Let’s Get This Class War Started
By Chris Hedges
“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is
said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly
replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up
a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The
cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into
compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth
breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story
“The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable
commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants,
gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the
whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic
and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become
disposable.
The public face of the oligarchic class bears little
resemblance to the private face. I, like Fitzgerald, was thrown into the
embrace of the upper crust when young. I was shipped off as a scholarship
student at the age of 10 to an exclusive New England boarding school. I had
classmates whose fathers—fathers they rarely saw—arrived at the school in their
limousines accompanied by personal photographers (and at times their
mistresses), so the press could be fed images of rich and famous men playing
the role of good fathers. I spent time in the homes of the ultra-rich and
powerful, watching my classmates, who were children, callously order around men
and women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies and servants. When the
sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble there are always lawyers,
publicists and political personages to protect them—George W. Bush’s life is a
case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich. The rich have a
snobbish disdain for the poor—despite well-publicized acts of philanthropy—and
the middle class. These lower classes are viewed as uncouth parasites,
annoyances that have to be endured, at times placated and always controlled in
the quest to amass more power and money. My hatred of authority, along with my
loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness and sense of entitlement of the
rich, comes from living among the privileged. It was a deeply unpleasant
experience. But it exposed me to their insatiable selfishness and hedonism. I
learned, as a boy, who were my enemies.
The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic
rulers is one of our gravest faults. We have been blinded to the depravity of
our ruling elite by the relentless propaganda of public relations firms that
work on behalf of corporations and the rich. Compliant politicians, clueless entertainers
and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture, which holds up the rich as
leaders to emulate and assures us that through diligence and hard work we can
join them, keep us from seeing the truth.
“They were careless
people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote of the wealthy couple at the centre of
Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back
into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam
Smith and Karl Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism
between the rich and the masses. “Those who have too much of the goods of
fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able
to submit to
authority,” Aristotle wrote in “Politics.” “The evil begins at
home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought
up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.” Oligarchs, these
philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and
overt repression and exploitation to protect their wealth and power at our
expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas.
Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to
an ideology—in this case free market capitalism and globalization—that
justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal
expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant
material relationships grasped as ideas.”
The blanket dissemination of the ideology of free market
capitalism through the media and the purging, especially in academia, of
critical voices have permitted our oligarchs to orchestrate the largest income
inequality gap in the industrialized world. The top 1 percent in the United
States own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent own
only 7 percent, as Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in “The Price of Inequality.” For
every dollar that the wealthiest 0.1 percent amassed in 1980 they had an
additional $3 in yearly income in 2008, David Cay Johnston explained in the
article “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes.” The bottom 90
percent, Johnson said, in the same period added only one cent. Half of the
country is now classified as poor or low-income. The real value of the minimum
wage has fallen by $2.77 since 1968. Oligarchs do not believe in self-sacrifice
for the common good. They never have. They never will. They are the cancer of
democracy.
“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive
people, but of course we are,” Wendell Berry writes. “Why else would we allow
our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why
else would we all—by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt
politicians—be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane
to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for
it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are
wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough.
Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”
The rise of an oligarchic state offers a nation two routes,
according to Aristotle. The impoverished masses either revolt to rectify the
imbalance of wealth and power or the oligarchs establish a brutal tyranny to
keep the masses forcibly enslaved. We have chosen the second of Aristotle’s
options. The slow advances we made in the early 20th century through unions,
government regulation, the New Deal, the courts, an alternative press and mass
movements have been reversed. The oligarchs are turning us—as they did in the
19th century steel and textile factories—into disposable human beings. They are
building the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human
history to keep us submissive.
This imbalance would not have disturbed most of our Founding
Fathers. The Founding Fathers, largely wealthy slaveholders, feared direct
democracy. They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect
the property rights of the native aristocracy. The masses were to be kept at
bay. The Electoral College, the original power of the states to appoint
senators, the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African-Americans
and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at
the
beginning of the republic. We had to fight for our voice. Hundreds of
workers were killed and thousands were wounded in our labour wars. The violence
dwarfed the labour battles in any other industrialized nation. The democratic
openings we achieved were fought for and paid for with the blood of
abolitionists, African-Americans, suffragists, workers and those in the
anti-war and civil rights movements. Our radical movements, repressed and
ruthlessly dismantled in the name of anti-communism, were the real engines of
equality and social justice. The squalor and suffering inflicted on workers by
the oligarchic class in the 19th century is mirrored in the present, now that
we have been stripped of protection. Dissent is once again a criminal act. The
Mellons, Rockefellers and Carnegies at the turn of the last century sought to
create a nation of masters and serfs. The modern corporate incarnation of this
19th century oligarchic elite has created a worldwide neofeudalism, where
workers across the planet toil in misery while corporate oligarchs amass
hundreds of millions in personal wealth.
Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this
right. The sooner we realize that we are locked in deadly warfare with our
ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realize that these elites must be
overthrown. The corporate oligarchs have now seized all institutional systems
of power in the United States. Electoral politics, internal security, the
judiciary, our universities, the arts and finance, along with nearly all forms
of communication, are in corporate hands. Our democracy, with faux debates
between two corporate parties, is meaningless political theatre. There is no
way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel
industry or war profiteers. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is
revolt.
It is not a new story. The rich, throughout history, have
found ways to subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout
history, have cyclically awoken to throw off their chains. The ceaseless fight
in human societies between the despotic power of the rich and the struggle for
justice and equality lies at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel, which uses the
story of Gatsby to carry out a fierce indictment of capitalism. Fitzgerald was
reading Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” as he was writing “The
Great Gatsby.” Spengler predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and
died, a class of “monied thugs” would replace the traditional political elites.
Spengler was right about that.
“There are only two
or three human stories,” Willa Cather wrote, “and they go on repeating
themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs once again
into the sky. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle.
It has been fought over and over in human history. We never seem to learn. It
is time to grab our pitchforks.
truthdig.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment.