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Middle class is and always was just a third class aristocracy that preside over the stolen labour of the imperial periphery. That includes me and I imagine most Western Lemmy users whether we know that’s what’s happening or not. Maybe not as bad as the real aristocracy but very far from blameless for the exploitation happening in the world. Not wanting to live off the exploitation of others is not an excuse for it actually happening. We’re all culpable.
I’d even go as far as to say there is no true proletariat in the imperial core because of how pervasively the spoils of exploitation is distributed here. The poorest person here still actively lives off the labour of even poorer people in the periphery.
Middle class is and always was just a third-class aristocracy that preside over the stolen labour of the imperial periphery.
Petite Bourgeois. Professional Managerial Class. Mercantile Class. Yeomen/Freeholder. The Third Estate. There’s a bunch of different names for it, depending on which socio-economic system you operate under.
We’re all culpable.
To be culpable, you need a certain level of agency. I’m reluctant to hang blame on a cog in the machine, even if that cog gets a marginally nicer standard of living than their peers. That way lays liberalist self-flagellation, rather than proletarian unity. The House Slave has no more say in the running of the plantation than the Field Slave, even if the clothing is nicer and the living quarters less drafty.
I’d even go as far as to say there is no true proletariat in the imperial core because of how pervasively the spoils of exploitation is distributed here.
sound of J. Sakai’s Settlers hitting the desk
If you’re looking for a “real” proletarian underclass, look no farther than all the prison labor camps our country has perpetuated. You’ve got homeless folks and debtors picked up by the modern day Press Gangs to do piecework for subsistence wages.
But climb up a rung or two to the modern-day service sector, what’s left of blue collar industry, the vocational trades, and the third-string office jobs. You’re still going to find debt peonage and a carceral state. People showing up to work with ankle monitors because they’re still on probation. People perpetually underwater on the car they need or the college debt they need or the housing note they need to stay out of bankruptcy and homelessness.
The domestic infrastructure is much nicer. When we need health care, there are doctors in the neighborhood who can provide treatment (which we maybe can afford) and schools that provide some professionalized education (which will maybe result in a sustainable employment) and highways/railways to get us where we need to go, and even parks and theaters and other amusement centers for a degree of recreational relief.
But any Roman will tell you that walking distance from the Colosseum didn’t make you more or less of a slave. Proletarianization isn’t about whether or not you hate your life. It’s about whether or not you own your labor.
The empire either needs to start crumbling or capital needs to start hoarding far more resources to itself rather than throwing its scraps to some workers of the imperial core before revolution is possible. We’re in a position now where both things are becoming feasible, we just need to make sure the ire of the people is pointed appropriately. Unfortunately, I think the imperial workers embracing fascism is just as likely as a socialist revolution, if not more so.
As much as I would hope most if not all of us socialists would be willing to accept a lower standard of living in exchange for ending imperialism, I don’t think the average USian is ready for the gravy train to end. The next few months are going to be very telling, I think.
Yeah once you get woke to the chain of misery and inequity that trails your regular existence in a capitalist democracy you see how we’re like a little echo of the aristocracy. Gotta fix this state of things somehow so we can actually build the real world for everyone
It wasn’t a fluke - it was a benefit from the capitalist overlords to workers in the belly of US imperialism to hedge against workers coming to a class consciousness that might have them taking over ownership of the means of production as they did in the Soviet Union. It was an indirect benefit because of the USSRs existence. That is how scared of communism the ruling capitalist class is…they gave us a little to lose because when we have nothing left to lose, we will start to mobilize as a working class.
Arguably, the fluke was Germans shitting the bed and failing to have a communist revolution. If Germany went communist instead of fascist in 1930s, then the rest of Europe would’ve almost certainly followed. The US had a strong isolationist movement at the time, so it likely would’ve remained a regional power. There was also a strong communist and union movement as a result of the great depression, and with Europe being communist, it would’ve had a huge amount of international support. So, we basically live in one of the worst possible timelines thanks to the Germans.
If Germany went communist instead of fascist in 1930s, then the rest of Europe would’ve almost certainly followed.
Germany (at least, half of it) did go communist fifteen years later. Half of Europe followed. The entire Eastern Bloc did the Communism. The failure of the movement wasn’t a failure to start, but a failure to endure.
There was also a strong communist and union movement as a result of the great depression, and with Europe being communist, it would’ve had a huge amount of international support.
The communist / trade movements of the Atlantic Nations were still plagued by religious schisms and racial animosity. Where the AFL-CIO succeeded(ish) was in harvesting labor from the lower castes for the benefit of the white nationalists. And where they failed, forty years down the road, was in reconciling the racial conflicts that underpinned the class conflicts. The movie “Blue Collar” does a really good job of painting this picture.
