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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The Real Class War

#561

Post by BuckRogers »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #503
BuckRogers wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never positive as your life is worth far more than those wages in all cases. That's why no one can be considered overpaid, or we would limit payment to CEOs. Thus wages can only be considered at best, a trade. That's why I asserted that profits are nothing more than unpaid wages. Since it's objectively a trade of your life for wages, paying others less than the value you produced is simply not valuing human life…

> paying others less than the value you produced is simply not valuing human life. The worst sort of theft. And yet, both the planet and individual people are far wealthier today than when they were producing and receiving "full value" for their labour.

That’s extremely loaded, and not true. I’ll unpack it all if someone is curious but in short your statement is only true if you define wealth in terms of faith-based fiat currency or define wealth as central bank issued scrip. There’s a reason credit is readily available. It’s a scheme that only works until it doesn’t, which is objective evidence that it makes for a very hollow definition of wealth.

Re: The Real Class War

#562

Post by gpanders »

dlkf wrote: post #88

Most places with high per-capita GDP (Canada, Scandinavia, England, Germany etc) have found that they can make meaningful, consistent, incremental progress on a lot of the problems Krein is trying to address through introducing a public system in sectors like healthcare, education, and child care - probably literally the only tack Krein would never agree to. The problem isn't "billionaires" or "capitalism." I would p…

> The problem is that market failure is a real thing

At least two of the examples you site (healthcare and education) are nowhere near being functional markets, so blaming market failure for poor outcomes in these sectors seems like a red herring.

Re: The Real Class War

#563

Post by gpanders »

esoterica wrote: post #282
Despegar wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pie may have grown, but aside from labor in the Global South, the people who have captured the gains from that growth have been the capital class in the developed nations (i.e not blue collar workers or the professional class). And no, getting some of your compensation in stock options doesn't make you apart of the capital class, unless you can stop working.

You can retire on your investments in your 30s or 40s on a higher end professional salary if you’re not an idiot with money. My old boss retired at 31. Not a CEO or a venture capitalist, just another schmuck who came in to the office to write code every day and got paid a lot of money to do it.

Indeed, particularly if one eschews chasing after some ephemeral and meaningless concept of "status".

The article repeatedly frames the professional class' decision making and motivation as pursuing status or in joining the ranks of the upper-class elite... Perhaps I live in a bubble, but this is not a trend that I observe at all among my peers, most of whom are (young) professionals.

Re: The Real Class War

#564

Post by jerry1979 »

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…

>The author perhaps underestimates the bottom 90%, who are written off as politically irrelevant [...] but we are only one true crisis away from that changing. [...] When crops and supply chains fail and famine kicks in, who is going hungry?

Regarding the first point, some people have noticed that food price changes can lead to revolts [1], but I'm not sure that says anything about the political power of the bottom 90% nor whether those revolts would lead to meaningful change. I imagine any food revolt in the US would mirror the Revolutions of 1848 [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

Re: The Real Class War

#565

Post by [deleted] »

noelsusman wrote: post #387
blurbleblurble wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason that Hillary Clinton got nominated in 2016. Because too many politicians are completely out of touch with the movements, conditions and perspectives of working people. Where I live, grassroots organizers are doing all the hard work. I'm not talking about protesters. I'm talking about people who are building and connecting organically, who are facilitating workshops and popular education sessions,…

Hillary won working class voters in the 2016 primary by a comfortable margin. +28 with non-college-educated voters and +13 with voters under $50,000 in income.

[deleted]

Re: The Real Class War

#566

Post by malandrew »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #426
malandrew wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. The middle class really isn't any less powerful today. Near as I can tell what happened isn't that the middle class became less powerful, but that journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class so they spread the perception that the middle class has lost its power because they…

"journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class" For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.

Journalists for the most prestigious outlets (NYTimes, WaPo, Newsweek, Time Magazine, etc) certainly did well for themselves. At secondary institutions it was a solid middle class job.

Now because of blogging and commodification of the news, the money is no longer in journalism but in clickbait and it's a race to the bottom.

This article about the decline of Newsweek does a good job chronicling what is happening at news media companies all over the world:

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/newsweek.php

Journalists now find themselves among the precariat, especially those in the long tail of journalism working at clickbait factories like Business Insider, HuffPo, Jezebel, etc. News media is now a gig industry job.

Re: The Real Class War

#567

Post by malandrew »

analyst74 wrote: post #457
jrochkind1 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class" For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.

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.

> public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class.

Maybe 10-15 years ago that was true, but today the control of public discourse is no longer controlled by the elite class. Blogging completely ended that control.

Re: The Real Class War

#568

Post by [deleted] »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #454
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The big ideological divide in families (usually between generations) is a serious symptom of our inability to really communicate and compromise. In large part these ideological groupings are meaningless and inconsequential." I think this is only true in very specific circumstances. Ideological divide can also mean disowning your child for being gay, which is why among homeless youth there's a disproportionate amount…

It’s illegal to disown children in the U.S.

[deleted]

Re: The Real Class War

#569

Post by jerry1979 »

StacyRoberts wrote: post #557
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…

The professional class has contributed the most to the wealth gap. We blame the wealthy, but it's not they who are performing the task of wealth extraction. The banks owners don't sign mortgages or repossess homes. The shareholders aren't doing the actual labor that increases page views or patents doodads worth negative value to the poor who buy them and funnel the money up. Owners don't do the taxes that rob society…

> the professionals [...] are to blame. Not the wealthy. They just pay for it.

This brought to my mind on old Chomsky comment about civilian casualties in war:

"Evidently, a crucial case is omitted, which is far more depraved than massacring civilians intentionally. Namely, knowing that you are massacring them but not doing so intentionally because you don’t regard them as worthy of concern. That is, you don’t even care enough about them to intend to kill them. Thus when I walk down the street, if I stop to think about it I know I’ll probably kill lots of ants, but I don’t intend to kill them, because in my mind they do not even rise to the level where it matters. There are many such examples. To take one of the very minor ones, when Clinton bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility in Sudan, he and the other perpetrators surely knew that the bombing would kill civilians (tens of thousands, apparently). But Clinton and associates did not intend to kill them, because by the standards of Western liberal humanitarian racism, they are no more significant than ants. Same in the case of tens of millions of others."

-- https://formicidaefantasy.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/chomsky-o...

Re: The Real Class War

#570

Post by gerbilly »

asdff wrote: post #465
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 agai…

IIRC, revolutionaries in Russia didn't wait for the proletariat class consciousness to arise on it's own, as it had been predicted by Marx.

The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually.

The fact that the article, and many of the commenters here are mentioning this again makes me wonder if socialist movements have always been primarily middle class movements.

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