State of the Union
An essay in two parts
Part One:
We’re living under the conditions that produce revolutions. The capitalist-bourgeois system is nothing but an economic “House of cards” that keeps the many working till death for the benefit of the few. In return, the masses get manufactured product like Justin Bieber, a media distraction to keep them enthralled in a state of false consciousness. Hence they’ll believe that the ‘system works.’ A veritable Horatio Alger story is being peddled to them daily. The masses fail to recognize their complete subordination to monopoly-capitalistic interests. The plutocracy we live under produces mass unemployment, ‘crises,’ war, and giant profits for the Banks and Big Business. They’ve eliminated the manufacturing sector (unions!) for a largely union-free service sector [90 percent of the economy] and a financial sector that funds both parties and cares mainly about profits.
We’re all living under “American McKapitalism.” The workers’ unions are being smashed by the right-wing pols, who are nothing more than the paid lackeys of big business, big religion, big military, and big bankers. These bureaucrats and leeches are all looking out mainly for their own interests and careers at the expense of the rest of us. Their goal is world domination through state-subsidized capitalism. Whether or not their politics are liberal or conservative is irrelevant. The system remains the same. The economic system is the underpinning of the political and cultural ones, the structure upon which the superstructure creates and re-produces itself. Hence an understanding of the social-economic conditions we under is fundamental– and yet is largely absent from American political discourse.
The American workers, who have never been united, are split up into those in the “Red States, ” which are predominantly conservative rural-agricultural regions, and the “Blue states” which are combined police-welfare states with a college-educated middle and upper-middle class and a small class of the superrich. The “blue” cities produce slums, crime, police brutality, noise, racial strife, injustice, and mass unemployment. Thus, the people in the Red States look with horror upon the ones in the Blue States, and this benefits the political elite which is interested in divvying up the masses so they can win the needed 51 percent of the vote. The old trick of divide and conquer politics is what makes the two-parties complicit in their elite, millionaire game of rulership over the masses.
In order to maintain their hegemony, the two parties must make the working-class believe it has a stake in the system. It must have a consciousness that the system serves them, rather than serving primarily the truly rich, the bankers and the corporations- not to mention the elite political class itself! Instead of working-class consciousness and unity, a false consciousness is pre-formed for them by the media, the churches, the social organizations, and the schools.
a. The mass media serve to keep peoples’ minds in bondage to commercial spectacles filled with ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’ so that the many won’t come to consciousness and reject the bill of goods they’re been sold.
b. Television is the main instrument for instilling into people a false consciousness about the world. This empty- calories, daily dose of glitter, this visual phenomenon which defies sustained intellection, keeps millions of minds enslaved in happy ignorance.
c.To compound the matter further, mediocre public education for millions of people helps to foster in them emotions of apathy and indifference as to their place in the world, driving them into various addictions.
d. Religion, the opiate of the masses, as Marx wrote, is so much mystification of the real social relations that keep the many in thrall to the few. Although there is a liberal, critical version of religion which supports social justice, it is of course watered down heavily after the Establishment became terrified of the just criticisms from the Left of their prosecution of that gross debacle, the Vietnam War. In response to the Left, the Right-wing establishment created, during the turbulent ‘70’s, a ‘fundamentalist religious movement’ which openly supported the capitalist-military alliance and hungered to create a theocracy. Reagan rode that crest to power, even though he really wasn’t one of them.
The workers don’t understand how they’re bamboozled from the cradle to the grave. The institutions are specifically designed to keep them believing in the system that dazzles their eyes with the wealth of others and holds out the promise that they too can achieve a much higher standard of living than is available to them.
America, which boasts so loudly of its of its ‘democracy,’ in reality helps to keep ‘social order’ through a caste system which keeps the meritocracy of ultra-wealthy people in power. The Ivy League and other select universities and colleges feed the State with its bureaucrats and technocrats. Education thus serves to divvy up the rewards among the Elite while offering to the Many a mere chance at fortune or fame, and not much more than that. Hence we are living under a form of authoritarianism with a popular sanction called ‘law and order.’
In America, the first world (the rich) meets the second (the middle classes) and the third world (the working class and the poor)–this is the fundamental essence of what is happening under this stage of American capitalism. There is an element of dynamism in terms of economic movement up and down the ladder, but in the final analysis, the system or structure of society largely remains the same. As the economist Pareto noted, “twenty percent rule eighty percent of the population economically.” He studied all of the major industrial economies of the world, and found such a ratio.
In America, the worst aspect is the theory of ‘trickle-down economics’ promoted by Reagan, which was allegedly scorned by Bush as “voodoo economics,” and helped to destroy the working-class right to form Unions. This branch of banana republic economics occurred while the doors of mass immigration from the real Third World were opened up to the hordes, thus pitting American workers, white and black, against the brown ones.
Thus the status quo was kept in place, the old boy’s fraternal network, which then suppressed the liberal attempt to liberate the fifty percent of the population which constitutes the ‘working-class,’ a pool of perpetual serfs who labor long hours for the minimum wage, which toils in perpetual competition with foreign labor which is willing to work for mere pennies. Their labor keeps society from utterly collapsing, yet they are second or third-class citizens, scorned and rejected — the despised poor, barely keeping afloat amid a rising tide of expectations. It is they to whom cigarettes are marketed, thus shortening their life-spans in a criminal conspiracy of benign neglect. The workers’ alternative to state education and productive, sustainable work, if it can be found, is the military, where Jane or John can expect to arrive home in a nice flag-wrapped coffin — or with a massive head, leg, or arm injury, rendering them cripples for life in America‘s undeclared, perpetual wars.
