The Great Con: Political Correctness Has Marginalized the Working Class, by Charles Hugh Smith. US figures here, but similar figures apply throughout the West.
We must first grasp the decline of the working class (self-described as “the middle class”), i.e. those who must sell their labor to earn their livelihood. Labor’s share of the national economy has been declining for 46 years:
Speculators and those with access to newly manufactured money (“credit”) ended up with much of the gain, due to the financialization of the economy after finally freeing the paper currencies from their link to gold in 1971:
The managerial class at the top who manage that money did well from financialization:
Let’s look at political correctness and identity politics through the lens of class warfare and class consciousness. Those enjoying enormous gains in wealth and income have a problem: they must fragment and distract the bottom 95% who have lost income and wealth to the top 5%, lest the bottom 95% realize:
1. We have lost the undeclared economic war
2. We have more in common economically with others in the bottom 95% than we do with our neofeudal technocrat/ managerial overlords. …
The heart of the Great Con of identity politics and political correctness is a tragic irony: the more wealth, income and power that slip through the fingers of the bottom 95%, the more their overlords rely on social “empowerment,” as if a “safe space” on campus is a substitute for real political and economic agency.
That’s the Great Con of political correctness: using worthless speech acts about empowerment to distract the working class from its disempowerment in the real world. No amount of “safe space” and happy talk about empowerment can replace meaningful opportunities for economic security and advancement — precisely what is abundant for the protected technocrat/ managerial class and scarce for the unprotected 95% that’s been sold down the river.
The propaganda beauty of class-consciousness-destroying political correctness is its deceptive claim of “progressive.” If you set out to design the perfect tool to enforced neofeudalism (the political and economic dominance of the protected few at the expense of the exploited many), you’d choose an Orwellian fake-Progressive agenda of cultural fragmentation and conflict that undermines any class consciousness of shared economic disempowerment.
This is why the protected technocrat/ managerial class is freaking out about Trump’s victory: the inchoate sense that the few have profited at the expense of the many is an expression of an emergent class consciousness that has the potential to threaten the neofeudal dominance of the New Nobility and its self-serving technocrat/ managerial class.
An interesting point of view, and part of the bigger picture. Notice how issues like this, such as the graphs above, are somehow not discussed in the media — are they not news, or are they not appropriate for everyone to know?
