Instead of staking our future on the action or inaction of the comfortable and sluggish, why not look for the moral high ground instead? That seems to be the common denominator here, not some sort of tantrum or something. The key is in motivating good people to do the right thing because they are good people. It has nothing to do with being fed up, it has to do with seeing an injustice and having a desire, a will, to set it right.
I appreciate your thoughtful response. However with respect, I don't see the history of social movements or any successful attempt to force structural change working as you suggest.
Actually, every mass social movement I can think of starts from dissatisfaction and the resentment that comes from being treated unfairly. Mass movements don't start from the outside - from people not directly effected by the injustice. They start when the people directly affected simply can't accept the situation anymore. That's what happened with early labor successes. That's what happened with women's suffrage, that's what happened with the Civil Rights Movement.
As movements grow, your description of good people and the need to reach out them kicks in, and successful movements reach the hearts and minds of decent folk that would not otherwise be directly affected and they do decide to join the struggle.
There's a point where you consistently miss a reality about class analysis. And I have some sympathy (depending on how you choose to write about it) because I can sort of see where the mistake can happen. Class analysis has never been about saying, "if you make less than x dollars you are a noble person and part of the solution, but if you make more than x dollars you are a wicked person and part of the problem."
No one I know has ever implied that, no writer writing from a post-modern critical theory framework (my sociological perspective - look it up if you're interested) nor even any writer that I'm aware of writing from a traditional full-on Marxist perspective would ever suggest something that simplistic.
"Rich" people sometimes side with those marginalized by the political and economic system. "Poor" people sometimes side with those who possess most power and influence and who frequently act in ways that harm the poor. Or put in simple everyday language, its always true that some "rich" people can be saints and some "poor" people can be sinners.
You seem to always want to die on this particular hill, and infer from this that "wealth does not matter." Wealth matters if for no other reason that because wealth buys political influence, and political policy and economic decisions are made primarily by wealth primarily for wealth with those without such wealth treated as externalites.
And in every day life differences between very rich and very poor matter because - through no deliberate fault of any one person's - people living in near completely different worlds have difficultly identifying with, empathizing with, and relating to each other. The tends to increase the likelihood of insensitivity to injustices are ill treatment, desensitization to certain plights.
I know this is true, not only because I observe it happen, but because it has been true in my own life on several fronts. Specifically when it comes to racial divides, a somewhat parallel example. Being white, and living in the south, then the midwest, then in a Colorado town where the population was 100% white, then living in Idaho meant that I had immense, dramatic difficultly even remotely relating to or understanding the situation or conditions for, say, a black women living below the poverty line in the inner city. It wasn't about me being a bad person. It was about me being divided by a certain type of "class" divide - in this case race and the complete removal from any black culture.
I was never a conscious racist, thank god. But the mere reality of the racial divide and the lack of empathetic understanding of an entire different world that some people lived in because of race made me more than a little insensitive. I scoffed at things like affirmative action, and bristled at black history month or political correctness towards race. I talked about reverse racism because from my little closeted perspective as a totally culturally sheltered white man, I thought everyone should just be equal and black people talking about racism all the time was just asking for special treatment.
Very racist. But I didn't know it. I didn't want to be racist. I was simply an ignorant hick.
A similar kind of disconnect frequently happens because those who have a great deal and those who have next to nothing. It's not about a person who "has" being a consciously bad person. It's about the ways in which the wealthy and poor live in two different Americans (and Michael Harrington wrote that long before Edwards co-opted the line and then got himself forever discredited.) Human beings always struggle to understand the "other." In America for the wealthy, the poor are often the "other."
Class analysis is not about analyzing the hearts of people - be they rich or poor. It's about institutional analysis, understanding the ways that a system structurally benefits one group of people by taking away from another group of people. Class analysis is about understanding a very factual, very basic historical reality, which is that wealth is a dividing societal factor. The world looks entirely different for those who have it and those who don't.
In our country, people like me believe that our political economic system functions in such away that it gives those who have it even more in excess, and that excess is taken from those who don't have it who then have even less. Again, in simple everyday English, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Statistics back this up, showing the shocking surge in the level of income inequality in the United States, which now leads its twenty other peer industrialized nations as having the biggest expansive gap between richest and poorest.
When I refer to people that are sluggish in their comfortability, you read into that a personal attack on the personal character of someone who is "rich." But I could have just as easily meant someone like myself, who is poor but currently has my basic needs comfortably met for the time being. Or anyone who feels that they enjoy some measure of security and fear losing that security. That's not a slam on anyone. And you have to ask yourself, why aren't more people in the streets right now?
To suggest that for some, it is because the uncertainty and risk to their livelihood and security keeps them from moving to action. That's a pretty reasonable and fair assumption. And I know that in past times in my life, it was absolutely true of me. Back when I was a Project Manager for a Fortune 100 company, the last thing I wanted to do was any sort of "radical" activity that might risk my job - even though I had at least an emotional desire to see certain things change in our country.
Class is a reality, that people have different lives and are treated differently when they are in the underlcass, that people have different lives ad are treated differently when they are in the "middle" class, and that people have different lives and are treated differently when they are in the overclass is a pretty obvious truism. And in a system that revolves around money and its built in the accumulation of wealth, it is not "radical" but rather common sense to understand that a dividing factor that often (often is not the same as always) divides attitudes, understanding and actions between groups of people is
money.
Finally, I think you have a completely wrong idea about Iran. Completely wrong. You speak of those protesting in the past tense. In a country like that, there was never going to be any sort of change that wasn't conflict driven. You have a violent tyranny quite comfortable using violence and direct oppression to control the population. That leaves the population very few options other than to have the courage to resist and protest anyway.
What you already categorize as a failure, I believe will historically mark the beginning of the revolution. I predict the Iranian regimes days are now numbered. If we were fighting a violent tyranny, our resistance and demands for change would look a lot like theres. But instead, given the conditions and structure of our society, our resistance and demands for change may instead look lot like the Civil Rights Movement of our own history.
A movement that, I remind you, did not start in the hearts of good-natured decent rich white Americans. I started in the hearts of some poor black women and men who were indeed "fed up" and decided they could take it no longer (god bless you, Rosa Parks)
I hope that one day I can convince you that class analysis does not mean hating rich people, and that class analysis (doesn't have to be pure unfetter marxism, again do a google on postmodern criticla theory - a sociological framework) is completely critical to understanding a market driven society.
Cheers,
PH
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