Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming at you today, sweaty, smelly,
Speaker 1: and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the desert
Speaker 1: where I have been spending the weekend trying my best
Speaker 1: to help, along with lots of other dedicated mutual aid workers,
Speaker 1: to mitigate the damage done by an entirely preventable humanitarian
Speaker 1: crisis at the United States Southern border. People are being
Speaker 1: held in the open desert in Hakomba, where it gets
Speaker 1: hot in the day gets very cold at night, and
Speaker 1: there are children, there are old people, there are young people.
Speaker 1: All the support they're getting it's from mutual aid workers,
Speaker 1: then maybe get some water from border patrol, from federal government,
Speaker 1: and not much else. And I'm here before your podcast
Speaker 1: to ask you if you can to help. We've all
Speaker 1: spent all of our time and most of our money
Speaker 1: the last few days week trying to help, and we're
Speaker 1: all pretty broke, and we're all pretty tired. But I
Speaker 1: could really do with your support, and I'm going they
Speaker 1: give the venmos and cash apps and PayPal information for
Speaker 1: two organizations who ideally love and whose work I have
Speaker 1: seen is extremely effective and is the only thing keeping
Speaker 1: this situation from being a lot worse. And please don't
Speaker 1: think that if you don't have much money that you
Speaker 1: shouldn't give. We can do a lot with a little.
Speaker 1: So if you only have five bucks, that is great.
Speaker 1: And five bucks is are top for someone to sleep
Speaker 1: under or a few hot meals. And what we're going
Speaker 1: to buy is food, blankets, tarps, water, the things that
Speaker 1: stop people dying in the desert. Those two organizations, Border
Speaker 1: Kindness and Free Shit Collective can be found online at
Speaker 1: border Kindness and at free ship pb on Twitter. For Borderkindness,
Speaker 1: the venmo is at border hyphen Kindness. The cash app
Speaker 1: is dollar sign border Kindness cash and the xell and
Speaker 1: PayPal information is info at Borderkindness dot org. Free Ship
Speaker 1: Collective are at free Ship Collective on cash app and
Speaker 1: PayPal and at free shippbe on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys.
Speaker 2: Welcome to tag it Appened Here, a podcast about why
Speaker 2: everything absolutely sucks. I'm your host, Nia Long. I'm back
Speaker 2: again and last episode we talked about the problems with
Speaker 2: conceiving of all of labor as production from a sort
Speaker 2: of macro feminist perspective of you know, thinking about how
Speaker 2: you know, thinking of all labor, as production doesn't actually
Speaker 2: capture what most labor is. And you know, we looked
Speaker 2: at how this allowed patriarchy to become a wedge to
Speaker 2: private workers movement apart. But there's another sort of more
Speaker 2: micro problem with thinking about productive labor, and that micro
Speaker 2: problem is that people are just absolutely unable to think
Speaker 2: about productivity in anything other than moral terms. As to
Speaker 2: you know, why this is the case, I'm not going
Speaker 2: to go forward an answer. I've seen every theory from
Speaker 2: like it's Christianity, to like it's ductual feature of capitalism
Speaker 2: to its human nature or whatever. I'm I don't know,
Speaker 2: pick pick your theory about why everyone is incapable of
Speaker 2: being normal about productivity. But this turns out to be
Speaker 2: a real problem for anyone who is trying to use
Speaker 2: productive versus unproductive labor in a purely technical sense. Now,
Speaker 2: the most famous person to do this is, as some
Speaker 2: of you probably know, one, Karl Marx. And you know
Speaker 2: I was hard on Mark's last episode, but this one
Speaker 2: and the stuff that's going to follow isn't really his fault.
Speaker 2: Marx here is actually doing one of the times where
Speaker 2: he's being very reasonable and he's being very specific about
Speaker 2: what productive labor is and everyone else is being extremely unreasonable.
