Not your neighbor mechanic. Not your family member, a cashier in a local market. Not your friend, happy with any job he can find. Not your kid, freshly graduated and fighting with “data input”. Not your neighbor, a local farmer providing you with healthy food. Not your neighbor, a plumber without whom the city will be renamed Rekatrina. Not your friends who repair pavement and care about local roads.
Is it possible that these books are being written by people who have never been working and who have no intention to ever work?
In Africa there are no public hospitals and healthcare is private, because only in these cases does the IMF provide economic aid, the same happens in the Middle East (except Syria and Iran) and in the non-socialist East and in Latin America, except in the states where there is socialism, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, which strangely are also the states that suffer the terrible attack of US and Western sanctions, and are continually targeted by hetero-directed coups d'état. The lack of a public health system is the real leading cause of death, but no one denounces this reality, and this is madness, which no media questions. The only states that have provided a welfare state system and education and public health, I am thinking of Gaddafi's Libya, Patrice Lumumba's Congo, Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso, but not only that, have been targeted by attacks violent states and criminal wars by proxy. from the west. The problem has always been there, because it is there, in Africa, in Latin America, and also here, in the areas where class injustices remain unresolved, that we continually witness the scene of primary accumulation that Marx talks about in the first book of Capital , even before covid and the fourth industrial revolution, which is just a new and faster method of expropriation of resources by the whores of financial capitalism. For the Western colonial states, these countries are what was destined to become Russia in the plans of the Nazis: mere geographical expressions, mines to be exploited without scruples, inhabited by subhumans.
Now we too are slipping into the subhuman state,
exploited for profit, which has always been the capitalists' ideal, didn't they do the same to workers in the nineteenth century? Just read Engels, "The Condition of the Working Class in England ... (or with non-whites they use as bodies to exploit and eliminate, as voids to lose.) They have not changed, they are still the same, they have only changed their method of appropriation. Capitalism drips blood from head to toe, wrote Marx, now we will understand it again on our white skin.
governments are corrupted by the big capitalists, by the multinationals that follow the armies in their wars of expansion, to rob the territories that the armies have reduced to ashes.
Hence the terror of communism, instilled in the minds of Americans and citizens of the Empire, the terror of justice from below, the terror of justice ..
I'm not talking about what Mao's China was forced to become, so as not to end up like Africa and the Middle East, lands of conquest and plunder, populated by subhumans, I'm talking about true communism, of the struggles that for two centuries, they have written the rules and rights with blood, for everyone, even for those who were previously considered little more than a thing, a non-human to be milked and suppressed. In the USA and here, in the West, communism has become a heresy, justice from below, justice of the people, in short justice, is a crime. This is why the world is returning to the Middle Ages, this is why citizens are clouded by the fetishism of goods, which is worse than the fetishism of religion.
This is why oligarchies strangle democracies, and the financial aristocracy (die neue Finanzaristokratie), without laws or culture, scum of humanity according to Marx, who as always is right, commands the sovereign people. he corrupts governments, loosens the rules, makes laws, sleeps with armies, because only with continuous wars can he remain in power.
"The financial aristocracy, in its forms of income as in its pleasures, is nothing other than the reproduction of the underclass at the top of bourgeois society." (Marx)
But people identified themselves with the interests of their masters, and Wilhelm Reich explains this well. People defend the bad guys who harass and rob them, they even hate the word communism. When in reality communism has always existed, well before Marxism, even if it has once again become a ghost, slandered and emptied of its true meaning. So we have returned to the Middle Ages and we will go even further back, we will let slavery re-establish itself undisturbed, we will continue to allow the commons to accumulate in the hands of a minority of lawless idiots, only cunning and evil. But there will always be people who defend them, as servants defended their masters...
''The first man who, after enclosing a piece of land, thought to say, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes one could have saved humanity,
breaking down fences , or filling the ditch, and shouting to his peers: “Be careful to listen to this impostor; we are finished if we forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all and the earth belongs to no one. " Rousseau, 1774.
Lets say those 10 people were not complete fools, no way they would want all the wealth IF acquiring it would disrupt or even destroy their opulent lives.
There’s a reason the elites and their ideological cadres have weaponised envy and resentment, now morphed into outright nihilism, into the opiate of the masses. Almost everything happening today in the west can be understood beneath the banner of resentment and envy ... the elites envy and resent our freedoms at the same time, and they would rather destroy everything than allow mankind to flourish.
At first, the British bourgeoisie were a despised and oppressed class-let under feudalism. Then they became the source of cash for the monarchy, separate from the proceeds of royal lands (the King had originally been just another Lord). When Britain went to sea, the English bourgeoisie largely displaced the gentry as the military class. Eventually, they took power. The largest of the British capitalists merged with the defeated aristocracy... in many cases, quite literally.
