#THE PROBLEM IS CAPITALISM AND EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKING CLASS REGARDLESS OF WHAT JOB YOU HAPPEN TO TAKE | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

undefined5posts · 4 years ago

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Credit: Jordan J. Lloyd

I've been trying to dive deeper into politics, discover the genuine roots of our society, the origins of our beliefs, and the consequences of our economic system. It's a big, long, wide journey and through multiple sources such as articles, images, videos and multiple social media platforms, I've been trying to educate myself more on important subjects.

Communism, capitalism, libertarian, conservative, the left, the right, the history, the impact. It is scary to commit to everything because once you start, you simply cannot stop, once you start waking up your conscience about the horrible reality, the lies, the truths, you cannot put it back to sleep. You can't just ignore prejudice, especially when you're extremely conscious of it's omnipresence. I have continually tried to build my own opinions all while actively creating bullet point arguments in my mind because I just know that at some point I will have to defend my thinking, and I want to do it right.

Now, I am so far from being enlightened, I am a beginner and an amateur in all of those themes, but I am trying, which is the only way to start and grow.

So to tell you about my beliefs, I am a militant human rights activist, I believe in equal opportunities regardless of gender identity, sex, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race and disability. This is a fact, not a belief, but the system was obviously not built to protect all people, its wasn't created to serve everyone equally but to grant a privilege to some and harm others. The current state of the world is not a slip, an accident or a misfunction of our brilliant system but a testament of it operating remarkably well. I believe that equity leads to equality, and I believe that we cannot "fix" methodologies that were immorally created with absolutely no honor whatsoever. I believe in reproductive rights, in legal, safe abortions for anybody who needs one. I believe in the decriminalization of marijuana. I believe that the death penalty is a despicable punition that should be banned as soon as possible. I believe in defunding the police and the military. I believe that it is a shame that I even have to talk about police brutality, I don't want to have to say that it is one of the most horrible things our world has originated, I feel extremely dense when I do because it seems like the most obvious certitude and I refuse to believe that this is a controversial statement. I believe that everything I have just stated, along with many more, isn't anything grand but the bare minimum, the bar is low, and yet, we still have the fight for basic human decency.

Humanity has become an option. We have normalized supporting people that represent everything wrong in this world under the name of tolerance. The left has never claimed to be tolerant towards hateful beings, We have never accepted homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism and sexism. We cannot, for exemple, accept nazis, as too much tolerance inevitably leads to intolerance. This picture explains it perfectly:

I consider myself a communist/ socialist. The two terms still confuse me a little, some say they are the same, some say they differ quite a bit. What I know is that socialism is the transitional period between capitalism and communism. At the end of the day, the final result and goal is a stateless, moneyless and clasless society that will provide to each his need.

Our capitalistic society has brainwashed us way more than you may think. It is the root of so many of our issues, the underground demon of our problems. Every idea, thought, belief, and misconception of ours were all affected by our current economic system. It has sold us the billionnaire dream which is one of the most toxic things capitalism has offered. We have looked up to billionaires for way too long, why are they so idolized? Most of them come from high upper class families that can easily afford to invest in their inventions and creations. After starting up their companies and occasionnaly stealing other's people ideas to ultimately get undeserved merit, they then can start to properly exploit their hardworking employees's labour. And for unlimited hours and a minimum wage which probably won't even suffice you to survive, you will have to either pick up more shifts or a second or even third job, especially if you have a family to support. All while the CEO barely does any of the work and gets all the praise and money. So no, they don't all come from really poor families and have built everything for nothing.

The worst thing is that we've been so gaslit and brainwashed that we're proud of our own exploitation, we are wired to think that to be successful we have to suffer, work 10 jobs we all hate, constantly pick up extra hours, have 2 hours of sleep, have no free time to do anything we love, waste our entire youth, be depressed our entire adulthood, to finally have a few pennies to spend when we're eighty. We so strongly believe that this is the only right way to be successful that I don't think many of us have dared to question it's authority, and even if we do, we quickly accept that this a truth, a fact we cannot change and this is just the way things are.

We have capitalized water, food, land, forests, oceans, space, and everything in betweeen. Money is social construct and we have deliberately let it take over our lives. To think about the wasted opportunities and the misery that we have to endure so others can enjoy life truly angers me.

Also, communism is not an ideology that has every actually taken place. Despite what they say, there was never actually a communist country. However, every nation that has attempted a socialist system, for exemple Burkina Faso, has thrived. But of course, once capitalist countries noticed that, they decided to murder it's leader. So in conclusion, the only reason socialism failed is because of capitalism and it's interventions.

"As President (1983-1987), Sankara initiated economic reforms that shifted his country away from dependence on foreign aid and reduced the privileges of government officials; he cut salaries, including his own, decreed that there would be no more flying in first class or driving Mercedes as standard issue vehicles for Ministers and other government workers. He led a modest lifestyle and did not personally amass material wealth. President Sankara encouraged self-sufficiency, including the use of local resources to build clinics, schools and other needed infrastructure. [...] President Sankara promoted land reform, childhood vaccination, tree planting, communal school building, and nation-wide literacy campaigns. He was committed to gender equity and women’s rights and was the first African leader to publicly recognize the AIDS pandemic as a threat to African countries. Although Sankara became somewhat more authoritarian during his Presidency, his ideas, and the possibility that they could spread, were viewed by many as posing the greatest threat. President Sankara was assassinated during a coup led by a French-backed politician, Blaise Compaoré, in October 1987. Compaoré served as the President of Burkina Faso from October 1987 through October 2014, when he himself was overthrown."

Via:https://africandevelopmentsuccesses.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/success-story-from-burkina-faso-thomas-sankaras-legacy/

I have been reading and watching some amazing human rights activists, notably Angela Davis, Malcolm X and James Baldwin. The people that were villainized, labeled as violent and radical, when every single word that came out of their mouhs were pure facts. They are probably some of the most eloquent people I have had the pleasure of hearing. Every sentence, every argument, every single detail made so much sense and opened my mind to so many new realizations. This is the perfect exemple of how the media tarnishes the reputation of wise black women and men. I would strongly advise you to research more about them.

"Socialism & communism are demonized in the west to the point of erasing influential individuals' socialist advocacy. Heres a short list of people you may not have known were socialists/ communists:

MLK

Albert Einstein

Nelson Mandela

Frida Kahlo

Tupac Shakur

Mark Twain

Malcom X

Oscar Wilde

Bertrand Russell

Hellen Keller

Pablo Picasso

George Orwell

Shia LaBeouf

John Lennon

Woody Guthrie

Socialism & communism are not dirty words. Some of the most brilliant minds of our history were socialists and communists. Embrace it." Via @sleepisocialist on twitter

So what else can I say, capitalism has ruined our society and the way we act and think. I know a lot of people refuse to support communism because they think it's too much of a perfect ideal utopian world for it to ever actually exist. And to that I say, first of all, so you agree, it is a wonderful theory, and second of all, a world without racism, sexism, homophobia or any kind or discrimination could also be perceived as "too ideal to actually exist", but does that mean I'm giving up on talking, educating myself and others, protesting and trying to build a better future? Absolutely not. This is the objective, it would be so dumb to think that we just couldn't achieve that so let's not even try.

I want to talk more in detail about communism, theory, human rights, etc... but I don't want to make this post any longer. I will however be posting more about it soon enough.

I know this is a little different than what I usually post, but I want to speak, tell you all my own opinions, I don't want to just repost activism related stuff. I'll continue to do that, but not exclusively. I know it won't get as many interactions as my other posts, but this is what I needed at some point in my life, and if I could make understanding some basic informations easier to some people, it'll already be a great accomplishment.

Thank you for reading.

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96thdayofrage · 3 years ago

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Austerity and Mass Murder: An American Pastime

The race to the bottom is an imperative of austerity, which is foundational to the history of state violence in the U.S.

Not a month after the eviction moratorium was allowed to expire in the United States did the Biden administration do away with nearly all pandemic-related protections. The latest casualty in the U.S. race to the bottom is the federal unemployment boost which provided $300 extra per week to workers not generally considered eligible for the benefit. Estimates predict that at least fifteen million workers across the United States are now at risk of losing their housing . Millions more will see their incomes drastically dip amid devastating spikes in the cost of living. These breakneck austerity measures come as the contagious Delta variant continues to kill more than a thousand people per day.

The pandemic has only further exposed how mass murder and austerity are an American pastime for the ruling class of the imperialist albatross. Nearly 900,000 people have died over the last 18 months due to the refusal of the United States’ political class to curb transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the Biden administration’s hoarding of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it is estimated that 100,000 more people will die from COVID-19 in the U.S. before the year’s end. Workers in all sectors of the capitalist economy are quitting their jobs in record numbers as they weigh the risks between engaging in low-wage work or avoiding COVID-19. Cuts in pandemic-related protections send a message that workers must make a choice: go to work or find themselves hungry and houseless.

This choice didn’t emerge from the pandemic. Rather, such coercion is a pillar in the foundations of U.S. capitalism. Capitalism is predicated upon the sale of labor to capitalists or those who own the means of production privately to accumulate maximum profit. A wage is provided to workers at a fraction of the value that they produce. The rest is pocketed as profit by the bosses.

Austerity is a key feature of the neoliberal stage of capitalism whereby finance and monopoly capitalists have calculated that any kind of so-called “welfare state” is an obstruction to their lust for profit. That calculation is based upon the very real crisis faced by a system mired in contradiction. The more intense the exploitation of the worker becomes, the harder and faster the system reaches a “bust cycle” vis-à-vis underconsumption (generally called overproduction). Austerity is an acknowledgement that underconsumption is a permanent feature of capitalism at this stage of development. That’s why universal welfare policies such as Medicare for All, a living wage, and student loan forgiveness find no support from any section of the capitalist class regardless of their political persuasion.

The class war inherent to U.S. capitalism is maintained and nurtured by state violence. U.S. capitalism has long surpassed its European forefathers in its capacity for brutality. The U.S. was founded upon a white supremacist chattel slave system which killed millions of Africans and left millions more in subhuman conditions of wage-free labor for several centuries. Indigenous people were nearly exterminated by a settler colonial regime that served as a precondition for U.S. capitalist development. Neither Africans nor indigenous people have received reparations for the crimes of colonialism and their oppression continues into the present day in a myriad of forms.

This includes the mass incarceration system (population 2 million or 25 percent of global total, 40 percent of which is Black American) and the legalized lynch mob known popularly among activists as “killer cops.” Police departments kill Black and indigenous people at nearly three times the rate of white Americans . And the entirety of U.S. society has been militarized, not just the cops and the prison system. A massive surveillance system collects private data from every individual residing in the United States as a means of social control. The U.S. military apparatus receives trillions of dollars to assert its hegemony abroad through drone strikes, invasions, coups, special operations, and a host of other forms of conventional and unconventional warfare.

There is no shortage of examples that demonstrate the direct link between militarism and austerity. The U.S. refuses to pledge the necessary $25 billion to vaccinate the world from COVID-19 yet has no problem providing this same sum of money to the Pentagon for endless war. Furthermore, Biden has sent more military weaponry to local police departments in the first quarter of his administration than the average quarterly expenditure under Donald Trump’s four years in the Oval Office. The U.S.’s addiction to militarism comes has an enormously negative impact on the economic health of the most oppressed sections of humanity worldwide. Extreme poverty has risen globally during the pandemic, and the economic conditions of Black America specifically have only become more precarious over this period .

State violence and militarism are thus tools of repression which help reproduce the misery of the exploited classes. These conditions have intensified the anti-social character of the U.S.’s “exceptional” capitalist system. Hurricane Ida serves as a prime example. More than fifty working class residents, many of them low-wage immigrant workers, were left to drown due to a lack of warning about the severity of the storm. Hundreds of thousands were still without power more than eleven days after Hurricane Ida passed through New Orleans.

This is what is meant by austerity and mass murder being an American pastime. The ruling class, what Glen Ford referred to as the “lords of capital,” has nothing to offer in the way of resolving the crises engendered by the system. Despite a global pandemic, climate catastrophe, and economic instability, the Biden administration is moving full steam ahead to satisfy the blood-soaked profits of its donor class. The race to the bottom will continue so long as the Democratic Party maintains its stranglehold over left politics. A reckoning is in order. The motive force behind this reckoning will be determined by how soon we can develop a critical mass to shut the gates on the Democratic Party’s graveyard of social movements for good.

Danny Haiphong is a contributing editor to Black Agenda Report and co-author of the book “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.” He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow his work on Twitter @SpiritofHo and on YouTube as co-host with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report Present's: The Left Lens. You can support Danny on Patreon by clicking this link.

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scoutshonor56 · 5 years ago

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American History

Capitalism

To me, capitalism is one of those concepts that, in theory, is sound and based on common sense. After all, at its core it is a monetary system of reward for hard work and initiative, often involving significant risk.

Those willing to dedicate and apply themselves are rewarded proportionally, often leading to advancement, growth and prosperity – sounds fair to me. Certainly everyone, regardless of effort, shouldn’t be rewarded equally. Many folks, myself among them, are pretty much content to hold down a steady job that provides a modest, comfortable income and at the minimum, some type of health care and some basic “bennies”; everyone is different, and this works out well within the system.

The problem starts when this system goes unregulated, and the opportunity becomes not fairly available to all. When over time, this dream becomes a runaway money train with only a small, select group of privileged passengers. In short, unlimited greed while the rest are exploited; the “rest” are left to build the tracks and walk.

So, where did it all begin? Well, here in America anyways; what gave America the template for big corporations and their punitive relationship with their labor force? There are a lot of facets to the horror and history of human slavery in this country, but to be honest, I was surprised to find out that this was one of them. I became aware of this thanks to a recent piece featured in the NY Times, which is running a series of stories this month entitled “The 1619 Project” to mark the 400 year legacy of slavery here in America. It’s quite a lengthy read, so as best I can I will cover the basics, and of course, for the full story in detail you can refer to the article.

To lay the groundwork for this blog:

Did you know almost half of the American population makes under $15/hr? That middle class wages (when adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant since the late ‘70s while CEO wages and benefit packages have increased exponentially to obscene amounts? That the number of Americans receiving food stamps has increased 40% over the last ten years, yet we have over twice as many billionaires? That the richest 1% of America owns 40% of our nation’s wealth, while a larger share of working age people live in poverty here than in any other nation belonging to The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.)?

This impartial organization also rates its capitalist members in the category of worker rights and how easy it is to fire them. As far as worker’s rights, the U.S. shares second to last place with Malaysia, and out of 71 nations, the O.E.C.D. scores our country #1 in ease of being able to fire workers. In other words, “You’re Fired!” isn’t just our reality show president’s favorite tag line.

So let’s crack open the history book you won’t find in your average school curriculum, because here in America we much prefer our taught legacies with plenty of smoothing out, touching up, masking of flaws, and finishing with a thick, glossy coat of varnish.

There was a time, just before the Civil War, when the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by slaves was the nation’s most valuable export, a font of phenomenal wealth. New Orleans suddenly had a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City, and the backbone of all this selective wealth was the thriving slave trade, where the combined value of slaves exceeded that of all our factories and railroads. Can you imagine? An enterprising person with an entrepreneur’s spirit and ambition finding himself in a new world of seemingly endless natural resources, cheap land, and free labor? Its a capitalist’s Disney World of profit, filled with promises of limitless growth.

Well, OK, that was hundreds of years ago – what does that have to do with the workings of large, modern corporations today? Well, other than the obvious Golden Rule of Capitalism: maximum productivity out of your workers while spending the least amount of money on wages, health care and benefits…

Have you ever fired up your PC or laptop at work in the morning only to see yet another memo from management? A memo that came from your “team leader”, who got it from lower management, who got it from mid-level management, who got it from upper management, who got it from regional management, who got it from the “Big Boss”, who first had to get it OK’d by the BIG, BIG Boss? Well there you have it, the inner workings and corporate-like hierarchy of a typical slave labor work force on a typical large plantation.

The owner (or group of owners) supervised a top lawyer, who supervised another lawyer, who supervised an overseer, who supervised multiple bookkeepers, who supervised a group of enslaved head drivers and specialists, who finally supervised hundreds of slaves. Like today, accountability was foremost and strictly adhered to. Laborious and complex spread sheets were developed by hand for the first time in American industry, and volumes of data were kept to breakdown all aspects of bale production. Everything was tracked, recorded, quantified, analyzed, and accounted for, including meticulous record-keeping of a slave’s age, sex, when bought, performance, expected productivity over the years, potential value, breeding history, etc.

Sound familiar yet?

Who hasn’t endured the sweat inducing “performance review”, where you are essentially forced to appear before the low-end management judge to plead for your job, bringing evidence of your worthiness to the company? You may want to feel lucky that today you might get an upbraiding, maybe a negative mark that will go on your record. The poor black slave was faced with walking that fine line of performance, where his production must be maintained at a level of competence and profitability without being too much of a pacesetter in the fields; that not only got his fellow workers a cruel beating, but himself included if he (or she) didn’t maintain that level every day.

More than once over the years, when reading about the millionaires through our history, the billionaires and mega-billionaires of today, I’ve pondered the question: when is enough, enough? Is there even such a thing as “enough”? Is there ever a point where you sit back, think about throwing in your cards and spending the rest of your life enjoying your bottomless bank account and investments?

Kind of a moot point. A person who had a single billion dollars at their disposal today would have to spend $40 million a year for 25 years before they ran short of cash; which would mean burning through $3 million a month, or over $100K a day. And that’s just a single billion… I recently read an article that shed some light, or clarity onto this supposition, and according to the author, at some arbitrary point it does become no longer about money. It becomes all about power and position among your peers. Your image, your perceived position in this exclusive pack – who are the big dogs at the front of the sled.

My apologies if you find this all too unsettling, or uncomfortable; in which case feel free to refer to one of those Board of Education sanctioned history books where you can read the softer, more palatable version: how white Europeans came over to the New World, claimed it theirs (in the name of Manifest Destiny), got rid of those indigenous savage heathens who were ignorant of the one true god and didn’t know how to exploit the land properly anyways, and soon began shipping over the “darkies” from Africa to give them a much more fulfilling life on our cotton and sugar plantations, where they could contently live out their lives singing happy spiritual songs in the fields and enjoying a higher standard of living, thanks to the largess and Christian charity of “the masta’”. For those interested in the harsh truth, you can check out all of the chapters in this series so far at The 1619 Project.

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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IN THESE TIMES

THE CASE FOR A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

BY MATT BRUENIG

In America today, around two-thirds of the national income is paid out to workers in the form of labor compensation: wages, salaries, tips and benefits. The remaining one-third is paid out to capitalists in the form of passive income: dividends, interest, rents and capital gains. The capitalists do not work for their share of the national income. They simply own things and, by virtue of that ownership, passively extract income.

This arrangement would not be so disequalizing if the ownership of passive income-generating capital was evenly distributed, but it is not. Federal Reserve data show that millionaires own 80 percent of the country’s capital while the bottom 38 percent of Americans own none. This means that a small group of people receives the overwhelming majority of the nation’s passive income, which is one of the reasons inequality is so high.

For the last hundred years or so, market socialists like Rudolf Hilfderding, Oskar Lange, Rudolf Meidner and John Roemer have argued that we should solve this problem by collectivizing the ownership of wealth into common pools. The Norwegian government made the idea work over the past few decades through nationalizing oil resources, creating dozens of state-owned enterprises, and just ordinary taxing and saving. Today, Norwegian citizens collectively own 59 percent of their wealth in these types of funds (and 76 percent if you exclude owner-occupied housing).

The main Norwegian social wealth fund is especially interesting because it does not invest in speculative real estate or coal, and is planning to divest from oil and gas. It also excludes companies from its portfolio if they violate human rights and labor rights or engage in environmentally destructive practices.

Once the wealth is collectively owned, that raises an interesting question: What to do with the income it generates? In Norway, the money goes into public spending, mostly on robust social welfare programs. Another answer is to fund a universal basic income, or UBI (also called a “universal basic dividend” or “social dividend”) for everyone in society. Such a program exists in Alaska and helps to ensure everyone benefits from the state’s wealth, not just the super-rich. In part because of this, Alaska is the most equal state in America.

Unlike a JG, this kind of UBI has been tried successfully. Since 1982, Alaska has used investment returns from the Alaska Permanent Fund to pay out a universal basic dividend to everyone who lives in the state. In some years, the dividend has been as high as $2,072 for a single person or $8,288 for a family of four. If Norway paid a dividend from its much larger fund, it would have been $23,970 per person last year or $95,880 for a family of four. Both the Alaskan and Norwegian programs are wildly popular, work as advertised and could easily be copied by our national government.

THE PROBLEM IS PROFITS

BY ROHAN GREY AND RAÚL CARRILLO

Like Matt, we oppose the concentration of wealth and ownership. However, his approach of redistributing capital income, rather than reducing it, stands to make a bad situation worse.

Financial inequality is a symptom, not a cause, of capitalism. It exists because capitalists and managers control production while exploiting workers and the broader public for their own power and profit. This system scars communities and the environment in ways dividends cannot heal, causing death, disease and ecological collapse. Consequently, proposals that rely on ever-greater profits risk entrenching the current economy’s worst abuses.

In particular, we oppose linking the performance of stocks, bonds and real estate to poverty reduction, as Matt’s social wealth fund proposal would do. Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, Halliburton, Facebook, Amazon and the rest of the Fortune 500 are not merely money-making machines; they are sprawling private governance regimes that warp the lives of billions. What’s good for General Motors is rarely good for the country (or planet). Furthermore, the hostility of central bankers to the working class, especially workers of color, should cause leftists to balk at reforms featuring a technocracy of fund managers.

The Norwegian and Alaskan experiences also cause us concern rather than comfort. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF), for example, amassed its wealth by investing in fossil fuels. Today it invests in overseas real estate and earns passive income off the backs of workers in the Global South. The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF), still rakes in healthy profits from fossil fuel extraction, while Alaska remains plagued by poverty, unemployment and underinvestment in public services. Meanwhile, the highest dividend paid by the APF—$2,072 per person—is still far too low to provide substantial respite from work, the alleged advantage of a universal basic income (UBI) over a job guarantee (JG).

Regardless of the size of the payout, we are concerned that mailing everyone an identical check will increase inequality, rather than reduce it. Early social dividend proponents, such as C.H. Douglas, envisioned an “aristocracy of producers and a democracy of consumers.” A standalone UBI, financed by a wealth fund or otherwise, does not challenge the capitalist system of production. History demonstrates technocratic elites favor a standalone UBI precisely because it actually subsidizes corporate power, rather than threatens it.

Instead of a stock dividend, we should guarantee housing, healthcare, education, family and disability support, reparations, and other public goods through a full employment economy, undergirded by a JG. Rather than leaning into financialization, we should reduce our dependence on mega-corporations and money managers by establishing a right to a job, then building alternative systems of community-oriented production. The solution to capitalist-driven inequality is not making everyone a capitalist. It’s less capitalism.

(Check out the full debate series HERE)

#politics #the left #in these times #progressive #progressive movement #UBI #universal basic income #federal jobs guarantee #jobs program #capitalism #economic inequality #socialism #democratic socialism #market socialism #Social Democracy #imperialism #environmental justice #ecosocialism

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art-arch-urb · 5 years ago

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Refusal after Refusal

What if we acknowledged that we had fallen out of love with architecture and couldn’t remember why we loved it in the first place? That we had given up on building long ago because we had no interest in collaborating with developers, in designing money-laundering schemes or parking garages for foreign capital? And what if we told you that now we even found architectural discourse repulsive? That we had seen the logos for the oil companies emblazoned at the bottom of the biennial posters and couldn’t look away?That we had read the disinterest on the faces of the public and could relate? That we had watched academics lecture about labor practices while exploiting their assistants and overworking their students? That we had tried to warn each other about abusers and assaulters and were reprimanded for it by our heroes? What if we confessed that all this made us depressed, that we could barely summon the energy to get out of bed, let alone to work? What if we told you that we were beginning to think work itself was the problem?

2. The summer was hot. The hottest on record in Los Angeles and Montreal, Glasgow and Tbilisi, Qurayyat and Belfast—though records are easily broken these days. Everything appeared out of focus. The edges of our thoughts were blurred. According to studies, heat makes you lazy and unhappy. But sometimes your unhappiness supersedes your laziness, and sometimes your laziness indicates something about your unhappiness. We decided to try learning from our laziness.

3. It was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, the Franco-Cuban radical journalist and activist Paul Lafargue who first articulated a “right to be lazy.” He equated work, and its valorization, with “pain, misery and corruption.”He argued for its refusal. “A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway,” Lafargue writes. “This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.”

4. But, as Marcel Duchamp reminds us, “it really isn’t easy to be truly lazy and do nothing.”

5. “Sleep is a sin,” say the architects. Equipped with coffee or speed, they avoid it at all costs—sacrificing the body for the sake of the project, for the eternally recurrent deadline. When finally the suprachiasmatic nuclei demand submission to the ticking of the circadian clock, they curl up beneath their desks. They wear all black to minimize time spent worrying over clothes. They marry other architects for the sake of having a synchronized schedule. According to a recent study, architecture students sleep less than any others, averaging 5.28 hours per night. More often than not, this is a performative demonstration of their dedication to their studies rather than a necessity, a time-honored ritual of masochistic devotion. In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary interrogates the neoliberal dictum that “sleeping is for losers.” Where time is money, sleeping is “one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.” Architects embody this attitude, imagining the stakes of the project—a luxury condominium, an arts center—as life or death. In fact, considering that sleep deprivation has been linked to premature death, it is their own lives that are put on the line.

6. Yesterday I woke up around 8:30 a.m. and took 450 milligrams of bupropion, 50 milligrams of Lamictal, 5 milligrams of aripiprazole, and 200 milligrams of modafinil, all swallowed in one gulp of coffee. (The modafinil—a medication used to treat shift work sleep disorder, among other things—is new, added by my psychiatrist last month when I complained I was having trouble working, or doing much of anything.) A few hours later, I took 20 milligrams of Adderall. Only then was I able to write this paragraph.

7. Beginning with their schooling, architects are routinely required to invest more money than they will ever receive in compensation and workplace protections. While the typical college student in the United States accrues an average of $29,420 in student debt, the architecture student is saddled with an average of $40,000.After graduation, the architectural employee can expect to work 70 hours a week for approximately $70,000 per year—or $15 an hour. And yet, as Bjarke Ingels has stated about the profession’s long working hours, “That’s the price you pay but the reward you get is that you do something incredibly meaningful if you actually love what you’re doing and you’re doing meaningful work."

8. In other words, architecture is a form of labor that masquerades as a labor of love. It contains within it the promise of fulfillment, of happiness. In her book The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed interrogates the normative function of happiness, how it serves as a means of orienting behavior and, in the process, is often deployed as a justification for oppression. That is, what it means to be happy is circumscribed culturally. “In wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations,” Ahmed writes. Work should make us happy and fulfilled—even more so when it’s “creative,” an assumption imbued with classist undertones. This draws young people toward architecture school; it makes the burden of debt, harsh working conditions, and low wages appear as an acceptable “price to pay.”

9. But, as the figure of the dissatisfied “CAD monkey” illustrates, the labor of architecture falls short of this promise. Conditioned to believe that fulfillment emerges from creative autonomy and expression, architects instead find themselves laboring over bathroom details or stair sections, and a sense of alienation emerges. It’s a feeling that parallels that of the industrial laborer described by Marx—more so than many architects would like to admit. In classic Marxist theory, workers are estranged from the fruits of their labor, which are taken away from them in the process of becoming rendered as commodities. Because it is understood as nonalienating work, to feel alienated in architecture becomes a sort of double-estrangement. Not only are you estranged from the labor, you are estranged from architecture itself.

10. While working as a studio manager at a New York architecture firm, my colleagues would often remark wistfully that they could rarely attend lectures or engage with discourse as I was able to do. Models, budgets, schematics, client meetings, site visits, overtime, and weekends at the studio had ravaged both their physical and spiritual capacities to participate in the field in a role beyond producing architecture with a capital A. Their passion had become their drudgery; their very own commitment to architectural work became the barrier between contributing to what they had imagined architecture could do and how it apparently must be.

11. I read somewhere that depression is the failure of your neurons to fire like they used to. There’s something ghostly to it: you have the memory of a feeling, of an association, but can’t conjure it anymore. Is there such a thing as a depression specific to architecture? How would it be characterized? I wrote a note on my phone: “The loss of belief in the possibility of designing a different world. Nostalgia for the future.”

