THE DISJUNCTION OF MODERNITY
I know how much that bothers many of you to hear. Very few things could be more anti- American than refusing to improve your station in life. I know for some of you this idea might be hard to picture. But it reminds me of a scene from my favorite movie Clerks. The two main characters are talking near the end of the film. Dante is trying to convince Randall how difficult change is for him:
DANTE
(sadly)
My mother told me once that when I
as three, my potty lid was closed,
and instead of lifting it, I chose
to shit my pants.
RANDAL
Lovely story.
DANTE
Point is-I'm not the kind of person
that disrupts things in order to
shit comfortablly.
I can't say that I've ever heard anything that more succinctly describes my modus operandi.
My lack of ambition used to bother me, and I know it bothered anyone I told. Whenever I admitted my truth that I had no particular talents, that I was bored of life, that improvement meant nothing to me because life is meaningless. I was always met with a protest, "Oh, you don't really mean that." People would say. What they really meant of course was that they did not want to feel meaningless, that they thought their mad skillz were impressive, and surely life had some kind of meaning, even if I couldn't figure it out.
But I doubt my ambitionlessness means anything to most of you now. Most of you are bored and useless non-thinkers. Unlike you, my typical day consists of eating Jack in the Box failure food and contemplating the Nothingness of the Universe. A hobby that just a hundred years ago was the past time of the rich, the insane, or the genius. Frederick Nietzsche nazel gazing at the Eternal Recurrence as his syphilitic mind spat out dreams of the überman as modernity itself spat out Eugenics and Hitler. "Aren't three generations of imbeciles enough?" It would ask.
Americans have become low wage workers living in the decadence & crumbled ruins of a what was once was the Ultimate First World Country. Rising levels of productivity in the economy for decades have mocked the workers who created it as median levels of income have remained stagnant since the 1970's. Meanwhile the share of income at the top exploded to such obscene levels that richest men in the world have contemplated colonizing outer space.
The pandemic startled America out of it's newest Gilded Age. The inept orangutan voted into office by a hollow and decayed middle class buried his head in the sand as thousands of Americanz died and many more lost their livelihoods.
Suddenly, it wasn't just Professors of Marxist theory that exposed the ruling class propaganda for what it was. It was the people themselves. Nurses, cab drivers, grocery workers, delivery drivers kept the economy afloat. They risked their lives so that millions in the middle class could stay at home and work on ways to automate away the jobs they had previously celebrated.
The pandemic made it clear to the Reagan democrats that job creators could do little to help. Upper and middle class folk saw heroism in simple acts like riding a bus to work a thankless job bagging groceries or emptying bed pans. Too afraid to leave their homes suddenly the middle class gated communities were at the mercy of the proletariat. Would the minimum wage security guard protect their insulated McMansions if they were desperate? Probably not they reasoned.
And so began the government bailout. Trillions spent. Some of it even going to the poor themselves. $1,400 doesn't seem like much to the rich. But to the poor? It's a lot when you realize most poor people couldn't cover a 500 dollar emergency if they had to. Suddenly the poor had that in the bank. They were gifted an extra $600 in unemployment benefits if they lost their jobs. Most low wage workers had never earned that much money working full-time their whole lives! Most didn't know it was possible.
In some ways the pandemic has been the best thing to happen to poor people since the Clinton boom years, if you disregard a half million lives being lost. And that's easy to do since the Wúhan virus was just a made up super flu that only kills the old and sick at rates less than 1 percent of the population. There were other negatives of course. The illuminati taught us to wear masks and accept social control. Everytime I pass a Covid-19 sheeple in his electric vehicle sitting by himself, but still wearing his mask I knew January 6th was no aberration. Our days as a Republic were over. But I'll still take that extra 600 bucks any day of the week.
With that extra 600 dollars in pocket many minimum wage earners are shrugging off returning to work that offers only unpredictable schedules, low pay, no benefits, rude customers, and overall crappy work conditions. But the poor should be careful, because they can only go so long without work. And while the populace is ready for change, the system isn't.
A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION A BRIEF PRIMER ON AMERICAN EXEPTIONALISM
There is no need to speculate using pseudo arm chair sociology what Americans are going through. And what's to come. What's coming is not more investment in the working class. It's not the reinvention of work. It's exceptionalism. American style. Despite calls to provide continued pandemic relief during these troubled times what you should expect from the system is right wing reactionary propaganda campaign against workers and a ruthless capitalism that will cut benefits and toss people to the streets.
Unlike Sarah Palin's usage, American exceptionalism's original meaning wasn't a bravado statement about how great America was, it's a question about why America never developed socialism or strong worker movement. One of the reasons socialism never developed was the brutal form of economic warfare from the ruling class. American bosses put down labor strikes using governmental help and hired thugs to rough workers up. Strikes were violent affairs in the early days and you better bet Americans learned their lessons. You fight capitalism? You can get a bullet to the head. Don't expect capitalism to evolve quietly. It never does. Dozens of red states have already begun to cut the generous benefits and are putting in place measures to deny the unemployed any benefits at all.
