Labor Day

Capitalism was built on the exploitation of human labor for as little cost and as much inhumanity as society would allow.

When society has expressed organized contempt, there were uprisings if not wars, protests, demonstrations, strikes, and more. Eventually, better conditions were negotiated. Even still, terms were not permanent, and there remained much to be desired.

When the owners of capital, tycoons of industry and banking, decided they were going to be defiant if not sneaky and find work-arounds, they not only exploited the vulnerable at home… but people and resources in other countries too, via wars and economic outsourcing.

Greed and power have been the basis for many political assassinations and wars between nations large and small. …which the poor folks of the United States were sent near and far to fight; not on behalf of freedom and democracy as the public was told, but rather for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful, to help build and expand geopolitical power and grow new markets for corporate exploitation.

For much of the 1900s, the general public in the US was bombarded with propaganda by sources of US media that were owned and operated by tycoons of industry who understood the value of owning the means of information the public consumed on a daily basis in manufacturing consent for their agendas.

In the 1950s and 60s, this operation was put into high gear as money and power railed against the gains of labor power from the New Deal era. Fear was pumped into the discourse to the level of a modern Salem Witch Trial. Mass hysteria ensued. Anything that was for the public good was politically tied to a demonized perception of a political system the US was at odds with across the globe.

No one personified the politicization of the tycoon class’ class war against the poor and working class better than former Actor turned politician, Ronald Reagan. Reagan had been a tool of the tycoon class for decades, becoming a stooge for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for communist Russian spies in Hollywood back in the 1940s and 50s. In 1980, with the power of the US Executive Branch and popular support, Reagan could spin the narrative and redefine what it meant to be not only a worker in the US, but a US citizen entirely.

Reagan redefined government priorities in the US and shifted massive power from the people to banks and corporations, killing labor power in the process, effectively rolling back gains of social and economic justice made over the previous 40 years.

The Democratic Party, which had been a political party that at best, to a certain extent, appeased organized movements for social and economic justice, changed course to accommodate Reagan’s shifting of the political landscape. They adopted Reagan’s rhetoric and policy positions and tried to outdo him. One such politician famous for it at the time was a Senator by the name of Joe Biden.

From Ronald Reagan on, despite power shifting from Republicans to Democrats and back again, the economic agenda was and continues to be the same, to this day, despite the rhetoric of “the Reagan era” being over.

Capitalism has and will always run on the exploitation of people and resources to best benefit the wealth and power of the few.

Over the course of the last century especially, big money… wealthy and powerful special interests and aristocratic families… have overtaken the power the government wields.

As a recent study out of Princeton University has revealed, the average US citizen has a negligible impact on the policy pursuits of the US government so long as corporate interests are against it.

This leaves one with the only logical conclusion… that we are not as much a representative democracy as we are a plutocratic oligarchy operating under the illusion of self-government.

In order to make this system work, we have to be one of the most propagandized people on the planet, instilled with such a sense of unyielding disregard for the health and well-being of others while fully projecting principles of bootstrap-ism, personal responsibility, patriotism, and devotion to our own collective demoralization and subjection to capital that we are not only ignorant to our collective demoralization but accept it with pride and passion and attack any persons or ideas to the contrary as a threat; alien and dangerous.

While the pandemic economy has given some life to labor power, labor power is still weaker than it has ever been in the United States, because people have been conditioned to accept it. It is no surprise then that the US has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the modernized world, the highest wealth inequality, the most incarceration, a falling average life expectancy, an infrastructure on the verge of collapse, an education system slipping in world ranking, a democracy generously demoted as flawed, and so on.

On this Labor Day, I lament what has become of society, a willing and accepting participant in its own exploitation, yet reserve hope that some day we might collectively snap out of it and care about what we should care about and actively fight against those responsible, for our own interests.