Why is the white working class deprecated under neoliberalism? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Modern liberalism. Civil rights and liberties, State responsibility to the people (welfare).
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#14755019
Most of the critique of identarism is subjective nonsense or outright a-historical. But some of Adolph Reed's analysis in Common Dreams is thought-provoking. Reed argues that racial (and other) identities, when asserted as political norms, are essentialist in nature.

race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.


His ascription of this syndrome to the "left-wing of neoliberalism" needs to be placed in context - it is not 'left' as a Marxist would understand it, but the appropriated 'left' of neoliberalism. The critical concept is what I have bolded above. Your identity is inherited and essential to your being, not a product of your actions. Action is irrelevant, and only identification with your recognized peers is recognized.

Therefore, quietism and acceptance are made an integral part of the political order.

The interesting question is why did the white working class end up on the outside? Reed doesn't explicitly deal with this, but I believe it is essentially an economic question. Tim Duy's bitter response to Krugman lay this out:

That Krugman can wonder at the source of the disdain felt toward the liberal elite while lecturing Trump’s voters on their own self-interest is really quite remarkable.

I don’t know that the white working class voted against their economic interest. I don’t pretend that I can define their preferences with such accuracy. Maybe they did. But the working class may reasonably believe that neither party offers them an economic solution. The Republicans are the party of the rich; the Democrats are the party of the rich and poor. Those in between have no place.

That sense of hopelessness would be justifiably acute in rural areas. Economic development is hard work in the best of circumstances; across the sparsely populated vastness of rural America, it is virtually impossible. The victories are – and will continue to be – few and far between.

The tough reality of economic development is that it will always be easier to move people to jobs than the jobs to people. Which is akin to telling many, many voters the only way possible way they can live an even modest lifestyle is to abandon their roots for the uniformity of urban life. They must sacrifice their identities to survive. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Follow the Brooklyn hipsters to the Promised Land.

This is a bitter pill for many to swallow. To just sit back and accept the collapse of your communities. And I suspect the white working class resents being told to swallow that pill when the Democrats eagerly celebrate the identities of everyone else.


So, the identities of some are essential, while the identities of others are disposable. It is not an actual holocaust, no one is physically killed. It is the new holocaust: your identity, culture, and way of life are simply made economically infeasible. The historic nastiness of white racism is the justification for this process, but oddly this only applies to poor whites.

Of course, the real reason is that rural and working-class cannot be supported under the precepts of neoliberalism. Notably, black poor suffer the same fate but no one is particularly interested in them.
#14755026
So, the identities of some are essential, while the identities of others are disposable. It is not an actual holocaust, no one is physically killed. It is the new holocaust: your identity, culture, and way of life are simply made economically infeasible. The historic nastiness of white racism is the justification for this process, but oddly this only applies to poor whites.

When has this not happened under capitalism? Tell me, why is there no peasant class in Britain today? We used to have lots of peasants in the Middle Ages. What happened to them all? Where did they go? The answer, of course, for anyone who knows anything at all about history, is that they were made landless and propertyless by the Enclosures of the Commons, and were forced to move to the cities or starve. There, they became the proletariat, the new 'working class' who had to sell their own labour power in the new factories and mills or starve. The peasantry, once he backbone of English and British society, were liquidated as a class, and forcibly transformed into the new industrial working class. They lost their identity as a community. Now it is the turn of the American rural poor and lower-middle classes to be melted down in the furnace of capitalism.
#14755047
Potemkin wrote:When has this not happened under capitalism?


The process was temporarily abated in the New Deal/WW II era, and only definitively resumed under Reagan. Your historical analysis may be true in the long run, but we have to live in the short and medium run. It depends on whether you believe participation in electoral politics is justified, and what the object of this participation should be.
#14755051
The process was temporarily abated in the New Deal/WW II era, and only definitively resumed under Reagan. Your historical analysis may be true in the long run, but we have to live in the short and medium run.

We also have to live in the long run too, which is what is becoming increasingly problematic. ;)

It depends on whether you believe participation in electoral politics is justified, and what the object of this participation should be.

