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I’d argue it started with FDR not the cold war. FDR did end up helping many Americans, but the concessions given slowed and/or completely stopped many workers movements in the US. Halting further progress amongst socialist or communist parties in the US.
The middle class wouldn’t emerge until the late 1940s, but the groundwork was set in the 30s
It was the same fear though, there was a really strong working class movement in the US after the great depression, and a lot of communist organizing happening within unions.
That is why I called them concessions
fair
RIP left wave USA 1930-1975
RIP right wave China 1980-2015Removed by mod
I like how slightly appeasing the socialists made the country way better for decades. Moar!
It also dampened the flames of revolution, preventing things from becoming extremely way better forever. Social democracy is a concession that can always be taken back by the capitalist class. Socialism and the elimination of classes should be the goal.
This is why I advocate for, hear me out, liberal arts. 🤢
Soc 100 or 101, can’t remember which, taught this.
After not enjoying Applied Calculus, I took Modern Math, AKA Math For English Majors, to complete my math requirement.
It was a great class! Lots of useful, real-world math skills. It didn’t use anything much more complicated than simple algebra, but we talked about the traveling salesman problem and ways to fairly split up an estate.
We also talked about election math, and how first past the post is objectively a terrible election system, and how there are several systems readily available that are mathematically more representative of the will of the people. I don’t even know if the teacher had a specific political stance, or if she was just mathematically offended by our outdated democratic operating system.
Great class. Wish they would start teaching subjects like that in high school.
As a STEM grad who spent 2 years undeclared, it sounds like a course even STEM people could use.
I’m so thankful that I sort of accidentally backed into a well rounded education. I cannot say the same for the majority of my STEM colleagues.
I think especially STEM students should have lib arts requirements.
100%. Some of the most useful courses that I took were either electives or simply did not count toward my major. Specifically: a logic course, a course about the history of socialism, and a writing course (including research papers)
Critical thinking and logic 101 (syllogistic logic) were infinitely valuable, imo. I think critical reading should also be required.
lib arts requirements.
There must be better ways.
We sort of touched on it, here:
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12070694
Not exactly, but the respondent to my question gave a really good answer I think can probably be extrapolated, somewhat.
I was just
fasticiousfacetious. If you force somebody to learn something, are they still free?All courses have requirements. No one is going to school, signing up for a bunch of random stuff and getting a master’s in a specific discipline. “Discipline.”
People aren’t free if they don’t know how to think.
“Facetious,” btw. Not picking on you, I just thought maybe you’d appreciate knowing.
They should also start teaching basic psych in grade school. Kids need that and adults’ bs may be mitigated, but they won’t teach it, and that’s why.
Unfortunately, HS teachers in places which need to know these things the most are also the most likely to lose their jobs for it. E.g. In my HS, learning ‘history’ stopped at the beginning of the 20th-century.
I advocate for a socialist revolution instead.
The middle class has always been systematically crushed under capitalism, which has been a primary project and function of the state. This pressure is felt by the middle class and forms the human basis for fascism.
This is why fascism is an intrinsic part of capitalist social relations. As long as there is a middle class to squeeze, there will be the structural basis to blame someone other than those responsible.
I’d be careful to say that the middle class is being turned into peasants. Its not completely wrong, but its a rhetorical statement (peasant bad, middle class good) rather than a materialist statement based on understanding social forces. I’m unconvinced that by destroying the material basis for the middle class, the capitalists are creating a whole new class, or reproducing older ones. If anything, destroying the middle only brings more attention to the central feature of capitalism that creates two diametrically opposed classes rather than many differing castes or classes, which stabilized previous modes of production. Capitalism creates capitalists and workers. Everything else is unstable or illusory.
well put
There are two classes, the senatorial class and the plebeians. Just like in Rome with the worst psychopaths at the top.
Just like in Rome
As was noted by P.K. Dick …
Noted where? I only know the Scanner Darkly film from 2006…
Probably the exegesis. I haven’t read it but the time period of the book of acts features prominently.
