On July 15, 2013, Douglas Kihn writes an op-ed in Trughout.org:
This is the big question, right? It’s what people are wondering everywhere.
The answer is simple and plausible – but the explanation is a bit more complicated. The majority of Americans are suffering terribly from the current economic crisis, but they do not yet have a political self-identity that will allow for a successful fightback. They don’t know who they are or what they’re fighting for. Neither do they understand whom or what they are fighting against.
The majority of Americans, unknowingly, are members of the working class, AKA the proletariat…
The American majority will be fighting against the other pole of attraction – the ruling class, AKA the capitalist class, AKA the bourgeoisie, and their particular version of class society, which could be referred to as the Dictatorship of Capital. The rulers are fighting for the status quo – their supposed right to own, control, and accumulate wealth – and the power over the majority that that wealth provides.
The capitalist class already knows who they are and what they are fighting for, and they are well aware of who their enemy is. That’s why they are presently winning the fights.
The last four decades have witnessed the first-ever generalized stagnation of wages and benefits for working people in this country, as well as the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world, from middle and low income Americans to the billionaire gamblers, bankers, industrialists, and their hirelings. According toMother Jones, from 1979 to the present, the productivity of American capitalism grew over 80 percent, while US wages only grew around 12 percent.
The share of US wealth held by half of American households plummeted in 2010 to1.1 percent, while the top 10 percent’s share was 74.5 percent. And according to the British aid agency Oxfam, the 2012 income alone of the 100 wealthiest families in the world was enough to end global poverty four times over!
This is the Privatize Everything period, when every grain of sand and every drop of moisture must be owned and extracted for their profit-producing potential. Since capitalist markets began crashing in the early 1970s due to the final exhaustion of the post-World War II boom and the subsequent global crisis of overproduction, American workers and small business owners have been hit with a concerted regimen of job speedup, increased competition, and economic strangulation – AKA “austerity” – which is aimed directly at them.
For the working class in America, unemployment remains high; debt is increasing; pensions are under attack; public education and medical care are being undermined; prices keep climbing; security and respect on the job are historical memories; public services are being slashed; cultural standards are coarsening; prisons are filling; foreign wars continuing without end; cop brutality increasing; harmful addictions of all kinds soaring; personal relationships fraying and mental/physical health spiraling downward, while the secretive security state grows stronger day by day. Times are good for snake oil salesmen of all colors and stripes, but bad for whistleblowers and other honest folk – and getting worse.
So the objective justifications for the Big Fightback are firmly in place.
Some are fighting back, but not the majority of Americans all at once… Despite some victories here and there, none have so far initiated a real groundswell of opposition to the relentless rightward course of the oligarchy and its institutions of class rule.
The development of modern technology has far outpaced political understanding and social progress (think nuclear bombs, global warming, and artificial intelligence). That is why the catch up, when it happens, will likely be rapid and explosive, taking most by surprise.
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the phenomenon of worker-owned enterprises. It’s understandable that workers hate being at the mercy of bosses or any kind of mis-leadership. To avoid layoffs and harassment, a few are pooling their resources to buy the businesses at which they work. Some people believe that this development will gradually and seamlessly replace capitalism as we know it.
These developments are valuable as learning experiences for the working class and can help to prepare for an alternative society. However, the strategy has some inherent problems:
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While worker-owned businesses do not have pay management salaries or generate profits for shareholders, they nevertheless must pay for overhead such as rent, utilities, raw materials, and marketing and still have some left over for the workers and all the while compete against large corporations, which can buy cheap in bulk, cut prices, and more easily absorb temporary loses in order to put smaller competitors out of business.
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Without an accompanying cultural shift away from unbridled competition, the talented and greedy few may eventually become the new bosses. We remain people acculturated to a dog-eat-dog culture, surrounded daily on all sides by selfishness and insecurity.
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The workers at major corporations will never raise the money to buy these corporations, because the super-rich who own them care more about the powerthat wealth confers on them than the actual selling price, and will do anything and everything to smash any idea about surrendering their power.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17498-why-arent-americans-fighting-back
