Newsletter Numéro 46 5 October 2011
Class Warfare Indeed
Michael Parenti (1)
Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have
been denouncing as “class warfare” any attempt at criticizing and
restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial
expropriation.
The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on
our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries.
But when we point that out, when we use terms like class warfare,
class conflict, and class struggle to describe the system of
exploitation we live under—our indictments are dismissed out of hand and
denounced as Marxist ideological ranting, foul and divisive.
Amanda Gilson put it perfectly in a posting on my Facebook page:
“[T]he concept of ‘class warfare’ has been hi-jacked by the
wrong class (the ruling class). The wealthy have been waging war
silently and inconspicuously against the middle and the poor classes
for decades! Now that the middle and poor classes have begun to fight
back, it is like the rich want to try to call foul---the game was fine
when they were the only ones playing it.”
The reactionary rich always denied that they themselves were
involved in class warfare. Indeed, they insisted no such thing existed
in our harmonious prosperous society. Those of us who kept talking
about the realities of class inequality and class exploitation were
readily denounced. Such concepts were not tolerated and were readily
dismissed as ideologically inspired.
In fact, class itself is something of a verboten word. In the
mainstream media, in political life, and in academia, the use of the
term “class” has long been frowned upon. You make your listeners
uneasy (“Is the speaker a Marxist?”). If you talk about class
exploitation and class inequity, you will likely not get far in your
journalism career or in political life or in academia (especially in
fields like political science and economics).
So instead of working class, we hear of “working families” or “blue
collar” and “white collar employees”. Instead of lower class we hear
of “inner city poor” and “low-income elderly.” Instead of the capitalist
owning class, we hear of the “more affluent” or the “upper quintile.”
Don’t take my word for it, just listen to any Obama speech. (Often
Obama settles for an even more cozy and muted term: “folks,” as in
“Folks are strugglin’ along.”)
“Class” is used with impunity and approval only when it has that
magic neutralizing adjective “middle” attached to it. The middle class
is an acceptable mainstream concept because it usually does not
sharpen our sense of class struggle; it dilutes and muffles critical
consciousness. If everyone in America is middle class (except for a
few superrich and a minor stratum of very poor), there is little room
for any awareness of class conflict.
That may be changing with the Great Recession and the sharp decline
of the middle class (and decline of the more solvent elements of the
working class). The concept of middle class no longer serves as a
neutralizer when it itself becomes an undeniable victim.
“Class” is also allowed to be used with limited application when it
is part of the holy trinity of race, gender, and class. Used in that
way, it is reduced to a demographic trait related to life style,
education level, and income level. In forty years of what was called
“identity politics” and “culture wars,” class as a concept was reduced
to something of secondary importance. All sorts of "leftists"
told us how we needed to think anew, how we had to realize that class
was not as important as race or gender or culture.
I was one of those who thought these various concepts should not be
treated as being mutually exclusive of each other. In fact, they are
interactive. Thus racism and sexism have always proved functional for
class oppression. Furthermore, I pointed out (and continue to point
out), that in the social sciences and among those who see class as
just another component of “identity politics,” the concept of class is
treated as nothing more than a set of demographic traits. But there
is another definition of class that has been overlooked.
Class should also be seen as a social relationship relating to
wealth and social power, involving a conflict of material interests
between those who own and those who work for those who own. Without
benefit of reason or research, this latter usage of class is often
dismissed out of hand as “Marxist.” The narrow reductionist
mainstream view of class keeps us from seeing the extent of
economic inequality and the severity of class exploitation in society,
allowing many researchers and political commentators to mistakenly
assume that U.S. society has no deep class divisions or class conflicts
of interest.
We should think of class not primarily as a demographic trait but as
a relationship to the means of production, as a relationship to power
and wealth. Class as in slaveholder and slave, lord and serf,
capitalist and worker. Class as in class conflict and class warfare.
And who knows, once we learn to talk about the realities of class
power, we are on our way to talking critically about capitalism,
another verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a
critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared
to act against it and defend our own democratic and communal
interests.
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(1)Michael Parenti is an internationally known, award winning author and scholar. Included among his recent books are The Face of Imperialism (2011), Democracy for the Few 9th ed. (2011), and God and His Demons (2009).
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