Bigotry, Racism and Capitalist Class Privilege
" The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the
sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being
to liberty and well-being." -- Emma Goldman
Class divisions are prime factors in all systems, governing where, how and if
people live, work, eat, dress, school and survive. All members of a class share
its privileges, not just some few, as in the case of what is called “white”
privilege, as though it was experienced by all humans characterized in racist
society as “white”. No matter the skin tone, sexual preference or ethnicity of
the persons, class status governs whether they live in some degree of physical
comfort, are educated, make investments and are able to plan for the future, or
live in relative and often severe discomfort, in debt, in low cost housing,
ghettos, jails or on the street, with their only future plan being able to
survive another day, let alone another week.
Class privileges come before and count for more than sexual privileges, which
are very real but are at least based on the organic nature of humanity, while
race differences are a filthy lie under which we live in the promotion of
capitalist class society, along with all other separations used to divide
humans from our commonality.
The lawyer reduced to ambulance chasing still enjoys a more comfortable
material standard of living than the driver of the ambulance, no matter the
lawyer’s sex or skin tone or the driver’s religion or sexual preference. Those
able to graduate from college enjoy privilege by comparison to the
majority who have no such luck and those with enough money or program access to
get them into the “better” schools enjoy more privilege than those who go to
ordinary colleges, but both groups enjoy a class status beyond that of the
majority, of all shapes, sizes, beliefs and skin tones, who haven’t a prayer of
attending college unless making deliveries, cleaning its toilets or building a
wing on the chem lab or art studio. And a less formally educated class of
majority Americans owe what education they have to their teachers, all of
whom are and were college graduates who enabled them to become, according to
some political bigots, unsophisticated, ignorant, and even “deplorable” members
of a working class.
Being born into an educated and materially comfortable family does not
guarantee a person wont wind up a miserable and suffering human, but that
suffering is much less likely to be physical and may at least have the
assistance of therapists and legal drugs, rather than reduce them to seeing a
parole or probation officer for therapy after consuming the only drugs they can
get, illegally.
These aspects of material class reality should be understood by all but are
still buried by consciousness controllers who sell us the prevailing mythology
that sees all social ills as the result of individual problems or blamed on
those most visible as members of lower economic classes, frequently and most
malevolently but not exclusively called “people of color”, as though they were
blue or purple, but in fact covering for a racist history that reduced some of
us to even lower economic status by virtue of skin pigmentation.
The horrid story of chattel slavery, in which hundreds of thousands of Africans
were transplanted to the western world in chains as the cheapest form of labor,
serving as the back bone of capitalist profits for a long period of history, is
still almost a secret to many Americans. But while that treatment was uniquely
cruel it was a continuation of the inhumanity and abuse of first, the
indigenous people who lived here centuries before European colonization, and
later, immigrant labor from Europe and Asia which sometimes suffered miserable
conditions even beyond some slaves who happened to be owned by benign masters.
While the squalor and bigotry encountered by millions of immigrants may not
have been as disgraceful as the suffering of slaves, the lesser evilism
implicit in such comparisons serves as an example of what passes for our
democracy, when voters are frequently reduced to selecting someone who sickens
them less than the opposition candidate after an alleged political debate that
often amounts to pimps arguing about which one represents true love.
In a system dependent on individual consumption at the market as the be
all end all of human relations that finds a majority of humans the world over
relating to life in poverty and misery, class divisions are used by rulers to
keep democracy from ever happening. The result can be as ridiculous as people
with cancer seeing people with polio as being privileged, with lesser
evilism carried to a point very close to current conditions of working people
so divided by ethnicity, sex and skin tones that they keep minorities in power
by allowing themselves to be so humanly reduced.
Our ruling billionaire class, smaller in number and richer than any in history,
hires and rents a professional class to maintain its rule while those
professionals hire, rent, administer and educate the working class to maintain
everyone’s status as members of separate classes but all somehow democratically
equal. During slavery, the upper class House Negroes sometimes organized and
led rebellions when they saw how their people suffered while the masters lived
on what they slaved to produce. But most went along to get along, often
hoping to bring change about by slowly working to bring understanding to all
concerned, or maybe just making life better for themselves, as most of us do.
Their behavior was the same as any other group trying to survive as best it can
under circumstances seemingly beyond its personal control. Welcome to 21st
century capitalism, the time when the system has never been as unjust but has
more people thinking and acting beyond imposed and taught differences but as
united humans whose experience is far beyond past expressions of change, though
with the same opponents, problems and with even more serious calamities for the
future if humanity is not successful.
