Class war real as ever

istory looks upon the century straddling the year 1900 as the 'golden era' of social gain by ordinary people. It now implies they won this war and all is fine.

Word is about - unspoken, yet implied by epidemic self-satisfaction - that working people won the war of wealth, wresting it - like a street urchin - from the clammy clasp of business moguls and squires of the land.

Quiet indignation and a faint mock protest might be heard from mogul or squire, but when greedy child (you, dummy) skips away to show his tiny conquest to like-minded imps the mogul-squire smiles softly and resumes gathering wealth and power.

Shall I drop this allegory and call a spade a tool to bury ideas?

It is true that ordinary people today live like royalty of a century ago. Their homes might not approach the grandeur of palaces, which were not so much the royal family's home as a public vestiture symbolizing the nation's power and wealth. And, though homes remain relatively humble, luxuriance and comfort of hoi polloi's personal space exceeds fantastic cravings of yesterday's monarch.

How can I suggest the worker has not won the war?

The scenarios of the past half-millennia show people of advanced civilizations appearing God-like before unsophisticates. Its regular billing in popular mind set has European pioneers throwing death at natives from a pointing stick and evangelistic scientists capturing the spirits of village dwellers upon shiny paper.

Your descendants would, so it goes, similarly appear as Gods if they arrived from the future to say hello and flaunt their high-tech accessories. And, yes, you all now realize this story is a consequence of the shrinking manufacturing cycle whereby today's coveted high-tech treasure is tomorrow's consumer common.

And that, dear proletariat, is what belies your 'victory'. As you feed en mass upon spoils of manufacture, behind your selfish avaricious back the hard-won rights of 150 years stealthily evaporate. Corporate lobbyists whisper, as self-serving men of wealth once manipulated warlords to battle for adjacent agistment, in the corruptible ears (and tickle the pockets) of weak-minded unprincipled (elected!) leaders.

Class war is alive and well. Corporate barons and czars marked time last century, knowing the inevitable spoils of technology would soon distract the populace and totally disarm political and social activists, pulling the rug from under their causes as struggling workers - no longer struggling - fled local, union and brotherhood for a swift gadget gather at the local superstore.

As congregations absent church for sunny recreation, so workplace and social zealots now mellow to consumer addiction.

Business turns free and unobstructed attention on the real work at hand, coercing its legal firm and public relations agency, your elected Government, to implementing corporate policy - quaintly termed "foreign policy".

Amid a comatose press asleep on the ramparts only the shrill calls of radio shock-jocks and hysterical hate verbiage of paid print assassins disturb the torpor. All is well, so believe the public, though a deep unease prevents it from scratching the shiny veneer of its prosperity and looking any deeper than the specifications of its latest toy.

My Fine and Deeply Respected Parents, with few most remarkable and admirable exceptions the entire population of 'western' cultures is truly in a somnial drift to extinction, differing only from fictional inhabitants of the Matrix film (I must send you a transcription; rarely has a tale strayed closer to the truth - strange, it's always their 'science fiction' that extends the boundaries of consensus, rarely their science) in that their bodies are exactly where they perceive them to be.

Oh, and kindly overlook my lapse into common journalese.

The class war has simply evaporated due to lack of interest by a lagniapped proletariat. Nor, however, did the magnates and their municipal minions win.

Victory goes to the dark forces of blind happenstance, mindless ebb and flow of meaningless markets - the so called 'free markets' of neo-economists.

Greed-inspired selfish apathy has delivered your future to a process with no plan, no intelligence, no compassion, no love, no hate.

Withdrawing government (of the people, for the people - remember??) inhibitions from commerce while selling infrastructure to private global entities you now embark, quite literally, on a random walk to nowhere.

The random walk of free markets.

With Respect and Love
Your Beloved Son