Speaker 2: And you know, given the incredibly dark places this is
Speaker 2: going to go, maybe this is one of those things
Speaker 2: where like, I don't know, you need to pick differ
Speaker 2: words that aren't as emotionally charged as like productive and
Speaker 2: unproductive labor. But all in all, like this, the catastrophe
Speaker 2: that's about to unfold is not Marx's fault. There was
Speaker 2: really no way that he could have known how nuts
Speaker 2: everyone was going to go over this. So what actually
Speaker 2: is the distinction between productive and unproductive labor? From Marx? So,
Speaker 2: first off, and this is very important, productive versus unproductive
Speaker 2: labor is a technical term. It has no moral content
Speaker 2: at all. All it means is that some labor produces
Speaker 2: capital for the capital owning class and some labor doesn't.
Speaker 2: That that's literally it. Here's Marx. The commodities the capitalists
Speaker 2: buys for his own private consumption are not consumed productively.
Speaker 2: They do not become factors of capital. Just as little
Speaker 2: to the service as he buys for his consumption voluntarily
Speaker 2: or through compulsion from the state, et cetera, for the
Speaker 2: sake of their useful value, They do not become a
Speaker 2: factor of capital. They are not therefore productive kinds of labor,
Speaker 2: and those who perform them are not productive workers. As
Speaker 2: you can see, this has literally nothing to do with
Speaker 2: the contents of the labor itself or morality whatsoever. If
Speaker 2: a dancer works for production company and gives a performance
Speaker 2: you know, working for the company, that's productive labor because
Speaker 2: the company has turned their capital into more capital by
Speaker 2: using the dancer to produce a commodity, which is to performance,
Speaker 2: and then selling it. Right if that same dancer puts
Speaker 2: on the same performance in the same place for a
Speaker 2: crowd of you know, just like their friends or even
Speaker 2: the same people, but who aren't paying a production company
Speaker 2: for it, Suddenly the dancer, who again is doing the
Speaker 2: same thing in the same place like even could be
Speaker 2: on the same day, is doing non productive labor because
Speaker 2: no capital is being created from it. Or, as you know,
Speaker 2: here's how Marx puts it, labor with the same content
Speaker 2: can therefore be both productive and unproductive. Milton, for example,
Speaker 2: who did Paradise Loss, was an unproductive worker. In contrast
Speaker 2: to this, the writer who delivers hack work for his
Speaker 2: publisher is a productive worker. Later on, Milton sold the
Speaker 2: product for five dollars, and to that extent became a
Speaker 2: dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who
Speaker 2: produces books e g. Compendium Political Economy at the instruction
Speaker 2: of his publisher is roughly speaking, a productive worker insofar
Speaker 2: as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes
Speaker 2: place for the purpose of the latter's valorization. This is
Speaker 2: a valorization of capital, which is like having capital make
Speaker 2: more capital. A singer who sings like a bird is
Speaker 2: an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money,
Speaker 2: she is to that extent a wage laborer or a
Speaker 2: commodity dealer. But the same singer when she is engaged
Speaker 2: by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to
Speaker 2: make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital.
Speaker 2: A school master who educates others is not a productive worker,
Speaker 2: but a schoolmaster who was engaged as a wage laborer
Speaker 2: and an institution alongside along with others, in order to
Speaker 2: make in order through his labor to valorize the money
Speaker 2: of the entrepreneur of the knowledge mongering institution is a
Speaker 2: productive worker. Now, okay, reading a lot of Marx here,
Speaker 2: I'm focusing on Marx, you know, because whether or not
Speaker 2: someone in you know, the eighteen hundreds is a Marxist
Speaker 2: or not. And if you picked this like a random
Speaker 2: worker in the period when this is being written, the
Speaker 2: odds are really bad that they're going to be a Marxist.
Speaker 2: Marx was enormously influential, particularly in Europe as sort of
Speaker 2: social democracy swept through the Germany's and then communism sort
Speaker 2: of swept back through Europe. In the US, and Marx
Speaker 2: is also and this is something that Marx himself like
Speaker 2: takes great pains to conceal a lot of the time.
Speaker 2: Marx is a kind of medium through which the broad
Speaker 2: cultural consensus on labor was transformed into capital T theory.
Speaker 2: And in this capital T theory, productive versus unproductive labor
Speaker 2: is not a moral claim at all. It's a measure
Speaker 2: of whether any given labor produces capital for the bourgeoisie. Now,
Speaker 2: part of what Marx is trying to do here is
Speaker 2: to intervene in existing discourse about productive and unproductive labor,
Speaker 2: to turn it into useful theory instead of people just
Speaker 2: yelling stuff at each other and Marks, I feel you, buddy,
Speaker 2: oh boy. Taking this as a validation of what I'm doing. God,
Speaker 2: here's an example I'm just going to put in here
Speaker 2: of Marx being very mad about this. The self employed laborer,
Speaker 2: for example, is his own wage laborer, and his own
Speaker 2: means of production confront him in his own mind as capital.
Speaker 2: As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage laborer.
Speaker 2: Anomalies of this type then offer a favorable field for
Speaker 2: outpourings of drivel about productive and unproductive labor. So, you know,
Speaker 2: even in the eighteen hundreds, people are sit being incredibly
Speaker 2: normal about this. They're saying things that are great and good,
Speaker 2: and only only that they're being exceptionally good. Marx isn't
Speaker 2: slowly being driven mad by reading at all. But you know,
Speaker 2: when when it's being used as a technical category, the
Speaker 2: sort of productive versus unproductive distinction, you know, it can
Speaker 2: tell you a lot of stuff about how a capitalist
Speaker 2: economy functions. But when it inevitably becomes a moral category,
Speaker 2: things get very bad, very quickly. And so we're going
Speaker 2: to go into two times that this has gone very badly,
Speaker 2: the Nazis and Ronald Reagan. Now, the Nazis and Reagan
Speaker 2: aren't quite doing the same thing, although there's a lot
Speaker 2: of similarities, which is, you know, to be expected from
Speaker 2: a band who went to a Nazi cemetery that included
Speaker 2: a bunch of SS dudes and then gave a speech
Speaker 2: defending his actions where he said, and I quote they,
Speaker 2: which is referring to Nazi soldiers, quote they were victims
Speaker 2: just as surely as the victims and the concentration camps,
Speaker 2: which I I, I.
Speaker 3: What the fuck, what are you even supposed to do
Speaker 3: with that? Like, I just this guy was a president
Speaker 3: of the United States. I mean, I like, I don't
Speaker 3: know it makes sense, but like it never even crossed
Speaker 3: my mind that it was like it would even be
Speaker 3: possible to have a take that is, people in the
Speaker 3: Nazi army are actually just as much victims as the
Speaker 3: people in the concentration camps. Like I, I don't know,
Speaker 3: baffling stuff by Reagan, I mean, I guess not baffling,
Speaker 3: considering how closely his administration is tied to a.
Speaker 2: Bunch of sort of Nazis who became like anti communists
Speaker 2: while here were always anti coomicist, but who became part
Speaker 2: of sort of like institutional anti communism and like the
Speaker 2: post war era. But god, what a terrible thing I'm
Speaker 2: getting my shots in at Reagan now because this is
Speaker 2: about to get so incredibly bleak. So yay, so okay.
Speaker 2: So the Right is able to sort of, you know,
Speaker 2: very successful in fact, in transforming this distinction between productive
Speaker 2: and non productive labor into a moral category, and then
Speaker 2: they infuse it with anti Semitism, and through this sort
Speaker 2: of I don't know, the horror of anti Semitism, productive
Speaker 2: labor is transformed into you know, productive and unproductive members
Speaker 2: of society. And this is one of the origins of
Speaker 2: sort of Nazi race science and race craft. You know,
Speaker 2: they have their attempt to quote unquote purify their race,
Speaker 2: which relies on a distinction between sort of productive and
Speaker 2: non productive members of society who's like quote unquote value
Speaker 2: and productive capacity you know, come to be seen as
Speaker 2: like genetically heritable, which you know, from the Nazi perspective,
Speaker 2: they are like, oh, this is stuff, this is heritable.