12. To express dissatisfaction or alienation in architecture carries deep risks. For one, it could cost you your job. “If you aren’t happy, then leave. Others would kill to have your job.” It could also brand you as an outcast, as if marked by some internal failure or incapacity for feeling what everyone else does. And such a killjoy would ruin the mood of the office. That is, as Ahmed asserts, happiness is framed as a duty to others.18 Misery is contagious and therefore irresponsible. So, regardless of how overworked you are, how alienated you are from the products of your labor, how underpaid you are, how often the boss touches your ass, you must grin and bear it. There’s a reason why architects rarely organize to fight back against exploitative work conditions. Be happy, or else.13. According to Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, a mandate to appear happy, which they term the “performance/pleasure apparatus,” underwrites neoliberalism more broadly.19 Today, the individual must not only produce more but also enjoy more—and, pivotally, this surplus of pleasure must be performed. Pleasure serves as a signifier of the subject’s value within a socioeconomic system in which self-edification is substituted for the social and responsibility is privatized. The flip side of the burned-out professional is the determined young architect who spends their free time attending lectures or writing essays or designing their own projects. Such work is valorized as a signal of their commitment to the field and an indicator of their value as an intellectual practitioner. This fuels a culture in which the products of extra-professional labor are exhibited in journals or galleries, often without adequate compensation. We’re told we should feel honored to have such work recognized at all. In other words, today, nothing is work, and everything is work. Even our bodies and minds are objects of labor.14. I was working hard on an essay about work—about the disconnect between discourses on architectural labor and the broader economic context in which the discourses themselves are produced. I stumbled upon an interview with Antonio Negri in which he explains how, by 1965, the architecture school in Venice had become a center for political agitation and organizing. In early 1968, students from Venice and Padua joined forces with the workers at a nearby Porto Marghera factory, the largest petrochemical complex in Italy, where “two kilometers from the most beautiful city in the world hundreds of workers were dying of cancer, literally poisoned by their work.”20 Negri states that the union of students and workers “worked out quite smoothly because they had been in constant contact for a decade: the school of architecture was a gathering place for the working class.”2115. This struggle was a major event in the development of autonomia operaia, or autonomism, a political movement that defined postwar Italian politics and in which Negri played a central role. The solidarity between the academy and the factory was a significant aspect of autonomism, which reconceived of the position of the intellectual within leftist politics. Rather than develop theories upon which to base organizing, the intellectual should learn from work, from the workers and their lived experience. In this way, the autonomists transitioned from a demand for better working conditions to a critique of work itself, in which they understood labor as a totalizing process of subjectivization that saturated not only the factory but all of society. They thus displaced the centrality of the static figure of the worker and the working class with an understanding of social class as always in a state of becoming, transforming alongside conditions of work. Work itself—its valorization and the power this gave it over the experience of life—was the problem. “Refusal of work means quite simply: I don’t want to go to work because I prefer to sleep,” writes Franco “Bifo” Berardi. “But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress. Autonomy is the self-regulation of the social body in its independence and in its interaction with the disciplinary norm.”2216. But wait, haven’t we had this conversation before? Isn’t the struggle against work what we studied tirelessly to ace our papers? We worked our bodies and our minds through the night to prove we understood what the refusal of work was about, to prove our political awareness, to garner a critical edge, to be diligent students. But clearly this feverish ambition prevented us from recognizing ourselves as the products of its failure. Why regurgitate the past if not in order to understand how it landed us here, at 4:00 a.m., exhausted, verging on panic, and for what? 17. As Berardi elaborates, struggles for autonomy produced a new monster, laying the foundations for neoliberal economics and governance.23 When workers demanded freedom from regulation, capital did the same. The monotony, rigidity, and harsh conditions of the industrial factory gave way to flexible hours and jobs (in the Global North), but also deregulation, precarity, and the withdrawal of social protections. This shift was ideological and cultural, as well as economic.18. “Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation,” argues Kathi Weeks. “That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract.” Under the contemporary neoliberal regime, work has come to be regarded as “a basic obligation of citizenship.”24Within the realms of politics, the media, and even sociology, the persistent messaging of its importance has generated a singular world-building experience where working remains the only means of belonging. “These repeated references to diligent work,” as David Frayne remarks, “function to construct a rigid dichotomy in the public imagination.”25 Those who work acquire social citizenship, while those who do not are leeches. Within this dichotomy, work becomes a choice: there exist only those who choose to be productive and those who choose to do nothing. “Which are you? The sleeper or the employee, the shirker or the worker?”2619. What if we told you we don’t refuse much of anything? What if we told you that we ate up praise like a spoonful of honey? What if we said that the validation always evaporates too quickly? Like a sugar-addled rush, we work on the premise that the next project will leave us satiated. We make promises to stop, to slow down, to regroup, to prevent the inevitable burnout, which leaves us languid and shrouded in shame. We wonder what all the research amounts to, what the interviews and panels in galleries and lecture halls even do or mean. 20. If the autonomist refusal of work helped produce a society in which there is nothing but work, what strategies are left for us? What would it mean to refuse after refusal? To stake out a position of alterity to the contemporary work ethic in order to find the room to question where we’re going, what’s driving us, and to what end?21. To work is to be normal. To work is to be socially acceptable. In order to comprehend the commitment to the drudgery and exploitation of working life, Lauren Berlant argues that normativity must be understood as “aspirational and as an evolving and incoherent cluster of hegemonic promises about the present and future experience of social belonging.”27 To rally for any kind of alternative beyond the moral imperative to work would be to cast oneself almost entirely outside the realm of affiliation, and even personhood.22. Architecture, today at least, is like work, an end in itself. It is autotelic—or, more precisely, a constituent element within the autotelic metabolism of contemporary capitalism. The need for shelter is hardly the driving motivation behind the majority of new builds. Rather, demolition and construction serve as the two poles of a coiling system of endless production for the sake of production. Financial speculation, warfare, and environmental desecration belong to its arsenal. All together, this system constitutes a global force responsible for the lion’s share of global carbon emissions. It results in the mass displacement of the poor and marginalized. In short, shelter is not the ends of architecture—it is its collateral damage. It is a question not of architecture or revolution but, rather, of architecture or survival.23. “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design,” said Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio. “[I]f architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities—until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then design must disappear. We can live without architecture.”2824. Let’s back up a bit. What produces this all-consuming, obsessive indifference to architecture? On the one hand, the profession and the academy are sites of violence, ridden with sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, ableism. But, perhaps even more than that, we have yet to find a work of architecture that is capable of changing the status quo. On the other hand, we’re obsessed with the belief that it could, since, at the end of the day, all architecture changes the status quo—converting land into capital, emitting carbon dioxide, displacing people. In other words, we acknowledge architecture as immensely powerful but find ourselves—and all architects or architectural thinkers—powerless. Architecture, it seems, has been swallowed up by external forces and put in the service of the smooth functioning of the city and of flows of capital. We can’t imagine an architecture capable of disrupting this. Formalism is a dead end—novel forms are just a means to produce new terrains for the expenditure of surplus capital. We have little control over program since we’re beholden to patronage. Meanwhile, criticism has no bite; speculation, no value; theorization, no impact. Academia and institutions defang all thought. 25. We believe that the problem of work is at the center of all this. The need to work—a shared condition for all but the very wealthy—means we can’t really turn down a client or an opportunity to exhibit or an adjunct teaching position. Refusal, done alone, is a privilege few can afford. But, alongside that, the culture of work has seeped into our souls. Affirmation produces dopamine. Success signals security (even if, in actuality, it doesn’t offer it). Everything we do is for the sake of capital, whether social or material. We look for opportunities to tear each other down so that we can rise up an imaginary rung on an imaginary ladder instead. We are cowards, unwilling to bite the hand that feeds us strychnine-laced food. We can’t pause to think. We’ve lost all hope in the future.26. When commissioned to write this essay, we were asked to provide “concrete alternatives” to the present—but how could we? All we can speculate on is having the time to do so. All we can imagine is a horizon, hazy and distant, in which we discover, or remember, how to refuse—together.

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/46/refusal-after-refusal?fbclid=IwAR3OA3zuZGwx0-VuEEM2QWZlP44uF2N6MFKoD8M2fUudNZnkNjnj4brp2nk

#harvard #architecture #harvarddesignmagazine

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montagnarde1793 · 8 years ago

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Why does Hamon (PS) want an automation tax, though? I mean, should automation, along with a universal basic income and the diminishment of the work ethic but be the way to a post-work society? What do you think?

I’m a bit on the fence about this one, citizen anon. On the one hand, I don’t think automation is a problem in and of itself, if we decouple the notion of having a “job” from the right to have one’s basic needs for food, shelter, etc. met. I do think it’s a major problem that just about every major political party’s orientation has been toward the creation of “jobs”, however useless or even harmful. Under capitalism, “jobs” have little to do with meeting workers’ needs (if capitalists can get away with not paying workers enough to live on, they do) but they also have little to do with meeting society’s needs. “Jobs” are what people (or states) that already have capital want done, not necessarily the work that needs doing.

And this is where things get tricky: I would be thrilled if mindless jobs that need doing but could be automated were automated and if, simultaneously, jobs that are actively harming society like weapons manufacturing and marketing were simply abolished, provided we had an alternative for the people currently doing those jobs beyond just adding them to the unemployment rolls.

But is high unemployment really due mainly to automation? There is still work that needs doing. I do suspect that there is less work that needs doing than would require every able person to work what we currently consider full time. For example, historically just to feed everyone about 90% of the population had to work in agriculture. Now it’s something like 2%, if I recall correctly. Now some people who would have been working in agriculture are now working in useful fields that didn’t necessarily exist or were in embryonic form in the 19th century, and environmentally friendly agricultural methods are more labor-intensive than those currently widely in use. But even given that, I haven’t seen any estimates that suggest that the ecological transition would require everyone to go back into agriculture, and as previously expressed, many of the jobs that have been created to take the place of agricultural work don’t actually need doing. Likely, all the work that needs doing could still get done if say, the standard work-week were 20 hours.

Beyond the global fact that not everyone needs to work in agriculture anymore, the reasons for unemployment in specific fields is that it’s considered more “cost-effective” (in purely monetary terms, because no one cares about the physical and mental health of the workers or even, it seems, the quality of their work - especially if that work is something like nursing or teaching…) to hire fewer people and work them long hours. Everyone would be happier and healthier if, instead of one person with long hours and one person on unemployment you had two people working what we now consider “half” time.

The difficulty is, you generally can’t live on what is considered a half or part-time salary.

There are a number of possible solutions to this. Mandating that employers pay the same salary for fewer hours (ignoring the political feasibility) would be a theoretical possibility, but it does immediately run into some problems. Profitable corporations could certainly afford to do this (though of course a good many of them are not doing necessary work to begin with), as could the state through taxation. But if you work for the corner bakery? Likely it would go out of business - though of course subsidies to small businesses are always a possibility as well. Nationalizing the most important sectors and applying this policy where they’re concerned is also possible: perhaps in conjunction with subsidies to artisanal shops like the aforementioned corner bakery.

A universal basic income is an interesting alternative solution. One of the earliest prononents was Thomas Paine, in his Agrarian Justice (1797), and he saw it as a restitution of usurpation of humanity’s natural collective right to the land by the institution of private property: the income in question is every individual’s share of the rent from that original collective ownership. I think there’s something to this - and, I hasten to add, I think there would still be something to this even without capitalism and individual private property (what gives a state or a particular collectivity a right to any particular piece of land over the whole of humanity, after all?).

A universal basic income that is actually enough to live on would solve the problem of not being able to work part-time unless your employer could afford to pay you a full-time wage for that work. It would mean that no one would bother to take a useless, unfulfulling job just for the sake of a salary. People who are unable to work or who want to stay home and take care of their kids or an elderly parent without being stigmatized or dependent on a spouse’s salary (and therefore, potentially on an abusive relationship) would have support without having to go through humiliating rituals of proving disabilities or filling out a million forms. It’s also the case that universal programs are more popular and harder to attack, because it becomes impossible to construct a narrative of taking away the middle class’s hard-earned money to spend on people who supposedly don’t deserve it.

All that said, it’s not entirely without problems. Some jobs that need doing are just unpleasant and they currently get done mainly because the people doing them need the salary they provide. We would therefore have to think of another solution: either offering some kind of perk to make those jobs attractive, or sharing them around (two possible examples: 1) mandatory civil service the way there used to be mandatory military service, with every able person spending a couple of years collecting garbage and the like or 2) every able person has to do those jobs a few days out of the year for their whole working life). So it’s not an insurmountable problem but it is something we would have to think about.

Of greater concern is the fact that there are a number of different versions of universal basic income, and adopting those that involve an income to low to live on or see it as a replacement for all other social spending would be disastrous and only aggravate current systems of exploitation. For example, the following scenarios: you now have 500€ a month, but you can’t live on it, you still need to take the first job you can get and employers, not having been forced to do otherwise, use this as an excuse to cut wages, so you’re back where you started. Or, you have a basic income that maybe would have been enough to live on, but now you have to pay for healthcare and very quickly you no longer have enough to live on and predatory private insurers are cropping up everywhere…

So basically, TL;DR: automation is a thing, but not as much of a thing as people want you to believe, there will continue be work that needs doing; and universal basic income could be a great thing or a terrible thing, depending on the implementation, but regardless, would require additional reforms, it’s not a panacea.

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

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How Capitalism Exploits Our Fear of Old Age

Digital Elixir How Capitalism Exploits Our Fear of Old Age

Yves here. I don’t mean to be a nay-sayer, but having developed major orthopedic problems after an accident, I find it hard to be cheery about getting old. This article makes a passing mention of financial stress among the elderly. A new story in the Financial Times, adding to a 2018 study Greying of US Bankruptcy, chronicles the rising level of indebtedness. Key sections:

In 1991, over-65s made up only 2 per cent of bankruptcy filers, but by 2016 that had risen to more than 12 per cent, says Robert Lawless, one of the authors of the report and a professor at University of Illinois College of Law. (As about 800,000 households filed for bankruptcy that year, this works out as approximately 98,000 families or about 133,000 seniors, since many file jointly as couples, he adds.) Over the same period, elders grew as a percentage of the US adult population too, but only from 17 per cent to 19.3 per cent….

In 1989, only one in five Americans aged 75 or older were in debt; by 2016, almost half were, according to the most recent US Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances. The rise in senior debt comes at a time when the wealth gap between rich and middle-class or poor Americans is at an all-time high, according to a study last year by the Pew Research Center.

By 2016, the wealth of upper-income Americans had more than recovered from the post-2008 recession, but the wealth of lower- and middle-income families was at 1989 levels, highlighting the long-term rise in income inequality in the US.

As these low- to middle-income families age, many are being pitched into debt-burdened retirement by several structural trends, including the decline of trade unions, with their power to negotiate real wage increases, good pensions and retiree healthcare packages; the disappearance of defined benefit pension schemes; steep healthcare inflation; and a sharp rise in middle-class families helping to pay for children to go to college.

By Valerie Schloredt, the the books editor for YES! Originally published at Yes!; cross-posted from openDemocracy

So I’ll be out in public, maybe ordering coffee, and someone I don’t know will address me as “sweetie.” I’m a 60-year-old woman, and I look my age. Because people haven’t called me “sweetie” since I was about 5, I’m thinking this is an age thing. That seems more obvious when a stranger ironically addresses me as “young lady” in situations where “excuse me,” “hello,” “hey, you,” or “pardon me, ma’am” would do just fine.

Such micro-aggressions, conscious or not, don’t just target older women. A friend my age who sports a distinguished gray beard was sweating through the last stretch of a half-marathon when a young guy in the crowd yelled from the sidelines, “Way to go, old dude!”

For decades, ageism has been one of the “isms,” along with racism, sexism, and ableism, that are unacceptable in progressive discourse and illegal under U.S. anti-discrimination law – at least in theory. Yet ageism against older people remains the most unexamined and commonly accepted of all our biases.

