Where Are Our Working Class Candidates?
American Labor Gets Forgotten (again) to Make Space for Gender Pronouns and Gun Rights
The Teamsters have yet to endorse either Trump or Harris. They may not endorse anyone at all.
And why should they be in any hurry?
Economist Richard Wolff lays it all out quite nicely, making it crystal clear that neither of these parties is your friend. Professor Wolff is correct when he argues that the myth of American Exceptionalism is just that: a myth.
Wolff, whose 1987 Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical is a great guide for anyone struggling with their first attempt at reading Capital, explains how American workers started suffering a brutal setback in the 1970s. The Japanese and Germans had ramped up their post-war economies and increased industrial production, computers had begun the process of replacing laborers, and women had started entering the workforce in huge numbers.
What does Capital do when it has an excess of labor?
Does it support social welfare programs that provide retraining, health care, and financial assistance for displaced workers?
Hardly.
Plus, when you look at real flat wages, reduced social benefits and pensions, dwindling public services, and a tax system that hits the working class hardest, the last 30 years have been apocalyptic for labor in the United States.
My last corporate writing gig paid $60,000. I lived in a very rough part of East LA, never went out, and rarely if ever bought new clothes or pricey, frivolous commodities. Still, I could barely make ends meet. And I have three university degrees and decades of experience. Imagine what life is like for Amazon warehouse workers or people slaving away at two or three different service industry gigs where they’re treated like dirt.
What’s the result of all this? More debt, more borrowing, flat wages, and as economist Michael Hudson points out, a brutally powerful patrician class that’s turning this planet into one vast lordly manor, run by platform Czars like Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
The future is a rentier economy, techno-feudalism according to Hudson and other economists, most notably Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek politician and theorist.
American labor, caught in between two parties that work for the same donor class, are the ones getting hit hardest, as neither party has done anything but create policies that have stripped the US working class of any power it once had. The majority of American workers still see unions as beneficial to working people, but propaganda and incessant ideological messaging have annihilated labor unions in this country, and many of those that remain are dead with rot and corruption, beholden to one of two dirty parties committed to Empire and finance capitalism.
The problem is that Americans don’t vote for people who share their interests.
They vote for their enemies: Democrats and Republicans.
“Joe Biden is the greatest pro-union and pro-labor blah, blah, gurgle, grunt…”
Genocide Joe? The one who promised to veto any universal healthcare bill and who reneged on his minimum wage promise? That guy?
Reality check: Joe Biden, hiding behind what Wolff correctly identifies as bullshit claims about supply chains and other economic mumbo-jumbo with no basis in fact, broke the rail worker strike. And all they were asking for was reasonable paid leave. I don’t know a lot of pro-labor politicians who go around breaking national strikes. This was no less disgusting than when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981. But Biden survived thanks to cable news and legacy media, who have always had his back. As Gabriel Winant of the Guardian highlights, Biden has no record of ever putting himself on the line to support workers, and he has consistently snubbed unions, for instance in 2011 when Verizon workers asked that he do something – even give a thumbs up of support – to the strikers.
But he was too busy eating lobster rolls and slurping down 100-dollar bottles of chardonnay with his wealth-hoarding pals in the Hamptons. I guess Hunter had a good week extorting kickbacks from Ukrainian and Chinese businessmen.
Trump is no better.
Under Eisenhower, taxes stood at 90% for Americans earning over 100,000 per year, and corporate tax rates were the highest in history at roughly 50%. Of course, Trump gutted the corporate tax rate by slashing it from 35% -- already a joke – to an abysmal 21%. Then Biden, his tag-team partner comes in and says “Let’s push it back to 28%.”
So we get this Machiavellian theatre, a decades-old dog-and-pony show, and all the Red and Blue Kool-Aid junkies out there are fine with suspending disbelief, like they’re at the movies, knowing deep down that none of our government employees are telling us anything resembling the truth.
This is what people don’t pay attention to, little facts like these. The Republicans or the Democrats will always find a way to step in and screw the working class one way or another. One party introduces some horrible anti-labor legislation. Then, the other party pretends to push back, offering legislation that is slightly less horrific. The result is workers getting their legs broken with a baseball bat instead of getting a skull fracture that lands them in the hospital.
But that skull fracture is always a heartbeat away.
Who’s fracturing the skulls depends on which party is in power, because they’re the ones with the biggest clubs. That’s why Obama was able to kill habeas corpus and why Bush got away with passing his fascist Patriot Act. It matters little who’s screwing us, just so long as workers get reamed, coming and going.
Kamala Harris?
She’s far from a working-class warrior. She supported breaking the strike just like Genocide Joe and the rest of the Democrats, including that “progressive” phony Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Fraud Squad (aptly named), who also sided against workers. Plus, after it was revealed that Harris was considering Mike Kelly as her running mate, labor activists were quite vocal in their opposition. Kelly even fought back against the meager protections introduced in the PRO Act. There is no sign that Harris will be any better for workers than any of the other proponents of imperial war, or the apologists for global neoliberal finance capitalism offered up by the duopoly.
All of this has a purpose. Global military hegemony, censorship, and anti-working-class politicians form the backbone of what Marx and others have called “The administrative class of the bourgeoisie.”
Their job is to protect capital. To do this, they must also ensure global military hegemony, especially because the US dollar is quickly eroding as a fiat currency. Paying workers more means that they have time to organize. It also means more free time to educate oneself, develop political consciousness, and resist.
That’s the last thing they want to see.
The reason American workers did well until the 1970s is because Capital needed labor. It was a mathematical calculation. Nothing more. Racism kept former slaves out of many jobs, and after the mass genocide of our Indigenous population, business owners needed to pay people a living wage to get their enterprises off the ground.
Dead people aren’t a viable workforce.
Not to worry. As the genocide rages on, as the proxy war continues, and as we find it harder to make ends meet, we can still come up with some other nonsense to devote ourselves to, fodder for our alienated citizens to blow out of proportion — niche issues that the major parties tell us it’s OK to still talk about. Gender pronoun warriors and 2nd amendment fanatics have plenty to wring their hands over…
… as their jobs disappear and we poison our planet and sink all of our money into setting half the world ablaze…
I have no issues with fighting for the rights of marginalized queer populations or anyone else suffering discrimination as an oppressed minority. But at the same time, if you run around endorsing someone like Biden, Harris, or Trump, you are not part of any solution.
The funniest thing about all of this, at least when we look at history, is that the system rolling back the hands of time and creating a new, global, feudal economy is capitalism, whose acolytes wanted nothing more than to drive a stake through the heart of the aristocracy and the entire system it represented.
Funny how things shake out, ain’t it?
Again, if you're not afraid to, check out Marx. He has a better explanation for this than anyone else I know of.
If this ever-increasing reality is one you don’t wish to live in — it may already be too late — then wake up, start reading, and learn about organizing and worker solidarity. Resist. Vote for Jill Stein or Gloria Riva. Or don’t vote at all.
And by all means, never vote for a major party candidate.
Unless you’ve gotten used to pissing into your empty Gatorade bottle during your ten-hour shift in that Amazon warehouse.