I'm a revolutionary communist, so my answers to those questions should be obvious. Participation in electoral politics is justified if and only if it improves the political position of the working class in the war of manoeuvre which is currently and constantly occurring under capitalism. The object of this participation, ultimately, is for the working class to replace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class of society.
#14755256
The tough reality of economic development is that it will always be easier to move people to jobs than the jobs to people. Which is akin to telling many, many voters the only way possible way they can live an even modest lifestyle is to abandon their roots for the uniformity of urban life. They must sacrifice their identities to survive. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Follow the Brooklyn hipsters to the Promised Land.

This is a bitter pill for many to swallow. To just sit back and accept the collapse of your communities. And I suspect the white working class resents being told to swallow that pill when the Democrats eagerly celebrate the identities of everyone else.

This is nothing new. This is, in fact, how capitalism began, back in the 17th and 18th centuries, and how it has always continued to operate. People move to the jobs rather than the jobs to people, communities are immiserated and uprooted, shared identities going back centuries are broken up and eradicated. When has it ever been any different? The OP is basically saying that water is wet and the sky is blue, and capitalism is capitalism. Is this supposed to be some great revelation? :eh:
#14755258
To be fair, Mr. @Potemkin, I think any sort of industrial/technological advancements whether under Capitalism or not will result in communities and identities getting destroyed.


I don't understand your reasoning. Until very recently, most of these advances were made by individuals. Their advancements were not a detriment to a community until they were utilized by capitalists, who insisted upon where they would be utilized.
#14755284
I think it's worth pointing out that for Marxists this is an almost frustrating argument for people to stumble upon as it's something we've been saying for a century and a half.

Quetzecoatl wrote:The process was temporarily abated in the New Deal/WW II era, and only definitively resumed under Reagan


Here we get into the shit.

In this same era, the Chinese Exclusion Act was at its strongest, the Japanese lost everything and put into concentration camps, blacks were forced to be criminals so they could be forced to share-crop, were experimented on, and not part of the New Seal or Great Society. Part of the reason for the Great Migration of this time, when blacks moved en masses from the most rural areas to the most urban, was because of these issues and the general issues resulting from capitalism.

The process was temporarily abated for whites in the United States. It didn't do shit for anyone else. Which is essentially what the optics on this whole thing is viewed through in the United States as a former slave colony.

This was a known problem, and it's part of the reason Marx argued violently for the victory of the Union in the Civil War, so that these things could be put away.

Marx wrote:In the United States of North America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic.


This remains true today, to a much lesser extent. What the poor white resents is that he is being treated like everyone else. Like the poor British Protestant after each bloody victory over papist, he's horrified to not find himself in Heaven and supposes he must not have been cruel enough. The rural whites suffer from capitalism, in the exact same way everybody in the world does, but they've been passed down their grandfather's faulty spectacles with which to view the world.
#14755309
One Degree wrote:
I don't understand your reasoning. Until very recently, most of these advances were made by individuals. Their advancements were not a detriment to a community until they were utilized by capitalists, who insisted upon where they would be utilized.


Technological advances constantly change the way people live and work. In many instances technology tends to destroy livelihoods of entire communities. This will happen with or without capitalism.
#14755313
A few things...

I think it's great that Potemkin is a revolutionary communist. It works for him. But I can't be one. It's not 1918. My grandfather was a wobblie and I have a certain romantic attachment - but that era is gone. The historical circumstances that made revolutionary communism possible no longer obtain. And they will not be returning.

My takeaway from TiG's post is that no effective change is possible without a communist revolution (being equivalent to ending slavery in the nineteenth century). This is demonstrably false. Massive social and economic changes (including ending slavery) have occurred in capitalist nations with no hint of a communist revolution. The critique of the New Deal based on its lack of universality is particularly shortsighted. Change never occurs systemically - it occurs locally and is propagated. There is no sense in which it is true that concentration camps (for example) were a prerequisite for the success of the New Deal economic changes.

Having been involved in labor all my life, it is particularly frustrating to be told that the existence of particular evils precludes any advancement elsewhere. The barriers we face getting people to get off their butts are high enough already without that kind of crap.

Massive changes will continue to occur, and occur without benefit of communist revolution. The only pertinent question is who controls these changes and who benefits. This is the province of politics. The notion that politics is 'only' an interim solution until revolutionary change can be effected is self-indulgent. All our interim solutions are aggregated and become the real world as we see it.

