Been thinking about that infamous conference call with big city Dem mayors by the DoJ (I think) under Obama, plotting how they’d crack down on Occupy, and they sure did. Now they just get right out in front of the cameras.
Not that it matters now but Obama's coordinated, orchestrated federal crackdown on Occupy was blatantly unconstitutional. The Posse Comitatus act prohibits the federal government turning federal forces inward against the nation's own people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
It would be disingenuous and fatuous to say Obama merely used local policing forces; on that day they were turned in to a federal army in which Americans became the enemy of the "real owners [of the country]..you have owners; they own you..." (George Carlin)
Makes me recall Michael Parenti's comment that he knew what the system was all about and exactly the role of the police when their batons landed on him and he was beaten by cops at a protest in the 60s. J. Edgar Hoover saw the protest movements of the period as the greatest possible threats to fascism, and protests today also pose the same threat. Fascism responds to criticism with violence, and all of its power to enforce its dictates depends on the threat of violence, every last ounce of their power is impossible without it. So, they have to display violence regularly to maintain their position. You protest Israel, you're "antisemitic" and you deserve a good beating for it. Maybe you deserve to be killed, for opposing the "right" kind of killing. Dole out enough threats and beatings, do some COINTELPRO projects and the movements go away, people start worrying about themselves because collective action "doesn't work" and it takes too much energy you could spend feeling good about capitalism. A few years later you can have Ronald Reagan. That's how the 60s played out.
How are we going to do things differently this time? Because surely we will have to.
"Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism is gonna stop us all." -Fred Hampton
So I had on Iowa Public Radio's insipid "river to river" politics show and they took some calls. A caller asked for some evidence, any evidence, that the protests are antisemitic. The ridiculous show host Ben Keefer (sp), who would never have me on ever, answered by saying that "some Jewish students on campuses have said they feel threatened." You can't make up shit that bad.
Thank you for your analysis and insights, Dr. Street. It would be trite and fatuous of me to say this, but I will anyway, the U.S. mainstream media will never come close to disclosing any of this information to the American public.
Due to the sophisticated American capitalist propaganda system most Americans don't even know they are in a working class. They naively believe they are just one lottery ticket or one job promotion away from "making it." They actually look up to and admire anti-humane snakes and parasites like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates who accumulate their fortunes on the backs of virtually enslaved working-class. Although de jure slavery went out of fashion in the 1820s in most of the world (the U.S. was a little late in catching on) it is far too lucrative an institution for the capital class to give up entirely; thus the wage-slave minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour for 15 years now.
The American working class needs to outgrow the trite platitude, "We're All in This Together." They need to read Marx and raise their awareness of the class based nature of capitalism. In short they need to grow up.
Am I holding my breath waiting for this to happen? If I were that stupid I'd have suffocated decades ago.
With all due respect. Marx's distinction between a "working class" that must sell it's labor power (whether physical or mental) to survive and a "capital class" that controls the means of production, the rents and the stock and bond rent producing assets is still highly relevant. The working class must sell its labor power (whether physical or mental) to the capitalist while the capitalist does nothing but extract the wealth created by the workers.
If a minimum wage worker at, say, MacDonalds adds $100 an hour to his employer's profit but is in turn paid $7.25 and hour that is to be Marxian "working class." Okay, it may be simplistic in terms of your sophisticated analysis, but for ordinary Americans it plainly, if nothing else, raises awareness that they work hour by hour for a paltry living while the owner class parasitically extracts most of the wealth the working class creates.
My perhaps sophomoric desire is to make Americans aware that what they do -- working for a wage or salary -- has nothing to do with what the capital class does to get their wealth, by extracting it from the working class.
And yes, I know founding a capitalist company and taking ownership shares in such a company is a form of wealth creation. (As in investment banking.) But that is beyond and outside of the issue of exploitation of the "working class." Adding the term "precariat" is fine and commendable (thanks to Dr. Guy Standing and the late Dr. Zygmunt Bauman) but those people (salary and wage workers) are still, at their economic foundation and essence, "working class."
Okay. I think I am responding more to anvast pool of online internet marxists who write as if there were no structural transformations in class structure since the time of the Russian Revolution. They have also have a tendency to fetishize the proletariat and trade uinionism and to reduce everything all the time to class.
With all due respect, Dr. Street, I don't understand what you are saying here. I thought the lack of "class consciousness" was at the heart of America's working class problem.
American workers don't see themselves as a common bloc or "class" (for the sake of simplicity). They view themselves as autonomous self-controlling agents free and competent to negotiate the price of their labor with a capital class that out bargains them and plays individual workers off against each other.
Without some sort of class or union solidarity workers are left to fend for themselves in a system in which they are mere pawns that can't win.
I recall it was (I'm pretty sure) 2012 when then presidential aspirant Mitt Romney went on Fox News suggesting workers should accept the end of the minimum wage because they (the workers) were smart enough to contract for their own desired wage. Of course Romney, being the snake that he was and is, never bothered to mention that workers bargaining against each other selling their labor to the capital class would soon bargain themselves right into slavery. Which the lowest paid workers essentially already are.
