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IS THERE A CLASS WAR IN THE U.S.?
A couple of congressional Republican leaders have recently called the President’s proposal to control the deficit, partly with tax increases on the affluent, “class warfare.” But then the Republicans have always been good at the use of language, even when the words have little to do with reality. The term “class warfare” dates back to the medieval insistence that the lord of the manor had the sole right to control both the grain supplies and the bread ovens. The peasants revolted and there arose a clash between those two very separate classes. Guess who won? With the rise of democratic societies, it became clear that no one class had the right to dominate everything, and that some system of equity had to replace feudalism. The Marxists picked up the language and held that any economic system which only benefited the rich at the expense of the working class needed to be challenged. The Republicans, in an attempt to label Obama’s proposal as Marxist, regurgitated the phrase.
Is America currently being seized by Maxist oriented class warfare? The best evidence would be the rapid flow of goods, money and power down, so that the already powerful and the rich lost massive ground and the poor and middle-class gained it. Society would then find most of the economic power in the hands of the proletariat. But the exact opposite has been taking place. Our current economic and political format guarantees that the already affluent receive the lion’s share of everything, while allowing some of the goodies to “trickle down.” Supply side economics loads money at the top, assuming that the accumulated wealth in the hands of entrepreneurs will generate jobs and therefore some of the overflow would leak on everyone below. Not even Milton Freedman, however, envisaged the day when instead of trickling down, wealth gushed up—and stayed there.
If there is class warfare these days, it is not in the development of an economic system where the power belongs to the workers, the poor and the outsiders, but is deposited almost solely with corporate interests, together with the already rich and the politicians they can buy. If it’s class warfare, guess who is winning? The top 1% of the population earns a staggering 20% of the nation’s net income. In the meantime almost forty-five million Americans live in poverty, one out of five children are in want of the basic resources needed to sustain a decent life, and tens of millions have no health insurance. The President’s proposals at their most extreme wouldn’t make a dent in that mal-distribution.
At the same time there is a concerted effort to shred the safety net woven by FDR and LBJ, even while the nation’s wealth continues to gush up. That’s class warfare! It is a belligerent assault on the poor, the left out, the unemployed, the ill-educated and the nobodies, on behalf of keeping the way clear so that the biggest hogs may stay at the table. The affluent have the political movers almost totally in their camp. Not only Republicans but also a sizeable smattering of Democrats are deep in the pockets of these right-wing power brokers.
No matter what sounds we are now hearing from the likes of the Tea Party, I am convinced that at heart the vast majority of Americans believe that health care for all, the social safety net, decent wages for workers, widespread educational opportunities, good schools and a society that cares about its elderly are all more important than preserving the entirety of the enormous wealth of America’s most affluent. If America is not built on the notion of fairness, what have we to offer the rest of the world? My guess is that sooner or later the American people will wake up and realize just how badly they have been had and how cheaply they have been bought. What we might hope to achieve is an equitable balance of America’s wealth. That is not the product of class warfare, but of economic and political justice.
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