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Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming at you today, sweaty, smelly,

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Speaker 1: and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the desert

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Speaker 1: where I have been spending the weekend trying my best

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Speaker 1: to help, along with lots of other dedicated mutual aid workers,

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Speaker 1: to mitigate the damage done by an entirely preventable humanitarian

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Speaker 1: crisis at the United States Southern border. People are being

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Speaker 1: held in the open desert in Hakomba, where it gets

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Speaker 1: hot in the day gets very cold at night, and

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Speaker 1: there are children, there are old people, there are young people.

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Speaker 1: All the support they're getting it's from mutual aid workers,

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Speaker 1: then maybe get some water from border patrol, from federal government,

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Speaker 1: and not much else. And I'm here before your podcast

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Speaker 1: to ask you if you can to help. We've all

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Speaker 1: spent all of our time and most of our money

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Speaker 1: the last few days week trying to help, and we're

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Speaker 1: all pretty broke, and we're all pretty tired. But I

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Speaker 1: could really do with your support, and I'm going they

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Speaker 1: give the venmos and cash apps and PayPal information for

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Speaker 1: two organizations who ideally love and whose work I have

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Speaker 1: seen is extremely effective and is the only thing keeping

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Speaker 1: this situation from being a lot worse. And please don't

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Speaker 1: think that if you don't have much money that you

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Speaker 1: shouldn't give. We can do a lot with a little.

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Speaker 1: So if you only have five bucks, that is great.

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Speaker 1: And five bucks is are top for someone to sleep

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Speaker 1: under or a few hot meals. And what we're going

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Speaker 1: to buy is food, blankets, tarps, water, the things that

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Speaker 1: stop people dying in the desert. Those two organizations, Border

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Speaker 1: Kindness and Free Shit Collective can be found online at

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Speaker 1: border Kindness and at free ship pb on Twitter. For

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Speaker 1: border Kindness, the venmo is at border hyphen Kindness. The

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Speaker 1: cash app is dollar sign border Kindness cash and the

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Speaker 1: xell and PayPal information is info at Borderkindness dot org.

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Speaker 1: Free Ship Collective are at free Ship Collective on cash

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Speaker 1: app and PayPal and at free shippbe on Twitter. Thank

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Speaker 1: you very much, guys.

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Speaker 2: Welcome Jack. It happened Here a podcast about things falling

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Speaker 2: apart and sometimes how to put them back together again.

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Speaker 2: I'm your host, Bio Wong. Now this is not one

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Speaker 2: of those times where it's about how to put things

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Speaker 2: back together again. This is one of those episodes about

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Speaker 2: why everything is absolutely awful, and one of the reasons

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Speaker 2: why everything is absolutely awful and something I've been driven

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Speaker 2: progressively more and more insane by in the past sort

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Speaker 2: of half a decade is the way people think and

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Speaker 2: talk about class in the United States. Why, for example,

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Speaker 2: do people think that Trump is working class? Why am

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Speaker 2: I watching people argue that being a barista isn't actually

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Speaker 2: being a worker. Why are all these millionaires driving forward

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Speaker 2: f one fifties while simultaneously claiming that they are also

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Speaker 2: somehow working class. Why are billionaires fleeing to Colorado and

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Speaker 2: Wyoming to cause play as workers about wearing jeans and

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Speaker 2: T shirts to bars. Why is every weight ring dipshit

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Speaker 2: posting the same video of a guy in an oil

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Speaker 2: rig committing approximately sixty thousand oh violations. Why is it

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Speaker 2: that the only part of the working class that anyone

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Speaker 2: ever seems to call the working class is the white

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Speaker 2: working class. Why is it that when people talk about

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Speaker 2: the white working class and then try to explain it

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Speaker 2: with data, and this is true across the entire ideological spectrum,

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Speaker 2: why do they start defining working class by things that

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Speaker 2: are objectively not class, like education levels. This reached a

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Speaker 2: breaking point with me a few weeks ago and has

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Speaker 2: finally caused me to snap and write this. Now, I've

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Speaker 2: given the game away a little by leading with the

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Speaker 2: white working class stuff, because a lot of the reason

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Speaker 2: that everything sounds so nuts is that when people talk

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Speaker 2: about class in the US, most of the time, what

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Speaker 2: they're actually talking about is race and gender. And this

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Speaker 2: pisses me off because I think more about class that

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Speaker 2: a lot of people with my ideology usually do, and

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Speaker 2: I think it can actually be a very useful way

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Speaker 2: to understand the world. However, COMMA thinking and talking about

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Speaker 2: class as I kind of floating signifier that you can

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Speaker 2: just jam conservative racial and gender politics into is a

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Speaker 2: really really bad way to talk about class. On top

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Speaker 2: of just the racism and the sexism, this way of

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Speaker 2: looking at class reduces class, which is a social relation,

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Speaker 2: into esthetics and grievances, and this leads to the question

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Speaker 2: how did this all happen?

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Speaker 3: Now?

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Speaker 2: You could take a really expansive look at this here

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Speaker 2: and go back to Aristotle or start later with Locke

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Speaker 2: or something, but I'm not going to do that because well, okay,

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Speaker 2: partially because this would be seventeen years long if I

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Speaker 2: tried to do this, and this episode is already now

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Speaker 2: three episodes. The other reason I'm not going to do

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Speaker 2: this is that the actual story of how everything got

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Speaker 2: like this is the story of how the right adapted

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Speaker 2: and distorted the incredibly successful leftist conception of labor that

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Speaker 2: built the identity of the working class in the eighteen

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Speaker 2: and nineteen hundreds. And in order to do that, we

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Speaker 2: need to talk about the labor theory value. Now, when

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Speaker 2: I talk about the labor theory of value, there are

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Speaker 2: two things going on here. You have, on the one hand,

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Speaker 2: Marx's law of value, and then you have the set

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Speaker 2: of slogans that are passed down the main line of

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Speaker 2: the workers movements. And these are not These are not

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Speaker 2: the same thing at all. Even though when someone just

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Speaker 2: says the labor theory of value, if that's a thing

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Speaker 2: that you've heard of, you probably immediately think Marx. So,

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Speaker 2: for example, let's get into a sense of sort of

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Speaker 2: what this kind of like sloganeering looks like. Here's the

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Speaker 2: beginning of the Gotha Program, which is the program of

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Speaker 2: the German Social Democratic Party in late eighteen hundreds. It begins, quote,

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Speaker 2: labor is the source of all wealth and all culture.

