Identifying and Escaping Pseudo-Poverty

In the Western World today, we’ve seen propaganda encourage people to indulge in behaviors that contribute to their impoverishment. While the axiom, “we live in the greatest time to be alive in history,” is endlessly repeated by people without houses, children, significant others, job security, pensions, affordable healthcare, and so on, these words do little to change the declining living standards of the American working class. The fact of the matter, when we look at the rapid inflation occurring across our economy, is that year by year, American labor is being continually devalued while corporations like BlackRock are targeting critical industries like housing in order to extort workers even more. In the current decade, we are seeing propaganda used to reorient our thinking and convince us to demand less of society, in terms of both social freedoms and resources, with the vague implication being that if we believe in the system’s values, we can eventually win. In a vein similar to religious beliefs of old that preached that devout believers would receive rewards in heaven, corporate capitalism through its countless propaganda campaigns has ingrained the belief in people that by believing in the system, success is sure to eventually follow. This perverse “prosperity gospel,” in combination with other capitalism phenomena like the dividing up and conquering of the working class along racial lines, showcases the tendency of the various actors of the system to coordinate in laying out messages that support their rule.

Economists and social scientists strive to make the case that even the average gig-worker today lives better than the average king of prior centuries, focusing not on things they had that we don’t have today but rather focusing on the fact that most workers possess products today that the people of the past simply couldn’t create. Pointing out the modern amenities we have, like the brain-draining room screen (television), the brain-damaging hand screen (phone), and the environment-destroying air adjuster (AC), these “thought” leaders try to push a view that America’s modern corposerfs live better than anyone else in history prior to their birth. The problem is that when we look at all the various modern amenities and their effects on our quality of life today, it is all meaningless in the face of the fact that we don’t need capitalism to produce any of these amenities and what we sacrifice under this system heavily outweighs the benefits given to us by the shoddily made products that we can “afford” primarily through debt, inherited wealth, or through membership in one of America’s crumbling labor aristocracies. Across the board, most of America is largely getting poorer and poorer while they willingly give up more of their rights and agency in exchange for a sense of security in their workplace, in their home life, and in regards to their social standing. While there is a naturally great amount of discontentment that arises from Americans’ declining economic circumstances, the amount of money spent on propaganda ensures that it is not necessary to adjust the socio-economic course of this nation so long as there are enough useful idiots here.

While it is not my place to talk about personal anecdotes within these articles, I will abandon scientific thought and objectivity for a minute to give you three examples recently of useful idiots I’ve come across. This is not because I wish to condemn these people, two of who I respect greatly, but because it illustrates the line of thinking that adherents of capitalism’s prosperity gospel adopt. Below are the first three examples that come to mind:

• 1. One adherent of capitalism was a late baby boomer, who at the age of 18, was making $35,000 in 1983. He was arguing that wages for entry-level pre-apprentices in my trade union should stay the same – as they were at the time he joined the trade ~40 years ago – because they didn’t know enough to justify their value otherwise and could live with their parents until they were promoted out of earning absolute poverty wages. Last month, when I used an inflation calculator to calculate his earnings, this man made $107,000 in 2023’s value of the dollar and it is worth mentioning that this man started out as a pre-apprentice in a very poor area of a poor southern state at a non-union utility. This man was not a stakeholder in the company arguing for the continued impoverishment of employees in this scenario, so it is worth mentioning in this article because this example showcases how incredible the brainwashing of workers under capitalism can be. The fact that union pre-apprentices today in a quickly growing major metropolitan area earn less than non-union pre-apprentices close to half a century ago in a very poor small town – despite the immense productivity gains and credentials required to enter the field – should be very worrying.

• 2. The next case in point of someone who has become a useful idiot under capitalism is a friend of mine, who works as a non-union commercial diver. Before we comment on the predicament of this man being against the prospect of organizing, it should be noted that he did not want to join the union for divers due to their requirement of having a COVID-19 vaccine card – a subject which I do not have the medical knowledge to comment on. Moving on, at his current job, this man makes very far under the living wage for the area that he lives in while working about 70 hours a week and earns about 1/6th of the income that he would earn within the Union. When I asked him about whether he’d unionize his workplace, he said that he wouldn’t – with the stated expectation that he would eventually buy out the multimillion dollar company if he worked there long enough. The problem here, is that in expecting to be the owner eventually, you never organize to demand the wages you need in order to accrue the wealth needed to become an owner. I do not need to delve into this further, because he is a close friend of mine, reads these articles on occasion, and is going to hang me when he realizes I used him as an example, but it showcases how capitalism strings people along.

• 3. A incoming supervisor of the work crew I work on, who told me several months ago what his abysmally low starting wage at our utility was in 2005 was, before he claimed that the younger workers should be grateful for the money that we earn presently. For reference, without knowing what I earned, he accidentally revealed that the starting wage for my position had not changed in close to 20 years. I will not further comment on this event, because he’s simply a useful idiot for trying to repress wages at a government utility he will never have an ownership stake in and I’m just an idiot of questionable value for putting up with working for sub-subsistence wages for so long in return for building my resume and sharpening my skills during a severe recession in my trade; side note: I currently earn less at my primary job than my rent payment costs each month, have more than enough hours to be a journeyman in my trade, am three months late on the electric bill, and had to have a biopsy performed on my testicles late last year in order to diagnose a very painful skin infection that I got while working a dangerous maritime-related side gig to make ends meet. No, I am not joking and the health issue… is not resolved.

In all these examples that I used, it is worth saying that these workers adopted the class interests of the bourgeois without belonging to the ownership class, regardless of whether they worked in the private or public sector. In all of these cases, the workers were not well-off themselves and were happy to justify the impoverishment of other people, with the assumption that their financial circumstances would never resemble those of the people that they actively pushed against the class interests of. In the first example, the man who argued that pre-apprentices should make the exact same wage today as he did 40 years ago when he was a pre-apprentice makes about 50% more in purchasing power after four decades of working in a very hazardous line of work than he did working as a non-union pre-apprentice in 1983. In the second example, the man who argued against organizing his company because he planned on buying it one day makes about a quarter of the purchasing power that a job that he was offered in 2001 would’ve afforded him. In the third example, the incoming supervisor makes less than 20% more in purchasing power than when he started off at the utility and can only reasonably afford to live where we work because he lives in a property he inherited from his family. In all these examples, those who argue for others to have less do not gain anything from arguing these points and actively work against bettering their peers’ – and their own – economic circumstances. While the fictional character Uncle Tom, from the play “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” is derided for not resisting the slave owners of his time on issues and is said to have held back his fellow slaves from improving their own material conditions due to his own passivity, the useful idiots of capitalism do far worse with their compulsive need to justify the pseudo-poverty that most workers live in today. It is worth mentioning that Uncle Tom never came to own the plantation and never saw his material conditions improve despite his non-resistance, and the useful idiots of today are no different in actively pushing for the creation of a serf caste in their country that they themselves will eventually join the ranks of. While Uncle Tom was beaten to death for not revealing the location of escaped slaves in the book he’s featured in, the classcucks of modern America will be forced to justify the ongoing brazilianization of America, will somehow try to ignore the looming dread that they will be relatively poor all their lives, and will have to contend with living alongside hostile immigrant groups (for what it is worth, I am a good chunk American Indian, so you’d be an idiot to pretend I’m “racist” for disliking immigrants of all sorts – besides actual refugee groups like South African whites and eventual refugee groups like American whites). While we can hammer the point in that these adherents of the prosperity gospel hold workers back, it is not worth making further mention of them because I currently want to forget that this kind of deluded thinking among the working class exists (I can only drink so much.)

