I guess the answer to what will kill neoliberalism is the State if we convince it that neoliberals are superfluous.
For individual wealthy people, this simply isn’t true in their personal experience.
I mean, let’s imagine a car company.
The company provides products ostensibly geared at people, right? But where do they get all their components? One level down the supply chain, and you have a thousand smaller companies designing and building bits and pieces of cars. These are big enterprises full of workers, executives, etc. and their idea of a customer is some other massive business. Making a sale involves executives, lawyers, and some sales specialists sitting around a table at a steakhouse drinking Crystal and chatting about the merits of a third Ferrari.
Each level down the supply chain, it’s the same. Maybe the level of wealth varies, but all the people in the room (at least the ones who talk and aren’t the hired help) are rich.
And look, other than Tesla, a car company doesn’t sell to people either. It actually sells to dealerships, rental car companies, corporate and government fleets, and so on. Plus, these companies are huge: an individual executive or director is hardly going to deal with the hoi polloi in any business: they deal with other departments, directors, executives, etc. You know, other rich people.
This basic model is true everywhere. Does Google sell to people? Mostly, no. It sells to advertising departments, propaganda houses, etc. Do people at Google deal with customers? Mostly, no.
What about a department store? Corporate deals with supply chain issues, selecting / specifying products from suppliers, real estate, financing to cover variation in demand, and so on. The people who actually deal with customers? They’re the hoi polloi themselves: the hired help. People get rich in these organizations by positioning themselves against other rich people, making a case that they saved the company money, managing to squeeze a little more work for less pay out of the workers.
Actually dealing with the little people is a pretty small part of the economy, and actual rich people insulate themselves from it very well. Why would they think it really matters anymore?
3 Likes
The working class is the only economic group in America that reliably votes majority Dem. The core of the GOP base is middle-class suburban whites.
Yeah, there are some working class people who are dumb enough to let their racism override their economic interests. But those people are not the root of your problem; they’re only a small and peripheral factor.
American fascism is overwhelmingly a product of the economically privileged.
4 Likes
There’s something really wrong with the system. In the current climate, a person only has value if they can contribute in strictly defined and circumscribed ways. If they cannot, they are “otherized” to justify withdrawing any support. The “makers vs. takers” rhetoric is a prime example.
6 Likes
The fuck of it is most of those 'maker’s don’t make shit except money…
I guess maybe that’s what they really mean.
2 Likes
False, consumption is roughly 70% of GDP. Without the little people constantly buying (yes, constantly, which is why month over month consumer confidence indexes are critical to econ analysis) the economy as a whole is prone to downturn.
This is part of the explanation for the massive expansion of credit and debtload in the absence of rising wages.[quote=“Elladan, post:23, topic:101750”]
actual rich people insulate themselves from it very well.
[/quote]
They certainly like to think so. But unless they’re in the ‘own my own private island class’ they are subject to economic failure like the rest of us.
2 Likes
Whilst I appreciate the Dickens allusion, this is kind of garbled.
Surplus is a value judgement; it means unnecessary, that which is left over when needs and goals are met. In economic jargon it means unutilized, but Darity says flat out that this “surplus” population has economic utility - it serves to depress wages, facilitating the cheap labor conservatism he seems to be endorsing.
Personally I suspect that the boardrooms of most multinational corporations are entirely filled with surplus population. Surplus from my point of view, perhaps not Darity’s or Charles Dickens’.
Anyway, we can avoid that muddle by substituting unemployed population for “surplus” population. Then it states half a truth - “An unemployed population under capitalism has a purpose &etc”. It’s only half of the truth because the relationship between supply of labor and demand for labor under capitalism doesn’t exist only when supply outstrips demand; it doesn’t disappear when one hundred percent employment is reached. When demand exceeds supply, that drives up wages and makes a society more wealthy overall, since it gives more buying and bargaining power to more people.
2 Likes
This is why staunch capitalists prefer the euphemism ‘full employment’ so as to disguise the naked value judgement of ‘surplus labor.’
Of course, full employment has never meant what the uninitiated would think those two words used in tandem might mean.
1 Like
People spend inordinate amounts of their notional free time playing games in which the primary goal is to run up huge scores. What should real life be any different?
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
