Monday, October 08, 2012

You say you want a revolution... it's staring you right in the face

David Seaton's News Links
The continued slide in median earning power, rather than public obfuscation or even lack of jobs, is America’s real problem. It is the wood as distinct from the trees. It tends to loom larger when the television is off. Edward Luce - Financial Times

What we are witnessing in Europe — and what may loom for the United States — is the exhaustion of the modern social order. Since the early 1800s, industrial societies rested on a marriage of economic growth and political stability. Economic progress improved people’s lives and anchored their loyalty to the state. Wars, depressions, revolutions and class conflicts interrupted the cycle. But over time, prosperity fostered stable democracies in the United States, Europe and parts of Asia. The present economic crisis might reverse this virtuous process. Slower economic expansion would feed political instability and vice versa. This would be a historic and ominous break from the past. Robert J. Samuelson - Washington Post

For almost two centuries, today’s high-income countries enjoyed waves of innovation that made them both far more prosperous than before and far more powerful than everybody else. This was the world of the American dream and American exceptionalism. Now innovation is slow and economic catch-up fast. The elites of the high-income countries quite like this new world. The rest of their population like it vastly less. Get used to this. It will not change.  Martin Wolf - Financial Times
The quotes above are the witness to the seeds of mighty change in the years to come. In them is the embryo of the world of the future.
Capitalism's winning weapon in the great struggle with Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War was the elevating of the former starveling, sans culottes of Marx's Das Kapital into the well fed, healthy, well educated, home-owning, fat, dumb and happy, paid-vacationing, new middle class... that, until not too long, ago made up the majority of Americans, or at least the way most Americans saw themselves or at least their children.
Now all of this is being taken away from them in the interest of technological progress, globalization and fiscal responsibility...
Good luck one-percenters, I have news for you. Today's soon to be déclassé  new middle class are infinitely more dangerous than the 19th century proletariat that Marx thought would be the protagonists of his revolution. We are talking about people with much more education, knowledge of and access to the levers of the economy than the "masses" of former days. In fact this sort of educated malcontent was previously only a tiny minority, but even so was feared as the seed corn of revolution: the "vanguard of the proletariat"... now there are masses of them.
The fools that want to take away these people's "entitlements" are just that, fools. This middle class was created so that rich people could sleep soundly in their beds, while sugarplum fairies danced in their heads.Take away their "life style" and they will devour the perp. DS

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So you're supporting scheiss-sandwich serving SS Slasher Zer0bama precisely WHY?

David Seaton's Newslinks said...

Why? When? How?

First the why:
In America we are talking about a huge mass of people who believe that if they do well in school and work hard, they have a right to live well. The end of growth means that the deal is off.

When?
When, it becomes obvious to critical mass of these nouveaux pauvres that this is not a momentary condition, but the new world that they, their children and grandchildren will be forced to inhabit.

How?
That is the interesting part… I imagine that because of the educational level of the victims that their reactions may be quite creative and original.

Anonymous said...

"Pull up a chair, there are old magazines on the coffee table, you (and I) may have quite a wait." And I doubt the Baracquiescent 0bamanipulator will be leading (except, perhaps in effigy), even in his comfortable street ("organizer") shoes!

David Seaton's Newslinks said...

The idea of the “end of growth” is revolutionary in American terms… Expansion and growth are at the center of the American experience. When this new concept sinks in the result could very well be explosive.

Han said...

You might say that this represents the breaking of a powerful American myth: that of the open highway, where you can escape your past and find a new future in a prosperous young town "out west" on the frontier.

Perhaps this is the economic "closing of the frontier".