Taken from the quarterly literary magazine "N+1"
Quote:
Let's talk about legible faces. You know those short, brown-toned South-American immigrants that pick your fruit, slaughter your meat, and bus your tables? Would you--a respectable person with a middle-class upbringing--ever consider going on a date with one of them? It's a rude question, because it affects to inquire into what everyone gets to know at the cost of forever leaving it unspoken. But if you were to put your unspoken thoughts into words, they might sound like this:
Not only are these people busing the tables, slaughtering the meat, and picking the fruit, they are the descendants of the people who bused the tables, slaughtered the meat, and picked the fruit of the Aztecs and Incas. The Spanish colonizers slaughtered or mixed their blood with the princes, priests, scholars, artisans, warriors, and beautiful women of the indigenous Americas, leaving untouched a class of Morlocks bred for good-natured servility and thus now tailor-made to the demands of an increasingly feudal postindustrial America
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Moral of the story is, in my mind, without a state of inequality there could be no ideal state of equality. Humans are NOT born equal to one another. We all have gifts and weaknesses, some of us more than others. So long as the capable and motivated exist, they will rise above the incapable and or unmotivated.
What we're seeing with inequality isn't some clandestine corporate plan to pad the pockets of top management, its a natural market reaction to the commoditization of what was formerly considered "skilled" labor simply because of the prerequisite of a university degree, something which used to be rare but nowadays is worth little more than a high school diploma.
Well guess what, the blue-collar workers of yester-year may wear white collars now, but instead of working on a physical product in the factory line they function as a tiny, interchangeable cog in a monolithic corporate machine.
The fact is that the American industrial monopoly of the post-WWII era, the rents of which allowed blue collar workers to be paid what they were for so many years, has disappeared. Nowadays you need a far more robust personal and professional skill set in order to command a top wage, because frankly someone just as smart as you in Inidia will do it for less.
The question that needs to be reconciled here is not whether capitalism is working--because it is, in its usual ruthless efficiency--but whether:
a) we want to transition to a hybrid capitalist-socialist state in which the strong subsidize the weak (see: obama, clinton)
AND
b) do we dare risk such a transition given that the rising stars of China and India will ruthlessly push efficiency as their highest priority and that we may well be hamstringing ourselves in the globalization race by doing A?