On the Meaning of “Middle Class” and the State of the Middle Class

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Dr. Nicholas Partyka

When politicians talk, one of the recurring themes about which they spew platitudes is the economy. It would be the subject of another essay to unpack what is meant by “the economy” when politicians and other capitalist elements use that term. This aside, in discussing the economy there is a phrase that politicians use with such alacrity that it has become trite. This phrase is, “middle class”. Politicians, pundits, and social commentators deploy this term in many contexts, but almost always appealing to its ubiquity of membership, critical role in democracy, and moral virtue in their speeches. These constant references to the middle class in the popular political discourse have rendered this term impenetrably vague. If we listen to politicians then one would be led to believe that most Americans are members of this middle class, whose health and prosperity the politicians never tire of proclaiming as their highest priority. Speeches are one thing, reality another. Let us interrogate this concept of the “middle class”, and see what to make of this notion that plays such a prominent role in American political discourse on the economy.

With an election year looming, and a Presidential election at that, with their seemingly always lengthening election cycle, the phrase “middle class” will only be heard more and more frequently from now until after November 2016. The President’s recent invocation of the phrase “middle class economics” is only the latest salvo between the two dominant capitalist political parties, as they try to position themselves in the public’s mind as the true defender of – the almost apotheosized- middle class. Candidates and their supporters will be arguing more and more vigorously about which party, or which policies, will do more to help this middle class. About the only thing that candidates from both parties will agree on is that the middle class is in trouble, and that economic policies should be designed which maximally promote the welfare of this class. The two major political parties in this country have divergent views about what kinds of policies best aid this alleged middle class. However, both parties are attempting to win votes by claiming to be champions of the middle class, a class with which a great many Americans still continue to identify themselves.

We’re going to explore two distinct, but interrelated questions in what follows. First, we’ll want to know, Who and how many, people are middle class? Second, we’ll want to ask, What does it mean to be middle class? The answers to these questions will likely have to be made relative to particular societies at particular times; though some generalization is possible. To begin we’ll look at what it has meant historically to be middle class. Then we’ll look more in depth into the meaning of being middle class in the contemporary American context. What we will find is a great deal more confusion and ambiguity about this notion of a “middle class”. So much so that we should start to wonder if this notion retains any usefulness.
The Middle Classes, Historically

For most of history being middle class simply meant occupying, however tenuously, a social status that was between that of a slave and that of a noble. Basically, the middle class was composed of everyone who was not technically a chattel slave, and lacking the noble pedigree of a true aristocrat. In most societies of the ancient world this simple definition would indeed make most people middle class. However, this understanding glosses over the highly variegated nature of socio-economic positions possible between technical chattel slavery and blue-blooded nobility. For instance, debt bondage and serfdom, both forms of un-free labour, would not cause one to be dropped from the middle class on this accounting. For example, in the ancient world slaves were often employed as overseers, that is in a management capacity. It would not have been uncommon for slave overseers to sometimes direct the labour of technically free men.

We can see in certain socio-political cleavages that splits have occurred in many contexts between the lower ranks of these middle classes and the higher elements of this class. Middle classes have struggled against entrenched aristocracy and nobility at many points in history for social advancement and political inclusion. However, almost always, in the critical moment, the higher elements of these middle classes would betray the interests of the lower elements, whose bodies, blood and ballots had been used to gain them inclusion. Marx would come to call these “higher elements” of the middle classes petit-bourgeoisie, signifying the much greater material, and indeed much more importantly, aspirational affinity with the bourgeoisie than the proletariat.

Two examples will suffice here. In ancient Greece we see the demos, or “the people” engaging in political struggle for inclusion in the political life of the polis. But who is this demos? First, Greeks used the word demos in two distinct ways. In one sense, we might call the wide sense, it meant the whole citizen body of city-state in general. In the narrow sense, on the other hand, the demos meant the ‘common people’, the ‘lower classes’, the aporoi, the propertyless. This group included a very wide range of socio-economic and political situations, and certainly contained an upper and lower group. The main cleavage within the ranks of the demos is between the better off elements and those struggling to get by. It goes without saying that slaves would not be counted among the demos. Those who are struggling are more, or in worst case entirely, dependent on others for their livelihood. The Greeks called Thetes and Banausoi. The former we might call day-labourers or wage earners, the latter we could translate loosely as artisans. These were the lowest two of Solon’s five social classes, and while not slaves, were subject to various kinds of forced labour. Though some artisans and merchants could be quite wealthy, most were not. Most merchants, as opposed to retailers, though were likely to be foreigners, and thus not eligible for citizenship.

When we focus on the internal political conflicts of the Greek polis of the Classical period (roughly the 5^th and 4^th centuries BC), what we see is a struggle over citizenship, that is over access to political participation in government. While the socio-economic and political realities of the ancient world are complex, in the main the conflicts were between an urban middle class of mainly artisans and middling farmers on the one hand, and the traditional land-owning oligarchy which monopolized political power on the other.[1] The political struggles over demokratia in this period revolved mainly around whether or not the banausoi and thetes should be given citizenship rights. Chiefly important among the rights of citizens were the right to vote in the Assembly, to hold public office, the serve as a juror in the dikasteria, to bring matters before the courts; at Athens in particular, citizens would be entitled to receive a share in any disbursement of the polis‘s dividends from the proceeds of the Laurium silver mines.

The demos was the main agent of social change in the ancient Greek polis, the traditional aristocracy certainly saw it this way. They saw “middle class” elements as being too politically ambitious, which is in part why they deploy the term pejoratively. By “middle class elements” the traditional aristocracy would have lumped together both very wealthy artisans, and much more humble enterprises, all of whom were united in not being aristocrats by blood lineage. Wealthy merchants and artisans might themselves employ slaves both for carrying out production, as well as the overseeing of this work, but they lacked the “best” kind of background. This made them unsuitable for political participation in the eyes of established elites. Smaller artisans and merchants, who didn’t have exorbitant wealth to recommend them, would have been thought only the more unsuited to political life.

All of the main institutions of Classical Greek demokratia were devices designed to help poor and working-class free men defend themselves from the depredations of their richer counterparts. Rule by majority vote in an Assembly, ekklesia, open to all citizens; freedom of speech, parrhesia, in the assembly; large popular courts of law, dikasteria, composed of fellow citizens; rule of law, isonomia, as passed by the Assembly and administered in the courts; the belief that political power should be scrutinized, subject to euthyna, are all practices that helped the aporoi defend their highly precarious social position from the predatory behavior of wealthy citizens. As one eminent scholar describes, “Since the majority of citizens everywhere owned little or no property, the propertied class complained that demokratia was the rule of demos in the narrower sense and in effect the domination of the poor over the rich.”[2]

In the ancient Greek polis political participation was usually restricted to those native adult men who could meet a certain property qualification. In the main, in order to be a citizen one had to possess enough wealth to afford to outfit themselves with the hoplite panopoly. This was the complete set of armaments associated with the heavy armed infantry. If one could afford to buy one’s own armor, and afford the leisure time to learn to fight as part of a phalanx formation, then one was considered worthy to participate in the political life of the polis. The idea being that if one was wealthy enough to afford the hoplite panopoly then one had enough of a stake in the success and survival of the polis to be entitled to a role in the government of the city-state. Those “old money” and nouveau riche aristocrats who were wealthy enough could afford to outfit themselves with horses as well as more ornate armor and weapons, and thus the traditional prestige associated with the cavalry. The question of democracy in the ancient Greek world, was thus a struggle over the inclusion of those who could not afford the traditional citizenship qualification based on the connection of wealth and military service, and who because they were not slaves could make legitimate claims to be entitled to such inclusion.

Renaissance Italy serves as another great example. In the rise of the classic northern Italian city-state podestaral form of communal government there was employed in the popular political discourse a term, the popolo. Loosely translated, it means the people. However, once again we’ll see that this notion of the people actually covers over a major divergence within between well-off members and working-class members. As one scholar claims, “When, therefore, the long and venomous struggle broke out between the popolo (the “people”) and the nobility, the popular movement drew its force and numbers from the middle classes, not from the poor, the day labourers, or the unskilled”.[3]

The political conflict in 13^th century northern Italian city-states was, much like in the ancient Greek world, fundamentally about participation. Beginning in the 12^th century, a political conflict between church and secular authorities saw the rise of communal governments in all the major Renaissance city-states in northern Italy. At the time, this form of government was identified with the self-government of local magnates and aristocrats instead of more alien authorities imposed by church leaders in Rome. In this early phase of commune government, “The nobility dominated the consulate, manipulated the general assembly, and ruled the city, except where the emperor successfully intervened, as at Vicenza, Siena, and Volterra, or where the political power of the Bishop persisted.”[4]

It was against this restricted form of government that the political forces of the popolo were arrayed in the 13^th century. By organizing for combat against the military forces of the nobility, the popolo was able to seize power in the commune and change the structure of commune government, in that it was able to secure more participation for those in its ranks; or more correctly, some of those in its ranks. The popolo, much like the demos, was a class composed of better off artisans, tradesman, merchants, et cetera. It was a class of persons who had to work for a living, that is they had to do physical labour themselves to achieve their subsistence. These people were free, in that they were not slaves or serfs, but were not aristocrats, they did not possess the right kind of lineage. Political participation was at this time still restricted to those who did have the proper kind of aristocratic genealogy.

Much as in the case of the ancient Greek world, the main political cleavage in the Renaissance northern Italian city-state between the popolo and nobilitas largely concerned the way individuals made a living. Nobles owned large landed estates, and derived their wealth and status from being able to control the labour of others, i.e. vassals and serfs. Those who were not aristocrats could be wealthy, could own land, but typically had to work themselves. That is, the typical member of the popolo could not control the labour of others to the same extent that a noble could. The political conflicts of the 13^th century were not simplistic conflicts between land owners and merchants, the reality was much more complicated than that.

Both popolo and nobilitas would be distinguished from a day-labourer in that they would be considered independent in the right sort of way, they would be considered the people who had real freedom. What distinguishes the position of the poorest classes is that they are dependent on others for their livelihood. Thus, for example, the serf is dependent on the lord, the tenant farmer on the land-owner, and the day-labourer on the employer who pays him. These kinds of people would have been considered not really free in the right way, especially politically. Though all God’s children would have been understood to be free, some were not considered free enough to be worthy of inclusion in government.

In what would become an unfortunate recurring tendency, once the leading – i.e. the wealthiest- elements in the “middle class”, the popolo, achieved inclusion in communal government, they allied with the old aristocracy and turned against the lower, more ‘middling’ elements in the popolo to suppress their continued agitations for further liberalization of political participation. Thus, as one scholar puts it,

“Up to about the middle of the thirteenth century, it was in the interest of bankers and -long-distance traders to batter the entrenched communal oligarchy with an eye to loosening the political monopoly of the old consular families, mostly of noble lineage… But after about 1250 or 1260, having fully achieved their aims and in fact now menaced by the political ambitions of the middle classes, they broke with the popolo, thereby dividing and undermining the popular movement”.[5]

With the erosion of nobility and its traditional privileges across Europe and North America from the 17^th century onward, as well as the formal abolition of chattel slavery in these societies, this traditional understanding of middle classes is not sufficient for the world we inhabit. Being neither a slave nor a noble will not help many locate their social position in contemporary societies, when these societies do not formally legally recognize slavery or nobility. As capitalism remade societies across western Europe and North America in this same period, it reshaped the nature of the classes that composed those societies. Thus, a new way to understand what the middle-class is will be needed.
The Idea of the Middle Class in Post-WWII America

There are some who are reluctant to define the middle class using income measurements. The alternative proposed by many of these critics is a more aspirational definition based on consumption. This definition is based on both the level and the kind of consumption desired by individuals who aspire to be middle-class, ie. who desire to live what is deemed a middle-class lifestyle. Most of the essential features of this conception of the middle class are derived from the experience of Americans post WWII. The vast pool of purchasing power accumulated by US citizens during the war led in the post-war period to rising standards of living for a wide swath of the population. The patterns of consumption, the norms and values, of what we today consider definitional of the middle class in America were originated to a large extent in this period.

