Class is ever the issue, and under neoliberalism, class struggle is a necessary construct to understand how neoliberalism is a ruling class political project that curbs the power of labor.

One instrument with which we are now quite familiar in the US #GOPTaxScam, is the use of legislative lawfare by a ruling class to instrumentalize the redistribution of wealth. But Class Lawfare cuts many ways on “many sides”, unlike class warfare.

Polite society seemed not to give a damn that it had become easier to get into Harvard or Cambridge if you were black than if you were poor. They deliberately ignored that identity politics can be as divisive as apartheid if allowed to act as a lever for overlooking class conflict. (Dec 8, 2017 YANIS VAROUFAKIS) ...
(OTOH, would it be satisfying or counter-revolutionary to photoshop them "hung upside down from a metal girder above a service station on the square.")

UPDATE: The wrapped package addressed to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin contained manure, multiple law enforcement sources tell @NBCInvestigates. https://t.co/ObTVkg294b

— NBC Los Angeles (@NBCLA) December 24, 2017

If anyone asks for an example of “Carrying coals to Newcastle,” you can now give the definitive one: shipping excrement to U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. pic.twitter.com/nfTKcEMHti

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) December 24, 2017

Trump replaced the national motto, "E Pluribus Unum"—Out of many, one—with his own campaign slogan. Then he had them make it gold and thicker, and put his name on it three times. It is as if they forged his mania and insecurities in the form of a coin. https://t.co/WarhQy4Loa

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) December 22, 2017

The President tells his club members who paid $200,000 to join that he made them richer.

This sounds like a banana republic but it is actually the United States. https://t.co/rxqBHn4kXe

— Matt Ortega (@MattOrtega) December 24, 2017

• It's class war. Republicans are assisting the efforts of a very small, very rich faction to take an ever-growing share of the nation's wealth from the rest of us.
• The wealthiest 20 percent of Americans, especially the ones in the rarified air of the top 1 percent, have no concept of the problems their fellow citizens in the bottom 80 percent face every day.
• (2016) Neither Trump nor Sanders started the nation's current class war—the biggest fight over class since the New Deal—but both candidates, as different as they ... Class is back. Arguably, for the first time since the New Deal, class is the dominant political issue.

David Harvey outlines the stakes which are being undermined by Trumpism in the appointment of incompetent and reactionary administrative agency heads whose goal is to destroy their sector of the State. This was but one component of a political strategy to disempower labor by appealing to nationalism via a vague racialized traditionalism, and using mobile finance capital to enrich the ruling classes.
Looting occurs during capitalist crises

Dismantling a flawed regulatory state is only a first step amidst the ideological appeals including the most bizarre of tactics, resurrecting immigration exclusion as a counter-terror strategy, and racial repression because the majority population is somehow being oppressed by minorities. That similar strategy finds its most baroque expression in making cultural sectors into a villain even as a finance capital buffoon became POTUS*.

Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.

A version of this is Foucault’s governmentality argument that sees neoliberalizing tendencies already present in the eighteenth century. But if you just treat neoliberalism as an idea or a set of limited practices of governmentality, you will find plenty of precursors.

What’s missing here is the way in which the capitalist class orchestrated its efforts during the 1970s and early 1980s. I think it would be fair to say that at that time — in the English-speaking world anyway — the corporate capitalist class became pretty unified.

They agreed on a lot of things, like the need for a political force to really represent them. So you get the capture of the Republican Party, and an attempt to undermine, to some degree, the Democratic Party.

[...]

The other thing I think is crucial is that the neoliberal push of the 1970s didn’t pass without strong resistance. There was massive resistance from labor, from communist parties in Europe, and so on.

But I would say that by the end of the 1980s the battle was lost. So to the degree that resistance has disappeared, labor doesn’t have the power it once had, solidarity among the ruling class is no longer necessary for it to work.

