Every Factor Is In Place For A Class Uprising

The pain and rage that’s been building over the past several decades could soon result in an overturning of our corrupt, despotic political system. Demagogues like Donald Trump have diverted the people’s outrage into hatred and authoritarianism, as happens in every period of extreme inequality. But with the Trump administration’s continuing the forty-year assault against the working class, the masses are realizing they have no other option than to revolt.

Half the country is officially living in poverty. Around 70% have less than a thousand dollars in savings, while 80% are burdened with debt and anxious about job security. The majority of Americans can no longer afford a new car, while a thirdcan’t afford food, shelter or medical care. Much of the population isn’t homeless and starving right now only because of their taking in monumental debt, which has created a banking bubble worse than that of 2008. Most Americans, nonetheless, are now found to be regressing into a third world lifestyle.

Those in this underclass know what’s going on here. We see how the top 0.1% of the population owns as much wealth as the bottom 90%. How average CEO compensation has gone up 1000% in the last four decades while the average worker’s wages have only declined. How our livelihoods have been taken away by corporate trade deals, our wages have been systematically stolen, our social services have been intolerably reduced, how corporations have been able to racketeer our health care, prescription drugs and education while they loot to treasury. How our voice in government has been silenced, culminating in the theft of the 2016 Democratic primary from Bernie Sanders.

I don’t promise a successful revolt. Societies have always seemed to develop like organisms, with individual people only able to partially influence a chaotic mass of events. And no amount of wishing history will go a certain way can guarantee the outcome. I’m only pointing out that at this moment, the conditions are in place for our society to throw down our corporatist, national security state-enforced oligarchy. Economic inequality is larger than it was in the late 1920’s, right before the capitalist elite decided only major concessions toward the lower classes could prevent an outright revolution. Taking from this and other examples of revolutionary upheavals, the sociologist Peter Turchin has predicted the next explosion of social unrest will come in 2020.

To save the republic, or at least the future of our species, we need to use this climax of outrage for bringing radical, nonviolent change. This means resisting taxes. This means organizing in our communities and working to transform our local energy and agricultural systems. This means carrying out civil disobedience, such as strikes, blockades and occupations, to disrupt the system that the oligarchy rests on. Most of all it means confronting our personal flaws, since each of us shares some of the blame for our crisis.

As we move into the post-net neutrality era, and as corporate power, military rule and surveillance continue to intensify, the power structure’s mouthpieces will gloatingly try to shut down our efforts. The class of brazen right-wing racists, warmongers and apologists for corporate rule, which the presidency now openly represents, will continue their attacks against the vulnerable. Intelligent and nuanced discourse will be relegated to those who still dare set themselves up against the state. Any attempt at revolution will be met with violent repression from the state and mockery from the establishment media, as happened with Occupy Wall Street and the WTO protests.

“The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism,” writes Chris Hedges about the state of consciousness that goes against the revolution’s sentiments. “It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is ‘correct.’ Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the ‘correct’ ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power.”

The irony is that the poor, which this idiot paradigm regards as inferior, are generally far less naive about the world than the rich. Always directly experiencing the evils and injustices of society, the poor are forced to become cynical and perceptive. Unlike the elite classes who, as their actions show, are lulled into not noticing the system’s massive flaws. The poor, able to recognize the essence of humanity and the spiritual pulse of the planet, might one day use this wisdom to overturn the world.