DU, Class and New Industrial State Economic Nostalgia

[HamdenRice]

<This was a response to one of the class posts, but what the hell ...>

There's almost no evidence whatsoever from what gets posted here that DU is upper middle class.

Mostly people post about financial/job/health problems and worries, and how the Reagan Bush years screwed them economically. The predominant "class experience" reported on DU is downward social mobility from middle of the middle class or blue collar/white collar/working class to acute economic insecurity -- especially since the catastrophic Bush years, and accelerating since the economic crisis that ended his administration.

Because the OPer of the "class posts" is basically fabricating a reality out of thin air -- that DU is upper middle class or of the wealthy elite -- it's appropriate to take issue with his entire faulty "class analysis" of DU.

But to engage seriously, here's what I think is going on. Many DUers are a lot older than the writer of the "class threads" and remember the relatively more economically secure 60s and 70s. There was a system in place that could be described, as John Kenneth Galbraith did, as "The New Industrial State" -- a system of big stable businesses, especially in manufacturing, focused on production and stability; big effective, trade unions that bargained with big business for ever increasing wages as a share of ever increasing productivity, and that secured nearly lifetime employment and pensions; and big government that was much more autonomous from business and played the role of arbiter between big business and big government.

I truly believe that there is a lot of nostalgia (perhaps misplaced) for that era, and some faith that the Democratic Party can return us to some semblance or new version of that system. I'm not saying such views are right; I'm saying that's what I infer from what I read here.

That view -- let's call it New Industrial State economic nostalgia -- does not want to "smash the system" or "let it fail," and is focused on bread and butter issues.

Pseudo-Marxists don't like that. They want everyone to agree with them that the system is doomed, or that the Democratic Party is automatically going to sell us out, or that private corporations have no role to play in an economically secure future. If you don't agree with them on that then you must be bad -- a corporatist, DLC, upper middle class, bourgeoise, whatever. It's a stupid immature word trick and nothing more.

The reason I use the term "pseudo" Marxists, is I spent lots of time with real Marxists in the United Democratic Front of South Africa, and they would die laughing at the analysis that passes for "radical" around here. Real Marxists I knew in South Africa -- in the Congress of South African Trade Unions and United Democratic Front -- were concerned with bread and butter trade union issues and figuring out how to bargain with corporations over wages and working conditions, while also making sure the economy and employment expanded.

<edited for clarity as separate thread OP>

[dionysus]

1. k&r

[imdjh]

2. There is a difference between broke and poor. One I might soon experience.

[Odin2005]

3. The resident Marxists are armchair radicals and nothing more.

Kind of like me in high school. Popular Marxist ideology is unfalsifiable self-reinforcing circular reasoning. Everyone who disagrees with them are "manipulated by Bourgeois Ideology" and thus can be ignored.

[HamdenRice]

4. Well said!

I think where we may disagree, is that I've seen a neo-Marxist, trade unionist political direction at work in South Africa, and it was pretty impressive.

I don't think Marx was completely wrong. I think he was a great historian, even better philosopher, a terrific commentator on economic conditions, but a truly lousy economist and worse political theorist (has any term been so damaging to humanity and the left as "dictatorship of the proletariat"?).

Looking at his work like the work of any other major thinker is one thing; but for inexplicable reasons, some people take it up as some sort of religion that is indeed, "unfalsifiable self-reinforcing circular reasoning."

[Odin2005]

5. IMO Marx was a brilliant sociologist and historian, it's his political notions that...

...I find wanting. The influence of Hegel really messed him up in his thinking. I reject the notion that everything in a society is dependent on economics. Often it's the other way around, Ideas influence economic and social development, as Marxism itself very much did, refuting it's own economic determinism in the process.