Silence, the two braincells of a progressist are working now.
Recommend: The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy - Jeffrey Winters
Middle class is and always was just a third class aristocracy that preside over the stolen labour of the imperial periphery. That includes me and I imagine most Western Lemmy users whether we know that’s what’s happening or not. Maybe not as bad as the real aristocracy but very far from blameless for the exploitation happening in the world. Not wanting to live off the exploitation of others is not an excuse for it actually happening. We’re all culpable.
I’d even go as far as to say there is no true proletariat in the imperial core because of how pervasively the spoils of exploitation is distributed here. The poorest person here still actively lives off the labour of even poorer people in the periphery.
Middle class is and always was just a third-class aristocracy that preside over the stolen labour of the imperial periphery.
Petite Bourgeois. Professional Managerial Class. Mercantile Class. Yeomen/Freeholder. The Third Estate. There’s a bunch of different names for it, depending on which socio-economic system you operate under.
We’re all culpable.
To be culpable, you need a certain level of agency. I’m reluctant to hang blame on a cog in the machine, even if that cog gets a marginally nicer standard of living than their peers. That way lays liberalist self-flagellation, rather than proletarian unity. The House Slave has no more say in the running of the plantation than the Field Slave, even if the clothing is nicer and the living quarters less drafty.
I’d even go as far as to say there is no true proletariat in the imperial core because of how pervasively the spoils of exploitation is distributed here.
sound of J. Sakai’s Settlers hitting the desk
If you’re looking for a “real” proletarian underclass, look no farther than all the prison labor camps our country has perpetuated. You’ve got homeless folks and debtors picked up by the modern day Press Gangs to do piecework for subsistence wages.
But climb up a rung or two to the modern-day service sector, what’s left of blue collar industry, the vocational trades, and the third-string office jobs. You’re still going to find debt peonage and a carceral state. People showing up to work with ankle monitors because they’re still on probation. People perpetually underwater on the car they need or the college debt they need or the housing note they need to stay out of bankruptcy and homelessness.
The domestic infrastructure is much nicer. When we need health care, there are doctors in the neighborhood who can provide treatment (which we maybe can afford) and schools that provide some professionalized education (which will maybe result in a sustainable employment) and highways/railways to get us where we need to go, and even parks and theaters and other amusement centers for a degree of recreational relief.
But any Roman will tell you that walking distance from the Colosseum didn’t make you more or less of a slave. Proletarianization isn’t about whether or not you hate your life. It’s about whether or not you own your labor.
Yeah once you get woke to the chain of misery and inequity that trails your regular existence in a capitalist democracy you see how we’re like a little echo of the aristocracy. Gotta fix this state of things somehow so we can actually build the real world for everyone
The empire either needs to start crumbling or capital needs to start hoarding far more resources to itself rather than throwing its scraps to some workers of the imperial core before revolution is possible. We’re in a position now where both things are becoming feasible, we just need to make sure the ire of the people is pointed appropriately. Unfortunately, I think the imperial workers embracing fascism is just as likely as a socialist revolution, if not more so.
As much as I would hope most if not all of us socialists would be willing to accept a lower standard of living in exchange for ending imperialism, I don’t think the average USian is ready for the gravy train to end. The next few months are going to be very telling, I think.
It wasn’t a fluke - it was a benefit from the capitalist overlords to workers in the belly of US imperialism to hedge against workers coming to a class consciousness that might have them taking over ownership of the means of production as they did in the Soviet Union. It was an indirect benefit because of the USSRs existence. That is how scared of communism the ruling capitalist class is…they gave us a little to lose because when we have nothing left to lose, we will start to mobilize as a working class.
Arguably, the fluke was Germans shitting the bed and failing to have a communist revolution. If Germany went communist instead of fascist in 1930s, then the rest of Europe would’ve almost certainly followed. The US had a strong isolationist movement at the time, so it likely would’ve remained a regional power. There was also a strong communist and union movement as a result of the great depression, and with Europe being communist, it would’ve had a huge amount of international support. So, we basically live in one of the worst possible timelines thanks to the Germans.