It was in this period that the idea of the “American Dream”, as it is currently understood, originates. This post-war vision of increasingly wealthy Americans achieving higher material standards of living is the well-spring of many of the elements of middle-class-ness that we take for granted. The conception of middle-class-ness as consisting of things like widespread home ownership, ownership of a motor vehicle or vehicles, stable long-term employment, ability to send children to college, take a family vacation, et cetera, was born during this era.

If we try to understand the middle class this way, we should investigate what the patterns of consumption for a middle-class individual, or family, today requires in terms of income, and how many Americans actually possess the financial means to afford this lifestyle. According to one recent report, it was estimated that a middle-class “American dream” lifestyle would cost $130,000 a year for a family of four.[6] The median income for individual income-earners in the US in 2013 was around $52,000, not even half of that estimated cost. According to a 2010 study by the Commerce Department only a family with two income-earners in the 75th percentile or above could afford the middle-class lifestyle described in the previous report. [7] According to data from a 2014 report by the Congressional Research Service only around 20% of American household could afford this price tag of a “middle-class” lifestyle.

If one takes only the items listed as “essential” in the report cited in the previous paragraph the total cost of a middle-class lifestyle, which is still above the current median income. This accounting clearly leaves out other important expenses, like taxes, that one will incur, as well as makes impossible any expenditure on important items like savings, and recreation. Now, of course food prices change, and fuel prices change, and these effect how wealthy consumers feel, as decreases in food and fuel costs can be transferred to increase consumption of “extras” like college savings for children, or family vacations. One should also note that this report categorized cell phone and internet expenditure as an “extra”. In today’s world these things are properly considered more akin to utilities, they are essentials for living.

Clearly, the level of income needed for achievement of a characteristically middle-class, or “American dream”, lifestyle is out of reach for a great many individuals and families. This is likely part of why the percentage of those identifying themselves as lower-class, or lower-middle class in recent surveys has increased.[8] Indeed, even a family with two income-earners, in the 25th percentile only has an income about equivalent to the median. Meanwhile, as of 2010, an individual income-earner in the 50th percentile only made around $25,000. The rising costs of college, the continued stagnation of wages – especially at the lowest ends of the labour market – as well as the reductions in employer-based pension and benefit programs for most workers have a contributed to making the mid-twentieth century American vision of middle-class existence more and more out of reach for large swaths of Americans.

The post-war American experience, if put in proper context, is the product of a historically unprecedented epoch. According to the research presented by Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the middle part of the twentieth century was the only time in the last 300 years that his law of capital (r>g) was reversed.[9] This was a special period in which the growth rate exceeded the return to capital, and thus workers received increasing wages, and increasing purchasing power. It was in this historically unique period that the main expectations, norms, values, and status symbols of modern American “middle-class” lifestyle were born.

If we look the heyday of the American middle class in the 1950s and 1960s what we see is a transformation of American society born of a historical accident. Piketty’s research demonstrates that income inequality in the US basically plateaued over these decades, after decreasing sharply during the period from 1913-1945, that is the period of the World Wars and the Great Depression. What the French call “les trente glorieuses”, and others have called a pax Americana, was the direct result of the tumult of the wars and economic crises of the first half of the twentieth century. Workers in the western world generally experienced a boom, in that they experienced rising living standards, wages, and benefits. In Europe these benefits often took the form of national programs, while in America they were largely employer-based; healthcare and retirement are good examples. It was in this environment of rising levels of access to material consumption that the dominant aspects of the outlook of the middle class in America took shape.

Without the devastating effects of two world wars and an economic depression of immense scale, governments, especially in the US, would not have made the concessions that they did to workers, to organized labour in particular. The need to secure consistent, reliable production of vital war supplies, which might be disrupted by labour agitation, inclined the US government to enter the fray of industrial warfare on the side of workers during the First World War; at least to the extent required to ensure production for war. The Great Depression was an important cause of the establishment of the main pillars of the American welfare system in the 1930s. Labour unions achieved even greater privileges during the Second World War, as the leadership of organized labour organizations were increasingly co-opted by the corporate interests they were supposed to oppose. As a result of the need to take sometimes drastic measures to fight two wars and a titanic economic depression the US government enacted policies which resulted in a reduction in income inequality. This reduction in inequality combined with rising levels of material consumption, due to workers increased ability to bargain collectively with the support of the legal apparatus of the state, define this unprecedented period in economic history.
Middle Class Confusion

Clarification about the meaning of “middle class” is especially important because Americans seem to be confused about this notion of “middle class”, about who is in it, and what it means to be in it. It is a well-know and, much commented on, phenomenon in American political culture that almost everyone tends to perceive themselves as “middle-class”. What makes this fact interesting, and thus worthy of the decades of commentary and analysis it has received, is the startling economic inequality that coexists with this perception.

Though the rates of self-identification with being middle-class have varied over time, a healthy portion of Americans still identify as being middle class. Even now, after decades of erosion in the position of workers due to stagnating wages, reductions in benefits, cuts to social programs and education, increasing international competition, and the shifting of various kinds of work to the global south and other peripheral economies, as well as more recently the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, 44% of people surveyed in one recent survey self-identified as being middle-class. [10] Indeed this figure has fallen over the years of the Great Recession, self-identification as middle-class fell from 53% in 2008, to 49% in 2012, and then to 44% in 2014. Thus, even in bad times, as a great many people are still struggling, a great many people continue to perceive themselves as middle-class.

There is no one universally accepted way to define the middle-class. Perhaps this is part of the reason why politicians are able to make so much political hay with it. This is also part of how it is possible for a great many rather wealthy see themselves as middle-class at the same time as many of the working poor. It is also part of how many super-wealthy individuals come to perceive others less wealthy than themselves, though still obscenely wealthy, as ‘merely’ middle-class.[11] This lack of a consensus about a definition is certainly one of the reasons there is so much confusion about the middle-class, and who belongs to it, and how one belongs to it.

Conventionally, the middle is understood as everyone in the second, third, and fourth income quintiles. Basically, everyone who is not in the top-fifth or the bottom-fifth of income earners is defined as middle-class. In America today this definition of middle-class is roughly equivalent to those earning between $30,000 and $80,000 a year.[12] This is quite a large middle-class. One might think that it is rather too large. Indeed, how can one assimilate the experiences of an individual, or even more a family, living on $30,000 to one making $80,000? One could, I think quite properly, say that these two sets of experiences are so incommensurable materially as to make them awkward members of a common middle-class. Let us note in this connection that the federal government defines the poverty threshold for a family of four as a bit less than $24,000 a year. So, it would seem hard to think the experiences of family living on about 25% more than the poverty level would be anything like those of a family making more than two and a half times that amount.

That this conception is too wide to be very useful, and for the reasons I alluded to, is admitted by the fact that, at least colloquially, we have adopted the distinctions between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ middle class. This distinction testifies to the difference in material position of individuals, or families, in the upper and lower ends of the middle. The lifestyle, the patterns of consumption, level of access to opportunity, and much else, varies so much between these groups that the distinction suggests itself, and is so patently apparent that no one questions its propriety.

Perhaps then we should narrow our definition of middle-class to only the third income quintile. This understanding of middle-class would include those making roughly $40,000 to $65,000. Even the top end of this range would still be half of what one estimate suggests a middle-class lifestyle would cost. Moreover, only about 15% of income earners would count as middle-class on this way of understanding the middle class. [13] This fact would certainly seem inconsistent with the widespread perception that the middle-class is the numerically largest class. Even if we expand back to our original range of $30-80,000, only about 40% of income earners would be middle-class. While this figure has the virtue of appearing to match up quite closely with the level of self-reported identification as being middle-class, it suffers from the vagueness we noted above. The upper limit of the 4^th income quintile is north of $100,000. I do not think it is a stretch to say the material circumstances of a “middle-class” family making anywhere from the median to the upper limit has much in common with those families earning closer to the lower threshold of “middle class”.

By several ways of trying to understand the middle class we come up with results that fall short of matching our expectations and common perceptions. We seem to end up with either an unhelpfully expansive notion of the middle-class that encompasses individuals and families with greatly divergent material circumstances. Or, one ends up with a more precise statistical conception of the middle class, but wherein fewer persons are understood to be middle-class than commonly report being so in surveys. Part of explaining this confusion about the middle-class is the fact that Americans are either unaware or deeply confused about the nature of the distribution of wealth in this country. Many people report feeling like they are middle-class, but only as a result of ignorance or confusion about the nature of wealth inequality in America. Indeed, it would be crazy to deny that part of one’s perception of class position is the relative position of others. Were more Americans aware of the real nature of the distribution of wealth they would likely feel less middle-class, and more lower-class. According to the results of one recent research study, a representative sample of Americans reported thinking that the share of total income possessed by the middle class in America, i.e. the second through fourth income quintiles, was just north of 40%. Respondents also reported thinking the third income quintile alone possesses over 10% of total national wealth. In fact, the real share possessed by the first through fourth income quintiles combined is less than 20%, and the third quintile alone possesses closer to 5% than greater than the 10% that was reported.[14]

Another important aspect of the explanation for why there is so much confusion about the middle class is the confusion individuals face given their precarious position in the socio-economic hierarchy. Given how much inequality has risen over the last few decades there has been an increase in the perception that the post-war American middle-class lifestyle is out of reach for a great many hard-working people. Rising inequality combined with the effects of a calamitous financial crises, followed by years of recession, caused many to report falling in social class. The youngest cohort especially was hard hit, with now 49% reporting being in the lower or lower-middle class. It also caused many who identify as middle-class to feel this status increasingly precarious. Indeed, according to a Pew Research study from 2014 almost as many Americans reported being lower-class as middle-class, and the spread between the two was a mere 4%.[15]
The Working Class

We have seen now that this notion of the “middle class” is highly problematic. When we attempt a rational accounting of it, what we find is that our social reality confounds many of the expectations that most Americans have when they talk about the middle class. We find that though many Americans report in surveys that they are middle-class, the middle class is small, and shrinking. Once we distinguish upper from lower in the middle class, the true middle is really a small part of the income spectrum. One cannot get too far below the median income for one to be more lower class than middle class, nor can one get too far above without becoming upper-middle, or even elite. For instance, $100,000 in income would put one at the upper limit of the fourth income quintile, while an income at or above $150,000 would place one among the top 10% of income-earners. One cannot thus get too far beyond the $80,000 average income of the fourth income quintile without ending up less middle class than upper class.

If we judge belonging to the middle class as a function of ability to consume, then again we find that the traditional middle-class lifestyle ideal is increasingly out of reach for large swaths of the American population. What we see now is that we need a new way to think about class, about the socio-economic positions that people occupy and how these are best described. Getting a handle on what class one belongs to is important, especially in these election cycles, as appeals for votes are made to members of the various social classes that compose the electorate. How is one to know which kind of candidate or policy to vote for if one does not know what candidates or policies will advance their interests? And how is one to know what will advance one’s interests if one does know have an accurate understanding of their own socio-economic reality?