Recall the chattel slave owner was compelled to feed and cloth his slaves (however poorly) because he paid good money for them and wanted to keep them alive to work as long as possible.
The wage-slave owner doesn't have to worry about that. If the wage slave is homeless and unfed the wage-slave owner can always find other willing wage slaves from the vast pool of the unemployed desperate for any work they can get. (Or as Marx called them, the reserve pool of the unemployed which capital always has available to threaten other workers.)
I've been through all this/your rap herre a million times. It was my jam for decades. I totally get it. But we require a much richer and more many-sided take on revolutionary politics, one that keeps a proper separation between communism and the labor movement while dropping the fetishization of imperial state proletariats, rejecting reductionist class truth, and the absurd notion that there's anything really or potentially radical about trade unionism, which in the US is a slave to the capitalist Imperialist Dems with some few exceptions. I've been in the factories, some of the ones that have survived the neoliberal, era, full of Wobbly spirit but damn this whole prole take was old in the 1970s. Check out the RCP and Avakian's work on all this.
Note they show the unmitigated asshole and fascist House speaker Mike Johnson absurdly claiming that Jewish students are "running for their lives" from anti-genocide protesters. A ridiculous Hitlerian lie.
I honestly don't think I can hold my nose against the stench in our mostly criminal "government" to vote for the Menace or not vote at all. I have an idea that if we don't act now against fascism we'll be doing exactly what the Germans did in the '30's. Woe be unto us and the whole world.
Bourgeois democracy as a class dictatorship: https://revcom.us/en/bob_avakian/democracy/index.htm
Obama, Dems and crackdown on Occupy: https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/14/did-the-white-house-direct-the-police-crackdown-on-occupy/
Been thinking about that infamous conference call with big city Dem mayors by the DoJ (I think) under Obama, plotting how they’d crack down on Occupy, and they sure did. Now they just get right out in front of the cameras.
Not that it matters now but Obama's coordinated, orchestrated federal crackdown on Occupy was blatantly unconstitutional. The Posse Comitatus act prohibits the federal government turning federal forces inward against the nation's own people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
It would be disingenuous and fatuous to say Obama merely used local policing forces; on that day they were turned in to a federal army in which Americans became the enemy of the "real owners [of the country]..you have owners; they own you..." (George Carlin)
Biden statements: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/04/21/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-passover/#:~:text=This%20year%2C%20let%20us%20remember,a%20Happy%20Passover%2C%20Chag%20Sameach.
Also here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/22/biden-condemns-anti-semitic-protests-and-absence-of-palestinian-empathy-too-00153709
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-condemns-antisemitic-protests-palestine-columbia-university/
Makes me recall Michael Parenti's comment that he knew what the system was all about and exactly the role of the police when their batons landed on him and he was beaten by cops at a protest in the 60s. J. Edgar Hoover saw the protest movements of the period as the greatest possible threats to fascism, and protests today also pose the same threat. Fascism responds to criticism with violence, and all of its power to enforce its dictates depends on the threat of violence, every last ounce of their power is impossible without it. So, they have to display violence regularly to maintain their position. You protest Israel, you're "antisemitic" and you deserve a good beating for it. Maybe you deserve to be killed, for opposing the "right" kind of killing. Dole out enough threats and beatings, do some COINTELPRO projects and the movements go away, people start worrying about themselves because collective action "doesn't work" and it takes too much energy you could spend feeling good about capitalism. A few years later you can have Ronald Reagan. That's how the 60s played out.
How are we going to do things differently this time? Because surely we will have to.
"Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism is gonna stop us all." -Fred Hampton
Right on.
Well said M.St.M,,!
Main news sources did not even bother to interview protestors, or even turn their cameras to the protestors.
So I had on Iowa Public Radio's insipid "river to river" politics show and they took some calls. A caller asked for some evidence, any evidence, that the protests are antisemitic. The ridiculous show host Ben Keefer (sp), who would never have me on ever, answered by saying that "some Jewish students on campuses have said they feel threatened." You can't make up shit that bad.
Thank you for your analysis and insights, Dr. Street. It would be trite and fatuous of me to say this, but I will anyway, the U.S. mainstream media will never come close to disclosing any of this information to the American public.
Due to the sophisticated American capitalist propaganda system most Americans don't even know they are in a working class. They naively believe they are just one lottery ticket or one job promotion away from "making it." They actually look up to and admire anti-humane snakes and parasites like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates who accumulate their fortunes on the backs of virtually enslaved working-class. Although de jure slavery went out of fashion in the 1820s in most of the world (the U.S. was a little late in catching on) it is far too lucrative an institution for the capital class to give up entirely; thus the wage-slave minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour for 15 years now.
The American working class needs to outgrow the trite platitude, "We're All in This Together." They need to read Marx and raise their awareness of the class based nature of capitalism. In short they need to grow up.
Am I holding my breath waiting for this to happen? If I were that stupid I'd have suffocated decades ago.
