The Quiet War Between the Capitalists and the Consumers

One strand of communist philosophy posits that the proletariat cannot rise up against the capitalist class because of something called “false consciousness,” meaning the failure to realize its true position in the capitalist system. Since Marx’s time, as the world has gotten richer, the capitalists have given the labor enough economic concessions, coupled with a healthy dose of mythology about classless society and upward mobility (if you work very, very hard), cultural pandering (god and guns), and enough scapegoats (communists, immigrants, terrorists) to keep it quiet. Outward oppression has been substituted for subtle exploitation. Since the capitalists were no longer allowed to use the cops and the army to literally beat labor into submission, its chief goal became screwing it out of its money. As a result, the proletariat has been turned into the precaritariat. 

As a result, class struggle in America, and elsewhere for that matter, is unthinkable. Instead, labor, which now can be classified as the consumer class that includes plenty of white collar workers, is engaged in a quiet war with the capitalist class. The prize is money (as before). Consider this astounding statistic; 37% of Americans would not be able to scrounge up enough cash from their savings account to cover a $400 emergency expense. This is actually down from nearly 50% a couple of years ago. And this is not limited to the blue collar or the poor; your supposedly comfortable middle class suffers the same fate. 

The labor’s objective in this quiet war is to keep as much cash as possible to ensure any sort of upward mobility or even basic comfort. The capitalists’ objective is to take as much of it away to ensure that the labor is in the constant state of precariousness and therefore continues to work. That war is so omnipresent and subtle that no one can call it what it is. And over the last two decades it has exacerbated. 

The most obvious battles in America are fought on the “needs” front. In order to secure a decent livelihood today we need food, shelter, education, and healthcare. The capitalists take advantage of these basic needs by artificially jacking up prices for them. In the last several decades college tuition has gone through the roof, while most public schools are in shambles. By the time most students graduate from an American university, the capitalist system has already put them in debt. Then come the landlords, the utility companies (the so called “natural” monopolies) and the healthcare industry whose inflated prices ensure the precarious state of the workers for the rest of their lives.

But lately, this war has also extended into other industries. Take flying, certainly not a need (though one can argue that seeing one’s family or going on a work trip is a need of a sort). Instead of paying for an airline ticket that ensures you a seat, a place for your luggage, and a meal, as used to be the case, the consumer is now forced to pay extra for all of those things. The airlines call it “unbundling,” and argue that the price of the ticket is now cheaper and the cost of services is more transparent. Of course, no one buys this PR story, as airlines rake in record profits.

And what can be more dispiriting than being at an airport today, with its atrocious, overpriced food and seven-dollar “purified” (that is run from a tap, filtered, and bottled) water. Whenever Anthony Bourdain was asked by an American journalist what was the ickiest food he’s had on his far-flung journeys to Asia (racism masked as exoticism), Bourdain’s answer would be, “the food at American airports.” And why would it be any good? Airports are designed to lock you in, and once you are locked in (just like you are at the movies or at a concert venue), the knives are out.

The middle class is not spared in this war. At restaurants, the owners demand that not only customers fork out for food and drink, but that they also pay their employees’ salaries through extortionate tipping, which in the last ten years went from 15% to 20% minimum. Or, consider clothing. The quality of mass-produced clothing has deteriorated drastically over the past several decades, as the capitalist class outsourced production (one study cited in the Economist estimates that 20% of lost blue collar work over the last decades has been due to offshoring), and cut corners wherever they could. In a 1994 interview, Jil Sander, certainly no slouch when it came to quality, suggested that if people cannot afford her clothes, they could shop at the Gap. Needless to say, she would not make such a statement today.

Should one want to buy a well-made garment, one may consider luxury fashion. Or not, since its prices have skyrocketed over the past 20 years, sometimes by 20% annually. The consumer is now engaged into a perpetual cat-and-mouse game of waiting for a sale, instead of simply walking into a store a couple of times a year and buying something nice. In designer fashion, 40% off is the new retail. To underscore their disdain for a consumer who shops on sale the department stores come up with ingeniously subtle ways to demean her by squashing the sale merchandise onto a couple of racks. It feels strange to see the same item of clothing prominently displayed and handled like fine jewelry one day, and then see its dignity destroyed, along with that of a shopper, on a sale rack ninety days later.

And dignity is the key point here. Dignity is essential, especially for those who don’t have much of it in their daily lives. The capitalist class knows this. In America dignity costs a lot, and increasingly the system is designed to take dignity away from you. Consider this the next time you are bagging your own groceries at self checkout, when you are handed a bag of stale peanuts on an airplane, when you are being asked for a tip after someone hands you a cookie, or after you have forked over seven dollars for a coffee in a paper cup. The struggle, as they say, is real.