Workings class Democrat supporters don't go to political rallies while elite Republicans don't go to their rallies. It's really that simple. Also just because someone wears cammo and work boots doesn't mean they're a struggling working man.
It is telling how Matt is looking at aesthetics as class signifiers. GWB didn't suddenly become a simple country boy just by buying a ranch and talking folksy.
It's really dumb considering I know he's been to Bernie rallies (I met him at one in Virginia), which are chocked full of working class people who look nothing like chuds.
Maybe he has the same brainworm that people have in the UK where "working class" often just means rural white people as opposed to the metropolitan city dwellers.
That's pretty extreme of an example lol. I certainly have met tons of folks who own small businesses or work in the defense contracting industry who make six figures and wear realtree camo jackets and baseball caps and drive big trucks.
workers (the proletariat)
I agree with everything you said but I'd argue there are still non-proletarian forms of the working class left.
There are, proletarians are workers under capitalism. There are non-capitalist modes of production: handicraft/artisinal production as well as peasantry and subsistence farming. They're workers, but not proles.
They stated: " but the two main classes under capitalism are always workers (the proletariat) and capitalists (the bourgeoisie)."
This is why most Trump supporters, and a lot of the country, said their economic situation had improved in four years. On first glance, it seems like material analysis can’t explain Trump’s resilience in 2020. You look deeper and you start to understand.
The exit polls showed a third of people made 100,000 or more. Trump also has a lot of boomers who might not have the same income but have retired comfortably. This is the main contingency of Trumps support. The material conditions of this pandemic do affect people, but these people are insulated. They aren’t affected by the depression, and the virus is killing African Americans overwhelmingly. To them, wearing a mask or having your business shut down is the worst consequence of this pandemic. Biden could never beat Trump with these folks, but the dems will still try and blame socialism when they fail.
Why didn’t Biden win the working class? Well he did. By a decent margin. But it wasn’t enough for a comfortable victory. These were pretty historic lows in coalitions that are needed for democrats to win. Why? Because Biden’s campaign offers no better vision to our material reality. The virus is out there. He can’t start a lockdown, Trumps petit bourgeois would start a riot. If he did, the capitalist system would flounder again like it did in the spring. All of this would be fine if you did UBI and rent forgiveness on a national level. Moratorium on mortgages and loans to businesses so nothing goes out of businesses and is ready to open again when this ends. But Biden won’t do those things. And if he will, he won’t campaign on them so people won’t know. Imagine if Biden campaigned on $15/hr in Florida? Instead, he goes completely negative on Trump and offers vague promises like build back better.
This is simply not true, there are some of us who support revolution even though it doesn't align with our material interests out of a sense of either empathy or by the realization that our privileged positions are precarious.
I know three, my wife (AP nurse), a girlfriend in marketing and me (retail exec).
We don't really "count" because we're ultimately class traitors. Discounting that, the sentiment holds. Also "six figures" absolutely is still working-class in high cost-of-living areas; just because it isn't starvation wages doesn't make it PMC or petty-bourg territory. I don't know if Taibbi was going for that level of nuance, though.
If you earn a wage or salary from someone much wealthier than you who runs their own company you are working class, whether you take home five or six figures. The crucial thing to remember is that the six-figure type of working class is shrinking rapidly, and may soon cease to exist or be subsumed into the non-working emergent capitalist class that "earns" its income through a combination of stocks, savings, and inherited wealth.
gen x-ers shut the fuck up and get off the internet challenge
May not be 100% accurate for sake of pithiness but:
If you use your time/labor (being told what to do) to acquire capital you're working class
If you use your capital to acquire time/labor you're boug
Class is based on a person's dialectical, pure (two-way) relation to the means of production. Just so everyone's on the same page on this site. There are temporary alliances labour professionals, economistic labour unions, etc. made with the capitalists, but they are temporary until their conditions change. Class consciousness, true or false, sits on top of this relation inside the minds of workers and further modifies their actions based on this relation to the MoP. Obviously, people with more control over the MoP or serve the direct interests of those who do, have more leverage to aquire wealth from the production process, but that is a symptom not a cause of the relationship.
