Neil Howe: 'Civil War Is More Likely Than People Think'

[pbrower2a]

(01-11-2019, 09:48 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: (exchange excised for brevity)

I'm sorry but the Democratic party is becoming the party of haves and have nots. The Democratic middle class damn near gone and most of what's left is government related as far as employment which is why there is so much concern/fear relating to the American right and its obvious political power and influence and its willingness to reform or massively cut well programs, interest in repealing blue laws and its obvious unwillingness to fall in line with blue Democrats and anti-up big time as far as taxes or switch their views or let go of their beliefs and values and submit to the blues. Like I said, blues keep comparing us to themselves and continue expecting us to miraculously change or eventually give in and accept whatever terms the blues have to offer, buckle down in fear or give up and quit like they would do if they were us.

America as a whole is becoming a nation of 'haves' and 'have-nots'. As the small-business owner, long a key constituency of the Republican  Party disappears due to the exit of small farmers from farming and the failure of small retail  trade against retailers such as Wal*Mart, Amazon.com, Dollar General, and rent-to-own emporiums, the middle class shrinks. That includes the Republican part of the middle class. Big Business is capable of inducing high levels of productivity from working people while gutting wages. Meanwhile, profitability soars, executive compensation (people being paid very well for treating workers very badly), and even organized crime flourishes. On organized crime -- Donald Trump has more connections to criminal syndicates (including both the Sicilian and the Russian Mafia) than any President in American history, and it is as nasty an exploiter as any elite. I mentioned farming, and the consolidation of farms implies the intensification of disparities between ownership and corporate management on the one side and farm laborers. Meanwhile, people that you consider middle class become renters if they are  to live in places that offer economic opportunity -- and they are often paying $3K a month in rent to landlords who simply collect rent from people in tiny apartments that resemble Stalinist flats.

So between greater concentration of ownership, bigger income for bureaucratic elites (the tendency is appearing in the public and non-profit sectors, too), and falling real wages despite rising productivity, life is getting worse for people who have nothing to sell but their labor. Karl Marx had a word to describe people  who had nothing to sell but their labor: the proletariat.

Capitalism saved itself from Bolshevik-style revolutions because the capitalists of the time decided that it was best that the proletariat have a stake in the economic order as participants in a consumer economy. The economic elites have chosen to dispense with the consumer economy for people other than themselves so that they can maximize their own indulgence and power. We may now see a reversion of economic conditions to those that make possible a proletarian revolution: the perception by many that they would be better off without the heirs owning the assets, executives who seem  to have graduated from the Simon Legree School of Management, bureaucratic elites  who serve only themselves, politicians servile to economic elites, and out-and-out mobsters. The Marxist appeal is that a society without such elites can foster economic growth or spread the bounty of a prosperous society more equitably.

Should there be a revolution against our economic elites, it will be led by the Millennial Generation which resembles in many ways the leadership of the French masses during the French Revolution. Maybe their solution will be to dispossess the rapacious elites who now bedevil us and to start over with more reliance upon small business. After all, the American political system is predicated upon free enterprise by yeoman farmers and small-business owners, with the competent doing well, but not so much better that they can lord it over the rest of us through economic power. That is the best hope: a revolution in the name of liberal ideals should our elites try to impose a feudal nightmare.


Elites who demand that others suffer for the power, gain, and indulgence of those elites have shown a poor record of survival in the historical record. It is a matter of time -- or of those elites coming to their senses or exercising some conscience. Karl Marx is very right very or wrong, depending on what the economic elites of the time choose as the reality for the rest of us. Neither the proletariat nor the intellectuals who study Marx and seek to adapt his teachings to the the reality of the time can make his teachings true.