The concept of citizenship is apparently difficult. Many people do not know what it is. They are nationalistic and they want immigrants, for instance, “to know our language and our culture, to understand our form of government and our laws.” Yet they tend not to believe in the rights of “man” and citizen. Daniel Brook’s article Extreme Inequality addresses this and other problems. Some interesting excerpts:
“Early in Free Lunch, Johnston’s lumping of the United States with Brazil, Mexico and Russia sounds inflammatory, even irresponsible, but the more one reads of his litany of plutocratic shenanigans, the less far-fetched it sounds. Johnston’s story of an oligarch getting $100 million in corporate welfare to open a call center filled with dead-end jobs in a frozen postindustrial city and then getting laudatory coverage in the local paper, which said oligarch owns, sounds right out of Putin’s Russia. But the Frost Belt city isn’t Vladivostok, and the oligarch isn’t Boris Berezovsky–it’s Buffalo and Warren Buffett.”
“Ever since the beginnings of democracy, Thompson explains, political thinkers have understood that a democratic society can not endure under conditions of extreme inequality. There was broad agreement on this principle. The difference between left and right was not that progressive thinkers opposed extreme inequality and conservative theorists supported it. Rather, left and right differed only on why they feared inequality.”
“For 2,000 years, hardly anyone thought extreme inequality was tenable in a republic. So while William Greider has described … the New Right agenda as ‘rolling back the twentieth century,’ it is even more audacious than that–it is to roll back Western civilization (or perhaps human civilization, period, for even Confucius warned, ‘Where wealth is centralized, the people are dispersed. Where wealth is distributed, the people are brought together’). While Aristotle began Western political thought with his insight that ‘man is by nature a political animal,’ Margaret Thatcher sought to end it: ‘Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.'”
“Admittedly, in American political thought there has always been a counterargument that high degrees of economic inequality, if established under conditions of open competition, could coexist with democracy. Thompson traces this tradition from Alexander Hamilton through John C. Calhoun to Milton Friedman. But none of these thinkers, so sanguine about the risks inequality poses to democracy, were particularly committed to democracy. Hamilton humiliated himself on the floor of the Constitutional Convention by arguing that what the new nation really needed was a ‘monarch’; Calhoun was America’s leading intellectual apologist for slavery; Milton Friedman advised Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The only thinkers who dismiss extreme inequality as no threat to democratic society appear to be, at best, indifferent to democracy.”
“How, after 2,000 years of broad agreement that extreme levels of economic inequality were anathema to self-rule, does one explain the United States, an ostensibly democratic country where the concentration of wealth exceeds not only those of our peer countries but that of imperial Rome? Thompson blames this on the triumph of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights and equal opportunity, over republicanism, with its emphasis on civic virtue, social equality and the absence of domination. Conventionally seen as being in tension, liberalism and republicanism, Thompson argues, were initially aligned in their opposition to feudalism. Early American liberals assumed that an economy of open competition would lead to reasonable levels of economic equality. After all, every person had the capacity to work; freed from the constraints of feudalism, each worker could keep the fruits of his labor.”
“In the early American economy of small farms and shops, this idea seemed reasonable. What liberals didn’t understand was that in the industrial economy of large corporations that would develop after the Civil War, work and reward would again be separated. In the feudal system, serfs worked land owned by nobles; nobles got rich while serfs remained poor. Under industrial capitalism, workers work in corporations owned by industrialists and shareholders, who similarly get rich while workers often get shortchanged. Blindsided by the rise of industrial capitalism, with its bifurcation of work and reward, liberalism was impotent to take on the inequality of the first Gilded Age or its re-emergence in the second Gilded Age today. While a liberal ideology of open competition has been able to take on racial and gender inequality, it has nothing to offer against the scourge of economic inequality. Capitalism’s Smithian system of seemingly free and open competition is a mechanism for generating extreme economic inequality. Until liberals understand this–including liberals like David Cay Johnston–there is little chance of rolling back the new inequality.”
“While it would be comforting to assume that extreme inequality would naturally lead to popular demands for greater equality, in highly unequal societies, people often aspire not to roll back inequality but to benefit from it. How to turn a nation of gamblers into a nation of citizens is the question that looms over America.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
well whoever has more money can influence political processes, which is why in a country like the US, where the gaps between rich and poor are very steep, the ideological influence on politics tends to be towards the right. In Australia — a relatively more egalitarian country — this is less the case. (In fact Mike tells me that the kind of government we now have in power would never have stood a chance in the US. It would be perceived as too far to the left to have anything to say.)
Yes. And Mike is right! (This is why I am “for” Obama. He is as far to the left as one can be and still be electable – at least given the power of the right wing media and so on.)
I find it an oversimplification to describe people as “workers shortchanged by corporations.”
Z: THINK SURPLUS VALUE.
It implies that people can not negotiate on an individual basis …
Z: HAVE YOU EVER TRIED THIS FROM THE FACTORY FLOOR?
and are just stupid lumps formatted towards a single destination.
Z: WHY?
It implies that the corporation must take care of workers, because workers are mindless lumps that can’t fend for themselves.
Z: WHY?
People need to take responsibility for their choices and recognize that they must plan for their own future.
Z: THIS IS VAGUE ENOUGH TO BE VAPID.