They're idealist left-lib dipshits, like him, Tersee, r/StupidPol, (Matt Christman a little), etc. who constantly conflate social affect and income for "class."
And that is exactly the problem. The struggle at the heart of post-left populism is a struggle of idealist categories. Normal person versus PMC. To be normal, much like to be a centrist, is to define yourself purely in relation to contemporary discourses rather than personal principles. Nagle arrives at the Normie political subject by critiquing subculture theorists who bought into the idea that there is indeed something special, something radical about these in-groups. But rather than escaping the idealist framework of cultural analysis, Nagle simply inverted this position.
Why she did this is quite simple when we realize that the normal political subject at the end of the book who enjoys trashy mainstream music is supposed to be a self-insert. Nagle, as well as Terese and their cohort have confronted the hyper-subcultural ingroups of the left and come away scarred. The dizzying factions, callouts, posturing and absurdity can be traumatic to many in the same way that imageboard culture can be to outsiders. I can hardly blame them. The betrayal at the heart of this trauma cuts deep, as it is often the betrayal of our hopes for the future of our world, coming at the hand of those we thought would be our allies, or even friends.
This trauma prevents them from escaping the paradigm of cultural analysis, and adopting principled, scientific understanding of capitalism. It is this trauma, in fact, that prevents themselves from attaining the normal political subjectivity they so covet . . .
https://newmultitude.org/kill-are-peemies-how-the-post-left-got-got/
Great article. His analysis applies more widely too. I’m seeing a lot of libs being pushed right because of cultural issues. Someone on the “woke-left” is mean to them and they go running to Tucker Carlson. It sucks people so unprincipled that they collapse right or go “post-left” so easily - there’s a material analysis at play here too.
Fitting into this, I see people who are themselves pretty left conflate performative wokeness with the left. Taibbi is the biggest offender. He gets called out on it but has a blind spot to it, or it’s a grift, or both. At any rate, he’s leaning into that budding post-left populist market hard.
Trump’s real base are the most petit-boug fuckers who ever lived, they’re all used car lot owners and shit
And biden's real base is project managers and shit. Neither one really has a working class base. This is an old debate at this point.
This person is using the liberal definition of class, which is cultural signifiers and nothing more
Taibbi is dumb, but that chart is pretty meaningless. It breaks down the percentages between the two candidates, but not the percentages within each candidate's group. There are wayyy more people making less than 100k a year in this country, so even if Trump is favored in the 100k+ group, the vast majority of his supporters are still going to be sub-100k per year.
The real question is...why the fuck does it matter?
Also, Taibbi is a failson who was set up to be the next Hunter S. Thompson by his NYC media executive dad and instead he just posts 20-year-old-high-in-your-dorm-room contrarian takes on twitter just to get ratioed by 15 year olds
There's not enough real people left for anyone to be as genuine as Thompson was. Decades after he offed himself, we've all become lizards.
It doesn't equal income, but Taibbi is wrong in a different way lol cause it doesn't mean whatever cultural signifiers he thinks it means. It's about your relationship to the means of production buddy!!! I kind of like Taibbi but he seems to be addicted to being wrong lately, he seems to go for the contrarian take about dumb bullshit
People that go to Trump rallies are probably a subset of his voters. This is entertainment for them.
That said, class is determined by the surface of the economy you interact with, which determines your understanding of the economy and what it means to participate in society. In other words, your relations to the means of production are the material basis for your class.
class is determined by the surface of the economy you interact with
that’s a useful framing
Class is not determined by the surface of our economy, but by what economy we build on the surface. I'm Pete Buttigeg, and I've been chewing on your power cables for some time now.
there's a correlation between income and being petite bougie and bougie, but it's an imperfect proxy.
