Zweig

Policy is essential, but it must be placed in the context of the broadest understanding of how the world works, how our life prospects are shaped, and how we create ad use our great capacity for wealth and community involvement. Introducing class into the national conversation can invigorate the political process and bring new energy and understanding to a broad range of questions, including the continued importance of race and gender as points of tension and needed progress.

Class talk allows us to recall the language of economic and social justice and to revive calls for economic democracy that have been the foundation of progressive social movements for over a hundred years. The corporate agenda has stripped all reference to morality from economic affairs. For the Right, unrestricted markets are all that is relevant in economic matters. This is a core question that progressives must address directly. Class understandings will help us to illuminate and ground the ethical dimensions of our politics and help us imagine and crate organizations, coalitions, and social forces capable of turning back the destructive power of capital and replacing it with values and policies that relieve human suffering and promote the social good.-Michael Zweig, “Six Points on Class”

                I use the last two paragraphs of this piece as an epigraph to this post because I will primarily be addressing this portion of the text. As it is the conclusion one could argue that the main argument of the essay is summarized here. Zweig takes the points he made earlier in the essay and formulates a concise and powerful way of bringing them all together for a strong conclusion. Throughout my reading of the text something didn’t feel right (well, a few things didn’t feel right but I

will primarily focus on one), and it was not until the end that it became glaringly obvious to me: Zweig is, or at least appears to be, a reformist. And, because of my own ideological framework, I cannot get behind Zweig’s general prescription. I do not see the value in “turning back” the destructive power of capital. The text reads as if it is calling for a more conscious and ethical capitalism which is not possible. Capitalism, at its core, is a destructive immoral force. We cannot reform capitalism. If we want to relieve human suffering we need to do away with it entirely.

                Now, one could argue that a destruction of capitalism, particularly in the USA, is idealistic and impossible. I can only say in response that I do not have all of the answers. I am not here to give a complete prescription for what we must do, but I can critique what I have before me. I can know something is wrong and not quite know exactly what to do to fix it/change it (even if I know what the end product should look like, I don’t necessarily have the map for the territory). To poach from Marco McWilliams who devoted this analogy in response to me stating exactly what I’m saying here: I can see that the sink is broken and know that a new sink should be put in, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I know, nor have all of the tools, to go about putting that new sink in. And, just because I may not be able to put the new sink in myself it does not override the fact that I can see that the sink is broken.

                There is no going back to a more ethical time when we are talking about capitalism. Capitalism was never ethical. Capitalism was always about the exploitation of labors. Factor in intersectionality and we have a complete disregard for human life at play. Capital is important, human life and the quality of that life, is not. Policy is like putting a bandaid on a wound that needs to be sutured. Or putting a cast on a leg that needs to be amputated and replaced. It will not give us a new life. It will not give us what we deserve. It will simply make our suffering a little bit less unpleasant. Policy does not speak to the structure enough. Policy works within the structure that’s in place.  

Myths and Constructions--Build on Keith's "Capitalism/Self-Reliance/Drug-Hyperlinks"

                In Keith’s “Capitalism/Self-Reliance/Drug-Hyperlinks” post he states something brilliant while reflecting on the Coontz, Currie, and “Capitalism Hits the Fan” texts. Keith notes that “There are various myths within United States history that we [are] exposed to in our history classes. Depending on your education later in life you either buy into them or you learn that just as everything you are exposed to in life the reality is quite a bit different from what you are taught”. I note that this is brilliant because he is gesturing towards the constructed nature of our history. This is not something that everyone is willing to admit or even see. However, many texts in this course have shown us just that, particularly the Coontz article.

                We are constantly being fed particular myths that we are supposed to believe are fact. We are taught a history that we are supposed to believe is fixed. But history is not fixed. History is relative. People are generally willing to admit this to an extent; they’re inclined to scoff at some of the Southern text books that call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression”. But, more often than not, those some people don’t seem to be aware that much of what we read is constructed. So much of the past that we are led to believe is “reality” is not. What is reality, even? Are any one of us so sure? We are constantly reading texts that make it clear to us that our foundation (our history) is actually not what we once thought it was. If our foundation is put into question then shouldn’t our reality be as well?

                We are taught that people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. That’s how the middle/upper class made it. That’s how the moguls of the past became who they are. But, as Coontz notes in “We Always Stood on Our Own Two Feet: Self-reliance and the American Family”, that is not the case. The middle class family with the picket fence, nice yard, 2.5 kids and a golden retriever didn’t just work hard to get there. There were many subsidies put into place to ensure their mobility, and the reverse is also true. There were many policies put into place to ensure that some people would not be able to experience upward mobility. That is our history. Those are the facts. We are not a country built by hard-working, self-reliant, folks with entrepreneurial spirit. We are a country that was built on community (even if that community had always been exclusionary). Somewhere along the way we lost even that exclusionary community and we are left with a country that believes solely in the individual, not the collective. They believe in the individual so much that they turn a blind eye to the ways in which aid has been received, and is still being received, to help people “better” themselves. 

Waging a Living connection to Media Magic

Waging a Living is a film about the costs of survival. I choose to use the word “survival” because of the weight that such a word carries. Surely we are all “surviving” if we are living, but more often than not when we hear “survival” we think “struggle”. We envision someone who has made it through or is currently trying to make it through hardships that have been thrown their way. That is why I choose to use survival when discussing this film because that’s precisely what these folk are doing. They are trying to live and fight through. They are struggling but they are still with us.

Now, I point out that the film is about the costs of survival because so much of the film deals with the ways in which these folks, and others just like them, are being held between a rock and a hard place. As Barbara, a woman followed in the documentary, says she feels like she is “hustling backwards. The harder I work the harder it gets”. How would the proponents of the bootstrap philosophy argue with that? What would they say in response? Barbara, and the many others like her, are working very hard but because of their positionality things just get worse. Barbara, because of her raise, lost a great deal of aid she was receiving and her rent went up. The amount of money she lost in aid was more than she gained by getting a raise. This is a system that forces people to be “survivors”. They are born into struggle and must constantly fight with every ounce of them, not even necessarily to get a so-called “better life” but to simply exist in the life they have.

People, even those who don’t see themselves as hardcore “bootstrap” philosophers, appear to be blind to the fact that Barbara’s story is all around them. People like Barbara and the other folks in Waging a Living are not unique. In fact, it does us a disservice to think about them simply as individuals. We need to recognize that this is a structural problem. And yet, many people do not see the individuals nor the structure. Why is this? In “Media Magic” Mantsios offers a great explanation. He argues that the American Public “maintain(s) these illusions [about living in an egalitarian society], in large part because the media hides gross inequities from public view. In those instances when inequities are revealed, we are provided with messages that obscure the nature of class realities and blame the victims of class-dominated society for their own plight” (100). We cannot even use this documentary as an example of the media doing the opposite of what Mantsios has described. While Waging a Living is certainly not trying to hide inequities from view it is not enough to counter the countless messages people have taken in over their lifetime. This is why people can watch this documentary and fixate on Barbara’s acrylic nails and the fact that she must spend money to get her nails and hair done as a way of finding a way to feel less sympathy/empathy for Barbara. If people can find a way to feel like a marginalized person has created, or added to, their situation then this allows them to continue to not really see the person’s plight nor the structure behind it. Many people seem to only see those who are struggling long enough to blame them for their struggles before those attempting to survive are rendered invisible again.