Brexit & economically incorrect identity politics

Brexit, a loss for not only British but also European and global capital, is ultimately a victory for humanity even though the mentally beleaguered brigades of all-is-always-lost are made to see it as a triumph of the racist right.

Those who insure the growing strength of a reactionary right are the barely existent left, too often acting as echo chamber for establishment politics even while posing criticism which amounts to hiring a woman captain, a multicultural crew and installing gender fluid toilets for the Titanic.

We should understand that the movement in the United Kingdom, a truly democratic expression in which more than 70% of the electorate voted, has also reared its head in the USA through the Trump and Sanders campaigns. While neither Republicrat says a word in criticism of capital they are both hopeful signs of its future democratically arranged demise, even as motivated-by-the right voices in Europe join a smaller but more economically conscious left in a unity many of them remain unconscious of but will hopefully soon act upon.

The ravages suffered by increasing populations who see wealth growing for tiny minorities while life becomes more difficult for them are causing breakdowns and uprisings that panic established power and its often innocent but sometimes conscious professional classes. The opinion shapers and consciousness creators work overtime to depict any reactions against a failing system as the work of neo-nazis on the one hand or cultural-Marxists on the other, with both labels vastly over stated, while understating the profound problems facing humanity which are sometimes causing seemingly irrational responses from people who have an economic floor collapsing beneath their feet while a political roof crashes down on their heads.

While capital has advertised its global aspects in glowing terms and made a new middle class in nations previously lacking one, it has added greatly to poverty and loss that must necessarily be absorbed in order for others to profit. The system of minority private gain which supposedly trickles down to insure a better life for the majority was always a lie, understood by many even back in the 19^th century. But the speed at which electronic change has joined with the inherent greed of blind individualism, which is contradictorily still seen by innocents as ways to improve life for everyone, has increased the assault on nature by commodity capital’s marketing process to the point of creating terminal danger to the most important part of that nature: humanity itself.

While savage austerity policies have been used to slash public spending to benefit private profiteers in Greece, France and England, they have also run rampant in the rest of the world and the USA. This global rule, which is making more billionaires, has also created millions more paupers and lowered what was once a fairly secure middle class to one that just barely gets by. Meanwhile, the upper percentile of professional servants to capital, especially those operating in the mind managing and systems strengthening fields of education and media, have shared in the gains, though at a much lower level of course, but fallen prey to support by inactivity except to opt for what are forms of affirmative action that make life better only for some selected groups while continuing to make it much worse for most others, even in the supposedly targeted demographic-ethnic-racial-identity subdivisions divide and conquer politics uses to assure the status remains quo. Thus, for one obvious example, an American Black Bourgeoisie increases in some numbers thanks to more college educated people, while prisons bulge with a much larger number of blacks who are of the economic class—the overwhelming majority!—who remain un-“affirmed.” What was originally criticized as a system to “send one to Yale and send ten to jail” has turned out to be even worse than that.

Whether formerly middle class people reduced to indebted workers trying to pay off loans or formerly working class people reduced to lower incomes, vanishing pensions and a tax burden to carry the social costs of benefits which accrue to fewer and fewer, anger and frustration are shared with few offers of solution from a barely existing left and far more from a populist right. Mislabeling all this simplistically as racism, especially in a society born of racist oppression in which all current residents, whether members of ethnically hyphenated groups, gay, straight, legal, “undocumented” or of any skin tone, live in and on land stolen from original inhabitants, is the plan and program of the divide and conquer rulers. Continuing to play into it will only make the worst outcomes a matter of fact rather than fantasy.

The fact that 400 billionaires in America have more combined wealth than 60% of the nation cannot be reduced to a problem of one or another identity group other than rich people having too much wealth and power. The fact that only 20 of those at the top command more wealth than 50% of the people—that’s more than 150,000,000—cannot be dealt with simply by hiring more professionals to serve them and seeing to it that they are a multi-cultural politically correct group. With such staggering economically tyrannical realities to deal with, reducing matters to whether one uses proper speech on what are often knee jerk issues of as much significance as ball scores is what our rulers want and all too often get. And yes we can all get thrilled or excited about rooting for the homies but when it’s time to come up with the rent or mortgage the landlord or bank will not accept “yay team” in lieu of payment.

Opposing immigration may sometimes involve racism, but so can supporting it. Those who finance national capital’s cheap labor employment agency which opens its doors wide for some immigrants while slamming it shut for many Americans—often “people of color”—are not heaven’s gift to a higher state of being but may simply be decent folks economically uninformed.

Of course, if they are among the groups that directly profit from that cheap labor, whether from agribusiness, the mills, foundries, or homes that get cleaned, gardened and child cared by that cheap labor, immigration is great. But if they are denied the jobs, both entry level and beyond, that go to a newer, cheaper labor force, or have to pay the taxes to support the social costs of that immigration there is a very different view. Rather than reducing a political economic problem to a simplistic good vs. evil which conveniently forgets or excludes the evil of economic and war policies throwing people out of their homelands, which is a responsibility we all share, we need to act on that responsibility as a majority and stop blaming it on supposedly politically incorrect minorities.

Instead of enabling some to feel good about themselves for being accepting of situations which either profit them directly or cost them nothing at all while others who show the loss protest and are treated as evil, we need to understand the economic roots which are costing all of us, to different degrees, and understand that even if it looks profitable to some for the moment, it can turn out disastrous in the next. Not only in a fast changing natural environment crisis called climate change, but in a more immediately dangerous one called terrorism, also a result of political economic policies which go unchanged while people allow themselves to be toyed with and shaped into fear and even hate for other people like them and often worse off, while remaining helpless, or unmindful, or supportive of the tiny group in ownership and operation of our political economic reality.

The British people took a step in the direction of saying “enough.” We need to go much further but we can only do so by ending the divisions that make democracy impossible, and that means ending this destructive fear mongering play upon emotions that may as well see every reaction to a reality that needs radical change as an assault on those poor 400 billionaires, and their global “identity group.”

Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate.