Proles

I'm reading Frantz Fanon's classic 1961 study about colonialism, "The Wretched of the Earth." I'm almost ashamed to say it's the first time I've read it.

I see parallels between his description of a colonial society and our own, almost as if our corporate rulers came from Mars like those two slobbering space monsters on "The Simpsons" to colonize the American proletariat.

The proles are usually called "the working class." There are a lot more of them these days than there used to be. Thousands of formerly middle-class families have joined the proles recently, due to unemployment, foreclosure, or chronic debt.

Because of the banking, real estate, employment, and health care crises, many workers are now increasingly irrelevant, and they know it. They struggle, sometimes in vain to supply their families with life's necessities, especially medical care. The travel amusements, mediocre entertainment, and propaganda the ruling class has supplied to distract them over the decades is starting to wear thin, and they're in a sour and disruptive mood.

Fanon describes the "compartmentalized landscape" of colonial societies. Our own ruling class lives separate from the proles by enclosing itself in walled enclaves, protected by the police as well as private security teams. Even what remains of the middle class, the technicians and technocrats, high-level government agency administrators, etc., wall themselves off from the masses in the "gated communities" that got so popular during the Bush-Cheney decade. Meanwhile, the proles are stranded in the neighborhoods of Slurbia, which are starting to look like bombed-out ruins because of foreclosures. They're stuck in San Berdoo, swatting at the mosquitos which breed in what used to be the swimming pool next door.

Over the decades, the ruling class has done a good job of teaching the proles how to behave. State-sponsored education, the established religion, and even common codes of morality, Fanon describes how all these things help prop up the colonial order. He wrote that "those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order."

For our proles, "good citizenship awards" handed out in school and the worship of a symbol of their own helplessness in the nailed-down God of the Christ cult combine with the brain's own junk food, "American Idol," and the ruling-class political propaganda laid on 24/7 by CNN and the corporate-owned networks to indoctrinate the subjects into orderly behavior. But the indoctrination isn't working as well as it used to.

The proles are a sleeping giant. Whether they will wake up from their TV-and-beer dream and throw off the corporate interests who stole their government by buying it is anybody's guess. The proles are currently in a sour and restless mood, but that mood will have to get a lot uglier for them to actually become dangerous.