I watched Russell Brand on Democracy Now! not long ago.
Despite several stupid questions from Amy—“would you run for London mayor” or “would
you run for parliament” when he’s sitting there telling her that the elected power
elite don’t represent the interests of the people—it was a very entertaining 45
minutes. Humor always makes radical political pontificating more digestible.
(And all us ‘Mericans love his accent.)
One thing in particular that Brand said struck me. He called
the class of people who used to work in manufacturing the “throwaway class.”
Because of the outsourcing of these jobs and the changing nature of
manufacturing itself, these people are now seen as the dregs of society,
sapping the welfare system because they can’t get jobs, holding back the
economy and those who engineer it.
Does this “throwaway” language sound familiar? How about the
Facebook page of the Albuquerque cop who described his job as “human waste disposal.” Or one of the cops
who shot homeless James Boyd in the Sandia foothills, talking to a state cop
before the shooting: “For this fucking lunatic? I’m going to
shoot him with [unintelligible] shotgun here in a second.” The homeless,
the mentally ill, the PTSD vets who are in and out of treatment are fair game,
it seems, for those in APD who think we’d all be better off without them, but
picking them off one by one is not very efficient.
Benjamin Netanyahu is much more efficient. He bombs the Palestinians
he wants to be rid of in Gaza and smashes the houses and destroys the crops of
the ones in the West Bank. He’s been documented saying he’ll never agree to an
Israeli state for anyone other than the Jews, and his foreign minister is
quoted saying, “I want to get rid of these people [the Palestinians] through
transfer, or exchange.”
What they are all getting at is eugenics, of course. The man
who coined the term was another Brit like Brand, albeit of the ruling class,
very much unlike Brand. According to Francis Galton, his ruling class was
“genetically superior” and should therefore rule the world. Across the ocean,
this translated into American policies to protect the Puritan gene pool from
inferior “stock” through immigration laws. And while people of color have felt
the brunt of this discrimination profoundly over last few centuries, it doesn’t
mean that the ruling class is opposed to throwing away other white people.
Orwell brought the conception to its nadir in Nineteen Eighty-four, where the Proles,
the rabble that lives outside the brotherhood, are left to their own ignorant
devices. Except that the tables are turned: the Proles appear to be the only ones
who have the capacity to enjoy themselves, even in their abject conditions and
exclusion from power. The carefully conditioned Inner Party can’t remember what
a good time might be.
Our “Proles” may end up spoiling the elites’ party, in a
different way. With all those good manufacturing jobs gone that raised so many
from working class to middle class, who’s going to be buying and consuming the
goods—all those iPhones and video games and flat screen TVs rather than cars
and washing machines and lawn mowers—that keep the American economy afloat? And
when folks can’t pay for healthcare or home mortgages they’ll end up sapping
the welfare system even more. Aha! Remember the industrial revolution when
workers couldn’t afford to buy any of the things they made?
One could argue that the solution to alienated labor is no
labor at all. There is enough wealth in the world to provide every human being
enough money to meet our basic material needs. I can just hear the
reactionaries screaming that that would be the end to civilization as we know
it, but a lot of us would be screaming back: thank god! Feed and clothe and
house all of us and see what we’re capable of.
