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.
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to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
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