Monday, September 26, 2011

Class Warfare

I have 5 minutes to write what I wish to say. This should be easy.

Currently there are efforts to relieve the tax burden on individuals of the working and middle class(even upper-middle class) within the party in power.
Consequently, there are efforts within the opposition party to characterize such attention to the specific social, political, and economic harms of being lower or middle class, as "class warfare".

If the current mainstream media is dominated by a handful of wealthy corporations, who are legal persons obligated by law to their shareholders to seek profit no matter what the human cost, most likely these corporations will have political agendas which favor the wealthy. Because the individuals who can arguably be said to hold the levers of power are assuredly of the upper class. And if there are no levers of power because the institution runs itself like some kind of organism or legal person, then that organism is wealthier than the vast majority of humans(those are the people that aren't corporations). 

I only bring up the preceding paragraph to make the point that in the status quo, before this event of relieving the tax burden came in to the focus of the agenda setting machine of the media, class warfare was a non-existent topic, only surfacing when George Bush Jr. made the same claim previously in regards to Kerry. My argument is that the dominant understanding of the idea of "class warfare" is discourse on class is not ok.

I only bring up the preceding paragraphs in order to argue that whether or not you agree that Obama is engaging in "class warfare", you should understand that class warfare is constantly taking place in the status quo.

Wealth is ALWAYS being redistributed in some way. Or else nobody would be spending anything. If nobody spent anything there would be no wealth. Thusly, we can see that wealth is constantly being redistributed in some way.


My thesis: Currently in the status quo wealth is being transferred from the middle class to the upper class in great quantities. The more discourse on class is silenced the more effective and accelerated this redistribution can take place. The fact that we have reached this Orwellian point where the middle class starts finally fighting for its life and realizing their shared experiences and goals have real significance for the political role they should play, and its called class warfare. During times we DON'T talk about class, "class warfare" plays a much larger role, than in times we DO talk about class.


Concession: Or we can just allow such activity to be called class warfare, just make sure we label the times when we are not talking about class as: Class Terrorism. Because the middle class should start fighting back rather than just hoping the economy doesn't come for them next.