Rather than muddle on with this vague notion of a middle class, we should substitute a new understanding of class and class relations. This understanding of class should emphasize the role that working conditions play in determining socio-economic position, or class. This understanding will of course have much overlap with the dominant income-based understanding. For indeed, working conditions and wage rates are often highly correlated in market economies, that is, typically the lower the pay the worse the working conditions (in one form or another) and vice versa. When we take the kinds of jobs people work into account, the picture that emerges is one which demonstrates the importance of thinking in terms of a working class rather than a middle class. When we start putting working conditions in the forefront of our conception of social class we gain a much accurate, and explanatory conception of class.

One example that helps demonstrate this need for an understanding of class based on working conditions is the practice of “flex-time”. In the upper end of the labour market this concept is instantiated by programs that allow workers to do their work on their own schedule, freeing workers of the need to always be in the office during the traditional working day. This allows workers to achieve a better work-life balance, by having more flexibility with the time they need to devote to work. On the lower end of the labour market flex-time typically takes the form of on-call forms of scheduling. This is an extension of the logic of the “just-in-time” inventory management systems that have come to dominate manufacturing industries, and applied to the labour force of a variety of businesses, but especially retail firms. The idea, in both cases, is to only have as much as it needed of both on hand at any one time, so as to free up capital from unnecessary investment in extra stock or extra labour.
Conclusion

Have middle classes existed in history, yes. Did a middle class exist in the US during the middle part of the twentieth century, yes. However, in both cases these answers must be qualified, if the nuance of reality is not to be lost. Yet, in appending these qualifications we change the nature of the answers, and thus must come to see the original answer as importantly flawed. In both cases we find the reality of the middle class(es) does not match up with our modern expectations and perceptions about the middle class. In the first case, one might be subject to various forms of un-free labour despite still being technically not a slave, and thus free but by no means rich, or even independent. In the latter case, we find that this ideal of the middle class was quite restricted, and the alleged golden age of its reign was certainly not seen as such by the many marginalized groups of that era. We also see that its very existence occurs because of the confluence of historical circumstances that would be near impossible to re-create.

The idea of being “middle class” is also a source of confusion when compared to modern thinking about the middle class, and its role in society. Indeed, much of the meaning of being “middle class” has always involved poor people, those who work for wages for a living, aping the consumption trends of their ‘social betters’. Thus, even while during the classic 19^th century hay-day of industrialization the middle class, ie. the petit bourgeoisie, was fairly small it nonetheless transmitted its social norms, consumption patterns, taste in art and décor, to those below them on the social ladder. It was not this middling class, but rather the working class, the proletariat, whose consumption, aping the middle class above them, drove the rise of a “middle class society”. This process of transmittal of social norms, values, and patterns of consumption is eloquently detailed by Thorsten Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class.

Today, this notion of the middle class, a remnant of the mid-century post-war Pax Americana, stands in the way of proper thinking about the role of class in society and the role of class in individuals’ lives. We need to be free of this notion if we’re going to able to correctly perceive how class works, and how it has changed. Remember that this notion of the middle class in post-war America was built on stable, long-term employment, with benefits, and pension plans, that paid enough to own a home, buy a car, household appliances, vacations, college educations, and more. In today’s economy these kinds of employment features of increasingly harder to come by for increasingly large segments of the labour market.

What one finds is that as automation increases, and as services increasingly dominate over production, more and more workers are forced into ever more precarious forms of employment. These tenuous relationships serve employers desire for flexibility, ie. ability to (re)move capital quickly, but increase burdens on working class people; especially on their time. Instead of thinking of themselves as “middle class”, these workers should more correctly perceive themselves to be part of what Guy Standing calls the Precariat[16]. The Precariat is already a class in-itself, but the ideology of the middle class in the US prevents it to a great extent from developing into a class for-itself. Opposed to this class is what Standing calls the Salariat, that is, the minority of a firms’ workers who are central to operations. These are core workers who typically earn a salary, have benefits, sick time, vacation days, and many of the other trappings of the fabled American middle class lifestyle.

Politicians will continue to talk in speeches, interviews, and the like about a middle class that supposedly exists in America, and how they will do the most to help it, typically by enacting the policies that will allow it to flourish. From what we have seen here working class people should no longer be duped into thinking that those politicians are addressing them. The rhetoric that dominates our politics simply does not match the reality of the contemporary economy, in particular the labour market. When we adopt a more appropriate view of class we see an economy characterized not by a broad-based and prosperous middle class, but rather by increasing inequality. We see a labour market where trends in job conditions and benefits very much resemble those in real wages. When we adopt a different view of class we see a very different answer to the question, Is there a middle class in America? No, not in a way that matches the mid-century American ideal.

Notes

[1] For a thorough analysis of the political and social conflict in the ancient Greek world see, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. 1981. Cornell University Press, 1998.

[2] De Ste. Croix 1998, 284

[3] Martines, Lauro. Power and Imagination; City-States in Renaissance Italy. 1979. Vintage Books, 1980; 40.

[4] Martines 1980, 29.

[5] Martines 1980, 61

[6] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/07/04/american-dream/11122015/

[7] http://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/documents/migrated/Middle%20Class%20Report.pdf

[8] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/27/despite-recovery-fewer-americans-identify-as-middle-class/

[9] In Piketty’s equation (r) = after tax rate of return to capital, and (g) = the rate of growth of per capita income, a proxy for economic growth. For further information about Piketty’s research see my review of his book for The Hampton Institute.

[10] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/27/despite-recovery-fewer-americans-identify-as-middle-class/

[11] http://www.salon.com/2014/12/21/why_so_many_rich_americans_think_theyre_middle_class_partner/

[12] http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2014/04/24/what-it-means-to-be-middle-class-today

[13] http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS20811.pdf

[14] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

[15] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/27/despite-recovery-fewer-americans-identify-as-middle-class/

[16] See his book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic; 2011.

The Asshole Factory

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Our economy doesn’t make stuff anymore. So what does it make?

By Umair Haque

Source: Medium

My good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a retail store.

Hey—it’s only minimum wage, but at least she’s working, right? And at a major-league, blue-chip company, An American icon; an institution; a name every man, woman, and child in this country knows; an historic company that rings of the American Dream the world over, besides. Surely, if nothing else, it’s a start.

Perhaps you’re right. Maybe it isn’t the start she always dreamed of…but at least it is one. If so…then awaits her at the finish?

What is Mara’s job like? Her sales figures are monitored…by the microsecond. By hidden cameras and mics. They listen to her every word; they capture her every movement; that track and stalk her as if she were an animal; or a prisoner; or both. She’s jacked into a headset that literally barks algorithmic, programmed “orders” at her, parroting her own “performance” back to her, telling her how she compares with quotas calculated…down to the second…for all the hundreds of items in the store…which recites “influence and manipulation techniques” to her…to use on unsuspecting customers…that sound suspiciously like psychological warfare. It’s as if the NSA was following you around……and it was stuck in your head…telling you what an inadequate failure you were…psychologically waterboarding you…all day long…every day for the rest of your life.

Mara’s boss sits in the back. Monitoring all twelve, or fifteen, or twenty people that work in the store. On a set of screens. Half camera displays, half spreadsheets; numbers blinking in real-time. Glued to it like a zombie. Chewing slowly with her mouth open. Jacked into a headset. A drone-pilot… piloting a fleet of human drones…pressure-selling disposable mass-made shit…as if it were luxury yachts…through robo-programmed info-warfare…like zombies…to other zombies…who look stunned…like they just got laser blasted, cluster-bombed, shock-and-awed…

WTF?

It’s bananas. The whole scene is like a maximum-security mental asylum designed by sadomasochists in a sci-fi movie. If Jeffrey Dahmer, Rasputin, and Michael Bay designed a “store” together, they couldn’t do any better. Her “job” will begin to drive her crazy—paranoid, depressed, deluded—in a matter of years if she continues doing it. No human psyche can bear that kind of relentless, systematic abuse.

Now. Note what all the technology and bureaucracy that wonderful, noble company has invested hundreds of millions in doesn’t ask her to do. Learn. Think. Reflect. Teach. Inspire. Lead. Connect. Imagine. Create. Grow. Dream. Actually…serve customers. Heaven forbid. It just beats her over the head, over and over again, three times a minute, every twenty seconds, with how much she hasn’t sold; hasn’t made; hasn’t produced. For her shitty .0003% commission. According to the quota that’s been set for her. By her boss. For his boss. For their boss. And so on all the way up the food chain.

See my point? Mara’s job isn’t to benefit customers. It isn’t to educate, understand, listen to, or even to chat with them. It isn’t to stop them from buying what they don’t want; to help them find what they might need; to match them with the right stuff. Nope. It’s merely to push more and more and more and more shit at them…faster, meaner, and dumber than any sane person would think is humanly possible…using advanced military technology and techniques… programmed to abuse her…so she can wage advanced psychological warfare…on her customers. And they were just suckers, gaping maws, fools, marks. And be yelled at…by a robot…if she doesn’t.

Really? This is the best our economy can do? To take the stuff of 21st century warfare and use them them to…rack up the profit? To turn a bright young woman with two grad degrees…into a Superprofitable Human Weapon of Mass Consumption…a half-crazed algorithmically-programmed asshole…a human drone…so even bigger, actually crazy assholes…can get super-rich…by slinging entire supertankers full of junk…at people getting poorer at four thousand percent interest a year…by using drones and bots to wage psy-warfare against them…so they’re conned into buying too much?

The economy doesn’t make stuff anymore. That much you know. So what does it make?

It makes assholes.

The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.

And that’s not just a tragedy. It is something approaching the moral equivalent of a crime. For it demolishes human potential in precisely the same way as locking someone innocent up, and throwing away the key.

Consider Mara again. Who in Christ’s name would design such an inhuman system? Whose sick joke of an idea is a “store” like that? What do you even call it? Because it’s surely not a “store”.

Only a monstrous asshole of the highest order could assemble such a demonically vampiric bullshit machine to prey on…everyone. Customers, managers, workers alike. Such a carefully sophisticated engine of human misery; of finessed cruelty; all to rake in a few extra pennies an hour, at the expense of dignity, intelligence, creativity, commitment, fairness, craft, service, sovereignty…sanity.

The store is an Asshole Factory.

Allow me to explain.

What happens to Mara when she’s “doing her job”? Think about it for a second. She turns into precisely the kind of asshole that the heartless dweebs who thought up this infernal torture-machine no doubt already are. Not because she wants to. But because she has to.

That’s exactly what the store was designed to do. Turn everyone into the same kind of asshole as the assholes that made it, run it, and benefit from it…want everyone to be.

The store is an Asshole Factory.

Our world is now full of Asshole Factories. That’s what the stores, offices, industrial parks, skyscrapers, malls, low-rise blocks, gleaming headquarters, whimsically designed corporate campuses, really are.

It’s the grand endeavor of today. We don’t make stuff anymore. We make assholes. The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.

Consider, for a moment, my tiny hypothesis.

Have you noticed, lately, that people seem to be more, well, assholish…than before? That everywhere you go, people seem to be meaner, nastier, dumber, angrier, more brutish?

Why?

It is the last and greatest industry left in an economy that has been impoverished, emptied, hollowed out, drained.

The Great Enterprise of the Age of Stagnation is the wholesale manufacture not of great, world-shaking, ground-breaking ideas, inventions, concerns…but of bigger and bigger assholes.

The chain-store; the mall; the hypermarket. The corporation; the firm; the partnership. B-school; law school; med school. The boardroom; the backroom; the trading floor.

These are, by and large, Asshole Factories. They don’t make people. Capable of great things. Who create and build and touch and soar. They make assholes.

They are designed to disinfect us of our fragility. To cleanse us of our flaws. To disinfect us of weakness. Love, grace, mercy, longing, forgiveness, passion, truth, nobility, dreams. Their objective is to stamp all that out; to eradicate it; to erase it. To replace it with calculation, ruthlessness, self-concern; gluttony; cruelty; anxiety, despair. By using the most sophisticated technology ever made to subjugate, oppress, and goad us into being little torturers ourselves.

And in so doing, they emotionally sterilize us. They psychically traumatize us. They intellectually castrate us. They socially neuter us. They cheat us of greatness. That is how they turn us into assholes.

They are designed to deprive us into depriving everyone else of the lives we could and have, at our highest and truest and noblest.

The assholes haven’t just taken our incomes, our savings, our careers, our educations. They’ve taken something far more precious; something priceless. It is our lives—the full, true lives we should be living—that have been taken from us. And in the gaping void where the lives we should be living are, the assholes have deftly inserted carbon copies of…themselves.

When you think about it that way…is it any wonder that society seems to be stuck? That the economy seems headed into oblivion? That life for so pretty much anyone under the age of 35 and/or worth less than $20 million or so appears to be going…nowhere?

Remember my friend Mara? She’s probably being piloted like a drone…yelled at by a bot…three times a minute…into waging advanced techniques of psycho-war…designed to traumatize prisoners…over and over and over again…right this very second…

Until she’s cleansed. Perfect. Flawless. Pure. Another gleaming, brand-new asshole, rolling proudly off the assembly line of the Asshole Factory.

We’re obedient constructivists. Pragmatists. Rationalists. So you probably want to know: what can we do about it?

It’s pretty simple.

Don’t be an asshole. Remember the Asshole Factories? Here’s a secret: they’re churning out assholes by the millions. And so should you bravely decide to be an asshole, what you’ll really be is just another interchangeable, forgettable, rapidly depreciating commodity.

So who should you be?

Be yourself. The person you were meant to be. Whether you believe in heaven or the inferno, freedom or fate, the simple fact is: each and every one of us was put here to be something greater than Just Another Asshole stealing pennies from his neighbors to pay off Even Bigger Assholes.

So let me say it again. Don’t be an asshole. Be yourself. The miracle of being that you were meant to be. A person that, consumed with passion, seared with happiness, aglow with meaning, brings forth all that is great, noble, and true in the world, and so, with love, mercy, and wisdom, lifts every life that you meet into the light.

Thank you and goodbye.

Our Spoiled-Brat Economy

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

By insuring spoiled brats/vested interests never face the consequences of their actions and choices, we guarantee failure of the entire system.

Spoiled brats do not take kindly to being called out as spoiled brats. Since economies are aggregates of individuals, we can anticipate howls of outraged denial at our economy being identified as spoiled rotten.

The two essential characteristics of spoiled brats are 1) a complete disregard for the burdens of those paying the bills and 2) a childishly self-absorbed sense of overweening entitlement. Spoiled brats have no sense of fiscal discipline. Indeed, it is their defining characteristic. They want what they want, and they want it now, regardless of the cost to others or the system as a whole.

In America’s Spoiled Brat Economy, no vested interest is ever allowed to fail. Lost billions gambling with borrowed money? Just throw a K Street temper tantrum and threaten to close all the ATMs when you go broke, and voila, Mommy and Daddy (the federal government and Federal Reserve) come rushing with trillions of dollars to make all the bad things like well-deserved bankruptcy go away.

That tens of millions of savers must be robbed of hundreds of billions of dollars in lost interest to rebuild your banks’ profits and balance sheets–the sacrifices of others are of no concern to spoiled brats.

What does not allowed to fail bring to mind? How about coddled children who are crippled by helicopter parents who do their homework for them and schools that give everybody passing grades and gold stars?

A system that doesn’t allow individuals and enterprises to fail is a system that is simply taking another path to failure. Students who are given gold stars and 9th place ribbons (Meet the Fockers) cannot possibly establish a real sense of accomplishment or learn how to make a realistic assessment of their deficiencies or strengths. They are crippled by all the “help” enablers press on them.

The same is true of spoiled-brat economies. Enterprises that are never allowed to fail (for example, too big to fail banks, bankrupt cities, counties and states, defense contractors who produce failed weapons systems, healthcare organizations that cheat the government and patients, etc. etc. etc.) become deadwood that saps the vitality of the economy, dragging down the few productive sectors.

The “help” lavished on vested interests include sweetheart contracts, direct subsidies, tax credits, lines of credit, zero interest rates and a vast range of other subsidies. The entire point of the vast lobbying machine that funnels federal and Federal Reserve largesse to vested interests is about staving off the very failure that keeps economies from imploding (creative destruction).

The Yellowstone Analogy and The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism (May 18, 2009)

Innovation, Risk and the Forest Fire Analogy (July 2, 2010)

By insuring spoiled brats/vested interests never face the consequences of their actions, choices and self-absorbed greed, we guarantee failure of the entire system. So by all means, keep passing out subsidies to too big to fail banks and 9th-place ribbons, and give the brats whatever they want as soon as they start wailing, regardless of the cost to the system itself.

Another World is Possible

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Reid Mukai

From the Spanish Civil War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, anarchism pushes for a new social order

By Tommaso Segantini

Source: Adbusters

The Spanish Civil War that occurred between 1936-1939 is always remembered as the fight between the Republicans and Franco’s nationalist semi-fascist forces. However, the war was marked by another, extraordinary event; in 1936, the year of the outbreak of the civil war, the world witnessed the first glimpses of an anarchist revolution. Sam Dolgoff, an American anarcho-syndicalist, stated that the Spanish Revolution “came closer to realizing the ideal of the free stateless society on a vast scale than any other revolution in history.”

The revolution was led by the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), a confederation of anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist trade unions. A significant part of Spain’s economy was collectivized and put under direct worker’s control. In Catalonia, workers controlled more than 75% of the economy. We should not imagine Soviet-style forced collectivization, but, as Sam Dogloff said, “a genuine grass roots functional libertarian democracy, where each individual participated directly in the revolutionary reorganization of social life”. George Orwell, who has served as a combatant for the CNT, was able to document the revolution as a first-hand observer. Two short passages from his Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938, illustrate superbly the spirit of the revolution: “[T]here was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine,” and “many of the normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves and no one owned anyone else as his master.”

Unfortunately, the Spanish anarchist utopia did not last long. The anarchists were crushed by a temporary alliance between all other political parties (including the Communists and the Socialists) and the brief—but real—experience of an anarchist society faded away.

However, an important lesson can be drawn from the anarchist utopia of 1936: another world is possible (which is also the slogan of the World Social Forum). Before discussing anarchism’s possible role in the resistance to the capitalist world order, let’s shortly retrace last century’s main stages of the capitalist system’s consolidation: elites have won the long-lasting struggle against the working class; this was achieved firstly by granting workers some benefits after World War II, notably through the implementation of welfare systems in the West, then by fragmenting them with the increase in specialization of labor and the growth of the service industry during the post-Fordist period and finally by assessing the knockout blow through neoliberal policies, which erased hard-fought social and economic rights, diminished trade unions’ bargaining power and weakened their influence.

The libertarian revolutions of 1968 have also ended up in disappointment. Hopes brought by the “New Left” political movement that emerged from the demands of students, activists and workers, came to a close when economic powers and politics colluded in the 80s, removing the last glimmers of hope that change could happen from within the current political system. The 1980s also marked the beginning of the neoliberal era (deregulation of the financial system, erosion of welfare states, privatization programs, financial crises, cuts to public spending).

Finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the end of the last bastion of ideological resistance against capitalism: communism. Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man main thesis was emblematic in the representation of the world we faced and still face today: the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism marked the end point of mankind’s ideological and political evolution.

We live in a historically specific cultural paradigm, shaped during the course of the last century through mass media, popular culture and advertising, which converged together and formed our consumer culture and in an economic and political system structured to serve the interests of a small elite. In this scenario, anarchist thought has a dual function of resistance: as a challenge to the neoliberal ideology, and as a possible concrete utopia that can guide us in the construction of a valid alternative social order.

The most accessible ground for us, “the 99%,” through which a radical change can be achieved, is that of ideas. No economic or political revolution can bring genuine change without, stated Serge Latouche, an advocator of the degrowth movement, “the decolonization of our minds” from the ideological framework we find ourselves in. Anarchism challenges the ideas, the dehistoricized and naturalized assumptions, and the taken-for-granted norms of today’s society. In an anarchist society, solidarity would replace individualism; mutual aid would prevail on competition; altruism on egoism; spirituality on materialism; the local on the global. Changing the current global framework of rules first necessitates an individual ideological liberation that can only come through self-awareness. To free our body we must first free our mind.

The Poverty Machine: Student Debt, Class Society, and Securing Bonded Labor

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Jeremy Brunger

Source: The Hampton Institute

At the dawn of the 20^th century, very few American students attended high school, as the demands of the heavy-industrial and the agricultural economies of that period were ill-suited to an extended education beyond the family sphere. In the middle of the 20^th century, most Americans who either aspired to or had to work entered the full-time workforce immediately after high school, for such a postwar economy featured plenty of growth and comparably fair wage-compensation for the average worker. As the economy became more complex in its labor needs, its extending length of education complemented these requirements. The transformation of the agricultural economy into the technological economy after World War II, in turn, transformed the university, once the commune of the well-to-do, into a center for job training, an adjunct to industry, and one which continued to increase in enrollment as the technological necessities of an increasingly complex economy required further education. What was once the realm of the study of Christian religion, the Rennaissance humanists, and the Aufklärung became, for most students, the study of the technical labor necessary to produce and reproduce the new forms of capitalism and scientific production coming into existence. The growth of the American middle class became co-incident with the growth of the education industries which had hardly existed a century previous, when the middle class itself had hardly existed in any recognizable form. Where there was study, there was hope for economic success-the maxim “if a man falls in a field he is redeemed in a library” comes to mind-and the institution of the university became as integral to living well in the United States as the ownership of property and the propagation of the nuclear family.

However, in the 21^st century, although attendance of university courses is at an all-time high as the millennial generation achieves the highest historical rate on record of college attendance, that same generation is forecast to experience a decline in standards of living comparative to their forebears. Not only this qualitative fact, but also the quantitative method of that attendance is worthy of critical analysis-for the funding of undergraduate and graduate educations comes largely from the borrowing of money from lenders with the Federal government playing its role as intermediary. As the declining middle class cannot pay for its children’s higher educations, it looks to the loan system to cover the ever-increasing costs of reproducing its standards of living over time. But such loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and with the already saturated labor markets of the majority of the professions that could hope to pay off those loans, the economic situation comes to look much different: rather than the state intent on spreading enlightenment to the masses, the state appears to be securitizing a labor force that will simply have to perform whatever jobs are available, perhaps for decades on end, in order to pay off those loans.

That is, the students will have to do so if they want to qualify for home mortgages and otherwise live free from debt, which historically has always loomed over the subaltern and the serf alike. The parallels between the indebted student and the historical bond-laborer are strong enough to warrant comparison. One trend that especially deserves critical analysis is the outreach of the market to cover students from low-income backgrounds and whether or not such outreach is democratic-a Rawlsian lifting of the boats-or if it is merely predatory in nature and outcome. For, if the state and its lenders are merely financing higher education in order to secure a labor force that will not practice in the professions for which it trained but rather any job available by fiat of the debt-load, then a new reckoning is due of the state of affairs between the working-class young and their educations, the relationship between the state and the private sector, and the ongoing presence of class determinism in the free world.
Debt Corvee

According to The Institute for College Access and Success, statistics for the average student debt load from 2014 suggest that 71% of all students graduating from four-year colleges had student loan debt and the average level of this debt for public colleges was about $25,550, about $5000 higher than 2008. At the for-profit colleges the level was even higher, with students graduating with about $40,000 in debt. Most of this debt is mediated by government loan programs-about 80%-with the rest being covered by private lenders without mediation. The average student debt has increased, since 1993, about three-fold; given the rising cost of living and institutional funding in general, an increase in cost is not particularly surprising. What is surprising is how steep that increase in cost is. The cost of the aspirant apparatus of education increases beyond the market value of the professions on offer when viewed sociologically-the combination of public funding and private ambition allows tuition rates to soar even as student returns on investment plummet.

