Class War

There are, right now, a couple of terms floating around in the corporate media and right-wing blogosphere that are driving me crazy:  “class warfare” and “Marxist Socialist.”  I’ll have to deal with “Marxist Socialist” in a later commentary but for now let’s turn to “class warfare.”

In the LA Times from late last month: “Obama’s budget: Taxing for fairness or class warfare?  The reactionary, David Horowitz, changed the question to an inflammatory accusation on his web site:  "The Budget as Class Warfare."

Funny how, whenever the oligarchic rule in this country is questioned, suddenly there are rumors of class war in the air and Bolshevism is only just around the corner. 

Now, I’d agree that there is class warfare going on, has been going on in the United States for more than a century, but it certainly is not the kind where the proletariat rises up to overthrow the bourgeoisie. 

In the late nineteenth century the wealthiest 1 percent of families owned 51 percent of the real and personal property in the United States.  The 44 percent of families at the bottom owned only 1.2 percent of the property.  Together, the ruling class, the top 10 percent of families owned 86 percent of the wealth.  The working class, the 90 percent of families, owned 10 percent of the wealth.  As you might suggest, this inequality of wealth sparked numerous uprisings among the working class and led to the rise of the Populist Party.  The ruling class, who understood their position and had achieved class consciousness, was able to use force of arms and the political system to repulse the class warfare undertaken by the less-conscious working people and farmers.

Throughout the 20^th century the ruling class well understood their place in society and waged an unrelenting war on working people to maintain oligarchic supremacy: in other words, class war by the ruling class. 

By the 1980s, writes Felice Pace, “the chief concern of the ruling elite became making sure that when the reckoning finally came,” when the economic reality of their recklessness could no longer be hidden from working people,  “it would be working [people] - - not the rich - - who would bear the brunt of the adjustment.  That required transferring wealth from working people to the rich in advance of the reckoning.  This has been the main projects of the ruling class since the election of Ronald Reagan.”

The transfer of wealth to the ruling class in the late 20^th century, the rich’s class war, “has been spectacularly successful.”  While worker’s wages have gone down every year since 1973, the rulinhg class consolidated their share of the national income.  “Since 1979 through 2005, the income of the top one percent skyrocketed by 228 percent.  The Wall Street Journal reports that the top one-tenth of one percent of the population, or 14,000 families, hold 22.2% of the nation’s wealth . . . ,” 10 percent of families own 96% of the wealth, “while the bottom 90% [of families], have just 4%.” 

Yes, there is class war going on in the United States.  The ruling class has been remarkably successful in maintaining their position for more than a century.  What really surprises me is how docile the working class is, how seemingly helpless the working class has been to bring about a redistribution of wealth.  If Obama really wants to redistribute wealth then I say bring on the class war.