I agree, my direct addressing of the zillionaires themselves was just rhetorical. I do think it’s useful to recall and restate the selling points and tenets of important ideas, particularly given the tendency of their labels to gather all kinds of moss. Social democracy and welfare capitalism both have mottled histories that confuse and conflate the abstract ideas and goals with the details of specific instances. While instances are important to know intimately as evidence of how to move forward, the level of success of individual examples in a particular place in time can’t stand alone as a measure of the potential. Complex inventions take time, experimentation and investment to get off the ground, democratic experiments are certainly no different. Hopefully Europe is just in one of those tough spots in the development cycle. Certainly they’re ahead of the game compared to the U.S. Most Americans have little to no idea what socialism is about, beyond Obama selling them as slaves to Kenyan warlords. Money and media talk with a big-ass megaphone, particularly in a post-citizens-united America, but I think that’s why, even in the dark times, it’s important to keep talking about the meat of important ideas.
Even some zillionaires participate in social democracy via team ownership in the NFL1…
1National Football League
Excellent points. For all the value of the wealthy saying nice things about social democracy, it’s still frustrating that only they have the platform to do it. It could be worse, he could have railed against democracy instead.
I’m unsure I follow?
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― John Steinbeck
I wonder, does America’s attitude toward Socialism come from never facing Fascism up close and personal like Europe did? Totalitarianism is associated in the popular consciousness with Communism, thanks to the Cold War, and fanatical nationalism maybe.
It feels like America’s flag-waving and embrace of Capitalism sets off alarm bells in Europeans that simply don’t register for Americans. Meanwhile Europe’s attitude to redistribution and sharing of wealth brings to mind America’s most recent Big Bads, the commies.
Yes, yes, yes! I have contributed twice to Mayday. I would like all the people who complain that nothing will ever change to contribute just a little bit to this effort. Just do it, for crying out loud. At least die trying!
The NFL team owners share all TV revenue, cap salaries, etc.
Actually, as much as I like Steinbeck, I think the truth is far more complicated than that. Race and immigration has something to do with it, as socialism was consistently tied to those groups. Government crackdowns, often fed through the work of the pinkertons or various state goverments is another. Third is that there was a constant effort to channel anger and frustration at the system through government intervention, such as with the attempts to regulate food and drugs after the publication of the Jungle or during the low point of the depression, where communism and fascism were looking pretty good.
I’d argue that many proletariats in America see themselves not as millionaires, but as middle class, as people who have a stake in what has been constructed as the ultimate middle class society. If we had to get all Foucauldian about it, I’d say they’ve internalized middle class values and work to replicate those and a fair amount of that rests of individual hard work and the so-called protestant work ethic.
Like I said, I like Steinbeck, but that quote kind of smacks of the sort of thinking that the Frankfurtt school philosophers were engaged in, that the poor are too dumb to know what is good for them, but we do.
I agree with this…Class is economic, but it’s also social. Plenty of people see themselves as middle class, when they are working class… But I think you also have factor in assests that one can gain with a higher wage. Does property ownership put you in a different class? Does having a fair amount of savings? Plus, is there some objective measure of where one belongs or is it more subjective, based on how one perceives oneself, and how one is perceived? Values matter here, I think.
I don’t think we should throw out baby marx with the bath water, but I do think he was pretty bound to his time and place. He was making observations about his time, and extrapolating it out over the rest of time, which can be dangerous. I think the specificity matters and that while theory is nice, it can miss lots of specifics that matter. He had no real theory of race, for example, which tends to get lots of Marxists in trouble when looking at the US context. Race might be a “construct”, but it has pretty real consequences in US history. Plus, as a friend of mine likes to say, he has no theory of desire. Related to that, I think that the type of economy matters. A service/consumer economy is different in some important ways to an industrial economy. Like I was just saying to @krigelmanj the social context matters. And I find Foucault persuasive about some issues, such as the internalization of our own social discipline.
Again, I don’t want to not use Marx, but I think he needs some qualification to understand the functioning of the capitalist economy today.
Yes, sort of. I think it was Aviva Chomsky talks about it in her book Linked Labor Histories. She argues that factories in the industrialized north, moved first south, then overseas, in search of ever cheaper forms of labor. I guess Thomas Sugrue sort of talks about that in his case study on Detroit - he brings in race as a category of analysis in a really effective way, I think. Race and class both matter, especially as civil rights acts were passed in the mid 60s.
Though @anon61221983 sends up these broad, abstract cultural force explanations pretty darn thoroughly above, to the extent that they do matter I think it’s important that Americans have never faced, battled and taken down an ahistorical aristocracy. Ahistorical in the sense that the story of their ascent was never really witnessed or told, it was just vaguely “bestowed” by divine right and a claim to superior worth not tied to worldly efforts or deeds. In the U.S. our (erroneous and oversimplified) picture of wealth is that it is earned, and in fact earned by those anti-aristocratic gents on the winning side of the Magna Carta. I hope we don’t have to wait 200 years to finally take down the great-great-great, etc… grandchildren of our Titans of Industry because the limbs of the family tree of holding up claims of “earned it by inheriting from those that did earn it” have finally become so far from the trunk that they break under their own ridiculous weight.
You know, I have a friend who is working on the issue of the Congress of Congressional Freedom and the CIA, and he had this Italian intellectual being quoted as saying that the reason he wasn’t a staunch anti-communist like the CIA would like, was because he had lived through fascism. I think what you’re saying is related to that…
It can. If you buy a house, it doesn’t affect class, but if you buy a business it can. If your wage allows you to get enough savings to invest, and you can live well primarily off the return on your capital, you aren’t really working class anymore. The point is that even high wage workers are subject to the same wage labour relationship as every other worker, just that they have a bit more leverage.
Both are important, but in different ways. It can be objectively determined (with some fuzziness on the edges) what one’s class is within capitalism. What people perceive their class to be is shaped by surrounding society and conditions how they will act politically about their situation. If the working poor all view themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, this won’t alter their actual class, as they will still be subject to all the same things as any other worker (employer-employee power imbalance, downward wage pressure, unemployment, etc), but it means they would likely be hostile to attempts to improve their situation through unions, minimum wage hikes, social safety nets, etc.
Marx wasn’t right about every little thing, but he got the broad contours of capitalism down, particularly its social dynamics like class. These social dynamics aren’t fundamentally different between Victorian England and contemporary America, but in Bangladeshi textile mills, you’d be hard pressed to find any distinction. On race, Marx didn’t write very much himself, but there is a mountain of Marxist writing about race in the US context alone. Marxist historiography has been about writing back into history all the groups (lower classes, women, people of colour, etc) who have been written out, and explaining how constructs like class, gender, and race operate and how people engage with them. Foucault was expanding on Marx, who would agree that political consciousness descends from social circumstance.
I’m not really sure what you mean here. Marx’s earlier writings (pre Manifesto) have a fair bit about ideas on human nature and the concept of freedom. In his unpublished notes there’s stuff about art and love as well.
I think we’re quibbling over slightly different conceptions over Marx’s contemporary usefulness. I think saying he is “pretty bound to his time and place” undersells his importance as a foundation that others have expanded on to cover issues he didn’t tackle or foresee like race or post colonialism.
My opinion is more in line with yours then Steinbeck’s on this topic. I was providing a sourced for the ‘displaced’ millionaires line above.
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