WHOSE CLASS STRUGGLE?
The Industrial Revolution produced the current class situation, the haves and have nots. The haves have agency, the have nots do not. Agency is a place in the world, opportunity, a job that makes a living wage, a home that they own, or rent they can afford, an opportunity to succeed.
Advertising sells an imaginary world to the public, and the repeating messages of spin doctors creates an alternate reality. Trump is great at selling an image, MAGA, make America great again. Home ownership was a ticket to the middle class. Now there’s a class of people here, the homeless, American untouchables.
When there was a Continent there for the taking in 1812, and manifest destiny, and the growth of a nation from sea to shing sea through military conquest, and eventual hegemony and dominion over the two hemispheres, North and South, the Monroe Doctrine, it created an American dominance, identified and practiced to this day.
Public education is what made America what it became, unlike Europe, a good public education, prosperity, the products of the hegemony and dominion of the American State, was availabe to a huge middle class that grew out of the prosperity the theft of a continent produced.
The have nots that we live with, the homeless, the deranged, the drug addicted, the hopeless, are products of an economic system, one that does not house all its citizens, does not provide an equal education for all citizens, schools are funded with property taxes, and ghettoes do not produce much tax revenue, or opportunity for there people to believe in their human possibilities, for them it’s dog eat dog.
Blame the poor for being poor is a product of a ruling class who do not care about a lack of agency, a belief that one can succeed, among the abject poor, 40,000,000 of them today, and that America lives among us, with nothing, they have nothing to lose.
There’s a war on, so increase the military budget, pass tax cuts for the rich, cut services to the poor in this year’s budget, you can count on it.
4/19/23