It's not about income, power or prestige for me. That's all smokescreen to obscure what does define classes -- relationship to the means of production, and relations to other classes.

Income is never the issue. A CEO that receives $1 in salary -- or no salary, symbolically -- is no less a manager than s/he was when they made $6.7 million. An autoworker with 20 years in and making $45,000 a year is still selling his or her ability to work on the market -- and having only that to sell on the market -- the same way that a new hire making half that amount is. A manager making relatively the same as his or her employees still has more in common with a manager making 10 times as much because they both occupy the same social position and have the same social being.

And in terms of alignments, there is the matter of social being determining consciousness. From the moment each of us is born, we are "tracked" based on our class background (social being). The schools we go to and education we receive, the stores, restaurants and shops we patronize, our friends, our neighbors, our authority figures, etc., are determined by where we stand. And our experiences with each of those elements, in turn, influence and shape how we see the world, how we understand it and, more importantly, what we want and expect from it.

I've learned over the years that there is no such thing as cross-class common interest. Common interests, when you get beyond abstractions, mean different things to different classes. "Democracy" for a worker means something fundamentally different, when you get past the abstract elements, than it does for someone who is a manager or business owner. And not only is there no universal common interests among classes, but the "common interests" on one class generally conflict with the "common interests" of others.

If working people align themselves with "middle class" managers/professionals/officials or with business owners, they are usually doing so over and against their own common interests as workers (and also usually as a result of a lifetime of propaganda being shoved down their throats). And, in my experience, when elements from the "middle class" or owning class go slumming and claim to be aligning themselves with the interests of the working class, it's because they are seeking to profit or otherwise gain some advantage from it. I have never met someone from one of these classes who called me friend and didn't have his or her hand in my pocket.

I know you want to get some of these "middle class" elements to see things from the perspective of the poor and working class. Sadly, that simply cannot happen unless they ditch their current social being and actually join the working class. Barring that, the best they can do is engage in a sappy feel-good adventure that only gets insulting for those of us who are subjected to it. The worst is use us as pawns for their own emotional (and material) gain.

This is why I'm a hardened classist, and make no apologies for it.

I am working class. What they know I can learn ... and what I know they can never learn.

I posted this to the UCPAToday blog earlier today:...

The latest round in rightwing "Tea Parties" took place earlier today in Washington, D.C., as thousands gathered by the Capitol to stage yet another "teabagging" event, sponsored by the reactionary corporatist "Americans for Prosperity" group and egged on by Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann.

Bachmann, best known for calling for investigations of other members of Congress for "anti-Americanism" and calling on reactionaries to be "armed and ready" to confront the Democrats over health care, called on the teabaggers descending on Washington to "scare" her colleagues on Capitol Hill into killing the proposed health care "reform" currently making its way through both houses.

The event was billed as a "press conference," attended by prominent GOP officials, such as House Majority Leader John Boehner, as well as AFP head Tim Phillips and washed-up actor Jon Voight.

The rally surrounding the "press conference" was what has become standard fare for this far-right movement. The crowd of mostly older white protesters (many of whom probably already collect that oh-so-"socialist" Social Security and have "government-run" Medicare) carried their usual signs depicting Obama as a Marxist and a Nazi, all at the same time. (These people don't care about accuracy -- it's all about what will strike fear the best.)

One large banner at the rally, visible to all who were there, compared health care reform to the Holocaust. It showed a pile of corpses with the caption, "National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany - 1945." Not one of the Republicans who headlined the teabagger "press conference" has commented on that banner.

After their rally on the steps of the Capitol, Bachmann led the teabaggers on a little outing through the Congressional offices. According to eyewitnesses, hundreds of teabaggers swarmed through the halls of the Hart Senate Building and Cannon House Building, seeking out offices of Democratic representatives and senators, and, in some cases, disrupting the work of Congressional staff.

Twelve rightwing protesters were arrested at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's district office in the Cannon Bldg. The dozen disruptors are members of the fascistic anti-abortion terrorist group Operation Rescue. They refused to leave Pelosi's office, tore up and threw around pages of the health care reform bill, and tried to intimidate staff. (Talking Points Memo has video of the assault.)

The increasingly violent and far-right character of the "Tea Parties" should give not only working people but all democratic-minded people a reason to pause.

Since the beginning of their campaign to kill health care reform, the far right has resorted to individual acts of violence and threats of large-scale violent action, all in an effort to alter the agenda of the Obama White House and Democratic-led Congress. From the "town hall" disruptions in August to armed displays at presidential events to today's attack on Pelosi's offices in Washington, the reactionary corporatist right has made it clear that they use violent authoritarian means to stop any move away from the trajectory of the George W. Bush regime -- even when that move is only a matter of degrees.

For these elements, there is no line between reform and revolution. One will elicit as sharp a reply as the other. The question then becomes: Why settle for reforms when the response of the corporatists will be similar, if not the same?

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I was a regular here some years ago and haunted the GD forum. But after a hiatus I decided to try my hand here again -- updated my profile, went through my Inbox, and even tossed a few bucks to the crew to get my star back. So, here's to old friends/adversaries and new!