Class Warfare 101

Class Warfare 101

By William Manson
Dissident Voice
August 26, 2020

Starting around 1848, socialists flooded the world with pamphlets
and manifestos explaining the basics of “wage-labor” vs. “capital.”

Yet here we are in the 21st century, having to go back to basics —
even though one would think that the dire economic situation for
most people today “speaks for itself.”

However, given the recent misguided detour into side-issues —
notably, police-style racism vs. “anti-fascism” (whatever happened
to “anti-globalization”?) — a basic reminder about the primacy of
“class” seems to be in order.

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, beginning over 30 years ago,
socialism was peremptorily consigned to the proverbial “dustbin
of history.”

Marxism, we were told by innumerable think-tank “intellectuals,”
was a failed experiment.

Maybe a handful of the intellectually curious still go back and look
at socialist-Marxist literature — a body of writings once pored over
by countless millions committed to “world revolution.”

With the exception of students of Russian history, few will
remember how, as the Czar abdicated in March of 1917, a
democratic, multi-party Constituent Assembly was established.

By November, the Bolshevik power-seizure, engineered by Lenin
and Trotsky with the substantial assistance of the German high
command, dismantled the Assembly, banned the other (mostly
socialst-democratic) parties, and jailed without trial many
dedicated socialists whose positions displeased the dictator Lenin.

Freedom-of-the-press was immediately drastically curtailed — the
one notable exception being New Life, the popular paper edited
by famed novelist and humanistic socialist Maxim Gorky.

Before his paper was eventually banned, Gorky wrote innumerable
articles blasting the anti-democratic, thuggish totalitarianism
imposed by Lenin.

Yet in Russia, the Warsaw Bloc, and many African dictatorships this
Bolshevik-style of elite-bureaucratic, single-party and totalitarian
“socialism” was imposed — only to eventually fail.

The bogus valorization of “the people,” an abstraction, contrasted
with the subjugation (and sometimes murder) of very real, if
intractable, individuals.

Nineteenth-century Marxists, responding to the vestiges of serfdom
(and its transformation into a proletariat), were generally less
concerned about civil liberties per se.

In this brief article, I merely want to remind readers of
a few precepts of Marxism which remain as relevant as ever.

Lenin also admittedly offered useful ideas about “monopoly
capitalism” — ideas later developed by Baran and Sweezy
(1960s) and the editors of the Monthly Review.)

In reality, as economic conditions for at least 80% of the world’s
population have worsened in recent decades, Marxist explanations
seem especially compelling once again.

To begin at the beginning — the raison-d-etre of capitalist
enterprises.

How do the big shareholders of major corporations maximize
profits?

By the 20th century, relentless marketing of their “products” —
with its penultimate perfection in the all-pervasive conditioning
of everyone with multi-media exposure.

As the passive, beleaguered individual increasingly feels
insignificant, she correspondingly idolizes prestigious consumer-
goods (Marx’s “commodity-fetishism”).

But in every industry, rival corporations are forced to engage
relentlessly in “discounts”) and price-cutting–in the never-ending
effort to grab more customers.

The age-old solution (escalated in the Clinton administration):
mergers, acquisitions — and eventual “oligopoly.”

A major corporation, by eliminating and/or swallowing almost all its
primary competitors, can then, of course, raise prices back up. The
result?: more customers, better profit-margin, reduced advertising
costs, and so on.

The next step: break unions.

Claim that minority workers, whether immigrants or not,
are stealing jobs from the dominant ethnic group.

Nip in the bud any emerging sense of shared “class solidarity.”

Invest heavily, along with other industries, in a relentless campaign
of anti-union propaganda; confused employees, even overtly
threatened with reprisals, will then typically reject union
organizing.

But with such low, stagnant wages, offer employees various
schemes for “low-interest, easy credit” — allowing them the
illusion of such things as home “ownership.” (Such illusions are
often quickly shattered.)

Of course, by the late 20th century, corporations “racing-to-the
bottom,” scouring the globe in the search of the cheapest possible
labor-force (i.e., poor, economically desperate people).

Back in the U.S. and EU, superannuated workers suddenly realized
that they actually “owned” very little. With higher unemployment,
tens-of-millions of the desperate were, of course, forced to accept
whatever low-wage job appeared on the horizon.

Part-time, contingent labor verged on becoming the norm, as
corporations temporarily “used-then-discarded” employees in
order to maximize even more the omnipotent “bottom-line.”

By the early 21th century, even workers in the Tech sector — the
one dramatically expanding, relatively new industry — were reeling
from one such setback after another.

These days, Silicon chieftains are finding this COVID crisis of
2020-21 to be yet another “golden opportunity” to reduce the
labor-force of actual human beings.

Even before the “Luddite” rebellion by weavers (ca. 1811), every
step in automation has deskilled legions of workers, depriving them
of the income needed for survival.

In our time, with frequent saturation-points of consumer
“demand,” big corporations have focused even more on “reducing
labor costs” as a major, if not the major, source of increased
profits.

Today’s Tech giants, as arrogant as the steel-and-oil barons of yore,
are in the business of promoting all kinds of “labor-saving”
products, from online “education” (goodbye teachers) to robotics
(goodbye everyone?).

Marx of course described all these trends in detail, noting the
inevitability of downward mobility into poverty for such deskilled
and displaced millions of persons.

But one doubts whether even Marx could ever have envisaged
a world “owned” by 1000-or-so billionaires?

https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/08/class-warfare-101