It appears the days when middle-class parents, a status declining in real terms since the 1970’s, directly financed their children’s college educations are largely over. While this may appear to be beneficial to the working class, in that the gatekeeping apparatus for entry into the professions-the colleges and universities-are more easily accessible than ever before, the debt that falls on the students is that much more of a burden. Students “who received Pell Grants, most of whom had family incomes under $40,000, were much more likely to borrow and to borrow more” than their more middle class peers, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. The debt load is thus geared to the children of the working class and the working poor who, no doubt seeking a better future for themselves, expend large sums of money-often more than a year’s wages, and sometimes two years’ worth-in accessing the portals of higher education. Given that student loans mediated by the government cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, students often have no choice but to live with that debt load for years and years if not forever: they have an education which cannot be repossessed, but they are also forced to work in professions for which they did not train in order to pay off that initial investment. This situation comes to resemble the historical institution of corvee labor, or other forms of debt-labor, in that the young, in being promised a better future, must nevertheless work for others as bonded servants in order to pay off their contracts. This is especially true for graduates in the non-scientific disciplines, as a Bachelor’s degree in a field other than business or the sciences becomes a mere shibboleth for entry into work that is not at the very bottom of the labor market, and even those “safe degrees” harbor little real safety for the student at the whim of capital. Having a Master’s degree in economics, the social science that ended The Great Depression, is yet no guarantee against waiting tables for tips for an indefinite period. The same can be said of the other disciplines.

The historical practice of corvee labor has much in common with the emergence of the indebted student. Corvee was a form of near-slavery, often linked to the military, that indentured laborers to a contract with an owner; nominally, the contract was entered into freely by the laborer, was guaranteed by the state, and was therefore not legally slavery, but due to the conditions of existence the laborer otherwise faced, the contract’s foundations were more reminiscent of the Hobbesian outlook than the Lockean. It was often the only viable option available for the children of the poor, and so, faced with hunger or hard labor, they chose labor on contract with the state. The structural difference between this practice and the practice of loaning to students are small, in that the state was involved in corvee as much as it is involved in student lending-for the student who may seek jobs after graduation is still in the economic red even as the student receives compensation for work. Corvee’s goals were to fill up a floating labor pool; the side effect, whether designed or accidental, of student lending winds up much the same. A student who accrued $30,000 in debt studying philosophy is likely to wind up working in the lower sectors of the labor market, unless they go back to school for a different or a higher degree-and so, in terms of base economics, their impersonal labor has been securitized by the public sector in favor of the private sector. Unless, that is, that student winds up working for the state in some other capacity than what they expected when they entered into their field of study, in which case the state has merely financed its own labor pool: and plenty of state jobs, like those in the sector of public secondary education, offer debt-manumission in reward for practicing in those fields for a period of several years. As such, the claim that only for-profit colleges are to blame for high student debt is false, for public universities contribute massively to rates of student debt and possess internal incentives for producing indebted students who might seek to dissolve their debt through public service.

The same may be said to apply to a pre-medical student who decides it is not prudent to enter into the “megaloans” required for medical school-at which point that student is already indebted for the undergraduate education and so, like the student of philosophy, winds up working for any institution that is hiring. This aleatory materialism may not have been intended by the state-the rhetoric behind opening access to higher education to as many people as possible was couched in democracy and enlightenment, to which every “Dream Big” sign on college campuses will attest-but its practical effects come to much the same result as corvee labor. The ideological state apparatus metamophoses into the financial state apparatus, yet focuses on the same people-the students, who, now indebted, represent a securitized labor force for private and public sectors alike. Most internships available to the graduate are unpaid internships-a relatively new development since the 1990s-thus leaving workng-class graduates desperate for income only non-professional career avenues. As the only broad field of economic growth under the last two presidential terms has occured in the service sector, educated working-class students can expect to enter the same service sectors in which their parents worked. Most interestingly, the etymological root of the word “service” stems from the word “serf.”
The Graeberian Insight

According to Dr. David Graeber’s 2011 book Debt: The First 5000 Years, the centralizing state has employed debt as its apparatus of growth for centuries. Debt, for Graeber, informs the very epistemology of Western people-we think in terms of credit and debit, of libertas and indebtedness, of squaring up our moral accounts. Debt is thus an all-pervasive category in how the Western world works, whether in the ancient world or in the contemporary 21^st century. Graeber’s insight is useful beyond his idealist prescriptions for “everyday communism” and his moral philosophy, for the latent commodification of the ideals of democracy-education among them-is still a very real phenomenon. Education may have its necessary infrastructural costs, but it need not be a commodity traded between lenders, or traded between speculators, with unwitting students-especially students from non-professional backgrounds-used as its financial pawns. Given that the actually-existing professions cannot absorb these students, and that the state serves as mediator between lenders financing their educations, the surplus labor which the students provide can only be absorbed by sectors they did not intend on entering: the various service sectors, the only growing sectors in the economy, the only employers broadly willing to accept non-professionals.

Graeber writes that “presented with the prospect of its own eternity, capitalism-or anyway, financial capitalism-simply explodes. Because if there’s no end to it, there’s absolutely no reason not to generate credit-that is, future money-infinitely. Recent events would certainly seem to confirm this. The period leading up to [the financial crisis of] 2008 was one in which many began to believe that capitalism really was going to be around forever; at the very least, no one seemed any longer to be able to imagine an alternative. The immediate effect was a series of increasingly reckless bubbles that brought the whole apparatus crashing down” (360). Given that higher education has become an industry like any other, subject to the same laws of capital and labor, it also suffers the same proneness to instability endemic to any other capitalist endeavor. Consider the recent closure of Sweet Briar College, the glut of PhDs, or the models of infinite growth to which larger universities seem to adhere. The universities are awash in internal commentary that they are swiftly becoming corporatized, going from the internally-administed grove of academe to an organ of capital’s interest-just look at any critical article on The Chronicle of Higher Education, especially those written by educators and researchers already secure in their tenure, such as Terry Eagleton’s 2015 article “The Slow Death of the University.” With such extension of the sphere of capital and its models of development into academia, academia comes to suffer the same risks as capital, along with its students-or, according to the corporatized university, its customers.

The social form of capitalism, in synthesizing Louis Althusser’s social theory of economic reproduction and Graeber’s theory of debt, thus reproduces itself not only through relations of the commodity-form but also through relations of debt (Althusser 47). Capital has a tendency to perform its name-to capitalize, to penetrate into vulnerable markets-and what market is more vulnerable than youth? From ancient Greece to Africa it was not uncustomary for families to lend their children to the market in the form of pawnship or peonage, or in the early modern Western world with indentured servitude, according to the Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition; and with corvee, the state guaranteed the trade-and within the structures of contemporary student lending these kinds of practices appear to have survived into the 21^st century even in the liberal West (174, 229-30). The millennial cohort, massive as it is and funded into debt by the state, represents not a boon for the professions but a huge and exploitable labor pool for the industries.
The Re-proletarianization of Youth

In world-systems theory, as understood by the scholar Immanuel Wallerstein in his book Historical Capitalism, the spread of capitalist social relations produces two key processional phenomena: embourgeoisement and proletarianization. These historical processes act in tandem, as some become bourgeois through the labor of those who become proletarianized, and others, more unfortunate, reverse that process. Such a process, now that the university systems have co-opted the capitalist mode of financing, has been enacted in large swathes of the student population. In seeking embourgeoisement and standards of living that have been viable for only a very few for decades, many students actually become proletarianized-and perhaps moreso than had they not attended higher education with the help of the lending system in the first place. Now that higher education is a thoroughly penetrated market for historical capitalism, many of its students become proletarians as surely as if they had went to work in the nearest factory-only it is not the lonely capitalist who profits but rather the university institutions and the state. The funding models of higher education depend on a floating student body, just how labor-intensive industry depends on a floating labor pool; both groups of people come to resemble each other more and more in terms of base material economy in relation to overall American wealth.

The trappings of economic success-a diploma, the social capital of calling oneself educated-only signify the sort of well-being to which people aspire. Those trappings do not guarantee it. Indeed, even many of the teaching scholars who profess at America’s universities still have debt from their undergraduate years well into their careers that prevent them from attaining the truly middle class lifestyles their students expect to earn. The academic phenomenology of the indebted teacher becomes the capitalist yoke of the indebted student who, upon graduation, in all likelihood does not even know the definition of “liberal capitalism.” It is odd, given America’s general strain of individualism, that it has become a normative part of life to amass such large amounts of debt-that the insistence on neoliberal economics binds the citizenry that much more powerfully by debt-relations than by individualism. Such a process is bound to produce discontent not in isolated outliers but in a whole cohort of the population.

The cornerstone of proletarianization is that one expects, in resignation, to work for low wages in industry-any industry, at that. The structural similarity between the historical proletariat and the new student proletariat is profound enough to warrant its assertion; even if standards of living have increased for the working class since Karl Marx’s 19^th century by vast leaps and bounds, the group of people graduating from universities with mortgage-sized loans fit into the same category of social utility as that historical proletariat. An indebted youth cohort is very good for capitalist endeavor-businesses, having already offloaded job-training responsibilities to the colleges, can expect an incoming workforce that is more desperate for employment because of the debt-burden-and it is very good for the state, since so many students attend public universities. Given that universities, once homesick spaces of learning and temporary poverty, have become profiteering enterprises of not only education but also entertainment akin to theme parks, they produce permanent poverty under the current administrative model of offering high loans to undergraduates.

Consider the critical theorist Theodor Adorno’s observations, in “The Culture Industry” section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, on “the original affinity between business and entertainment” which “reveals itself in the meaning of entertainment itself: as society’s apologia” (115). Even the studious and earnest student plays today and pays tomorrow in the contemporary university-the hardships of education are passed onto not the undergraduate of today but the graduate of tomorrow. The right to proletarian entertainment is not the “jazz-machines” of Adorno’s era, but the sites of higher education which only since the 1980s welcomes proletarians on their credit. Through a Kantian education that is supposed to free them from external determination, the young have become mere objects of financial speculation, as well as objects of exploitable and undifferentiated labor. The parallels in labor, in relation to the social totality, suggests that the average student body upon graduation becomes the reproduced proletarian body due to debt peonage, which has always been the chief exploitable force and method in industrial society.

In contrast, the medieval institution of journeymanship, by which a student learns gradually more and more from a teacher-worker, was not a relationship of bondage so much as a relationship of tutorship, but despite the modern university’s medieval roots in these practices, the emergence of student debt of such magnitude renders null those benign roots. The indebted student is, as a rule of thumb with its exceptions, rendered by the system of higher education the indebted servant to capital. Working-class 18 year olds ought not be the victims of financial speculation instruments wielded from above, nor should the narrative of enlightenment reproduce inequal relations of capitalism on their shoulders. Beyond this, it is perhaps symptomatic of general living conditions that so many working-class students are attending higher education in the first place-that being poor in a world-historically dynamic economy is that much more intolerable than in the past.

