New Class Divisions in the United States

Abstract

Although the North American Free Trade Agreement has proven contentious and looms ominously threatening as a new source of economic dislocation, its greatest significance, together with that of similar trade agreements (e.g., GATT), may ultimately lay in the emphasis and legitimation it contributes to social and economic changes already under way. These social and economic changes lend themselves to the further articulation of new class divisions in the United States. These emerging new class divisions are explored in relation to both the implications that they have for society in the U.S. and in relation to some of the questions they pose.