A great example
2 Likes
By the way, I say this as someone who has styled himself a conservative/libertarian (more the later) most of my life. I remain firm in my belief that the government ought to do as little as possible and the stuff it should do should be done with as little market distortion as possible ā I donāt want the government to either care or be able to do anything about whether someone wants to spend their money on crack or solar panels ā but Iāve come to reluctantly believe that some minimum income actually might be a reasonable thing.
This isnāt the forum to get too far into the woods, except to say yes, consumption taxes can be regressive, but thatās what the minimum income is for.
1 Like
Definitely true. Thatās what the Vox article was, and thereās an awful lot of obnoxious liberal moralizing that leads nowhere. Of course, thatās a recurrent phenomenon, because thatās one of liberalismās tricks: choosing moralism over system analysis.
The article is contradictory: it condemns the lack of systemic analysis in the concept of privilege, but replaces it with a slogan, that also lacks systemic analysis.
This gets at much of what concerns me about this. Kilpatrick is a socialist, and an editor of Jacobin Magazine, an explicitly socialist magazine, where this article was published. Itās addressed to an audience that should know the difference between class position and income level, and should know better than to elevate a useful slogan to a platform. And yet Iāve been seeing a fair number of Marxists praising this article.
So part of whatās going on, I think, is that this is actually an argument in a debate about strategy for socialists. Kilpatrickās emphasized, in Tweets about the reactions to this article, that he thinks that itās critical for socialists to defend the āWe are the 99%ā slogan, which he thinks is a breakthrough.
I disagree. It was a good slogan, but it only gets us so far; itās limited, as the Occupy movement was limited. Itās one thing to open a dialogue with people whoāve been attracted to right wing populism, but you have to move to the next step in that conversation.
6 Likes
None of these examples are corporations lobbying for greater government power.
Everyone knows corporations lobby. I was responding to the specific Occupy/Tea Party Venn Diagram.
Iād say that this might be a good example, although Iām not sure. Certainly if for-profit prisons were lobbying to give the government greater power to classify more drugs as illegal, for instance, that would be a great example. Merely lobbying for minimum sentencing requirements, while horrible, is not lobbying to grant the government more power. So that wouldnāt be an example at all.
Again, no one is arguing that corporations donāt lobby the government, or that politicians arenāt in the pockets of corporations.
The reason Iām being specific about this is that the Venn Diagram presented above by @atl is making a straw man argument about how Occupy and the Tea Party have more in common than they think. While in general this kind of thing is easy to do (look at all the online quizzes that cherry-pick positions to prove that youāre actually a Libertarian), I donāt think this example is a good one at all.
While Occupiers may hate the coziness of politicians and corporations, the solution that many of them/us favor is often more government power to regulate. Elizabeth Warren is an excellent example of an Occupy hero. What does she favor? More government power to regulate corporations.
The Venn Diagram presents a generally-inaccurate statement (as far as I can tell) to make people on both sides of the spectrum nod their heads and say āyeahā¦ that IS what I hate.ā
7 Likes
The fundamental issue with that solution though is while corporations and government should be opposed, they have evolved into co-dependence. This is why the Republican party is currently thoroughly split in the US, between the conservatives and the establishment, and the Establishment Republicans have been frequently crossing the aisle to work together with the Democrats. A bigger government is just going to continue to hand out more favors.
1 Like
What would you say to the proposition that most of the things āgovernment ought to doā have to do with correcting spontaneously occurring or privately engineered market distortions?
And I do agree that a minimum income would go a long way towards solving a lot of problems - and eliminating a lot of wasteful bureaucracy - in one fell swoop. Out of curiosity, how would you propose setting and updating the minimum?
1 Like
The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.
~C.L.R. James; 1938
5 Likes
I presume thatās why the article contained several paragraphs addressing this specific point:
But what then is one-percentdom? Is it simply earning north of
$340,000 a year? $10,000 less and youāre Tom Joad, $10,000 more and
youāre the Monopoly Man?
No ā itās about the class it places you in.
The category of class, after all, is relational ā not gradational.
Most of the super rich get their money by virtue of exploiting the labor
of others and holding private property ā corporate shares, real estate
investments, bonds and treasury bills, etc. ā that they will fight
tooth and nail to protect.
Even when the income of the one percent (mostly the bottom half of
that select group) is derived primarily from high salaries (as opposed
to returns on investment) itās far more likely to be reinvested in
shares, bonds, and real estate ā and of course elite educations and
other opportunities for their children ā than the income of the middle
40 percent, who have hardly anything left once the bills are paid.
That means that even with nothing more than a killer W-2, the
salaried lower half of the one percent still have the means to
consolidate themselves as an elite class while the rest of us are
immiserated.
In essence, the article cuts to the heart of the problem. Unity is strength, and a great proportion of activism is directed at achieving self-defeating division, swiftly followed by blaming the rest of the 99% for not getting on board with the narrowest agenda.
1 Like
But heās explicitly reducing class to income level in that passage. Heās explicitly arguing that your paycheck determines your class position. In fact, on re-reading this, his argument is worse than Iād originally said.
And again, while the Vox article was certainly an example of the abuse of the concept of privilege, Kilpatrick is not considering the way itās used by people of color, and others, to explain the way their concerns and their issues are routinely ignored or trivialized, even by their nominal allies.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the 99% rhetoric suggests that heās arguing for an alliance of the working and middle classes, and his neglect of the better application of the concept of privilege suggests heās not sufficiently concerned about working class unity. This is, potentially, disastrous.