Having said that, if a corporation welches on a specific promise in a contract the workers should have full legal recourse. Frequently, government and public opinion becomes too embroiled in the argument thus tilting the playing field too much one way or the other.
Z: EXAMPLE?
I fear that the racism you despise is just another way for people to change the numbers on the playing field so that when the vote is counted they get to take the biggest piece of the pie. Ah, democracy.
Z: I’VE CORRECTED SPELLING IN SOME OF THESE SENTENCES. ANYWAY WHAT IS THE BASIS OF YOUR FEAR… (it sounds like projection to me).
When they come to demand your vote will you join the side of women, blacks, creoles, academics, writers, or the bi-linguals? What about the side of fair and square?
Z: SO FAIR AND SQUARE is men, whites, nonacademics, nonwriters, and monolinguals? … and all members of these groups have the same goals and opinions?
Honey, you seem to be heavily into identity politics which is not my bag although I am interested in cultures. My views are more or less socialist which is I think what you object to. –Z
You think the term “surplus value” is not “vague enough to be vapid”? Although, I must admit it is a lovely condescension.
Z: Not condescension, just shorthand. Surplus value = the amount you produce and are not paid for, which the owners of the means of production amass as wealth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value
You accused me of “identity politics”, but I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. As I read this site, I understood you to be describing yourself with those words.
Z: I’m just creating a character with certain cultural characteristics. I am a sculpted skull on a stela.
I was attempting to say that the more adjectives you add to define yourself the more you are not fully committed to any of those groups and will require something other than identity to choose with whom to side.
I side with the workers of the world!
But if you are not into “identity” why paint someone’s identity as a shortchanged worker. Aren’t we all shortchanged workers? No one can afford the time of someone who has only one life to live with each moment precious. It’s not even worth the time to envy a CEO or itemize the unfairness of it all.
Z: I’m not a vulgar Marxist and don’t think only in terms of class identity. Yes, if we’re working in capitalism we are short changed. That doesn’t mean one has to envy a CEO. Who is by the way also working.
But, in acknowledgment of your time, I spell-checked before I hit submit.
I agree with those who say, “We’re all fucking animals”. Yup. We’re certainly not vegetables nor minerals. And we should ‘take responsibility” and stand up for ourselves. Problem is that as individuals we have little to no power and our rulers are already organised. To be organised is to have power and workers are, for the most part, not organised and that has a lot to do with fear of losing one’s ability to make a living i.e. having a ‘job’. The employing class has this kind of power over most of us. Fear is big in class society of power structures. For instance, it’s why many people post things to blogs under false names or anonymously.
Okay, so organised for what?
Our rulers are organised to gain the greatest possible share of the wealth which workers produce. We should organise for this purpose too–to get back control of the wealth we produce about and beyond the value of our wages. Anyway, this organisation they have, gives them power over us in that they can influence how the rules of the market game are played. The rules are laws and we elect politicians to make those laws and have a judiciary to enforce them, with violence if necessary. But in a capitalist democracy, it’s the capitalists who wield the greatest influence because they are organised to appropriate the wealth we create and use some of that wealth to buy lobbyists and politicians to enhance their class power within the legal bounds of the State. The golden rule: those who have the gold make the rules.
Although many of the other animals are smart, humans have reason. It’s what gives them their adaptive advantage and why there are six billion of us on the planet now. So far, our reason has not caught up with our ability to procreate; but that’s another kettle of fish.
Now, most humans fall into one of two classes: workers, who have to sell their skills and time to others to make a living and their employers, people who live from buying those labour skills over time. As Pascal Lamy, head of the WTO has put it: “Before everything else, the idea that market capitalism is a system based on a certain theory of value and the dynamic and the dysfunctions it may generate. A system where there are owners of capital who buy labor and holders of their own labor power who sell that. That relationship implies a theory of profit which ensues from alienation: the system has the tendency for the rich to become richer as they accumulate capital and for the poor to become poorer when they own nothing but their labor. All that remains largely true. No one since Marx has invented an analysis of the same significance. Even globalization is only a historical stage of market capitalism as Marx imagined it.”
http://www.truthout.org/article/pascal-lamy-capitalism-cannot-satisfy-us
The thing about the workers is that they are largely unconscious of the fact that together, socially, they produce the wealth of societies in exchange for wages. Of course, their employers reap the benefits of owning and controlling this wealth and use it to their political advantage.
When workers start becoming aware of what this, the social relation of Capital, is all about, they start to get upset and their reason starts to kick in. “Perhaps, this is NOT the best of all possible worlds, as my rulers have told me.”
And so it goes, the class struggle is over the socially produced wealth which the workers create, but which is largely owned and controlled by their respective national ruling classes in the world.
Any employees out there who wish to change the power balance between workers and employers can organise by clicking here and joining the IWW, along with Jen and I.
http://www.iww.org/
I should probably actually join it. Various family members of my grandparents’ generation were in it back in the day. It seems anachronistic because they have so much nostalgia around it and the later generation was anti-Communist and so on. But it may be the thing for NOW, as well.
P.S. Perhaps I should put a disclaimer somewhere that this blog is not antiracism 101 or critique of capitalism 101. Since those aren’t its specific topics – it’s just a place where I put my thoughts – I don’t like the idea. But still.