The military indoctrinates young minds to kill Arabs and hate Muslims, most of whom have never done us any harm. Soldiers are psychologically conditioned into violence and unreflecting patriotism. Inevitably they are wounded or wound or kill others for a flag and a cause they may not fully support.
Behind that flag, the Anglo-American Establishment, now united with European, Middle Eastern and Asian interests, control much of the world’s real wealth.
Their goal is to keep it that way… so Mr and Mrs Smith, can you please produce your child for service in our Imperial Democracy, aka the Capitalist Plutocracy?
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Free-market-capitalism and the property-system produce, as sociology shows, a working class, a middle class, an upper middle class, and a class of the very, very rich, a veritable pyramid structure masquerading under the empty concept, “democracy.” The workers live an increasingly insecure existence, terrified of their bosses’ gaze and the pink slip. The corporations become more and more powerful. Meanwhile only those with real wealth and connections can get anywhere in society.
The people, let’s face it, are screwed under the system. Among the people, there is not enough class consciousness and solidarity, but only a ‘lifestyle’ of partying and beer and wasted lives as sold to them by the beverage industry. Meanwhile, Business class flies first -class, pockets its profits, and mocks the people flying in coach.
We live under the tyranny of capitalistic social relations; a winner-take-all society is what we have created.
In America, you want to make sure then that you’re born privileged and preferably, white.
6/27/11
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Part Two.
History contains within the seeds of its next stage of development, according to Marx’s mentor, Hegel.
Before the Industrial Revolution occurred, the old order of things had to be destroyed. The decline of medieval feudalism gave birth to Capitalism which gave birth to the twin revolutions in America and France. Scientific discovery led to the Industrial Revolution in the 1820’s and ‘30’s, and the modern bourgeois class found itself the new leaders of society, replacing the discredited feudalistic church-kingdom aristocracy. The conditions necessary to produce goods for modern society, however, left the forgotten working-class in the lurch. It was they, the voiceless millions , who fueled the labor power of society under oppressive conditions, fueling the profits of the wealthier classes.
The Industrial Revolution contained within it the seeds of the bourgeoisie’s imminent destruction. The Property owners and bosses ruled the workers with an iron hand and could fire them at will since there were no unions. Bourgeois civilization precipitated the increasing alienation of the workers whose growing class consciousness, under the tutelage of the Communist Party, would work toward its final overthrow. Society, reformed by radical intellectuals and the workers, would then be re-constituted by the Marxists in order to create a class-free society through the abolition of private property and the temporary dictatorship of the Communist representatives of the working-class.
Material property, according to Marx, contained within it the dead, reified labor of the worker who fabricated it. Property became, under capitalism, a force superior to its maker, and sold or traded as a commodity, it ended up acquiring surplus-value (profit) in addition to use-value (usefulness), which rendered the worker, the mere human manufacturer, a wage-slave, a modern-day serf as he toiled long hours to make goods that another sold for a profit. The owner pocketed the difference, and the worker came back the next day for more of the same treatment.
The workers as individuals eventually realized that they had the mass power to organize and challenge the system. But without the right to unionization, without representation by the bourgeois political parties, the workers would be forced to rebel violently against the superior social classes which oppressed them.
The conditions of unrelieved wage-slavery would precipitate an increase in awareness among the workers, leading to their doing away with the conditions that had produced wage-slavery in the first place, namely, the surplus-profit of the capitalist’s expropriation of their labor. In short a revolution must take place against all existing social relations, and a new movement in history will occur, freeing the workers from the conditions of exploitation and unfreedom.
Conclusion:
What is needed is revolutionary knowledge, organization, and discipline. Lenin was a great critic of capitalism, but I don’t know that his assurance that the ‘state will wither away under communism’ was all that workable. It never did occur. “Workers of the world, unite!” was a great slogan of Marx and Engel’s. The Soviet Union, as such, never emerged from Dictatorship of the few into becoming a form of “Democratic Socialism”, ie Communism, that Marx envisioned.
Marxism may survive, not only as a blueprint for the overcoming of the alienation of the working class in the historical dialectical movement toward Communism, if it should occur- but also and principally as the best criticism of the Capitalist order that has ever been conceived by the mind of man.
The impetus to allow the suffragette movement of feminism may have occurred, giving women the right to vote, for the first time, largely as the Establishment’s method of fending off Marxist criticism. After World War One, the Gov’t. began deporting “Communists” and “Anarchists” because they were terrified by their actions and ideas.
Is there an alternative philosophy that will help liberate the working class?
Is it because they don’t want the workers to attain collective consciousness of the way forward, that they have prevented public criticism of the system — the ultimate attack on capitalism itself?
Marxists, according to Karl Marx, must work toward the overthrow of bourgeois society. The criticism of all social relations must lead, finally, not to their reform, but to their ultimate demise. According to Marx, modern industry, with its overseers, its machines, its systems of manufacturing, would lead to a ‘crisis’ in bourgeois relations between the capitalist owners of the means of production and the underpaid workers who toil long hours for wages without any visible increase in their welfare. They are the proletariat, or working class. This crisis would produce a revolution in human affairs and the creation of a new, more just society.
We are all slaves of Capitalism- but with the decline of orthodox Marxism as a philosophy, where will the impetus for reforming Capitalism come from , if not from the workers themselves?
Written in Protest to the Status Quo.
workinprogress66 