Is the Working Class Subdued by Having a Poverty Class?

Among the wave of discussion surrounding hurricane Katrina, Tom Teepen argues, in essence, that it's culturally imperative that the current wave of public attention to poverty die out:

The fashionability of the poor will fade again soon enough because it has to. The rest of us need the poor in order to validate ourselves.

It is the American boast that this is the land of opportunity and anyone -- anyone -- can make it here if they just apply themselves. It follows then that the flops are never victims of system flaws and are always failures instead, and it follows, too, that you and I are doing well, or well enough or at least not as badly as those others, thanks only to our own grit and cleverness. The poor are a great reassurance to the rest of us.

Tepeen's point raises a lot of questions.

Accepting Teepen's proposition that the lower class gets self-esteem and status by having widespread poverty beneath them, what would it mean if that poverty were eliminated? Would the lower class no longer be pacified? With that presumed loss of status and esteem, would the lower class then start to awaken to the reality that they themselves are both the victims of and participants in a system that exploits and robs the majority for the benefit of a wealthy minority? Would that consciousness translate into resistance? That resistance into change?

There is a common contemporary debate over whether it's better to fund advocacy or programs. Is it better that the middle class and lower class pour their limited resources directly into charity programs that alleviate poverty for some, or better that they instead put their limited resources into the indirect political gamble of advocacy, such as lobbying and political campaigns for the creation of government programs which could eliminate poverty altogether?

Also, Teepen's point, whether he realizes it or not, challenges the typical (and most likely fallacious) view that more people will have to fall into poverty and suffer before broader resistance to the fascist system will emerge. Not only is this later view problematic if one accepts the proposition that the lower class derives status (and is pacified enough to give consent to the system) by having more people suffering beneath them, but the view that "more suffering means more resistance" is especially problematic when one considers that most who land in poverty are completely disempowered. Those surviving hand-to-mouth have no time and no resources to help bring about any change. Any additional burden is too great to risk.

Having slowly migrated down from middle class to dire poverty, what I do know is that the impoverished are far more aware of the consequences of our fascist system than the lower or middle classes. In fact, some of us experience dire poverty partly because of our principled refusal to help prop-up corporate fascism while there are no other appatent means to escape poverty. Some of the impoverished simply refuse to cave-in to the likes of Walmart. With some means, plenty could and would contribute toward positive change.