Miriam,
I was responding to Richard's remarks when he wrote: "We must make a
effort to not over complicate our comments and over simplify them at
the same time."
And I have no idea of what Richard was talking about, or why I wrote
what I did.
By the way, Cathy's mother died this past Wednesday. She was 28 days
shy of her 93RD birthday. We could see her slipping each time we
visited her. Our last two trips prior to Wednesday were not visits in
the sense that we interacted with her. She could barely whisper, and
her speech was so garbled that it made no sense. Wednesday we found
her unable to respond to our words or our touch. Cathy tried to have
her mother squeeze her hand, but with no success. It was last July
17, Dorothy's 92ND birthday, when Cathy found her in her apartment,
disoriented and unable to make sense, verbally. The doctor told us
that the extent of the stroke was so vast that she would not live
beyond three days. At the end of the third day, he said she might
live another three weeks. While she did seem to rally some, she never
was able to walk, even with a walker. She had no use of her right
side, which made eating difficult. She could say a few words clearly,
but most of what she said was garbled.
It's been a long, hard 11 months for Dorothy. She was unable to turn
over in bed without assistance. She could not remember what the Call
Button was, or the TV remote. And it was a hard 11 months for Cathy
and her sister Marlene...and for me, too.
It was a good thing we'd decided to work only part time this past
year, since we spent a good 5 hours each time we drove to Bremerton to
visit Dorothy and to make certain that she was receiving good care.
Cathy and Marlene each went every other day. This meant three or four
days each week. And mostly, when Cathy headed out I was riding
shotgun. Once the dust has settled and everyone has headed home,
we'll probably wonder how we suddenly have so much time on our hands.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/22/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
What did he say?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2019 12:43 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Clueless and Shameless: Joe Biden, Staggering
Frontrunner
And, Richard, you have done a magnificent job, if I do say so myself.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/22/19, R. E. Driscoll Sr <llocsirdsr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Comment: We must make a effort to not over complicate our comments
and over simplify them at the same time.
A difficult process for most people.
Richard Driscoll
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 21, 2019, at 8:21 PM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
OK. So I got the term wrong. But my idea was right. The view is
mechanistic. All these labels and definitions that are so important
to you, are not important to most of us. We don't think the way you
do. We don't understand all the terms, nor are we so literal. But
instead of fighting with me because I got the words wrong, try to
understand the general thought behind it. Your view is a mechanistic
view of history as economic class struggle and it is not the way in
which I conceptualize the world or human nature or history. But I
certainly do see class struggle as part of the whole.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2019 9:30 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Clueless and Shameless: Joe Biden,
Staggering Frontrunner
Miriam wrote: "I suspect that what you are referring to, is a very
mechanistic formula of economic theory like, "dialectic materialism"
How many times have I explained dialectical materialism on this list?
Not as many times as I have explained concepts like class relations,
but I have still explained it more than one time and you still do not
seem to understand what it is. First, dialectical materialism is not
an economic theory. It is not a theory at all. It is a philosophical
framework presented to understand the dynamic nature of the universe.
It concerns itself with the unity of contradictions. It is true that
it applies to economic theory just as much as it applies to anything
else, but before it can be used in economic theory the dialectical
relationships have to be identified. Second, calling dialectical
materialism mechanistic shows not only a very fundamental failure to
understand the concept, but it shows a failure to understand the polemics
of the debate that originated it.
Materialism is the view of the universe without appeals to the
supernatural to explain it. Some antiquated materialist concepts have
been identified as materialism itself, specifically mechanical
materialism.
That is the view of the universe as a clockwork universe with a
specific mechanical event causing every other event which causes
another event until all events have occurred. Dialectical materialism
denied that over simplistic view of the universe. It gave the view of
the universe that allowed for a constantly dynamic universe without
the necessity of falling back on mechanics or the supernatural
either. Calling dialectical materialism mechanistic is like calling a
spacecraft a submarine. This reminds me of a conversation I once had
in a bar. Somehow the subject of materialism came up. The other
person said that he was completely aware of what materialism was and
so I started talking about some of the implications. I was not even
talking about dialectics. Soon it became apparent that my
conversational partner thought that materialism meant something that
might be better called consumerism or acquisitiveness. That had
nothing to do with what I was talking about. So I started trying to
explain what kind of materialism I was talking about. No matter what
I said he persisted to assume that I was talking about the desire for
expensive consumer items. Finally someone who had been just sitting
there listening said, "You two are on entirely different
wavelengths." Miriam, I am suspecting that is how you and I can be
described. We are on entirely different wavelengths. I am talking
about one thing and you respond to me with the assumption that I am
talking about something and you go ahead and talk about that
something else as if I had been talking about it. ---
Carl Sagan
“ Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ”
― Carl Sagan
On 6/21/2019 5:27 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Roger,
You say that if we talk about economic classes, we must name them
and then you give them names like national bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie,
petty bourgeoisie, proletariat, lumpen proletariat labor aristocra
peasantry, proletarianized peasantry and so forth. These are simply
names that describe classes in a capitalist economic system
Those are names that Marx gave them back in what year? In what country?
