Orthodox Marxists of the 19th century type preached that capitalism could only work if the system ground down the faces of the workers, that is, kept down their wages and living standards.

American Nationalist thinker Lawrence Dennis countered that by the 20th century capitalism could only survive by promoting a continuous rise in consumption and living standards. That was the American experience until the time of Reagan.

Marx formulated his basic theory around 1840, time of the darkest moments of the industrial revolution in England. For an English worker, the minimal cost of living was 14 shillings a week. Yet the average wage was 8 shillings, not much more than half of what it took to survive. Hence, women working and an abundance of child labor.

Marx taught there was no way out. Revolution was the only answer. Trade unions and the like were futile. Hence the slogan: Abolish the wages system!

But even before Marx expired in 1883, this had begun to change. By 1875 the cost of living had risen to 15 shillings a week. But wages had also risen to 15 shillings a week. British historian Arnold Toynbee would later write that this was the first time unskilled labor earned enough to survive.

Now, since the advent of Reagan, we may be moving back to the 19th century world. Read some of the novels of Charles Dickens.

Dennis located the key contradiction of the system in the chronic tendency of a free market economy to underconsumption. The challenge is how to provide for a rise in consumption without resort to war.

This is the topic of our next Blog.

With the US client-regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt all wobbly at the moment, the politically incorrect question would be: Could it happen here? The short answer is No. (That’s short answer in the short run.)

Recent revolutions around the world have started out as pieces of upper-class political theatre using the unwashed masses as stage props. That’s the long and the short of it.

Just as most terrorism today is state-sponsored terrorism with this or that government behind it, similarly the recent revolutions seem to have the fingerprints of differing intelligence agencies behind them. A classic case was the charade of the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine which was an Anglo-American psy-ops gambit from the git-go.

In the USA, an increasing restive population has periodic elections to let off steam. Parties & politicians come and go but the policies remain the same. Sick of the Bush-Cheney disaster? Then try a little black face.

Right now, the American Oligarchy–itself a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Global Financial Elite–feels secure enough that it doesn’t feel the need to stage manage anything. The one putative opposition force, the Tea Party, has been co-opted and is just one monster in the swamp of Inside-the-Beltway politics.

That’s it for the short run. How about the long term? Well, there might not be a long term. Medium term is more like it. Kevin Philips argued forcefully in his 2006 book, AMERICAN THEOCRACY, that every world-dominating power from ancient Rome to the British Empire came to be brought down by a related set of causes including global overreach, militant religion, resource shortages and ballooning debt. Yet both the Obama Regime and the Republican opposition are committed to the status quo. They live for the moment and not for the long term. As Keynes wrote, in the long term we’re all dead.

Greatly aiding the Establishment in keeping the lid on is the nature of the American people. Lawrence Dennis summed it up best in his 1932 book IS CAPITALISM DOOMED?:

“Americans are the most organized, standardized, regimented and docile people in the world.”

Francis Parker Yockey said much the same thing in IMPERIUM. Yet he held out hope. In his masterwork IMPERIUM, the chapter entitled “The Future of America” contains the following KEY:

“Despite the extent of Culture-distortion and its attempts to render a People into a feckless, uniformed mass, there are millions of people who have held themselves instinctively aloof.

“These people are the focus of great historical forces. They fight against gigantic odds and fight under enormous handicaps.

“The primary objective, it then appears, gigantic odds and handicaps aside, is to reach those millions who have held themselves instinctively aloof.

“And these people MUST be reached if we are to survive–reached with all possible speed and with the correct solution to the problem at hand.”

President Obama’s State of the Union address could be called ‘No Direction Home.’ I was reminded of Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary “No Direction Home” which was about Bob Dylan’s rise to fame & fortune in the 1960s. The title comes from a throw-away line from Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The documentary was unintentionally sad since Bob Dylan has been adrift and aimless since the Sixties. He’s been all over the place. He started out as a folksinger in the radical folk milieu which emerged from the Communist Party periphery, i.e. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, et al. That gave him a purpose however dubious it might be. Then he wanted to be a rocker. Then he did an album as a Jesus freak. Another as a super Jew. And so it goes. Most were impossible to listen to. But he made a good living with small concerts, coasting for 40 years on his Sixties celebrity status. He might be awful but he was cool and hip. Go figure.

Dylan songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind”, made into a big hit by Peter, Paul & Mary, made him the troubadour of the Civil Rights movement. But that movement is a failure. A freak poll conducted about 10 years ago surprisingly showed a plurality, if not a majority, to the LEFT of the Democrats on bread n’ butter issues but to the RIGHT of the Republicans on civil rights issues. So much for the romance of the Sixties.

Back to Obama: Left journalist Alexander Cockburn said that Obama’s whole presidential campaign, with its empty sloganeering, made no sense except for him being black. He stood for nothing but hope. The subliminal message was we were to vote for him on faith so we could feel good about ourselves.

The snow job worked. But now we have Dubya in black face. He continued the Bush bailout of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. He expanded the Bush wars. And the USA decline has speeded up.

Little wonder he couldn’t offer anything concrete in his SOTU address.

In the meantime, the putative Leader of the Opposition, Sarah Palin, has been hiding out in her Alaska bunker since the shootings in Arizona.

No Direction Home!

Sarah Palin has her tit in a wringer because she placed a target symbol on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) who lies critically wounded in a Tuscon hospital, the victim of a shooting. Any direct connection? Probably not. At first glance the shooter in custody appears to be a bona fide lunatic. This would make the wounding of 20 and killing of 6 more like Columbine and Virginia Tech than anything political.

The authorities are looking for an additional ‘person of interest’ who was spotted on a security video. He might just be a slick off the street who wandered in front of the camera. Or, he could be the ‘handler’ who now lies buried in the desert sands. Or, he could be another lunatic running for his life. We don’t know.

What we DO know is that Sarah Palin placed a target symbol on the now wounded Congresswoman. Why? I wouldn’t place a target symbol on anybody unless I intended to do the dirty deed. And I wouldn’t do it in public. That’s the province of underground paramilitaries. That is, if we’re talking about serious people.

But there’s something less than serious about the whole Palin operation. They’re trying to use Old West symbolism for good old fashioned but decidedly 21st Century money-making. Establishing a certain persona is part of the act.

But is it real? Hell no! Kurt Nimmo of Infowars.com said it best:

“Sarah Palin is not an anti-government radical–she is part of the establishment Republican party . . .”

And we might add that Rep. Giffords is an Eastablishment Democrat. closer to the likes of Joe Lieberman than, say, Dennis Kucinich.

So Sarah Palin using target symbolism is unserious and careless. Just part of the all-around escalation of bullshit in the country.

Kurt Nimmo goes on:

“Sarah Palin is obviously a creation of the establishment. She was appointed the unofficial leader of the Tea Party movement after a large part of it was craftily transformed by operatives into a harmless cheerleading section for the Republican party. Palin’s handlers made sure she publicly kissed the ring of top level Rockefeller minion and notorious unapprehended war criminal Henry Kissinger.

“The Tea Party movement originally established by Libertarians and Ron Paul and subsequently co-opted and brought trance-like into the Republican party hive is not a threat to the establishment.

“The real Tea Party not co-opted by Republicans is the obvious target of what may yet turn out to be another staged event. Sarah Palin is the television reality show queen and propped up figurehead of an orchestrated movement funded in part by the CIA operative Richard Mellon Scaife. The CIA has perfected the art of undermining and destroying indigenous political movements in opposition to the ruling elite and their power structures and institutions.”

I would add that what the CIA does abroad they also do here at home.

Stay tuned.