Look at media, from advertising to news, that portray aging almost exclusively in terms of loss – of physical and mental abilities, rewarding work, money, romance, and dignity. That sad and often denigrating picture leads us to fear aging. To distance ourselves from our anxiety, we label older people, regard them as “the other,” and marginalize them, perhaps most obviously in casual, patronizing remarks to strangers.

I’m seeing ageism a lot more clearly now that I am subject to it. So I welcomed Ashton Applewhite’s encouraging new book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism. Applewhite, who has been speaking and blogging on the subject for several years, takes a particularly empowering approach by discussing ageism from the perspectives of both the personal and the political, debunking myths along the way. Take the “deficit model” of aging – the common assumption that getting older is all loss and no gain. In reality, we humans retain all sorts of qualities and abilities as we age.

We’re also adaptable. That’s a quality that can have unexpected benefits, like the “U-curve of happiness” described in a paper published by the National Bureau for Economic Research. The authors found that older people report being happier than do people in middle age. We deal with declines, of course, but we may actually get better at some things, like discarding superficial values, solving emotional problems, and appreciating life’s pleasures.

That bonus in emotional resilience may come in handy, because we’re aging in an economically, politically, and socially volatile era. According to Applewhite, poverty rates for Americans older than 65 are increasing and 50% of the baby boom generation feel they have not saved enough to create sufficient income should they live into their 80s and 90s. And while employment discrimination against older people (40 and up) is well known but difficult to prove, half of the boomer generation doesn’t see how they will be able to retire at all, Applewhite reports.

In her new book, Downhill from Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality, Katherine S. Newman looks at the current economic landscape for older Americans and concludes, “Retirement insecurity is an increasingly serious manifestation of the vast inequality that is eating away at the social fabric of America.” What is now a bad situation for many boomers could be even worse for Gen Xers and millennials when their turns come.

So here we are, becoming more vulnerable over the years in a system that already treats people as expendable. Applewhite, for all her good-humored tone, calls out that system as global capitalism, as when she critiques the intergenerational competition narrative. The image evoked is of greedy oldsters sucking up jobs and houses and Social Security and Medicare, leaving nothing for the next generation.

It’s easy to be pulled into the generation blame game, abetted by underlying ageism, and to forget that economic systems are not inexorable phenomena like gravity or time; rather, they are the result of choices. In fact, rather than regard older people as leeches, we should remember that economic interdependence is intergenerational. Older people are an intrinsic part of society. Most of them have supported younger and older people in whatever ways were available. And whether working or retired, they buy products and services and pay taxes and contribute labor, support, and finances to their families and communities.

Applewhite caps her manifesto with recommendations that strike me as parts of what could be a Great New Deal for Age. It could start with more flexibility in employment so people could have longer careers, with more time out for training, exploration, and family. Resources would be put into accessible design for public spaces, as well as programs to support mobility for people across the spectrum of age and ability. That would facilitate their inclusion in community, and they would be in good shape to take part because of improvements in health policy, clinical practice, funding, and research. And if, toward the end of life, more intensive care were needed, workers and family members doing paid and unpaid care work would be fairly compensated or supported.

The truth is that improving systems to include older people would improve access and prosperity and quality of life for everyone.

All that calls for a new movement against age discrimination and organizing to get socially responsible representatives and policymakers into office. It also requires the sort of consciousness-raising and agitation that is now going on around the issues of race, justice, climate, and gender. Waking up to the real harms of ageism and refusing to feed the beast with our words and actions is the first step. The good news? The job is open to anyone and everyone, regardless of age.

How Capitalism Exploits Our Fear of Old Age

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velmaemyers88 · 5 years ago

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Trump’s and Democrats’ Incendiary Week: Fact Checking Claims

President Donald Trump attributed statements to a Democratic congresswoman that she didn’t make as he set off an incendiary week of vilification with accusations that she and three other lawmakers of color hate America.

The episode roiled the capital and excited Trump’s North Carolina rally, overshadowing distortions in rhetoric that came from many quarters and from both parties on a variety of matters over the last week-plus — the Democratic presidential campaign among them.

A sampling:

Loving America

TRUMP quotes Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., as saying: “You don’t say ‘America’ with this intensity. You say ‘al-Qaida,’ it makes you proud. Al-Qaida makes you proud. You don’t speak that way about America.” — North Carolina rally on Wednesday.

TRUMP: “I hear the way she talks about al-Qaida. Al-Qaida has killed many Americans. She said, ‘You can hold your chest out, you can — when I think of America — uhh — when I think of al-Qaida, I can hold my chest out.‘” — remarks Monday at a manufacturing event at the White House.

THE FACTS: This is a wholly distorted account of what the Omar said. She did not voice pride in the terrorist group.

Trump is referring to an interview Omar gave in 2013. In it, she talked about studying terrorism history or theory under a professor who dramatically pronounced the names of terrorist groups, as if to emphasize their evil nature.

“The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘al-Qaida,’ he sort of like — his shoulders went up” and he used a menacing, intense tone, she said. Her point was that the professor was subtly rousing suspicions of Muslims with his theatrical presentation, while pronouncing “America” without the intensity he afforded the names of terrorist groups.

At no point did she say “al-Qaida” should be uttered with intensity or pride and that “America” shouldn’t.

Trump is continuing to assail Omar and three other liberal Democratic women of color, challenging their loyalty to the U.S. They are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The House rebuked him Tuesday for his “racist comments” after he said they should “go back” to their countries. All four are Americans; Omar was born in Somalia; the others in the U.S.

Omar said Trump is a “fascist” and she and the other women he’s going after will “continue to be a nightmare to this president because his policies are a nightmare to us.”

___

TRUMP, on Omar: “When she talked about the World Trade Center being knocked down, ‘some people.’ You remember the famous ‘some people.’ These are people that, in my opinion, hate our country.” — remarks Monday at a manufacturing event.

THE FACTS: It’s true that plenty of critics thought Omar sounded dismissive about the 2001 terrorist attacks in a comment in a speech in March. Those remarks, though, did not express love “for enemies like al-Qaida,” as Trump put it.

Speaking to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Omar said the group “was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” Her phrasing — “some people did something” — struck many people as a tone-deaf way to refer to the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The American-Islamic group actually was founded in 1994, according to its website. Its membership skyrocketed after the 2001 attacks.

___

TRUMP, on Ocasio-Cortez: “Cortez said that illegal immigrants are more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be. Can you believe that? That’s what she is saying.” — North Carolina rally.

THE FACTS: True, except that people who come to the border and ask for refugee status can’t be described as “illegal immigrants.” They commit no crime by applying for that status. Ocasio-Cortez, speaking of women and children who show up seeking refuge or opportunity, said: “They’re acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be.” This was from an MSNBC interview in January.

At the rally, Trump refused to call the New York congresswoman by her full hyphenated surname.

___

Migrants

TRUMP: “The Obama Administration built the Cages, not the Trump Administration!” — tweet Monday.

THE FACTS: He is right.

The same facilities that Democrats characterize as cages for migrant children were used by the Obama administration. They are sectioned-off, chain-link indoor pens where children who come to the border without adults or who are separated from adults in detention are temporarily housed. The children are divided by age and sex. When Vice President Mike Pence recently visited detention facilities at the border, journalists accompanying him witnessed migrant men crowded into fetid chain-link quarters.

A year ago, Associated Press photographs showing young people in such enclosures were misrepresented online as depicting child detentions by Trump and denounced by some Democrats and activists as illustrating Trump’s cruelty. In fact, the photos were taken in 2014 during the Obama administration.

Many Democrats in the presidential campaign and Congress continue to exploit the “kids in cages” imagery without acknowledging Obama used the facilities, too. His administration built the McAllen, Texas, facility with chain-link holding areas in 2014.

___

Health Care

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS of Vermont, Democratic presidential candidate: “‘Medicare for All’ would reduce overall health care spending in our country.” — speech Wednesday.

THE FACTS: That remains to be seen. Savings from Medicare for All are not a slam dunk.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a report this year that total spending under a single-payer system, such as the one proposed by Sanders, “might be higher or lower than under the current system depending on the key features of the new system.”

Those features involve payment rates for hospitals and doctors, which are not fully spelled out by Sanders, as well as the estimated cost of generous benefits that include long-term care services and no copays and deductibles.

Sanders’ figure of $5 trillion over 10 years in health cost savings comes from a study by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The lead author has been a political supporter of Sanders’.

Sanders also cites a savings estimate of $2 trillion over 10 years taken from a study from the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. But the author of that study says that Medicare for All advocates are mischaracterizing his conclusions.

A report this year by the nonprofit Rand think tank estimated that Medicare for All would do the opposite of what Sanders is promising, modestly raising national health spending.

Part of the reason is the generous benefits. Virtually free comprehensive medical care would lead to big increases in demand.

The Rand study modeled a hypothetical scenario in which a plan similar to Sanders’ legislation had taken effect this year.

___

TRUMP: “We are offering plans up to 60 percent cheaper than Obamacare.” — North Carolina rally.

THE FACTS: The bargain health insurance plans Trump talks about are cheaper because they skimp on benefits such as maternity or prescription drug coverage and do not guarantee coverage of preexisting conditions.

The short-term plans that his administration began offering last year on the federal insurance marketplace provide up to 12 months of coverage and can be renewed for up to 36 months.

Premiums for the plans are about one-third the cost of fuller insurance coverage. The health plan offerings are intended for people who want an individual health insurance policy but make too much money to qualify for subsides under the Affordable Care Act.

The administration introduced the short-term plans, which undermine how the Obama health law is supposed to work, after failing to repeal much of that law.

___

TRUMP: “Patients with preexisting conditions are protected by Republicans much more so than protected by Democrats, who will never be able to pull it off.” — North Carolina rally.

THE FACTS: But Democrats did pull it off. Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act, requires insurers to take all applicants, regardless of medical history, and charge the same standard premiums to healthy people and those who had medical problems before or when they signed up.

The Trump administration is pressing in court for full repeal of that law.

Trump and other Republicans say they’ll have a plan to preserve protections for people with preexisting conditions. The White House has provided no details.

___

Auto Industry

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS of California, Democratic presidential candidate: “Some estimate that as many as 700,000 autoworkers are going to lose their job before the end of the year.” — remarks in July 12 radio interview.

THE FACTS: This isn’t happening. Harris mischaracterized the findings of a study that is also outdated.

In July 2018 the Center for Automotive Research laid out a variety of scenarios for potential job losses across all U.S. industries touched by the auto business — not just autoworkers — if a number of new tariffs and policies that Trump threatened were enacted. The worst case was 750,000. But those hypothetical losses went well beyond autoworkers, to include workers at restaurants, retail stores and any business that benefits from the auto industry.

In any event, the center revised its study in February 2019, with a worst-case scenario down to 367,000 job losses across all industries. And since then, the administration lifted tariffs on steel and aluminum products coming from Canada and Mexico, further minimizing the impact on the auto industry.

The auto industry has grown under Obama and Trump both. Although it’s facing a leveling off in demand, it still posts strong numbers. It is not at risk of the catastrophe Harris raises as a possibility — the loss of 3 in 4 autoworkers in the remainder of this year.

___

TRUMP: “They’re coming in at a level that we haven’t seen for decades. Car companies are coming in — Japanese car companies, in particular. … Japan has 12 different companies building plants in Michigan, in Ohio, in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania. One is going to be announced in Florida. We are doing things that nobody thought were possible.” — Cabinet meeting Tuesday.

THE FACTS: There’s no evidence that car companies are coming to the U.S. at a rate faster than in previous decades. Industry observers know of only a few Japanese automotive companies building or expanding factories in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina or Pennsylvania — nowhere near a dozen.

Federal statistics show that jobs in auto and parts manufacturing grew at a slower rate in the two-plus years since Trump took office than in Obama’s last two years.

Between January 2017, when Trump was inaugurated, and June of this year, the latest figures available, U.S. auto and parts makers added 41,900 jobs, or a 4.4% increase, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But in the two years before Trump took office, the industry added 63,600 manufacturing jobs, a 7.1% increase.

In Ohio, Honda has filed paperwork for a small expansion of its engine plant in Anna, Ohio, near Dayton, but also has announced production cuts without layoffs. A parts supplier announced plans last year to expand in Springfield, Ohio. In North Carolina, transmission maker Aisin in April announced plans to bolster manufacturing operations with 900 jobs by 2021, but gave few details.

The only Japanese automakers building a new U.S. assembly plant are Toyota and Mazda, which are jointly constructing a factory in Alabama that will build SUVs. At least three parts companies have announced plans to build factories in Alabama to serve that facility.

Also, spokesmen for German automakers Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and BMW AG say they haven’t been told of any coming new factory announcements.

___

Economy

TRUMP: “I think a number that makes me the happiest is that, proportionately, the biggest gainer in this entire stock market — when you hear about how much has gone up — blue-collar workers, the biggest proportionate gainer.” — Cabinet remarks Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Wealthier Americans have largely benefited from the stock market gains, not blue-collar workers.

The problem with the president claiming the stock market has helped working-class Americans is that the richest 10% of the country controls 84% of stock market value, according to a Federal Reserve survey. Because they hold more stocks, wealthier Americans have inherently benefited more from the 19% gain in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks so far this year. Only about half of U.S. families hold stocks, so plenty of people are getting little to no benefit from the stock market gains.

___

TRUMP: “We have the strongest economy in history.” — North Carolina rally.

THE FACTS: The economy is not the strongest in the country’s history. It expanded at an annual rate of 3.1% in the first quarter of this year. That growth was the highest in just four years for the first quarter.

In the late 1990s, growth topped 4% for four straight years, a level it has not yet reached on an annual basis under Trump. Growth even reached 7.2% in 1984.

The economy is now in its 121st month of growth, making it the longest expansion in history. Most of that took place under Obama.

The economy grew 2.9% in 2018 — the same pace it reached in 2015 under Obama — and simply hasn’t hit historically high growth rates.

___

TRUMP: “The lowest unemployment numbers ever.” — North Carolina rally.

THE FACTS: Not so.

The 3.7% unemployment rate in the latest report is not the best in history. It’s near the lowest level in 50 years, when it was 3.5%. The U.S. also had lower rates than now in the early 1950s. And during three years of World War II, the annual rate was under 2%.

___

TRUMP: “The best unemployment in our history. And likewise, women, 74 years. … I’m sorry, women, I let you down, it’s not in our history but we’re going to be there very soon.” — North Carolina rally.

THE FACTS: No, the jobless rate for women of 3.1% in April was the lowest in 66 years, not 74, and it has since increased to 3.3% in June. The data only go back 71 years, so 74 years isn’t a possibility.

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—What to expect from the second Democratic debate

—When it comes to politics, Americans are divided. Can data change that?

—Elizabeth Warren declares war on private equity ‘vampires’ in 2020 plan

—Trump outspent every other political campaign on Facebook. Here’s who those ads targeted

—Sex toys allowed, not massages, in fine print of Trump tax break

Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.

