There is No Excuse for the Working Class to Still be Enduring “Hard Times”

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

As I noted in my previous article, the stats show that a buffoonish reality show host is making a comeback and trailing Biden in percentage points in five out of the six swing states; and the sole exception has Sleepy Joe ahead by a mere two percentage points. I also explained there why this is so: basically, the working class as a whole is getting sick of the Democratic Party giving us nothing economically, and even many on the Left are thankfully no longer receptive to all the usual excuses/rationalizations.

Don’t get me wrong, some on the Mainstream Left are seriously still trying to sell the obvious load of rotten fish that Biden has been doing “amazing” considering all the obstruction by Republicans and pre-designated Dem obstructionists like Sinema and Manchin, yadda yadda yadda. How many times have we heard this through 20 years of Democrat presidents since the neoliberal phase of the now-in-its-twilight-years capitalist system started with Reagan and Thatcher on twin sides of the Atlantic.

Clinton was the first Dem president to follow twelve years of Reagan and Bush the Elder, and all he did was more of the same. And Obama and Biden did more of that same stuff.

And we’re sick and tired of it. And finally, it’s really showing.

Sorry, but the old excuses ain’t cutting it no more

Yes, a commentator on Medium actually used the word “amazing” to describe Biden’s first three years in office considering all the obstruction that he has to deal with. I will provide an expanded version of my responses to everything he/she said with minor corrections for grammar/clarity, as this very obvious nonsense and tribalistic desperation by the Mainstream Left needs to be refuted.

First excuse: Biden has done “amazing” considering… (see above).

Biden has not done “amazing.” He has done nothing for us that improves our lives economically. And he broke every single promise during his campaign… except for the promise that he would never give us universal health care and would continue running things on a “business as usual” basis, of course. So, I’ll give him that.

The constant, tired old excuse of “he/she tried, but the Republicans obstructed him/her” is no longer enough. Not after we see how he has no issue with obstruction whatsoever from Repubs when it comes to sending countless billions of dollars to fight one war after another and over a trillion upwards to the capitalist class during the pandemic — the greatest upward flow of wealth in the history of the country.

Next excuse: given the congressional constraints he’s had to deal with, aka Manchin and Sinema.

Oh, you mean the capitalist-controlled puppets who alternate with taking on the role of “bad guy in-party obstructionist” as a perpetual excuse to rationalize why the sitting president never does a damn thing for the working class? Sorry, but this isn’t fooling us anymore.

working class? Sorry, but this isn’t fooling us anymore.

Next excuse: I get that times are tough,

Times have been too tough, and getting tougher, for too long now. But only for the working class, while times continue to get better and better for the tiny handful of people that Biden and all the politicians of the duopoly are truly loyal to.

There is always more than enough money available for them. We are getting sick of this, and the polls are showing that the Dems are going to drive people away from their party if they continue doing nothing, and continue with the same set of excuses over and over. That only works so many times. This shows we are now sick of it!

Next excuse: but it’s simply not possible to undo 40+ years of trickle-down economic devastation in one term.

But it’s always possible to send billions and billions to the capitalist class to fund their wars, subsidize them to ensure they remain “too big to fail,” and compensate them when workers no longer have enough to buy their products, right?

Regarding Dems allegedly struggling to undo the the trickle-down nonsense of the ‘80s, Clinton spent eight years passing legislation that did nothing but benefit capitalists while tearing down programs that the poorest of the working class desperately needed.

This included heavy de-regulation of the industries; passing the “free trade agreement” NAFTA that sent what was left of our factory production economy overseas; passing the racist 1994 Crime Bill and strengthening the drug war laws even further; destroying welfare for the poor “as we know it”; repealing the Glass-Steagall Act that was passed during the Great Depression to protect us from the speculator market that previously brought the economy to its knees; enabled the college tuition debt debacle to go more overboard than ever before; and launched a deadly cruise missile attack on Sudan and Afghanistan that led to the events of 9/11 and the unending wars in the Middle East that has defined the first two and a half decades of 21st century American foreign policy.

And let us not forget the huge blow to our civil liberties undertaken by Clinton when he passed the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed big media companies to go from 100 owners to a mere 6 and helping to commodify the Internet. As Michael Corcoran noted in the above-linked March 20, 2016 article:

Twenty years ago last month, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The act, signed into law on February 8, 1996, was “essentially bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies,” as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) described it, and radically “opened the floodgates on mergers.”

