Class Warfare, Take 2

[chris_gerrib]

So, the "Occupy Wall Street" (OWS) movement is getting some mainstream media attention. I'm not sure I agree with the protesters (they look to me like they took logical thinking classes from the Tea Party) but with unemployment at 9.1%, protests are certainly understandable. At any rate, the OWS movement has drawn fire from people like Eric Cantor to Herman Cain who call it "class warfare." Well, as David Brin points out, class warfare has been going on since at least the invention of agriculture.

Personally, I don't get upset about a little class warfare. I've used the predator and prey analogy before, and I think it fits in this case. The prey not only has no obligation to go down quietly, it's better for everybody, including the predator, if they fight as hard as possible. The goal of democracy is not to prevent strife, but to prevent violent strife.

At any rate, Brin, in his somewhat rambling post, notes that the American Founding Fathers decided that part of the democratic solution was to ban primogeniture. Primogeniture is the practice of automatically and by default giving all property and wealth to the eldest son, and folks like Thomas Jefferson were dead-set against it. What they sought to avoid was the concentration of wealth and power that resulted from primogeniture - a concentration that led to the French Revolution, among other evils.

In short, the Founding Fathers engaged in pre-emptive class warfare. This warfare was continued by other means, from the estate tax to various workers rights and industrial safety laws. The bottom line is that we've always had class warfare in America and always will.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I see nothing wrong with lawful, peaceful demonstrations against Wall Street or any other entity. I do see something wrong with blocking traffic or attacking passerby. When this happens, the perpetrators need to be arrested: when it happens regularly around a demonstration, the mob needs to be dispersed.

Having said this, the goals of the OWS movement are incoherent, impractical and in some cases self-contradictory. So I don't think they stand much chance of being achieved, and I think that the spinoff from this movement will mostly help elect Republicans in 2012.

So I'm all for it! :)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I've seen some banners which suggest a slight edge over the Tea Party in the critical thinking stakes. Not necessarily a big one, but it is there.

The core problem they have is they don't really have a political party, because, whether certain "people" like it or not, the US has two rightist parties, a quite right one and a very right one. The quite right one, currently has a center right president(*) who hasn't shown a lot of interest in doing too many things to upset the status quo.

The Republicans winning, should Romney win, won't change anything - if anything things will probably get dramatically worse as they have in Britain where the head of the Bank of England is describing them as being in the worst economic crises ever.

So... not sure if they can achieve much. I certainly hope the anger continues to boil over peacefully at the degree to which the banks, special interests and financial sector have screwed over the general population.

(*) - by the political standards of EVERYBODY ELSE on planet Earth

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

the Founding Fathers engaged in pre-emptive class warfare

Y' know, that's a darned good point. (Are you and I allowed to agree on something? Isn't that like against the Articles or something?) I had occasion recently to reread T Paine's Common Sense, and that's exactly what he's talking about, and indeed some of what he says is eerily prescient of the French Revolution.

What made the American Revolution so sane compared to the French, and turn out so much better is I think because we were a colony. Distance equals travel time equals delay. American Colonial Governors thus tended to be either a) Britons who said, Umm, I can't do anything without orders from the Home Office, let me get back to you on that, say, next year sometime… Or b) Americans who said, Chuck it, I'm an American. The simple, odd truth is that by the summer of 1776 when the Continental Congress sat down to draft the Declaration, not one Crown-appointed Colonial Governor was left in office. America was already functionally self-governing, effectively independent, like a rocket that's dropped its last umbilical and is now running on internal power.

Whereas in a country where not the least hamlet is more than five to eight days' post from Paris, it was definitely King Stork, not King Log, who ruled.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Shock. Swoon. I basically agree. Although I think part of the issue here is that while the colonial administration had some gripes, they weren't all that different to ones their counterparts were having at home in England. 1776 was before the Act of Union, and almost 60 years before the Great Reform Act of 1832.

What actually interests me the most is how Britain avoided having a French style revolution in the late 18th/early 19th centuries. There were times when it started to get damn close. Mill owners in the North of England were able to get the army to break strikes and protests in ways that was getting close to armed rebellion at times. But, somehow, the country managed to defuse itself. There were a battery of reforms from 1832 onwards which basically curtailed corporate rights and enshrined personal rights legally which gave the Middle and Professional classes a lot of protection and power, something that didn't really happen in France and other parts of Europe until post WW1 and 2.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

blocking traffic or attacking passerby which they haven't. So far, the attacks have been by the police on them.

[karenjeane.livejournal.com]

For those saying OWS doesn't have true "goals" or "ends", I suggest reading this editorial (http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/opinion/rushkoff-occupy-wall-street/) by Douglas Rushkoff (kind of amazing it's on CNN.com.)