Credit: Source link

The post Trump’s and Democrats’ Incendiary Week: Fact Checking Claims appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

0 notes

omglr · 5 years ago

Conversation

dumb as bricks dude

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

You both like feminism.

Stranger: hi

You: hi

Stranger: asl

You: 32 F

Stranger: m 22 canada

You: cool, i am also in canada

Stranger: Vancouver

You: Toronto

Stranger: cool

Stranger: Feminist?

You: yes

You: you?

Stranger: im a man so... DUH.. NO

You: kurt cobain was a feminist

Stranger: never knew that

Stranger: our retard PM is a feminist.

You: eh... is he though?

Stranger: claims to be but hes useless regardless

You: yeah

Stranger: so why are you a sexist?

You: lol

You: in what way?

Stranger: feminism is hatred of men

You: i like kurt cobain

Stranger: hes dead

You: yeah, he was good dude though

Stranger: yeah.. but feminist men are pathetic

You: mmmmeh

You: it kinda sounds like you're the one who is sexist?

Stranger: how so?

You: cause you think that feminism is about the hatred of men, and that men who are feminists aren't manly enough

Stranger: exactly

You: and that says something about how much you value women

Stranger: feminism is about female superiority and any man who supports it needs to grow a pair of balls and realize hes the superior one

Stranger: I dont value women.

You: yeah

You: so you are sexist

Stranger: and women dont value men so...

You: mmmm, that's also pretty obviously wrong

Stranger: sure

Stranger: lets say a woman has a boyfriend.

then she meets a better looking, stronger richer man whos showing interest in her, shes dumping the current BF for the new guy.

You: women rarely value sexist men, so maybe you just didn't recognize that your attitude was effecting how people treat you and creating a feedback loop

Stranger: LOL I avoid women now

You: yeah, maybe you need to get a hobby?

Stranger: I have hobbies

Stranger: I've had 3 girlfriends, and guess what

You: are you MTGOW now?

Stranger: yeah.

Stranger: its freedom

You: have you considered castration?

Stranger: why...

You: that's freedom from sexual needs

Stranger: I can jerk off

You: focus on playing the chello or whatever

Stranger: sure

Stranger: if women were not so shallow and heartless I wouldnt be MGTOW

You: i think that's the self fulfilling prophesy speaking

Stranger: well, im not good looking, im not 6'2 and I dont make $100K a year after taxes, im of no interest to a woman .

You: you're 22 though

Stranger: I know. and?

You: dudes still look like teenagers at that point

You: at like 35 you're probably gonna look pretty good

Stranger: not really, people have guess that im 30...

You: eh, i mean, it just seems like you are giving up too early and getting advice from other dudes who also gave up

Stranger: I gave up 3 years ago

You: you are gonna let a teenager tell you how to live?

Stranger: no

Stranger: I decide how I live

You: yeah but its never to late to change directions

Stranger: also, my dream job is bus driver, I cant say how it is at the TTC, but here, the pay is awesome, the benefits are great, the pension is fat, once im older and driving a bus women will probably want me, but not for me, for the perks that come from being with me, the fat pay checks, the family benefits etc

You: yeah that sounds good

You: go for it

Stranger: yeah, so, sorry girls, im not interested in you.

You: its ok not to be interested in girls

Stranger: im not gay

Stranger: im just not a betabux

You: it is a bit weird to think women are mostly interested in money though

Stranger: but its the truth

You: like, women are interested in feeling secure

Stranger: because god forbid she has to work to support herself

You: and couples who are financially insecure tend to have a hard time unless they work together

Stranger: ok

You: like most women have goals and shit they want to do with their lives, no body is really expecting to be a stay at home mom in this economy

Stranger: i know

Stranger: but they want a man to get the money to pay the bills while her money goes for fun stuff

You: i've never been in a relationship like that

Stranger: then you've never been married

You: i have been married

You: have you?

Stranger: FUCK NO

Stranger: why would I do that?

You: it just seems like you were speaking from some authority

Stranger: I know what a marriage is like

You: how?

Stranger: by listening to other men

Stranger: its bullshit, nothing but being controlled by a wife

You: lol, ok

You: those dudes probably shouldn't be married

Stranger: and she'll get bored and cheat sooner or later

You: did your parents get divorced?

Stranger: never married

You: where they partners?

You: were^

Stranger: they were dating.

Stranger: Anyway the 3 girlfriends i had were nothing but lying whores

You: and this was before you were 19?

Stranger: yeah

Stranger: your point?

You: teenagers are dipshits

Stranger: sure

You: and treat eachother terribly

Stranger: thats odd, I treated them fine, I guess im just smarter than they are

You: mmmm, maybe

Stranger: obviously

You: you sound pretty arrogant though

Stranger: oh well

Stranger: women need to learn how to respect men and how to treat a BF

You: ehhhhhh ok, what do men need to do?

Stranger: nothing, they are fine

You: how come their needs aren't being met then?

Stranger: because women dont value men

You: perhaps...

You: but maybe its because men need to learn how to communicate?

Stranger: nope

Stranger: woman -is mad-

man "are you ok"

woman- still mad- "im fine"

but men cant communicate... ok then

You: like the men who are married and being controlled by their wives and are expected to pay the bills and shit

Stranger: its either that or get divorced and pay alimony and child support

You: could have had conversations with their partners about responcibilities

Stranger: LOL a woman taking equal responsibility

You: eh, unpaid labour is often taken for granted by dudes

Stranger: aww, did she make dinner?

You: shrug, i don't know, I'm giving you a lot here

You: but its boring me,

Stranger: well women are boring

You: like, you can keep repeating sexist shit until you die alone and unloved

You: like, i don't care, really

Stranger: im not good looking, im not worth of love

You: dude your self esteem is bonkers

You: stop listening to men who tell you shit like that

Stranger: but they are right

You: stop listening to women who tell you shit like that

Stranger: but women know what women like

You: focus on your bus goal, read some fiction by diverse authors, take a fucking pottery class, stay off incel and mgtow message boards

Stranger: but MGTOW and Incel is the truth

Stranger: I am an incel

You: get your shit together, drop your shit attitude and stereotype nonsense, and change your stupid life

Stranger: nah

Stranger: I live the truth

You: next time i'm in vancouver I'm gonna slap the shit out of any busdrivers over 6 feet

Stranger: have fun judging their height when they are sitting, plus any new buses purchased after 2018 have a driver barrier

You: they all take smoke breaks

Stranger: no

You: ok, well, i'm not actually going to, i forgot what the point of that comment was

Stranger: lol

Stranger: I'll be too busy driving to have a relationship

You: maybe go see a dominatrix or something where the value exchange of sex for money is clear and you don't have to get all resentful about it

Stranger: nah, I like keeping my money

You: mmmm you ever go on rollercoasters?

Stranger: long ago

You: you ever go for a fancy dinner or a 3d movie?

Stranger: no and yes

You: back massage or dentist appointment?

Stranger: no

You: yeah, 22 and you haven't seen a dentist?

Stranger: well long ago

You: before you had to pay for it?

Stranger: yeah

You: you still got your wisdom teeth?

Stranger: nope

You: lol, lucky you have a mom to take care of your teeth

Stranger: yeah

Stranger: Anyway when im driving a bus I wont have time for dating

You: oh yeah?

Stranger: yah

Stranger: there is so much available OT to do so when will I have time to try (and fail) to get a girl

You: when you are walking your dog in the park

You: like a responsible adult

Stranger: I dont care for pets

You: ok, well, i've spent a lot of time here trying to problem solve your stupid shit, do you have any questions about feminism?

Stranger: why is feminism even needed?

You: to fight for the rights of the marginalized and prevent social regression

Stranger: sounds BS

You: meh

You: its pretty awesome honestly

Stranger: not its not

Stranger: women are not oppressed, they are just greedy and demanding

You: lol, but imagine their was a mgtow/incel support group for woman

Stranger: nope

You: except not shitty

Stranger: sure

Stranger: dating is shit

You: https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/

Stranger: what is that?

You: website for missing and murdered indigenous women and girls

Stranger: dont care

You: ok, so you don't care about the parts of society where women are oppressed

Stranger: nope

You: no wonder you didn'

You: t notice

Stranger: ever seen a homeless man?

You: yeah dude

Stranger: "oppressed" men

You: capitalism man and conservative pollitics man

Stranger: ok?

You: socialist feminism is about getting the needs of homeless men met

Stranger: nope

Stranger: socialism is bullshit

You: lol

You: but a workers union for bus drivers?

Stranger: yes

You: bs or no?

Stranger: nope

You: welcome to the labour movement

Stranger: socialism is bullshit.

You: its fuckin socialism

Stranger: "free" "free "free"

You: you dork

Stranger: "Socialism cause I dont want to work, I want it free, paid for by those who do work"

You: you don't actually know shit about it

Stranger: sure

Stranger: lets raise taxes for the rich so you dont have to pay for shit

You: mmmm, well that doesn't sound too bad

You: are you rich?

Stranger: nope

Stranger: you know why those people are rich?

You: exploiting the working class

Stranger: nope, working hard

You: no dude, they extract value from the work and pay them as little as possible

Stranger: well, get a new job, maybe a union job, they pay more

Stranger: stop being lazy

You: lol, dude, if you don't want your boss to exploit you and take 95% of the value created by you working your ass off, guess what helps with that?

You: fucking forming a union

You: fucking socialism

Stranger: yeah, but not socialist bullshit

Stranger: "boo hoo, I have to work hard boo hoo"

You: UNIONS ARE SOCIALIST

Stranger: nope

You: lol, ok

You: tell that to the guys when you are applying for your union job

Stranger: I will enjoy my union job

You: and you'll be an ignorant hipocrit

Stranger: I'll be richer than you simply by working.

You: lol,

You: jesus

Stranger: so stop being a crybaby and get a job

You: i have a job, and i'm in a union

You: but i know what i'm talking about

You: i'm not regurgitating capitalist bullshit

Stranger: no you dont, you seem to think those who work harder than you should pay for your stuff

You: lol dude

Stranger: what

You: i don't know where to start

You: you are just really thick

Stranger: nope, just smarter than you

You: ok, so remember how you had your mom pay for your dental care

Stranger: yeah

You: remember how your teeth are growing out of your skull

Stranger: yeah...

Stranger: get on with it idiot

You: and how if you had head trauma you could get free health care at a hospital

Stranger: GET ON WITH YOUR POINT IDIOT

You: but if you have a tooth problem you have you pay hundreds of dollars

Stranger: whats your fucking point moron

You: dentistry could be socialized like the rest of healthcare

You: and it would be better for society

Stranger: "boo hoo, I dont wanna pay when I have too, boo hoo

Stranger: "

Stranger: "make it free cause I dont wanna pay, wwwaaaaa"

You: and it wouldnt cost people much and it would imrpove the quality of life of lots of people

Stranger: sure

You: that's the kind of free shit socialists want

You: not Ipods

Stranger: sure

You: although, with the savings... you could buy an ipod

You: but then apple would also get taxed properly

Stranger: they want free college, higher taxes for those who work so social assistance rates can be raised for those who cant be bothered to work

You: and pay for dentistry....

Stranger: aww, did you have to pay a bill like an adult?

You: dude, you already said you have never paid a dentist bill in your life

Stranger: but did you

You: yeah I'm 32

Stranger: yeah but you act like a child

You: dude you don't even understand taxes

Stranger: i do

You: yeah, you are worried that your taxes which you pay for will be used for something usefull for society

Stranger: but I' be paying MORE taxes, I dont want that

You: and you are worried that people who make millions of dollars more than you are going to have to pay more

You: progressive taxation doesn't work like that

Stranger: well, they earned it why should they have to pay more?

You: because they have extracted that value from the world, and that's what taxes are, for taking care of the world

Stranger: sure

You: yeah

Stranger: im not intrested in your bs

You: lol

You: i mean, you're a piece of work buddy

Stranger: thanks

You: i mean, you've got a lot of growing up to do

Stranger: I could care less what a socialist loser thinks

Stranger: I worked for it, its fucking mine

You: lol

You: jesus, ok

You: lets start over

Stranger: you want it? work harder

You: "I worked for it, it's fucking mine"

Stranger: yeah

You: yeah

You: agreed

Stranger: so you want something? work harder and earn it, dont expect someone else to pay for it

You: you get hired for a job flipping burgers

Stranger: no thanks, I can do better than that

You: you work 9 hour shifts, and cook 300 burgers an hour

Stranger: is that your job?

You: you get paid, 12 dollars

You: no i'm an electrician

Stranger: then why do those shit jobs matter?

You: but this person gets paid 12 dollars for making 300 burgers sold for an average of $4 each

Stranger: your point is?

You: they process the food that made the company $1200

Stranger: ok and?

You: and got paid 1%

Stranger: your point is?

You: the $1200, I WORKED FOR IT, I PRODUCED IT, ITS FUCKING MINE

Stranger: nope

Stranger: you get paid $12 per hour worked, not per item cooked

You: yeah dude its the same shit, you are worried about the people who took 99% of the wealth from a shit job employee having to pay more taxes and give poor people dental care

Stranger: if they want to get paid more go get a higher skilled job than flipping burgers and salting fries

You: it can be a fucking hard job

You: like, seriously watch a fast food employee next time you are in one

You: they are always having to do shit

Stranger: I did, she was cute and bent over

You: yeah, you should have paid her for that

Stranger: nope

You: you stole a look

Stranger: paid her to pick up trash from the floor? I believe the company pays her for that

You: again, the wealthy will pay their employees as little as they legally can, and keep as much money as they can and pay as little taxes as they can

Stranger: oh

Stranger: well

Stranger: get a higher paying job?

You: and you think that these people are working harder

Stranger: there is no skill in burger flipping

You: when they are just working hard enough to exploit resources of other people and hoard wealth

Stranger: sure

You: so yeah, burger flipping is a job that is grueling and bullshit and annoying

Stranger: well, get a new one

You: but the metaphor is applicable to most jobs

Stranger: sure

You: you figure out how much the company is making off of you, and you realize it is a lot more than they are paying you and they should be respecting you a lot more for doing your job well

You: that's why unions are fucking awesome

You: because they can protect you from exploitation, get you better wages and services

You: and fight for you if you are wronged

Stranger: yeah, so those burger flippers can go get a new union job

You: the burger flippers can also start a union, but mcdonalds is pretty keen on union busting

Stranger: I've had to repeat my order to some of the morons working there and sometimes they still cant get it right, so why should they be paid more?

You: again, you don't have to focus on burgers,

You: like, shit man

Stranger: oh well

You: anyway, your bus job sounds cool and i hope it treats you well and you learn from your coworkers what the union is doing for you

Stranger: yeah

Stranger: because I have the high skill required to drive a bus, I will be paid more than a no skilled worker in a store or Mcdicks

You: i mean... some would try to say that driving a bus doesn't take much skill at all

Stranger: explain to me how to do a right turn while driving a bus,

You: like it's basically sitting on a couch

Stranger: sure.

