The Riots Across the Pond

I've been listening to the BBC for coverage of the rioting/looting in London and other English cities, and I've come to think that nobody over there actually gets it. In case you hadn't noticed, the class system over there is quite pronounced (including "clahhss," "clawws," "clows," and several others.) The rioters, according to David Cameron's "clahhssmates" from Oxbridge, are the "lowest of the low." They are young, uneducated, and unemployed. They are white, black, and various shades of brown. They are just knowledgeable enough to realize that the only way they ever are likely to have a few nice things is to steal them.

I think it was my favorite senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who first coined the (now very politically incorrect) term, "underclass." Back in Moynihan's day, the "underclass" in the USofA was predominantly black, since race and class were even more closely correlated then. I know I heard that very term on the BBC today, spouted by some Tory twit or another, whose argument seemed to be that "the lowest of the low" are congenitally defective, with no regard at all for their lower-middle-class neighbors struggling to keep their beauty salons and falafel stands unburnt.

It's true. They couldn't care less. They'll never have a beauty salon or a falafel stand. A more upscale Blackberry or pair of sneakers is their height of aspiration.

Cameron and the Conservatives are committed to austerity. So are our homegrown plutocrats and their political allies, from both parties. Here in the USofA, as the rate of teen unemployment and the widening gap between rich and poor continue to increase, our ability to pretend that we really don't have a class system is falling apart. As state and local governments, strapped for cash, cut back on policing, fire fighting, and education, things can only get worse.

'Ow's 'at 'it ya, guvner?

Where is the Class War?

We hear people on the right yelling "class war" with a boring regularity. Those of us who have been paying attention are inclined to believe the class war is over, and that the working and middle classes have lost.

There still are plenty of warriors out there, though, often quite well armed. There are hunters, rifle clubs, militias, street gangs, and no shortage of individual angry paranoids — many with combat experience. They could stir up some extremely severe civil unrest if they got it into their heads to just start shooting in a concerted way, but except for the drug gangs shooting each other and some of the paranoids shooting their families, co-workers, and the occasional abortion provider, things are unnaturally quiet.

To a large extent, the liberals have to take the blame. They have perpetuated the ridiculous belief that we can get what we want and need by voting, and that shooting our corporatist oppressors and their toadies is just not done. The ones most likely to shoot anyone for political and economic reasons don't even have a clue whom they should be shooting, and dream about taking potshots at immigrants and Democrats.

Okay, some Democrats might deserve it, but not for the reasons their assassins would have in mind.

The main thing that keeps a perfectly justifiable class war from happening is that there's nobody left to tell the people with the guns who they ought to be shooting. They won't get it from their corporatist media, their corporatist drug cartels, nor their supremely corporatist NRA. Organized labor — what remains of it — has been co-opted. "Progressive" campus groups were suckered into working for corporatist Obama, and now they've gone back to their keggers.

The so-called "left" has fragmented into feminists, environmentalists, "free speech" advocates, gay rights activists, anti-war activists, immigration reformers, and scores of other single-issue ax-grinders, incapable of recognizing that their common enemy is world corporatism — and that fascism, over six decades after World War II, has triumphed. The other problem with the "left" is that they're liberals, and "don't believe in violence." Where are the goddamned Communists when you need them? Is everybody who owns a gun and understands that "the man" is not his friend in prison on drug charges?

Oddly enough, I think the best chance for class warfare might be in China. New to capitalism, their elites haven't learned to hide their corruption as well as ours do.