Remember Rich Uncle Pennybags

I’ve written some version of this post every five-ish years for as long as I’ve been blogging. I do so because I think it’s an essential point that, unfortunately, is out of fashion in progressive circles, thanks to the obsession with interpersonal bigotries as the predominant concern of left-of-center politics.

Here’s what I ask of you. When you think politically, apply the inverse of Gandhi’s famous dictum: think of the most privileged person you have ever seen, and ask if your next act will be of any threat to him. I call this the Rich Uncle Pennybags test, after the guy from Monopoly. The question is, does your next proposed political action hurt Rich Uncle Pennybags? Does it threaten his station at all? Could it meaningfully reduce his advantage? I’m not saying everything that you do has to pass the test. I’m not saying that there aren’t meaningful, constructive types of political engagement that fail the test. But I am saying that a left-wing movement that devotes most of its time, effort, and attention to actions that fail the test risks no longer being a left-wing movement at all. I’m saying that a left wing that constantly fails the Rich Uncle Pennybags test is precisely the kind of left-wing movement that establishment power would prefer to face - a movement about symbolism over substance, about the individual rather than the masses, about elevating minorities in the ranks of a corrupt system rather than ending that corruption, about personal antipathy rather than structural reality.

A good example of issues that threaten Rich Uncle Pennybags are labor issues, laws and regulations about unions. A legal regime that empowers workers to organize and collectively bargain has obvious consequences for Rich Uncle Pennybags; a strong union could reduce his profits by improving the wages and benefits of his workers, effectively amounting to a redistributive instrument away from the wealthy to the working class. A good example of an issue that does not threaten Rich Uncle Pennybags is workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings. They may have some positive impact on worker interpersonal relations (I’m skeptical, but maybe), but what they will never do is change the distribution of power between Rich Uncle Pennybags and his workers. In fact, DEI training typically functions to protect businesses from lawsuits, meaning that they can even help empower company leadership.

Which should not suggest that racial issues are somehow incapable of passing the test. For example, does race-based affirmative action threaten Rich Uncle Pennybags? It does. Race-based affirmative action helps to address inequalities in access to college, inequalities that most often help people like Rich Uncle Pennybags and his idiot kin. It’s also a (small) step to help redress the overall socioeconomic inequality that Rich Uncle Pennybags enjoys. Done well, it helps lift the fortunes of millions rather than of a few; it’s a victory for an entire class of oppressed peoples, not a lottery. As actually practiced, race-based affirmative action programs frequently serve to create superficial diversity rather than structural change, so affirmative action doesn’t always work. But under ideal conditions, supporting race-based affirmative action passes the test. Meanwhile, to pick a recent issue of supposed relevance to racial justice, whether Gwen Stefani is guilty of cultural appropriation of Japanese culture - which, for the record, the Japanese themselves tend to find laughable - just makes no difference to the privileged. It’s irrelevant. It provokes immense amounts of angst on social media, to no discernible positive effect. But what issue gets more engagement on Tumblr and Tik Tok? The substance of affirmative action, or complaints about cultural appropriation?

Elon Musk is an interesting case. Musk is a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world, a Rich Uncle Pennybags himself. And if the left energy regarding Musk was about raising his taxes, or about subjecting his companies to stricter regulation, or about empowering their workers to join labor unions, that would pass the Rich Uncle Pennybags test. But the anti-Musk energy on Twitter, the service Musk owns, has much less to do with those sorts of structural ways to address economic and labor conditions more broadly and much more to do with mocking Musk personally. If you’re looking around online for criticism of Musk, you’ll find more in terms of pure volume that engages in culture war - going after him for the dumbshit rightwing memes he shares - than that which criticizes the position of billionaires in our economy, their disproportionate influence on our political process, and the connection between their riches and the poverty of others. This is a pretty effective gloss on the poverty of progressive priorities right now; even with one of the richest men in the world, people can’t look past culture war and see the structural problems underneath.

This is typically the kind of thing that I write where people accuse me of not caring about interpersonal racism or sexism or similar. That isn’t the case. What is the case is that politics is about mass action at scale, and the ability of politics properly understood to address interpersonal bigotries is limited. What’s not limited is our ability to reduce economic and social inequalities between identity groups, if we engage in politics in the right spirit and with a healthy understanding of the need to achieve structural change instead of personal critique - the kind of structural change that Rich Uncle Pennybags can’t ignore.