The Matador's Cape (Part 2)
Women’s Lib: The Empire Strikes Back
This is the 2nd of 3 mini-essays about the fundamental tension between democracy and wealth-hoarding. America is an experiment in both. We are a strange mixture of democratic ideals from Classical Greece and hierarchical capitalism from Renaissance Europe. That’s an explosive combination. So far, the wealth of American capitalism has been sequestered from democratic redistribution by a series of clever deceptions. This mini-essay series illustrates the point by drawing an analogy with the red cape of a matador.
After getting stuck with the bill for the New Deal in the 1930s, it took several decades for the wealthiest Americans to exact revenge. Their big chance came in the 1970s, when computers began supercharging worker productivity. Suddenly, a clerk equipped with spreadsheet software could instantly run calculations that once took days for a whole team. With the arrival of international air travel and instant telecommunications, American business owners could also access cheap overseas labor and fire their expensive domestic workforces. At home, the net result of all this technology was a collapse in demand for old-fashioned human labor. And less demand in any market means lower prices. Worker productivity continued to soar in the decades since the 1970s. The cost of living spiked too. But the price of labor, or wages, remained stagnant. As employers profit from productivity gains they don’t have to pay for, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, effectively reversing the New Deal.
The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s also played a role in reversing the New Deal. A one-to-one ratio between workers and households previously forced employers to include the living expenses of an extra person in each paycheck, because men could only work as long as someone else was at home performing crucial domestic labor. Essentially, women’s compensation passed through their husbands before it got to them. It was too often an abusive situation, one that cried out to be addressed. But the face of the movement, Gloria Steinem, was secretly a CIA spook whose job was to undermine its often-Marxist, class-conscious elements. The piles of CIA cash she brought to the table made Steinem devastatingly effective. Women were simply thrown into the labor market to compete with men for the remaining jobs not made redundant by tech. The 1970s was the turning point at which the middle class started dying.
Using the Women’s Lib movement as a weapon in an ongoing class war succeeded where the Business Plot from Part 1 of this series failed. As a tiny minority, the ultra-wealthy couldn’t directly confront the raw power of the poor democratic majority. So they became like the matador who distracts and deceives his much more powerful opponent with a red cape. Their tactics have continued to evolve in the decades since the 1970s. They now control our legacy media outlets and our social media companies outright. And, in the years following the 2008 financial collapse, they launched their cleverest ruse of all, one that is going on right now. That will be the subject of Part 3 of this series.