It doesn’t have to get together and do something about struggle from below because there is no threat anymore. The ruling class is doing extremely well so it doesn’t really have to change anything.

Yet while the capitalist class is doing very well, capitalism is doing rather badly. Profit rates have recovered but reinvestment rates are appallingly low, so a lot of money is not circulating back into production and is flowing into land-grabs and asset-procurement instead.

So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, “What to do?”.

The ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.

[...]

With respect to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for example, Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian labor, the British colonial labor. But this created a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest.

Instead they chose the other way — to take capital to where the low-wage labor forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs and empower finance capital, because finance capital is the most mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating currencies became critical to curbing labor.

At the same time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs abroad, and a third component: technological change, deindustrialization through automation and robotization. That was the strategy to squash labor.

www.jacobinmag.com/...

As with most actual warfare in history there are hybrid and asymmetrical elements, much like the current theories of battlefield warfare. There is historical struggle and its political economy of violence persists in more virulent forms in the 21st Century.

The rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic is being investigated psychoanalytically, culturally, anthropologically, aesthetically, and of course in terms of identity politics.

The only angle left unexplored is the one that holds the key to understanding what is going on: the unceasing class war waged against the poor since the late 1970s.

---

[...]

William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century British philosopher, famously postulated that, when bamboozled in the face of competing explanations, we ought to opt for the one with the fewest assumptions and the greatest simplicity. For all the deftness of establishment commentators in the US and Britain, they seem to have neglected this principle.

Loath to recognize the intensified class war, they bang on interminably with conspiracy theories about Russian influence, spontaneous bursts of misogyny, the tide of migrants, the rise of the machines, and so on. While all of these fears are highly correlated with the militant parochialism fueling Trump and Brexit, they are only tangential to the deeper cause – class war against the poor – alluded to by the car affordability data in the US and the credit-dependence of much of Britain’s population.

Today, establishment opinion-makers, who scornfully rejected the pertinence of social class, have contributed to a political environment in which class politics was never more pertinent, toxic, and less discussed. Speaking on behalf of a ruling class comprising financial experts, bankers, corporate representatives, media owners, and big industry functionaries, they act exactly as if their goal were to deliver the working classes into the grubby hands of the populists and their empty promise of making America and Britain “great again.”[...]

The only prospect for civilizing society and detoxifying politics is a new political movement that harnesses on behalf of a new humanism the burning injustice that class war manufactures. Judging by its callous treatment of US Senator Bernie Sanders and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the liberal establishment seems to fear such a movement more than it does Trump and Brexit.

www.project-syndicate.org/…

 

What is to be done?

---

In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours and the like. To convert the working class to Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or "vanguard", of dedicated revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet precipitated in part the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

Who was Marx’s proletariat? He was an industrial workingman (we’re dealing with 19^th century conventions): “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.” He also was an individual, a man: “The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” The proletariat knew the system was rigged. www.counterpunch.org/...

The media regularly reports on political bribery scandals, secret campaign funds and luxury speaking-engagement junkets. Today’s ruling class, the 1 percent is not – in Marx’s words – “trembling.” Like robber barons of old, today’s ruling class is laughing all the way to the bank.

* * *

For a century, the concept of proletariat anchored radical analysis and politics, theory and practice. Its now all but disappeared.

***

From European revolutionaries of 1848 to victims of the ‘50s Red Scare, it was a concept understood by radicals of every strip. The proletariat was the vanguard of struggle, at once the most advanced sector of the capitalist system in terms of generating profit as well as the most exploited. Given Marx’s dialectic thinking, the proletariat prefiguring a utopian future, suggesting new forms of social organization. Today, the proletariat has vanished from radical discourse. But has it disappeared from the historical stage?

***

Often overlooked, is the new proletariat the legions of contingent – i.e., freelancers, contractors, consultants — workers hungry for a paycheck and willing to work for what’s been dubbed “the sharing economy?” There are the estimated 9,000 companies identified with the new for of high-tech innovation.

