Isn't it possible that there's no real progressive movement because the power disparity between rich and poor is so great? People draw up comparisons to turn of the century industrialization, but if you draw a broader net and look at, say, incidence of peasant uprisings in the Dark Ages, or slave rebellions in pre-Civil War America, you see pretty similar trends. Small, undirected individual outbursts of violence, crime by the poor and desparate preying on the poor and desperate, extremely rare general revolts that are typically put down brutally and successfully, great sections of the population comprising an invisible underclass so little acknowledged by the media and intelligentsia of the time that to this day we've got very little idea what their actual lives were like, outside a mythologizing narrative crafted by masters concerned only with themselves.
This isn't exceptional (ha) to America in any way, nor do I think it's really surprising. Those with the money control the halls of political power, the media narrative, the police and military, the schools rich and poor alike learn to understand the world around them in - and the power of the oligarchy is strengthening, not weakening. What's in it for them, that they should pander to the issues of the slovenly ill-spoken poorly educated unskilled tractable lumpen masses? Just look at how much sneering at the cultural trappings of poverty goes on in liberal circles around here. The only people with a potential interest in 'class issues' are members of the underclass themselves and those on the edge of being lower-class, and to actually organize to a meaningful extent requires manpower, resources, regimentation, ability to disseminate information, exceptional leadership in the face of the active hostility of the existing system, all of which take money and influence to achieve that they by definition don't have. The right circumstances might come together for a genuinely proletarian movement, time to time, but it'd be a freak occurrence as it always is, ever less likely the poorer the poor get and the more the actual middle class shrinks.
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Date: 13/4/10 00:42 (UTC)This isn't exceptional (ha) to America in any way, nor do I think it's really surprising. Those with the money control the halls of political power, the media narrative, the police and military, the schools rich and poor alike learn to understand the world around them in - and the power of the oligarchy is strengthening, not weakening. What's in it for them, that they should pander to the issues of the slovenly ill-spoken poorly educated unskilled tractable lumpen masses? Just look at how much sneering at the cultural trappings of poverty goes on in liberal circles around here. The only people with a potential interest in 'class issues' are members of the underclass themselves and those on the edge of being lower-class, and to actually organize to a meaningful extent requires manpower, resources, regimentation, ability to disseminate information, exceptional leadership in the face of the active hostility of the existing system, all of which take money and influence to achieve that they by definition don't have. The right circumstances might come together for a genuinely proletarian movement, time to time, but it'd be a freak occurrence as it always is, ever less likely the poorer the poor get and the more the actual middle class shrinks.