Speaker 2: We need to do eugenics and mass exterminations of you know,
Speaker 2: increasing numbers of disabled, queer communists and especially Jewish and
Speaker 2: Groma people to ensure that only the quote unquote like
Speaker 2: productive members society remain and like pass down their traits.
Speaker 2: And this is fucking horrible. But this is also too
Speaker 2: simple for an explanation for what actually happens. In order
Speaker 2: to actually fully grasp the depths of what's happening here
Speaker 2: and how this stuff functions, we need to go deeper
Speaker 2: into specifically looking at anti Semitism, And in order to
Speaker 2: do this, I'm going to turn to the great sort
Speaker 2: of the great social theorist moist pistone Dressed in Peace
Speaker 2: died a few years ago. Apparently a great guy. I
Speaker 2: don't know, but yeah, postone and his essay Anti Semitism
Speaker 2: and National Socialism. This is something I recommend people read
Speaker 2: it in full. It's a bit theoretically intense. It's also
Speaker 2: like one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read.
Speaker 2: But I think it's important to understand what national socialism
Speaker 2: actually was and what it's what it's sort of ideological
Speaker 2: basis was, because it, oh boy, not only has it
Speaker 2: not gone away, it you know, it's it's it's it's
Speaker 2: it's doing. It's doing it's doing a lot of the
Speaker 2: sort of work that we've we've been sort of discussing. Okay,
Speaker 2: so what what what is what is pistone actually talking about?
Speaker 2: So postone sees Nazi anti Semitism not just as you know,
Speaker 2: the sort of socialism of fools where like Jewish people
Speaker 2: get substituted for capitalists to see the worker and okay,
Speaker 2: like yeah, it's like it's it serves as function to
Speaker 2: some extent, but for postone, like Nazi anti Semitism is
Speaker 2: its own sort of horrific, incomplete anti capitalist system. It's
Speaker 2: this sort of ghastly aryan mirror of like Marxism, and
Speaker 2: you know, okay, so, so to to get an understanding
Speaker 2: of what he means by this, because this is something
Speaker 2: that is you know, like it's it's it's deeply it's
Speaker 2: kind of theoretically intense, but it's worth it. So in Marxism,
Speaker 2: this the central mystery of the commodity is that a
Speaker 2: commodity is a well, I mean, central mystery isn't the
Speaker 2: right word, but this is this is one of the
Speaker 2: one of the opening things in capital is that, you know,
Speaker 2: this is this is this thing called the commodity fetish.
Speaker 2: You have a commodity. A commodity is simultaneously a concrete
Speaker 2: physical object that nonetheless contains within it an abstract social relation.
Speaker 2: It has at the same time a use value, which
Speaker 2: is like, you know, the thing that makes it useful. Right,
Speaker 2: Like take a pencil, right, pencil, it has a used value.
Speaker 2: The use value is that you can like use it
Speaker 2: to write things, right, and you can use it to
Speaker 2: erase things. But the pencil also has an exchange value.
Speaker 2: And the exchange value, you know, is the value quote
Speaker 2: unquote that you use it to compare it to other commodities. Right,
Speaker 2: it's like how much is this thing? How much is
Speaker 2: this thing worth? How much is this compared to like
Speaker 2: other commodities, And this is a that's simply an enormous
Speaker 2: that's that's kind of a simplication of it. But what's
Speaker 2: happening here is that the sort of the exchange value
Speaker 2: that lets you compare how much a pencil is worth
Speaker 2: and how much a bracelet is worth. Right, that's not
Speaker 2: an actual characteristic of the pencil or the bracelet. That
Speaker 2: is a serious you know that that's an embedded social relation, right,
Speaker 2: is an embedded capitalist social relation that allows a commodity
Speaker 2: to be compared to all other commodities by again like
Speaker 2: embedding this capitalist social relation into it. The important part
Speaker 2: for our purposes is that the commodity has at the
Speaker 2: same time a concrete component, which is the physical object,
Speaker 2: and an abstract component, which is the sort of capitalist
Speaker 2: social relation embedded in the pencil that makes it appear
Speaker 2: to have value. Here's pistone, as indicated above. On the
Speaker 2: logical level of the analysis of the commodity, the quote
Speaker 2: double character allows the commodity to appear as a purely
Speaker 2: material entity rather than as an objectification of mediated social relations.
Speaker 2: So this is a more complicated way of saying what
Speaker 2: I've sort of been trying to get at, which is
Speaker 2: that the commodity, you know, because it's a physical object, right.
Speaker 2: The commodity fetish allows the commodity to appear as if
Speaker 2: it's just a pure physical object instead of something that
Speaker 2: is produced by capitalism and contains within it capitalist social
Speaker 2: relations that give it value. So we'll back back back
Speaker 2: to pistone. Relatedly, it allows concrete labor to appear as
Speaker 2: a purely cial creative process separate from capitalist social relations.
Speaker 2: On the logical level of capital, the double character labor
Speaker 2: process and valorization process. And by valorization process he means
Speaker 2: the process that turns, you know, capital into more capital.
Speaker 2: So the fact that there's both a labor process, and
Speaker 2: a valorization process allows industrial production to appear as a
Speaker 2: purely material, creative process, separable from capital. The manifest form
Speaker 2: of the concrete is now more organic. Industrial capital can
Speaker 2: then appear as linear descendant of quote natural artismal labor
Speaker 2: as quote organically rooted in opposition to rootless, quote parasitic
Speaker 2: finance capital. You can see here where the whole sort
Speaker 2: of productive versus unproductive labor distinction has ended up right.
Speaker 2: It's been transformed into the sort of organic concrete rooted
Speaker 2: like productive national worker and like entrepreneur versus like rootless
Speaker 2: parasitic finance capital. This is unbelievably dangerous because now having
Speaker 2: set the concrete against the abstract, the fascist proceeds to
Speaker 2: turn the abstract into a people, which is Jewish people.
Speaker 2: The result of this is that in the fascist mind,
Speaker 2: the sort of concrete productive worker and the entrepreneurs stand
Speaker 2: against the abstract anti national finance capital personified in the
Speaker 2: figure of the jew. Here's postona again of what happened next.
Speaker 2: The extermination of European jeury is the indication that it
Speaker 2: is far too simple to deal with Nazism as a
Speaker 2: mass movement with anti capitalist overtones. Which shed that husk
Speaker 2: in the nineteen thirty four Rome push. At the latest,
Speaker 2: once dead served its purpose in state power have been seized.
Speaker 2: In the first place, ideological forms of thought are not
Speaker 2: simply conscious manipulations. In the second place, this view misunderstands
Speaker 2: the nature of Nazi anti capitalism, the extent to which
Speaker 2: it was intrinsically bound to the anti Semitic worldview. Auschwitz
Speaker 2: indicates that connection. It is true that the somewhat too
Speaker 2: concrete and Plebeian quote unquote anti capitalism of the essay
Speaker 2: was dispensed with by nineteen thirty four, not, however, the
Speaker 2: anti Semitic thrust the knowledge quote unquote that the source
Speaker 2: of evil is abstract the Jew. A capitalist factory is
Speaker 2: a place where value is produced, which unfortunately has to
Speaker 2: take the form of the production of goods of use values.
Speaker 2: The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier of the abstract.
Speaker 2: The extermination camps were not a terrible version of the factory.