One of the first profitable businesses after the Civil War for the unemployed aristocracy was the production of offspring for marriage and the transfer of hereditary title. The smaller bourgeois became the new "middle-class", now supplemented by paid employees (if privileged ones) of the larger capitalists, and these were supplemented in turn by a rising number of specialists. Eventually, after the Industrial Revolution, the term described highly paid employees almost exclusively through the elimination of most independent proprietors, though technical progressions provided some opportunities for moving up the class ladder. The original class had been revolutionary and in competition with their "betters". The reconstructed one, which was mostly not a class at all, was absolutely slavish in its loyalty and was the mainspring of Empire.
The American Brits were "middle-class" in the original sense: landed, propertied, but untitled. So too were the bulk, perhaps even a majority, of the original population, although they held much lesser property. But in America, there was no landed gentry... the term was a nonsensical import.
The unreality of it all is inevitable. A new, faux middle-class is declared just as the old, real one is destroyed.
But the real innovation was the scale of it all... in Britain and America. Such a middle-class exists in every capitalist country. The difference with these two was that it was declared to exist as even a majority of the population. It takes a lot of bodies to administer an Empire, it seems.
To glorify the "middle class" is to glorify Empire knowingly or not.
In truth, it is not class but a polyglot. It consists of small proprietors who are constantly diminished in number, new "entrepreneurs" propelled by revolutionary changes in industry, highly paid employees of large enterprises, educated professionals and specialists, and even an "aristocracy of labor". This exists in every country. What makes it quite often reactionary is its total dependence on the ruling class.
That they exist on such a grand scale is precisely because of Empire. In the 1950s and 1960s, the political population of the U.S. included not only the small businessmen, engineers, and advertising executives of the U.S. but also those of India, and Argentina, and Belgium, and Tunisia... all of whom happened to be American... for the moment.
It is Empire on a grand scale which produces this polyglot on such a grand scale, so as to dominate the political life of a country and drown even proletarian thought in ordinary philistinism. And it is the death of Empire, or its stagnation, which will weaken and ultimately displace that monopoly. How do we know this to be true? The same way as everything else we know... it wasn't always like this.
Most people don't distinguish between personal property and private property.
Anyone who obtains their understanding of Marx through Anthony Sutton will be forever ignorant. Why not go to the source?
While, the origin of the term may be British, for most of its history, the American middle-class went by a Continental definition. America was a “middle-class” country from its inception… built on “free” land (in the dual sense… i.e. also “freed” from its former inhabitants. As late as the decades after the Civil War, 70% of the population owned their own means of production, even if it was modest in most cases.
The subsequent transformation of that status was partly the operation of the very same forces of Empire and partly the result of the flood of European immigrants recently freed from their property. In approximately 60 years, the population of freeholders fell from 70% to less than 10%. It is less than 5% today, once the various tax schemes and contractor rackets are abstracted away. The story of America before the War is the story of The Grapes of Wrath and in no way could the U.S. be accurately described as a “middle-class country.”
So what has changed, since? Was it FDR, the New Deal, Democrats… a new “Enlightenment” perhaps? In fact, it was a positive outcome to the Second World War. What Britain lost, the U.S. inherited. And among that inheritance was a new definition for “middle-class”, adopted from the English.
Social mobility, the movement up the division of labor, a certain level of prosperity, advancement through education… and all of it made possible from industrial ascendancy and the fact that Indian banks were now located in New York. The end of that era comes with globalization. It makes little difference whether the new era produces a new capitalist competition or whether the very success of American Empire relocates Indian banks to India. The inevitable result will be the decomposition of the American middle-class and there is not a single political perspective which promises otherwise. It is the division of misery in the decline that is in question.
Capitalism does not elevate… it expropriates and impoverishes. Its urban slums and shanty towns are a step down from the rural, quasi-capitalist material it begins with. Worldwide, it expropriates wealth from the many instead of creating “prosperity”. It is only in microcosm that it appears otherwise.
Look at some charts on postwar income in the U.S.- they divide U.S. income into a hierarchy of 10 tiers, each representing 10% of the population, and then project that income forward from WW2. For something like 20 years, the top seven or eight of the ten reach upwards… until they stall in the 1960s and 70s. After that, one after another, the next highest tier stagnates… sometimes even falls… until only a couple of tiers continue to advance. Meanwhile, the “lifestyle” is temporarily maintained through two incomes, and then through huge debt and home equity loans, followed by the first general drop in home ownership and the first general reversal of “liquidity” in a generation. The story is straightforward.
All attempts to paint the existence of the middle-class as an aspect of “politics” or policy, positively or negatively, are simply wrong. The "middle-class" is a historically created, changing, and ultimately decomposing social structure which is no more a permanent part of America than Conestoga Wagons or the railroads.
Who is writing such books?
