Class analysis at an individual level is useful for agitation purposes, but class does not exist at the individual level to begin with. Class only exists at the whole system level. This analysis this guy is making here is like saying “individual atoms in this gas don’t have a temperature therefore temperature doesn’t exist”.
The proletariat as a class sells its labor to the bourgeoisie - owners of the means of production - to survive.
There, I solved the conundrum of the article in 1 sentence.
“Only paid subscribers can comment on this post” AKA only those who view my opinions as valid can have a conversation with me about my opinions.
The entire concept of “Class” is so distorted here that it means nothing. Class isn’t some intersectional data point that you can tease out of a spreadsheet. It’s defined by the relationships within a society, and in capitalist society it’s defined by those who earn their money by selling their labor for a wage, and those who earn their money through underpaying for that labor. It’s defined by the disproportionate control one group (the labor buyers) has over the way the other group (the labor sellers) lives their lives.
His point about “Dems don’t see themselves as working class” is literally the challenge of raising “Class Consciousness”. These Dems are part of the working class, they are simply not conscious of that fact. If the “Working Class” is always depicted as greasy car mechanics, construction workers, assembly line workers or delivery drivers, then yes, the white-collar office worker putting in 90+ hours a week to crank out the next GTA game only to get fired before its released, will never see themselves as “Working Class” even though they suffer under the same conditions.
People who work in a cube slamming their fingers into a keyboard for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, on-call 247, will look at a guy who works 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, on-call 247, at a tow truck company and think, “Well, at least I’m not that poor slob.” This dissonance is created by a lack of class consciousness!
Liberals read a book challenge fucking IMPOSSIBLE!!
EDIT:
- Workers in factories lose their jobs to cheap labor overseas.
- Workers doing call center work lose their jobs to cheap labor overseas.
- Workers doing technical support lose their jobs to cheap labor overseas.
- Workers driving taxi cabs are replaced by contractors driving their own cars for Uber.
- Workers delivering packages are replaced by contractors driving their own cars for Doordash.
- Workers in factories lose their jobs to automated assembly robots.
- Workers doing call center work lose their jobs to Large Language Models doing synthesized voices.
- Workers doing technical support lose their jobs to Large Language Models doing text communication.
- Workers writing technical documents are replaced by Large Language Models.
- Workers creating art assets are replaced by Generative Imaging Models.
- Workers driving their own cars for Uber will lose their jobs to automated self-driving cars.
- Workers driving their own cars for Doordash will lose their jobs to automated self-piloting delivery drones.
- Nothing is done to address this assault on workers.
- Mother fuckers like this will still wonder if it’s the “identity Politics” that is the problem.
Liberals and purposefully redefining socialist terms to muddy the waters, name a more iconic duo.
IDENTITY POLITICS AREN’T WHY THE DEMS LOST YOU SLIMY FUCKING LIARS
Would be really nice if he actually had no opinions.
God, the comments on the article, only…one(?) person got the proper definition of working class right…I gave up after that though.
This is the dude who said that neoliberalism is good because eventually everyone will work in a cubicle and buy stuff online
So much data with so many graphs. This person must have a rock solid understanding of the world. /s
love that economic mobility chart, just three bars that say some high percentages with zero analysis. I wonder where such robust data came from? Oh look, a citation
American Enterprise Institute
Wish I could get paid to be an annoying blowhard online
edit: oh my God it doesn’t even come from like a journal article, it comes from a 12 slide power point whose final answer to if there’s a meaningful degree of economic mobility in the US is literally “it’s difficult to arrive at firm conclusions”
This is like high school essay written at 2 am levels of bad
This is like high school essay written at 2 am levels of bad
Average economic model
That’s what makes their movement different from the Trumpoids, they have data and graphs™.
And after a few years of Trump, they’ll break out the calipers
So much brainrot here.
I can’t resist picking this apart some more
But our numbers for capital income are probably greatly exaggerated, because capital income gets taxed at a lower rate than labor income. Smith et al. (2019) find that most rich Americans get a lot of their income from working at their own pass-through businesses, but classify most of this as business income in order to pay a lower tax rate
This is super misleading. He makes it sound like this income is from self-employed people, independent contractors classifying their work as a single-employee business for tax purposes. But, If you read the study he cites what you find is that these pass-through businesses are still ultimately paying their owners from profits. They have employees. The difference between them and a public corporation is that they’re owner-managed instead of hiring a corporate suite. This is like saying CEOs technically earn some large percentage of their income through a salary and bonuses, so they’re part of the working class
The study makes an interesting point in showing that these businesses tend to fail when the owner dies or retires, but they make no claim that this is because the owner was doing enough work to constitute all of, of even a majority of the firm’s revenue, just that their management was part of the firm’s success. They acknowledge that
Owner charisma or connections may have kept key employees at the firm until her death. Or a firm could replace its dead owner-manager (compensated in profits) with a hired nonowner manager (compensated in wages), yielding a decline in measured profits. In each case, the withdrawal of the owner’s human capital caused profits to decline
That isn’t working class Noah.
How does anyone have this little self awareness ;_;
The educated professional class is out of touch with America https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-educated-professional-class-is