To the right wing ideologue, the worker, no matter how skilled or noble, is simply just a worker: merely someone who works for someone else. Regardless of his skill or professionalism, dedication or courage, he is not a truly creative, innovative individual. That description is reserved for the
entrepreneur, the owner-executive, the MAN WHO MAKES THINGS HAPPEN. For the Right, the worker, whether he be a brain surgeon or nuclear physicist, star athlete or a great musician,
is just an interchangeable carbon unit to be exploited and utilized by the true geniuses of the marketplace. People like them. The worker is a tool, perhaps to be admired like a well-balanced hammer or a sharp blade, or even a good horse, but never respected as a human triumph in his own right.

The one thing I’ve learned in the last few years of hanging around politically oriented websites and
studying what the Right actually is saying, is the incredible contempt they have for those who “work for a living”. They may have a certain grudging comprehension of a worker’s skill, just like an ante-bellum Southern aristocrat might have recognized a slave’s skill at picking cotton or driving a mule team, but the recognition is patronizing and condescending and always tempered by the realization that the management/ownership class needs that skill, and cannot function without it. They don’t like being dependent on those they consider their inferiors. You will note the businessman or executive or manager is never dismissed as “simply doing his job”. No, THEIR job is more important, more valuable, more noble than that of the “mere” technician. To them, the rest of us will always be, at best, “mere technicians”. For the most part, they see us as lazy, stupid, immoral and criminal louts.

Perhaps this is just their way of recognizing that they really don’t know how to do anything, that they are actually parasitic on those who do. Too often, management jobs are the result of educational or class position, promotion within the ranks of a self-defined cohort, not any intrinsic quantifiable skills. True entrepreneurial skills rarely have anything to do with it, ask yourself, how many of the people you’ve worked for were genuine entrepreneurs? But they all seemed to think they were, didn’t they? Real entrepreneurs, real leaders of commerce, come from all parts of the policitical spectrum. The right-wing ideologues have rarely had to actually meet a payroll, they are mostly wannabees who need an excuse, someone else to blame for why they can’t make it: Jews, Socialists, liberals, foreigners, the government, unions…need I go on? I’m sure you know the litany by heart. As far as they’re concerned, it’s never their fault.

The entire management mystique is that the ownership class possesses an intrinsic quality that others do not, some skill at being a generalist that gives them the right to rule. Essentially it is fascistic, a superiority based on racism. No doubt they smugly congratulate themselves because this racism is not genetic in origin, it’s not because they feel they are born into some master race. Neither is it based on some imagined superiority of aristocratic breeding or family name. These people see themselves as more evolved than the rest of us because their interests and psychology are superior. They made themselves that way, because of their ambition and work ethic, which of course the rabble seems to lack. Businessmen are just BETTER than scientists or artists or skilled artisans, or for that matter, any profession that is not involved in the manipulation of capital and the exploitation of the labor of others. For them, that is what really matters, the real measure of a human being. They possess it and the mob doesn’t, which proves why they deserve to be in charge.

Thoughtful, educated and capable workers represent a threat to that view of the world. John Lennon, an artist from the British working class obsessed with the Blues of the American Negro, figured it out early in his song “Working Class Hero”;

“They hate you if you’re clever, but they despise a fool.”

And this formula appears to work no matter how rich, or how poor, you are.