Not your neighbor mechanic. Not your family member, a cashier in a local market. Not your friend, happy with any job he can find. Not your kid, freshly graduated and fighting with “data input”. Not your neighbor, a local farmer providing you with healthy food. Not your neighbor, a plumber without whom the city will be renamed Rekatrina. Not your friends who repair pavement and care about local roads.
Is it possible that these books are being written by people who have never been working and who have no intention to ever work?
This is an outstanding analysis of the historical record. Thank you.
Thank you very much for the well-written summary.
In Africa there are no public hospitals and healthcare is private, because only in these cases does the IMF provide economic aid, the same happens in the Middle East (except Syria and Iran) and in the non-socialist East and in Latin America, except in the states where there is socialism, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, which strangely are also the states that suffer the terrible attack of US and Western sanctions, and are continually targeted by hetero-directed coups d'état. The lack of a public health system is the real leading cause of death, but no one denounces this reality, and this is madness, which no media questions. The only states that have provided a welfare state system and education and public health, I am thinking of Gaddafi's Libya, Patrice Lumumba's Congo, Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso, but not only that, have been targeted by attacks violent states and criminal wars by proxy. from the west. The problem has always been there, because it is there, in Africa, in Latin America, and also here, in the areas where class injustices remain unresolved, that we continually witness the scene of primary accumulation that Marx talks about in the first book of Capital , even before covid and the fourth industrial revolution, which is just a new and faster method of expropriation of resources by the whores of financial capitalism. For the Western colonial states, these countries are what was destined to become Russia in the plans of the Nazis: mere geographical expressions, mines to be exploited without scruples, inhabited by subhumans.
Now we too are slipping into the subhuman state,
exploited for profit, which has always been the capitalists' ideal, didn't they do the same to workers in the nineteenth century? Just read Engels, "The Condition of the Working Class in England ... (or with non-whites they use as bodies to exploit and eliminate, as voids to lose.) They have not changed, they are still the same, they have only changed their method of appropriation. Capitalism drips blood from head to toe, wrote Marx, now we will understand it again on our white skin.
governments are corrupted by the big capitalists, by the multinationals that follow the armies in their wars of expansion, to rob the territories that the armies have reduced to ashes.
Hence the terror of communism, instilled in the minds of Americans and citizens of the Empire, the terror of justice from below, the terror of justice ..
I'm not talking about what Mao's China was forced to become, so as not to end up like Africa and the Middle East, lands of conquest and plunder, populated by subhumans, I'm talking about true communism, of the struggles that for two centuries, they have written the rules and rights with blood, for everyone, even for those who were previously considered little more than a thing, a non-human to be milked and suppressed. In the USA and here, in the West, communism has become a heresy, justice from below, justice of the people, in short justice, is a crime. This is why the world is returning to the Middle Ages, this is why citizens are clouded by the fetishism of goods, which is worse than the fetishism of religion.
This is why oligarchies strangle democracies, and the financial aristocracy (die neue Finanzaristokratie), without laws or culture, scum of humanity according to Marx, who as always is right, commands the sovereign people. he corrupts governments, loosens the rules, makes laws, sleeps with armies, because only with continuous wars can he remain in power.
"The financial aristocracy, in its forms of income as in its pleasures, is nothing other than the reproduction of the underclass at the top of bourgeois society." (Marx)
But people identified themselves with the interests of their masters, and Wilhelm Reich explains this well. People defend the bad guys who harass and rob them, they even hate the word communism. When in reality communism has always existed, well before Marxism, even if it has once again become a ghost, slandered and emptied of its true meaning. So we have returned to the Middle Ages and we will go even further back, we will let slavery re-establish itself undisturbed, we will continue to allow the commons to accumulate in the hands of a minority of lawless idiots, only cunning and evil. But there will always be people who defend them, as servants defended their masters...
''The first man who, after enclosing a piece of land, thought to say, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes one could have saved humanity,
breaking down fences , or filling the ditch, and shouting to his peers: “Be careful to listen to this impostor; we are finished if we forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all and the earth belongs to no one. " Rousseau, 1774.
Lets say those 10 people were not complete fools, no way they would want all the wealth IF acquiring it would disrupt or even destroy their opulent lives.
There’s a reason the elites and their ideological cadres have weaponised envy and resentment, now morphed into outright nihilism, into the opiate of the masses. Almost everything happening today in the west can be understood beneath the banner of resentment and envy ... the elites envy and resent our freedoms at the same time, and they would rather destroy everything than allow mankind to flourish.
At first, the British bourgeoisie were a despised and oppressed class-let under feudalism. Then they became the source of cash for the monarchy, separate from the proceeds of royal lands (the King had originally been just another Lord). When Britain went to sea, the English bourgeoisie largely displaced the gentry as the military class. Eventually, they took power. The largest of the British capitalists merged with the defeated aristocracy... in many cases, quite literally.
