As the American working class loses all that was gotten in the 1930s,
its wages go nowhere anymore especially since the 1970s. So, how does the standard of living keep
going up? You say to the workers we'll lend you the money. We're not raising your wages anymore.
We're making more and more profit off you because we're computerizing and robotizing and artificial
intelligencing so we're making a fortune. We're not going to raise your wages,
but we're making so much money. Here's what we'll do. Instead of raising your wages,
we're going to take some of the profit we get by ripping you off by not paying you the higher
wages even though you're more productive every year than you were the year before.
We will turn around [and] lend you some of the money we ripped off of you. That way, not only
do we get the benefit of keeping your wages low, but you're going to have to pay us back and you're
going to have to pay us interest between the time we lend you the money and when you pay us back.
We're going to make even more money off of you, and the American working class, knowing not what
to do having no left wing to mobilize, says 'Oh okay I guess I'll have to borrow. I'll have to
borrow for my home and my car and my credit card and my student getting an education.'
The American working class becomes very angry, deeply angry. It's being ripped off. It kinda
knows it. It's losing all those government programs that saved it. It knows that too.
Now for part of the population, there is an offset. And here comes the splits of America
today. The offset is the Democratic Party, unable or unwilling to contest against the capitalists
who become their donors, the dominant voice in the culture, the old progressive Roosevelt fading into
forgotten history, the new democrats, the center democrats, the Clintons, the Obamas, all of that:
they decide 'We got to give our people something. Our workers, our African-Americans, our women,
the people who really gotta leg up in the 1930s from progressive politics, we've got to give them
something. So, in the years since the 1970s, they got something. You know what they got? What they
were demanding in the 1960s. We did get some, some amelioration of the racism in this culture.
Some amelioration of the sexism in the culture. Some recognition of the environmental issues of
the culture. The Democratic party became the party of all of those interests. It was a compensation,
an offset, something that the left in America could focus on if please it wouldn't go near the
issues of socialism and communism and the critique of capital[ism]. That had to be shut down.
That was impermissible. That was the taboo and much of the left in America fell for that.
The issues of racism, sexism, environment are very important.
They had been neglected. This was something you could focus on with your leftist impulse
and grumble a little bit that you couldn't criticize capitalism but you kind of knew
that that was dangerous to do. So for a while that worked, but you know it couldn't continue
to work because it was all a ruse. Whatever was done for women, for blacks, for environmentalists
didn't change the basic dynamic in which the rich got richer and everybody else didn't.
The inequality of the United States gets worse and worse across the 70's, 80's, 90's and both
of the decades of this century. It's unremitting. Capitalism moves on. And you can do your little
left wing cultural activity. Just don't interfere with us and after a while people catch on.
Even the gullible left of America caught on, and that's why we now see two things:
a progressive wing of the Democratic party which sees it and fights it. Not enough,
but they do. We have people who are called socialists winning elections and having a
position inside that party and pushing. We all saw what Bernie did. We all saw
what AOC is doing and so on. We also have, even more important[ly], a sudden
explosion of a labor movement, a militant labor movement unionizing, striking. Starbucks is not
the union free enterprise it boasts that it was, nor is Amazon, nor are fill in the blank.
Workers are figuring out, 'Yeah I might be this. I might be that, but I'm a worker. And I need to
be protected against this system that is not taking care of me. It didn't take care of me
with COVID. It didn't take care of me in the crash that came with COVID.
It's not taking care of me with the inflation. I better join a union. I got nothing else,
and you know what won't be far behind? A revived socialist, communist and other left-wing parties
because the unions by themselves can't do it. And they are learning. They're seeing now
the importance in their unionizing and striking efforts of the community support they can
develop. But I want to also turn to you not only about the split inside the Democratic Party,
but the split over on the other side. Here's what happened to the other part of the working class.
The other part not only saw that the benefits they got in the New Deal were being taken
away from them in the 50's, 60's, 70's and the whole 75 years since the end of World War II.
But they reacted by also noticing correctly that the cultural shift in America
was toward multiculturalism, multiracialism, women being finally lifted up through their own efforts
from the subordinate secondary position they had been put into, and these people were horrified. It
meant that not only was their economic well-being being taken from them but so were all the cultural
realities they had come to rely on. All the people who prided themselves that maybe they were this
and they were that, but they were at least white, or they were at least male, or they had some place
in that old culture that had taught them "It's good to be white. It's better to
be white than not to be" and on and on. So we developed in this country
the left wing into anti-racism, anti-sexism, environmentalism, but a right wing that wanted
to re-establish the good old days economically by having a job that was secure with benefits.
They never got that. They couldn't get it. It was not there, and you know what happened to them
because they could not get economic restitution, because they could not reverse their decline
economically? They became all the more- here we go now- enraged about the denial of their culture:
their culture of patriotism, their culture of white supremacy, their culture of religious
fundamentalism. In an ironic twist, the reaction to capitalism's predations in the last 75 years
produces the majority of the Supreme Court today. They want to take the country back.
They are Mr. Trump's court. MAGA. Make America good, in their view, again. None of them faces
the economic catastrophe capitalism has worked on this country, so instead the country splits apart
into red and blue states, into those who allow and favor abortion and those who want to stop it,
those who don't want a limitation on religion. They want religion everywhere. They want to have
the culture if they can't have the economic security.
Culture is the war place, but capitalism is the war. It's fought out in these cultural splits,
and like the war in Ukraine, and like the fight between the United States and Russia,
it can end the world.