If you don't mind me sayng so, I think a lot of the language I hear about "the American working class" is obsolete. Here's a piece did back in my short-lived Truthdig days: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/in-the-age-of-hyper-disparity-the-ultimate-loss-is-a-livable-earth/
With all due respect. Marx's distinction between a "working class" that must sell it's labor power (whether physical or mental) to survive and a "capital class" that controls the means of production, the rents and the stock and bond rent producing assets is still highly relevant. The working class must sell its labor power (whether physical or mental) to the capitalist while the capitalist does nothing but extract the wealth created by the workers.
If a minimum wage worker at, say, MacDonalds adds $100 an hour to his employer's profit but is in turn paid $7.25 and hour that is to be Marxian "working class." Okay, it may be simplistic in terms of your sophisticated analysis, but for ordinary Americans it plainly, if nothing else, raises awareness that they work hour by hour for a paltry living while the owner class parasitically extracts most of the wealth the working class creates.
My perhaps sophomoric desire is to make Americans aware that what they do -- working for a wage or salary -- has nothing to do with what the capital class does to get their wealth, by extracting it from the working class.
And yes, I know founding a capitalist company and taking ownership shares in such a company is a form of wealth creation. (As in investment banking.) But that is beyond and outside of the issue of exploitation of the "working class." Adding the term "precariat" is fine and commendable (thanks to Dr. Guy Standing and the late Dr. Zygmunt Bauman) but those people (salary and wage workers) are still, at their economic foundation and essence, "working class."
Okay. I think I am responding more to anvast pool of online internet marxists who write as if there were no structural transformations in class structure since the time of the Russian Revolution. They have also have a tendency to fetishize the proletariat and trade uinionism and to reduce everything all the time to class.
With all due respect, Dr. Street, I don't understand what you are saying here. I thought the lack of "class consciousness" was at the heart of America's working class problem.
American workers don't see themselves as a common bloc or "class" (for the sake of simplicity). They view themselves as autonomous self-controlling agents free and competent to negotiate the price of their labor with a capital class that out bargains them and plays individual workers off against each other.
Without some sort of class or union solidarity workers are left to fend for themselves in a system in which they are mere pawns that can't win.
I recall it was (I'm pretty sure) 2012 when then presidential aspirant Mitt Romney went on Fox News suggesting workers should accept the end of the minimum wage because they (the workers) were smart enough to contract for their own desired wage. Of course Romney, being the snake that he was and is, never bothered to mention that workers bargaining against each other selling their labor to the capital class would soon bargain themselves right into slavery. Which the lowest paid workers essentially already are.
Recall the chattel slave owner was compelled to feed and cloth his slaves (however poorly) because he paid good money for them and wanted to keep them alive to work as long as possible.
The wage-slave owner doesn't have to worry about that. If the wage slave is homeless and unfed the wage-slave owner can always find other willing wage slaves from the vast pool of the unemployed desperate for any work they can get. (Or as Marx called them, the reserve pool of the unemployed which capital always has available to threaten other workers.)
I've been through all this/your rap herre a million times. It was my jam for decades. I totally get it. But we require a much richer and more many-sided take on revolutionary politics, one that keeps a proper separation between communism and the labor movement while dropping the fetishization of imperial state proletariats, rejecting reductionist class truth, and the absurd notion that there's anything really or potentially radical about trade unionism, which in the US is a slave to the capitalist Imperialist Dems with some few exceptions. I've been in the factories, some of the ones that have survived the neoliberal, era, full of Wobbly spirit but damn this whole prole take was old in the 1970s. Check out the RCP and Avakian's work on all this.
I'll stop. Most of what I write could go to 100 endnotes if I had time.
Pro-Palestine students banned from Columbia campus but an open PB fascist gets to join leading Republifascist Mike Johnson on Columbia campus: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/gavin-mcinnes-columbia-protests-palestine/
Democracy Now report on student protest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeYAA7I7nhE
Note they show the unmitigated asshole and fascist House speaker Mike Johnson absurdly claiming that Jewish students are "running for their lives" from anti-genocide protesters. A ridiculous Hitlerian lie.
Students given 15 minutes to pack and leave dorms with meal plans cut...loss of housing and food!
Fascist police display at U-Texas-Austin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYVThq9T7Pg
Wave of campus protests https://revcom.us/en/waves-campus-protests-against-us-backed-israeli-war-genocide-continue-and-spread?
Biden and Congress break rail strike December 2022: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/
1945-46 strikes and Truman: https://www.amazon.com/Strike-Jeremy-Brecher/dp/1604864281, pp. 221-231.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams justifying crackdown on student protests, blaming them on the "outside agitators": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqeS8CV_JfI
FDR "plague on both your houses": https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/05/pers-m29.html
I honestly don't think I can hold my nose against the stench in our mostly criminal "government" to vote for the Menace or not vote at all. I have an idea that if we don't act now against fascism we'll be doing exactly what the Germans did in the '30's. Woe be unto us and the whole world.