The negative impact of the law cannot be overstated. The law, which was the first major reform of telecommunications policy since 1934, according to media scholar Robert McChesney, “is widely considered to be one of the three or four most important federal laws of this generation.” The act dramatically reduced important Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations on cross ownership, and allowed giant corporations to buy up thousands of media outlets across the country, increasing their monopoly on the flow of information in the United States and around the world.

“Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few,” said Eduardo Galeano, the Latin-American journalist, in response to the act.

Twenty years later the devastating impact of the legislation is undeniable: About 90 percent of the country’s major media companies are owned by six corporations. Bill Clinton’s legacy in empowering the consolidation of corporate media is right up there with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and welfare reform, as being among the most tragic and destructive policies of his administration [emphasis mine].

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not merely a regrettable part of history. It serves as a stern warning about what is at stake in the future. In a media world that is going through a massive transformation, media companies have dramatically increased efforts to wield influence in Washington, with a massive lobbying presence and a steady dose of campaign donations to politicians in both parties — with the goal of allowing more consolidation, and privatizing and commodifying the internet [emphasis mine].

And yes, we got four horrid years of the Repub Bush/Cheney administration thanks to eight years of the Dem Clinton administration. One led directly into the next.

After that, Obama spent eight years strengthening the war machine, turning Bush’s two wars into seven; broke every campaign promise that he made, including that he would provide us with a “public option” for health care, codifying Roe vs. Wade into federal law, and continued Bush’s bail-outs of the banks that led to the Great Recession we’re now dealing with. The Recession, by the way, is the direct result of fallout from Clinton’s administration — and Obama did this with the usual “I don’t want to do this, but here’s why I have to do it” excuse.

And of course, the working class suffered immensely while the capitalist class continued to prosper more than ever on the speculator market, using readily available working class money rather than hard work to make even greater amounts of money. Even the conservatives are no longer claiming that this vast increase in wealth at the expense of the working class was due to superior “merit” on the part of the capitalists.

After Obama’s presidency paved the way for Trump’s, Biden scored a narrow victory after which he likewise did nothing over four years. That is, unless you count everything he has done to further enrich the Military Industrial Complex during that short span of time, provoking Russia, China, and now Iran and just about everywhere else in the Middle East thanks to bankrolling Israel’s cleansing of Gaza. And this having followed a brutal attack on innocent Israeli citizens following decades of U.S.-backed suppression of Palestinians, at a rave that the lunatic Zionist Netanyahu was warned about ahead of time by both U.S. and Egyptian officials (I cover that here).

So, the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations, which paved the way for two Repub administrations between them so far (with likely a third to come in 2024) left us, the working class, in “hard times.” The capitalist class all over the world continue to do better than well, however. But most certainly not the working classes of America, Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Palestine, or Israel due to all the wars and continual wealth hoarding by the international capitalist class. In fact, Biden’s liberal counterpart in France, Emmanuel Macron, was responsible for a massive uprising of French workers against his administration throughout 2023, due to the president of France making some very bad pension reform legislation at the behest of American super-capitalist Larry Fink.

Next excuse: If young people think Trump will do better for them, they will learn a painful lesson to the contrary.

You’re right, he won’t. But what do you expect when the Dems continue to do nothing for us economically yet still insist that young people and others in the working class continues voting for the party that claims to be for us but is clearly only for the capitalist class?

And sorry, but the Repubs are not the only other option. We are quickly realizing that we need to abandon the capitalist duopoly altogether and stop relying on multi-billionaire capitalists to take care of workers, whom they cannot remotely identify with. That is not their real job, which is why we need to fire their asses and take charge ourselves.

The painful lesson we’re all gradually but now more rapidly learning is not to trust any capitalist politician from either wing of the capitalist duopoly.

Oh, and one final excuse I heard from a fellow worker I spoke with today, which I will paraphrase here: It wasn’t Obama’s fault that things got messed up during his presidency; he had to deal with the mess left by Bush/Cheney. And Trump is just bad news!

No, that excuse doesn’t cut it anymore either. Obama had eight years to deal with that mess, and Biden has had going on three at this writing. Neither did a damn thing for us with eleven years between them, and in fact, Obama and Biden together not only continued the mess created by Bush/Cheney but escalated it in every way imaginable! Between the two, they made no attempt to reverse most destructive policies initiated by either Bush/Cheney or Trump/Pence, despite all the promises they made to the contrary.

So, the excuse for Biden is again going to be that he hasn’t had enough years in the White House? I think too many of us all across the currently fractured Left are well aware that Biden won’t do a damn thing to reverse any of the terrible policies pushed by the four administrations before him, whether he has five or fifteen more years in the White House. Instead, he will continue with his promise to his fellow capitalists of maintaining “business as usual,” including anything he promised them that he would never give to us (e.g., universal health care).

