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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The Real Class War

#541

Post by cryptica »

motohagiography wrote: post #274
tvanantwerp wrote: post #159

I've spent my career working in public policy circles, and this rings true to me. > At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “un­acceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies. > Unlike the work­ing class, the professional managerial class is still capable of, and re­q…

To +1 one this: Having spent a great deal of time consulting to government, in addition to working in media, but with a deep background in tech, the managerial class of people making policy have a revolving door to the universities, which are seized by faddish ideas as often as the elected representatives. Many of these policy people actually come to hate technologists because they find their more chauvinistic plans…

I wonder how this would relate to the Peter principle which states that every employee rises to their level of incompetence. The conclusion might be that the managerial class is not qualified to decide on what's good for others.

If you were to look at the individual histories of most senior corporate executives, most of them were in various middle management positions at some point before they became executives...

The kinds of people who were able to move above each layer of middle management were basically those who were the most skilled at manipulating others for their own personal benefit; the simple game of taking credit whilst deflecting blame. It's not surprising that the kinds of people who are able to traverse several levels of the management hierarchy to become executives completely lack any self-awareness. Thinking about themselves would distract them from their main activity which is fooling others.

I've worked in enough companies to know that those who get promoted are not those who care about others' (or even the company's) well being. This is provably true because the contrapositive statement would create a contradiction because in such case, the manager would help others to get promoted and thus they would never get promoted themselves.

Re: The Real Class War

#542

Post by FussyZeus »

partyboat1586 wrote: post #493
FussyZeus wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The working class has been satiated since the times of such strikes and accomplishments with tax breaks, easy access to credit and a booming economic growth rate that was long-term unsustainable. Keeping in mind both parties are at fault in that trade: the politicians for being willing to ply the electorate with unsustainable economic policies to ensure votes, and the voters for being so shortsighted and naive to thi…

Do tell, how will the world look different without infinite growth? What is your vision?

Sustainable business practices. Recognition that YoY growth, every year in every business, is unreasonable. That in a world of limited resources, limited audience, limited funds and limited attention, expecting infinite growth is childishly naive.

Re: The Real Class War

#543

Post by theaino »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #536
analyst74 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That low pay serves as a gatekeeping mechanism so poor people can't survive on that career. On the other hand, journalists have a disproportionate influence over public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class. Or maybe it's the reverse, because the field has high prestige and impact, it attracts upper class children who don't need the salary, causing a downward pressure for journalist wages.

Eh, I don't think that's what was actually going on for most of the 20th century. Journalist was not a prestigious job, it was in fact done by working class people. I think. It's instead a new thing that journalism is dominated by "elites". "How journalism became a middle class profession for university graduates": https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2009/jul/21/new... "The death of the working class reporte…

> "The death of the working class reporter"

This article is just standard journalistic myth-making. The journalists cited as examples of success without college degrees, Carl Bernstein and Walter Cronkite (who both went to college, just dropped out), came from privileged backgrounds just like the privileged kids who fill the industy today.

Re: The Real Class War

#544

Post by malvosenior »

porknubbins wrote: post #460
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…

I know a lot of working class people, and their views are just as valid and often they are smarter/more well informed about some particular low level details of the way the economy/society operates. But without a college education in today’s complicated world its really hard to be a sophisticated consumer of information (even with one many fail) so working class people are more susceptible to manipulation by propagan…

Isn't there an argument that many people currently saddled with college debt made poorly informed decisions? Maybe the working class people who knew not to do that actually processed information better than many people who took massive amounts of debt on for degrees of dubious economic value.

Re: The Real Class War

#545

Post by ernst_klim »

claudiawerner wrote: post #524
ernst_klim wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the $2 is the monetary value of the surplus labour (S), also known as "unpaid" labour What about risks and decision making, investing in the future products and potential failures? How much is "paid risk" and "unpaid labor", how to objectively evaluate that? I would argue that $2 is paid risk, not unpaid labor, how to prove that that's not the case? Also, if I paid you a salary, and than the product failed in the m…

The proof follows from the labour theory of value (the proof of which is, I believe, more controversial, especially as Marx does the "proof"), which states that the magnitude of value of a commodity is objectively determined by labour-time, not by "risk", and I think that's shown in cases where many busniesses, no matter how risky (and it seems here you're only talking about the capitalist's risk, not that of the wag…

> The proof follows from the labour theory of value

But I'm asking you about the proof of the labor theory of value in fact. I didn't thought that there exist people who take it seriously after marginal revolution.

> and I think that's shown in cases where many busniesses, no matter how risky

Business shows exactly the opposite, the most risky (volatile) domains have the highest gains and highest losses: pharma, construction, fintech.

