Working class

The Working Class Is Morally Superior To The Ruling Class

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Paul Rosenberg – If you’re a producer, I’m talking about you, and I’m serious about this: You are morally superior to the suits and names who order everyone around. I’m not saying you’re without your flaws (Lord knows we all have them), but in comparison you are better, and clearly so.

If you feel good coming home from an honest day of work; if you go out of your way to help family and friends; if you like pointing at something and saying “I made that”; if you care about your work as a carpenter, trucker, housewife, nurse, welder, shopkeeper, clerk, farmer, rancher, engineer or any of a hundred other professions, you are a producer, and this is for you. Continue reading →

The ‘Gilets Jaunes’ Are Unstoppable: “Now, The Elites Are Afraid”

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Christophe Guilluy – The gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement has rattled the French establishment. For several months, crowds ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands have been taking to the streets every weekend across the whole of France. They have had enormous success, extracting major concessions from the government. They continue to march.

working classBack in 2014, geographer Christopher Guilluy’s study of la France périphérique (peripheral France) caused a media sensation. It drew attention to the economic, cultural and political exclusion of the working classes, most of whom now live outside the major cities. It highlighted the conditions that would later give rise to the yellow-vest phenomenon. Guilluy has developed on these themes in his recent books, No Society and The Twilight of the Elite: Prosperity, the Periphery and the Future of France. spiked caught up with Guilluy to get his view on the causes and consequences of the yellow-vest movement.

spiked: What exactly do you mean by ‘peripheral France’? Continue reading →

The Protected, Privileged Establishment vs. The Working Class

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workingCharles Hugh Smith – As noted in The Collapse of the Left, the working class has finally awakened to the Left’s betrayal and abandonment of labor in favor of the protected privileges of the elitist Establishment. I also described the Left’s Great Con:

To mask the collapse of the Left’s economic defense of labor, the Left has substituted social justice movements for economic opportunities and security.This has succeeded brilliantly, as tens of millions of  self-described “progressives” now parrot the Great Con that “social justice” campaigns on behalf of marginalized social groups are now the defining feature of Progressive Social Democratic movements.

This diversionary sleight-of-hand embrace of economically neutered “social justice” campaigns masked the fact that social democratic parties everywhere have thrown labor into the churning propellers of globalization, open immigration and neoliberal financial policies–all of which benefit mobile capital, which has engorged itself on the abandonment of labor by the Left.

Meanwhile, the fat-cats of the Left have engorged themselves on capital’s largesse in exchange for their treachery. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s $200 million in “earnings” come to mind, as do countless other examples of personal aggrandizement by self-proclaimed “defenders” of labor.

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The New Nobility Uses Political Correctness to Fragment the Precariats

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classCharles Hugh Smith – I have long held that our economy is, stripped of propaganda, nothing but an updated version of feudalism, i.e. neofeudal: a vast class of precarious laborers (i.e. precariats–precarious proletariats) who own little to no wealth-producing capital ruled by a New Nobility/Oligarchy that owns the vast majority of wealth-producing capital and control of the political system.

I explained this structure in America’s Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014 – link), Neofeudalism 101: Strip-Mining the Upper Middle Class (April 8, 2015 – link) and The Class War Has Already Started (November 14, 2015 – link).

In the Marxist analysis, there are only three classes: those who must sell their labor to earn a livelihood, those who earn their livelihood from owning wealth-generating capital, and the dispossessed/ marginalized who are dependent on the state (bread and circuses) or who scrape out a living on the margins of the lawful economy.

In this view, there is no meaningful class difference between the well-paid liberal technocrat with the $1 million (mortgaged) house on the Left/Right Coast and the rural conservative “deplorable” wage earner. Both must sell their labor and neither earns a livelihood from wealth-generating capital.

If we extend this analysis, we find that the entire self-described “middle class” is in fact nothing but the better paid slice of the working class, i.e. the class who must sell their labor to pay their rent/mortgage, buy food, etc.

Both are precarious, but not equally so. The well-paid technocrat believes his skills will protect him from unemployment, and he is equally confident that the “wealth” in his mortgaged house and stocks/bonds 401K retirement account is secure and permanent.

He feels superior to the “deplorable” wage earner, but this superiority is contingent on 1) asset bubbles never popping (ahem, which they always do, eventually; 2) software that’s eating the world will not eat his job or the premium he is currently being paid, and 3) the skills he currently has won’t become over-supplied as the global work force expands into the sectors that require high levels of education.

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The Great Con: Political Correctness Has Marginalized the Working Class

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politicalCharles Hugh Smith – So when the protected class of well-paid institutional “progressives” speak darkly of “reversing 40 years of social progress,” what they’re really saying is we’re terrified that the bottom 95% might be waking up to our Great Con of identity politics and political correctness.

To understand the Great Con of political correctness, we must first grasp the decline of the working class (self-described as “the middle class”), i.e. those who must sell their labor to earn their livelihood.

Labor’s share of the national economy has been declining for 46 years:

Shares of gross domestic income [view chart]

So where has the wealth that’s been generated ended up? In the hands of the .1%:

Share of US household wealth [view chart]

And where did the wages gains end up? In the top 5% technocrat/ managerial class:

The ever-widening wage gap [view chart]

And what is the technocrat/ managerial class response to this staggering decline in wealth and wages suffered by the bottom 95%? Political correctness.

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