The longtime free movement of capital and investments across the borders of the 50 US states has produced the classless society Karl Marx predicted would result from a superabundance of material wealth. Of course we average Americans don’t own most of the wealth and the rich distribute theirs to us on their terms but we work and get our hands easily upon more than what we need. Our poor all have cars and you can go to the cheapest supermarket in any American town and watch them stack their cars with an abundance of food. Money alone talks and class power is now silent. The rich are an upper moneyed class but we never come in contact with them and they are so rich that it is often difficult for them to live except hidden in wealthy boondocks. We don't know what it’s like to live under the political and economic tyranny of aristocrats or a bourgeoisie. Our postmodern American society is classless. We prove that Karl Marx was right.
Have we proved Karl Marx right that all forms of government would slowly disappear? No, but we have spread them around and limited their powers much more extremely than any other society. With one central government that is not a state located in a federal district and with 50 state governments, we Americans at least feel something like being governmentless. We simply move about where we wish as though state borders did not exist. We are more or less indifferent to the fact that we live in a union of states because it has become natural to go with complete freedom and live and work and vote in any one we wish. We send lots of money in taxes once a year to Washington but Washington recirculates all its money back to our states directly or indirectly by concocting and funding thousands of projects adding money to all our states’ economies. Sending off tax money to Washington is like putting up money in a gigantic pot in a gigantic poker game. Money goes from the pot into some of our hands and then back into the pot to be recirculated. We never feel that there is some government somewhere with the power to interfere in our lives and tell us what to do. We live “in America”, a place that has no mention on any world map. We live mostly on our own in a country that needs five words to name it realistically.
The question our way of life asks (although few of us ask it} is: how can anyone anywhere live freely and happily confined behind the borders of one national state? For us it is an unthinkable, abnormal political condition. But there doesn’t seem any cure for it except for the nation-states of the world to apply to our Congress in Washington and become states of a united states of the world with the Washington central government the new Rome. But the opposite seems to be happening. States prefer commanding their citizens rather than freeing them to live democratically and prosperously under governments with their power reduced by a written constitution to just the level necessary to keep life in communities civil and happy.
Karl Marx predicted that governments would gradually disappear. That will happen but only when most states in the world unite politically and legally with most other states so that most of us can finally live classless and governmentless as we do now in America.
Daniel McNeill
Read Daniel McNeill’s writings about the metaphysical and cultural meanings of baseball in American culture at: www.usoftheworld.com/culture
Daniel McNeill’s books are displayed at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall
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