This will be my last post related to the Weissport Redneck Festival, I swear. (At least until 2016.) I must mention two concepts taken from Marxist analysis which I think were illustrated at the Festival.
The first is the term “lumpenproletariat.” Marx noted that below the proletariat (read workers) was a group of societal dregs. These were the people who could be hired as strike breakers. These were the people who could be recruited for anti-Semitic rallies, who were often criminals, who had no loyalty to the working class, but who were often shock troops for the fascists, like the brown shirts in Nazi Germany. In modern day America they would be anti-union people willing to fly Confederate flags and beat up on Mexican immigrants. I saw a number of them at the Festival.
The other Marxist concept I saw illustrated was the idea of “false consciousness.” Marx noted that not all workers realized their true interests. They sometimes identified with the owners or managers, and they felt themselves superior to the workers. Even though they had no assets and no hope of moving up, they felt themselves to be better than the working class.
Thomas Franks wrote a whole book about this phenomenon a few years ago entitled What’s the Matter with Kansas? Poor people in Kansas, whom my mother would have said didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, were voting Republican. It’s weird, but I met quite a few of those types at the Festival as well.
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