One of the first profitable businesses after the Civil War for the unemployed aristocracy was the production of offspring for marriage and the transfer of hereditary title. The smaller bourgeois became the new "middle-class", now supplemented by paid employees (if privileged ones) of the larger capitalists, and these were supplemented in turn by a rising number of specialists. Eventually, after the Industrial Revolution, the term described highly paid employees almost exclusively through the elimination of most independent proprietors, though technical progressions provided some opportunities for moving up the class ladder. The original class had been revolutionary and in competition with their "betters". The reconstructed one, which was mostly not a class at all, was absolutely slavish in its loyalty and was the mainspring of Empire.
The American Brits were "middle-class" in the original sense: landed, propertied, but untitled. So too were the bulk, perhaps even a majority, of the original population, although they held much lesser property. But in America, there was no landed gentry... the term was a nonsensical import.
The unreality of it all is inevitable. A new, faux middle-class is declared just as the old, real one is destroyed.
But the real innovation was the scale of it all... in Britain and America. Such a middle-class exists in every capitalist country. The difference with these two was that it was declared to exist as even a majority of the population. It takes a lot of bodies to administer an Empire, it seems.
To glorify the "middle class" is to glorify Empire knowingly or not.
In truth, it is not class but a polyglot. It consists of small proprietors who are constantly diminished in number, new "entrepreneurs" propelled by revolutionary changes in industry, highly paid employees of large enterprises, educated professionals and specialists, and even an "aristocracy of labor". This exists in every country. What makes it quite often reactionary is its total dependence on the ruling class.
That they exist on such a grand scale is precisely because of Empire. In the 1950s and 1960s, the political population of the U.S. included not only the small businessmen, engineers, and advertising executives of the U.S. but also those of India, and Argentina, and Belgium, and Tunisia... all of whom happened to be American... for the moment.
It is Empire on a grand scale which produces this polyglot on such a grand scale, so as to dominate the political life of a country and drown even proletarian thought in ordinary philistinism. And it is the death of Empire, or its stagnation, which will weaken and ultimately displace that monopoly. How do we know this to be true? The same way as everything else we know... it wasn't always like this.
Most people don't distinguish between personal property and private property.
Anyone who obtains their understanding of Marx through Anthony Sutton will be forever ignorant. Why not go to the source?
While, the origin of the term may be British, for most of its history, the American middle-class went by a Continental definition. America was a “middle-class” country from its inception… built on “free” land (in the dual sense… i.e. also “freed” from its former inhabitants. As late as the decades after the Civil War, 70% of the population owned their own means of production, even if it was modest in most cases.
The subsequent transformation of that status was partly the operation of the very same forces of Empire and partly the result of the flood of European immigrants recently freed from their property. In approximately 60 years, the population of freeholders fell from 70% to less than 10%. It is less than 5% today, once the various tax schemes and contractor rackets are abstracted away. The story of America before the War is the story of The Grapes of Wrath and in no way could the U.S. be accurately described as a “middle-class country.”
So what has changed, since? Was it FDR, the New Deal, Democrats… a new “Enlightenment” perhaps? In fact, it was a positive outcome to the Second World War. What Britain lost, the U.S. inherited. And among that inheritance was a new definition for “middle-class”, adopted from the English.
Social mobility, the movement up the division of labor, a certain level of prosperity, advancement through education… and all of it made possible from industrial ascendancy and the fact that Indian banks were now located in New York. The end of that era comes with globalization. It makes little difference whether the new era produces a new capitalist competition or whether the very success of American Empire relocates Indian banks to India. The inevitable result will be the decomposition of the American middle-class and there is not a single political perspective which promises otherwise. It is the division of misery in the decline that is in question.
Capitalism does not elevate… it expropriates and impoverishes. Its urban slums and shanty towns are a step down from the rural, quasi-capitalist material it begins with. Worldwide, it expropriates wealth from the many instead of creating “prosperity”. It is only in microcosm that it appears otherwise.
Look at some charts on postwar income in the U.S.- they divide U.S. income into a hierarchy of 10 tiers, each representing 10% of the population, and then project that income forward from WW2. For something like 20 years, the top seven or eight of the ten reach upwards… until they stall in the 1960s and 70s. After that, one after another, the next highest tier stagnates… sometimes even falls… until only a couple of tiers continue to advance. Meanwhile, the “lifestyle” is temporarily maintained through two incomes, and then through huge debt and home equity loans, followed by the first general drop in home ownership and the first general reversal of “liquidity” in a generation. The story is straightforward.
All attempts to paint the existence of the middle-class as an aspect of “politics” or policy, positively or negatively, are simply wrong. The "middle-class" is a historically created, changing, and ultimately decomposing social structure which is no more a permanent part of America than Conestoga Wagons or the railroads.