> Who do you think the working class is?
I’m saying that the right-wing working class has no idea what the left wing is, the only representations they have seen are left-wing patsies that are a prop for right-wing debaters to knock down. People like Moore and Chomsky are rays of light from the left into the darkness of the right-wing framed political debate that the inheritor class has constructed. Even the KKK reviewer of Moore liked Moore until Moore stood up for African-Americans. He thinks, wow, this guy really cares about my problems, the fact that my factory is shutting down and moving to Mexico where people will work in sweatshop conditions. It’s a better representation of the left than the “liberals who want to deny my son a place in college with affirmative action, or take away a potential job or promotion, or destroy the mostly white working class neighborhood which we are barely clinging to as it is with block-busting and NAACP suits trying to make all my neighbors black or maybe throwing up a ! ho! using project for blacks in the midst of it, destroying my property value, all that I own, and my neighborhood” or the “liberals like Jane Fonda who mistreated American POW’s and sat in a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun and her followers who spit on American soldiers on their return to the US”. Aside from racism and nationalism, there’s religion and “liberal morals” which is another ball of wax.
Wilhelm Reich and Antonio Gramsci noted that a cultural revolution of sorts has to take place in order for working class people to accept the idea of income equality. In fact, Mao carried this out and did away with things such as foot-binding for women, because he realized that people who accept the tradition of women being purposefully crippled in order to limit their movement, are more bound to reject communism (or anarchism) and embrace authoritarian, hierarchical structures. The important thing is not stopping the tradition of purposefully crippling women because women don’t deserve such oppression, the important thing is doing away with it because otherwise it primes people’s minds more for authoritarian systems than communal systems. We must reform the culture insofar as it needs to prime people’s readiness of acceptance of communist (anarchist) society over authoritarian society. Capitalism pits races against one another, nations against one another, and the! n ! there’s the whole religion thing. Culture can only be reformed so far when nations and races are competing and attacking one another. We must not only join and form unions, worker’s councils and/or political parties that represent our class interests, we must reform the culture insofar as it will allow for a communist (anarchist) society. The “cultural revolution of the 1960’s that carries on to today” which the right always decries can only be carried out so far in a capitalist society, and it’s sole goal is to achieve a level of mass acceptance for communism (anarchism), because it is only after a communist (anarchist) system is in place where nations and races are not competing with one another, that further removals of racial and national authoritarian structures can be removed.
To paraphrase Engels - What is the working class? The working class is that class in society which draws its means of livelihood wholly and solely from the sale of its labour and not from the profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose whole existence depends on the demand for labour, hence, on the alternations of good times and bad in business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the twenty-first century.
Engels criteria are “wholly and solely from the sale of its labour and not from the profit from any kind of capital”. I won’t get bogged down by didactics, industrial working class vs. world working class, exceptions and so forth - I myself would not be so rigid and exclude those who have earned a few dollars in interest on their checking accounts – Engels never had to work an ATM and this has to obviously updated over 150 years later. Your estimate is pretty good, in the US probably 90% are working class, 9% are petty bourgeoisie and 1% are bourgeoisie. To paraphrase Engels I think that the “petty bourgeois are in the process of falling into the working class” and that that the 90% figure will increase at the expense of the 9% figure.
An over-worked, poorly paid fast food restaurant manager is a member of the working class just as sure as the guy who puts the burger together is. In fact, although I’m cognizant of the existence of the petty bourgeois, since Engels says that their political interests are ever-increasingly becoming dependent on the working class, because of the proletariazation of professions like engineering, law, medicine and so forth, I often rhetorically would include them within the working class. In other words, when I talk to non-class conscious people about economics, I stress that 42.2% of stocks are in the hands of the top 1%, not that 84.4% of stocks are in the top 10%. In my presentation to non-class conscious people, how much wealth 1% controls is more important than how much the top 10% control. This is for several reasons, one, because Engels said that they are falling into the working class and their political interests become more working class-aligned as time goes on.!
! Also, because conceptually it is more appealing – if 10% of the population is OK, then the person tries to figure out where they fit in – the poor, who are portrayed as black and Mexican or white people living in trailer parks, are written off. The right wing picture of the classes is the poor, who are alien, then the broad middle class, then the upper class who a hard-working middle class person can enter, or at least their kids can with a good education, and which entrance to is dependent upon a cultural ethic of hard work along with thriftiness, a good education and so forth.
Because most millionaires are self-made goes the refrain. In fact, getting to be a millionaire is all about having a dream and pursuing it, having a goal and going after it. People who don’t become millionaires are ones who are thinking the wrong way, not taking risks and going for it, since self-confidence and determination and persevering are all that’s needed to become wealthy. Blah, blah, blah – just go to the business section of the local bookstore or peruse the web. Most millionaires who lost all their money would gain it right back again, because it’s their mentality which gets them there. “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” is a #1 bestseller. Being a #1 best-seller means many, many Americans are buying in to what it has to say. In fact the book’s full title is “Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money--That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!” What does it say? Surprise, the reason the poor are poor and the rich are rich has nothing to!
d! o with how much money their parents had! It’s about the mentality that the rich dad hands to his son, dummy. If a poor dad handed down the same mentality, his son would have been rich too! My father called me and told me to read the book, he was guilty that he hadn’t passed down to me the lessons that a rich dad would have that would have guaranteed me enormous wealth. Actually there’s a small sliver of truth in this of course, an inheritor class dad is probably more likely than a working class dad to tell his son and daughter about what a great investment real estate is. But in a larger sense, are most working class people kept out of the inheritor class because their father didn’t tell them “save your money in the bank, and buy real estate when you’ve saved enough for a downpayment?” No.
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