The Abandonment of the Working Class
Paul Craig Roberts
One of the great tragedies of our time is the abandonment of the working class by the white liberal/progressive/left. No longer is the victim group the working class and the victimizers Wall Street, the big banks and the capitalists. Today the victimizer is the white working class, and the victim group is everyone else. Somehow the working class, whose incomes and opportunities have been shrinking for three decades, a class that owns no politicians and has been abandoned even by the Democratic Party, is the powerful exploiter that has pushed aside the billionaires and rule America in their place. How likely is it that the down and out working class, branded by Hillary Clinton “the Trump deplorables” are the rulers of America?
The capitalists use their power to maximize their income and wealth, but in Identity Politics the white male simply uses his power to engage in racism, sexism, and homophobia. Moreover, unlike the victim groups—homosexuals, preferred minorities, and women—the white male is not protected by quotas, political correctness, and hate crimes. A white male can be called every name in the book, but one word considered hurtful or threatening to a member of a victim group and off goes the powerful white male to sensitivity training or to the ranks of the unemployed. If truth were possible, clearly it is the white heterosexual males who comprise the victim group.
But like all ideologies, Identity Politics is blind to facts. The ideology is not truth-based. Identity Politics is based in Jewish cultural Marxism, which was designed to break up goy society, and it has done a good job.
Identity Politics has far-reaching ability to distort understanding. For example, one positive result of Donald Trump’s election as President is the revitalization of national wildlife and environmental organizations. The dependency of these organizations on corporate grants and, thereby, on corporate executives as members of their boards, has diminished their fighting spirit. Trump’s all-out assault on the environment—even national monuments and Florida’s protected coastal waters—is reviving it.
The environmental and wildlife organizations’ magazines are becoming more combative, a good thing. For example, in the current issue of Sierra, there is an article, “Fool’s Gold,” by Sophia Jones. The article is about the seizure by the Colorado mining giant Newmont of small farms in Ghana in order to expand its mining operations.
Somehow the US mining company, possibly by the paying of bribes, secured permission from the government of Ghana, or whomever the government of Ghana represents, to allow the mining company to evict citizens of Ghana off of their land at minimal cost to Newmont. Sophia Jones writes that Yaa Konadu was moved off her land, where she and family members were self-sufficient, for a Newmont payment of a measly $343.
The article documents many adverse consequences of Newmont’s takeover, including the ruining of water resources and the exposure of sexually-interested young women to employed men who are unconcerned about the pregnancies that result.
As far as I can ascertain, Sophia Jones is giving accurate information. It is not my intention to discredit her by pointing out that she, perhaps under the influence of Identity Politics, loses the focus of her story of capitalist exploitation, substituting men’s exploitation of women in its place. The villain of the piece ceases to be Newmont and becomes the heterosexual male.
If you read the Sierra article, which I recommend, you will see that Identity Politics prevents Sophia Jones from holding her focus on capitalist exploitation. Global capitalism is ruining the lives of people all over the world, but the emphasis is diluted with a story of sexual exploitation.
For global exploitative capitalism, Identity Politics is a useful creation that deflects attention from itself. I can visualize the corporate planning staff deciding that the way to rape a country economically is to shift attention to gender politics.
The downside of Sophia Jones article in Sierra is that it shifts concern away from global capitalist exploitation. In other words, Identity Politics serves the ruling class by disguising who the real exploiter is.
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