Is this class war? Damn right it is

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Is this class war? Damn right it is

(Tuesday 30 September 2008)

DAVID FLOYD witnesses some heated discussion on the situation in the US.





Class War, of a kind, was in the air last week as British liberal journalist Polly Toynbee met US lefty chronicler of the dark underbelly of US capitalism Barbara Ehrenreich.

The event, a short talk from Ehrenreich followed by questions from Toynbee and the audience, was part of the Southbank Centre's America Decides series.

While Ehrenreich's introduction, a series of excerpts from her new collection of essays Going To Extremes, was fairly light-hearted and included the humorous suggestion of scapegoating old white people for US problems, the discussion that followed focused on the credit crunch and its possible implications for the looming presidential election.

Toynbee and Ehrenreich took it in turns to rail against the greed and stupidity of the super-rich, Ehrenreich claiming that there are two sides of the US that rarely connect with each other and where "poverty is the flipside of an enormous bubble of wealth" and, where ordinary citizens do the work, "they get the pay."

"When you say these kinds of things in the US, it's inevitable that someone jumps up and says: 'Isn't it class war to be saying that?' I say: 'Damn straight, but I didn't start it and ordinary working Americans didn't start it,'" she said.

"The poor brought the system down. I wish I could say it was a revolution," she reflected ruefully of the sub-prime crisis.

Though thoughtful and interesting, the discussion might have been spiced up by the presence of either a panellist or some audience members who disagreed with the speakers' world views.

As it was, the closest thing to a challenging question was a query as to why Ehrenreich had chosen not to provide a full Marxist analysis of the economic structures that had caused the current debacle in the US.


In response, Ehrenreich admitted to being a social democrat and expressed hope for a properly regulated capitalist system.

When asked whether she had much hope for progressive change under a new president, Ehrenreich offered a positive but ambivalent conclusion. "The only thing that makes change is large social movements.

"If Obama is elected, we have a party that day and get to work building a fire under his seat."