Politicians Divide the 99% ... a Tool of the Elites

The GOP primary in South Carolina is history.  The results show us a few important things about how the ruling elites manage to persuade the 99% to surrender their power.  Romney, the undisguised patrician, seeks through his rhetoric to have the laboring classes identify with with the capitalist class.  This is done by promoting the gutting of the social safety net.  The message delivered, none to subtly, is this:  The reason your taxes are so high is that the people who do not want to pull their weight are living off of you.  "Let's get them."  Tax cuts that primarily benefit the ruling elites are great: The ruling elites are, after all the "job creators."  You need job creators so that you can have someone to sell your labor to.  The capitalist class has your interests at heart.  This message did not play well in South Carolina due to a resurgent class consciousness.  When Romney described, for example, his earnings from speaking tours totaling over $300,000 as "not very much," this laid bare his class isolation.  He has a "gated mentality."

Now Newt Gingrich, on the other hand uses rhetoric to foment divisions within the labor class.  Division is a tool for controlling and stirring up intraclass hatred.  President Obama is characterised, for example, as the "food stamp President."  This brings in race, class and fear of minorities taking something they are not entitled to.  Never mind that the majority of Americans using food stamps are white.  The math of demographics is too subtle to bother with in the heat of a campaign.  Gingrich also attacks public employees.  This is more division of the 99%.  One publicly employed custodian in a school, for example, could be "fired" thus leaving a wage for 30 school children.  Child labor laws should be eliminated.  They are an unnecessary barrier to capital accumulation.

My personal take on these two candidates vying for the Republican Party nomination is this:  They both employ strategies designed to divide the 99%.  You don't want the labor class to be angry with the capitalist class.  So you promote discord among the labor class itself.  Romney seeks to have the labor classes identify with the capitalist class.  The implication is that you could be wealthy if only all of the others of the labor class would just pull their weight. 

Newt, on the other hand, is just plain despicable.  He promotes divisions in the 99% having to do with ethnicity, public employees, children and gender.  In South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War and still flies the Confederate flag at the state capitol, Newt's rhetoric targeted the old divisions.  What do you call a person who can operate with the contradictions that pervade his life?  If he were a homeless person on the streets he would arrested and referred for psychiatric treatment.

The more subtle thing to acknowledge here is that the vaunted two-party system is, at bottom, nothing more that an elaborate means for dividing the labor class.  In essence we have but one party with two right wings.  It is the capitalist party.  This ruse may be coming unwound with the growing number of voters identifying as independents.  The occupy movement, which is international, has a perspective that goes beyond the outmoded instrumentality of parties.  Class consciousness is being given a voice.  "We are the 99%."  What is interesting to me is that the awareness of class is being constructed outside of the Marxist prescriptions.