The most worrying facet of this indebting process is the public insistence that students from low-income families attend university on credit. Born into poverty, they can expect to continue enduring it even upon graduation, even if they amass the scholarships and grants that are geared to supporting them. Given the statistics on debt provided by The Institute for College Access and Success, this low-income cohort is the most vulnerable to predatory lending, and so becomes the most indebted relative to their wealthier peers. The class determinism inherent to this shifting of capital from private business to the educational sector all too often makes poor teenagers into poor students into poor working adults. The kinds of jobs these students were taught never to do, by their parents who worked those very jobs in order to keep food on the table, are the only kinds of jobs available to the majority of indebted students upon graduation. While standing debts that pose no possibility of discharge in bankrupty might be good for the speculators of the macro-economy, it represents a monumental burden for individuals and especially those individuals who compose the working class. The pedagogical theorist Henry Giroux suggests in his 2014 book Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education that the funding mechanisms for American universities are abrasively neoliberal, in that they are extended to students only in the interest of maximum returns on investment-and not only does the funding mechanism support inequality, but also the class interests vested in university research that favors the wealthy over the interests of the poor: the aspirant young become as grist for the capitalist mill by the very institutions they were taught to trust since birth.

The sociology of student debt suggests that indebted working-class students will live in, in relation to society at large, the same socioeconomic position as their parents despite their higher educational attainments. According to findings in the economist Dr. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not increase,” and neither did “the intergenerational correlation of education and earned incomes, which measures the reproduction of the skill hierarchy over time” that “shows no trend toward greater [social] mobility over the long run” (484). The cycle of sociological immiseration thus continues unabated, no matter how loud the college yells of freedom and democracy resound, for someone-most likely not the student-profits off the exploited student body. The social utility of higher education transforms, under capitalism, into the private utility of the capitalist; the social affectation of education-as-commodity transforms into the relations between master and bondsman in the new feudalism. Cultures are changed not by the beliefs of the old but by the beliefs of the young. Where the forces of conservatism-not necessarily undesirable in themselves provided they are matched with creativity-over-reach their purview is in the debt-relations extended to the young, who alone amongst the age groups offer history an American future.

Youth is a time for creative experiment and creative destruction, for healthy questioning of the decadent status quo, for sane inquiry into our insane history; it is not a time to be enslaved to financial circumstance, the time clock, or the manager with delusions of grandeur. Such inexuscable waste now doubtless bears future repercussions. Education has always had its costs, and any prosperous society has paid them-but to what result? Creating a vast age group that, in coming to political and economic consciousness, despises the institutions that led it into servitude is not only damaging to the quality of life the students themselves experience. It is also damaging to the self-serving patriotism that conservative forces depend on, for student debt loads only foster distrust of hallowed institutions. “Mistreat the young,” the old adage goes, “and doom the old.” Not only this, but it is also destructive to middle-class capitalism itself, for a generation that pays student debt is a generation that does not buy homes-a high mark of complaint given that so many American cities are falling into infrastructural decay and personal poverty. The populist imperative to preserve a future worth living in need not clash with the profit motive, provided speculators find means other than the young to achieve their profits. The theory of higher education-its opening of access to a more democratic cross-cut of the classes-ought to inform its more predatory practices which, under the debt-relation, only reproduces poverty.

A Victorian patriarch despite himself, Marx despised the immiseration of proletarians most of all because their subordinate positions rendered them incapable of independence, as though by virtue of their servitude they became adult children permanently. Similar in his criticism was that the chief goal of the working class is self-abolition, that is, the working class’s aspiration is to no longer be working class. In seeking to escape the mire of poverty amidst splendor-for America remains the wealthiest country on the planet-working-class students all too often dig themselves deeper into the poverty trap, however adorned with diplomas its ever-heightening walls become. The only way out of the poverty trap for most of them is to become the very thing they were taught not to become by their parents and their professors: bonded servants, or, as the economist Frederic Lordon calls them, “willing slaves of capital,” in his book of the same name.

It is not that state involvement in higher education is destructive to the common weal. Far from it-higher education is definitely an institution best left to public administration, for it is a valuable aspect of the commons and its democratic purview. The attendance of higher education may represent one area where the erosion of the commons, at first appearance, has not progressed. But the erosion of the commons occurs where capital privatizes public utility, whether or not it happens in land-grant universities or in private colleges. Where the danger lies is in the inter-relationships between the state and funding models that target the poor for the benefit of the wealthy, thereby fostering uneven development and the reproduction of the conditions of poverty for the working class. Were the attendance of university by the poor and the children of the poor not incumbent upon credit, and therefore upon their probable future immiseration, higher education in America would actually function in harmonious accordance with its original raison d’etre: the humane enlightenment of society no matter the class situations its members may have happened to inherit in the lottery of birth.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor & Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford UP, 2002.

Althusser, Louis. “The Reproduction of the Conditions of Production.” On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Verso, 2014.

Eagleton, Terry. “The Slow Death of the University.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2015.

Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Harmarket, 2014.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Melville House, 2012.

Klein, Martin. “Pawnship.” Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition. Scarecrow Press, 2002.

Lordon, Frederic. Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Verso, 2014.

Piketty, Thomas. “Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Do Educational Institutions Foster Social Mobility?” Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard UP, 2014.

TICAS. “Quick Facts About Student Debt, March 2014. ” The Institute for College Access and Success. 2014.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical Capitalism. Verso, 2011.

25 Signs That The Global Elite’s Ship Is About To Sink

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Lance Schuttler

Source: The Mind Unleashed

Make no mistake about it. The tide has turned on the global elite and there will be no going back. A new day is rising for humanity as those who have planned for complete control are now being exposed, cornered and investigated from many different angles. There is no need to buy into the fear-based propaganda the major media and even several alternative media outlets dispense. Very good things are happening and even better things are coming. Let’s take a look at some of the major stories that have occurred in the last 8 weeks alone. Piecing the puzzle together, we see that the jig is up and the events surrounding it are growing in size and speed.

1. 57 Nations approved as founding members of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Notable countries who signed on June 29th, 2015 include Russia, India, Iran, Switzerland, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Indonesia, the UK, Italy and Austria. Notables who did not join are the U.S. and Japan.

2. May 12th, 2015: Russia asks Greece to join the BRICS Alliance. Notice the BRICS trend in the stories to follow.

3. May 24th, 2015: The Pentagon released documents to Judicial Watch, a government watchdog law firm,
proving that the US Government played a central role in creating ISIL. Interestingly, the mainstream media failed to cover this story. A few weeks later, ex US Intelligence officials confirm the report.

4. May 31st, 2015: Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras writes an open letter, warns European leaders they are “making a grave mistake,” and suggests they re-read Hemingways’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls.”

5. June 2nd, 2015: The U.S. Federal Government was hacked as the personal data of 4 million current, former and prospective employees believed to have been breached. 3 weeks later FBI Director James Comey told US Senators the actual number could be 18 million. Some believe the hack was coordinated to gather further evidence
of crimes by certain government officials. More on that further down.

6. June 2nd, 2015: Kentucky Senator Rand Paul calls for the U.S. Government to declassify 28 pages in the 9/11 attack report that the Bush Administration blacked out.

7. June 3rd, 2015: Famous musician Akon announces his Solar Academy will bring solar power to over 600 million people in Africa. A major victory for clean energy and humanity.

8. June 4th, 2015: Whistle-blower Edward Snowden says a “profound difference” had occurred since releasing the NSA documents and that the balance of power has shifted in our world. Is he referring to the BRICS Alliance?

9. June 5th, 2015: “There Will Be A Reset of The Financial Industry.” The International Monetary Fund says the Chinese yuan is no longer undervalued. This sets the stage for the yuan to be recognized as a global reserve currency, something the U.S. Dollar (which is backed by war and oil) does not like.

10. June 7, 2015: Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s largest banks, co-CEO’s Jain and Fitschen resign. Two days later, German prosecutors raided the Bank’s headquarters in a criminal tax-fraud probe.

11. June 15, 2015: China says the G-7 Summit in Germany was a “gathering of debtors.” They mean this literally as the Bretton Woods western financial system is based on debt. And in fact, the entire western financial system has been running illegally and is technically bankrupt. For more on the real history of Bretton Woods and its connection to JFK, The Global Collateral Accounts and the gold standard, read here.

12. June 17th, 2015 is quite the day with the next four stories all being reported at that time. First, JP Morgan’s number 2, the Vice Chairman Jimmy Lee, suddenly and unexpectedly passes over. Since late 2013, the list of high-level banking officials to have passed over has grown to 70. Clearly, something is happening.

13. June 17, 2015: Russia and China announced that all natural gas and crude oil sales between
the two countries will now be done in Chinese yuan( formerly the U.S. Dollar) and will be convertible into Russian Rubles. The U.S. Dollar hegemony is waning.

14. June 17, 2015: The State of Texas has signed a bill that calls for the repatriation of their gold from the Federal Government. When asked what would happen if the government tried to steal back the gold, State Representative Giovanni Capriglione said this: There is a motto in the office of almost every state legislator in Texas, and it’s a flag that we have [from the Texas Revolution], it’s below a cannon and what the motto says is, “Come and Take it.”

15. June 17, 2015: Greece’s Hellenic Parliament’s Debt Truth Committee released a report stating that the debt Greece “owes” is illegal, illegitimate and odious, according to international law. Further, they stated the IMF and ECB ( European Central Bank) having illegally and knowingly imposed these illegitimate debts upon Greece and other nations. A direct call out to the global banking cartel.

16. June 18th, 2015: Baron David de Rothschild has been indicted by a French court over financial fraud. French police have been ordered by the court to track down Baron. The Rothschild family has long been viewed as the family sitting atop the global financial ponzi scheme. Lawyer Antonio Flores told reporters, ” it’s a real breakthrough moment for everyone involved.”

17. June 18, 2015: In a 2-1 ruling, the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals says Bush era officials can be held liable for detaining innocent people after the 9/11 attack. Will this lead to some major arrests?

18. June 19, 2015: While European leaders try to save face on the debt crisis, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras was in Russia and gave a speech at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, stating that “the economic center of the planet has already shifted” and that new powers are playing an “important role on an economic and geopolitical level.” * Reread story header number 8…BRICS, anyone? Oh, and Greece and Russia signed a €2 billion gas pipeline deal that day too…a strategic economic and geopolitical game-changer.

19. July 5th, 2015: Greece votes “NO” to the creditors’ bailout offer. This is a massive stance for humanity that Greece just took against the banking elite. As of this writing, a “deal” has been reached but is expected to fall apart in the coming days. Kicking the can down the road does not solve the issue, but rather speeds up the revolution mindset of many frustrated Greek citizens. September/October is when many financial experts are saying that some fireworks are to be expected.

20. July 7th, 2015: The BRICS Bank officially opens for business.

21. July 8th, 2015: On this day, several strange events occurred. The NYSE was taken down for multiple hours, the Wall Street Journal was taken offline just after the stock exchange went down, United Airlines was forced to ground all of its flights nationwide due to computer “issues,” and 2,500 people losing power in Washington D.C. This whistle-blower journalist just wrote that his Pentagon sources said the Pentagon/BRICS Alliance took it down as a “dry run.”

22. July 7th, 2015: Backing up one day we see that the hacking group Anonymous tweeted this on the evening prior to the stock exchange hack: Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street….we can only hope.
David Wilcock has previously written a detailed document stating that Anonymous is working with certain patriotic US Military forces to legally take down the banking elite.. This aligns nicely with what the whistle-blower journalist, Benjamin Fulford, just wrote this week about the Pentagon and BRICS Alliance in the previous story.