Even if I chose to think about contemporary issues only in terms of
economic class, as if no other variables influenced what is
happening in today's world, there is no rule that says that I must use
those names.
Those names are not relevant to America in 2019, not as far as I'm
concerned. And I haven't heard any current Marxist economists use
them either. Not that they may not have used them as they were
learning Marxist theory, but if they want to communicate with their
fellow Americans, they need to use language and concepts that feel
relevant to people's everyday lives.
You write about how class can be used to understand people's
economic situation. You said, The categories of what is commonly
called class is there to let us know what economic role people play
in economic relations and how they relate to each other on an
economic basis. Ethnicity, religion or even the specific job one
performs are mostly irrelevant to this.
I cannot imagine how it is relevant to talk about people's financial
situations, about who has more privileges or more power, about who
ends up homeless or incarcerated, without taking ethnicity, race,
religion, and personal psychology into account. I suspect that what
you are referring to, is a very mechanistic formula of economic
theory like, "dialectic materialism" or some other economic theory,
the reverse side of market theory, which doesn't take real people
and their thoughts, feelings, or motivations into account.
In fact, one of the criticisms made of Bernie Sanders by some of his
detractors on the left, is that he doesn't talk enough about how
race impacts people's economic situation. I don't agree with that
particular criticism of him, but I do think that one can't look at
class status in the United States without analyzing the impact of
race, religion, and ethnicity on just who is a member of which economic
class.
We also have, in this country wide differences in philosophical
viewpoints regarding religion, sexuality, and civil liberties and
this divergence of viewpoint exists among the very wealthy. So
although in some ways George Soros and the Koch brothers have
similar self interests, in other ways, they use their money in very
different ways when it comes to influenceing events.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2019 3:24 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Miriam Vieni
<miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] Re: Clueless and Shameless: Joe
Biden, Staggering Frontrunner
Okay, you are getting into some of those quibbles that I alluded to
that I have with what Carl had to say, but your quibbles come from
an entirely different perspective. I will have to agree that it is
over simplistic to divide everyone into two classes, the ruling class
and the working class.
However, this talk about different ethnicities, religions and things
like that does not even address the whole point of dividing people
into classes at all. In some contexts the word class means category
and that is what you seem to be talking about. You can divide people
according to their ethnicity. You can divide people according to
whatever shade their skins are. You can divide people according to
whether they prefer to play chess or checkers. But if you divide
people by any of those criteria or any of the vast number of
criteria available for you to divide them by you have to ask the
question of why are you dividing them. Any such division you come up
with may very well have some usefulness in some study or endeavor
like psychology, sociology marketing studies or whatever, but you are
still talking about categories as opposed to class.
Okay, dividing people into classes is categorical too, but the
purpose of doing so will not be the same as dividing people into the
categories of people who stand under five feet and people who stand
over five feet. The categories of what is commonly called class is
there to let us know what economic role people play in economic
relations and how they relate to each other on an economic basis.
Ethnicity, religion or even the specific job one performs are mostly
irrelevant to this. As I have said before, you can be either a
lumper or a splitter and varying degrees of lumping or splitting may
be more or less appropriate for whatever you are doing with your
categories. You could pick out at random any two people from the
human population of the earth and compare them and find that one or
the other has some advantage over the other with some amount of
greater power or privilege, but to what purpose would you be making
that comparison? The only thing I can think of is that you might be
studying individual psychology, but that doesn't have much to do
with what is ordinarily meant when the word class is used. This
comparison of just one person to another, though, is an extreme
example of splitting. What Carl has explicated, though, is an extreme
example of lumping. Okay, there is the ruling class. They are called the
ruling class because they rule.