> value of a commodity is objectively determined by labour-time, not by "risk"

So when the value of a bottle of wine inflates with time, somebody is working on it?

> no matter how risky

Did you ever run a business? When you pay for a snack, you pay not only for a snack, but also for a stolen snack. When you pay for a Intel x86 processor, you also pay for failed Intel iAPX 432 which never appeared in the market.

Risks are pretty material, and should be payed for. When you are starting a project, you never know in advance whether it would be successful or not. If it fails, the only way to pay the salaries and costs is through revenues of other projects.

> If it were the reward for decision making, the rate of profit would diminish the more you sell something the same way and in the same place, since there are fewer decisions to be made for each subsequent commodity.

Strange inference. Not the number of decisions matter but their impact. If you sell something many time, it means that the first one decision was very clever and rewarding. Not to mention that revenues are falling with time and it requires new strategies and decisions to make your company competitive and profitable again.

> The capitalist labours the monetary equivalent of $1, i.e he spends $1 on his labour power, producing a total of $2 worth of labour

Again, I see no evidence that labor creates any objective value on its own. Goods have value, labor has value as a good evaluated by an employer, but it does not "create value". If you make a chair, you apply labor, but if nobody values it and nobody buys it, it has no value, hence your labor has no value.

How did you evaluate that capitalist labors $1? Maybe his decisions and ability to take risks cost $100, and his workers are just freeriding him? How exactly did you infer that he spends exactly $1 of labor power? What is a labor power, how could you measure it objectively?

Forget about capitalists, here is a simple though experiment: there are two workers living in a commune and owning the means of production. They do chairs and sell it to the outer capitalist world. One worker is a carpenter who does the woodwork. Another one make nails. They sell chairs for $1, which share of this $1 each of than created? How to measure that objectively?

After that add a capitalist who start the business, takes risks, credits, make decisions and devise strategy. How to evaluate the "value" of his activity?

Re: The Real Class War

#546

Post by cryptica »

> Many industry observ­ers believe Schmidt contributed virtually nothing to the company, but he became a billionaire because of his superior grasp of business etiquette: “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” he once said. Jeffrey Epstein, erstwhile dinner companion of Schmidt, Bill Gates, and seemingly every other member of this class, had a slightly different policy.

Funny. Obviously this is going overboard with the facts but it makes a good point.

Re: The Real Class War

#547

Post by te_chris »

thu2111 wrote: post #507
Iv wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to diss protests that accomplish nothing but then I realized what their real use was: to connect people into doing actual stuff. To open a place for discussion on a specific issue, sometimes in the media, but at least in the street, for few hours, with like-minded people. If you are rich serious people concerned over an issue, you create a forum or gather a summit. If you are poor, or rather, let's be realisti…

Are there many examples of that happening? The biggest counter example I can think of was Occupy Wall Street. AFAIK nothing ever came out of it, not even a small organised group. Most protests I've seen have actually been the other way around. They were organised by pressure groups or unions and the protesters were already members of those groups. They existed primarily as a chest-beating exercise to show politicians…

You're missing the forest for the trees on Occupy. Loads of people and groups active today found each other through that or got their start there.

Re: The Real Class War

#548

Post by te_chris »

rout39574 wrote: post #420
kortilla wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> political system to organise itself to reward work done How do you decide which work is valuable and which work isn’t?

Reading a book on that question right now; 'The Value of Everything'. Might be worth a look.

Excellent book, recommend it as well!

Re: The Real Class War

#549

Post by golergka »

humanrebar wrote: post #538
golergka wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal And who on earth would seriously think that this would be any other than total nightmare?

It's pretty common to Christian, especially Protestant, theology and culture. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise." And that principle is the often (most?) quoted part of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evid…

That's equality in eyes of the law - not the equality of the outcome, which leftist movements try to preach.

Re: The Real Class War

#550

Post by helen___keller »

127 wrote: post #539
helen___keller wrote: post #152

A cogent and well-written article. My only possible contributions are the following: 1. The author perhaps underestimates the bottom 90%, who are written off as politically irrelevant (in terms of real power) near the start of the article. I do think there's a good reason for this, but we are only one true crisis away from that changing. For example, suppose India and Pakistan only were to have a nuclear engagement a…

I do think we are definitely in a state of rapidly declining relevance of need for programming work. Code is an Ouroboros that eats its own tail to grow. Especially with the ethics of open source free software development and the dismantling of moats and credentialism, we might be in an accelerating state of programming jobs vanishing.

No, I don't think it's even begun yet.
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