Edit: added content: April 25, 2024
In the March 2024 State of the Union Address, Joe Biden pumped out some of his long-standing rhetoric, including the focus on the middle class with lines like “the middle class built this country,” and “I see a future where the middle class finally has a fair shot,” as well as a focus on creating blue collar jobs: “800,000 new manufacturing jobs,” “American roads bridges and highways will be made with American products built by American workers creating good-paying American jobs!”
You can read the full speech here.
The “middle class” concept has always, in my mind, been merely a conceptual buffer that protects the wealthy from the rest. It foments division, proposing a separation of power, status, and worth based on the income differences of the working class. It encourages people to look down on the fast food worker, the cashier, the store clerk, while reassuring them of how much better they have it. It allows the rich to make concessions to a small subset of people and lull them into complacence. To persuade them to otherize anyone who makes less than them, and dismiss discussion of systemic change as ‘extreme.’
I often think back to Howard Zinn’s writing about how white servants and black slaves often rebelled together against their masters:
“In Bacon’s Rebellion, one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of eighty negroes and twenty English servants.”
“if freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done.”
“And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes, involving discipline and punishment, were passed by the Virginia Assembly, Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.”
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (p. 36)
White people received benefits that white women didn’t. White men with property received benefits that white men without property didn’t. Small concessions continuously made over time. This is how you control a population. Credit where it’s due, it’s a brilliant tactic. You rob the most desperate and likely to rebel of potential allies, and lull the rest into complacence. Give them something to lose, and they’re much less willing to risk losing it.
Reading and listening to Biden’s remarks over the past four years, it has always stuck out to me how the middle class seems to take priority. The lower class is always an afterthought. Should not those in the worst situations be the highest priority?
“That’s why I’m determined to turn things around so the middle class does well the poor have a way up and the wealthy still does well.”
At the end of the day, I can’t reconcile my own understanding of the socioeconomic system of the US with Biden’s views. They can’t coexist in the same reality. I do not believe Biden’s goals can be obtained. All any of this can do is, at best, add some temporary stability to an inherently unstable system. At worst, this failing to understand and address the fatal flaws of capitalism will exacerbate the problems.
Biden talks about about a “way up” for the poor, but never specifies any of these “ways.” He mentions the middle class, and how the wealthy should pay their fair share, but cuts the middle class off at “$400,000” a year. The amount of people making this much money accounts for less than 2% of the population and means vastly different things for a single person living in West Virginia and a family of four in San Francisco.
“Look, I’m a capitalist.” I think we all understand that, Joe, but even as far as those go, you don’t seem to be a very good one.
Industrial labor, factory work, is largely considered one of the worst jobs you can have in America. The pay is better than other types of jobs, but it is often difficult work with little chance for advancement and leaves workers mentally and physically too exhausted to think of how bad things are. Another thing that helps maintain the status quo. It also is a dying job. Automation will eventually replace the majority of these new jobs Biden is creating.
Instead of focusing on creating more soul-crushing jobs of manual labor, we could be focusing on raising the minimum wage. On eliminating student debt. On drastically lowering or eliminating the cost of attending college. On healthcare. All obstacles that directly and immediately work to oppress and repress.
You want to help the middle class? The best way to do that is to help the poorest people in the country. Instead of giving the police billions more dollars, give money to poor black neighborhoods to improve their schools and their housing options. Listen and consider with respect the voices of civil rights leaders instead of throwing a temper tantrum because you feel threatened. Stop giving money to the border security that separates families and directly harms children. Stop propagating racism by painting all immigrants as drug and gun traffickers.
And stop fucking giving money to Israel so that they can bomb women and children.