There was a time when the Left wanted to diversify working class jobs or at least fight for better wages. MLK was gunned down while in Memphis to support striking garbage men. This point was emphasized when I was at a pro-union rally on MLK day in Seattle about a decade ago. A speaker, who had known Dr. King well, said that the union won so many concessions that the vast majority of all the garbage men in Memphis are now white and are called "Collectors of Debris."
Perhaps not garbageperson, but I’ve definitely heard “garbage worker” and “garbage collector”. “Postal worker” instead of “postman” is very common and postal workers aren’t exactly the top paying jobs. Same thing with “firefighter”, “police officer”, and plenty of others.
I'm going to try and out-Freddie Freddie here and make a complaint about progressive language: in this case, his.
Why do leftists talk in a reifying way about "capital"? Everything that's described as an injustice perpetrated by "capital" is an injustice perpetrated by human beings against other human beings. It's not obvious to me that this usage helps make people more class-conscious; I think it may do the opposite.
So what? We clearly live in a society that has several levels of class stratification that didn't exist when Marx was writing. It's not helpful to pretend otherwise.
I get that. But I still think "capital" is like "Black bodies": it adds an unnecessary layer of abstraction to what ought to be a straightforward critique of how humans treat each other
Because the individual personality traits of capitalists don't really matter much? It's like when people attribute rising rents to greedy landlords, or low wages to greedy capitalists. A landlord or capitalist could personally be the nicest person in the world, if they run their business in a way that's not chasing every dollar of profit they'll go out of business or get left behind. Seeing the human being behind that is actually less helpful in understanding what's going on.
I get that too. But I don't think the alternative to over-theorization has to be over-personalization. Somewhere between "Capital is our enemy" and "Your boss is a mean person" there should be room for concepts like "The rich are exploiting the poor" or "There's too much inequality in America". You want to frame the problem socially, but not in jargon that only college grads understand
Great piece, and I couldn't agree more. I've been trying to bring more awareness to this with my writing and guests on my podcast. Some great books are Batya Ungar-Sargon's new book Bad News about woke media and Vivek Ramaswamy's new book Woke Inc. They were both on the podcast and we chatted about how the culture wars are such a distraction from the class and wealth issues that are the real problems. But like you said, people would rather show up for stuff they can post to social media for some useless signaling rather than doing the real work.
I'm fairly progressive and seeing people not recognizing that they're wasting time, energy and resources on this stuff hurts my soul.
PS - following up about you coming on the podcast. shoot me an email at therewiredsoul@gmail.com <3
is capital the problem? seems more like corrupt government, law enforcement, and mass media with no investigative journalism; weak, poorly run unions; and uninformed, misdirected voters paying too much attention to censored social media.
capital tends to maximize profit and that has some very good results. but it must have countervailing forces that correct externalities, punish its excesses, and fight its evil tendencies to corrupt with bribery particularly.
All of those symptoms are directly caused by capital. Corporate cash corrupts government and law enforcement. Corporate owners shift funds from newsrooms to opinion and entertainment. Unions have been under assault from corporate consultants for decades. And corporations design, build, and run social media.
Under capitalism, it is impossible, in theory and practice, to build lasting countervailing forces. Privatization and deregulation win in sector after sector and country after country. Maybe China will be different and succeed in harnessing the productive forces of capitalism without having them dissolve social relations, but they'd be the first.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Saddest moment of my teaching career was last year when my students and I were watching video of a speech by Jesse Sharkey of the Chicago Teachers Union. One of my brightest and most committed "social justice" students remarked that he often found labor union rhetoric boring because "economic issues aren't sexy."
Economic issues aren't sexy in part because generation of corporate wealth is what drives our wealth creation as a nation. What do you think makes it possible for the California's teachers pension plan to pay its beneficiaries?
Bonds and equities and other financial products purchased from Wall St.
I personally just gave up. It was mostly out of disillusionment with the left. I'd like to say it was just the ever more ridiculous purity tests, virtue signaling, and identity politics, but even that doesn't go far enough. I think most leftists not only don't understand economics to get serious about reforms, most don't even bother with a serious study of core Marxist/socialist texts to even understand what they are supposedly advocating. Empty sloganeering plagues every aspect of today's left. People point out obvious injustices and churn out hot takes like that alone will make the issues go away. The saddest thing of all was that most of the people on the left had no idea what an alternative would look like, much less one they agreed on, and even less than that a realistic one. The left as it stands wouldn't know what to do with power if people gave it to them on a silver platter.
My disillusionment is more with the class-focused marxist socialists, because even though this bloc was never comfortable with the identitarian takeover of what "socialism" in the 2010s/20s was going to mean, their resistance to that takeover was, and remains, extremely meek. Marxist socialists, at least of the millennial generation, have proven themselves to be completely and utterly terrified of being called stigmatizing names and easy to manipulate since this is their primary psychological fear.
I think you could make a good case that such socialists were severely outnumbered in most left or left leaning organizations. That and Trump broke a lot of people's brains, made proving you were not some MAGA child or alt right edgelord priority #1 for anyone even slightly left of center.
