The Working Class Must Be Loyal to Principles Over Any Political Party
Now that the Democrats helped usher in the Second Coming of Trump with their utter failure to do anything for the working class, we need to consider all the reasons why the only alternative for our class is to abandon the Duopoly entirely.
And also to abandon the futile hope that some billionaire politician is going come along and somehow force capitalism to work for the common person. The system that grants huge privileges to the few has outlived its useful progressive purpose to the world after overthrowing feudalism and bringing us the Industrial Revolution. After we reached that point in our technological development, production for profit and private ownership of the industries has become an albatross around the working class’s neck.
Automation and A.I. are rapidly decreasing the capitalist class’s need for our labor — whether it be physical, clerical, or intellectual — and this potentially labor-saving boon to our class with its potential to drastically reduce toil and the number of hours we need to work is instead being used to displace us from our ability to earn money.
And money is an all-important means of survival and motivation under capitalism. It greatly limits our access to the vast cornucopia of abundance we collectively produce while allowing a handful of people access to vast resources that literally enable them to control the world governments.
These mega-billionaires are now beginning to openly rise from the shadows to bring the system to its logical conclusion, enabling them to go from heavily influencing the governments to actually taking control of things directly. They are becoming hi-tech feudal lords while reducing the workers to post-industrial serfs that own nothing but rent everything from their uber-monied overlords.
As a result, we are rapidly heading towards a regression back into a feudal economic system, what may best be called Industrial Feudalism — or as some are now calling it, Techno-Feudalism. For generations now socialists have been warning about where capitalism was headed after the Industrial Revolution eliminated most real forms of material scarcity. However, capitalist-directed propaganda canonizing the current economic system as being something that must go on eternally has thus far kept the working class blind to the source of their economic insecurity and ingrained with a deep fetishism for utilizing money.
The Pendulum Problem
One of the worst manifestations of the working class’s failure to move beyond the known towards a different and better world order is its continued reluctance to reject the capitalist Duopoly. That is, the two main political parties, which are actually two factions of the same class of billionaires that fund and control them both. In fact, all politicians are either millionaires or billionaires, or members of the PMC (Personal Managerial Class) of affluent workers who serve them and attempt to use positions in Congress to become capitalists themselves. Just ask Nancy Pelosi and AOC.
Let us consider the reality we’re now faced with. The Democrats falsely presented themselves as being the party of the working class while having done absolutely nothing for us economically after the 1960s. Following that decade, they did everything in their power to usher in the neoliberal era, while never doing a damn thing to keep us out of needless, lengthy wars.
The failure of Jimmy Carter ushered in eight years of Reagan and the true beginning of the neoliberal era of capitalism, followed closely by another four years of Republican administration under Bush the elder. Then the failure of their wing to do a damn thing for the workers derailed H.W. Bush’s chance of another four years and brought us eight years of Clinton, which marked the full metamorphosis of the pre-1970s Democrats — who gave us the New Deal in the 1930s and civil rights legislation of the 1960s — into the corporate-controlled duplicate of the Republicans.
Under Clinton’s watch, the Democrats began rapidly undoing those genuinely progressive Keynesian economic policies by ending welfare and (briefly) replacing it with a form of slave labor dubbed “workfare” (remember that disaster?); escalating the Drug War; sending our jobs overseas with NAFTA, thus ending our factory economy and paving the way for turning us into the low-paying service sector and gig economy we know today; passing legislation that allowed big media companies to start forming monopolies via the Telecommunications Act; and repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, thus ending the separation of commercial & investment banking which led to the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s, which consequently led to the Great Recession of 2008 that we still haven’t recovered from.
On the civil liberties front, the post-1990s Democrats abandoned their previous commitment to civil rights by fomenting a regressive and reactionary caricature of its original incarnation via the sordid identity politics that took a stranglehold on this nation — and all of the West — from the latter half of the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s.
And the full twisting of the Democrats into the shameless corporate & warmongering shill it has now become was followed by a resurgence of the Republicans and eight years of the younger Bush. The Red wing of the Duopoly then fostered a worsening of the working class’s economic situation that brought about eight years of Obama — which further impoverished the working class and escalated the two pointless wars started by the Bush/Cheney administration into eight wars. And on top of that, it helped usher in a decade of destructive and clownish identity politics in place of economic policies.
This led to a backlash against the Blue that brought us four years of Trump, whose failure brought us four years of Biden. Which then led to the worst failure of the Democrats to do anything for the working class yet, thus bringing us another four years of Trump without giving Biden’s pre-selected successor Harris a chance to get her four years of dismal failure in.
