Celine-Marie Pascale, professor emerita of sociology at American University, discusses her book Living on the Edge (2021), wherein she details her research into the struggling communities across the United States—from Appalachia to the Standing Rock and Wind River reservations to Oakland, California—who face the hardships of stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Analysing the experiences of people emanating from communities that deal with systemic, entrenched levels of poverty, Pascale uncovers the “social organisation of power relations that keep people submerged in poverty, that actually make poverty profitable,” calls out the “American dream” as much more of a myth than a reality, similar to the adjacent myth of “class mobility.” Considering how “capitalism depends upon a large, poorly paid workforce,” Pascale observes that in order to maintain the workforce without rebellion, these myths are turned against the workers and the poor, essentially telling workers that if they are struggling to put food on the table or take care of their families, that the fault lies with the worker and not with the system, not with capitalism. Historicising the lack of class consciousness in the United States, she notes how workers are cannibalised by capitalism while advanced capitalism, Pascale contends, “cannibalises itself.” Pascale critiques the federal measure of poverty, narrating how such standardisation for the cost of living is “untethered from reality” since it makes no distinction for food or rent costs in areas where food is imported (eg, Alaska and Hawaii) or where rent is extremely high (eg, San Francisco and New York). Covering her work on the violence against Native American women, Pascale assesses the high rates of violence and sex trafficking networks which fuel “man camps”—temporary housing facilities for a large workforce, typically in isolated areas where men are recruited to work on resource extraction or construction projects (eg, oil, gas or mining)—that have a documented correlation with increased rates of sexual assault, violence, and sex trafficking.

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