This new form of exploitation, of turning oneself into a commodity, is spreading throughout the economy. Its gaining ground within transportation, with companies like Uber and Lyft; apartment rentals with Airbnb; good and services, like designer clothes from RentTheRunway; and odd jobs with TaskRabbit. And don’t forget adjunct faculty, the exploited intellectual labor force who keeps the billion-dollar collage education racket functioning.

www.counterpunch.org/...

So what is to be dumb?

Who are class enemies/class allies:
Version One: They’re just Security State dupes

The replies on this tweet confirm that most people are smart enough to avoid this app. A senior intelligence officer at the CIA who was stationed in Russia said to me tonight that the chances that the Kremlin ISN’T involved in this are zilch. https://t.co/LTGkdjCoAC

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) December 24, 2017

Edward Snowden's new app will help keep your laptop protectedhttps://t.co/Mpzu2ojxmX

— Axios (@axios) December 24, 2017

Version Two: They’re just Finance Capital dopes.

returning from a day-trip to Fort Knox to watch the solar eclipse from the roof of the gold repository

The US Treasury chief, Steven Mnuchin, has sparked a wave of criticism and mockery after photos appeared of him and his wife, Louise Linton, holding up a sheet of new dollar bills.

[...]

They were heavily criticised in September when it emerged that he had asked for the use of a US air force plane to fly him and his wife around Europe for their honeymoon.

Linton apologised in the same month for an Instagram post earlier in the year, in which she had tagged a series of designer clothes producers in an image of her stepping off a government plane.

Version Three: They could be a “new class” or movement that is even a vanguard, but haven’t we heard that before...

“Berniebro” is a pejorative term referring to fanatical male supporters of 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary candidate Bernie Sanders who supposedly oppose his rival candidate Hillary Clinton based on sexist cultural biases. Since its coinage in late 2015, many Clinton supporters have asserted that the term accurately underscores the basis of Sanders’ affinity with young male Democrats, while others have dismissed it as a straw man argument or smear tactic aimed at detracting criticisms surrounding Clinton’s campaign platform. knowyourmeme.com/...

Millenials are not a lumpenproletariat, even as they adopt many of its sensibilities, yet for every 1968 avant-garde, there is a 1988 arrière-garde of asymmetric strength. Class warfare is not class lawfare, even as it presents a fun-house mirror of social relations. Even then, like a state, at some moment it should be smashed, or at least challenged in its ideological asymmetry, see OWS or BLM.

OTOH we have seen agents provocateurs make a mess of things at the electoral level, raising contradictions, but to what palpable end. Trump’s success may be to ensconce systemic RW repression for another generation.

The rich get richer, and millennials miss out https://t.co/q7X9jF98UQ

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 24, 2017

I think much of the Left right now, being very autonomous and anarchical, is actually reinforcing the endgame of neoliberalism. A lot of people on the Left don’t like to hear that.

But of course the question arises: Is there a way to organize which is not a mirror image? Can we smash that mirror and find something else, which is not playing into the hands of neoliberalism?

Here’s a proposition to think over. What if every dominant mode of production, with its particular political configuration, creates a mode of opposition as a mirror image to itself?

During the era of Fordist organization of the production process, the mirror image was a large centralized trade union movement and democratically centralist political parties.

The reorganization of the production process and turn to flexible accumulation during neoliberal times has produced a Left that is also, in many ways, its mirror: networking, decentralized, non-hierarchical. I think this is very interesting.

And to some degree the mirror image confirms that which it’s trying to destroy. In the end I think that the trade union movement actually undergirded Fordism.

www.jacobinmag.com/...

Rationality and the Ideology of Disconnection By Michael Taylor (2006)

The group of people who get to decide how big and powerful companies can become is exceedingly narrow. https://t.co/Pzy25UN6vX

— American Prospect (@theprospect) December 24, 2017