The Origins of the Build a Wall Trick.

All political education should start with the hard fact that there is an adversarial relationship between labor and capital. It’s so easy to prove. You can do it with history or statistics, but you can also do it with a simple Socratic question. Ask any worker is they believe that corporate profits and employee wages go up at the same time? Workers know that higher salaries cut into profits. That’s an adversarial relationship. Point out how management behaves. If management believed that workers and owners were in the same boat, they would raise wages as high as possible and expect soaring profits. People know that the relationship is adversarial. They have been smothered with so much propaganda about a rising tide lifting all boats that they ignore what they already know. We don’t go into a salary negotiation expecting the employer to persuade us to accept more money. We know the truth.
When republicans play the fear of immigrant labor card, Democrats need to have the guts to say that the adversarial relationship exists. After that is established, it’s easy to channel the anger away from globalized labor and onto globalized capital, where it belongs. Republican spin doctors have convinced the Democratic leadership that the adversarial relationship is the third rail of progressive politics. Until the Democratic leadership has the guts to say that recognizing the adversarial relationship does not make you a communist, the Republican spin machine will continue to laugh and push us to the extreme right.
The blind spot around the adversarial relationship was how Republican leaders were able to outflank Hillary Clinton on the left. Working-class voters heard populist talk from Trump and went for it. Trump could not have done that if working-class Democrats knew that there is an adversarial relationship between Wall Street and Main Street. To understand the history, the opposition of Republican vs. Democratic platforms, a voter has to understand the adversarial relationship. All Republican tactics fail after that.
Why do you think Republican strategists deny the adversarial relationship so vigorously? All they have to do is say, “Marx said that” and Democratic strategists run for cover. Point out that corporate executives believe that Marx was right about the adversarial relationship. Look at what they do, not what they say. Companies pay the lowest wages that they can, not the highest. They don’t invest in their employees. They squeeze every bit of labor out of them for the smallest possible wage and benefit package.
Democratic strategists get fooled into haggling over single issues when they should be going after the Achilles Heel of the Republican Party: The adversarial relationship. Republican strategists are evil geniuses. They make up controversial issues that they have no interest in at all as a trick to deplete Democratic resources with diversionary tactics. People read the morning news, see something ridiculous, and say, “OMG! They can’t do that.” Then they spend valuable organizational resources chasing after a wedge issue like a dog chasing a tennis ball. There are only so many hours in a week. We can’t put all of these fires out while neglecting the primary source of the fire, the adversarial relationship between labor and capital. Please DNC, stop listing to “professional strategists” and lobbyists who have no real interest in exposing the source of the problem.
https://firewalleconomics.com/my-book-firewall-economics-political-literacy-for-democrats/