Any path upward for the colored worker was defined as managerial. And the white workers were taught to resent this, in order to cultivate a nationalist movement built on the fear of a colored aristocracy. Modern day Obama/MAGA politics is rooted in the Reagan-Era managerial liberalism and white nationalist professional class turned on each other, with Barack Obama and JD Vance being the avatars of this phenomenon.
Nothing in the Great Depression Era really stood in the way of this trajectory. A few electoral flukes defined its precise shape, but the end result was all overdetermined.
It was a completely different world after WW2 because the US got to develop its productive forces while the rest of the world burned, and then dragged the Soviet bloc into the Cold War right after which was specifically designed to force socialist nations to divert inordinate resources towards the military. The Cold War was also what justified communist purges in the US and how the communist movement was gutted under McCarthyism.
the communist movement was gutted under McCarthyism
The communist organization was gutted under J. Edgar Hoover. McCarthy just picked off the stragglers.
For better or worse, it was WW2 itself that split the American Communists, as they wrestled with the old Leninist urge towards anti-war activism as a proletarian rallying cry and the Stalinist plea for interventionism on the Western Front. The internal reaction to the assassination of Trotsky, the protests against FDR at the peak of his popularity, the championing of civil rights movements back when segregation was fully normalized, the turmoil produced by various intraparty sex scandals, the repeated violations of the Smith Act that the FBI pounced on, the CIO’s throwing the party under the bus to appease Truman, the nuclear espionage… it all fouled the party’s national image and the economic philosophy as a whole.
By the Cold War, US Communism was a shadow of its former self and Global Communism was fully in the thrall of sectarianism (absent the odd Third Worlder like Tito). But that was all largely due to the success of the Russian Communist experiment (and the Chinese experiment, hot on its heels). There was never a comparable movement in the west, in no small part because US industry was too successful at appeasing the American public with consumer surpluses even at the height of WW2 rationing.
Communism, as a socio-economic philosophy, has a very hard time taking root in the imperial core precisely because it is so bound up with anti-imperial economics and self-sufficient policies. Sakai was right on that much, at least. You can’t sell an American or a Brit or Frenchman on self-determination when imperial extraction is so much more lucrative. The Settler isn’t going to buy an economic plan that strictly benefits the native laborer by internalizing their surplus.
At absolute best, you could see American Native People and segregated workers take up the banner. But as soon as capitalism becomes color blind, the Black Socialist losses footing.
FDR saved capitalism from itself with social democracy. He was the one responsible for killing communism in its craddle. Had Hoover and Dewey been allowed to do libertarian white nationalist capitalism for another twenty years, you might have seen American communism take firmer root. But FDR, Truman, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and Obama have been far too good at expanding the economic borders and perpetuating the illusion of upward mobility.
So, going back to my original point, had Germany gone communist instead of fascist, we would be living in a very different world right now where communist was the dominant system in the world.
So, we basically live in one of the worst possible timelines thanks to the Germans.
Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten!
They’re pulling up the ladder behind them and kicking you in the face when you try to climb up the sheer cliff they “already climbed.”
It wasn’t a fluke, it was a period of power re-distribution forged from the destabilizing affect of a world war. The vote for the average man was also a product of needing men to go to war. They never give us anything unless they absolutely have to. I wish we’d figure that out and get back to making them have to. I’m done with conversation and dialogue that they build labyrinths from. They will never voluntarily give up power, they are psychologically incapable of doing so. There is only one end to this, as it has always been between the cruelly selfish and the rest of the community.
The middle class has always been systematically crushed under capitalism, which has been a primary project and function of the state. This pressure is felt by the middle class and forms the human basis for fascism.
This is why fascism is an intrinsic part of capitalist social relations. As long as there is a middle class to squeeze, there will be the structural basis to blame someone other than those responsible.
I’d be careful to say that the middle class is being turned into peasants. Its not completely wrong, but its a rhetorical statement (peasant bad, middle class good) rather than a materialist statement based on understanding social forces. I’m unconvinced that by destroying the material basis for the middle class, the capitalists are creating a whole new class, or reproducing older ones. If anything, destroying the middle only brings more attention to the central feature of capitalism that creates two diametrically opposed classes rather than many differing castes or classes, which stabilized previous modes of production. Capitalism creates capitalists and workers. Everything else is unstable or illusory.
well put
I’d argue it started with FDR not the cold war. FDR did end up helping many Americans, but the concessions given slowed and/or completely stopped many workers movements in the US. Halting further progress amongst socialist or communist parties in the US.
