We pass it to the people of Eastern Europe for them to negotiate. It is affecting their lives by trying to transform things which can't be registered in economic terms into economic mechanisms. But this is a confusion of what the struggle is about. The issue is about the use of resources, the imperialism of the wealthy. We have to make a distinction between labor, in which there are hierarchies of who's paid more and who's paid less, and the question of wealth and the kinds of political systems that support wealth and imperialism.
People feel coerced into silence.
Particularly in this culture, where some black writers and intellectuals have been able to attain that which comes close to wealth, people feel they can't critique anything that has to do with capitalism anymore. Your comments raise two issues for me. One is a question of class and what it means to say that you can transcend your class location, that you don't have to mechanistically act out what people imagine goes with the income you have. The two things are connected, but one is not the other. Marx was going to write a volume about class just before he died, and there are a few sentences of the manuscript remaining that he was never able to complete.