Intransigence

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.  

The middle class, and its college educated managerial all stars, would do well to remember who paid the price for their captive commons, their enduring institutions, and their wholly owned regulatory agencies. They would do well to remember who the various iterations of the state work so hard to contain - hint, they almost never look like the face a middler sees in his Tarjay mirror -, and who they buy up with goodies, tax write offs and public services. They would do well to remember to which class's support staff they actually belong. And why it is the actually poor mistrust them.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

It was intransigent people who bought the middle class its breathing space, though they were aiming for something else. They were people who were willing to go up against their class enemies. Red Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Ettore, Johann Most, Mother Mary Harris Jones, Big Bill Haywood and the countless workers, strikers and saboteurs who have no names recorded in the history books  - these were intransigent people. They were, for the most part, without the sanction of credentials. They were unsafe. They knew the score, and who was always winning.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

Just ask the Black Panthers, what's left of them. Intransigence cost them, surely. The response to the Panthers, by those with political and economic power, should tell all you need to know about the potency of intransigence. To this day, the idea that they might re-form and rise up again is enough to send the middlings into shivers.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

The Fabian experiment failed. Because the state always belongs to those with the wealth. The ruled don't get the government they deserve. The wealthy get the state they've purchased, a state which exists to protect their...property. Because those who own the world are, surprise fucking surprise, intransigent about relinquishing it. They aren't going to be persuaded with polite laws and peaceful protest. These they tolerate, because every fool with a placard or a hotline to the next election is already half in the bag for another set of compromises...

If you're worried about what happens when people think in terms of class enmity, about what happens to all the middling managers, the clerks, the professors of ruling class literature, the people with debt-homes and the lifestyle to which service to the wealthy has made you accustomed - perhaps you know in your heart what side you're really on. Perhaps your liberalism, your adherence to progressive "reform" and your willingness to submit go hand in hand. No doubt you might even accompany your good liberalism with a sneer for those who haven't been so lucky. All under the guise of saving them, of course. That's why you teach the destitute and poor -er, whoops. You don't. You're a more than comfortable professor, or an administrator. You don't understand why the stupidheads aren't agitating for universal university education. I mean like, isn't that just the pinnacle of good living - the security-prurity of academia? It must be because they're all too dumb and ill-fashioned to have your taste in books and the good life. They lack your cultivated aloofness, the silly dears. They have strong needs, instead of a lifestyle.

Perhaps this is all too unforgiving, harsh and intransigent of me. You love the poor and the dirty, surely - from a safe distance. You don't really have a problem with soup kitchens. You might even volunteer at one.

But, doing what it takes to make sure there's no need for soup kitchens? That smells of violence, risk, and the opportunity to lose your good liberal life, doesn't it? And besides, what would you do if you didn't have good little middle class students to teach?

Because, maybe, you're not intransigent. This is your life, right? It's your set of compromises. Nobody should fault you for sticking to them. Honestly. Sincerely. But you're not an improvement upon the human norm. You're just compromised. And being less-compromised isn't an improvement either, for what it's worth. It just sucks more. Poverty sucks. That's why people stress it. It's why we suffer it. It's killing us. It's killing those of us who are actually poor.

It makes you intransigent, living from hand to mouth. It rends you, and renders you.

The problem with the compromisers isn't that they've compromised. It's that their view of the end game is insufficient. It ends up with everyone complicit.

Because...

Taking a knee to avoid the ramifications of actual resistance, safely ensconced in academia, prideful of the number of books about which opinions have been offered, dripping with scorn for those who don't embody or need to apologize for a gambler's debt of affiliations to the status quo, wagging an unscarred, unburned, uncalloused finger at the first indication that actually poor people might visit the middle class with the hatred and disregard due the clerks and condottieri of the too-distant lords of all creation - those are contemptible traits.

Intransigence is not contemptible.

It's what's going to get the rest of us through.

If you don't like that, kindly pick your side already. And stick to it.


* - and before another fuckwit argues that the possession of internet access makes a person an inhabitant of the compromised middle class, we live on less than $23k a year. It's been a decade since we made anything approaching the money which might allow us to do more than just survive. And it's worth mentioning that once a man has been out of work for more than a year, he becomes less and less "viable" as an employee. There are so many others, especially the shits with useless degrees, vying for the same jobs...and they don't have children's schedules around which work time must be fit.