Surviving Capitalism (Not) : There is a war on ordinary people and feminists are needed at the front

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

There is a war on ordinary people and feminists are needed at the front

Click here to access article by John Pilger from New Statesman (Britain).

Obviously, the people who benefit from a class structured society are always the top class, more accurately referred to as the "ruling class".

Feudalism benefited the aristocratic ruling class; and with their overthrow, a new class took over: the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. Feudalism's claim to legitimacy was sanctioned by religion, ultimately by a "god" who was the central power especially in Western religions. The capitalist class rallied working people to their side in order to defeat the aristocracy by espousing "natural rights", "liberty", "equality", and "fraternity", "social contract", "freedom", sovereignty of the people as opposed to "divine rights" of kings, etc. But always included in this new ideology of capitalism was "property rights", and it was this element that the new class really took seriously. The rest of the propaganda was just window dressing to sell to the unwashed masses the new system where rights (freedom) and influence were in reality based on the ownership of (economic) property.

Once the new capitalist class became the ruling class, they proceeded by hook or by crook to accumulate as much property as possible as a means to thoroughly dominate societies. One primary method in what evolved into an ongoing class war was their use of "divide and conquer". Their cultivation of gender wars is another form of this strategy. This author describes how the ruling class uses this form to divert attention away from their "austerity" policies.