You: i mean, what goes on a double mcRib, no L, ex P,

Stranger: dont know, dont care

You: yeah, dude people undervalue the labour of workers

Stranger: sure

Stranger: "duuurr I put cheese on a burger"

You: "I made 600 burgers today, and some shithead started screaming at me for getting onions when he asked for no ketchup"

Stranger: well, do your job right

You: lol, show some compassion and empathy in every aspect of your life

Stranger: nah

You: yeah, dude

Stranger: if they cant figure out what "no ketchup" is they are not too bright

You: i think you missed the part where the guy didn't ask for no onions

You: he only asked for no ketchup

Stranger: oh well I dont care

Stranger: get a better job

Stranger: I've seen quite a few downright useless fast food workers, so tell me why they are worth more than $12 an hour?

You: your anecdotal evidence is as flawed in observations of fast food employees as it is with women

Stranger: sure

You: you have no empathy and only think about yourself

You: you are short sighted, ignorant and arrogant

Stranger: I had to repeat my order of "2 double cheese burgers and 1 regular sized M&M Mcflurry " 3 times

Stranger: only to get slow service and an oreo Mcflurry

You: yeah dude, i had to repeat unions are socialism like 5 times and you still don't understand

Stranger: but unions are not socialism you fuckward

Stranger: if you want to get paid more EARN IT

You: fuckin' you want me to crack open wikipedia

Stranger: dont care

Stranger: I dont care what some socialist moron thinks

Stranger: burger flippers are skilless, so they get low paid

You: ok, but you understand the central theme though right?

Stranger: high skill= high pay

low skill = low pay

You: a burger flipper does a variety of tasks for 8 hours a day and gets paid 1% of the value they produce, or less

Stranger: burger flipper has no usefull skills

You: YOU EAT THE FOOD DIPSHIT

Stranger: and?

You: THEY MADE THE FOOD FOR YOU!

Stranger: making food isnt hard

You: YOU DIDN"T MAKE THE FOOD AND YOU GOT FOOD

Stranger: they are paid to make the food

Stranger: I bought the food

You: ok, so you paid a company 99% for them to exploit a worker tyo make you a burger

Stranger: yeah, so what

Stranger: why do you even care? its not your job

You: we move up, and look at the day shift managers, the night shift managers, they get paid quite a bit more than the employees but aren't working much harder

Stranger: managers are overpaid slackers

You: they might actually be working less hard

You: yeah, and above them, managers of the local franchises, and up ward and upward to a ceo who is perhaps having a meeting once a day? and getting paid how much more than their lowest employee

Stranger: oh well\

Stranger: I dont care about the useless burger flipper

You: again, its not burgers, its everthing

You: its you right now

You: you don't even have this kushy bus job

You: with union support

You: you are probably unemployed

Stranger: you realize their job is pretty much

cooking food

taking out trash

sweeping the floor,

stuff you do at home, its simple shit

Stranger: I have a union job

You: what is your job?

Stranger: loading trucks

You: and that takes how much skill?

Stranger: a fair amount

You: in what way?

Stranger: gotta load 4 trucks, sort it according to the load sort, keep up with the pace of freight coming to you

You: but anyone with muscles could do it?

Stranger: if your loading a company truck keep count of the number of stops, if its owner op dont count it

Stranger: muscles and a brain

You: ok

Stranger: harder work than burger flippers

You: i mean, I was gonna scrutinize it further to make the point that your job seems pretty simple but you have lots of insider knowledge about the challenges of the job to say otherwise

Stranger: exactly

You: it could be argued that it is an unskilled labour possition though

Stranger: harder job thus for higher pay

You: maybe, or a labour rights movement that had your back

Stranger: no the unskilled is unloading trailers, all it takes it watch your head, watch out for the guy your with and put the labels facing up onto the conveyor

Stranger: still not socialism you idiot

You: i mean, i don't need to argue that rain is wet

You: you can deny it if you want

Stranger: nah

You: you can even call me an idiot for saying the rain is wet

Stranger: your dumb enough to think the morons at fast food deserve higher pay so I cant take you seriously

You: but it only reflects on your arrogance

Stranger: sure

Stranger: "2 double cheese burgers and an M&M Mcflurry"

I had to repeat it 3 times and they still couldnt get the order right.

but you think they should be paid more?

You: i guess should have picked a better metaphor

You: you are really hung up on that eh?

Stranger: its an example to prove you wrong

Stranger: picking up an empty cup from the floor is so hard, oh poor girl

You: it proves nothing really

You: except that you hate poor people

Stranger: it proves they are not worth more than min wage

You: and that they deserve worse treatment than wealthy people

Stranger: no, they just need to work harder to get higher pay

Stranger: also whens the last time you were in any fast food place?

You: and that caring about the needs of the marginalized and downtrodden is outside of your wheelhouse, and that you should eat shit and die alone

You: simple as that

You: fuck off

You: and die

Stranger: lol guess what

You: mgtow to hell

Stranger: I used to be homeless

You: yeah, sounds made up

Stranger: well its not

Stranger: you see, I did what was needed to get off the street, finish school and get a job

You: and you have internalized all sorts of capitalist bullshit along the way

Stranger: so what

Stranger: hard work is all you need

Stranger: get a skill

You: lol

Stranger: why are bus drivers paid so much?

high skilled job

gotta deal with shitty people sometimes

You: you're still pretty thick

Stranger: also, since you dodged my question, most fast food workers are high schoolers anyway, so who cares if they make min wage, most of that money is just blown when they hang out with friends anyway

You: ok, but that's not actually true

You: most fast food employees are between 28 an 40

Stranger: odd. I was in Mcdonalds today, the oldest guy there looked 20

Stranger: hmm, then how come I've seen people from my old highschool working there? they were a grade or two below me as well...

You: cause of the neighborhood you live in doesn't represent the majority of fastfood service jobs?

Stranger: I've been to quite a few and its all highschool looking kids workin there

You: and so you know a lot of workers who are 18-20 but that doesn't actually mean that's the average

You: https://groundswell.org/fast-food-misconceptions/

Stranger: want higher pay? get hire skill

You: 40 percent of the workforce in the fast food industry is 25 or older, and the average fast-food worker is 29 years old.

Stranger: get a skill

Stranger: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/best-paid-job-skills

You: but also, tax the rich and give services to poor people

Stranger: so tax those who work hard and have skills to pay for things for people who are lazy and have no skill.

Stranger: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-10-skills-you-need-to-earn-higher-wages-may-surprise-you-2017-04-18

You: alright lazy brain, i gotta go to bed

You: got work in the morning

You: gotta put these skills to work

Stranger: get a skill to get higher pay

Stranger: dont want to flip burgers? get a skill

You: dude I'm an electrician

Stranger: exactly, so your paid more than a burger flipper cause your usefull

You: not everyone can do this work, we need a diversity of workers doing all sorts of shit

Stranger: there are plenty of skilled jobs

You: you're dumb as bricks but you are getting paid decent with your loading job

Stranger: yeah, because its skill

Stranger: and im not dumb as bricks.

You: i want a society that takes care of you even though personally I hope boxes crush your legs and a woman shits in your mouth

Stranger: lol

Stranger: see, your so bitter

Stranger: you cant accept that not everyone agrees with you and you freak out

You: yeah, its just cause you are 22, a bitter misogynist and unable to process new information

Stranger: I have processed it

Stranger: and its bullshit

Stranger: you dont get high pay for low skill

You: eh... your bs assessment skills are weeeeeek

Stranger: everyone knows that to get high pay you gotta work hard

Stranger: take from those who work to give to those who dont, your fucked in the head

You: aight duder

You: eat shitbricks

You have disconnected.

0 notes

marcjampole · 5 years ago

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Mathematical models for everything from marketing to perusing resumes are making inequality & discrimination against the poor & minorities worse

Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction doesn’t break new ground in its discussion of how computer algorithms discriminate against the poor, minorities and women, making them pay more for loans, shutting them out of jobs, and disrupting their work schedules. Just about everything she writes about we’ve seen in the pages of major newspapers and serious magazines.

But O’Neil puts it all together in language we can understand and with the rigor of a mathematician who has actually delved into the various assumptions and computations hidden within the digital black boxes that companies use to sort resumes, banks use to give loans, employers use to schedule employees and virtually every consumer company uses to target customers with products and services.

O’Neil does not advocate doing away with all the mathematical models that permeate contemporary American society, only those that threaten our social fabric because of hidden prejudices built into the algorithm or those that purposely exploit or deceive people.

Take the development of U.S. News Report’s top college rankings, which over the past thirty years has engendered a “keep up with the Joneses” competition among status seeking parents, while dramatically changing how universities approach their own development and improvement, pandering to the rating instead of the educational mission of the institution. It has also created a new industry of college selection advisors to help rich and middle class parents get their children into the highest-ranking schools. O’Neil reports that the original mathematical model used as its measures of success those variables in which the schools thought to be traditionally the best had excelled, such as contributions by alumni. Their selection of what to measure not only favored Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the other universities already entrenched at the top of the pecking order, it also led to such obvious distortions as small liberal arts colleges for the wealthy achieving a higher rating than state universities with far-ranging research capabilities and an economically diverse student base such as Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and the University of California Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses.

It’s amazing that one misshapen computer model could do so much damage. But O’Neil analyses a number of such monstrosities, such as the biased models by which school districts evaluate teachers, banks decide which financial services to offer and how to price them, employers analyze resumes without looking at them to decide whom to hire and political campaigns select which messages to send to individual voters. O’Neil calls these models “Weapons of Math Destruction,” or WMD, both clever and accurate.

Many of the problems caused by WMD stem from substituting a simple measurement for a complicated situation, for example when teacher evaluation models substitute test scores for in-class performance to measure teachers’ competence or employment models use credit scores to determine a potential employee’s stability. Another major problem is that many of the models have as their sole purpose the maximizing of profit, regardless of what that means to customers or employees, such as job scheduling models that make employees work split shifts, add or cancel their work hours before the shift begins, and prevent their total hours from exceeding the minimums for receiving benefits. The employer makes more money, while financially strapped employees have to deal with juggling childcare, medical appointments and other aspects of daily life. Then there are the models that instantaneously analyze your Internet browsing history as soon as you get on the website of a financial institution, telling the institution whether to offer you a high or low rate on loans and insurance, based on your “risk.” High risk in this case serves as a euphemism for poor and often, minority.

An anecdote O’Neil tells near the end of the book is particularly scary because it reflects the anti-science, anti-fact bias shared by many corporations and politicians. Despite years of work as a successful mathematician in the private sector, in 2013 O’Neil took an unpaid internship in New York City’s Departments of Housing and Human Service. She was interested in building mathematical models that help, not hurt society. The issue was homelessness. Her team looked over masses of data to figure out what factors led people into homeless shelters and what factors led them to leave and stay out for good. One of her colleagues discovered that one group of homeless families left shelters never to return—those who obtained vouchers for housing under a federal housing program called Section 8.

Ooopsy! As it turns out, then NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the data king who had made billions of dollars supplying the financial industry with information, didn’t like Section 8 vouchers and had instituted a highly publicized new program called Advantage, which limited Section 8 subsidies to three years. As O’Neil writes, “The ideas was that the looming expiration of benefits would push poor people to make more money and pay their own way.” Yeah, right—they’d finally stop working as a fast food cashier and take a job as a Wall Street lawyer! Of course with rents booming in the Big Apple, the opposite was happening: people lost their vouchers after three years and ended up in homeless shelters.

The Bloomberg administration did not welcome the researcher’s finding and evidently ignored it in future planning. What the Bloomberg Administration wanted to believe literally trumped (pun intended!) what the facts were suggesting: that the cure for homelessness was not unfettered capitalism but providing a helping hand. Ignoring what the research proved corrupted Bloomberg’s approach to reducing homelessness as much as the current Trump administration’s approach to the environment, government regulation, taxation and education is corrupted by its failure to follow the facts. Corruption and manipulation lie at the heart of what caused institutions to create and apply WMDs.

I vividly remember an example of the corruption of ignoring facts I experienced when I worked for a large public relations agency in 1987. I returned from a Conference Board seminar with a study about the way corporations would employ agencies in the 1990s. The new approach to agency use would make it harder for agencies to make money and force them to engage in more competitions with not just other large agencies, but small boutique firms that specialized in one kind of PR. As soon as I completed my presentation to the staff of our office, our general manager got up and said I was wrong and outlined a rosy view based on no research whatsoever. Of course, the predictions presented at the Conference Board seminar turned out to be right on the money.

#math

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thesouthendproject · 5 years ago

Text

“Chavs”, class and representation

Owen Jones’s best-selling Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class has deservedly been praised as an accessible and refreshing engagement with the issues of class in modern Britain. Since its publication last year Jones has achieved celebrity status as the unofficial figurehead of a re-emergent young left. His popularity is significant testimony to a resurgent interest in left wing politics, and indicative of a mood of both struggle and discontent with Tory and New Labour thinking.

Chavs traces the rise of an offensive caricature of the working class: a racist hooligan, an alcoholic thug; women unable to control their vaginas, men unable to control their fists; brainless, feckless scroungers-working class people, as represented by the term chav, are nothing more than parasitic growths on society. Jones demonstrates how the figure of the chav is used to deflect blame away from the structures that create inequality onto individuals. The chav caricature implies poverty is the result of personal choices and moral deficiencies-laziness, pure unadulterated barbarity and primitive atavism-rather than the system itself. Consequently, such representations not only shroud the real causes of inequality, but also act to justify further attacks upon the welfare system. After all, why should taxpayers’ money go towards sustaining the gross lifestyles of indolent plebs?

Jones argues that derogatory working class caricatures gained currency because the working class has relatively little power over how it is represented. The proportion of people from working class backgrounds in journalism and politics has significantly dwindled, while the middle class edges further and further towards monopolising positions of power, replicating society in its own image to serve its own needs. Put simply, there is a class bias in the dominant representations of society. Even genuine attempts to give the working class a fair representation or voice inevitably reproduce unrealistic stereotypes due to the middle class’s detachment from the actualities of working class life.

Alongside growing contempt for the working class, class itself has been increasingly ignored and disavowed by politicians and the media. Jones argues that Thatcherism’s all-out assault on trade unions and the welfare state crippled the working class, allowing for the subsequent airbrushing of the working class out of public life. He lambasts the disingenuous claim made by Thatcherites that we live in a classless society, pointing to the fact that those who made such statements were ruthlessly pursuing their own class agenda. Jones is also disdainful of New Labour’s capitulation to this logic, with their feeble response that “we are all middle class now”. This idea, or the notion that we live in a meritocracy in which all can, regardless of background, achieve unlimited wealth and success, denies the fact that class affects people’s lives in any real meaningful way and entrenches the belief people are responsible for their own poverty.