Maybe it could have been different, I don't know, but even the Marxist crowd shot themselves in n the foot with radical posturing and purity tests of a different kind. All of a sudden it wasn't okay to be a center left social democrat (which undeniably was what Sanders was). You had to be in favor of full communism or else. I think the most fascinating part of the last decade of politics has been what I'll call radicalism inflation, these endless more radical than though pissing contests which were everywhere, left, right, or center. Actual ideas got lost along the way, and I'm sorry to say no one gives half a shit what you decide to label you chosen political identity but yourself.
I don't have many "full communism or else" people in my social system so I'll take your word for it. But the rest of what you said strongly resonates with me: Trump, and also (and maybe more importantly), the left-reaction to Trump, breaking people's brains.
Maybe not, I might be drawing a false equivalence or making excuses I shouldn't. I think there was a time when the class focuses left could have made a stand, maybe turned the DSA into something other than what it became, but it just doesn't seem like they ever had the numbers to me. Maybe more people are like you and I, browbeaten into hushed complicity with wokeness. Among normies in the general population, sure, but it's a totally different story in left orgs.
I've never been attached to DSA myself. The group seems somewhat out of step with the proletarian concerns outside of anglosphere big cities full of tons of college grads. Nor do they strike me as particularly interested in "global industrial labor" (if they were then their focus would be industrial labor in Asia, I think, there would be orientation in that direction) -- so the core theory of how they think the world works and what intervention they're adding into that world-operation seem, to me anyway, to be profoundly, almost unfixably confused. As I've said elsewhere on this thread, it seems to me that the last decade has highlighted an urgent need to return to and reexamine intellectual first principles. The discussion should be primarily philosophical, in the sense of say Slavoj Zizek and Curtis Yarvin both sitting down and talking over their different understandings of the last 150 years. Instead, at the precise moment that deep intellectual rethinking is needed, all of the energy has drifted towards these intensely smallminded antiphilosophical twitter-bros like Vaush.
Vaush is clown, you'll get no argument from me. What does being focused on "global industrial labor" even mean in a first world country besides lip service and talking about solidarity. Even this falls into the trap of so many other leftist stances which have no practical solution and just make people feel really shitty about themselves. I think most of the left has this bizarre, masochist self-flagellation fetish. They may get off on hearing about how terrible they are, but most people don't.
What do they say when you raise these points? What’s their justification?
Also, “ That those are utterly remote threats to the vast majority of poor and oppressed peoples in the United States today doesn’t seem to occur to them.”
I live in the South of the USA. Do you not want redneck readers? Why do people from NY stereotype people living in Louisiana or Georgia? (At least you didn't call us white trash like Erica Jong). I know Randy Newman wrote that song, but he wrote it for NYers to make fun of us.
Granddaughter of coal miners from Northeastern PA here. It's not just the South. Liberal New Yorkers--Black as well as white-- have no truck with rural white Americans anywhere. But I don't include Freddie in the category of liberal New Yorkers.
I wouldn't think he was in that category, but casual of "redneck" is something I notice many northerners think is ok when they talk among themselves and think no one from the working class/rural regions will ever read them. Working class people know more about NY than NYers do about working class people.
Agreed. Also, rednecks are badass! Here I use the term as it was originally used, to denote the army of miners who fought coal bosses in the W Va mine wars. Working class heroes, all.
I remember a scene from Conair when they were trying to get a plane going and the stereotyped white convict did it, and one of the other convicts said, hey, you white trash know how to do everything. I think of the line from Hank Williams, Jr.="I had a good friend in New York City
I heard that song on the radio recently. "He was killed by a man with a switchblade knife . . . for 43 dollars my friend lost his life."
It really dates the song. Who mugs someone with a switchblade in 2021? It made me really notice how far the gun situation here has de-generated in the last few decades.
I think there’s a Chris Rock joke out there about how no black guy owns a pickup truck. I live in NC and the two most enormous, expensive trucks I’ve seen recently (like within the past three weeks) were driven by black men.
FWIW poor rural northerners have been known to call themselves/the culture redneck. I know these ideas get conflated in the popular imagination and contribute to some derisive attitudes northerners may have about southerners (no argument there!) but urban/rural, rich/poor, and north/south are all different axes, and not everyone from NYC (there are rednecks aplenty in NY state) is a rich snobby jerk preening from a tall tower either. Opposing New Yorkers and working class people as you do in your last sentences evidences the same confusions that contribute to anti-southern sentiments.
I use terms like "redneck" only in the context of discussing the threat as defined by the contemporary liberal conversation. I'm not calling anyone a redneck, really, although I wouldn't be afraid to do so if I wanted to; the point is that the redneck is the stereotypical threat that distracts from the real threat.
