by Joe Siano
As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me
John Lennon 1979
In the Good Book,
Aaron spoke for Moses, although Aaron was not the prophet.
Democratic
Socialists purport to speak for America’s “working class”, although the
Democratic Socialists are not working class.
It’s been that way
for a long time
Joseph Schumpeter debunked these frauds ages ago.
In his 1942 classic, Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy, he observes how capitalism sows the seeds of its demise:
“One of the most
important features of the later stages of capitalist civilization is the
vigorous expansion of the educational apparatus and particularly of the
facilities for higher education.
…inasmuch as
higher education thus increases the supply of services in professional,
quasi-professional, and in the end all “white-collar” lines beyond the point
determined by cost-return considerations, it may create a particularly
important case of sectional unemployment.
Second, along with
or in place of such unemployment, it creates unsatisfactory conditions of
employment (i.e.) employment in substandard work or at wages below those
of the better-paid manual workers.
Third, it may
create unemployability of a particularly disconcerting type. The man who has
gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in
manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say,
professional work.
All those who are
unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the
vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and
acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals
in the strict sense of the term whose numbers hence increase
disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind.
Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into that social
criticism which as we have seen before is in any case the intellectual
spectator’s typical attitude toward men, classes and institutions especially in
a rationalist and utilitarian civilization.”
These overeducated malcontents coalesce into
“…a well-defined
group situation of proletarian hue; and a group interest shaping a group
attitude…(Of)… hostility to the capitalist order”
These people often find employment in education, media,
politics, or government bureaucracy, where they will spread their distaste for
competitive free enterprise – particularly among the young and impressionable.
Schumpeter’s insight has been given new credence via Peter
Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis, “that describes the condition
of a society that has excess of potential elite members relative to its ability
to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social
instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low
socioeconomic status”.
A recent
posting by blogger Nate Silver,
affirms that the Democratic Socialists are anything but working-class heroes. He writes:
“The DSA occupies
the high-education, lower-income corner of the electorate
…candidates like
Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed who are associated with democratic socialism
often claim to have the mandate of the working class. But in practice, their
strengths tend to be with college-educated voters.
Platner wasn’t
particularly doing better among voters without college degrees than
previous (losing) Democratic nominees in Maine. El-Sayed has relatively weak
support from Black voters”
This is the latest epoch in a shameful tradition.
Karl Marx, an educated son of a successful lawyer, could not
support his family with his writing. He depended on handouts from his rich
buddy, Friedrich Engels, to tide him over.
Engels got money from his wealthy dad’s textile mills. One wonders if he beat his breast crying mea
culpa while exploiting his proletariat workers?
Proto-progressive Jean Jacques Rousseau enjoyed royal opulence in the palace of King Frederick the Great, as he waxed idyllic about the Noble Savage. He pined for a return to nature while soaking up all the luxury the 18th century offered – fine food, warm beds, wine, spirits and doting servants.
Meanwhile, Rousseau never married the woman who bore him five children, nor did he support his kids. All five newborns were consigned to a public orphanage.
Noble savage, meet deadbeat baby-daddy.
In the “workers’ paradise” of the Soviet Union, the working
people were intimidated, starved, beaten, and sentenced to slave
labor in the gulags. The intellectuals
ran the show, living like the Tsar and his nobles. The elites were the “Vanguard of the Revolution”,
the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”.
This Vanguard was to
rule until the time came that the workers were ready to govern themselves. Their clocks were set on mañana time.
Give me a break. At
least America once produced working-class heroes who were actually workers.
·
Eugene Debs worked in railroad shops at age
14 and later became a locomotive fireman
·
Samuel Gompers started rolling cigars at age 10
– first at home, then in small shops and later in factories
·
David Dubinsky left school at 15 to work as a
baker in Russia and then in garment factories in America
·
Jimmy Hoffa left school at 14 to start his working life in a warehouse.
Tough. Street
smart. No pampered college boys, there. They may be pink, but at least they worked.
Yes, a working-class hero is something to be. Yet, the guy who wrote that tune had little claim to being one himself. When John Lennon recorded songs like PowerTo The People and Working Class Hero, he was a jet-setting,
estate-owning, pop music glamour boy who left his working-class roots far behind.
When he got caught up with the Marxist radical left-wing editors Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn of the leftist publication Red Mole, Lennon felt compelled to justify his highfalutin lifestyle with phony baloney populist anthems.
Baby, you're a rich man. Or, were. Pretending otherwise fools no one,
No wonder Hunter Thompson dismissed these songs as “ten years too late”, calling Lennon a "punk that should have stayed put and not tried to get all serious”.
For my money, real working-class heroes are people with
ideas to improve consumers’ lives and take risks to bring those ideas to market. They create jobs for workers, and profits for investors.
In other words, capitalists.
Related
Articles:
Collectivism – The Last Refuge
Of The Useless
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“Half
the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong
direction.”
- Paul Simon
