Most American men were independent producers at the Revolution, nearly none are today

Evidence

By the time of the American Revolution when private property was the rule, the ownership of the means of production was still quite widespread. About 80 percent of the nonslave adult males in the United States were independent property owners or professionals— farmers, merchants, traders, craftsmen or artisans, businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and so on. By 1880, this figure had fallen to 33 percent and, at present, more than 90 percent of all adults in the labor force are nonmanagerial wage and salary workers. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 615

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Marx’s primitive accumulation and proletarianization debates, and to the chapter’s broader thesis on schooling as reproduction of wage-labor relations.