My late husband was a union organizer, a carpenter--in a RTW state. He was well-read, but not a college graduate. A head organizer from DC came to a power plant construction site during an organizing campaign and cavalierly called the crew "a bunch of hard-workin' rednecks" (northerners often drop the "g" when trying to buddy up w/ the working class). This did not help with the union sign-up campaign.
Southerners, in general may call each other rednecks (Foxworthy) but don't take kindly to it from outsiders. Tom Petty had a song he often did in Georgia--"Southern Accents"
The most culturally radical thing I do as a relatively conservative member of a college faculty is to teach my students to look for the economic underpinnings of the injustices we all decry. It’s clearly news to them that disadvantaged communities in the U.S.—viewed from an economic perspective—have profound interests (and experiences) in common that transcend the familiar dividing lines, but they are listening, learning, and discussing this paradox In our politics, which keeps me going.
This reminds me of something that I hoped would be a fruitful conversation with my conservative brother. After the George Floyd riots last year, he asked me if BLM was a political group. Obviously they are so I said so.
He thought he had a gotcha moment so he asked why Amazon and Wells Fargo said that their vocal support of BLM was not political.
The answer, of course, is that for corporations, temporarily printing #BLM on their websites was not political. It was marketing. A financial decision. So I tried to explain to him that corporations don't go 'woke' but make decisions purely driven by profit motives.
> Most of them aren’t motivated by conservative cultural issues at all.
This is exactly right. They are motivated by work. And that's about it. Their political opinions come from the occasional political snippet that makes it onto their bloomberg terminal. Many of them can't be bothered to vote, let alone care about the latest cultural issues. And why would they? It doesn't matter.
I was one of them for a decade. I can't think of a single political conversation at work that lasted more than a minute.
I found the whole 1% versus 99% schtick regressive and unhelpful.
Who is in the 1%? The 'class enemies' who you want to focus on? Yes, OK. But also dentists working 60 hours weeks. Local guy who owns a gravel business and keeps roads paved. Owner of a modest sized family farm. Etc etc etc. Do we really want to send these kulaks to the gulag? Or pretend that is the plan?
The problem is that this type of conceptualization is way past its expiration date, which at the latest was the mid 20th century. Even C Wright Mills 75 years ago was able to come up with something that is more conceptually salient than what is being used now by the Bernie Left.
It would be best if we just admitted we are all neoliberal now. Europe is wholly neoliberal with rare examples (Norway's oil industry). Denmark is textbook neoliberal.
In reality, we are arguing whether as a neoliberal state public spending should be 49% of GDP versus 43%. To get up to that level of spending you have to have high marginal tax rates (>50%) not just for the top 20% but starting at MEDIAN incomes.
To get Americans to accept higher taxes you have to get them to trust the government more, and sorry we don't have the good governance that Scandinavia, Canada, Switzerland, or Australia do. Sorry, but if you look at New York commuter rails cost or what you get for spending $31k per public school student in Washington DC, or California that builds billion dollar trains to nowhere but can't keep roads paved, Americans are right to not want to send more money to the government.
I think the most palatable financial liberalism may come ultimately come from center right libertarians. Enough with the class conflict kabuki, enough with the racial identitarianism, enough with technocratic 'improvements' and upper middle class jobs programs to 'fight poverty.' Expand Medicaid, increase EITC, think about GBI, etc. etc. and other entitlements that go directly beneficiaries. Our country is getting wealthier and we can afford to share. But that is not what the Left is focusing on (SALT, teachers unions' demands, etc. etc.) while weighted down by decades of ideological baggage and derangement that no longer serves it.
'If your family business can't afford to pay $15 an hour plus benefits like Amazon does maybe it should go away,' is a new and interesting progressive take!
(OK, it can't be abolished. But does it have to be so high?)
Someone referred me to More in Common's "Perception Gap" quiz. I found myself surprised that about a third of Democrats surveyed agreed "America should be a socialist country". I wondered, do they think "socialist country" means "Neoliberal welfare state, possibly with a freer market than the US," like Nordic countries? The outfit, Heritage, publishing the Index of Economic Freedom, isn't invested in making Nordic states look good, but right now, it ranks Finland, Denmark, and Iceland as economically freer than the US and Sweden nearly tied, the US beating Sweden by only 0.1 point.
I realize free markets and capitalism shouldn't really be conflated, but it's normal to use the terms interchangeably. Injustice in necessities like housing, medicine, and education is injustice in heavily regulated markets already — some, like housing (hence education, too) federally subsidized to be racist within my parents' lifetime. To the extent ordinary people think "down with capitalism" means "up with regulation", why should they be confident it'd make things more just?
Karen Stenner, an expert on authoritarianism, pointed out that the US is an exceptionally punitive nation. As the Time Tax article puts it, "The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both... has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult". I'm a fairly happy neoliberal (not entirely: I think alienation is real, I just suspect technology and density more than a particular economic system), and I find this punitiveness atrocious. Heavens to Betsy, it sounds inefficient, which is supposed to be *the* neoliberal sin!
The problem with "socialism" is that's it's vaporware. There is no actual plan, anywhere by anyone, for running a 21st century country larger than Rhode Island by socialist principles that does not involve a brutal top-down dictatorship (as in modern China or Stalinist Russia).
I agree with you - housing, healthcare, education, etc. are all heavily regulated and subsidized.
I would like to see the federal government exit funding higher education beyond community college.
And for the unfortunate who can't support themselves I think, in general, that housing, food, transportation, etc., will be improved by giving people vouchers or benefits to purchase in the marketplace.
The Scandinavian countries (with the exception of Norway perhaps) have wealth generated by success in global competition. They are not socialist. One of the truly import technocratic questions is why America's public sector performs so poorly (e.g. California) compared to those in Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. Money goes in, quality benefits and social services do not come out. If progressives can start addresses that set of issues I suspect Americans would be more willing as taxpayers.
Capital selects the activists it wants to fight against, as it has since at least the 60's. The ones who don't play ball end up dead, in jail, or isolated. It's not like there weren't people with a class analysis in Ferguson, but the hundreds of millions of donations didn't go to them. We've got a new generation of Jerry Rubins and Peter Camejos, but, as misguided as they are, we've also got millions of people talking in explicitly anti-business terms and hundreds of thousands organizing on anti-capitalist lines.
I'm not sure "the left" in the United States is really as out of step with its past as you say - has this "left" ever really been about some kind of fundamental opposition to capital as such?
Right - so I'm not saying there has never been a left movement of this kind in the United States. I'm saying that the "left" in the broadest sense - where, in a two-party system, it is embodied by one major party, and the "right" is embodied by the other - has never been fundamentally opposed to capital, as far as I know.
And I think the "leftists" of today that you speak of, those who will end up as actuaries and secretaries, attending PTA meetings, are only really part of the "left" in this broad sense. They aren't radicals of any kind, not really.
This has been such a significant bummer to me since Occupy, honestly. There is no sense of solidarity across groups because someone unpleasant might benefit from something along with everyone else.
If you even try to talk about class and economics in certain spaces, people treat it like a dogwhistle, which is...well, it's something.
I think it's very tempting to view the people that you encounter in every day life as the problem when the actual problem is people that are in a completely different milieu than you, or maybe when you don't have a solid ideological base or an organization like a union that helps you build it. Marx said something about how workers turning against each other benefits capital, I forget the phrasing.
My favorite example of this is my mom, who was a wonderful person and generally a pro Bernie democratic socialist late in life but not really ideological about it. She was too cool to be a dork about theory and her teacher's union was pretty lame. She worked as a public school teacher in the south for most of her life. When we were living in Texas and she was working at a fairly poor school, her classroom was in a double wide trailer in the parking lot of the school (they called them "portables") that was of course supposed to be temporary but never was. She would buy all sorts of stuff for their classroom with our own family's money because they were underfunded and the kids were poor, and I'm pretty sure she even tried to pay one student's home electricity bill but the school district stopped her.
But she also got mad a few times at student's parents who would drive flashy, fancy cars while their kids were on the school's free lunch program. I was able to steer her away from it generally, but it was interesting to me just because she was so immersed in the structural inequities that dominate this country but it was happening so far out of sight that it was tempting to get mad at the parents that she saw every day that were failing their own kids (and they frequently were, but that's obviously not the point). I asked her why don't we just have everyone on free lunch and she like oh yeah that's fine too.
Anyway, solidarity across groups is tough but necessary.
I've found that both liberals and conservatives alike are far more willing to express opposition to the 1% if you talk to them IRL. Social media turns everyone who uses it regularly into powerless losers. Capital gave up the trappings of power (fame) but kept the real power (money, government influence). It's working very well for them.
The "left" hasn't come to a consensus on anything in at least the past half-century.
There was a time when the Left wanted to diversify working class jobs or at least fight for better wages. MLK was gunned down while in Memphis to support striking garbage men. This point was emphasized when I was at a pro-union rally on MLK day in Seattle about a decade ago. A speaker, who had known Dr. King well, said that the union won so many concessions that the vast majority of all the garbage men in Memphis are now white and are called "Collectors of Debris."
Perhaps not garbageperson, but I’ve definitely heard “garbage worker” and “garbage collector”. “Postal worker” instead of “postman” is very common and postal workers aren’t exactly the top paying jobs. Same thing with “firefighter”, “police officer”, and plenty of others.
It's sanitation engineer, and we did that years ago.
I'm going to try and out-Freddie Freddie here and make a complaint about progressive language: in this case, his.
Why do leftists talk in a reifying way about "capital"? Everything that's described as an injustice perpetrated by "capital" is an injustice perpetrated by human beings against other human beings. It's not obvious to me that this usage helps make people more class-conscious; I think it may do the opposite.
(Particularly since the 2-through-20-percent aren't "capital" in any meaningful sense. Does Freddie see the tension here?)
So what? We clearly live in a society that has several levels of class stratification that didn't exist when Marx was writing. It's not helpful to pretend otherwise.
I'm a Marxist, Jeff
I get that. But I still think "capital" is like "Black bodies": it adds an unnecessary layer of abstraction to what ought to be a straightforward critique of how humans treat each other
Because the individual personality traits of capitalists don't really matter much? It's like when people attribute rising rents to greedy landlords, or low wages to greedy capitalists. A landlord or capitalist could personally be the nicest person in the world, if they run their business in a way that's not chasing every dollar of profit they'll go out of business or get left behind. Seeing the human being behind that is actually less helpful in understanding what's going on.
I get that too. But I don't think the alternative to over-theorization has to be over-personalization. Somewhere between "Capital is our enemy" and "Your boss is a mean person" there should be room for concepts like "The rich are exploiting the poor" or "There's too much inequality in America". You want to frame the problem socially, but not in jargon that only college grads understand
Great piece, and I couldn't agree more. I've been trying to bring more awareness to this with my writing and guests on my podcast. Some great books are Batya Ungar-Sargon's new book Bad News about woke media and Vivek Ramaswamy's new book Woke Inc. They were both on the podcast and we chatted about how the culture wars are such a distraction from the class and wealth issues that are the real problems. But like you said, people would rather show up for stuff they can post to social media for some useless signaling rather than doing the real work.
I'm fairly progressive and seeing people not recognizing that they're wasting time, energy and resources on this stuff hurts my soul.
PS - following up about you coming on the podcast. shoot me an email at therewiredsoul@gmail.com <3
is capital the problem? seems more like corrupt government, law enforcement, and mass media with no investigative journalism; weak, poorly run unions; and uninformed, misdirected voters paying too much attention to censored social media.
capital tends to maximize profit and that has some very good results. but it must have countervailing forces that correct externalities, punish its excesses, and fight its evil tendencies to corrupt with bribery particularly.
All of those symptoms are directly caused by capital. Corporate cash corrupts government and law enforcement. Corporate owners shift funds from newsrooms to opinion and entertainment. Unions have been under assault from corporate consultants for decades. And corporations design, build, and run social media.
Under capitalism, it is impossible, in theory and practice, to build lasting countervailing forces. Privatization and deregulation win in sector after sector and country after country. Maybe China will be different and succeed in harnessing the productive forces of capitalism without having them dissolve social relations, but they'd be the first.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Saddest moment of my teaching career was last year when my students and I were watching video of a speech by Jesse Sharkey of the Chicago Teachers Union. One of my brightest and most committed "social justice" students remarked that he often found labor union rhetoric boring because "economic issues aren't sexy."
*sigh*
That is because they are not from union families where people are at the job site at 7am rain or shine .
Yes!!!!
Economic issues aren't sexy in part because generation of corporate wealth is what drives our wealth creation as a nation. What do you think makes it possible for the California's teachers pension plan to pay its beneficiaries?
Bonds and equities and other financial products purchased from Wall St.
And they don’t have f-ing bills to pay. Unless they’re from a wealthy family, just wait till them student loans come due.
I personally just gave up. It was mostly out of disillusionment with the left. I'd like to say it was just the ever more ridiculous purity tests, virtue signaling, and identity politics, but even that doesn't go far enough. I think most leftists not only don't understand economics to get serious about reforms, most don't even bother with a serious study of core Marxist/socialist texts to even understand what they are supposedly advocating. Empty sloganeering plagues every aspect of today's left. People point out obvious injustices and churn out hot takes like that alone will make the issues go away. The saddest thing of all was that most of the people on the left had no idea what an alternative would look like, much less one they agreed on, and even less than that a realistic one. The left as it stands wouldn't know what to do with power if people gave it to them on a silver platter.
Hegel. If they don't know Hegel, they don't know what they are talking about.
My disillusionment is more with the class-focused marxist socialists, because even though this bloc was never comfortable with the identitarian takeover of what "socialism" in the 2010s/20s was going to mean, their resistance to that takeover was, and remains, extremely meek. Marxist socialists, at least of the millennial generation, have proven themselves to be completely and utterly terrified of being called stigmatizing names and easy to manipulate since this is their primary psychological fear.
Yeah but tenured professors are afraid of these names too. I should know, being a tenured prof myself.
I think you could make a good case that such socialists were severely outnumbered in most left or left leaning organizations. That and Trump broke a lot of people's brains, made proving you were not some MAGA child or alt right edgelord priority #1 for anyone even slightly left of center.
Maybe it could have been different, I don't know, but even the Marxist crowd shot themselves in n the foot with radical posturing and purity tests of a different kind. All of a sudden it wasn't okay to be a center left social democrat (which undeniably was what Sanders was). You had to be in favor of full communism or else. I think the most fascinating part of the last decade of politics has been what I'll call radicalism inflation, these endless more radical than though pissing contests which were everywhere, left, right, or center. Actual ideas got lost along the way, and I'm sorry to say no one gives half a shit what you decide to label you chosen political identity but yourself.
I don't have many "full communism or else" people in my social system so I'll take your word for it. But the rest of what you said strongly resonates with me: Trump, and also (and maybe more importantly), the left-reaction to Trump, breaking people's brains.
Maybe not, I might be drawing a false equivalence or making excuses I shouldn't. I think there was a time when the class focuses left could have made a stand, maybe turned the DSA into something other than what it became, but it just doesn't seem like they ever had the numbers to me. Maybe more people are like you and I, browbeaten into hushed complicity with wokeness. Among normies in the general population, sure, but it's a totally different story in left orgs.
I've never been attached to DSA myself. The group seems somewhat out of step with the proletarian concerns outside of anglosphere big cities full of tons of college grads. Nor do they strike me as particularly interested in "global industrial labor" (if they were then their focus would be industrial labor in Asia, I think, there would be orientation in that direction) -- so the core theory of how they think the world works and what intervention they're adding into that world-operation seem, to me anyway, to be profoundly, almost unfixably confused. As I've said elsewhere on this thread, it seems to me that the last decade has highlighted an urgent need to return to and reexamine intellectual first principles. The discussion should be primarily philosophical, in the sense of say Slavoj Zizek and Curtis Yarvin both sitting down and talking over their different understandings of the last 150 years. Instead, at the precise moment that deep intellectual rethinking is needed, all of the energy has drifted towards these intensely smallminded antiphilosophical twitter-bros like Vaush.
Vaush is clown, you'll get no argument from me. What does being focused on "global industrial labor" even mean in a first world country besides lip service and talking about solidarity. Even this falls into the trap of so many other leftist stances which have no practical solution and just make people feel really shitty about themselves. I think most of the left has this bizarre, masochist self-flagellation fetish. They may get off on hearing about how terrible they are, but most people don't.
What do they say when you raise these points? What’s their justification?
Also, “ That those are utterly remote threats to the vast majority of poor and oppressed peoples in the United States today doesn’t seem to occur to them.”
Then all is going according to plan.
https://youtu.be/YKUOB8MN4Kc
I live in the South of the USA. Do you not want redneck readers? Why do people from NY stereotype people living in Louisiana or Georgia? (At least you didn't call us white trash like Erica Jong). I know Randy Newman wrote that song, but he wrote it for NYers to make fun of us.
And it is dang hard to be an actuary.
Granddaughter of coal miners from Northeastern PA here. It's not just the South. Liberal New Yorkers--Black as well as white-- have no truck with rural white Americans anywhere. But I don't include Freddie in the category of liberal New Yorkers.
I wouldn't think he was in that category, but casual of "redneck" is something I notice many northerners think is ok when they talk among themselves and think no one from the working class/rural regions will ever read them. Working class people know more about NY than NYers do about working class people.
Agreed. Also, rednecks are badass! Here I use the term as it was originally used, to denote the army of miners who fought coal bosses in the W Va mine wars. Working class heroes, all.
I remember a scene from Conair when they were trying to get a plane going and the stereotyped white convict did it, and one of the other convicts said, hey, you white trash know how to do everything. I think of the line from Hank Williams, Jr.="I had a good friend in New York City
He never called me by my name, just hillbilly."
Total tangent, sorry, feel free to skip.
I heard that song on the radio recently. "He was killed by a man with a switchblade knife . . . for 43 dollars my friend lost his life."
It really dates the song. Who mugs someone with a switchblade in 2021? It made me really notice how far the gun situation here has de-generated in the last few decades.
And I think it also shows that the country/city face off is long standing. I know, I haven't seen much talk of switchblades for a long time.
I think there’s a Chris Rock joke out there about how no black guy owns a pickup truck. I live in NC and the two most enormous, expensive trucks I’ve seen recently (like within the past three weeks) were driven by black men.
Chris has evidently never been to south Georgia or north Louisiana!
FWIW poor rural northerners have been known to call themselves/the culture redneck. I know these ideas get conflated in the popular imagination and contribute to some derisive attitudes northerners may have about southerners (no argument there!) but urban/rural, rich/poor, and north/south are all different axes, and not everyone from NYC (there are rednecks aplenty in NY state) is a rich snobby jerk preening from a tall tower either. Opposing New Yorkers and working class people as you do in your last sentences evidences the same confusions that contribute to anti-southern sentiments.
I use terms like "redneck" only in the context of discussing the threat as defined by the contemporary liberal conversation. I'm not calling anyone a redneck, really, although I wouldn't be afraid to do so if I wanted to; the point is that the redneck is the stereotypical threat that distracts from the real threat.
My late husband was a union organizer, a carpenter--in a RTW state. He was well-read, but not a college graduate. A head organizer from DC came to a power plant construction site during an organizing campaign and cavalierly called the crew "a bunch of hard-workin' rednecks" (northerners often drop the "g" when trying to buddy up w/ the working class). This did not help with the union sign-up campaign.
Southerners, in general may call each other rednecks (Foxworthy) but don't take kindly to it from outsiders. Tom Petty had a song he often did in Georgia--"Southern Accents"
𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆'𝒔 𝒂 𝒔𝒐𝒖𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒏 𝒂𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒕, 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝑰 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎
𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒈 '𝒖𝒏𝒔 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒊𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒚, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒀𝒂𝒏𝒌𝒆𝒆𝒔 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒊𝒕 𝒅𝒖𝒎𝒃
𝑰 𝒈𝒐𝒕 𝒎𝒚 𝒐𝒘𝒏 𝒘𝒂𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒈𝒆𝒕𝒔 𝒅𝒐𝒏𝒆
𝑾𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒂 𝒔𝒐𝒖𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒏 𝒂𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒕, 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝑰 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎
The South has a long history of organizing that seems to be ignored. Here is a great book by James J. Lorence: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑼𝒏𝒆𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒐𝒚𝒆𝒅 𝑷𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆'𝒔 𝑴𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕
𝑳𝒆𝒇𝒕𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒔, 𝑳𝒊𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒔, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑳𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒓 𝒊𝒏 𝑮𝒆𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒊𝒂, 1929-1941 (University of Georgia Press, 2011.)
Thank you for letting me explain.
Here in Reno, we're further west than Los Angeles, and we're all rednecks out here.
The most culturally radical thing I do as a relatively conservative member of a college faculty is to teach my students to look for the economic underpinnings of the injustices we all decry. It’s clearly news to them that disadvantaged communities in the U.S.—viewed from an economic perspective—have profound interests (and experiences) in common that transcend the familiar dividing lines, but they are listening, learning, and discussing this paradox In our politics, which keeps me going.
This reminds me of something that I hoped would be a fruitful conversation with my conservative brother. After the George Floyd riots last year, he asked me if BLM was a political group. Obviously they are so I said so.
He thought he had a gotcha moment so he asked why Amazon and Wells Fargo said that their vocal support of BLM was not political.
The answer, of course, is that for corporations, temporarily printing #BLM on their websites was not political. It was marketing. A financial decision. So I tried to explain to him that corporations don't go 'woke' but make decisions purely driven by profit motives.
He was more concerned with the seeming wokeness.
So it goes.
This has also lead to the canard of "right wing populist" who oppose the woke virtue signaling of corporations but not their economic power.
'Capitalism is good unless it narrowly disagrees with me.'
> Most of them aren’t motivated by conservative cultural issues at all.
This is exactly right. They are motivated by work. And that's about it. Their political opinions come from the occasional political snippet that makes it onto their bloomberg terminal. Many of them can't be bothered to vote, let alone care about the latest cultural issues. And why would they? It doesn't matter.
I was one of them for a decade. I can't think of a single political conversation at work that lasted more than a minute.
I found the whole 1% versus 99% schtick regressive and unhelpful.
Who is in the 1%? The 'class enemies' who you want to focus on? Yes, OK. But also dentists working 60 hours weeks. Local guy who owns a gravel business and keeps roads paved. Owner of a modest sized family farm. Etc etc etc. Do we really want to send these kulaks to the gulag? Or pretend that is the plan?
The problem is that this type of conceptualization is way past its expiration date, which at the latest was the mid 20th century. Even C Wright Mills 75 years ago was able to come up with something that is more conceptually salient than what is being used now by the Bernie Left.
It would be best if we just admitted we are all neoliberal now. Europe is wholly neoliberal with rare examples (Norway's oil industry). Denmark is textbook neoliberal.
In reality, we are arguing whether as a neoliberal state public spending should be 49% of GDP versus 43%. To get up to that level of spending you have to have high marginal tax rates (>50%) not just for the top 20% but starting at MEDIAN incomes.
To get Americans to accept higher taxes you have to get them to trust the government more, and sorry we don't have the good governance that Scandinavia, Canada, Switzerland, or Australia do. Sorry, but if you look at New York commuter rails cost or what you get for spending $31k per public school student in Washington DC, or California that builds billion dollar trains to nowhere but can't keep roads paved, Americans are right to not want to send more money to the government.
I think the most palatable financial liberalism may come ultimately come from center right libertarians. Enough with the class conflict kabuki, enough with the racial identitarianism, enough with technocratic 'improvements' and upper middle class jobs programs to 'fight poverty.' Expand Medicaid, increase EITC, think about GBI, etc. etc. and other entitlements that go directly beneficiaries. Our country is getting wealthier and we can afford to share. But that is not what the Left is focusing on (SALT, teachers unions' demands, etc. etc.) while weighted down by decades of ideological baggage and derangement that no longer serves it.
'If your family business can't afford to pay $15 an hour plus benefits like Amazon does maybe it should go away,' is a new and interesting progressive take!
And abolish the time tax!
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/
(OK, it can't be abolished. But does it have to be so high?)
Someone referred me to More in Common's "Perception Gap" quiz. I found myself surprised that about a third of Democrats surveyed agreed "America should be a socialist country". I wondered, do they think "socialist country" means "Neoliberal welfare state, possibly with a freer market than the US," like Nordic countries? The outfit, Heritage, publishing the Index of Economic Freedom, isn't invested in making Nordic states look good, but right now, it ranks Finland, Denmark, and Iceland as economically freer than the US and Sweden nearly tied, the US beating Sweden by only 0.1 point.