Jones wants to reveal the real working class behind these representations. He dismisses the idea that class is about how much you earn, home ownership or lifestyle, instead defining the working class as “people who have no means of sustenance other than the sale of labour” and who lack autonomy or control over that labour.1 He describes an increasingly female workforce, based in service industries, working in poor conditions for low pay. He criticises the drive to create a flexible workforce of temporary and part-time employees working under terrible conditions, and explores the social cost of unemployment within communities destroyed by the closure of industries during the 1980s.

Like Jones, Marxism sees class as “the collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure”.2 Class is essentially a social relationship: “Class society arises when a minority establishes sufficient control over the means of production to compel the direct producers-slaves, peasants or workers-to labour not simply for themselves but also for the exploiting minority”.3 Class position is objective and exists with or without class consciousness. A person may consider themselves to be middle class because they have a university degree, work in a white collar industry or display what are regarded as middle class consumption patterns and tastes, but it is their relationship to the means of production and to other classes in society that determines their class. Although it is tempting define class by occupation, this mystifies more than it reveals. For example, identifying the working class with manual workers overlooks the fact that “manual workers” can be shop-floor workers, supervisors and small businesspeople, just as the term “white collar” can bunch together the CEO of a large corporation and the low-paid office worker in the same category.4 Class is not about identifying static social groups within a predefined hierarchy; classes are better “defined as common positions within the social relations of production, where production is analysed above all as a system of exploitation”.5

Culture and class

Despite Chavs being about the working class, the opinions of journalists and politicians take precedence throughout the book. The middle class, who are the main focus of Jones’s anger and criticism, simultaneously provide his main sources, while those who own and control the means of production-the capitalists-escape largely unscathed.

Nevertheless, there is much of worth in Jones’s discussion of the realities of working class life today and his acknowledgement that “ultimately it is not the prejudice we need to tackle, but is the fountain from which it springs”.6 This is a refreshing departure from much recent scholarship of class identity, which analyses class through looking at culture and perceptions, and ideas of hierarchy and status in which class position is not only determined through the relationship to the means of production, but is also formed through consumption patterns and lifestyle choices.7Thus Floya Anthias argues for a definition of class that “is not so much concerned with resource distribution and allocation but rather with inferiorisation at the cultural or ascriptive level, as well as the level of identity and access to cultural or symbolic resources”.8

Similarly, Andy Medhurst has argued that “class is not just an objective entity, but also (and mostly?), a question of identifications, perceptions, feelings”.9 This approach is more interested in the “linguistic condescension” levelled at those with working class accents, than that those who own such accents are working for the minimum wage with no job security. For these writers, Marxist analysis suffers from an “obsession” with economics. Medhurst argues “class privilege and class prejudice are not reducible to dispassionate debate or the algebras of abstraction”.10 They see the need to address cross-class cultural differentiation and the ways in which the middle class sneer at working class culture because this is fundamental to their idea of how class is constituted. However, this ultimately drags them further and further away from the material social relations at the heart of class.

If we focus on the prejudices attached to status, the key to transforming society becomes an appreciation of chav stereotypes and tropes-a perverse donning of Burberry and gold earrings as a route to emancipation and tolerance. The answer to changing society does not lie in eradicating “status snobbery” which ultimately elevates the importance of people’s subjective attitudes towards one another above the unequal distribution of wealth and property. Jones’s strength lies in his concise articulation of the need for class struggle rather than status parity in Chavs, emphasising the need for strong unions and an international labour movement as the means through which real equality can be achieved.

However, although the idea that we need to tackle issues of status rather than distribution and ownership has enjoyed a resurgence in recent times, it is not particularly new, and the failure to recognise this is a weakness of Chavs. In the 1950s Labour revisionists sought to shed the rhetoric of class, believing it alienated the electorate and attributing their 1951 defeat to their characterisation as a party of the working class. Leading revisionist Anthony Crosland claimed the material inequalities in society had been largely overcome, increased state planning had protected people against ravages of capitalism and the real problem of society was the importance attached to status-that people did not feel like they were equal. People were apparently living in an age of affluence in which discontent was not a result of actual material deprivation or class antagonism, but “status anguish”.11Concurrently, “embourgeoisement” theorists of the 1950s and 1960s claimed the working class had benefited from capitalism; content with their material lot, the real issue at stake for the working class was cultural acceptance.12

A history of class demonisation

The tendency to underplay such continuities emanates from Jones’s stress upon Thatcherism as the decisive turning point in class relations. Although he has rebutted claims that he romanticises the pre-Thatcherite working class, he maintains that:

There was a time when working class people had been patronised rather than openly despised. Disraeli had called working class people “angels in marble”. “Salt of the earth” was another phrase once associated with them. Today, they are more likely than not to be called chavs. From salt of the earth to scum of the earth. This is the legacy of Thatcherism-the demonisation of everything associated with the working class.13

This claim that Thatcherism saw the birth of contempt for the working class leads Jones to underplay the historical antecedents of class demonisation. The “undeserving poor”, the Victorian “social residuum”, the 1960s “culture of poverty”-class demonisation is not simply a product of Thatcherite neoliberal ideology and policies, and neither was it absent during Labour’s post-war period. Broadly speaking, these ideas can be traced back to the 17th century Poor Law, which sought to differentiate between “deserving” and “undeserving” claimants.14 Similarly at the turn of the 20th century, debates raged regarding proposals to segregate the very poor into detention centres, to remove children from “degenerate” parents and even to send the “residuum” overseas.15

Descriptions of the self-inflicted poverty of sections of the working class have been used to justify attacks upon social provisions for the poor for centuries. Just as Thomas Malthus argued at the end of the 18th century that Poor Laws “diminished the will to save, and weakened incentives to sobriety, industry and happiness”,16today David Cameron argues that welfare has created a “culture of entitlement” and has remarked that “the benefit system has created a benefit culture. It doesn’t just allow people to act irresponsibly, but often actively encourages them to do so”.17

The unemployed have a particularly long history of demonisation. John Harrison has shown how people receiving benefits have been criminalised since the inception of unemployment benefits:

Stigmatised as the “dole”…granted only after a household means test carried out by the local Public Assistance Committee… No aspect of the 1930s was more hated and remembered more bitterly than the means test. It often involved officials coming into the home; it penalised thrift and encouraged tale-telling and petty tyranny…smelled strongly of the Board of Guardians and the workhouse.18

This proves strikingly similar to contemporary government campaigns on “benefit thieves”, which encourage individuals to ring a confidential hotline to report suspicious behaviour of others and the constant media denunciations of benefit scroungers and fraudsters.19 To acknowledge that people are unemployed because of the economic system would require questioning capitalism; it is easy to see why blaming the poor for their own poverty has always appealed to the ruling class. It is also convenient for these people to deflect questions of theft and fraud onto the poorest in society: MPs’ “overclaimed” expenses, on average 31 times the amount claimed by “benefit thieves”, banking scandals and corporate corruption draw attention to who the real criminals of society are.20

Race and the “underclass”

One frequent criticism levelled at Jones concerns his treatment of race in Chavs. The language of race has long been used to emphasise the supposedly deep foundations of immoral behaviour which invites poverty. Jose Harris notes that “from 1870 down to 1914 popular discussion of the problems of the very poor frequently referred to them in biological and anthropological terms as ‘a backward people’ and ‘a race apart’”.21 During this period, which witnessed the rise of biological racial determinism, some social Darwinists argued not only that there was a hierarchy of races, but that the poor, criminals and prostitutes were themselves evolutionary throwbacks, evidence of racial degeneration of the “white race”.

Likewise, in modern discussions of poverty, culturalist approaches tend to talk about the supposed criminal traits and behaviours of the poor as if they were part of a fixed culture, a hereditary disease-effectively to describe sections of the working class in racial terms. One of the most famous propagators of the culturalist approach to poverty is Charles Murray who has written extensively on the “underclass”: 22

The underclass does not refer to degree of poverty, but to a type of poverty. It is not a new concept. I grew up knowing what the underclass was; we just didn’t call it that in those days. In the small Iowa town where I lived, I was taught by my middle class parents that there were two kinds of poor people. One class of poor people was never even called “poor”. I came to understand that they simply lived with low incomes, as my own parents had done when they were young. Then there was another set of poor people, just a handful of them. These poor people didn’t lack just money. They were defined by their behaviour. Their homes were littered and unkempt. The men in the family were unable to hold a job for more than a few weeks at a time. Drunkenness was common. The children grew up ill-schooled and ill-behaved and contributed a disproportionate share of the local juvenile delinquents.23

The underclass concept itself is incontrovertibly tied up with ideas of race. First appearing in America, the disproportionate concentration of African Americans living in poverty led policymakers and academics to describe “underclass behaviours” as predominantly belonging to the African American community. The idea of a specifically black underclass entrenches the imagined dichotomy between a respectable white working class and a black “sub-class”, existing outside of working class struggle and with distinct interests. Moreover, it denies the role of racism and capitalism in the concentration of poverty in black communities, instead blaming black culture and behaviour. Consequently, whites who fall into similar levels of poverty are described in similar racialised terms.24

An apt example of how class inequalities are sometimes treated as racial issues is Jones’s infamous debate with right wing historian David Starkey immediately after the 2011 British riots. Starkey claimed that “the substantial section of the chavs…have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion.” Jones lambasted Starkey for equating economic and social power, and respectability, with whiteness.25 Deploying the language of race functions to ascribe to poor whites static cultural and genetic characteristics, and simultaneously reinforces racist ideas-that whiteness is normal and superior, and blackness alien and inferior with the potential to “infect” white people.

Gareth Stedman Jones has detailed how the “social residuum” of the 19th century “was considered dangerous not only because of its degenerate nature but also because its very existence served to contaminate the classes immediately above it”.26 Yet, although racial ideas have certainly been applied to the domestic white working class, we cannot collapse class into race. Talking about class as if it were race confuses the specifics of both; racial oppression exists to justify unequal relationships in society, whereas class is the relationship of exploitation embodied in the structure of society. Racism may be ideological, but has tangible effects; oppression is lived and is real, but race itself is a historically specific category with no objective basis. Acknowledging that certain sections of society are described in racial language which assigns people particular criminal and poverty-inducing cultures and behaviours helps to uncover how their poverty is legitimised and individualised, but does not explain why that poverty exists.

The working class whitewashed

Furthermore, using the language of race to describe sections of the working class potentially reinforces the propensity to describe the white working class as a specifically dispossessed racial group. In Chavs Jones states that inequality has been racialised, that “the promotion of multiculturalism in an era when the concept of class was being abandoned meant that inequality became almost exclusively understood through the prism of race and ethnic identity”.27 Jones is referring to a liberal multiculturalism that conceives of a set of pre-defined, homogeneous cultures assigned to distinct ethnic groups, living side by side with completely different needs and attitudes, struggling to tolerate the innate differences between them. Within this understanding of multiculturalism the portrayal of the working class as exclusively “white”, with a monocultural British identity, has been used to claim that poverty and inequality are direct results of the presence of ethnic minorities. Alongside the portrayal of the white working class as an endangered cultural relic under attack from distinct “ethnic cultures”,28 it is argued that ethnic minorities receive preferential treatment by the state in the allocation of resources and that the immigration involved puts unnecessary pressure on taxpayers.29

Therefore the white working class are not always portrayed as “chavs”, but can also be represented as victims-particularly as victims of immigration. The Daily Mailfrequently prints stories featuring headlines such as “Nine Out Of Ten Jobs Created Last Year Went To Foreign Nationals” and “Mass Immigration Has Made The UK’s Poor Even Poorer”.30 In the 2011 elections Tory candidate Maureen Pearce stood on a patriotic, virulently xenophobic platform which fed off notions of a white British identity under siege. Her manifesto stated a dedication to:

(1) Flying the Union Jack and Cross of St George all year round.

(2) Stopping mass immigration into Britain.

(3) Putting “political correctness” into the dustbin of history.31

Jones rightfully expresses the need to recognise the multiracial nature of the British working class to counter this inaccurate portrayal of a racially homogeneous working class under attack. In his new preface he states, “Chavs was sometimes referred to as a book solely about the white working class. One of the purposes of the book was to take on this narrow, exclusive image of the working class”.32 Although Jones understands that the chav is a representation that does not encompass the reality or diversity of the working class, his focus on this representation only allows him to show how the white working class has been demonised. To demonstrate the demonisation of a multiracial working class, the specific ways in which different sections of the working class have been represented must be recognised. Much could be gained from looking at the similarities in the ways in which chavs, immigrants and people of colour have been represented: derogatory stereotypes serve an ideological function in dismissing the structural causes of inequality, and reinforce the idea that particular groups of people have inherent immutable cultures prone to criminality and sloth. These categories are by no means identical, in either their development or their effects-but it is worth noting their similarities nonetheless.

Jones’s argument that the criminality of working class individuals is used as a template for the entire working class resonates with the way the media and politicians present crimes by particular immigrants and ethnic minorities. In his study of race and the press Teun A Van Dijk found that “crime is not covered [in the press] as involving black individuals, but as a form of ‘group crime’, for which the whole black community tends to be blamed”.33 Immigrants, like chavs, are portrayed as benefit thieves, fraudsters and scroungers. Many politicians are keen to emphasise the supposed inherent degeneracy of immigrants, who are regularly depicted as self-ostracising, with values and interests antithetical to the imagined white national community.

The working class has certainly been demonised, but it has been demonised in many different ways through numerous prisms that veil the commonalities and shared position of exploitation of people from different backgrounds. The chav figure must be placed alongside these other forms of demonisation to show how the multiracial working class is attacked and divided.

Working class racism

One of the most interesting sections in Chavs is the exploration of how the white working class has been portrayed as a racist rabble. The working class is regularly depicted as actively choosing to live in ignorance: ignorance of manners, ignorance of other cultures and a fervent anti-intellectualism. This portrayal of working class racism has been used to justify attacks upon the welfare state. The odious 2006 report The New East End uses the idea of racial competition over resources precisely for these ends.34 Welfare, it claims, is a “faceless bureaucracy”, an “impersonal force” based on taking “out” of the system, encouraging competition over resources that creates racial tensions, whereas “when competition is channelled into serving national goals, and putting something into the community, then its effect is likely to be increased solidarity, as happened during the war”.35

Yet there is another function in projecting all issues of racism onto the working class. When racism is seen as the product of morally and socially sick individuals who embrace their self-inflicted ignorance it becomes “a problem involving those on the outer edge of society which [does] not threaten the core of present mainstream society, culture, or the state”,36 a problem which can be ignored. The image of the chav is a convenient canvas onto which all problems of racism and crime can be projected by a media and state eager to protect their liberal and tolerant self-characterisation; each denunciation of the racist chav minority a ritual purification to cleanse and absolve themselves from their roles in the development and propagation of racism. Within this climate, where the working class is demonised as a racist underclass, the BNP and far-right groups attempt to align themselves in an empathetic position, claiming they are also wrongly victimised and accused of racism by a hypocritical ruling class.

