A Message from Business Manager Chris Erikson
The state of current affairs moved me to recently read more about class struggle. Today, as it has always been throughout history, it’s between the rich and the poor. According to Wikipedia, the investor, billionaire, and philanthropist Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world, voiced in 2005 and again in 2006 his view that his class, the "rich class", is waging class warfare on the rest of society. In 2005 Buffett said to CNN, "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." Then in a November 2006 interview in The New York Times, Buffett stated that "[t]here’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." Historian Steve Fraser, author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, asserted in 2014 that class conflict is an inevitability if current political and economic conditions continue, noting that "people are increasingly fed up...their voices are not being heard. And I think that can only go on for so long without there being more and more outbreaks of what used to be called class struggle, class warfare."
February is Black History Month and it’s relevant. W.E.B. Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain certain aspects of Black political economy. Patricia Hill Collins writes, "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African-American access to status, poverty, and power." In modern times, emerging schools of thought in the U.S. and other countries hold the opposite to be true. They argue that the race struggle is less important, because the primary struggle is that of class since labor of all races face the same problems and injustices.
We are in for a ride. The current administration is dividing the working class over race, intent on weakening and destroying unions and undermining our democracy at the behest of billionaires and corporations who could care less about us working men and women. Too many workers were distracted by rhetoric to not see their real objective of protecting the top 1% of the wealthiest Americans. Don't think for one second that these policies aren't going to trickle down and affect our economic standards, wages, and benefits. We are in a fight, sisters and brothers.