So, where should we go from here?

As I mentioned in my previous article linked above, vows to fight “white supremacy” or “preserve Democracy” (the Dem version of it, not as defined in the Constitution) or “this is an unusual time in American history”, a.k.a., “we gotta strop a ‘fascist’ like Trump winning or our Democracy is done for!” is no longer being accepted as a stand-in for the multitude of economic issues the working class is dealing with. The Dems offer no solution for any of this, and it is now starting to grate on us no matter how many of the old excuses the desperate adherents of the Mainstream Left keep trotting out in defense of Biden. The results speak far more to us than empty claims with no evidence to back them up.

Things have been getting so difficult for the working class as the capitalists concern themselves with fighting their expensive & destructive wars and enforcing their class rule above all else that even many conservatives in the working class are no longer spewing the “It’s too bad if times are tough, the system owes you nothing! We’re all responsible only for ourselves!” line of bullshit. They are starting to realize, much like some on the Left, that the system itself is the problem, not “laziness” or other personal issues on the part of the growing plethora of poor people in this country — and all over the Western world, really.

In fact, workers across all demographics and the entire political spectrum are beginning to acknowledge the darkest open secret of the modern post-Industrial Era: There is no moral or material justification for anyone in the country — or even in the world — to still be enduring “hard times,” let alone such difficult times getting increasingly worse.

Both the Repubs and Dems have worked hard to keep the workers blaming each other for these failures, whether it’s the fault of immigrants, or gay people, or black people, or straight people, or white people, or men dominating everything, or women wanting too much, etc, et al. It’s now becoming clear to all workers that the prime culprit of our economic woes is only a handful of people and the system they, not us, benefit from.

Now don’t get me wrong, the Right and the Left will, at least for a while, continue to offer differing solutions to the problems with the system that we are starting to mostly agree on. The Right and Libertarians will not blame capitalism per se, but the way that it’s run by the current crop of capitalists, or the type of capitalism we now have (the Libers will call it “crony capitalism”); the Mainstream Left will insist the problem with the current iteration of capitalism is that old white men run the corporations and all branches of the government, so all we need is more “diversity” and “inclusion.”

But those of us on the Classical Left will put the blame where I strongly believe it truly belongs: on the capitalist system itself. It was the most progressive system possible when first established during the final decades of the 18th century.

The real crux of the problem

We need to understand that when capitalist was first established, it was a very different era with a much less advanced level of technology. We did not possess the material capacity to mass produce an abundance for all.

One hundred years of capitalism helped us get to that point, just as a few centuries of feudalism before it helped us get to the point where the system of private (not royal) ownership of the industries could be fully established with the one-two blows of the American and French Revolutions. But we had still not yet advanced to the point where class divisions could be eliminated.

We are now well past that point, however. We can now produce an abundance for everyone and eliminate class divisions and any need to continue using money or anything akin to a barter system.

So yes, that is capitalism’s darkest open secret revealed: as of now — and as of a while now, in fact — it is no longer a progressive system but utterly archaic and destructive.

The longer class rule goes on under these advanced technological conditions; and the longer that advances like modern automation and A.I. remain the private property of the few, the more labor will be displaced and the more the ruling class will resort to outright fascism and the use of force to preserve class rule.

As automation and A.I. become more advanced, the less capitalists will need our labor, which — along with our vastly superior numbers — is the only advantage we have in our corner.

We need to stop making excuses to reform capitalism, or change which demographic should predominate in the ruling class, or try to create “public” or “debt free” money, or claim that such a better world is a “utopian” dream that we’re incapable of accomplishing because of some Social Darwinist nonsense that the human species is inherently predisposed to horrible behavior, etc.

Instead, we need to eliminate class rule, our fetishistic reliance on money to move resources, and production for profit altogether in favor of a new type of economic order that is based on cooperation instead of competition. Under such a system we can share an abundance for all rather than one that denies full access to the resources to literally billions and forces us to fight each other in a mad race to acquire “more” than others. Such a system brings out the worst in all of us and creates a hellscape of crime, mental illness, substance dependency, avarice, mistrust, and people being compelled to commit terrible acts of behavior towards others in order to “get ahead.”

We are now finally reaching a point where we, the working class, are mostly in agreement on what the problem is. What we need to do is move onto the next step of giving up our stubborn loyalty to capitalism and the belief that it was meant to be an eternal system. It wasn’t; it was meant to serve a purpose at the time it was established and then eventually be replaced by another, more advanced system as soon as it became technologically possible to do so. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism before it, etc.