Class Is In Session
By Harold Niver
02 January, 2008
Countercurrents.orgIt would be fairly easy for working class Americans to buy into the line of rhetoric that CNN's Lou Dobbs is selling, and sure enough, whatever he's selling, people are buying. Before extolling his trademark anti-immigrant sentiment, he proclaims the state of America as one of crisis – NOT because of the illegal and unpopular wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world, NOT because of the federal, state and local governments' racist and classist policies that led poor and desperate people to briefly rise up against the police a couple of weeks ago in New Orleans, NOT because the poor are getting poorer while the rich become more fat and bloated – but because the soul of our once great nation is being eaten alive by America-hating immigrants and terrorists that just want to devour and destroy our proud heritage.
He goes on to ask good patriots like Pat Buchanan what can and must be done about the twenty million "illegals" that are destroying the cultural fabric of this society.
As if "illegal" was an apt term to characterize and/or define a human being. As if America had a culture to call its own, and only its own.
You see, people like Dobbs and Buchanan like to talk about the melting pot that was great for our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, allowing the poor, the tired, the weak, the huddled masses of the European continent to come to our rich shores, to run into the arms of Mother America. Sure, it was great to open our gates for hundreds of thousands of white people to come here, to further anglicize the country. But when we're discussing non-white immigrants (I'm sorry – illegals) coming here to enjoy our (slowly crumbling) freedoms, well, they must be terrorists and criminals, waging what amounts to cultural genocide. They just want to blow up our subways and poison our water supplies and steal our children and sell them on eBay.
Dobbs and Buchanan are right about one thing, though – there is a class war being waged. But they have grossly mutilated what the word "class" means. It's not simply about economics. Used correctly, "class" takes into account a wide array of factors that Dobbs and his fellow Mainstream Mediamen are purely ignorant to. That's why to them, it's a war on the middle class – meaning a war on those that have more money than poor folks but less than the rich.
The truth is that the class war is being waged on anyone who is NOT a wealthy white educated Christian American male. Think about all of the people that don't fit that mold and you'll begin to understand exactly what "class" means. You'll also see how deftly propaganda is being used to stir up division and distrust within the ranks of the working class.
You should then quickly understand why it is a fact that working class Americans should not feel threatened by Arabs and Muslims and Latins and Illegals. Working class Americans should realize that we should feel great camaraderie with those that many of us fear, because we are all targets. We are all people to be exploited by the Capitalist Empire Machine, which, by the way, is coming to a venue near you this election season.
Blink and you might have missed it, but for the last 5 or so years, people in the right places have slowly but gradually started to realize all of these things, and those people are continuing to organize and agitate – two activities that the corporate State fears immensely, for it strikes at people's complacence, the heart of the status quo. Class consciousness is taking shape, and the movement is building, growing, picking up steam. 2007 saw great leaps and bounds, and if we continue to see through the lies and think for ourselves, 2008 will be a year that no one will ever forget.
And Yes, ruling class – you should regard that as an open and blatant threat.
Harold Niver is a student of Social Theory, Social Structure and Change at Empire State College, living in Albany, New York. He can and should be reached at [email protected]
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