August
27/28, 2023 -
Information Clearing House - "
Consortium News
" ---T
he
song “Rich Men North of Richmond” is a
personal lament, a cry of pain and despair
over the state of the “new world”.
The fact that Oliver Anthony’s powerful
voice and frank lyrics immediately resonated
with millions of listeners tells each of us
something about the rest of us. On the
simple but deep level of sensibility,
millions of very different people found they
shared something in common.
Exactly what this might be and where it
might lead is a mystery, but there is
potential political meaning in the
subjective unity aroused by this song.
No, not unity but division! – promptly
decreed liberal establishment
opinion-makers. It’s the “right wing” that
loves it, ruled The Guardian and
the rest. Scrutinizing the lyrics for
rightwing extremist stigmata, critics jumped
on just these lines.
Lord, we got
folks in the street
Ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
But God if
you’re five foot three
And you’re three hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay
For your bags of fudge rounds
North of Richmond, where lobbyists and
legislators play, this may seem to be all
about welfare payments, good on the left,
bad on the right. But in its way, this is a
poem, and as such it calls for a more poetic
interpretation.
[After 40 million views on YouTube, Edward
Snowden
tweets
that Oliver likely already has an FBI file.]
Here the author is pointing to a paradox,
the coexistence of having nothing to eat and
suffering from obesity. This contrast is
observed and experienced with growing
frequency in the working class.
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Anxiety, despair, substance abuse and binge
eating, homelessness and bad nutrition, not
to mention poor health and lowered life
expectancy come together in these apparently
opposing phenomena. All, including welfare
itself, reflect the misery of the
contemporary working class.
And if we stand back and look for causes and
effects, we can drop the minor matter of too
many fudge rounds and get to the great big
root causes of the whole picture behind
Oliver Anthony’s rapid sketch.
The Planned Obsolescence of the Working
Class
Teamsters Local 804 rally in New York
outside a UPS customer center.
(Teamsterts for a Democratic Union)
The plight of the contemporary Western
ruling class goes back roughly forty years,
to the political takeover of public policy
by financial capital. Financial capital
makes the investment decisions that shape
society, and governments, to lure those
precious investments, began to cede more and
more freedom to those decision-makers. The
social impact was enormous.
Capitalist rulers not only chose measures to
increase the share of stockholder profits
over remuneration to employees for their
productive work, but began to plan the
obsolescence of the Western working class
altogether. Automation and outsourcing
diminished the political influence of labor,
further weakened by uncontrolled immigration
of potential substitute job fillers.
The plain truth is that planned obsolescence
has been the dominant policy of the Western
elite toward the working class since the
neoliberal power seizure of the 1980s.
And what about the political left in all
this, the political thinkers and activists
who under Marxist influence once championed
the working class as both the agents and the
beneficiaries of historic progress?
To
a significant extent, the American
intellectual left settled into the ivory
tower of academia, where it thrived
following a trajectory in harmony with the
obsolescence of the working class. Ensconced
in humanities departments, the intellectual
left more or less forgot about class as they
theorized society in terms of a new array of
human categories, racial and sexual. As
befits a left, it actively promotes
progress, championing oppressed identity
categories as it once championed
theoretically oppressed wage earners.
Now, when a working class stiff, who
suffered a bad accident working in a paper
mill, comes along with his complaint,
representatives of this contemporary left
don’t get it. What is he complaining about?
Is he racist?
It
is not just the present that causes
suffering. Somehow the Western working class
can feel that at more than one level, its
future has been taken away from it.
Today’s official left
doesn’t capture this discontent because
it has essentially
abandoned the working class
and is no longer
interested in ownership of the means of
production, or even production, which may be
bad for the planet.
The academic left see the
whole world as classrooms and conference
halls. It asserts its values by
championing diversity, equity and inclusion
in math classes and
corporate board rooms.
It wants fair distribution within its own
elite and other elites as well.
It
doesn’t care about the identity distribution
of workers in a paper mill, which probably
should be shut down anyway, for the sake of
the environment. Yes, society is bitterly
divided, but it sure ain’t the fault of
Oliver Anthony.
“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all
day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay /
So I can sit out here and waste my life
away / Drag back home and drown my
troubles away.
It’s
a damn shame what the world’s gotten to
/ For people like me and people like you
/ Wish I could just wake up and it not
be true / But it is, oh, it is.
Livin’ in the new world / With an old
soul / These rich men north of Richmond
/ Lord knows they all just wanna have
total control / Wanna know what you
think, wanna know what you do / And they
don’t think you know, but I know that
you do / ‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit
and it’s taxed to no end / ‘Cause of
rich men north of Richmond.
I
wish politicians would look out for
miners / And not just minors on an
island somewhere / Lord, we got folks in
the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat /
And the obese milkin’ welfare.
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re
300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for
your bags of fudge rounds / Young men
are puttin’ themselves six feet in the
ground / ‘Cause all this damn country
does is keep on kickin’ them down.”
Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the
Green Group in the European Parliament from
1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle
in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity
Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in
the transformation of the German Green Party
from a peace to a war party. Her other books
include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia,
NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly
Review) and in co-authorship with her
father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD
to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War
Planning (Clarity
Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
