A brilliant paper:
vaivecchio.com
Excerpt:
From the point of view of those at the top, what becomes essential in a political democracy is to find ways and means to insure that the class interests of the largest portion of the population will lose their cutting edge in a welter of noneconomic issues, while those of the power élite are continually sharpened with the instruments of their power.
So it has come about that when the term class is used in the United States – as in the middle class – the reference is either to income levels or to what have come to be called “lifestyles,” in turn a reference to levels and modes of consumption. It can scarcely be denied that the historic definition of the term working class – that is, those who work for wages, having no other means of survival – applies just as much to the largest percentage of the people of the United States as, say, to those of Italy. But one would search at some length on the streets of our cities before finding anyone who, when asked “Which class do you belong to?” would answer, “The working class.” Almost all would answer, “The middle class.” Or not answer at all. It wasn’t always thus here, and it still isn’t so in the rest of the capitalist world.
The most recent and telling manifestation of this bias was in our presidential election of 1992: it was widely-noted and agreed that when candidates used the term “middle class” the reference was to those neither poor nor rich, nor black, brown, yellow or red: in short, the white working class is the “middle class.”
The use of such political language in other industrial capitalist nations (along with a weakening Left) is one of several indicators of how Americanized other nations have become since World War II. The absence of class politics is “as American as apple pie.”
Throughout its history the United States has differed from, say, the French, Italians, and Germans in these respects, but less so in the century or so preceding World War I than in subsequent decades. What in particular intervened was the growth of what has come to be called consumerism and its essential partner, the skills of the media – first becoming a reality in the 1920s, and greatly accelerating after World War II. When it is noted that other nations have become Americanized, it is consumerism that stands at the center of the description. The United States could afford consumerism – and needed it – first. Not until well after World War II did it become a possibility – and a necessity – for the other industrial capitalist nations.
When people think of themselves first as consumers (rather than, say, as citizens or as workers) they are seeing themselves in ways that take them toward selfish individualism and away from the recognition of common interests – or solidarity, to use a word rarely used in the United States.
Those who may be classified as being part of a power élite or ruling class are also consumeristic, of course: how could one be otherwise in this day and age and place? But they also are solidaristic in advancing their class and group interests when it comes to legislation concerning taxation, the conditions of labor, and tariff and environmental policies, to say nothing of policies directly affecting their own industry or profession.
The major exception to this set of generalizations regarding the lack of political efforts on their own behalf by ordinary working people in the United States has been, of course, the trade union movement. But that exception has become an endangered species: the number of workers in unions diminishes in absolute terms with every year, and proportionately even more so (as the working force grows): there are fewer than half as many organized workers now as in the 1950s – falling from about one-third to about one-eighth of wage-earners. Unions these days consider it a victory when they succeed in having their member’ wages and benefits reduced less than the initial demands of employers.
The steady weakening of organized labor is due to a variety of processes: successful attempts by the employing class (with the abundant help of a friendly State) to make it more difficult for unions to be formed and to function; the manifold uses of racism, by both employers and workers, that deflect the latter’s energies in self-defeating directions; and also the always declining interest of the upcoming generations of workers in being members of a union. Nor does it help that consumerism (and what it accompanies and supports) focuses always more on individualistic ways and means. Just as capitalism brings out the worst in its three pals of the Big Four [ie capitalism, colonialism, industrialism, and nationalism], it also has – must – bring out the worst in us. As one of the most popular songs of the antiwar movement asked: “When will we ever learn?”
What’s Next?
Predictions about social change are always difficult, always dicey, especially ones about the mercurial capitalist process. Historically capitalism has been the social formation that has changed most rapidly and in more ways than any other. Furthermore, its processes of change have continued to accelerate from its earliest times, as they must. Capitalism is the one social system that lives by change and dies without it. The system itself (consciously or not) creates change.
Among those who have been the most knowing of “the laws of capitalist development,” Marx and Veblen certainly rank at the top. Although Marx’s optimism concerning its overthrow was much wider of the mark than Veblen’s pessimism regarding its capacities for surviving through the cultivation of irrationality and strife, writing in earlier eras, neither came even close to anticipating the full quality of the era of monopoly capitalism. And now the second stage of monopoly capitalism is in a process of transformation toward something else. What is that something else?
There can be no dependable answer, but grim prospects abound. Present tendencies in the sociopolitical economy of the United States and, in different ways, of the world economy do not provide a basis for optimism – either for maintaining (let alone improving) the well being of people in general or for the strength of capitalism itself. As in the past, however (and assuming the foregoing generalizations to be valid), deterioration in either or both areas in no way assures a movement toward something better – whether defined in terms of well being, beneficial reforms within capitalism, or the emergence of some beneficial alternative to it. Totalitarian regimes of all sorts came on the heels of the military destruction and socioeconomic disarray after 1910, as did even greater military destruction. And the general improvement in material well being in the core countries after World War II, quite apart from the fact that it was made possible by what proved to be a ruinous Cold War (for all concerned) and the worsening of the conditions of a huge proportion of the peoples of the periphery, is also proving to be rickety. Indeed, all over the world, the imbalance between a wealthy minority and the impoverished many has never been greater.
The solution of our economic and political moguls to this deterioration has been to bring back important elements of nineteenth century capitalism, conflated with the latest elements of contemporary business organization and technology. Thus we see increasing dependence by the transnationals upon the very cheapest labor in peripheral countries, and the deployment of the latest technologies of production, communications, and transportation.
The other side of that pleasant development (for the corporations) is the gutting of the well-paid labor force in the core countries, replaced by low-wage, part-time, and temporary workers – accompanied, unsurprisingly, by a further deterioration of cities, rising violence, shameful educational and health services, and a politics of fear and hate. In addition to the systematic neglect of our infrastructure, our cities, and our (as distinct from their) economy by the ruling élites is a stony indifference to an inevitable and long-term decline of average global purchasing power, which, ironically, is a form of self-induced malnutrition for the transnationals and their nations. With variations on particulars, that also brings back the nineteenth century, which functionally ended in 1914.
If mainstream attention is paid to these matters, they are dismissed in the same cavalier and mistaken way as in that same nineteenth century: the trickle-down theory, the origins of which were in Adam Smith. This fantasy flourished until the 1930s, when it was thought to have perished from sheer embarrassment. No such luck: it was born again as the 1970s ended and has risen to a level of credulous popularity hitherto reserved for Santa Claus.
Its message is that although the rich seem to be getting richer as the poor get poorer, that is merely an appearance and is deceiving: damn the statistics, full speed ahead! In the long run – the period in which, as Keynes reminded us sixty years ago, we are all dead – the manna will descend on us all (if, to be sure, in varying degrees). Meanwhile, in the United States and Britain, where trickle-down was invented and has had its current image burnished most fully, the past twenty years has the trickle seeming to defy the law of gravity as it continues to fall up, and at an ever-accelerating rate! Because the idea sits at the very center of capitalist ideology, there is no set or application of mere facts that can dislodge it. It’s sheer theology. And it sells like mad.
As in the past, if capitalism and its decision makers are to change for the better, it will only be if the pressure to do so comes from an informed and resolute majority of the population, not from some tiny minority of “enlightened” businessmen, politicians, or professors – even if the latter were throwing their two-bits’ worth in from the left field bleachers, as here.
Essays such as this one are, I trust useful; but this and others can mean little but laughs and groans unless they become part of a swelling growth of determination, understanding and effort by the people.
A farm woman of the Populist movement entered our history books when, more than a century ago, she said, “It’s time to raise less corn and more hell.” Like me, she would have liked what the great Wobbly organizer Joe Hill (framed by authorities for murder) added to that, just before he was executed by a firing squad in Utah in 1915: “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”
____________________________ |
