Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter.
The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.
Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.
Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”
The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: Society is not mad or messed up, you are.
There is an obvious political dimension to the claim that wellbeing, with the right attitude, can be produced spontaneously. Months after being elected leader of the most right-wing government in recent British history, yogurt-featured erstwhile PR man David Cameron launched an ill-fated “happiness agenda.” The scheme may have been better received if the former prime minister were not simultaneously engaged in decimating health care, welfare, and higher education—the very social structures that make life manageable for ordinary British people. As part of Cameron’s changes to the welfare system, unemployment was rebranded as a psychological disorder. According to a study in the Medical Humanities journal, in the teeth of the longest and deepest recession in living memory, the jobless were encouraged to treat their “psychological resistance” to work by way of obligatory courses that encouraged them to adopt a jollier attitude toward their own immiseration. They were harangued with motivational text messages telling them to “smile at life” and that “success is the only option.”
This mode of coercion has been adopted by employers, too, as Cederström and Spicer note. Zero-hour-contract laborers in an Amazon warehouse, “although they are in a precarious situation … are required to hide these feelings and project a confident, upbeat, employable self.” All of which begs the question: Who exactly are we being well for?
Feeding the poor and helping others is not “good PR” for anarchism or anarchists. Feeding the poor and helping others IS anarchism, fundamentally. I’ve been thinking about this, and I think this is important for both anarchists and non-anarchists to understand. We aren’t using these opportunities to spread our ideology, or manipulate you into agreeing with us. We aren’t a political party trying to win your support. Mutual aid is a fundemental part of what being an anarchist means.
We have entered a phase of regression,and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics.
In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check.
The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check.
Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check.
The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check.
Social and economic mobility is low. Check.
Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.
Even with a diploma, you will likely find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives. Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to crucial healthcare.
How did we get this way?
What happened to America’s middle class, which rose triumphantly in the post-World War II years, buoyed by the GI bill, the victories of labor unions, and programs that gave the great mass of workers and their families health and pension benefits that provided security?
Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.
Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”
What can we do?
We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging.
If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly.
The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions.
We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans.
We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector,
reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and
focus on embracing an integrated American population.
We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.
We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone — including some of the rich people.”
Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority.
Without a robust middle class, America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.
Democratic socialists have advised presidents and cabinet members; they have been elected as members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and as as state legislators, judges, sheriffs and school board members. But their primary service has been at the municipal level, as mayors and city council members—leading not just big cities such as Milwaukee but mid-sized cities like Reading, Pennsylvania, and small towns like Girard, Kansas.
So it is worth noting that, at a moment when democratic socialism is experiencing a surge of interest and enthusiasm nationwide, some of the first electoral victories are coming in small and medium-sized cities. The 2016 presidential campaign mounted by Bernie Sanders—who first came to prominence in the early 1980s as the democratic socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont—opened up the constrained American discourse and got millions of Americans thinking anew about an ideology that was deeply rooted in American history. Sanders struck a chord, especially with young working class activists, when he declared:“Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy. Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.”
Since the 2016 race finished, Democratic Socialists of America—the group forged over many decades by Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dolores Huerta, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West and others to give voice to American democratic socialist vision—has experienced rapid growth in states across the country. And now DSA members are campaigning for and winning local races in states like Georgia and Illinois.
More than a dozen DSA members now serve in local posts across the country, and their numbers are growing.
And the jokes came deliciously thick and fast soon after the above photographs, in which Sanders appears to be speaking from inside the carton, were shared on Twitter.
It probably depends greatly on their class position and level of knowledge about socialism and capitalism. I’d say that most working- and middle-class liberals who call themselves “democratic socialists” are probably sincere in their support of social democracy and they probably genuinely want to see a more egalitarian society. But because of capitalism and the way it permeates our perspectives, these liberals don’t have any frame of reference for a system beyond capitalism – they just assume (like most people) that the only viable alternative to neoliberal capitalism is heavily-regulated capitalism or state capitalism. Typically, the more these people explore what actual socialism entails, the sooner they leave liberalism and join the resistance.
Upper-class liberals, on the other hand, tend to view these things in pragmatic terms. They may see Social Democracy Lite as a way of keeping the masses better fed so that they’re less likely to revolt. Civil unrest is a major concern of the upper class, for obvious reasons – they like their cushy positions in society and “angry pitchfork-wielding peasants” challenge their gold-plated bubbles. Sure, some upper-class liberals might be sincere in their support of a left-liberal setup, but ultimately it doesn’t matter too much because when the chips are down and conditions ripen, they will almost always remain in support of the capitalist system that maintains their lifestyle.
Anyway, I try to be patient with the former type of liberal. I recommend that other leftists do the same – most of us didn’t start off as anti-capitalist, and we were often lucky enough to have patient leftists guide us into the right direction. Any leftism that refuses to work with reformists or liberals in any context is an anti-social leftism that will never win over the people before it’s too late.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren will join Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for a political rally in Boston that will join the nation’s leading political progressives under one roof.
The rally, sponsored by Sanders’ political non-profit Our Revolution and Raise Up Massachusetts, will take place at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Orpheum Theater in Downtown Crossing.
The rally will end an active day in the area for Sanders. Earlier in the day he will give a speech and take questions at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate in Dorchester. Later, he will attend a book signing at MIT.
Sanders and Warren have worked closely alongside each other in the Senate, but many of his supporters were disappointed that she never endorsed his presidential campaign in 2016.
can u imagine being one of the best humanitarians out there just to have headlines talk about your pregnancy instead of the work you put in with trying to help genocide/rape victims…..
lovingdread 