Speaker 2: The extermination camps were not a terrible version of such
Speaker 2: a factory, but rather should be seen as its grotesque
Speaker 2: aryan quote anti capitalist and negation. Auschewist was a factory
Speaker 2: to quote unquote destroy value, that is, to destroy the
Speaker 2: personifications of the abstract. Its organization was that of a
Speaker 2: fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to liberate
Speaker 2: the concrete from the abstract. The first step was a dehumanize,
Speaker 2: that is, to rip away the quote unquote mask of humanity,
Speaker 2: of qualitative specificity, and reveal the Jews for quote what
Speaker 2: they really are shadows Cipher's numbered abstractions. The second step
Speaker 2: was to then eradicate that abstractness, to transform it into smoke,
Speaker 2: trying in the process to rest away the last remains
Speaker 2: of the concrete material use value, clothes, gold hair, soap. Auschwitz,
Speaker 2: not the Nazi seizure of power in nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 2: was the real German Revolution. The attempted to overthrow not
Speaker 2: merely of a political order, but of the existing social formation.
Speaker 2: By this one deed, the world was to be made
Speaker 2: safe from the tyranny of the abstract. In the process,
Speaker 2: the Nazis quote unquote liberated themselves from humanity. The Nazis
Speaker 2: lost the war against the Soviet Union, America and Britain.
Speaker 2: They won their war, their revolution against the European Jews.
Speaker 2: And this ideology, this pitting of the abstract against the
Speaker 2: concrete is so powerful that it was never defeated. By
Speaker 2: the time the Nazis were defeated militarily, they had, you know,
Speaker 2: by the combined might of five of the largest empires
Speaker 2: in human history, they had already won, and their ideology
Speaker 2: never went away. If you look closely, you can still
Speaker 2: see it moving throughout the world. You can see it
Speaker 2: in the left making exactly the same mistakes it made before,
Speaker 2: waging war against the abstract in the name of an
Speaker 2: anti capitalism that can never end with the actual destruction
Speaker 2: of capitalism in that specific form. You can see it
Speaker 2: in a right that openly espouses these exact same ideas,
Speaker 2: in the form of pitting their nationalists and patriots against
Speaker 2: the glblists, in the way it pits national American or
Speaker 2: Russian or Hungarian workers against George Soros. It is the
Speaker 2: basis of all modern right wing thought. And when we
Speaker 2: come back from ADS, we're going to talk about right
Speaker 2: wing thoughts other basis Ronald Reagan's rampant racism. We've now
Speaker 2: seen one way that the productive and unproductive working distinction
Speaker 2: can be turned into unfathomable right wing violence. And now
Speaker 2: we're going to take a look at another one, which
Speaker 2: is the myth of the welfare queen. So one of
Speaker 2: the ways that Reagan eventually took power was by I
Speaker 2: mean literally he was doing this for like a decade.
Speaker 2: He does it for like twenty fucking years. It's insufferable,
Speaker 2: is screaming about the myth of the welfare queen. So
Speaker 2: the welfare queen for people who like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: we're too young to like remember what I mean. I
Speaker 2: wasn't around for the original height of it, but like
Speaker 2: I fucking remember from when I was a kid. It's
Speaker 2: this sort of like mythical racist caricature of like a
Speaker 2: black woman who lives off of scamming the welfare system.
