A great essay, and all good points. I think that the question is being asked from the wrong perspective in the long run. Our planet is asking, "Are humans consumers or contributors?" Therein lies all of the problems with our solidarity and confusion, because underneath all of the talk about politics, "The Economy of Stupid" and global heating is the basic fact that most of the shit people do doesn't need to be done, and it is all eating away at the future of our grandchildren's places. We keep building roads for people to move 4000 lbs of steel and rubber to places that don't need steel and rubber. We keep placing bets (stock market) on the competitive moral turpitude of men who swear moral allegiance to piles of money. We vote once every 4 years for someone we hope won't kill us in our sleep, but we vote billions of times every day for the corporations that are suffocating our children. Our education systems are built to provide feedstock to those same corporations, not to improve the state of the planet's resources.

"Are American workers Consumers or Laborers?" They are Fanatically Competitive Consumptionists who labor blindly in a war against the planet. Half want to vote for a chance to have a new System of Consuming Systems, and the other half wants to vote for a chance to tell them they can't. Which is which is hard to tell. That's why the vote is always so close.