"There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." –Warren Buffett, New York Times Magazine November 2006
It’s a seemingly never ending effort for the plutocratic ruling class to control production, drive down wages and beat down and homogenize the labor force in the United States of America as well as the rest of the world.
We’re currently in a state of class warfare, all right. Unfortunately, the lower rung of the economic ladder, which also happens to be the majority of the working population, is fighting like 1939 Poland and/or behaving like 1940 Vichy France.
Yeah, a lot of you out there were pretty buzzed right after the Obama election, huh? Me too. Admittedly, I was a bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately but eventually the guy got to me, just like he did for millions of other progressively minded pissed off voters at the time, from all ages, ethnicity, and social stratification. I went to the polls and copped my hit, and we were LOADed that Tuesday night, aw shit, the whole three months afterward!
It was one Hell of a headache once the buzz started to wear off, eh?
Any of us who go out and actually work for a living, especially for someone else, have obviously learned a rather potent lesson about hope and change. Namely, that hope and change won’t make any difference in the election of an individual to public office, but rather that a populace united in hope must demand change, regardless of the political representation of the time.
It’s not the elected official who is going to improve the quality of life for the bottom eighty percent of the population which, by the way, has only about seven percent of the nation’s total financial wealth. It’s going to have to be an uprising of one form or another by that very majority. Furthermore, it seems that four out of five of us need to try to get to know each other a little bit better and figure out how we can work as a team in order to level the playing field against the remaining twenty percent. If the latest machinations of the Establishment Media and Corporate America against free speech, Internet content neutrality and the like are any indication, most of those “one out of five” are already forming a battle line aimed at suppressing our voices and abilities to question authority, access alternative information sources and express dissent.
In order to engage in anything resembling true class warfare, or a resurgence of working class activism at the least, there will need to be a sort of remedial education necessary in regard to the hell raising working class movements of the old times. A good way to look at the general strategy is like this: direct action is live action. While online social networking and similar technological methods are helpful on an organizational level, the most effective weapon of change is direct live dialogue. It’s time to stop staring at the screen and walk outside to start talking about the world around us, as well as what to do about our lives and our current challenges, face to face. A line of communication from person to person, one person at a time, can work wonders.
We are all living beings, and not robots under the remote control of a ruling class. No matter how hard that the moneyed oligarchs try to get us to believe they are our overlords, we need to keep letting each other know that our only support in overcoming this attempted clampdown is from each other. Whatever it takes, be it something along the lines of mass labor disruption, collective product boycotts, or just plain old fashioned nonviolent protest and resistance, the sense of common need among us needs to be recognized and acted upon, and soon.
I’m calling out to you. It’s time to get out there and start talking amongst us. What do we really want, and how are we going to get it done?
I’m in. All in. Talented terrors of the American working class, unite to fight.
Let’s go to war.
Posts
