Chapter 1: Capitalism and Other Cults, Part II

The second main class of society is those who, because they need money to subsist in this world, sell their labor to the bougies for a fraction of its true value. The rest is extracted by the bougies and we call that "profit," but we ought to start calling it "theft." The class so exploited is called the "working class" or the "proletariat" in technical terms, or "workers" or "proles" or "the 99%" for short. "Proles" or "workers" is the term I'll use to refer to this class.

The third main class of society are those proles who have decided to sell out to the capitalist system for a cut of the plunder, who more generally draw their livelihood from servicing the bougies in particular, or bougies whose means of production are fairly minor, like small business owners. The proper term for this class is the "petty bourgeoisie," but I will refer to them here as the "middle class," or "petties" for short. And Lord, are they ever petty. Because their place in the capitalist system is so precarious, they will defend it tooth and claw where bougies would be inclined to compromise, because one shake of the system and they will fly off back down to the proles at the bottom. Like a black overseer in the slavery era, they will whip twice as hard over half as much, just to avoid the whip themselves. This is why the bougies tend towards the mindless tolerance and cheap utopianism of liberalism, while the petties are the most natural constituency fascism ever had.

The best description I can think of for this class is that they exist to make class war for the bougies against the proles in whatever realm they work in - be it a physical class war with casualty lists, a psychological class war with propaganda, or even an academic class war over which ideologies are allowed prominence. Petties, by definition, were pulled from the ranks of the workers to make war against the workers. These petties are cops and soldiers, who are paid well to put their bodies on the line against their fellow workers to protect the property of the bougies. These are also the intelligentsia, those professors and public intellectuals who say seemingly radical things but also lie and flatter the bougies so they can make tenure and get book deals. These are also the clergy, who whatever their religion might be, tend to preach subservience to the bougies; in more religious eras this was the chief manifestation of false consciousness among the working class, but with the collapse of religious faith among the masses the clergy have divided, half of them the avatars of naked reaction and half more open to the needs of their prole flocks while still counselling obedience to the authorities. There is also my own subclass, the intelligentsia - writers, artists, musicians, whose customers are mostly bougies and who therefore tend to tailor their output to please them to stay employed, or suffer destitution to retain their integrity (and how!).

The main form that class war takes in a bougie liberal democracy like ours is the culture war. It's a form of political theater that serves as the main fount of false consciousness, a replacement for the religious-founded false consciousness of the medieval era. How it works is that the middle class divides in two in the electoral system, appealing to roughly half of the working class apiece. In America, cops and military and the bulk of the clergy so side with the majority of those white workers who bother to cast their ballot, and they call it the Republican Party. The clergy of minority faiths and a few dissident Christians join together with teachers, professors, artists, and celebrities to pretend that they're the only thing saving black and Latino workers from Jim Crow and ICE, and they call it the Democrat Party. (They truly call it the "Democratic" Party, but as the Republicans noticed long ago, saying "Democrat" instead sends them into liberal conniptions, and that's just funny.)

With the workers so divided, the culture war starts in earnest. Of course things could be better for your part of the working class, but it's those other workers over there and their dastardly party standing in the way with their disgusting mockery of true culture! We must defeat them electorally and then your part of the working class can get that much closer to banning gay abortions or slapping "Black Lives Matter" all over the White House stationery, respectively. And if anyone notices that their paychecks have turned to shit in the interim while their half of the party system controls government, well, there's always a Joe Lieberman or Susan Collins that can be scapegoated for it.

Continue on to Part III