I agree! The reformist social democrats are to blame….and we need to learn from this. Only a revolutionary program will lead the way to capitalism’s demise and the liberation of the people of the world.
Unfortunately, we are seeing the DSA in the US absorbing a lot of discontent and potential revolutionary energy, funneling it into a reformist, populist, electoral program….even running within a capitalist party. The DSA needs to break with the democrats now as a first step of correcting this course. There needs to be a united front of various revolutionary caucuses to bring this political fight to the forefront!
So, we basically live in one of the worst possible timelines thanks to the Germans.
Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten!
If Germany went communist instead of fascist in 1930s, then the rest of Europe would’ve almost certainly followed.
Germany (at least, half of it) did go communist fifteen years later. Half of Europe followed. The entire Eastern Bloc did the Communism. The failure of the movement wasn’t a failure to start, but a failure to endure.
There was also a strong communist and union movement as a result of the great depression, and with Europe being communist, it would’ve had a huge amount of international support.
The communist / trade movements of the Atlantic Nations were still plagued by religious schisms and racial animosity. Where the AFL-CIO succeeded(ish) was in harvesting labor from the lower castes for the benefit of the white nationalists. And where they failed, forty years down the road, was in reconciling the racial conflicts that underpinned the class conflicts. The movie “Blue Collar” does a really good job of painting this picture.
Any path upward for the colored worker was defined as managerial. And the white workers were taught to resent this, in order to cultivate a nationalist movement built on the fear of a colored aristocracy. Modern day Obama/MAGA politics is rooted in the Reagan-Era managerial liberalism and white nationalist professional class turned on each other, with Barack Obama and JD Vance being the avatars of this phenomenon.
Nothing in the Great Depression Era really stood in the way of this trajectory. A few electoral flukes defined its precise shape, but the end result was all overdetermined.
It was a completely different world after WW2 because the US got to develop its productive forces while the rest of the world burned, and then dragged the Soviet bloc into the Cold War right after which was specifically designed to force socialist nations to divert inordinate resources towards the military. The Cold War was also what justified communist purges in the US and how the communist movement was gutted under McCarthyism.
the communist movement was gutted under McCarthyism
The communist organization was gutted under J. Edgar Hoover. McCarthy just picked off the stragglers.
For better or worse, it was WW2 itself that split the American Communists, as they wrestled with the old Leninist urge towards anti-war activism as a proletarian rallying cry and the Stalinist plea for interventionism on the Western Front. The internal reaction to the assassination of Trotsky, the protests against FDR at the peak of his popularity, the championing of civil rights movements back when segregation was fully normalized, the turmoil produced by various intraparty sex scandals, the repeated violations of the Smith Act that the FBI pounced on, the CIO’s throwing the party under the bus to appease Truman, the nuclear espionage… it all fouled the party’s national image and the economic philosophy as a whole.
By the Cold War, US Communism was a shadow of its former self and Global Communism was fully in the thrall of sectarianism (absent the odd Third Worlder like Tito). But that was all largely due to the success of the Russian Communist experiment (and the Chinese experiment, hot on its heels). There was never a comparable movement in the west, in no small part because US industry was too successful at appeasing the American public with consumer surpluses even at the height of WW2 rationing.
Communism, as a socio-economic philosophy, has a very hard time taking root in the imperial core precisely because it is so bound up with anti-imperial economics and self-sufficient policies. Sakai was right on that much, at least. You can’t sell an American or a Brit or Frenchman on self-determination when imperial extraction is so much more lucrative. The Settler isn’t going to buy an economic plan that strictly benefits the native laborer by internalizing their surplus.
At absolute best, you could see American Native People and segregated workers take up the banner. But as soon as capitalism becomes color blind, the Black Socialist losses footing.
FDR saved capitalism from itself with social democracy. He was the one responsible for killing communism in its craddle. Had Hoover and Dewey been allowed to do libertarian white nationalist capitalism for another twenty years, you might have seen American communism take firmer root. But FDR, Truman, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and Obama have been far too good at expanding the economic borders and perpetuating the illusion of upward mobility.
