School's Out

First, you need to understand what "real estate" is all about.  It's all about finding, targeting, and fleecing the "bigger fool."   That requires pretense, and pretending. Deception.  Advertising. That requires enforcing, imposing, that pretense as a contract.  That requires lawyers, and goons. Enforce the contract on the bigger fool, protect the "builder" from the pretense of equity inserted in the contract to deceive the bigger fool.

The "builder," "developer," is the sum total of pretense, deception, advertising, enforcement, law, and thuggery.  The entrepreneur's entrepreneur. 

Keep that in mind.

There's a "school of thought" that claims that Trump's campaign is fueled by the  "populist rage" of the "white working class"  at the "neo-liberal" establishment,  with the neo-liberal establishment personified by the likes of Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2,   Obama, and...the prospects of Clinton 2. 

The problem with that "school" is that "neo-liberalism"  is exactly the application of the "builder's,"  the "developer's" business model to the capitalist economy as a whole. 


"Neo-liberalism" does not exist separate and apart from it origins, its pretense as something other than the attack on racial equality, and than the attack on the few steps taken towards racial equality--the equal treatment of black and brown labor-- forced upon the bourgeoisie by the struggles after WW2.

The ideology of  "neo-liberalism"--  "free markets," "reduced regulation,"  "free trade," --  is a string of codes, of coded messages, designed to allow the implicit racism, the attack on black labor, to become public discourse and a public policy.

And...and with the election of an African-American president, Trump embodies the real moment of "neo-liberalism:"  there is no longer any need for codes.  Racism, the fundamental imperative for waging the struggle against the working class is, once again, the explicit currency of politics.

The bourgeoisie have been trading in this discourse, this code, forever, more or less. The Republicans have embraced it with particular fervor since 1964.  That the "neo-liberals" among them are now "horrified" by Trump; by his attacks on "free trade;" on their military adventures;  on sources of cheap labor;  shows that indeed Trump knows the real estate better than they do.  He has found his bigger fools.


That Trump is now more than less dispensing with the codes and explicitly appealing to racists doesn't mean we can "speak" to those  "populists" and give them an "alternative" way to "channel that rage." If there ever was a "liberal" response to a class struggle that's it. Our appeal needs to be to the migrant workers, to the most exploited sector of the working class, and it has to begin with proposing the dismantling of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and attacks on workers.

S.Artesian
March 20, 2016