All told, nearly 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills-some 400 pills for every man, woman and child in the state-found their way to Kermit and the other small towns that dot the southern West Virginia coal fields. Eyre found that in just six years, McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, had dumped nearly 9 million pain pills on the tiny hamlet of Kermit, West Virginia, population 392. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis had climbed atop The New York Times Best Sellers list, garnering rave reviews from pundits and the public alike, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail published a multi-part series detailing how three pharmaceutical companies had helped fuel the highest drug overdose rates in the nation’s history.
In doing so, I investigate how these books seek to explain the twin crises, how and where they locate “class”, how working-class families are portrayed, how the relationship between class, gender and immigration is conceptualised, and lastly how the role of working-class organisation features in these accounts. In this article I seek to address this question by discussing “popular books” on the working class. This ultimately raises the question of how these crises reconfigure working-class politics.
Arguably, this amounts to a twin crisis in which the ruling class can no longer “lead” and the working class is unable to advance an alternative vision for society. At the same time, low levels of unionisation in the Global North, the decline of social democratic parties (apart from Corbyn’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom) and the decimation of communist parties are symptoms of a crisis of the working class. This is defined as a situation in which the ruling class is no longer able to rule in the same way as before. As the conservative promise of law, order and economic stability remains just as unfulfilled as the social-democratic promises of peace and social justice, we are experiencing what the philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1975) has labelled a “crisis of authority”.
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