like Marxism, Communism, Socialism (Fabianism) as one. Ironically, the collectivisation of these ideals in a figurative sense resembles the amalgamation of resources from which communism originally derived its name.
When I first attended a public high school I was told that, as a prerequisite for their employment, all of our teachers were required to sign a document stating that they would not teach their students anything about communism. This small but pertinent concept seems emblematic of the greater idea that Americans seem to have willfully and, over time, increasingly denied themselves any kind of real economic class consciousness – almost as if they were doing so for the sake of their survival.
More to come.