The middle class wouldn’t emerge until the late 1940s, but the groundwork was set in the 30s
It was the same fear though, there was a really strong working class movement in the US after the great depression, and a lot of communist organizing happening within unions.
That is why I called them concessions
fair
I like how slightly appeasing the socialists made the country way better for decades. Moar!
It also dampened the flames of revolution, preventing things from becoming extremely way better forever. Social democracy is a concession that can always be taken back by the capitalist class. Socialism and the elimination of classes should be the goal.
RIP left wave USA 1930-1975
RIP right wave China 1980-2015Removed by mod
The middle class is what happens when a reserve currency taxes the word through money printing. Now that we are in 39 trillion in debt and countries are dumping Treasury bonds, the middle class is going away.
It won’t be coming back anytime soon.
Capital has no use for social democracy anymore. In Germany that is obvious since the 2000s. Social Democrats turned so hard on the working class, but that was a cul de sac.
Silence, the two braincells of a progressist are working now.
Recommend: The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy - Jeffrey Winters
The way this is written… It’s just so far from reality.
Rich people (most of them) aren’t plotting to fuck us over for sinister reasons… They’re fucking us over because they are selfish, greedy assholes.
The problem isn’t that we’re all being stepped on, it’s that we’re being used as steps to elevate these psychopaths.
Is a very important distinction, even if the results feel the same. You can’t typically fight a problem effectively without understanding it.
It doesn’t say anything about any sinister reasons actually. It simply states the fact that there is a systematic effort by the ruling class to extract more profit from the working majority.
You can be right all day but if no one listens what’s the point? Join the enemy and exploit the stupid peasants, too.
Seriously though, once we’re pushed below a certain point, we physically can’t escape. We won’t have the time, resources, knowledge, cooperation or skills to execute a strategy, even if we know one that would work. Poverty is powerlessness and if we’re too powerless, it no longer matters how we feel or think about our lives, the wealthy no longer know we exist at all, nevermind care.
The irony is that cooperation has always given us the power to overcome them but we can’t figure out how to actually accomplish that for any length of time.
You may want to look into how wretched things were in pre-revolutiom China
Unless you actually give me a reason, I’m not wading through a massive field of history on a hunt for a point you didn’t bother to make.
Okay. It was unimaginably worse than the circumstances you seem to think are prohibitively bad.
There are two classes, the senatorial class and the plebeians. Just like in Rome with the worst psychopaths at the top.
Just like in Rome
As was noted by P.K. Dick …
Noted where? I only know the Scanner Darkly film from 2006…
Probably the exegesis. I haven’t read it but the time period of the book of acts features prominently.
This is why I advocate for, hear me out, liberal arts. 🤢
Soc 100 or 101, can’t remember which, taught this.
After not enjoying Applied Calculus, I took Modern Math, AKA Math For English Majors, to complete my math requirement.
It was a great class! Lots of useful, real-world math skills. It didn’t use anything much more complicated than simple algebra, but we talked about the traveling salesman problem and ways to fairly split up an estate.
We also talked about election math, and how first past the post is objectively a terrible election system, and how there are several systems readily available that are mathematically more representative of the will of the people. I don’t even know if the teacher had a specific political stance, or if she was just mathematically offended by our outdated democratic operating system.
Great class. Wish they would start teaching subjects like that in high school.
As a STEM grad who spent 2 years undeclared, it sounds like a course even STEM people could use.
I’m so thankful that I sort of accidentally backed into a well rounded education. I cannot say the same for the majority of my STEM colleagues.
I think especially STEM students should have lib arts requirements.
100%. Some of the most useful courses that I took were either electives or simply did not count toward my major. Specifically: a logic course, a course about the history of socialism, and a writing course (including research papers)
Critical thinking and logic 101 (syllogistic logic) were infinitely valuable, imo. I think critical reading should also be required.
lib arts requirements.
There must be better ways.
We sort of touched on it, here:
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12070694
Not exactly, but the respondent to my question gave a really good answer I think can probably be extrapolated, somewhat.
They should also start teaching basic psych in grade school. Kids need that and adults’ bs may be mitigated, but they won’t teach it, and that’s why.
Unfortunately, HS teachers in places which need to know these things the most are also the most likely to lose their jobs for it. E.g. In my HS, learning ‘history’ stopped at the beginning of the 20th-century.
I advocate for a socialist revolution instead.
Don’t worry about that, the threat will be back.
We just have to reach the level of peasantry that started the communist revolution.
Worry about that.