23. July 14th, 2015: Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. reach a historic deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Entire books could be written on the geopolitical, financial and technological implications of this move. There are also reports that the reality of this situation is that Iran has free energy technology and will be using this to help bring down the banking/political/oil industry elite. This would make sense as the strongest opponents to this deal have been Israel and its Prime Minister and several American politicians like the Bushes, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

24. July 15th, 2015: Santa Cruz County votes to stop doing business with 5 major banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS. Watch this set off a chain reaction in those who will follow suit.

25. Now: You are here on the planet at this time to make a wonderful contribution. Please continue playing your role for the benefit of us all.

It is clear that something big is happening. Use this information to move forward with optimism and hope. Share with your friends. Discuss with your friends. Continue to search and dig for the truth. Two people I strongly suggest the reader looking into are Benjamin Fulford, the whistleblower who was the Asia Pacific Bureau Chief for Forbes Magazine and is listed in stories number 21 and 22, and Neil Keenan, who is working with many well connected sources to open up the global collateral accounts. These accounts are what President Kennedy was assassinated over and are what the banking elite does not want the public to know exists. This revolution WILL NOT be televised.

The Eurasian Big Bang

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Reid Mukai

How China and Russia Are Running Rings Around Washington

By Pepe Escobar

Source: TomDispatch.com

The several hundred Republicans who have thrown their hats into the ring for the 2016 presidential race and the war hawks in Congress (mainly but hardly only Republicans) have already been in full howl about the Vienna nuclear deal with Iran. Jeb Bush took about two seconds to label it “appeasement,” instantly summoning up the image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain giving in to Hitler before World War II; former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee spared no metaphor in labeling the agreement “a deal that empowers an evil Iranian regime to carry out its threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ and bring ‘death to America’”; Senator Lindsey Graham called it a “possible death sentence for Israel”; this year’s leading billionaire candidate, Donald Trump, summed up his opinion of the deal in one you’re-fired-style word, “ridiculous”; Senator John McCain described Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the deal, as “delusional”; and Senator… I mean, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mockingly turned Chamberlain’s infamous “peace in our time” into “peace at any price,” dismissed the deal as a catastrophe filled with “absurdities,” and then appeared on every American media venue imaginable to denounce it. And that’s just to start down the usual list of suspects. Even Senator Rand Paul swore he would vote against the agreement (though his father called it “to the benefit of world peace”), while Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was typical of Republican presidential candidates in swearing that he would personally scuttle the deal on his first day in the Oval Office.

This, in short, is the mad version of international policy that makes Washington a claustrophobic echo chamber. After all, the choice isn’t actually between Iran having no nuclear “breakout” capacity or regaining that capacity 15 years from now (as the present deal seems to offer); the choice is between an agreement for 15 verifiably non-weaponized years and a guarantee of nothing whatsoever. And if you’ve just checked off that nothing-whatsoever column, the alternative is to somehow crush the Iranians, to force them into submission. It is, in other words, some version of war. Two questions on that: How successful has war in the Greater Middle East been as an American policy weapon these last 13 years? And what makes anyone think that, when even Dick Cheney and crew couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger on Iran, Jeb B. or any of the other candidates will be likely to do so in an ISIS-enriched world in 2017?

When you’ve satisfied yourself on those two questions, consider the seldom-discussed larger context within which twenty-first-century nuclear politics has taken place. In these last years, the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Russians, and the Americans, to name just four nuclear powers, have either been expanding or “modernizing” their nuclear stockpiles in significant ways. And god knows what the Israelis were doing with their super-secret, never officially acknowledged, but potentially civilization-busting atomic arsenal of 80 or more weapons, while the North Koreans were turning themselves into a nuclear mini-power. Nonetheless, the focus of nuclear attention and the question of “disarmament” has remained almost exclusively on a country that had no such weapons, has officially disavowed them, and at this point, at least, doesn’t even have a weapons program. And note that no one who is anyone in Washington considers any of this the least bit strange.

In this context, that irrepressible TomDispatch regular Pepe Escobar offers another kind of lens-widening exercise when it comes to the Iranian deal. He focuses on a subject that Washington has yet to fully absorb: changing relations in Eurasia. Few here have noticed, but while the Vienna deal was being negotiated, Russia and China, countries the Pentagon has just officially labeled as “threats,” have been moving mountains (quite literally in some cases) to integrate ever larger parts of that crucial land mass, that “world island,” into a vast economic zone that, if all goes as they wish, will be beyond Washington’s power and control. This is a remarkable development that, despite the coming two months of sound and fury about Iran, won’t be at the top of any news report, which is why you need a website like TomDispatch to keep up with the times. Tom

The Eurasian Big Bang
How China and Russia Are Running Rings Around Washington
By Pepe Escobar

Let’s start with the geopolitical Big Bang you know nothing about, the one that occurred just two weeks ago. Here are its results: from now on, any possible future attack on Iran threatened by the Pentagon (in conjunction with NATO) would essentially be an assault on the planning of an interlocking set of organizations — the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), the AIIB (the new Chinese-founded Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), and the NDB (the BRICS’ New Development Bank) — whose acronyms you’re unlikely to recognize either. Still, they represent an emerging new order in Eurasia.

Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Islamabad, and New Delhi have been actively establishing interlocking security guarantees. They have been simultaneously calling the Atlanticist bluff when it comes to the endless drumbeat of attention given to the flimsy meme of Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” And a few days before the Vienna nuclear negotiations finally culminated in an agreement, all of this came together at a twin BRICS/SCO summit in Ufa, Russia — a place you’ve undoubtedly never heard of and a meeting that got next to no attention in the U.S. And yet sooner or later, these developments will ensure that the War Party in Washington and assorted neocons (as well as neoliberalcons) already breathing hard over the Iran deal will sweat bullets as their narratives about how the world works crumble.

The Eurasian Silk Road

With the Vienna deal, whose interminable build-up I had the dubious pleasure of following closely, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and his diplomatic team have pulled the near-impossible out of an extremely crumpled magician’s hat: an agreement that might actually end sanctions against their country from an asymmetric, largely manufactured conflict.

Think of that meeting in Ufa, the capital of Russia’s Bashkortostan, as a preamble to the long-delayed agreement in Vienna. It caught the new dynamics of the Eurasian continent and signaled the future geopolitical Big Bangness of it all. At Ufa, from July 8th to 10th, the 7th BRICS summit and the 15th Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit overlapped just as a possible Vienna deal was devouring one deadline after another.

Consider it a diplomatic masterstroke of Vladmir Putin’s Russia to have merged those two summits with an informal meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Call it a soft power declaration of war against Washington’s imperial logic, one that would highlight the breadth and depth of an evolving Sino-Russian strategic partnership. Putting all those heads of state attending each of the meetings under one roof, Moscow offered a vision of an emerging, coordinated geopolitical structure anchored in Eurasian integration. Thus, the importance of Iran: no matter what happens post-Vienna, Iran will be a vital hub/node/crossroads in Eurasia for this new structure.

If you read the declaration that came out of the BRICS summit, one detail should strike you: the austerity-ridden European Union (EU) is barely mentioned. And that’s not an oversight. From the point of view of the leaders of key BRICS nations, they are offering a new approach to Eurasia, the very opposite of the language of sanctions.

Here are just a few examples of the dizzying activity that took place at Ufa, all of it ignored by the American mainstream media. In their meetings, President Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi worked in a practical way to advance what is essentially a Chinese vision of a future Eurasia knit together by a series of interlocking “new Silk Roads.” Modi approved more Chinese investment in his country, while Xi and Modi together pledged to work to solve the joint border issues that have dogged their countries and, in at least one case, led to war.

The NDB, the BRICS’ response to the World Bank, was officially launched with $50 billion in start-up capital. Focused on funding major infrastructure projects in the BRICS nations, it is capable of accumulating as much as $400 billion in capital, according to its president, Kundapur Vaman Kamath. Later, it plans to focus on funding such ventures in other developing nations across the Global South — all in their own currencies, which means bypassing the U.S. dollar. Given its membership, the NDB’s money will clearly be closely linked to the new Silk Roads. As Brazilian Development Bank President Luciano Coutinhostressed, in the near future it may also assist European non-EU member states like Serbia and Macedonia. Think of this as the NDB’s attempt to break a Brussels monopoly on Greater Europe. Kamath even advanced the possibility of someday aidingin the reconstruction of Syria.

You won’t be surprised to learn that both the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the NDB are headquartered in China and will work to complement each other’s efforts. At the same time, Russia’s foreign investment arm, the Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), signed a memorandum of understanding with funds from other BRICS countries and so launched an informal investment consortium in which China’s Silk Road Fund and India’s Infrastructure Development Finance Company will be key partners.

Full Spectrum Transportation Dominance

On the ground level, this should be thought of as part of the New Great Game in Eurasia. Its flip side is the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Pacific and the Atlantic version of the same, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, both of which Washington is trying to advance to maintain U.S. global economic dominance. The question these conflicting plans raise is how to integrate trade and commerce across that vast region. From the Chinese and Russian perspectives, Eurasia is to be integrated via a complex network of superhighways, high-speed rail lines, ports, airports, pipelines, and fiber optic cables. By land, sea, and air, the resulting New Silk Roads are meant to create an economic version of the Pentagon’s doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” — a vision that already has Chinese corporate executives crisscrossing Eurasia sealing infrastructure deals.

For Beijing — back to a 7% growth rate in the second quarter of 2015 despite a recent near-panic on the country’s stock markets — it makes perfect economic sense: as labor costs rise, production will be relocated from the country’s Eastern seaboard to its cheaper Western reaches, while the natural outlets for the production of just about everything will be those parallel and interlocking “belts” of the new Silk Roads.

Meanwhile, Russia is pushing to modernize and diversify its energy-exploitation-dependent economy. Among other things, its leaders hope that the mix of those developing Silk Roads and the tying together of the Eurasian Economic Union — Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan — will translate into myriad transportation and construction projects for which the country’s industrial and engineering know-how will prove crucial.

As the EEU has begun establishing free trade zones with India, Iran, Vietnam, Egypt, and Latin America’s Mercosur bloc (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela), the initial stages of this integration process already reach beyond Eurasia. Meanwhile, the SCO, which began as little more than a security forum, is expanding and moving into the field of economic cooperation. Its countries, especially four Central Asian “stans” (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan) will rely ever more on the Chinese-driven Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the NDB. At Ufa, India and Pakistan finalized an upgrading process in which they have moved from observers to members of the SCO. This makes it an alternative G8.

In the meantime, when it comes to embattled Afghanistan, the BRICS nations and the SCO have now called upon “the armed opposition to disarm, accept the Constitution of Afghanistan, and cut ties with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist organizations.” Translation: within the framework of Afghan national unity, the organization would accept the Taliban as part of a future government. Their hopes, with the integration of the region in mind, would be for a future stable Afghanistan able to absorb more Chinese, Russian, Indian, and Iranian investment, and the construction — finally! — of a long-planned, $10 billion, 1,420-kilometer-long Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline that would benefit those energy-hungry new SCO members, Pakistan and India. (They would each receive 42% of the gas, the remaining 16% going to Afghanistan.)

Central Asia is, at the moment, geographic ground zero for the convergence of the economic urges of China, Russia, and India. It was no happenstance that, on his way to Ufa, Prime Minister Modi stopped off in Central Asia. Like the Chinese leadership in Beijing, Moscow looks forward (as a recent document puts it) to the “interpenetration and integration of the EEU and the Silk Road Economic Belt” into a “Greater Eurasia” and a “steady, developing, safe common neighborhood” for both Russia and China.

And don’t forget Iran. In early 2016, once economic sanctions are fully lifted, it is expected to join the SCO, turning it into a G9. As its foreign minister, Javad Zarif, made clear recently to Russia’s Channel 1 television, Tehran considers the two countries strategic partners. “Russia,” he said, “has been the most important participant in Iran’s nuclear program and it will continue under the current agreement to be Iran’s major nuclear partner.” The same will, he added, be true when it comes to “oil and gas cooperation,” given the shared interest of those two energy-rich nations in “maintaining stability in global market prices.”

Got Corridor, Will Travel

Across Eurasia, BRICS nations are moving on integration projects. A developing Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor is a typical example. It is now being reconfigured as a multilane highway between India and China. Meanwhile, Iran and Russia are developing a transportation corridor from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the Caspian Sea and the Volga River. Azerbaijan will be connected to the Caspian part of this corridor, while India is planning to use Iran’s southern ports to improve its access to Russia and Central Asia. Now, add in a maritime corridor that will stretch from the Indian city of Mumbai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and then on to the southern Russian city of Astrakhan. And this just scratches the surface of the planning underway.

Years ago, Vladimir Putin suggested that there could be a “Greater Europe” stretching from Lisbon, Portugal, on the Atlantic to the Russian city of Vladivostok on the Pacific. The EU, under Washington’s thumb, ignored him. Then the Chinese started dreaming about and planning new Silk Roads that would, in reverse Marco Polo fashion, extend from Shanghai to Venice (and then on to Berlin).

Thanks to a set of cross-pollinating political institutions, investment funds, development banks, financial systems, and infrastructure projects that, to date, remain largely under Washington’s radar, a free-trade Eurasian heartland is being born. It will someday link China and Russia to Europe, Southwest Asia, and even Africa. It promises to be an astounding development. Keep your eyes, if you can, on the accumulating facts on the ground, even if they are rarely covered in the American media. They represent the New Great — emphasis on that word — Game in Eurasia.

Location, Location, Location

Tehran is now deeply invested in strengthening its connections to this new Eurasia and the man to watch on this score is Ali Akbar Velayati. He is the head of Iran’s Center for Strategic Research and senior foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Velayati stresses that security in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and the Caucasus hinges on the further enhancement of a Beijing-Moscow-Tehran triple entente.

As he knows, geo-strategically Iran is all about location, location, location. That country offers the best access to open seas in the region apart from Russia and is the only obvious east-west/north-south crossroads for trade from the Central Asian “stans.” Little wonder then that Iran will soon be an SCO member, even as its “partnership” with Russia is certain to evolve. Its energy resources are already crucial to and considered a matter of national security for China and, in the thinking of that country’s leadership, Iran also fulfills a key role as a hub in those Silk Roads they are planning.

That growing web of literal roads, rail lines, and energy pipelines, asTomDispatch has previously reported, represents Beijing’s response to the Obama administration’s announced “pivot to Asia” and the U.S. Navy’s urge to meddle in the South China Sea. Beijing is choosing to project power via a vast set of infrastructure projects, especially high-speed rail lines that will reach from its eastern seaboard deep into Eurasia. In this fashion, the Chinese-built railway from Urumqi in Xinjiang Province to Almaty in Kazakhstan will undoubtedly someday be extended to Iran and traverse that country on its way to the Persian Gulf.

A New World for Pentagon Planners

At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month, Vladimir Putin told PBS’s Charlie Rose that Moscow and Beijing had always wanted a genuine partnership with the United States, but were spurned by Washington. Hats off, then, to the “leadership” of the Obama administration. Somehow, it has managed to bring together two former geopolitical rivals, while solidifying their pan-Eurasian grand strategy.

Even the recent deal with Iran in Vienna is unlikely — especially given the war hawks in Congress — to truly end Washington’s 36-year-long Great Wall of Mistrust with Iran. Instead, the odds are that Iran, freed from sanctions, will indeed be absorbed into the Sino-Russian project to integrate Eurasia, which leads us to the spectacle of Washington’s warriors, unable to act effectively, yet screaming like banshees.

NATO’s supreme commander Dr. Strangelove, sorry, American General Philip Breedlove, insists that the West must create a rapid-reaction force — online — to counteract Russia’s “false narratives.” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter claims to be seriously considering unilaterally redeploying nuclear-capable missiles in Europe. The nominee to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Commandant Joseph Dunford, recently directly labeled Russia America’s true “existential threat”; Air Force General Paul Selva, nominated to be the new vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, seconded that assessment, using the same phrase and putting Russia, China and Iran, in that order, as more threatening than the Islamic State (ISIS). In the meantime, Republican presidential candidates and a bevy of congressional war hawks simply shout and fume when it comes to both the Iranian deal and the Russians.

In response to the Ukrainian situation and the “threat” of a resurgent Russia (behind which stands a resurgent China), a Washington-centric militarization of Europe is proceeding apace. NATO is now reportedly obsessed with what’s being called “strategy rethink” — as in drawing up detailed futuristic war scenarios on European soil. As economist Michael Hudson has pointed out, even financial politics are becoming militarized and linked to NATO’s new Cold War 2.0.

In its latest National Military Strategy, the Pentagon suggests that the risk of an American war with another nation (as opposed to terror outfits), while low, is “growing” and identifies four nations as “threats”: North Korea, a case apart, and predictably the three nations that form the new Eurasian core: Russia, China, and Iran. They are depicted in the document as “revisionist states,” openly defying what the Pentagon identifies as “international security and stability”; that is, the distinctly un-level playing field created by globalized, exclusionary, turbo-charged casino capitalism and Washington’s brand of militarism.

The Pentagon, of course, does not do diplomacy. Seemingly unaware of the Vienna negotiations, it continued to accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons. And that “military option” against Iran is never off the table.

So consider it the Mother of All Blockbusters to watch how the Pentagon and the war hawks in Congress will react to the post-Vienna and — though it was barely noticed in Washington — the post-Ufa environment, especially under a new White House tenant in 2017.

It will be a spectacle. Count on it. Will the next version of Washington try to make it up to “lost” Russia or send in the troops? Will it contain China or the “caliphate” of ISIS? Will it work with Iran to fight ISIS or spurn it? Will it truly pivot to Asia for good and ditch the Middle East or vice-versa? Or might it try to contain Russia, China, and Iran simultaneously or find some way to play them against each other?

In the end, whatever Washington may do, it will certainly reflect a fear of the increasing strategic depth Russia and China are developing economically, a reality now becoming visible across Eurasia. At Ufa, Putin told Xi on the record: “Combining efforts, no doubt we [Russia and China] will overcome all the problems before us.”

Read “efforts” as new Silk Roads, that Eurasian Economic Union, the growing BRICS block, the expanding Shanghai Cooperation Organization, those China-based banks, and all the rest of what adds up to the beginning of a new integration of significant parts of the Eurasian land mass. As for Washington, fly like an eagle? Try instead: scream like a banshee.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for RTand Sputnik, and a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Empire of Chaos. Follow him on Facebook by clicking here.

Putin Leads BRICS Uprising

Posted on July 15, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Mike Whitney

Source: Counterpunch

There’s been a virtual blackout of news from this year’s seventh annual BRICS summit in Ufa, Russia. None of the mainstream media organizations are covering the meetings or making any attempt to explain what’s going on. As a result, the American people remain largely in the dark about a powerful coalition of nations that are putting in place an alternate system that will greatly reduce US influence in the world and end the current era of superpower rule.

Let’s cut to the chase: Leaders of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) realize that global security cannot be entrusted to a country that sees war as a acceptable means for achieving its geopolitical objectives. They also realize that they won’t be able to achieve financial stability as long as Washington dictates the rules, issues the de facto “international” currency, and controls the main levers of global financial power. This is why the BRICS have decided to chart a different course, to gradually break free from the existing Bretton Woods system, and to create parallel system that better serves their own interests. Logically, they have focused on the foundation blocks which support the current US-led system, that is, the institutions from which the United States derives its extraordinary power; the dollar, the US Treasury market, and the IMF. Replace these, the thinking goes, and the indispensable nation becomes just another country struggling to get by. This is from the Asia Times:

“Leaders of the BRICS… launched the New Development Bank, which has taken three years of negotiations to bring to fruition. With about $50 billion in starting capital, the bank is expected to start issuing debt to fund infrastructure projects next year. They also launched a foreign-exchange currency fund of $100 billion.

The two new endeavors are statements that the five largest emerging markets are both looking out for each other and, simultaneously, moving away from the western financing institutions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

“The BRICS states intend to actively use their own resources and internal resources for development,” Putin said, according to Reuters. “The New (Development) Bank will help finance joint, large-scale projects in transport and energy infrastructure, industrial development.”…..Birthing the two initiatives in Russia had been Putin’s top priorities.”

(“Russia’s Putin scores points at Ufa BRICS summit“, Asia Times)

Can you see what’s going on? Putin has figured out the empire’s vulnerabilities and he’s going straight for the jugular. He’s saying: ‘We’re going to issue our own debt, we’re going to run our own system, we’re going to fund our own projects, and we’re going to do it all in our own currency. Kaboom. The only thing you’re going to be doing, is managing your own accelerating economic decline. Have a good day.’ Isn’t that the gist of what he’s saying?

So can you see, dear reader, why none of this is appearing on the pages of US newspapers or on US television. Washington would rather you didn’t know how they’ve bungled everything by alienating the fastest growing countries in the world.

The Ufa conference is a watershed moment. While the Pentagon is rapidly moving troops and military hardware to Russia’s borders, and one bigwig after another is bloviating about the “Russian threat”; the BRICS have moved out of Washington’s orbit altogether. They are following the leadership of men who, frankly speaking, are acting exactly like US leaders acted when the US was on the upswing. These are guys who “think big”; who want to connect continents with high-speed rail, lift living standards across the board, and transform themselves into manufacturing dynamos. What do America’s leaders dream about: Drone warfare? Balancing the budget? Banning the Confederate flag?

It’s a joke. No one in Washington has a plan for the future. It’s all just political opportunism and posturing. Check this out from The Hindu:

“China and Russia have described BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as the core of a new international order…

Russian President Vladimir Putin said… “There is no doubt — we have all necessary premises to expand the horizons of mutually beneficial cooperation, to join together our raw material resources, human capital and huge consumer markets for a powerful economic spurt.”

Russia’s Tass news agency also quoted Mr. Putin as saying that the Eurasian continent had vast transit potential. He pointed to “the construction of new efficient transport and logistics chains, in particular, the implementation of the initiative of the Silk Road economic belt and the development of transportation in the eastern part of Russia and Siberia. This may link the rapidly growing markets in Asia and Europe’s economies, mature, rich in industrial and technological achievements. At the same time, this will allow our countries to become more commercially viable in the competition for investors, for creating new jobs, for advanced enterprises,” he observed.”….

The summit also acknowledged “the potential for expanding the use of our national currencies in transactions between the BRICS countries.” (“BRICS, SCO, EAEU can define new world order: China, Russia“, The Hindu)

The dollar is toast. The IMF is toast. The US debt market (US Treasuries) is toast. The institutions that support US power are crumbling before our very eyes. The BRICS have had enough; enough war, enough Wall Street, enough meddling and hypocrisy and austerity and lecturing. This is farewell. Sure, it will take time, but Ufa marks a fundamental change in thinking, a fundamental change in approach, and a fundamental change in strategic orientation.

The BRICS are not coming back, they’re gone for good, just as Washington’s “pivot to Asia” is gone for good. There’s just too much resistance. Washington has simply overplayed its hand, worn out its welcome. People are sick of us.

Can you blame them?

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

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