Jones shows how the typical BNP supporter is likely to be portrayed as a working class lout. This view is also pervasive in much of academia; in a study of the National Front in east London Christopher Husbands has argued that the working class East End has an “unusual local culture” that encourages its inhabitants to be predisposed to politics of racial exclusionism.37 Much of this thinking centres on the presumption that the working class are more likely to be racist than other sections of society. Jones demonstrates how liberal commentators use the apparent racism of the working class to berate and mock them,38 but highlights that it is the working class who are most likely to live and work with, marry and befriend immigrants. Yet he maintains that “attitudes towards immigration are liable to depend on the class of the person who holds them. Indeed, prospective employers stand to gain from cheaper foreign workers”.39

The implication of this is that anti-immigration feeling is stronger within the working class, because it is they who suffer most from an influx of competitive foreign labour. Jones argues that “the average BNP voter is likely to be working class… The BNP has thrived in traditionally white working class areas with a long history of returning Labour candidates,” without acknowledging the real class basis of fascist organisations.40 For example, one prominent former BNP donor is millionaire Charles Wentworth; EDL strategist and funder Alan Lake, or Alan Ayling, is a rich director of a City investment fund; while successive leaked BNP membership lists point to a petty bourgeois core of supporters.41 Additionally, there is no strict correlation between votes for the BNP and levels of deprivation. One report found that the BNP’s election results were negatively correlated with the highest levels of poverty and greatest numbers claiming state benefits, concluding, “Overall it seems the poorer the ward the less likely the BNP are to do well”.42

Furthermore, working class people, black and white, have repeatedly organised and fought against oppression. There is a long history of working class anti-racist struggles, from Cable Street in 1933 to Lewisham in 1977 and contemporary mobilisations against fascist organisations, which complicate the image of a liberal, tolerant middle class desperately trying to hose down the frothing racism of the working class hordes.

While Jones argues that we should direct anger at the bosses rather than immigrants, he nevertheless reduces the causes of racism to the material concerns of the working class. Jones may give some anecdotal evidence of some middle class racists, but this is an inadequate substitute for considering where racist ideas actually come from and the role of capitalism in developing racial categories.43Working class people do not instinctively turn to racist ideas to explain their material deprivation-the state and media play a fundamental role in shifting the blame for inequality onto immigrants.

Representations of the working class

Even if we accept that there was a time when the working class had an easily identifiable and largely positive representation, problems remain. Peter Hitchcock has argued that the difficulties involved in working class representation start with the fundamental abstractness of class itself:

Representations of class are active negotiations on the meaning of class as it is lived but do not constitute the real proletarian Being as an abstraction for capital. This certainly explains why cultural representations in themselves do not encompass social change, but it also goes a long way towards explaining the tenuousness of working class expression in general.44

The working class has never possessed a unique, homogeneous culture and identity that can be given a singular representation. Representation can provide insights into how class is lived in specific contexts, but cannot fully explain class or social change. In Capital Marx contrasts class in its “pure” abstract form with its historically specific manifestations, remarking:

In England, modern society is indisputably more highly and classically developed in economic structure. Nevertheless, even here the stratiﬁcation of classes does not appear in its pure form. Middle and intermediate strata even here obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere.45

While this stratification can exist within a class, the fundamental characteristic of the working class remains intact-the fact of its own exploitation. Therefore this recognition of diversity within the working class does not rid the working class of its collective role or suggest these strata are in antagonistic relations with one another, but rather points to varying degrees of heterogeneity within a shared social position.

As Savage and Miles have explained:

The British working class has always been heterogeneous…no single sector of employment ever accounted for more than 40 percent of the workforce throughout the period [1840-1940]. Even at the peak of Britain’s industrial primacy the majority of workers were not employed in manufacturing. The British working class was never purely an industrial working class.46

As well as being diverse, the working class is also dynamic. Under capitalism, the means of production are continually revolutionised as new industries appear and once-profitable ones go into decline. As the needs of capital change, the working class is reshaped.

Despite this, a certain section of the working class is sometimes treated as representative of the class in its entirety. So the “traditional” white, male manual worker has often been used as shorthand for the working class. But anchoring definitions of class to this historically specific manifestation ignores the diversity of the working class in terms of employment, prioritises a static representation over the dynamism of class, tends to exclude women and ethnic minorities, and undermines understanding of the contemporary working class.

The decline of traditional manufacturing industries, which saw the destruction of many mining and industrial communities that for many had come to represent and embody what it meant to be working class, has led some to claim we are living in a post-class world or that the nature of class has been fundamentally transformed.47At the end of the 1980s a group associated with the publication Marxism Today, including cultural theorist Stuart Hall, produced a “Manifesto for the New Times”:

The “New Times” argument is that the world has changed, not just incrementally but qualitatively, that Britain and other advanced capitalist societies are increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economics and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society.48

They argued this meant we were living in a “post-Fordist” world in which social life, culture and politics were no longer primarily based around class, but local decentred identities. Class seemed irrelevant to explaining the new wave of struggles rising in the second half of the 20th century around issues of gender, race and sexuality, and was increasingly regarded as simply one more facet of people’s identities.

While Jones largely avoids such lines of reasoning and vehemently argues that class is still important today, his comments sometimes seem to reflect an understanding of class centred upon representation. This is the case, for instance, when he laments the dearth of working class bands in popular music. This might seem like a pedantic point, but it is important to highlight how easily we can mistake a changed working class for its complete absence. In arguing that there have been no prominent working class bands since Oasis in the 1990s,49 not only does Jones overlook arguably the most successful band in the past ten years, the Arctic Monkeys, who sing in an unmistakably working class Sheffield accent, he also fails to acknowledge that many current artists, such as Cheryl Cole, Tulisa Contostavlos and Emeli Sande, are from working class backgrounds. His examples of The Beatles and Happy Mondays as the heyday of working class prominence in popular music expressed a historically specific working class identity-just as these female artists do today. Of course these artists do not fit into the traditional representations of the working class male manual labourer-but as ethnically diverse women from urban areas they do reflect a changing and variegated working class.

Similarly, while adopting a broad definition of the working class, Jones’s focus is on part-time, agency and short-term workers, employed in supermarkets or call centres. It is easy to see why, as he wants to explore those who are most likely to be demonised as chavs, but it leads to a tendency to see those in the worst paid jobs under the worst conditions as the most representative of the working class. These workers have been described as “precarious”, characterised by insecurity at the hands of a flexible free market, an argument that often goes hand in hand with the idea that globalisation has fundamentally undermined job stability. Jones’s argument that industry can “simply relocate” to countries with less expensive workforces50misunderstands the selective and uneven character of global industrial relocation: capital mobility is restricted by the expense of relocation and the particular requirements for productivity, such as a skilled workforce and developed infrastructure.51

In the UK the number of part-time workers was 7.9 million at the end of 2011, a rise of 2 million since 1992, and agency work currently accounts for somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million workers. Yet part-time work should not be unquestioningly understood as non-permanent and unstable, and agency work cannot be seen as unremittingly enveloping the permanent workforce.52 Despite a trend towards flexibility, significant countervailing tendencies exist.53 One in seven people still work in manufacturing in the UK, while most people still have permanent jobs.54

The chav is certainly unrepresentative of the working class, but we must be wary of suggesting the working class ever had a straightforward uncomplicated image, or that this representation, in itself, was necessary for the existence of class or for social change.

Although the underclass and chavs do not exist as a distinct class or social layer, these representations can have a real impact upon how people understand class. The chav is an attempt to win over sections of the working class to a ruling class idea-that there exists a minority who are responsible for their own poverty and from whom the problems of society ultimately stem.

However, these dominant representations are not simply unquestioningly repeated. For instance, people in council housing or in receipt of benefits can differentiate themselves from the other unworthy and lazy poor. But such representations can also be challenged and wholly rejected. As Jones notes, since the 1960s around half of the population have consistently seen themselves as working class, despite the lack of working class representation.55 Representation, in itself, cannot fully explain class, either as an objective relationship of exploitation, or as a definitive indicator to gauge class consciousness or how people understand their class position. The meanings people take from representations are not static and fixed, existing in a vacuum outside of class struggle and the material world. While the ruling class presents its own vision of society and attaches derogatory characteristics to sections within it, social being-our lived experience of class in the socioeconomic structure-challenges and undermines this common sense ideology.

We should not doggedly fixate on older identities or engage in a top-down process of creating an ideal representation that the working class should strive to embody; collective interests and working class identity are transformed and given expression through struggle, rather than workers being passive bearers of imagined idealisations of class identity.

Conclusion

In his conclusion Jones attempts to set out a loose agenda for left politics in the 21st century, which reflects his belief in a predominantly fragmented and deskilled workforce. Therefore, while acknowledging that the workplace is still important, Jones nevertheless underestimates its continuing significance. Additionally, while Jones is right to argue against politics of rugged individualism and “aspiration” that focuses upon escaping the working class, and for the centrality of class rather than identity politics, some of his criticisms of the left are largely unwarranted. He complains that the current left are “more likely to be manning a stall about Gaza outside a university campus” than tending to the “bread and butter” concerns of the working class.56 But such international issues are class issues. Not only do they have significance for particular oppressed sections of the working class who are Muslim or Arab, but the working class needlessly fight and die in imperialist wars, wasting lives and billions of pounds that could be better used upon housing and welfare. Moreover, support for imperialism is one method the ruling class uses to try to bind a section of the working class to itself, making it essential that the left challenges it.

Although Jones argues that “the biggest issue of British politics today is the crisis of working class representation”,57 the reality is that at the high point of “old” Labour and trade unionism working class parliamentary representation did not translate into unfettered equality. If, as Jones states, “Old Labour remained committed to raising the conditions of the working class as a class, even if this sometimes amounted to mere lip service”,58 we should also recognise that Labour remained committed to upholding a system that exploited those it claimed to represent. The reforms enacted under extra-parliamentary pressure should be seen as bringing significant improvements for the working class, but ultimately, as Tony Cliff noted, “in office, the Labour Party has always ensured the continuity of the capitalist state and guarded its harshest, most anti working class plans”.59

The key to eradicating class inequality does not lie in giving the working class better representation within a system which maintains exploitative relations. Although this may bring improvements under particular conditions, it is the actions of the working class in collective struggles against capital that carry the potential to transcend that system.

Overall, Jones has made a welcome contribution to discussion of class in modern Britain during a period of economic turmoil in which working class people are being attacked. The chav may well mock a class reeling from the defeats under Thatcherism, and the power and influence of the ruling class to make its representations of society the most pervasive certainly impact upon the ways in which people understand society-but this is by no means the end of the story. The experience of growing unemployment and worsening living standards, while the rich visibly increase their wealth and push through policies that attack the poorest in society, undermines notions of classlessness, while social movements such as those based around the 99 percent reveal the common interests among the majority at the bottom of society and point to where the real divisions in society lie.

Notes

1: Jones, 2011, p144.

2: Ste Croix, 1984, p100.

3: Callinicos and Harman, 1987, p6.

4: Callinicos and Harman, 1987, p4.

5: Wright, 1979, p17.

6: Jones, 2011, p12.

7: Much of this culturalist approach is influenced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

8: Anthias, 2004, p25.

9: Medhurst, 2000, p20.

10: Medhurst, 2000, p21.

11: Callaghan, 1990, pp174-180.

12: See, for example, Zweig, 1961.

13: Jones, 2011, pp71-72.

14: Welshman, 2006, p4.

15: Stedman Jones, 1976, p314.

16: Welshman, 2006, p5.

17: Cameron, 2011.

18: Harrison, 1984, p371.

19: Although a crude gauge, a quick online search for “benefit fraud” on newspaper websites has the following results. The Sun: 585 articles, the Daily Mail: 1,311 articles, the Telegraph: 5,640 articles.

20: “Benefit Fraud Average Cost 31 Times Lower Than MP Expense Overclaims”, Political Scrapbook, 30 May 2011, http://politicalscrapbook.net/2011/05/mps-expenses-vs-benefit-fraud/

21: Harris, 1993, pp235-236.

22: The notion of the underclass has numerous contested conceptualisations and has both right and left wing adherents. Here I focus only on those who stress cultural and behavioural determinants, rather than those who see the underclass as created primarily by structural causes, while recognising that these approaches are not completely distinct as there is often considerable overlap between the two.

23: Murray, 2006, p24.

24: Although Murray denies race plays a significant role in the British context (Murray, 2006) the ideological underpinnings and assumptions remain.

25: Newsnight, BBC, 12 August 2011.

26: Stedman Jones, 1976, p289.

27: Jones, 2011, pp101-102.

28: This is problematic for several reasons. The notion that ethnic groups have distinct, uncomplicated cultures ignores cultural variation within nationalities and ethnicities. It also ignores the mixing that has gone on for thousands of years between people from different backgrounds to such a degree that to speak of any distinct national or ethnic culture is meaningless. It also denies the ideological role static and fixed conceptions of culture play, and fails to see the various and diverse interpretations and meanings cultures can have to different social groups within different circumstances and contexts, or see culture as a process rooted within material practice and the struggle between social groups. For a more detailed discussion, see Rosen, 2011; Barker, 1981; Jenkins, 2011.

29: For a rebuttal of such claims see Barker, 1981; Kimber, 2010.

30: Daily Mail, 13 May 2011; 31 August 2011.

31: “Labour Slam Tories Over Attempts To ‘Woo the BNP Vote’”, Your Thurrock, 3 May 2011.

32: Jones, 2011, p xiv.

33: Van Dijk, 1991, p100.

34: Indeed, it argues that not only has welfare increased racism, it has been detrimental to women and disproportionately benefits the middle and upper classes.

35: Dench, Gavron and Young, 2006, p7. For a debunking of the myth of cross-class solidarity during the war, see Calder, 1992.

36: Witte, 1996, p174.

37: Husbands, 2007, pp55, 26.

38: Jones, 2011, pp117-118.

39: Jones, 2011, p240.

40: Jones, 2011, p223.

41: Basketter, 2008. For a more detailed analysis of the BNP see Smith, 2009.

42: John, Margetts, Rowland and Weir, 2006, p15.

43: See Callinicos, 1993.

44: Hitchcock, 2000, p29.

45: Marx, 1959, p885.

46: Miles and Savage, 1994, p22.

47: For notable examples of the argument that the working class no longer has a revolutionary role, see Gorz, 1982, and Hobsbawm, 1978, or for a more recent example, Pakulski and Waters, 1996.

48: Hall and Jacques, 1989, p11.

49: Jones, 2011, p133.

50: Jones, 2011, p157.

51: See Harman, 1996.

52: Choonara, 2011.

53: See Dunn, 2004.

54: Smith, 2007.

55: Jones, 2011, p33.

56: Jones, 2011, p257.

57: Jones, 2011, p258.

58: Jones, 2011, p88.

59: Cliff, 1975, p166. See also Coates, 1975, and Miliband, 1972.

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