The Obvious Pattern
Do you see the pattern here? Can you identify the rut that the working class has gotten itself into?
Granted, Trump proved he was not the greater evil in terms of social policies and war. He quickly eradicated the divisive DEI nonsense, thus providing more opportunities for the working class to unite rather than descend into brutal in-fighting between different demographics. He also got tough about ending the pointless and destructive proxy war against Russia courtesy of that charlatan government in Ukraine.
Of course, Trump won’t do the same thing for the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza. This is because like all Duopoly politicians he is fully owned by AIPAC, which will ensure that Israel remains a potent & enduring arm of the Military Industrial Complex while masquerading as a “safe haven” for Jewish people. Netanyahu and AIPAC can teach even the liberal SJWs a lesson in using manipulative identity politics and the glamorization of Victimhood to acquire power for themselves.
Not only that, but has the economic situation of the working class gotten any better? Are grocery prices any lower? Do we have universal health care? Do jobs pay a lot more while letting us use automation to decrease the required labor time? Have those insane city and county property taxes gone down or been eliminated so they do not make the status of home ownership increasingly fragile?
Um, no. Instead, the Republican administration immediately went back to its familiar script of trying to cut what remains of the social programs we still have and desperately need to make our lives a bit less miserable and just a smidge less fraught with insecurity. And this is treacherous territory for the party, considering how so many MAGA people also depend on these programs, thus inciting that warning from Steve Bannon despite his admitted desire to gut all those programs.
The Republican party finally won over the working class due to the Democrats’ constant lies, failures, let-downs, clownish identity politics, and warmongering. And that latter wing of the billionaire class have vowed to “fight” while only doubling down on the nonsense that caused them to lose the support of the working class in the first place.
In the meantime, the Republicans are torn between doing what they are supposed to do for the capitalist class while maintaining their newfound support from the working class.
How is the Trump 2.0 administration going to handle this conundrum? What is his plan behind simply talking about how “great” America is and “cleaning” out government waste, and other empty rhetoric that is ultimately not going to make our lives easier economically? Not to mention his open alignment with a certain tech billionaire who has openly revealed himself as using his 400 billion personal fortune to control the direction of the government in a most blatant fashion. And all the other tech and media billionaires who immediately jumped from the sunken ship of the Democrats to join the currently-triumphant Republican dealer-in-chief.
As certain journalist-activists on the Classical Left have noted, since Trump scored an undeserved victory while delivering a much deserved defeat to the Democrats (no, that is not a contradiction), too many people on the working class ceased complaining about certain matters that are crushing us, including the hefty grocery prices and out-of-control healthcare and property taxes.
The above serves to underscore the main problem this essay is set out to address: Party loyalty is again being placed before loyalty to a set of Principles that should transcend any party and any particular politician, or group thereof.
The Bind We’re In — And I’m Not Talking About the Type You Experience After Eating Too Much Cheese
This has put the working class in a serious bind that has been called the Ratchet Effect or Pendulum Syndrome. We continuously go back and forth between these two wings of the Capitalist Duopoly, hoping that one of the two will make our lives significantly better; or, at least take just a little bit of the stress away. And even if one or the other turns out to actually be a “lesser” evil in some respects the one thing neither ever does is get the working class out of poverty, crushing debt, and freedom from economic insecurity.
In between all of that, we get conservatives arguing that the working class deserves no help from the government because of “personal responsibility”; and liberals insisting that we need to focus on fighting white supremacy instead of bringing economic security to our class.
As a result, the main rules of capitalism are preserved, along with the power of its handful of rulers. We are kept in a state of perpetual struggle to survive while a few people live like pampered royalty the likes of which the kings and queens of the feudal era could scarcely have imagined. Not even the latter could dominate the entire world during their heyday, whereas their modern counterparts hold the entirety of global civilization in their grip.
The working class needs to abandon the Duopoly to stop this perpetual domination by the capitalists. We need to do this before their privately owned automation replaces their need for our labor almost entirely. And this to the point were even the military and security apparatus enforcing their rule is entirely robotic so that they no longer have to trust relying on hiring working class soldiers, police, or even mercenaries to preserve their class rule.
In my next article, I’ll explain how we need to do this. Along with praying that the working class listens to enough of us urging this class unity towards opposition against capitalism before it’s too late. Whether that takes the form of nuclear annihilation or complete feudal enslavement.