Forum Post: Capitalist Country

Posted 12 years ago on Dec. 25, 2011, 5:32 p.m. EST by aaabbbbccccc111111 (10)
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I make about 20000 a year and have come to the realization that there is a large wealth disparity in this country. But What I don't understand is why does everyone here just want to be handed a good job. This is a country where every man and women is given opportunity to go to college and get government funding and can create a business on their own. Why isn't anyone doing this instead of just complaining. Life isn't fair and we must create our own luck.

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[-] 2 points by Anachronism (225) 12 years ago

Are you actually complaining that rising tide of unemployment and poverty is due to some loss of entrepreneurial spirit? Do you know the probability of starting a successful business in the era of mega-corps

I used to think that way too. Then I came to understand how working class Americans came that way over generations through conditioning. You gotta stand waaaaay back to see how it works.

Look at it this way: The empire needs only about 20-25% of its population at the very most to administrate and perpetuate itself -- through lawyers, insurance managers, financial managers, college teachers, media managers, scientists, bureaucrats, managers of all types and many other professions and semi-professions.

What happens to the rest? They are the production machinery of the empire and they are the consumers upon the empire depends to turn profits. If every one of them earned a college degree it would not change their status, but only drive down wages of the management class, who are essentially caterers to the corporate financial elites who govern most things simply by controlling the availability of money at all levels, to to bottom, hence your hard struggle to pay for college in an entirely capitalist profit driven economy. In every other modern post industrial economy you would have attended for free as long as you chose to, and been given free healthcare and a stipend to live on while you did it.

Clawing down basic things like an education in such a competitive, reptilian environment makes people hard. And that's what the empire wants, hardassed people in the degreed classes managing the dumbed down, over-fed proles whose mental activity consists of plugging their brains into their television sets so they can absorb the message to buy more, and absorb themselves in the bread and circus spectacles provided them through profitable media corporations operating mainly as extensions of the capitalist state's propaganda system, such as "buy this," or "you have it better than anyone in the world," (not at all true). The more generations subjected to this, the more entrenched ignorance, materialism and lack of intellectual drive becomes.

At the same time average household income in America is $34,000. So a guy making $75,000 has two choices. He can feel like the money justifies a superior attitude, or he can take some time to think about things other than the capitalist state's stamp upon his brain that, yes, he is superior because he can buy more things, and he can call other Americans lazy because they did not make the same choices he did.

Only about 20-24% of Americans get a college degree. One quarter of Americans do not finish high school. Interestingly, they are beginning to come together, though they don't know it. Right now we are seeing the proletarianization of college graduates, as increasingly more of them are forced to take service and labor jobs. (Remember that it only takes a limited number to directly or indirectly manage the working masses, which these days includes workers like hospital technicians, and a thousand other occupations we have not traditionally thought of as working class.)

America will go through its most profound changes ever within our lifetimes, if you are under say 55-60.