Within the corporate hellscape of America today, the question to ask for those who still hope for a revolution or peaceful political solution is to ask how they can overpower an omnipresent propaganda apparatus, nullify the reactionary struggles of capitalism’s useful idiots, and overturn a heavily militarized government staffed increasingly by these useless idiots. The fact of the matter is that while the inefficiencies will continue to mount across this capitalist nation as divisions, corruption, and preferences create more politically correct incompetence across the board, it is worth asking what any political reformist hopes to achieve without getting shot and what any revolutionary hopes to achieve without also getting shot. In both cases, the risks are absolute, the odds of rallying people together are diminishing by the day, the fighting-age people that anyone could organize are becoming more deranged by the day, and the government is becoming more openly brutal in its treatment of dissidents. Similar to how the state atheism seen in Maoist China and the former Soviet Union countries largely scrubbed any moral compass from the citizenry in the aftermath of their denationalization periods, the pro-bourgeois propaganda espoused within the United States has similarly scrubbed any notion of class consciousness away within huge segments of the working class. America at the moment is crumbling before our eyes and the problem is that by the time anyone within DMSG can afford to leave with a sizable nest egg, it may be that our purchasing power within this nation would have crumbled enough that we won’t have the ability to do so. For those seeking reform or change, the best advice I could give based on the numbers I’ve seen is to seek it elsewhere or try to ride out the American Apocalypse until this country disintegrates. Due to the fact that the entirety of DMSG’s membership are millennials and Gen X’rs (don’t act surprised), most of us are embracing the second option in the hopes that we can build up enough wealth to escape this once-great nation before we are rendered destitute by the eventual hyperinflation. Based on the enormous natural wealth and sophisticated infrastructure that Americans have inherited from our forefathers, the social fabric of America may be ripped apart well before the economic apparatus of America follows suit, and in these coming years, it may be that the earning power of non-union workers decreases across the board while unionized workers within natural monopoly industries or government agencies (which don’t have the same impetus to push down costs) continue to maintain some semblance of dignity and earning potential. For those making career choices and changes, it is worth considering this if you plan on escaping America during its decline.

Pseudo-poverty in America, in which the declining purchasing power of the proletariat is never addressed, the means by which workers would formerly attain middle class living standards become infeasible, and countless perverse excuses are made by organizations for the continual impoverishment of workers, is an economic reality upheld and justified by American institutions, their bourgeois beneficiaries, and the bourgeois’ countless aspirants today. Just as it took decades to demoralize the populations of the USSR and its satellite states, it has taken decades to desyndicalize the populations of America, and just as it was politically incorrect for proletarians to talk about religion with anything other than disdain in the USSR, it has today been made politically incorrect for corposerfs to talk about organizing labor and improving the material conditions of their fellow employees with anything other than disdain in America. Just as the Soviet Union would diagnose pro-capitalist / anti-state capitalist forces with things like Sluggish Schizophrenia, the United States government’s probable hand in the creation of terms like “class reductionism” similarly stigmatizes socialists and syndicalists who think outside the convenient parameters set up for them by their neoliberal overlords. In the United States, political reform is not simply a matter of showing facts to people but of proving to them that their faith in the system has and will continue to amount to nothing for them. If you believe that you cannot reasonably convince an evangelical of anything contrary to his faith, it should be understood that with many people in America, their faith in capitalism is steeled with the same levels of resolve. Due to the fact that pseudo-poverty is becoming the new point of reference by which every worker is evaluated by their orientation around in America, for those in search of a better life, it is simply more likely that you’ll find one by saving up and abandoning the sinking ship that is America at this point.

In conclusion, I’m saying all of this not because I’m trying to convince potential political dissidents to flee America before they are crushed under the thumb of the corporate-controlled government or eventually rendered extinct by the dual collapse of welfare systems and wage markets but because I’m a *federal agent.

*Author’s note: the comment about me being a federal agent is satire and in no way should be construed for me impersonating an officer. That being said, any federal agents reading this should feel free to pay me off because rent is coming up, my power might be turned off by myself next week for nonpayment, and I’m broke as a motherfucker.