This is one of the custom blogs I do for my Facebook friends. I asked if there was anything they wanted me to blog about, and I’m writing a post for Joe because he answered.
I loved the classism argument in today’s podcast. Made me think alot about where we come from. Will that be the new “obstacle” that our country has to overcome? Eventually we’ll need a cause again. Civil rights, done (for the most part). Gay rights, getting done. What’s next? Certainly not poverty. We are based on capitalism after all.
For those of you not familiar with my terrible podacast (I thank any who are, I know it must be hard for you), I maintain that the core issue in America right now is class. While there is intersectionality, and other forms of bigotry are of course very real, class just takes the cake in terms of direct effect on quality of life. For example, a middle class black man will always get better tangible care than a poor white guy. Yeah, they may be shitty about it, but if his money’s good he’ll get quality education, medical care, even safer cars and houses. His life will be measurably better than his poor white counterpart.
My other argument for class being the core issue is because I think of who it benefits. If rich and poor are consistently kept apart from each other, the rich make a killing (literally, they can kill us, either on purpose or through simple employer neglect and completely get away with it) and every societal ill can be blamed on the poor. Then if middle class and poor people believe that race is the issue they should focus on, we will ignore the fact that the rich continue to get richer while the middle class dissolves into poverty. At this point, I’d argue that the reason there aren’t many minorities in the upper class has just as much to do with the fact that poor parents have poor children than it does with the fact that the richest people are probably racist as fuck. But as racist as they are, they’ll bend over backwards for a person of color if they pay enough. Money negates color.
Investment bankers can send our entire economy to dick and never even lose their jobs over it. Meanwhile we have a peasant uprising when a Latino shoots a black kid, like more pressure on on our country’s already taught racial heartstrings is going to help anybody fix this shithole? Let’s all light candles and mourn this boy while the wealthiest among us stuff their pockets on government bailout gains that the rest of us will never, ever see.
The rich live in a different universe than the rest of us. Everybody knows that the rules don’t apply to them. How could we make that happen? They own everything we would use to level the playing field. Down to the very politicians we vote for to protect us from this shit.
Sorry if this is really dark. On the one hand, it’s everything I actually think, but even in evil dictatorships there is happiness and love and sunshine, or whatever. Just because none of us have the kind of freedom or justice we think we do doesn’t prevent us from having good days, maybe even good lives. There are always children smiling in Russia. Sometimes you’re just happy anyway. On the other hand, I had another day where several small things went wrong, none of my big things went right and I’d really just like to be able to get some fucking sleep, which has once again abandoned me.
First thanks for this post. You brought up an interesting point that I also like to hear your opinions on. Does democracy really work in a capitalist country where elections are not publicly financed? Put in other words, because we are capitalist in nature and elections re financed privately, are we truly democratic? Does socialism really reflect the will of the people (democracy) since the government policies help everyone? Better yet, is there a good example of any government in any period of history with capitalist economies that were truly democratic (they represented everyone, even minorities)? I can’t think of any since most histories of countries included slavery until recently.
I think that the short answer is no. There is no true way to have a democracy in a capitalist economy, nor is there an example of a true democracy to date. In capitalism money has too much influence, and in socialism the state has it.
But I’d argue that we’re as close as we’ve ever been in this era. Right now the super rich and the corporations have siezed the opportunity they created with the recession to get more than their fair share, but this is unsustainable. A top heavy society can not last. Eventually the tides will turn and hopefully the unions will experience a resurgence. Then something else will push it the other way. The same goes for state control in socialist countries. Eventually the power shifts too dramatically and some action is taken to maintain order and balance. The fact that we are able to effect change so quickly, that over the course of three small decades, we can go from the AIDS crisis to GayRealtor.com, says a lot for the effectiveness of a capitalist system. Because if your money is good, and minority money is just as good, maybe better since we’re such loyal markets, prejudice takes a back seat.
Yeah, the people with the most money have the most power, but when economic mobility is easy, that pool becomes way more diverse way more quickly. But the people without financial power do have to use their numerical advantage from time to time to ensure that economic mobility remains accessible.
I sense that we are on the brink of something, but I’ve been feeling like that for so long now. I also wonder sometimes if it will ever come.