I realize free markets and capitalism shouldn't really be conflated, but it's normal to use the terms interchangeably. Injustice in necessities like housing, medicine, and education is injustice in heavily regulated markets already — some, like housing (hence education, too) federally subsidized to be racist within my parents' lifetime. To the extent ordinary people think "down with capitalism" means "up with regulation", why should they be confident it'd make things more just?
Karen Stenner, an expert on authoritarianism, pointed out that the US is an exceptionally punitive nation. As the Time Tax article puts it, "The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both... has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult". I'm a fairly happy neoliberal (not entirely: I think alienation is real, I just suspect technology and density more than a particular economic system), and I find this punitiveness atrocious. Heavens to Betsy, it sounds inefficient, which is supposed to be *the* neoliberal sin!
https://perceptiongap.us/the-perception-gap-quiz/
The problem with "socialism" is that's it's vaporware. There is no actual plan, anywhere by anyone, for running a 21st century country larger than Rhode Island by socialist principles that does not involve a brutal top-down dictatorship (as in modern China or Stalinist Russia).
I agree with you - housing, healthcare, education, etc. are all heavily regulated and subsidized.
I would like to see the federal government exit funding higher education beyond community college.
And for the unfortunate who can't support themselves I think, in general, that housing, food, transportation, etc., will be improved by giving people vouchers or benefits to purchase in the marketplace.
The Scandinavian countries (with the exception of Norway perhaps) have wealth generated by success in global competition. They are not socialist. One of the truly import technocratic questions is why America's public sector performs so poorly (e.g. California) compared to those in Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. Money goes in, quality benefits and social services do not come out. If progressives can start addresses that set of issues I suspect Americans would be more willing as taxpayers.
Capital selects the activists it wants to fight against, as it has since at least the 60's. The ones who don't play ball end up dead, in jail, or isolated. It's not like there weren't people with a class analysis in Ferguson, but the hundreds of millions of donations didn't go to them. We've got a new generation of Jerry Rubins and Peter Camejos, but, as misguided as they are, we've also got millions of people talking in explicitly anti-business terms and hundreds of thousands organizing on anti-capitalist lines.
"Capital selects the activists it wants to fight against" -- So does this sort of activist include Richard Spencer, mentioned in FDB's post?
I'm not sure "the left" in the United States is really as out of step with its past as you say - has this "left" ever really been about some kind of fundamental opposition to capital as such?
Yes. Almost always and consistently since, like, the 1870s.
Well, you could ask the Cuban industrialists of the 1950s, to pick one....
Right - so I'm not saying there has never been a left movement of this kind in the United States. I'm saying that the "left" in the broadest sense - where, in a two-party system, it is embodied by one major party, and the "right" is embodied by the other - has never been fundamentally opposed to capital, as far as I know.
And I think the "leftists" of today that you speak of, those who will end up as actuaries and secretaries, attending PTA meetings, are only really part of the "left" in this broad sense. They aren't radicals of any kind, not really.
This has been such a significant bummer to me since Occupy, honestly. There is no sense of solidarity across groups because someone unpleasant might benefit from something along with everyone else.
If you even try to talk about class and economics in certain spaces, people treat it like a dogwhistle, which is...well, it's something.
I think it's very tempting to view the people that you encounter in every day life as the problem when the actual problem is people that are in a completely different milieu than you, or maybe when you don't have a solid ideological base or an organization like a union that helps you build it. Marx said something about how workers turning against each other benefits capital, I forget the phrasing.
My favorite example of this is my mom, who was a wonderful person and generally a pro Bernie democratic socialist late in life but not really ideological about it. She was too cool to be a dork about theory and her teacher's union was pretty lame. She worked as a public school teacher in the south for most of her life. When we were living in Texas and she was working at a fairly poor school, her classroom was in a double wide trailer in the parking lot of the school (they called them "portables") that was of course supposed to be temporary but never was. She would buy all sorts of stuff for their classroom with our own family's money because they were underfunded and the kids were poor, and I'm pretty sure she even tried to pay one student's home electricity bill but the school district stopped her.
But she also got mad a few times at student's parents who would drive flashy, fancy cars while their kids were on the school's free lunch program. I was able to steer her away from it generally, but it was interesting to me just because she was so immersed in the structural inequities that dominate this country but it was happening so far out of sight that it was tempting to get mad at the parents that she saw every day that were failing their own kids (and they frequently were, but that's obviously not the point). I asked her why don't we just have everyone on free lunch and she like oh yeah that's fine too.
Anyway, solidarity across groups is tough but necessary.
I've found that both liberals and conservatives alike are far more willing to express opposition to the 1% if you talk to them IRL. Social media turns everyone who uses it regularly into powerless losers. Capital gave up the trappings of power (fame) but kept the real power (money, government influence). It's working very well for them.