They control how the economic system is conducted and they have life
and death power over a lot of people. However, there are other
people who have a lot of power too who are not quite as powerful as
the ruling class. Their own lives may be subordinate to the ruling
class, but they still have a high degree of privilege and they
maintain that privilege by implementing ruling class directives and
by making their own directives when not directly implementing ruling
class directives. You have powerful people who own the biggest
manufacturing companies and who control those companies. You have
other powerful people who manage the transfer of money who are the
bankers. Below those kinds of people you have managers of various
levels and owners of smaller companies. You have company owners who
not only own and so implement their own power, but who also perform
productive labor themselves. Then you also have people who make
their living only from productive labor. Other people perform
agricultural labor for a wage or perform agricultural labor while
owning the farm where they work. Then you have a reserve of
unemployed people who are maintained to keep the price of labor from
being bid up so high that the owners would fail to make a profit
after paying wages. Among those unemployed are a layer who have to
resort to criminal activity to make a living and may become
professional criminals. There are a lot of other gradations too and
it has very little to do with their ethnicity, religion or other
characteristics that you mention. But my point in mentioning all of
these layers in the economic system is to illustrate just how over
simplistic Carl's division is. There are a lot of classes other than
the ruling class and the working class and just how far you are going to
split or lump them depends on what you happen to be doing with the
information. Now, let me add what I have been avoiding so far.
These various classes have names.
If you are going to talk about anything and have it make sense you
have to give it a name. Oh, I suppose you could describe it every
time you mention it, but that would be very unwieldy. I know,
Miriam, that you don't like it when I put a name to these classes,
but they have to be named in order to make sense of what is being
talked about. When someone calls classes by their names it does not
mean that there is an attempt to make you think in a certain way. It
does not mean that you are being looked down on. It does not mean
that anyone is dismissing your own cultural perspective. It does not
mean that you are being personally attacked or however you see it.
It only means that the person who uses those names is calling
something by its name. The names of those classes include names like
national bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, proletariat,
lumpen proletariat labor aristocracy, peasantry, proletarianized
peasantry and so forth. These are simply names that describe classes
in a capitalist economic system and the names were never given to
any of these classes to offend you or anybody else. And if we only
call the class divisions ruling class and working class we just
cannot talk about the ways these varying classes effect and relate to
each other.
---
Carl Sagan
“ Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ”
― Carl Sagan
On 6/21/2019 9:25 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
My feeling is that you can't just lump everyone together in, "the
working class". People have different levels of education, come
from different ethnic and racial and religious backgrounds, do very
different kinds of work, have very different kinds of life styles,
and most importantly, have very different views of who they are and
what their place is in this world. You're talking about power and
it's true that you don't have any more power than the people with
no education or who struggle to make a living for their children.
That is, you don't have any more power to influence whether or not
we have war or peace, or whether or not we get a single payer
health system. But you do have enough power so that you will be
treated with more consideration by business people, politicians,
and police officers. To me, for people like us to say that there's
no difference between us and migrant workers or fast food workers
or Walmart employees, is to trivialize the kinds of problems that those
working class people have. You're not one of them.
They know it and you know it.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2019 10:11 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Clueless and Shameless: Joe Biden,
Staggering Frontrunner
With all due respect, I continue to consider all of us who are not
members in good standing of the Ruling Class, to be members of the
Working Class. Unless we are homeless or chronically unemployed,
which would put us in the Lower Class.
Middle implies halfway between something and something else. In
the economic structure of the American Empire, there is no "Middle"
anything.
My wife and I earned, back in the early 1990's, a bit over $100,000
per year between us. So $100,000 would put us mid way between
$000,000 and $200,000. But in order to be midway between
$000,000,000 and $100,000,000, we would need to come in around
$50,000,000.
Middle Class is just another make believe term that soothes the
Soul, but means absolutely nothing.
But hey! All of the rest of you can call it anything you want,
because the fact of the matter is that all of us who are not
members in good standing in the Ruling Class are owned by one or
more members of that Ruling Class.
Remember, when you get set to disagree, a Monkey on a golden chain
is just as much of a prisoner as a Monkey on an Iron chain.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/20/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Clueless and Shameless: Joe Biden, Staggering Frontrunner By
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
20 June 19
Joe Biden just put a spotlight on his mindset when he explicitly
refused to apologize for fondly recalling how the Senate "got
things done" with "civility" as he worked alongside some of the
leading racist lawmakers of the 20th century. For Biden, the
personal is the political; he knows that he's virtuous, and that
should be more than good enough for African Americans, for women, for
anyone.