So, going back to my original point, had Germany gone communist instead of fascist, we would be living in a very different world right now where communist was the dominant system in the world.
had Germany gone communist instead of fascist, we would be living in a very different world
Depends on how long the communist moment lasted. Italy had a big communist movement in 1919, but it had fully collapsed within five years. The USSR was a dominant economic system across the world for nearly a century. It couldn’t endure in the face of the productive forces of a capitalist rival.
I might suggest that a German communist movement was doomed in the face of the American, English, and French aggression. Especially if it was caught in the same kind of schism that divided Russia and China for so long. You get a Communist Germany that does about as well as Nasser’s Egypt or Allende’s Chile or Lula’s Brazil. Or it gets watered down by perestroika as Gorbachev’s Russia and Mandela’s South Africa, such that it dissolves into a weak nationalist socialism.
Or maybe the Germans really did have the secret sauce to make Global Communism work, in a way Communists in Russia and India and Latin America and the Middle East didn’t? I just don’t think so. Not given how easily the country collapsed into the most enthusiastic kind of self-immolation.
I don’t think there’s any economy in the 1930s that was going to come off the plate, swing one, and do International Communism right on the first try. Maybe Berlin gets to be the center of the experiment instead of Moscow or Beijing for a generation or three. But it seems like there’s still a lot of headwinds no matter where it started. Not unlike how liberal democracy and industrial capitalism had to sputter and fail and restart itself for centuries before it finally got enough traction to envelop the globe.
Once again, you’re omitting key facts in your narrative. The USSR suffered massive destruction during fascist invasion, and then was thrown into a cold war by a the US which was able to develop its economy, and used that leverage to suffocate the socialist bloc. It wasn’t ‘productive forces of a capitalist rival.’ that USSR couldn’t endure. It was the advantage of the US not being a direct participant of the war. If you ignore this reality then you end up with absurdist analysis as a result.
And of course, you can suggest anything you like, but that wouldn’t make it true. The German communist movement lacked the will of the Bolsheviks and they thought they could attempt reformism and work within the system. Then they were summarily betrayed by social democrats who aligned with the nazis. Had German communists been more principled and achieved a revolution, then they would have been able to ally with the Soviet Union and there was no chance of English or French capitalists overthrowing them. In fact, western capitalists tried doing exactly that in USSR in 1918 and they failed there too.
Or maybe the Germans really did have the secret sauce to make Global Communism work, in a way Communists in Russia and India and Latin America and the Middle East didn’t? I just don’t think so. Not given how easily the country collapsed into the most enthusiastic kind of self-immolation.
You’re once again entirely missing the original point I was making which is that the reason capitalist world has the advantage is due to the fact that the second world war happened because Germans fell into fascism. Had that that not happened, then the advantage would have been reversed.
I don’t think there’s any economy in the 1930s that was going to come off the plate, swing one, and do International Communism right on the first try.
Great, because nobody has been making that argument here. Let me know if my point is still unclear for you.
But the threat is neither dead nor gone
For a while the ruling class managed to convince people that it really was the end of history.
Don’t worry about that, the threat will be back.
We just have to reach the level of peasantry that started the communist revolution.
Worry about that.
Capital has no use for social democracy anymore. In Germany that is obvious since the 2000s. Social Democrats turned so hard on the working class, but that was a cul de sac.
They’re pulling up the ladder behind them and kicking you in the face when you try to climb up the sheer cliff they “already climbed.”
It wasn’t a fluke, it was a period of power re-distribution forged from the destabilizing affect of a world war. The vote for the average man was also a product of needing men to go to war. They never give us anything unless they absolutely have to. I wish we’d figure that out and get back to making them have to. I’m done with conversation and dialogue that they build labyrinths from. They will never voluntarily give up power, they are psychologically incapable of doing so. There is only one end to this, as it has always been between the cruelly selfish and the rest of the community.
