Markin comment:
The rich, especially the very rich, in capitalist America, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald’s evocative description, are different from you and I. Certainly today, by every possible index, that is the case, although it has not caused the rest of us, the poor, to rise up and smite the haughty bums down. Yet. Today, though, I am not as interested in the transgressions of the rich, and their abilities to make life very tough for the rest of us but to look at the other end of the rich versus poor axis. And that description of the battle lines is exactly the point I want to discuss. Marxists have always used the rich versus poor description as propagandistic shorthand for the two sides in the capitalist class struggle but those designations have always been too broad and all-inclusive when one looks at the political fault lines of any capitalist society, and particularly of American capitalist society.
Some cases in point. Recently I commented, in response to the electoral gains of the amorphous tea party movement, that some of the elements of that movement made me wonder about the long ago struggle to bring Enlightenment values to this continent (See A Republic Of Virtue Or A Republic Of Lunatics? - Musings On Late Bourgeois Electoral Politics). There I noted:
“Now remember those were the days when, although we current revolutionaries reserve our criticisms of what was wrought and how deep that revolution was, the democratic experiment on this continent was an isolated light in the wilderness of world politics. A real step forward in human progress. What does this current crop of sadists, masochists, sado-masochists, maso-sadists, unreconstructed foot-fetishists, unemployed court jesters, punishment freaks, chain-whippers, chattel slavery worshippers, and their allies have to do with all that…”
And there I was speaking about the tea party candidates so one can imagine what is going on down at the base. Part of that base, to be kind, is made up of marginal people; the survivalists, the Aryan brothers (and sisters), the street corner (or now mall) hang-out slick boys and girls, and the stone hard luck cases. The pimps, pushers, hustlers, grifters, drifters and midnight shifters. In short what we call the dregs of society, the lumpen proletariat. They provide the tinder for fascist movements when those movements start to rear their ugly heads and gather steam.
Another case. I also recently placed as part of my Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By series Pete Seeger’s song Hold The Line a tribute to those left-wing militants, including trade unionists, who held off the incensed local business types, the irate World War veterans, and the forbears of those same street corner boys (then pool hall boys from the looks of them) out at rural Peekskill, New York in the late 1940s at the dawn of the red scare “night of the long knives” Cold War here in America.
Finally, as part of my Fragments Of Working Class Culture series I placed an entry here entitled On the Question Of Working Class War Time Social-Patriotism that dealt with the intersection of street corner society (armed robbery branch) and the working poor in providing the social support, and cannon fodder, for American imperial military adventures in my old coming of age growing-up working poor neighborhood, including within my own family.
Now all of this is anecdotal, of course, but there is a thread that runs through all of this from the late 1940s to the present. It is not enough to say poor, hell, those street corner kids were (and are) poor, desperately poor in most cases as I will bear witness to. However, if one does not acknowledge the heterogeneous fragmentation of the working class, especially in late capitalist society, and the potential, the real potential for the corner boys and girls to provide fuel for reactionary movements then we are in serious trouble if what is now brewing at the base of society explodes.
Here is a little snapshot, or rather here are snapshots of the way to begin to look at our allies and enemies before we even get to tackle the rich. The core of the working class; the people in blue, pink, and white collars who today are actually privileged to be working, struggling to raise families, sent their kids to college, pay the bills, go to lodge meetings, coach Little League, whatever, is where our battleground is. Yes, some are heading to the tea party express, for now, but that doesn’t negate that we have to get to that element. And fast.
The working poor, those who marginally work, who work a lot but don’t make much, or are now unemployed have to be organized for our side. The street corner boys and girls, the lumpens, who mainly come from the working poor (and make life hell for those poor, not the rich) have to be watched and politically neutralized. This is hardly an exhaustive note but take it rather as a tom-tom for what might be ahead. These are the practical matters we face today in order to win under our banner-“the fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government.”
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