Speaker 2: And you can see what's happening here pretty clearly, right,
Speaker 2: This is not like a particularly subtle political maneuver. The
Speaker 2: plan is to pit you know, sort of so called
Speaker 2: like productive workers and entrepreneurs versus people on welfare and
Speaker 2: through through the sort of incredible power of racism and
Speaker 2: specifically misogyn noir, which is, you know, through the power
Speaker 2: of America. Is just like specific a bideen casured to
Speaker 2: black woman, the identity of the worker is transformed into
Speaker 2: a racial category. So what you're actually dealing with is
Speaker 2: this opposition Reagan is trying to between quote unquote like
Speaker 2: productive white people who like work for a living or whatever,
Speaker 2: and you know black welfare queens quote unquote who are
Speaker 2: dependent on the state and don't work. And this is
Speaker 2: this is this is sort of Reagan's framing of it. Now,
Speaker 2: if you go back to the sort of older Marxist
Speaker 2: conception of class, right, like unemployed black people are like
Speaker 2: unambiguously part of the working class. And this is something
Speaker 2: that Reagan understood. Now, part of what was going on
Speaker 2: here actually was Reagan attempting to sort of crack down
Speaker 2: on black welfare activists who were doing a lot of
Speaker 2: you know, really incredible organizing, ranging from sort of like
Speaker 2: you know, organizing mass protests to like doing squats to
Speaker 2: doing like full it's full on building occupations and Reagan
Speaker 2: and more so the people sort of around Reagan by
Speaker 2: the end because you know, by like by like term two,
Speaker 2: Reagan has like basically checked out. You know. But but
Speaker 2: the people around Reagan can see which way the wind
Speaker 2: is blowing, and you know, they are busy sort of
Speaker 2: like lining up every fan they can find to make
Speaker 2: the wind blow a bit stronger, And the way that
Speaker 2: the winds are blowing is that a bunch of people
Speaker 2: are about to be spat out of the capitalist system
Speaker 2: and too increasingly precarious service jobs or just no jobs
Speaker 2: at all. And as the sort of crisis dynamics emerged
Speaker 2: and intensified, and people tend to forget this. But Reagan's
Speaker 2: term started with him nuking the economy, setting off a
Speaker 2: recession and jacking employment up to ten percent. But you know,
Speaker 2: as this unfolds, Reagan sees a perfect opportunity to sever
Speaker 2: what Marks would call the industrial reserve army. Who are
Speaker 2: you know, all the people who've been spat out of
Speaker 2: the capitalist system and forced to face sort of precarity
Speaker 2: and unemployment. He sees an opportunity to like to split
Speaker 2: these people from workers who held onto their jobs. And
Speaker 2: the way you do this is by talking about class
Speaker 2: in a way that's really about race. This new sort
Speaker 2: of moral division of like productive non productive worker is
Speaker 2: incredibly racialized, which is to say that, like, I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just it's just really racist. There's no sort of
Speaker 2: I don't know, there's no I'm I'm not gonna do
Speaker 2: the circumlocution on that ship it is. It is really racist,
Speaker 2: and it's it's specifically designed to pit white workers against
Speaker 2: black workers. And it's also this is something we should
Speaker 2: point out here, like reality has no effect on on
Speaker 2: the sort of like dash repropaganda value. But like the
Speaker 2: people who are on welfare who are working like they're off,
Speaker 2: they're working a lot, they're working really shit jobs. They're
Speaker 2: working more than the people who aren't on welfare in
Speaker 2: a lot of cases. What's happening here, right is this
Speaker 2: is this, this, this entire thing is very specifically designed
Speaker 2: to pit white workers against black workers by invoking racial
Speaker 2: prejudice and slightly more subtly, it's designed to remove black
Speaker 2: workers from the category of labor altogether through you know,
Speaker 2: the sort of sort of means of America's like deep
Speaker 2: in abiding hatred of black women. Now back in sort
Speaker 2: of reality, and again bearing in mind, reality has no
Speaker 2: effect on this bullshit, but you know, back in reality,
Speaker 2: like the actual biggest welfare cheat of the modern era
Speaker 2: is Brett Farr, former quarterback in the Minnesota Vikings. Please
Speaker 2: send all complaints at irite, Okay on Twitter, far managed
Speaker 2: to spend seventy seven million dollars of welfare money on
Speaker 2: a bunch of bullshit that includes like trying to get
Speaker 2: a multimillion dollar volleyball facility built at his daughter's school.