ARE WE WITNESSING THE FIRST LUMPEN PROLETARIAT REVOLUTION?
The poor in America are quite familiar with the cruelty of Capitalism. Here in the USA desperate poverty is visible in ways that shock visitors from other countries. A million homeless in the streets. The mentally ill left to roam bus stops and raid garbage bins for dinner. It's a stark reminder for those on the bottom rung in America that things could get worse. Go to your minimum wage jobs. Don't complain. The homeless could be you if you aren't lucky. In the U.S. if you hear a person complain about work you often hear the rebuttal, "hey, at least you have a job."
But the Lumpen Proletariat Revolution will not be won at work. For those of you who don't own a closet full of Marxist secondary literature, the lumpen proletariat were the underprivileged folks that played no role in history for Karl Marx. Prisoners, the disabled, the feeble minded, criminals of various sorts, the drunken, drugged out, suicidal, and misfits that could not be trusted to keep a job, join a union, or form a family to fight the ruling class. But how have things changed?
I WEAR MY HOBO ON THE INSIDE
It seems that yesterday's lumpen misfit is today's hope for radical transformation. The founder of communism, Karl Marx, understood that the worker held just one advantage over the rich. It was her ability to withhold her labor. Marx also rightly understood that the worker creates much of the value for the capitalist. Most workers; however, are afraid to use that power to strike. Today, it appears that the only workers willing to withhold their labor turn out to be the desperate and most underprivileged in society.
I don't think it would have been much of a advantage a few years ago to have the outcasts of society withhold their labor. But today with labor force penetration at its lowest point ever, with millions of workers retiring, fewer babies being born, harsher attitudes towards migrant workers, along with the recalcitrant attitudes of many who worry about their continued health risks from acquiring Covid-19, along with the generous welfare benefits that allow millions of people to exit the workforce temporarily, the baseline of laborers is just too low for replacement much less economic growth.
In addition we see a striking and unheard of growth in the disabled. Millions of workers are now excused from work because of poor health. On top of that we are living through the greatest and most destructive drug addiction epedemic the United States has ever known. 50,000 or more deaths a year from heroin. Suicides and death by alcohol are growing so quickly that the average life expectancy in the United States has dropped for the first time outside of war. The United States is fast approaching third world status for most of it's poor. The Lumpen revolution will not be a matter of strikes by ordinary workers. It won't be a top down unionization effort (though the brave McDonald's workers who strike for a 15 dollar wage have played an important role in economists looking at the minimum wage.) The revolution will be bottom up.
Instead it will the disabled, the ex-cons denied employment, the morbidly obese, the drug addicts, the massive new homeless population from the financial cliff, the angry mothers without child care, the mentally ill, the fed up unskilled, the Gen Z kids who can't afford to leave home, and a smorgasbord of others who are either denied employment, or rationally choosing to forego working, along with the increasingly alienated and angry unskilled workers who will sit at home that will frighten the small businesses and corporate leaders into raising incomes for all.
Though most likely we will see the American dream die. The Republicans will use asymmetrical and non-conventional warfare to wrestle control of the White House. Egregious electoral reform will doom efforts to reorganize the economy, and the divide between the haves and the have nots will continue to widen.
THE FINICIAL CLIFF COULD END AMERICA AS WE KNOW IT
The financial cliff that awaits many on the other side of these pandemic benefits could force hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people into the streets. Homeless tent cities will become permanent fixtures. The busses and public transit will be filled with drug addicts nodding off. Public restrooms will be plastered with needles from the bloated corpses of heroin overdoses.
It doesn't really matter if orthodox Marxists are correct and that changes from the base of the economy alter the superstructure of culture. Fewer jobs and forced automation make a skillless workforce redundant. There is a reason that the market did not increase low end worker's pay. The market knows these workers are replaceable. The market knows it has created a lazy and entitled underclass it can exploit.
Continued improvement in productivity will allow capital to remove most of these unwanted workers from civil society. They will simply shuffle about with suitcases full of clothes from fast food restaurants to grocery stores stealing just enough food to survive. They will drink to forget. They will overdose on walkways. And the middle class will drive around them and mutter under their breath. The few workers who manage to survive on the miserly wages that unskilled labor pays will lament the freeloading welfare state for paying as much to freeloaders as they make with their pathetic paychecks. The poor will shame the underclass and do the work of ideology for the ruling classes.
Daniel Bell believed that economy, politics, and culture were independent of one another. That modernism had a logic of despair and depravity that as Thomas Mann wrote that modernity, "cultivated a sympathy for the Abyss."
Bell didn't have much of a response to modern times. He hoped that old fashioned religion could provide meaning and solace to an overworked and overlooked populace. Today, Jordan Peterson gives many of the same insights to young men who've seen jobs dry up, their prospects for marriage disappear, who respond with despair and violence. Despite Bell's worry you don't need to cultivate a "sympathy for the abyss" when you live it. Maybe religion could offer respite in the future of tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes.
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