The shrinking 'middle class' and the unraveling of America's founding myth

[The Red Next Door]

http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=14379&news_iv_ctrl=1261

Discuss.

[Kiev Communard]

Well, basically it says it all. The collapse of the U.S. monopoly at the global market and the fall of immensely inflated and unsustainable financial system both undermined the socioeconomic positions of the higher strata of the working class as well as the lower strata of specialists and managers' (incorrectly called "white collar workers") class that together comprised (and still comprise) the so-called "middle class" (in fact, the term "middle class" originally referred to XIX century industrial bourgeoisie), whose unity has always been existing more as a mental image among its members.

This "middle class", unlike the conventional "petty bourgeoisie", which (in form of small employers and "family businesses) are included into it in public consciousness, is extremely vulnerable to the malaises of the U.S. and global economy. As most manufacturing jobs have been downsized, and China together with Mexico have become actually "oversees" industrial base for the U.S. capitalism, there exists no more significant opportunities to obtain relatively well-paid job in "classic" industry, while the so-called "post-industrial" jobs are increasingly shifted to India, South-Eastern Asia and actually even Eastern Europe, including my own country, Ukraine. These are the main causes of the U.S. "middle class" decline.

[ckaihatsu]

Instead of using the term "middle class" it might be more accurate to conceptualize this strata as the bourgeoisie's state and financial bureaucracy -- hence upholders of the prevailing nationalist ideology and any related mythologies.

[Ocean Seal]

America relies on telling the middle class that communists will take their money. Unfortunately, for the ruling class, when they take all their money, they have nothing to lose but their chains. So I ask, what is capitalism good for? Absolutely nothing. Who is capitalism good for. People that can flip 50 coins and come up with all heads.

[Rusty Shackleford]

America relies on telling the middle class that communists will take their money. Unfortunately, for the ruling class, when they take all their money, they have nothing to lose but their chains. So I ask, what is capitalism good for? Absolutely nothing. Who is capitalism good for. People that can flip 50 coins and come up with all heads.


reminds me of a line or 2 in the communist manifesto. Marx wrote along the lines of people not having to fear the loss of private property because 9/10ths of it has already been accumulated by a tiny portion of the population, doing away with private property for almost everyone anyways. which, by the way, is absolutely true.

[ckaihatsu]

Yeah, we get to be the boogeyman in the nation's cultural imagination, something like hordes of invading Mongols crossed with military-uniformed faceless soulless bureaucrats marching unimpeded in through your front doors and walls to drag you off to backwater rural barracks for political re-education while we seize everyone's stuff and change the flag.

And it's called -- 'Red Dawn II: The Colder War'


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