"There's not a racist bone in my body," Biden exclaimed Wednesday
night, moments after demanding: "Apologize for what?" His deep
paternalism surfaced during the angry outburst as he declared:
"I've been involved in civil rights my whole career, period,
period, period."
Biden has been "involved" in civil rights his "whole career" all
right. But at some crucial junctures, he was on the wrong side. He
teamed up with segregationist senators to oppose busing for school
desegregation in the 1970s. And he played a leading role - while
pandering to racism with a shameful Senate floor speech - for
passage of the infamous 1994 crime bill that fueled mass
incarceration.
Such aspects of Biden's record provide context for his comments
this week - praising an era of productive "civility" with the
virulent segregationist Dixiecrat senators Herman Talmadge of
Georgia and James Eastland of Mississippi (known as the "Voice of
the White South"), who often called black people "an inferior race."
Said Biden at a New York fundraiser Tuesday night: "Well guess what?
At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn't
agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished."
To Biden, any assessment of his past conduct that clashes with his
high self-regard is unfair; after all, he really means well. On
the campaign trail now, his cloying paternalism is as evident as
his affinity for wealthy donors.
Biden shuttles between the billionaire class and the working class
- funded by the rich while justifying the rich to everyone else.
His aspirations are bound up in notions of himself as
comforter-in-chief.
"I get it, I get it," Biden said during his brief and
self-adulatory non-apology video in early April to quiet the
uproar over his invasive touching of women and girls. He was
actually saying: I get it that I need to seem to get it.
"I want to talk about gestures of support and encouragement that
I've made to women and some men that have made them uncomfortable,"
Biden said in the video. "In my career I've always tried to make a
human connection - that's my responsibility, I think. I shake
hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and
say, 'You can do this' . It's the way I've always been. It's the
way I've tried to show I care about them and I'm listening."
Weeks later, appearing on ABC's "The View," he declared: "I have
never in my life, never, done anything in approaching a woman that
has been other than trying to bring solace." It was not a credible
claim; consider Lucy Flores, or the countless other women and
girls he has intrusively touched over the years.
For several decades, Biden has made his way through the political
terrain as a reflexive glad-hander. But times have changed a lot
more than he has.
"What the American people do not know yet is whether Biden has
actually internalized any of the blowback he's earned over the
years for his treatment of women," journalist Joe Berkowitz wrote last
week.
"So far, it's not looking good."
What's also looking grim is Biden's brazen adoration of wealthy
elites who feed on corporate power. His approach is to split the
rhetorical difference between the wealthy and the workers. And so,
days ago, at a fundraiser filled with almost 180 donors giving his
campaign the legal limit of $2,800 each - an event where he tried
and failed to get funding from a pro-Trump billionaire - Biden
declared:
"You know, you guys are great but Wall Street didn't build America.
You guys are incredibly important but you didn't build America.
Ordinary, hard-working, middle-class people given half the chance
is what built America."
The formula boils down to throwing the "hard-working middle class"
some rhetorical bones while continuing to service "you guys" on
Wall Street.
Given his desire to merely revert the country to pre-Trump days,
no wonder Biden keeps saying that a good future can stem from
finding common ground with Republicans. But for people who
understand the present-day GOP and really want a decent society,
Biden's claims are delusional.
Biden sees his public roles of winking patriarch, civility toward
racists, and collaborator with oligarchs as a winning political
combination. But if he becomes the Democratic presidential
nominee, Biden will suppress turnout from the party's base while
providing Republicans with plenty of effective (albeit hypocritical)
fodder.
Already the conservative press is salivating over the
transparently fraudulent pretenses of Lunch Bucket Joe, as in this
headline Tuesday in the right-wing Washington Examiner: "Biden
Rubs Elbows With Billionaires in $34M Penthouse."
When Bernie Sanders (who I continue to actively support) denounces
the political power of billionaires and repeats his 2020 campaign
motto - "Not Me. Us." - it rings true, consistent with his
decades-long record. But Biden can't outrun his own record, which
is enmeshed in his ongoing mentality.
And
so, the former vice president is in a race between his pleasant
image and unpleasant reality.
As the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe
Biden is the biggest threat to Joe Biden's political future. He
continues to be who he has been, and that's the toxic problem.
Email This Page
Norman Solomon is cofounder and national coordinator of
RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California
to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a
coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network.
Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to
Reader Supported News.
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