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what made this middle class what it was during the fordist period (1945-sometimes in the 1970s)? the manufacturing base. relatively high wages won through collective bargaining arrangements that altered the political situation that shaped wages. this enabled a rational extension of consumer credit, a vast expansion of home ownership.
what has happened since the 1970s? the internationalization of stock trade, the internationalization of manufacturing by way of the net and supply-pool management technologies, the breakdown of the political framework that enabled relatively high-wage jobs for many people, the atomization of the manufacturing base geographically---and of ownership (a major reason why nation-states are finished)...a radical transfer of power to the holders of capital---what amounts to an ideological offensive waged over many years to conceal the fact of this transfer of power---a happy-face simple-minded economic ideology that has NEVER delivered on what people promised by referring to it for most people---a culture of debt---endless war as a way to prop up the economy---and so on.
the problem with jobs goes beyond unemployment. the problem is the entire geography of production that was developed while people were waiting to be trickled down on from above. you know, the good serfs waiting for the lords to do their thing.
this is a major reason why it is obvious to almost everyone (outside the dissociative spaces of the american right) that (a) the present crisis is of neo-liberalism itself and (b) it cannot and will not be addressed using neo-liberal tools, neo-liberal thinking, or neo-liberal policies.
doing that now will accelerate the decline of the american empire considerably.
but it seems characteristic of declining empires that people cannot face the fact of decline.
there seems a vicious circle at the center of it.
i wouldn't have known that but for living through the decline of an empire.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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