Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl
Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a
natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the
rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The
lives of the rich are not our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt
for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to pay armies of
lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to
censure and control public debate and stifle dissent. Neoliberalism,
deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even
eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade,
globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity the
ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests
are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and
economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a
liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to
extinguish human life.
The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about
sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They
are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration.
They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun
control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural
freedom. They are not happy to talk about class. Race, gender, religion,
abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used
to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent
hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats
and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. There are few
substantial differences between the two ruling political parties in the
United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg
can switch effortlessly from one party to the other. Once oligarchs seize
power, Aristotle wrote, a society must either accept tyranny or choose
revolution.
The United States stood on the cusp of revolution a fact President
Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged in his private correspondence amid the
breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s. Roosevelt responded by aggressively
curbing the power of the oligarchs. The federal government dealt with
massive unemployment by creating 12 million jobs through the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), making the government the largest employer in the
country. It legalized unions, many of which had been outlawed, and through
the National Labor Relations Act empowered organizing. It approved banking
regulations, including the Emergency Banking Act, the Banking Act and the
Securities Act, all in 1933, to prevent another stock market crash. The
Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided the equivalent in todays
money of $9.88 billion for relief operations in cities and states. The
Democratic president heavily taxed the rich and corporations. (The
Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was still taxing
the highest earners at 91%.) Roosevelts administration instituted programs
such as Social Security and a public pension program. It provided financial
assistance to tenant farmers and migrant workers. It funded arts and
culture. It created the United States Housing Authority and instituted the
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the minimum wage and set
a limit on mandatory work hours. This heavy government intervention lifted
the country out of the Great Depression. It also made Roosevelt, who was
elected to an unprecedented fourth term, and the Democratic Party wildly
popular among working and middle-class families. The Democratic Party,
should it resurrect such policies, would win every election in a landslide.
But the New Deal was the bête noire of the oligarchs. They began to undo
Roosevelts New Deal even before World War II broke out at the end of 1941.
They gradually dismantled the regulations and programs that had not only
saved capitalism but arguably democracy itself. We now live in an oligarchic
state. The oligarchs control politics, the economy, culture, education and
the press. Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con artist, but he savages
the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his
crowds. He, like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic class.
But Trump, though an embarrassment to the oligarchs, does not, like Sanders,
pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite
violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and
consolidate tyranny, but he will leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom
the oligarchs fear and hate.
The Democratic Party elites will use any mechanism, no matter how nefarious
and undemocratic, to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination. The New
York Times interviewed 93 of the more than 700 superdelegates, appointed by
the party and permitted to vote in the second round if no candidate receives
the required 1,991 delegates to win in the first round. Most of those
interviewed said they would seek to prevent Sanders from being the nominee
if he did not have a majority of delegates in the first count, even if it
required drafting someone who did not run in the primaries Sen. Sherrod
Brown of Ohio was mentioned and even if it led to Sanders supporters
abandoning the party in disgust. If Sanders fails to obtain 1,991 delegates
before the convention, which appears likely, it seems nearly certain he will
be blocked by the party from becoming the Democratic candidate. The damage
done to the Democratic Party, if this happens, will be catastrophic. It will
also all but ensure that Trump wins a second term.
As I wrote in my Feb. 17 column, The New Rules of the Games, Sanders
democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His
political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where
democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is
routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical
socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the
military budget, for Medicare for All, abolishing the death penalty,
eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of
Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to
$15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College,
banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a
revolutionary agenda.
Sanders, unlike many more radical socialists, does not propose
nationalizing the banks and the fossil fuel and arms industries, I
continued. He does not call for the criminal prosecution of the financial
elites who trashed the global economy or the politicians and generals who
lied to launch preemptive wars, defined under international law as criminal
wars of aggression, which have devastated much of the Middle East, resulted
in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees and displaced
people, and cost the nation between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. He does not
call for worker ownership of factories and businesses. He does not promise
to halt the governments wholesale surveillance of the public. He does not
intend to punish corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas. Most
importantly, he believes, as I do not, that the political system, including
the Democratic Party, can be reformed from within. He does not support
sustained mass civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we
have of halting the climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race.
On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an enlightened moderate.
The Democratic Party leaders are acutely aware that in a functioning
democracy, one where the rich do not buy elections and send lobbyists to
Washington and state capitals to write laws and legislation, one where the
danger of oligarchic rule is understood and part of the national debate,
they would be out of a job.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the
pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The Democrats, like the
Republicans, serve the interests of the defense contractors. The Democrats,
like the Republicans, serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry. The
Democrats, along with the Republicans, authorized $738 billion for our
bloated military in fiscal 2020. The Democrats, like the Republicans, do not
oppose the endless wars in the Middle East. The Democrats, like the
Republicans, took from us our civil liberties, including the right to
privacy, freedom from wholesale government surveillance, and due process.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, legalized unlimited funding from the
rich and corporations to transform our electoral process into a system of
legalized bribery. The Democrats, like the Republicans, militarized our
police and built a system of mass incarceration that has 25% of the worlds
prisoners, although the United States has only 5% of the worlds population.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, are the political face of the
oligarchy.
The leaders of the Democratic Party the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck
Schumer, Tom Perez would rather implode the party and the democratic state
than surrender their positions of privilege. The Democratic Party is not a
bulwark against despotism. It is the guarantor of despotism. It is a full
partner in the class project. Its lies, deceit, betrayal of working men and
women and empowering of corporate pillage made a demagogue like Trump
possible. Any threat to the class project, even the tepid one that would be
offered by Sanders as the partys nominee, will see the Democratic elites
unite with the Republicans to keep Trump in power.
What will we do if the oligarchs in the Democratic Party once again steal
the nomination from Sanders? Will we finally abandon a system that has
always been gamed against us? Will we turn on the oligarchic state to build
parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against
power? Will we organize unions, third parties and militant movements that
speak in the language of class warfare? Will we form community development
organizations that provide local currencies, public banks and food
cooperatives? Will we carry out strikes and sustained civil disobedience to
wrest power back from the oligarchs to save ourselves and our planet?
In 2016 I did not believe that the Democratic elites would permit Sanders to
be the nominee and feared, correctly, they would use him after the
convention to herd his followers into the voting booths for Hillary Clinton.
I do not believe this animus against Sanders has changed in 2020. The theft
this time may be more naked, and for this reason more revealing of the
forces involved. If all this plays out as I expect and if those on the left
continue to put their faith and energy into the Democratic Party, they are
not simply willfully naive but complicit in their own enslavement. No
successful political movement will be built within the embrace of the
Democratic Party, nor will such a movement be built in one election cycle.
The struggle to end oligarchic rule will be hard and bitter. It will take
time. It will require self-sacrifice, including sustained protest and going
to jail. It will be rooted in class warfare. The oligarchs will stop at
nothing to crush it. Open, nonviolent revolt against the oligarchic state is
our only hope. Oligarchic rule must be destroyed. If we fail, our democracy,
and finally our species, will become extinct.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers
