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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The Real Class War

#461

Post by asdff »

tenpies wrote: post #107
TomMckenny wrote: post #52

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…

> So for many, adjunct faculty are called "elites" while the Koch brothers are not. I think this is an important point. Wealth in the West knew to stay out of the radar. The whole concept of "old wealth" has the key characteristic of not spending frivolously in public or making a scene. Even in the Instagram age, they largely keep it under control. Their wealth - while beneficial - is not their defining characteristi…

Old wealth also spent lavishly, just on things more beneficial to the public. Imagine the costs with constructing an ornate art deco build today, vs. another 6 story wood frame box. At least with the pricey art deco building, the luxury is enjoyed by everyone who uses the space. Not to mention old wealth often donated huge fortunes to civic endeavors.

There was good reason why the working class resentment of old wealth was minimal, it was because they weren't only hoarding it for hedonism or a lust for power.

Re: The Real Class War

#462

Post by asdff »

maxerickson wrote: post #71
TomMckenny wrote: post #52

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…

I wonder if the typical adjunct faculty is more or less 'educated' than someone with a masters in engineering from MIT.

Presumably adjunct faculty could be more current and active in their respective field than someone who got their degree but spent the bulk of their efforts working on unrelated projects.

Re: The Real Class War

#463

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #453
roenxi wrote: post #24

What a fantastic article; this might be the high point for my 2019 Hacker News reading. What clarity of vision. It is remarkable reflecting after an article like that on the complete inability of the US political system to organise itself to reward work done rather than access to the super-elite social circles. I'd love to know if this Julius fellow has a take on what mechanisms the 0.1% are using to drive the growin…

Economic growth increases the gap. The only fix is working with other countries on inheritance tax and anti-tax evasion schemes.

Where is the growth? The Federal Reserve pumping easy money into the economy doesn’t count. The author completely missed the point as to why capital is misallocated. True growth is when productivity increases, prices fall, and capital investment increases.

It’s easy to sell 10 dollar bills for 8 dollars a piece. In what world is that considered growth?

Re: The Real Class War

#464

Post by bambataa »

neonate wrote: post #350
bambataa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very tricky problem. My awareness of false consciousness is more from feminism. So what if a woman aspires to being nothing more than a good housewife? But what if she's been brought up in a culture where she has been told from early childhood that being a good housewife is all she every should aspire to? I don't think you can tell that person that their desires are wrong but you can point out what other optio…

(I don't mean to be rude or argumentative, just interested.) Don't you think this is patronizing in the way I described above? By all means point out options, but if people decide not to choose those options, I don't see what entitles us to call that false consciousness. A caricature of this view might go as follows: "if you accept my political agenda then you have true consciousness and are entitled to your beliefs;…

I think it's the distinction between intrinsic beliefs and beliefs based on knowledge of the world. Maybe I didn't make the distinction clear enough. The former, though we may want to change them, can't usefully be called "wrong" but the latter can. False consciousness is then wrong beliefs deliberately propagated to achieve some end.

What is missing from your caricature is whether the beliefs expressed make internal sense and fit with what we know about reality. Are you entitled to a belief that we shouldn't fund space programs because they're too expensive? Of course. Are you entitled to a belief that we shouldn't fund space programs because the world is flat? No.

Another good UK example is government austerity over the last decade to reduce the deficit. The government gained popular support for it using analogies about household budgets that in fact aren't very applicable to government spending. This and other arguments got picked up and repeated by the media despite not being accepted by mainstream economists [1]. This led to a divergence between popular and academic understanding of the economy's strength and weaknesses. Given all of that, how much weight should be put on the economic beliefs of someone whose only macroeconomic knowledge is gleaned from the headlines? I would say that this a classic example of false consciousness.

Of course, in politics and economics neutral knowledge is a tricky concept. That's why this is inherently discursive. My economics knowledge is mostly from reading a few introductory textbooks and reading blogs. Some economics expert might come along here and say I'm totally wrong on austerity and here's why. That's fine. I don't have an inherent right to be wrong.

[1] https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2015/05/on-mediamacro.html

Re: The Real Class War

#465

Post by asdff »

kingkawn wrote: post #5

I disagree that the working class is not going to radicalize itself. They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate, like everyone else. For the first time they have the power to publish and think in public uncoupled from professional barrier. Better believe it’s being used, and that they will assert their awareness.

The working class is already radicalized, however it's powerless through division. A poor minority in the city and a poor majority in the countryside have a lot more in common than either of them might like to believe; their economic interests are shared as they are both simply the working class.

However, the poor person in the city is unlikely to vote at all, and the poor person in the country is likely to vote against their own economic interests in favor of perceived social narratives. As long this remains true, I wouldn't hold my breath on a working class awakening anytime soon.

Re: The Real Class War

#466

Post by munificent »

nine_k wrote: post #89
fladrif wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but my personal belief is that all work is valuable, otherwise it wouldn't be desired. I don't think it's a good exercise to decide how much it is worth, except to say that work that requires X unit of time should provide at a minimum an amount of compensation that allows a person to obtain a standard of living above the poverty line.

In my book, work has negative utility. It is something you tolerate to get the fruits of it, which may have positive utility. Being paid in exchange for work is the sign that otherwise the work won't be worth doing for you. The less work you do to achieve a desired result, the better. This is why technical improvements are valuable: they allow you do less work. There are activities that are rewarding by themselves, l…

I fundamentally disagree with the separation of life into toil and leisure. That mentality debases both acts. It implies that the more miserable our job is, the greater the moral reward we have earned. And, conversely, our leisure must be maximally hedonistic and selfish to make that suffering worthwhile.

All of our waking day is a mixture of good and bad experiences, intertwined with all manner of internal and external rewards and punishments. A hobby is just a job that pays you more in fun than cash, and a job is a weird club you go to more than you want but that pays you dues in return.

Trying to separate them into strict binary options makes it hard to build a complete, balanced life that has all of the various kinds of rewards that are meaningful to you as an individual.

Re: The Real Class War

#467

Post by munificent »

shevek_ wrote: post #262

From 2018-2019, we saw teachers protests and strikes lead to massive concessions being gained in 7/9 states they occurred in, most of which were red states. The working class has a considerable amount of power when wielded correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%9319_education_work... Eric Blanc's Red State Revolt is another great source on this https://www.versobooks.com/books/2955-red-state-revolt

> The working class has a considerable amount of power when wielded correctly.

This is why "organized labor" is such a perfect term. Yes, the power is there. But without organization, it's not motion, it's just heat.

Re: The Real Class War

#468

Post by munificent »

kingkawn wrote: post #5

I disagree that the working class is not going to radicalize itself. They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate, like everyone else. For the first time they have the power to publish and think in public uncoupled from professional barrier. Better believe it’s being used, and that they will assert their awareness.

> They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate

If by "talking to each other" you mean "increasingly consuming only whatever media the machine learning has been trained to foist onto them", yes.

> uncoupled from professional barrier.

This was true ten years ago, but not today. The recommendation algorithms run by the big tech companies are the window most people use to look into the Internet now.

Re: The Real Class War

#469

Post by monkeydreams »

I would like to further understand the societal, political and economic forces in the context of the political outcomes described in this article. Has anyone got a couple of recommendations on where to start?

Re: The Real Class War

#470

Post by amanaplanacanal »

simonh wrote: post #105

This is all driven by globalisation, and don't get me wrong I'm a globalist, but this is just a fact. First manual labour in manufacturing was outsourced abroad, then higher tier tech jobs in software and product engineering. Now big firms from former third world countries are muscling in on markets at every level of the economy, creating competition at every level of business. You can't add hundreds of millions of C…

I was under the impression that automation has had a much larger effect than globalization. Unfortunately they both have happened in the same time period and are hard to disentangle.
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