Monday, August 28, 2006
(8:43 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Class Unconsciousness
There's a case to be made that class -- the economic kind, not "social class" -- is the biggest issue facing the United States and the world today. Just within the United States, you can see completely and totally obvious signs. For instance, there's a story out in the New York Times entitled "Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity" -- that is, workers are producing more and more for the owners, and workers are getting a proportionately smaller and smaller share. The gap between rich and poor is growing. Social programs are nickled and dimed while the rich get tax cuts. The acknowledged reason that getting an effective single-payer health care system in America is impossible is because of corporate interests (insurance companies). We are in the midst of a war in which primarily lower-class people are doing the fighting, and meanwhile major defense firms are getting multi-billion-dollar contracts. A major city's poor black population was left to die in a hurricance; a year later, their city still stands in ruins and its people are spread out in isolated trailer parks. The same does not generally happen when a hurricane endangers Florida's retirement communities. Globally, the exploitation of poor nations by multinational corporations is a brutal daily reality.Yet everyone acts as though it's impossible that class could ever be an issue, and day after day we are barraged with fantasy stories about how "moral values" are the biggest issues or about how the greatest danger to global security is "religious extremism" -- not preemptive imperialist war, not the looting of natural resources, not the exploding population of third world urban slums.
This stuff is all so obvious, and yet so completely off the radar. Liberals don't talk about povery -- it's all about the "middle class" for them. Income inequality is an opportunity to talk about how bad the Republicans are. "National security" is all focussed on spectacular but low-probability events that in any case will never effect most areas of the country -- security from want and bankrupcy is the kind of "national security" most people would actually benefit from. Now somehow the liberals have to come up with a "serious" way to talk about the "threat" of Iran -- a threat that does not exist.
America's entire political life is based on fantasies, when it's not based on outright lies.
