The U.K. Riots And The Coming Global Class War

Forbes ^ | August 15, 2011 | Joel Kotkin

[rightwingintelligentsia]

The riots that hit London and other English cities last week have the potential to spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England; in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself.

The hardening of class divisions has been building for a generation, first in the West but increasingly in fast-developing countries such as China. The growing chasm between the classes has its roots in globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; technology, which has allowed the fleetest and richest companies and individuals to shift operations at rapid speed to any locale; and the secularization of society, which has undermined the traditional values about work and family that have underpinned grassroots capitalism from its very origins.

[Billthedrill]

The difficulty with the "if they only had job opportunities they wouldn't riot" thesis is that it is patently false. This is not an underclass bitter about diminished expectations, it is a class typified by cultivated, instant-gratification hedonism, whose members wouldn't take a job if they were offered one because (1) they don't want to, (2) they've never had to, (3) they aren't equipped educationally for anything but manual labor, and (4) they can do better on the dole. This is not a "working" class. These are not miners whose mines have closed, farmers whose land has been taken, high-tech workers whose jobs have been outsourced to India. These are drones, and no economy worthy of the name can be made of them.

Equating the London rioters to the Chinese working classes is simply absurd. Yes, the model comes with a prepackaged set of premises and terms of analysis straight out of Marx but it doesn't cover the facts on the ground. There is no cabal of exploitative capitalist bosses in Britain who are keeping their heel on the neck of this "working" class, nor are there "pubs and clubs" to divert the Chinese populace. The two situations are not alike. The model fails.

Lost in this analysis is any mention of the middle class, to which the underclass must aspire if there is to be any hope of class mobility and the slow accretion of real wealth. That aspiration has been carefully and systematically stamped out by taxation economically and by mockery culturally. Those "little houses made of ticky-tacky" have for decades been beneath the lofty disdain of those on the Left who seem to regard themselves as the guardians of working-class interests, unless those houses can be expropriated from the people who earn them and given to those who have not. Only a fool would attempt to earn one under those circumstances. The multicultural nanny state does not promote class mobility, it stifles it coolly and deliberately. The only class interest involved here is on the part of the ruling one.

...economic systems, to be credible and socially sustainable, must deliver results to the vast majority of citizens.

I honestly do not know what the author means by "credible" and "socially sustainable" in terms of economics, those terms having essentially no semantic content in this particular context. Political systems are credible in this context insofar as they empower the individual citizen, not the class, to better himself. That is, after all, what class mobility means. Those governments most successful at it tend to be those most adept at staying the hell out of the way.

[DaxtonBrown]

I just wrote a whole book titled “Surviving Civil War II”, this new war isn’t going to look like CW I. In fact, we are already in it. I didn’t want to go into the Global Civil War, I was already at 130,000 words.

Basically, CW II is a war over slavery, but this time it is your debt bondage. The Fed’s inflation is in essence taxation without representation. The battlefields and territory have changed, you now have to include cyberspace.

http://www.futurnamics.com/civilwar.php

[ETL]

[jospehm20]

I agree, there are poor people in other countries. The government subsidized “poor” in America are better off than many working people.

[rbg81]

I think that we’ve made being “poor” so damn comfortable, that the “poor” have no incentive to change. In the short term, reducing benefits could lead to more violence until they realize that the Authorities are serious. After that, they’ll be better behaved.

[ridesthemiles]

Anyone who isn’t paying attention to the global unrest & thinks it cannot happen here deserves to be ground into the dust when trouble starts.

Be prepared to fight or be prepared to fall into the morass.

[doberville]

It just struck me: the colors black and red. . .the colors of the anarcho=communists.

Everyone in black or red. . .

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks rightwingintelligentsia.

[WePledge]

I believe if you pit an unorganized group of looter/pillagers against a neighborhood/family group bent on protecting their own, the odds are in the defender's favor.
As you said ,it's not going to be pretty!

[hedgetrimmer]

Except some of the rioters were rich kids.

Poor? Disadvantaged? Pull the other one... The rich, rioting students are unmasked

[Mariner]

"If capitalism cannot do that expect more outbreaks of violence and greater levels of political alienation — not only in Britain but across most of the world’s leading countries, including the U.S."

It's amazing that Forbes published this. The man is a Marxist idiot.

Riots are easily handled..."If you loot, we shoot"

It's the failure to enforce the law that is the basis of lawlessness.

[hedgetrimmer]

Class warfare is a product of Cultural Marxism.

Cultural Marxism is a tool of globalization. You see, you have to restrain free speech, and destroy freedom of association to promote globalism. The idea that all cultures are the same, no type of government is better than any other, are required so that people will be afraid to speak openly about the effects of globalism on their own cultures,countries and lives. Then the globalists can move people about at will (Somalis into Minnesota and Mexican illegal labor for example). Notice how people who are in favor of national borders are called 'racist'? Its the globalists using cultural marxism to stifle them.

That along with the schooling Americans get now, with communist Noam Chomsky writing history books for our schools, and never a fulfilling pro human pro American film being made in Hollywood. And the cultural marxism of television, slipping deeper and deeper into an amoral morass where groups are now calling for Bert and Ernie to get married on Sesame Street!

Globalists want citizens to be disorganized and debauched. They can much more easily control our Congress and White house because there is no one to oppose because we're all struggling to keep our communities and families from utterly falling apart. Best way to do it is to destroy the culture through cultural marxism, which in turn prepares the citizens for full on communism.

[nuke rocketeer]

I would tell an American anarcho-marxist to bring it on. They forget that most of us are armed and can shoot better than they can.

[LucyT]

Say...those Riots mentioned earlier?

It is all going according to plan:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2764014/posts?page=12#12

(Photo) The Promise:

http://i45.tinypic.com/25rnknt.jpg

[Hotlanta Mike]

The ‘US Day Of Rage’ Is Coming

http://www.black-and-right.com/2011/08/14/the-us-day-of-rage-is-coming/

The Real Story of the Weathermen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_hPDpOVTE&feature=player_embedded

[2ndDivisionVet]

What Good Can a Handgun Do Against An Army?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/2312894/posts

[2ndDivisionVet]

What Good Can a Handgun Do Against An Army?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/2312894/posts

[Blind Eye Jones]

Globalists want citizens to be disorganized and debauched.

That's right. You remove the family and religion as the principal organizing institutions that demand sacrifice and loyalty from citizens, then all you are left with is the state. In the past the communists were atheists and wanted the children to be loyal only to the state. Children were encouraged to spy and turn in their parents -- state allegiance supervened the natural bonds of family and religion. One of the best way of weakening the family is to weaken religion which promotes traditional family and marriage. The vices that religion are against -- pornography, adultery, prostitution, sodomy, polygamy, bestiality, etc. -- are vices because they weaken the family, whose main purpose is to protect children (societies weakest members). But today these vices have been normalized: redefined as lifestyle choices, where everything is of equal value and just a question of "taste." Even pedophilia will one day be considered a legitimate lifestyle choice rather than a disorder or pathology; where children will be encouraged to have sex at younger ages and it will be seen as their natural right; where the age that defines children as children today will be lowered to accommodate these practices. This is all part of the debauchery that lay ahead if the socialists ultimately get their way. Theirs will be a pleasure dome worthy of disgust. Nietzsche said "God is dead" and Dostoevsky might as well finished his sentence with "and everything is permitted." A reversion to pagan times is the future... if things don't change for the better.

[GOPJ]

Umm, the Brits are talking about pulling the welfare checks of those who participated. That will stop riots dead in their tracks.

[LucyT]

. . . . Back to the thread, check out # 35.

Thanks, Hotlanta Mike.