US workers losing faith in capitalist institutions has the capitalist class on edge. It's something we can be optimistic about.

The capitalist class through their ownership and control of the media consciously portray the working class as conservative and reactionary and the “petty bourgeois” and left academia as progressive, more open to ideas; some of them are even anarchists and socialists they claim.

In fact, the term “working class” is generally scorned upon here in the United States. When I immigrated here more than 35 years ago I was quite insulted that someone would refer to me as middle class. “I’m not middle class” I would reply. Not only that, I had no aspirations to become middle class either.

The theoreticians of capital are well aware of the class structure in society and do everything they can to obscure the fact that the vast majority of us are working class or that US society has a class structure at all. The worst thing a political candidate can do in the US is to wage “class warfare” to give this idea credibility in any way; this is how afraid they are of the working class. Racial or gender division is OK, but not class.

Every ruling class does this, uses the institutions that it controls to convince those that it exploits that we are all “god’s children” “one nation undivided”. The state, or government as most workers would call it, and its institutions of organized religion and the education system all function to cement these ideas in the minds of the working class.

This gradual decline of the US as the sole major power on the world stage a development accelerated by the present historic economic crisis has weakened the faith the US working class has in the system and its traditional institutions. A September 2nd op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal revealed the level of concern that the strategists of capital have about the grip they have on the consciousness of the working class. Despite the propaganda from the media and the pulpit, echoed by the worker’s leaders atop the Union movement, consciousness has a material base and their propaganda does not correspond to objective reality.

The authors of the WSJ piece on September 2nd are very concerned because the working class (and they use the term 13 times in their article) have lost the ability to enter in to the “middle-class ideal”, or put this way, the American Dream has not only become unattainable, it is more of a nightmare. These academics have discovered that the working class in the US, those without the education needed to get “professional and managerial jobs” have “sunk towards the wages of the working poor”.
This is a very dangerous situation for them as the ideology of the bourgeois, individualism and selfishness as the way to success, is strengthened among the working class through the intervention and growth of the middle class layers.

The ability to move in to the more conservative middle class has been an important factor, along with the role of the Union leaders, in the passivity of the US working class over the past period. But this door is rapidly closing and the faith in the institutions of capitalism, marriage, traditional family and church, are breaking down. “..they are losing not only jobs”, the authors discover, “but also their connections to basic social institutions such as marriage and religion." “They’re becoming socially disengaged, floating away from the college educated middle class.” In other words, they are losing the battle for the consciousness of the working class-------this is not a bad thing for workers. It is the struggle for freedom in the truest sense, connecting with objective reality.

The institution of marriage, or the capitalist version of it, is losing its grip on working people. The percentage of working class women (of all races) who were unmarried but living with a partner when they gave birth has risen from 10% in the early 1990’s to 27% in the mid 2000’s. The WSJ piece claims that “cohabiting relationships” don’t last and that children born to unmarried couples are twice as likely to have their parents break up by the age of five as children born to married parents. I see this as a positive thing. Gone are the days when couples, especially women, were forced to stay in relationships that didn’t work. This statistic reflects more freedom not less. But for the capitalist class it represents the weakening of their influence on the consciousness of the working class through the institution of marriage.

They are equally concerned about the influence the pulpit has over the consciousness of the worker. A steady job, a house and a car and a good education system, these all contribute to the security and faith workers have in the system and the faith they have in the institution of religion---god has been good to them. But the general decline of the security and possibility of upward mobility that many baby boomers had has also weakened the grip this institution of capitalism has over our thinking.

The number of workers that attend church has declined considerably. The decline has been greatest among working class whites. In the 1970’s 35% of working class whites aged 25-45 attended religious services almost every week according to a study by the National Opinion research Center. This was about the same as college educated whites in that age group, the research finds. But this is not so today as those with college degrees is the “only” group that attends religious services with the same frequency as in the 1970’s.

The authors of the Wall Street Journal piece are not concerned with the welfare of the working class in their findings. They are not concerned that they are losing their relationship with god in the way a genuine working class person who has faith might. They are not concerned about the general well being of unmarried couples and their children, that they will have no jobs, or decent education or good social services like education and medical care. They are deathly afraid of the response the working class will have to the failure of the capitalist system, their so-called free market, to provide a decent life. The number of Americans in that category is dwindling rapidly.

They pose some important questions to their class comrades who read the Wall Street Journal: “What happens, then, when the job marker conditions that once allowed most high-school educated Americans to connect to the rest of society through hard work, marriage and religious participation no longer exists?”

“Will their social disengagement leave them vulnerable to political appeals based on anger and fear?” they add. This is their fear; politicization of the working class, the questioning of the system and being open to alternatives.

In today’s WSJ another frightened bourgeois strategist attacks Obama for his “class war” rhetoric. And what class war language was Obama uttering? He told a Labor Day crowd (rhetoric indeed) that, “Anyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it’ll trickle down to working folks running faster and faster, just to keep up----they just haven’t studied our history.” He's right.


This is not exactly a call to revolution but that matters not; any reference to the haves and the haves-not is a dangerous road to travel. And the trickle down argument is the dominant theoretical justification they use to convince us that the system serves our interests. It is the capitalist class’ equivalent of the Divine Right of Kings used by the European feudal regimes to justify their rule.

Today’s WSJ piece agrees that we need to do something but warns about tapping in to the anger that workers have towards bankers and the rich. Obama’s speech, “….pumped out more class-based political demagoguery than the nation needs right now.” writes Daniel Henninger. What’s needed, he whines, is a “..national leader willing to spend his time in office getting everyone, from top to bottom, believing they are on the same national team.” This is a hard sell given the real world workers find ourselves in.

Here we have various strategists of the capitalist class discussing the consequences if their system cannot halt the continued assault on US workers. They agree that something must be done to regain a firm grip on the consciousness of the US working class. But those of them that use class war language go to far, it’s too dangerous. But the class war rhetoric is forced on them by the objective situation. It is the response they hope will temper the anger they see and feel in society against the rich and their system; it is too strong to ignore, they have to validate it and hope for the best.

The ranting of a lunatic Florida preacher with a congregation of 50 is what best suits the situation. It is no accident that this nutcase is all over the media, on CNN, in the papers etc. It is part of their arsenal in the propaganda war aimed at the working class, directing our thoughts in to a direction that best suits them---but they are losing this war and that is a good thing. We all make choices but not necessarily in circumstances of our own choosing.

I do not gloat in the increased suffering that working people endure due to the failings of the system of production we call capitalism. But it’s clear when reading the serious journals of capital that they are very pessimistic and insecure about the future. It is good to read about their pessimism rather than ours. Like the alcoholic that finally rejects denial and accepts that his dependence on the bottle is the major cause of his predicament paving the way for recovery; breaking the chains that link us to their institutions is an important step to freedom, to understanding the world as it really is.

It is a step forward.