Thursday, June 16, 2005
Be poor, it's okay
Today was my last day of French class. My French teacher was friendly but formal, as she's been the entire class. Sigh. Sometimes I'm much better at macro-realities than managing my own micro-reality.
She did, however, tell us that the concept of 'class' was outdated, and now people use the term mains d'oeuvre (labour force) rather than ouvrier (worker). Which is a good way to introduce a website I've been fulminating about for some time, www.classism.org, entitled Class Action: Building Bridges Across the Class Divide.
It purports to be a way to bring people of different classes together. Their mission:
See what great jobs rich people give us?
Classism is a perfect example of liberal bullshit. It's like saying: class is inevitable, we're very sorry about it, so at least we won't point it out so often. 'Cross-class coalition' is an epithet in socialist circles - the idea that rich & poor people can ever have anything in common, other than one exploiting the other. But Class Action actively tries to set up these coalitions. They hold workshops for inter-class couples. They provide workplace training to sensitive different class members.
And best of all, they offer 'resources' to people of different classes. Poor people get advocacy groups; rich people get philanthropy & financial advising. For example, the Sudden Money Institute offers financial planning to the newly rich. It spins comforting prose about the difficulties of managing money, and offers the following bon mots under the heading "Money & Emotions":
The pain of being rich & having to dress yourself
Class is not an ism. It's not a socially constructed identity. It's a relation of exploitation. It exists because rich people - the very ones Class Action wants to placate - take money from poor people. Treating class as an idea is as offensive as saying racism & sexism are just ideas. They are not: they are ideological tools for capitalist profit-making, adapted to further divide the working class. They exist materially every time poor blacks work at MacDonalds and women do all the housework. This is capitalism. It's brutal, abhorrent, and I dream of the day poor people will rise up and take what's theirs.
And unlike Tracy Chapman, it doesn't sound peaceful at all. I have glorious fantasies of a mob of poor people destroying Class Action's offices, tearing down their pictures of Democratic Party heroes, and making all those rich people who are trying to come to terms with their wealth, start coming to terms with their houses being occupied by refugee families, their Hummers being used as coral reef infrastructure, and their perfectly manicured hands getting blistered from deep-fat fryers on their 12 hour shifts. Or they could just be shot, that's an option too.
What they shouldn't be is coddled. Nor should poor people be made to empathize with the problems of the rich, because no matter how bad the latter are, there's always money to hire a therapist or take a vacation. Finally, do-gooder liberals will have to answer for their crimes of trying to obscure class differences. History is littered with cross-class coalitions that sided with the rich when the question of real power came up. Or, put more bluntly, the rich said "Screw this", ignored or killed the poor people and did what they wanted - because they had the means to. Russia in 1905, March 1917; China 1925-1927; Spain 1936-1938 - those are just a few.
The rich are bastards because they're rich. They might be nice people, they might not. It doesn't matter. Those without callouses on their hands, RSI, or glaucoma from VDT radiation, are going to have some hard questions put to them when the revolution comes. Including these liberal idiots trying to paper over reality.
She did, however, tell us that the concept of 'class' was outdated, and now people use the term mains d'oeuvre (labour force) rather than ouvrier (worker). Which is a good way to introduce a website I've been fulminating about for some time, www.classism.org, entitled Class Action: Building Bridges Across the Class Divide.
It purports to be a way to bring people of different classes together. Their mission:
We aim to heal the wounds of classism, support the development of cross-class alliances, and work with others to catalyze the movement of resources to where they are most needed to create justice, equity, and sustainability for all.They start off okay, listing the very real impact of class: poverty, unemployment, discrimination. But along the way, class turns from the underpinning of capitalist inequality (& the motor force of capitalism) into bad ideas in people's heads.
See what great jobs rich people give us?
Classism is a perfect example of liberal bullshit. It's like saying: class is inevitable, we're very sorry about it, so at least we won't point it out so often. 'Cross-class coalition' is an epithet in socialist circles - the idea that rich & poor people can ever have anything in common, other than one exploiting the other. But Class Action actively tries to set up these coalitions. They hold workshops for inter-class couples. They provide workplace training to sensitive different class members.
And best of all, they offer 'resources' to people of different classes. Poor people get advocacy groups; rich people get philanthropy & financial advising. For example, the Sudden Money Institute offers financial planning to the newly rich. It spins comforting prose about the difficulties of managing money, and offers the following bon mots under the heading "Money & Emotions":
What do a lottery winner and a widow of September 11 have in common? Sudden Money - and sudden, similar emotions.Lose a spouse, gain $25 million, the shock, the horror. They also offer weekend retreats for financial planners at $2,300 per head.
The pain of being rich & having to dress yourself
Class is not an ism. It's not a socially constructed identity. It's a relation of exploitation. It exists because rich people - the very ones Class Action wants to placate - take money from poor people. Treating class as an idea is as offensive as saying racism & sexism are just ideas. They are not: they are ideological tools for capitalist profit-making, adapted to further divide the working class. They exist materially every time poor blacks work at MacDonalds and women do all the housework. This is capitalism. It's brutal, abhorrent, and I dream of the day poor people will rise up and take what's theirs.
And unlike Tracy Chapman, it doesn't sound peaceful at all. I have glorious fantasies of a mob of poor people destroying Class Action's offices, tearing down their pictures of Democratic Party heroes, and making all those rich people who are trying to come to terms with their wealth, start coming to terms with their houses being occupied by refugee families, their Hummers being used as coral reef infrastructure, and their perfectly manicured hands getting blistered from deep-fat fryers on their 12 hour shifts. Or they could just be shot, that's an option too.
What they shouldn't be is coddled. Nor should poor people be made to empathize with the problems of the rich, because no matter how bad the latter are, there's always money to hire a therapist or take a vacation. Finally, do-gooder liberals will have to answer for their crimes of trying to obscure class differences. History is littered with cross-class coalitions that sided with the rich when the question of real power came up. Or, put more bluntly, the rich said "Screw this", ignored or killed the poor people and did what they wanted - because they had the means to. Russia in 1905, March 1917; China 1925-1927; Spain 1936-1938 - those are just a few.
The rich are bastards because they're rich. They might be nice people, they might not. It doesn't matter. Those without callouses on their hands, RSI, or glaucoma from VDT radiation, are going to have some hard questions put to them when the revolution comes. Including these liberal idiots trying to paper over reality.
