Tue Dec 27, 2011
posted under General
In the early 20th century a great African American singer/athlete named Paul Robeson changed the way he sang the lyrics to one of the favorite ballads of the day, Stephen Collins Foster’s “Old Black Joe.” Instead of singing “old black Joe” he sang it as “old old Joe.” Robeson was a powerful voice for civil rights and equal justice under the law for African Americans and all laboring people. He participated in coal mine strike marches in England and in America. Robeson believed “black” to be an insulting term like the “n” word and refused to use it. Fifty years later young African Americans changed that, saying they were “black and proud.” Robeson was ahead of his time in so many ways, the use of language was just one of them.
Frank Luntz is a skilled wordsmith who crafts ideas into language for the Republican Party. When Democrats cast the top one percent of the population as the “Greedy rich,” Frank Luntz reframes it as the “job creators.” So when Frank talks about being afraid of a word we pay attention.
Recently in Florida at a gathering of Republican strategy creators he said “There is one word I am terrified of when I do focus groups and that word is capitalism.” His explanation was not as clearly stated as his fear of the word. However the Democrats also had some input to the concept of capitalism, one prominent Democrat sent an e-mail out that related the history of Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts on the subject of Capital and Labor. He quoted from a speech that Abraham Lincoln gave to a joint session of Congress in December of 1861:
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.”
Lincoln wrote those lines six years before Karl Marx published Das Kapital and given the connection newspaper wise, (ships carrying our papers between America England) and the fact Marx was living in England one could speculate that he took those six words from Lincoln, “capital is the fruit of labor” to open his famous book. Lincoln wrote his words at the outset of the civil war and they were an economic argument based on the productive labor of both white and black men. Lincoln believed the wealth of the south was built on the fruit of slave labor.
Mr. Luntz might have justifiable concerns about having “capitalism” surface in focus group discussions. After all, the 99% group are asking for a more equitable share of wealth, a bigger slice of the prosperity pie. The 99% group could take a page from the Tea Party playbook and organize on the congressional district level; political power in America does not grow out of violence and noisy demonstrations but rather out of the ballot box. When they do calm down and begin talking about the stuff that Lincoln was talking about a century and a half ago, then the paradigm will shift and it will be a different ballgame.