Capitalism will not die. It will not be defeated nor eliminated. There will be no revolution, whether televised or not. It can only evolve and mutate. The question of politics is this: can its evolution be guided or molded, or are we helpless in the face of historical forces?
#14755315
Technological advances constantly change the way people live and work. In many instances technology tends to destroy livelihoods of entire communities. This will happen with or without capitalism.


Well it has definitely happened, so I can't argue your point. It does not need to happen under any system. It is cronyism that causes the jobs to be centralized in a few large communities. Everything from the Interstate Highway system to social programs are centered on a few cities with political/economic power. They continue to grow despite all their flaws while the rest of the country suffers. It is a self-perpetuating system that is most closely associated with Capitalism.
#14755318
Capitalism will not die. It will not be defeated nor eliminated. There will be no revolution, whether televised or not. It can only evolve and mutate. The question of politics is this: can its evolution be guided or molded, or are we helpless in the face of historical forces?


Greater local autonomy including a ban on non-resident ownership. I know I harp on this, but how else can you control more and more ownership being in fewer and fewer hands.
#14755323
The only country that I know of with a ban on non-resident ownership is Cuba.


You could be right as far as total ban. Many countries/states place limitations especially on farm land. Canada included.
#14755342
Rugoz wrote:Interesting article, but urbanization has been an ongoing process for decades, if not centuries, so why now the political divide?

The divide has always existed. For a few generations, this disruptive effect of this divide was limited by labor getting a relatively larger share of generated wealth. This trend was reversed in the early seventies (The Great Disconnect). The other factor is the decline of the family farm - only in the first half of the twentieth century did the US transform itself from a largely agrarian society into an urban one.
Rugoz wrote:Yes, high agricultural productivity is a real pain in the ass.

The world just isn't the same without starvation and crippling farm work.


Actually, centralization is a temporary phenomenon. There is no inherent reason why productivity requires geographic concentration. The long-term effect of automation will be decentralization. This can be a good thing, but there's going to be a lot of dislocation and political chaos.

-----

One of the ways capitalism can be "mutated" is through altering its legal infrastructure (without which it could not exist). One could do this through any combination of the following:

1) Altering, limiting, or re-defining definitions of property.
2) Altering, limiting, or re-defining corporate structure.
3) Limiting corporate access/control of mass media.
4) Eliminating corporate contributions to candidates, political parties, non-profit 'educational' foundations, and PACs
5) Eliminating wage slavery through a combination of BIG, extension of Medicare to all citizens, and salaries for homemakers, students, artists, etc. Radically widen the definition of work.

Any or all of these can be accomplished without a violent and destructive upheaval that would end up placing more power into the hands of reactionaries.
#14755359
Potemkin wrote:When has this not happened under capitalism? Tell me, why is there no peasant class in Britain today? We used to have lots of peasants in the Middle Ages. What happened to them all? Where did they go? The answer, of course, for anyone who knows anything at all about history, is that they were made landless and propertyless by the Enclosures of the Commons, and were forced to move to the cities or starve.

This is a Communist lie and the widespread credulity of this nonsense only proves my point to how far Marxism has corrupted the West's intellectual life. There was a expansion of the agricultural population of Britain in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. The living standards of the British working class (agricultural and non agricultural) reached a low point about 1830. This was caused by massive population expansion. The fact that the Malthusian process stopped about the time that Malthus was writing does not invalidate Malthus. Society was Malthusian until recently. Our current prosperity is due to the dramatic fall in the birth rate. It was this fall that stopped technological improvements just leading to more people without any rise in living standards.

More population not only makes the average person poorer, it makes society more unequal. that why in the aftermath of Black Death the British worker had never had it so good. Marginal land and marginal industry could be abandoned, but the power of the worker increased allowing him to take a larger share of the cake relative to the average, the average which had it self increased. Its like these arse holes who think that workers small scale producers early United States had a high standard of living for the time, because of the American Constitution. No the US was prosperous because population density was low. Even without slavery ordinary White Americans would have been prosperous.

Some people know this full well, which is why we always see Libertarians, big business and the Marxists conspiring to flood our countries with more workers. the Marxists do it for their internationalist ideology. the Libertarians and big business do it to make rich people richer.

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