2 Likes
Like I said last time I saw that diagram, thatās one of the basic idea behind libertarian-socialism and has been for the last 150 years. Also bear in mind that the difference between a big business and a small one is the extensive use of outsourcing jobs to private contractors.
I suspect the libertarian-capitalist who created it doesnāt want anyone to know that though. Yes, I checked his article.
1 Like
I believe the example youāre looking for is this:
http://www.npr.org/2010/10/28/130833741/prison-economics-help-drive-ariz-immigration-law
7 Likes
Are we even reading the same article? In my quote, heās explicit saying that it isnāt income alone that matters, itās how income governs your relationship with the power structures of capitalism. The elite, the 1% is composed both of people who are rentiers, living off of the returns from capital, and a layer of managerial workers who have so much income that they are able to convert that income into capital and join the rentier class. Ownership and control of the mechanisms of capitalism are held in their hands, and itās this wealth and power relationship that defines the 1%.
What middle class are you talking about here? This seems to be the Vox error writ large. Your so called āmiddleā are nothing more than a slightly wealthier section of the working 99%, that weāre arbitrarily dividing out on cultural and consumer lines. And itās this hyper focus on every real and imagined division within the 99%, this crab-bucketing, divisive, ghettoising mumbo-jumbo ridden use of the the concept of āprivilegeā which is disastrous.
If you actually want to address the problems described above, youāve got that exactly backwards. Look at the paragraph you replied to and actually read it again.
Taxing consumption taxes 100% of the income of people who live hand-to-mouth, only the tiniest fraction of the richest peopleās income, and effectively none of the income of the corporations and trusts and so on that they control. The people in the top 0.1% spend hardly the tiniest fraction of their income; they donāt need to because they have so absurdly much more income than they need to live in luxury.
Taxing consumption would be the fastest way to further increase the divide between the average and the rich.
6 Likes
The biggest problem with the article is that it rebuts the Vox piece for its idiotic application of privilege, but without acknowledging that there are very real divisions within American society that are not solely reducible to class. Things like racism and sexism have to be addressed as part of fighting economic inequality, because these things are used to divide people and they further perpetuate economic inequality. For example, the systematic underpaying of women and minorities helps drive down wages overall, and can be used to make men and whites resentful of having their jobs stolen by someone who has no choice but to work for less. While all these people may share the same class interest, there are still significant barriers to solidarity. Papering over these divisions in trying to construct a 99% based solidarity is a near certain recipe for catastrophe.
4 Likes
That second half of your sentence is exactly what Iām objecting to. This is a base-superstructure relationship, and income is not the base. The elite tier of managers who are paid enough for their salary to be converted into capital, are already part of the ruling class; the income follows from that.
Completely wrong.
The middle class, in Marxist terms, has the role of mediating between the working class and ruling class. The classic example is a small business owner ā a.k.a., the petty bourgeois. Beyond this are managers, independent professionals, and middling bureaucrats. They generally have a measure of independence within their roles, play key roles in electoral politics, and frequently put themselves at the heads of social movements. However, as their role is defined by their relationship as mediators between the other two classes, theyāre independent as individuals, not as a class: they cannot really play an independent role as a class.
Most estimates Iāve seen put the middle class at about 20-25% of the population. I would guess that their numbers are dropping, under current economic pressures, and as more are driven into the working class. Small business owners go under, bureaucratic positions are eliminated, professionals are reduced to employees without independence ā consider the proletarianization of academics, in particular, as a recent trend.
The middle class tends to play a stabilizing role, so when they get desperate, itās an indication of a serious crisis.
3 Likes
I agree. You might be responding to @atl , who did talk about a consumption tax. I am 100% with you that consumption taxes are regressive and would increase inequality. Sorry if I replied to the wrong post or confused the thread.
How about a property tax on total assets, with an exception for primary residence of 500K or less?
I hear they are lobbying to make pain management drugs harder to obtain, because restricting access to effective pain relief has been shown to drive up illegal opiate use and thus increase imprisonment. Is that a good enough example?
1 Like
So, people whose relationship with capital is still fundamentally C-M-C, who still rely on employment and wage labour, and who still ācannot really play an independent role as a class.ā? Sounds like a textbook definition of a section of the working, non-elite class to me.
And even if we accept this division that I canāt see with a rhetorical microscope, it still leaves the rest of that paragraph as a complete non-sequiter.
Thereās a concept that tells ordinary working people that other ordinary working people are somehow āprivilegedā and natural allies of the elite, and yet somehow Connor Kilpatrick is the one undermining working class unity by not supporting this?
1 Like
Small business owners both work and own capital. Managers and bureaucrats manage workers and capital, which they do not own, but over which they have immediate control. Professionals are their own managers. The common element is that they occupy intermediate positions, and have a degree of personal autonomy which working class people generally do not have.
A critical, recurring question throughout the history of working class movements in the 20th century was how to relate to the middle class. Iām at a loss how you could drop a reference to the first chapter of Capital and yet not realize this.
But then, Iām astonished at Kilpatrick as well.
Backwards. Part of the reason to discuss privilege is to figure out why certain wings of the working class keep siding with their natural enemies, the elite, against their natural allies, the rest of the working class. The obvious answer is that one section is being tricked, with petty bribery. The nagging question is, why donāt they realize the bribes arenāt worth it? Because they generally donāt perceive it as bribery.
I could be wrong but I think you may have misread that. I read it as āthe person making $65K probably has more in common with the person making $365K than with the truly downtrodden; donāt let the rhetoric of solidarity lead you to believe that you understand the lives of the dirt-poor just because youāre both being fucked by the ultra-wealthy.ā
But like I said, I could be wrong.
2 Likes
