The Invisible Wage Class


We are invisible as they do not take notice of us.

They ignore their privilege and are forgiven:

[T]o the privileged, privilege is invisible. That’s not just a matter of personal cluelessness, or of personal isolation from the less privileged, though these can of course be involved. It’s a matter of enculturation. The mass media and every other aspect of mainstream American culture constantly present the experience of privileged people as normal, and just as constantly feed any departure from that experience through an utterly predictable set of filters.

They say we are stupid and lazy and forgetful.

They mock our candidate to no avail.

Here’s Trump 2500 years ago.

Bernie has rightfully attracted the millennials.  Unfortunately, they don’t know shit and haven’t done shit.  I’d rather hang with those who ran this country back when it ran.

Regardless, the millennials and the wage class represent a lot of pissed off voters.  And both have been sold down the river by the salary class on behalf of the oligarchs:

The reason that millions of Americans have had their standard of living hammered for forty years, while the most affluent twenty per cent have become even more affluent, is no mystery. What happened was that corporate interests in this country, aided and abetted by a bipartisan consensus in government and cheered on by the great majority of the salary class, stripped the US economy of living wage jobs by offshoring most of America’s industrial economy, on the one hand, and flooding the domestic job market with millions of legal and illegal immigrants on the other…

They are corporatists to the last man and therefore technocrats capable of anything:

Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Gitta Sereny in “Into That Darkness,” Omer Bartov in “Murder in Our Midst,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago,” Primo Levi in “The Drowned and the Saved” and Ella Lingens-Reiner in “Prisoners of Fear” argue that the modern instrument of evil is the technocrat, the man or woman whose sole concern is technological and financial efficiency, whose primary measurement of success is self-advancement, even if it means piling up corpses or destroying the lives of children.

It took the affluent class putting nearly every black male in prison at some point to subjugate their race.  They subsist in most part, with many in the welfare class.

The bully boys have come for the wage class:

The hatred is the product of a liberal class that did nothing to halt corporations from driving tens of millions of families into poverty and desperation as it mouthed empty platitudes about rights and economic advancement.

And we are gone:

Wolin and Saul excoriate academics, intellectuals and journalists, charging they have abrogated their calling to expose abuses of power and give voice to social criticism; they instead function as echo chambers for elites, courtiers and corporate systems managers.

With all that time on our hands:

There must be people, they said, willing to dedicate their lives to confronting the corporate state outside traditional institutions and parties. Revolt, for a few, must become a vocation. The alliance between mass movements and a professional revolutionary class, they said, offers the best chance for an overthrow of corporate power.

Meanwhile, the millennials have been robbed of a future:

Higher education and its professoriate have been targeted because they represent a major reservoir of resistance to corporate control and the erosion of democracy. The last thing that elites want to encourage is a space in which critical thinking is nourished and a liberal arts education is valued.

From H.L. Mencken:

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

Perhaps the millennials and the wage class will throw in together:

Hillary Clinton, like her already-forgotten Republican equivalents, is a perfect salary class candidate; she speaks for the privileged, and her entire campaign consists of waving around sound bites that signal to the privileged that they don’t need to worry about significant change if she moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Donald Trump, and to a lesser extent Bernie Sanders, are appealing instead to the wage class. I doubt either one expected to get anything like as far as he has, but both seem perfectly willing to ride the wave of popular discontent just as far as it will take them—and in Trump’s case, it seems likely to take him straight to the White House this autumn.

It’s not as though we have a choice:

If we cannot think morally, if we live devoid of empathy, if our advancement comes at the expense of the other, if we lose touch with the wisdom of the past, we cannot rebel. And if we do not rebel we will sustain a system that will ultimately slay us.

The consequences will be dire:

College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended.

There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.

The political process must be abandoned:

Since most citizens are more interested in their own personal, short-term advantage than they are in the long-term destiny of their nation, democracy turns into a polite fiction for plutocracy just as soon as the rich figure out how to buy votes, a lesson that rarely takes them long to learn…

We have a different purpose:

It is not our job to take power. It is our job to keep power constantly off balance and fearful of overstepping its reach to pillage on behalf of the elites…

And since we have no choice:

The fight against radical evil is the ultimate affirmation of life…

The rebel expects nothing and gets nothing…

The rebel, who has few friends, is the constant target of the liberal establishment…

To do nothing during a time of radical evil is to be complicit.

We must also abandon hope:

There is nothing inevitable about human existence except birth and death. There are no forces, whether divine or technical, that will guarantee us a better future. When we give up false hopes, when we see human nature and history for what they are, when we accept that progress is not preordained, then we can act with an urgency and passion that comprehends the grim possibilities ahead.

And take on a terrible aspect:

Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the disassociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil.

With a great resolve:

The only choice offered by “bourgeois society,” as Friedrich Engels knew, is “socialism or regression into barbarism.”

We must avoid hypocrisy:

You cannot truly claim you oppose the apartheid state of Israel, endless war, mass incarceration, the ravaging of the environment or wholesale state surveillance and then go vote for Clinton.

After all:

“The price of freedom,” Malcolm said shortly before he was killed, “is death.”

Until then, we must be subtle:

Demonstrators are required to exercise tremendous self-discipline as they endure acts of violence and repression. They must refuse to retaliate. If bonds of sympathy are established between protesters and some of the police and soldiers, the ruling elites are unsure whether they can trust the security apparatus to obey. This engenders paralysis within the centers of power.

And remain focused:

An adherence to nonviolence will not save us from the violence of the state and the state’s hired goons and vigilantes. But nonviolence makes conversion, even among our oppressors, possible. And it is conversion that is our goal.

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