Speaker 2: The actual woman who was like the model for the
Speaker 2: first like welfare queen thing like may have stolen eight
Speaker 2: thousand dollars. But you know this, this doesn't matter at
Speaker 2: all because again, like reality's ability to combat propaganda is
Speaker 2: incredibly weak. And you know, and the other thing that's
Speaker 2: that's important to understand about this, right is this was
Speaker 2: never actually about the money, and this is something that
Speaker 2: people use to try to combat this stuff, right, which
Speaker 2: people will point out and they're right that like, yeah,
Speaker 2: like you know, in order in order to like quote
Speaker 2: unquote combat welfare fraud, like you spend more money try
Speaker 2: to combat the fraud than you save on the fraud.
Speaker 2: But that's not the point. That's not the point at all.
Speaker 2: The point is again, like turning white workers against black
Speaker 2: workers happen to be unemployed, and it works incredibly well
Speaker 2: because they tap into two just really powerful wells of
Speaker 2: emotion racism, and they happen to do a second one,
Speaker 2: which is people hating work. But because this is the
Speaker 2: right the way they tap into people hating work was
Speaker 2: they transform it into the seething hatred and resentment at
Speaker 2: the possibility of someone not having to have the suffering
Speaker 2: that you have and doing the thing that you always
Speaker 2: want to do, which is not work, and then tying
Speaker 2: that to, oh, these people don't have to suffer the
Speaker 2: way that I do because they're living off of like
Speaker 2: the product of my labor. And you know, you can
Speaker 2: you can see the sort of ghosts right of like
Speaker 2: an anti capitalist critique of labor, which is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: there are a bunch of people who like don't work
Speaker 2: a fucking day in their lives off the prophecy proceeds
Speaker 2: of our labors. They wear a bunch of suits and
Speaker 2: they you know, they they're like seventeenth generation like descendants
Speaker 2: of the Walton family or whatever. But you know, this
Speaker 2: is this is the sort of right wing version of it.
Speaker 2: And so through the sort of lens of racism and
Speaker 2: through the sort of transformation of class and productivity like
Speaker 2: into into sort of like pure race discourse, they've managed
Speaker 2: to sort of, you know, they've managed to completely transform
Speaker 2: the way people think about class. And this is a
Speaker 2: this is a big part of the reason why the
Speaker 2: way Americans think about class is so incredibly messed up,
Speaker 2: and it's a big part of the reason why you know,
Speaker 2: the United States has spent i mean, spent the next
Speaker 2: fifty years doing this unbelie evenly merciless like ruthless purge
Speaker 2: and just like mass infliction of suffering on the poorest
Speaker 2: people in the US. It's because of this shit. And
Speaker 2: this is also the reason that no one, you know,
Speaker 2: if you're fucking reading the New York Times, right, you
Speaker 2: will never hear anybody talk about black workers. They will
Speaker 2: only ever talk about white workers. And this is because
Speaker 2: that ideological project, the ideological project that Reagan was attempting
Speaker 2: to do, was a big part of it was again
Speaker 2: about an attempt to expel black workers from the popular
Speaker 2: collective imagination of the working class. And it fucking worked.
Speaker 2: If you're a white pundit, you can do this thing.
Speaker 2: You can make an entire career off of study and
Speaker 2: quote unquote the working class only ever talk to white people,
Speaker 2: because that's the only part of the working class that
Speaker 2: like exists, to these people that they even will pretend matters.
Speaker 2: And then you know, never mentioned black workers even existing
Speaker 2: at all, much less like engage with black workers is
Speaker 2: like the core of the workers movements, and no one
Speaker 2: outside of like actual leftist circles or even bad and
Speaker 2: I no one, no one even thinks this is fucking weird, right,
Speaker 2: And you can get away with this ship because you know,
Speaker 2: eighty percent of all discourse about class is really about
Speaker 2: race or gender. And you know eighty percent of all
Speaker 2: discourse but race is fucking white people talking to other
Speaker 2: white people. And that's what we're going to end for today.
Speaker 2: We will we will come back to the sort of
Speaker 2: ruling class reaction to this another time. But in the meantime,
Speaker 2: this has been naked Happen here. Go out into the
Speaker 2: world and make something that's not this one. It could
Speaker 2: Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 3: You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 3: monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.