When there are social breakdowns, as are currently being experienced in
possibly the most severe and communicated way in capitalist history, class
differences become bolder and clearer than ever. The latest political economic
crisis in America is due to a possibly overdone but still deadly virus
compounded by another in a long series of killings of Black Americans by white
police, highlighted as never before in the age of instant communication, as
well as instant mis-communication. Long dominance by major media over citizen
consciousness is often countered now by what is called social media –though it
is still at times very anti-social – but the views of a dreadful and at its
roots social crime is, as too often, treated as the act of a bigoted
individual, or group of individuals who perform state services in maintenance
of American class society.
The horrid scene of a victim with a police officer’s knee on his neck
causing his death even though he offered no resistance has ignited
outbursts of understandable pain and rage but also sometimes cynical
manipulation mostly directed at the police as though they are individually
acting out racist behavior in some social vacuum in which the formidable
economic barriers between communities originate because of servants of the
state, rather than the owners and operators of that state: the ruling class.
A relatively comfortable sector of the population has suddenly been confronted
by a nearly shut down society under assault by a seemingly new virus and
simultaneously seen the most vile aspects of racism for the first time, which
the collapsing system has spread in its lust for private profit at public
expense, but still clouded by mind management into placing blame for increasing
horrors on evil individuals or “identity groups” deemed guilty of perpetuating
injustice all by themselves.
Blaming police for the wretched social reality of communities segregated by
economics and alleged racial difference is like blaming the military for the
wars that destroy nations and kill hundreds of thousands of foreigners while
most of us go to work, school, shop, watch TV, feed pets, eat
taco-pizza-burgers or health food, buy guns and demonstrate against wars. The
political economic realities that treat some humans as lesser commodities in a
diseased culture that reduces everything to a market item to be bought and sold
are rarely dealt with let alone confronted. The forces of the market
exclusively under minority control can no longer be tolerated by any of us
wishing or claiming to be working on behalf of humanity and not just a sector
of it.
The present moment of a virus which may get worse with demonstrating crowds
breathing on one another may end with more deaths and social division but as
long as it pits people against the police it will be just what our rulers want.
Sincere comments offered by politicians and celebrities are nice but in
substance they amount to the usual speeches about hearts going out to the
sufferers of whatever tragedy of the moment is being discussed. They are very
much like the hordes of us who demonstrate against a war or another injustice,
and then go home for diner while the war and the injustice continue after we
vote for another candidate who supports the system of war and injustice.
Our rulers have made even more billions during this pandemic phase of a
crumbling system which may yet fall on all our heads if we don’t stop lashing
out simply at those employed by them and paid for by us and aim our
rebelliousness at the top where it resides.
Capitalism will continue pouring billions into the accounts of the fraction of
1% at the top while millions lose their jobs, hundreds of thousands lose
their homes and businesses, and well meaning if often misled manipulated
“rebels” lash out at working class state servants or a handful of shaved headed
bikers or other selected by their manipulators enemies, while the real problems
ride around in chauffeured limousines, private jets and soon, even space ships.
As we continue pouring wealth into the coffers of Wall Street, the Pentagon
and Israel, reducing more Americans to crippling debt and poverty while
killing more people in foreign countries, the current resident of subsidized
presidential housing and some “white” cops are still seen by too many of us as
the source of all our woes.
Someof us are reduced to thinking the poor, the homeless and those on the dole are
great problems because we not only hear that from our mind managers but
frequently see them on the street and under the freeways, while our rulers are
never seen unless on major media and might as well be gods. Their upper class
servants live in gated communities while they are in walled estates less
accessible to common people than the royalty of feudal days were in their
castles with moats and drawbridges to keep the common people out and under
control. The police certainly serve in the same capacity in some communities
but attacking them as the source of our problems would be like feudal rebels
attacking the moat or drawbridge while remaining ignorant of the people and
wealth they protected.
We share a material social reality no matter what our personal
comfort level may be for the moment and it grows more dangerous to our future
the longer we allow ourselves to be ruled by an unelected tiny minority running
a system that works against all our interests. We do not need to simply end
poverty and injustice in one or another community: we need to end poverty and
injustice for all by insisting on jobs, healthcare and housing for all
people. We do not need to simply stop killing people in the Middle East or in
American ghettos: we need to cut military budgets, work for global peace and
disarmament, and stop killing people everywhere. That calls for a radically
different system than the one under which we live, one that puts the public
good before - way before - private profit, and that needed transformation can
only come about when we of the majority class unite to bring it about.
email: fpscott@gmail.com
Frank Scott’s political commentary and satire is online at the blog legalienate: http//legalienate.blogspot.com
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