Why is the threat gone? Cultural and political momentum died down while USSR was around and USSR being dismantled for sure killed off a huge chunk of the momentum and strength, but it’s hard to believe the ideology would be dead and never coming back
Modern liberals drank their own kool-aid and literally thought it was “The End of History”, and the future would just be liberal democracy, with some technocratic tweaks. These are people who genuinely believed freedom for capitalists was intrinsically tied to human rights and that capitalism eventually means the best outcomes for everyone. They’d just watched the USSR fall, and were so sure China was either going to embrace free markets and western-style democracy or stagnate until they were overthrown and replaced by a government who did.
I mean they were sorta right about the Chinese free market thing, but only partly and without the Western style democracy.
They saw China using markets and didn’t understand the fundamental difference between markets being wielded by capitalists, developing the means of production in rare, specific cases where it helps them concentrate power and markets being wielded by workers to for the singular purpose of developing the means of production.
I meant more how they’re now where there’s billionaires there running huge private companies etc
Yeah, but unlike the US, those billionaires do not control the government. The government is controlled by the CCP.
It’s the dictatorship of the (people who say they represent) the proletariat. Not the dictatorship of the people who buy the most politicians.
Yaaayyyy…
To clarify, the PRC is a dictatorship of the proletariat. The CPC is the organization of the proletariat, not its own distinct class.
Indeed! I am hopeful that they do actually represent the proletariat, and there is some great evidence for that. I just do not know enough about the internal politics. They certainly do not represent the capitalists.
It’s just a very capitalistic seeming thing to have billionaires and huge private corporations. Something familiar to many capitalist countries.
The commanding heights of China’s economy are publicly owned, and the private corporations that do exist are heavily controlled by “golden shares” the CPC owns. Billionaires exist because private property still exists, and private property exists because markets are useful for socializing production. The social surplus is still oriented towards socialist development. The marketization of small and medium firms is in service of socializing production so that it may develop and be folded into the public sector, not for the sake of capitalist class interests.
The socialist market economy in China was a return to more classical Marxist economics than the dogmatic attempt to collectivize even small proprietors under the Gang of Four.
I mean more what became after the economic liberalization. Billionaires and huge private companies and stuff. That’s probably partly what the people were expecting to see in the future.
Calling the socialist market economy “liberalization” isn’t really accurate, as it implies the opposite direction, dogmatic collectivization, would be “more communist.” It was a course correction. Either way, western liberals began projecting onto the PRC’s economy what they expected of a capitalist economy, and now that it’s increasingly evident that this is fundamentally incorrect they are scrambling to come to a new analysis of why China works and why the west is dying.
I just mean it in the sense of relaxation or freeing the market for more private operators.
I understand what you meant, I just took it a bit further as stating that alone gives a different impression from what actually happened and why.
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Nobody called China a paradise, but it is projection to say China is “extremely xenophobic to anyone who isn’t Han Chinese.” By proportion of the population, Han Chinese are some of the least represented in the NPC, with minority groups given regional autonomy, minority protections, and affirmative action that goes beyond western protections.
Further, the rights the west does have over China, such as with regards to LGBTQ rights, are improving over time in China (and are largely regional, rather than state-wide). Meanwhile, the west seems to be falling backwards.
Yes, China does crack down on certain bourgeois freedoms, because the bourgeoisie are kept on a short leash, when they’re allowed to exist at all.
No, China’s government is not xenophobic to its own people. Some people may be bigoted, including some Han people, but you can find bigotry anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_ChinaYou’re getting your information from anti-communist & anti-China propaganda that our government, corporate media, and NGOs (which are funded by our government and corporations) produce & propagate.
No, they were wrong.
The liberal socialist wave of China 1980-2015
should be seen as the inverse
of the social democratic wave of the US 1930-1975.Both ditched it once it became unnecessary to preserve their socio-economic structure.
The middle class is what happens when a reserve currency taxes the word through money printing. Now that we are in 39 trillion in debt and countries are dumping Treasury bonds, the middle class is going away.
It won’t be coming back anytime soon.
