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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The Real Class War

#51

Post by tristram_shandy »

neonate wrote: post #33
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's radical energy there, but here's the clincher: it will never turn into anything productive because the Republican propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class into continuing to think that public services are their enemy . They will rant and holler about communism until the billionaires have milked them of their very last dollar, and then blame that on communism too. The very policies t…

Isn't there something patronizing, even patrician, about saying "the propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class"? Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? There seems to me a great assumption in saying that they are "manipulated". Who isn't? This is the idea of false consciousness ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness ), and it has always seemed questionable to me. Who…

I think you might be having a completely valid emotional response to your consciousness being called false.

False Consciousness, like Dictatorship of the Proletariat, are specific terms within Marxist thought that are popularly misinterpreted, and often used by more cynical capitalists to misdirect.

False consciousness has to be understood as false as it relates to 'class consciousness', the true consciousness of the Proletariat as the Proletariat relates to its position within the dialectical materialism applied by Marx to the historical process. This has nothing to do with psychological consciousness.

The Proletariat has class consciousness when it collectively realizes that capitalism is simply a phase in history, and not an eternal state of nature.

It's awfully pompous. Marx wasn't infallible. False consciousness developed a lot after Marx, and you truly can't see it when you're in it. Krein, for example, is in false consciousness. He can't properly conceptualize that capitalism will be replaced, and has developed his own asinine class analysis not on the bedrock of Hegel, but on dividing the working class by race, gender, and ethnicity. It blinds him from seeing the real class antagonisms in society between the Proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

He doesn't seem to know he's a prole like the rest of us, for instance.

Re: The Real Class War

#52

Post by TomMckenny »

It makes sense that the top 10% to 2% become more active as blame and anger are re-routed toward them. For example, many people think the "elite" are the educated but not necessarily the wealthy. So for many, adjunct faculty are called "elites" while the Koch brothers are not.

Likewise, discussions of wealth inequality are becoming conflated with income inequality.

Yet the professional class has only marginal voting power and comparatively little to contribute to political funding, so it's not surprising that the astute ones are concerned.

Re: The Real Class War

#53

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

leereeves wrote: post #48
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest may be unable to acquire more information than is conveniently delivered to them through a handful of sources, and if those sources are controlled by certain actors and not balanced by o…

The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory, but they do have experience dealing with the government. They've seen how broken their local public schools, VA care, and Medicare are. They've been overwhelmed and overborne by the complicated rules of government programs, and faced harsh penalties for slight missteps. They also know that Democrati…

> The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory...

Yet there are traditions both within working-class leftism and working-class libertarianism that emphasise that what you call the "abstract theory" is key to activism and informed participation in the democratic process. After all, the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of writings that goes back centuries. Thus, as I said, in the past political thinkers have urged the working class to read, read, read, and not just go off their anecdotal experiences of interaction with government and society or their gut feelings.

Re: The Real Class War

#54

Post by neonate »

nl wrote: post #39
neonate wrote: post #29

I read it, though not closely, and am still unclear what is the "real class war". The educated-but-alienated professional elite against the oligarchs? I'm just guessing. Also, he kind of loses it in the final paragraphs, which weakened my impression of the rest.

>I read it, though not closely, and am still unclear what is the "real class war" The real class war is between the 0.1 percent and (at most) the 10 percent—or, more precisely, between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on profes­sional labor. It's pretty clearly defined. It's the group that makes their money primarily from investment returns vs those who make their money primar…

Ok, so I guessed right. Thanks, I missed that bit.

Re: The Real Class War

#55

Post by knolax »

tranced wrote: post #4

Recently, I have a friend group who all graduated from Stanford, with relatively upper middle class(but not suburb/NY upper middle class) roots, and you might even describe as "woke" who belonged to a fb messenger group called "Anti Asian Asian Group". I felt like I had to call them out on it. Though they made the group as a play on "anti social social club" and to counter conservative sentiments their upper class co…

What a bizarre world these people live in where identity is both arbitrary and inescapable.

Re: The Real Class War

#56

Post by leereeves »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #53
leereeves wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory, but they do have experience dealing with the government. They've seen how broken their local public schools, VA care, and Medicare are. They've been overwhelmed and overborne by the complicated rules of government programs, and faced harsh penalties for slight missteps. They also know that Democrati…

> The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory... Yet there are traditions both within working-class leftism and working-class libertarianism that emphasise that what you call the "abstract theory" is key to activism and informed participation in the democratic process. After all, the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair…

> the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of argument that goes back centuries.

Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Abstract theory often leads people astray.

I think the working class might be wise to ignore those arguments in favor of their own experiences.

We've seen what the government is actually doing, and theory doesn't match reality. Those who advocate more government intervention should first improve those government interventions that already exist, so government programs can serve as an advertisement for their ideas, instead of a warning.

Re: The Real Class War

#57

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

leereeves wrote: post #56
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory... Yet there are traditions both within working-class leftism and working-class libertarianism that emphasise that what you call the "abstract theory" is key to activism and informed participation in the democratic process. After all, the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair…

> the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of argument that goes back centuries. Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Abstract theory often leads people astray. I think the working class might be wise to ignore those arguments in favor of their own experiences. We've seen what the government is a…

> Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia?

Or the arguments for American democracy and the nascent European democracies, whose founding fathers advocated for such systems by citing literature from Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment. The 19th century saw a wave of low-cost, mass-market editions of the classical canon precisely because it was thought that democracy required an educated citizenry.

Or modern libertarianism, which points to many of the same sources but adds more recent thinkers like Hayek or von Mises.

With your third paragraph, you seem to be suggesting that I favour government invention, but I have made no such suggestion in my posts. Rather, as I said, the need to be informed and aware of the tradition of political argument holds regardless of where a person might be situated ideologically, whether on the "left" or "right".

Re: The Real Class War

#58

Post by barry-cotter »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #36
neonate wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there something patronizing, even patrician, about saying "the propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class"? Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? There seems to me a great assumption in saying that they are "manipulated". Who isn't? This is the idea of false consciousness ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness ), and it has always seemed questionable to me. Who…

> Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest may be unable to acquire more information than is conveniently delivered to them through a handful of sources, and if those sources are controlled by certain actors and not balanced by o…

> The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest

The average American watches three hours of TV a day. People have plenty of free time. If they’re not interested their political opinions are irrelevant, politics will happen to them, not with them.

Re: The Real Class War

#59

Post by tjpnz »

>Since at least 2016, the divide between the “working class” and the “elite” has been considered a defining issue in American (and Western) politics.

I watch a bit of US news (CNN et cetera) when travelling and almost never hear it defined in those terms. Based on what I've seen the debate is almost entirely framed in terms of the "middle class" and the elites.

Re: The Real Class War

#60

Post by leereeves »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #57
leereeves wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of argument that goes back centuries. Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Abstract theory often leads people astray. I think the working class might be wise to ignore those arguments in favor of their own experiences. We've seen what the government is a…

> Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Or the arguments for American democracy and the nascent European democracies, whose founding fathers advocated for such systems by citing literature from Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment. The 19th century saw a wave of low-cost, mass-market editions of the classical canon precisely because it was…

You did more than argue in favor of staying informed and aware of the tradition of political argument. You suggested that the political opinions of those who do not spend time on that are illegitimate:

> Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to?

But politics is not mathematics. Political ideas should be judged by their outcomes, not their theoretical validity. And everyone gets a vote about whether those outcomes are good.

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