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Speaker 2: Now Marx hates this line. He writes a thing called

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Speaker 2: the Critique of the Gotha program where he goes on

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Speaker 2: a giant rant about how you know, nature also produces

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Speaker 2: use values and so on and so forth. But you know,

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Speaker 2: Marx just sort of bitterness at this aside labor is

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Speaker 2: the source of all wealth is a very very common sentiment.

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Speaker 2: It's the expression of the sort of common understanding of production, class,

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Speaker 2: and nature of value. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century,

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Speaker 2: As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Abraham Lincoln, a

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Speaker 2: man who is by no means a socialist and is

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Speaker 2: in fact the President of the United States, talks like this.

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Speaker 2: Here's Lincoln quote. Labor is prior to an independent of capital.

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Speaker 2: Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never

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Speaker 2: have existed if labor had not existed. First, labor is

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Speaker 2: superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. Now,

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Speaker 2: this is obviously not something you'd ever hear from a

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Speaker 2: president of the United States today, and we'll come back

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Speaker 2: to Graver's argument about why that is later. But I

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Speaker 2: want to get a bit deeper into not just the

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Speaker 2: common conception of the labor theory of value, but what

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Speaker 2: the sort of capital w capital m workers movement believed

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Speaker 2: in and this, as it turns out, has a tenuous

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Speaker 2: relation to Marx, but is not the same thing, and

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Speaker 2: I think is different enough that I'm actually not going

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Speaker 2: to spend another like fifteen minutes trying to explain Marx's

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Speaker 2: version of the labor theory of value or Marx's law

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Speaker 2: value because it doesn't ultimately matter that much, which is

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Speaker 2: which is a very weird thing to say about the

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Speaker 2: actual sort of you know about about about sort of

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Speaker 2: Marx's role in labor movement, but it kind of doesn't.

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Speaker 2: So what I'm going to do instead is read, well,

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Speaker 2: I should, I should, Okay, I should also mention like

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Speaker 2: we are going to get a bit more into like

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Speaker 2: the things that Marx actually wrote and why they mattered

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Speaker 2: to the specific movement like next episode. But you know,

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Speaker 2: we'll do, we'll do. We'll deal with that tomorrow. And

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Speaker 2: in the meantime, I'm going to read a bit from

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Speaker 2: the journal end notes from a Unity and Separation supporting

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Speaker 2: workers claims to respectability was a vision of their destiny

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Speaker 2: with five tenants. One, workers were building a new world

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Speaker 2: with their own hands. Two. In this new world, workers

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Speaker 2: were the only social group that was expanding, whereas all

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Speaker 2: other groups were contracting, including the bourgeoisie. Three. Workers were

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Speaker 2: not only becoming the majority of the population, they were

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Speaker 2: also becoming a compact mass, the collective worker, who was

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Speaker 2: being drilled in the factory to act in concert with

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Speaker 2: the machines. Four. They were thus the only group capable

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Speaker 2: of managing the new world in accordance with its innermost logic,

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Speaker 2: neither a hierarchy of order givers and order takers, nor

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Speaker 2: the irrationality of market fluctuations, but rather in every more

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Speaker 2: finely grained division of labor. Five. Workers were proving this

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Speaker 2: vision to be true, since the class was realizing what

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Speaker 2: it was in a conquest of power, the achievement of

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Speaker 2: which would make it possible to abolish class society and

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Speaker 2: thus bring Man's prehistory to a close. This is the

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Speaker 2: basis of the formation of the identity of the working class.

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Speaker 2: It's how people understand themselves as workers, you know, and

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Speaker 2: so in Marxist terms, this is the class in itself

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Speaker 2: becoming the class for itself.

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Speaker 3: You know.

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Speaker 2: This is this is this is this is the identity

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Speaker 2: that produces the workers movement. It's the expression of what

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Speaker 2: what people believe about themselves. Now there are ingrained ideological

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Speaker 2: assumptions here that go sort of beyond peer arguments about class. Right,

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Speaker 2: this is an argument about a very specific kind of

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Speaker 2: factory worker. And in some sense, I think the focus

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Speaker 2: on the factory worker as like the sort of emblematic

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Speaker 2: like bearer of this. And this is true both of

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Speaker 2: the theorist of the time and from people like end

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Speaker 2: Notes who are looking back on it from like one

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Speaker 2: hundred years later. I think this is kind of a

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Speaker 2: distraction from what a lot of the actual base of

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Speaker 2: the workers movement is, which is to say, like coal

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Speaker 2: miners and workers involve energy logistics. You know, you could take,

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Speaker 2: for example, like the beating heart of the ANEC movement

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Speaker 2: in much of the twenties and thirties are these Andalusian

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Speaker 2: coal miners whose militancy and ability to sort of control

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Speaker 2: the supply of coal that you know, the capitalists class

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Speaker 2: relied on for production gave them enormous leverage. And as

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Speaker 2: the sort of as a historian Timothy Mitchell has argued

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Speaker 2: it was, it was this sort of capacity to you know,

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Speaker 2: break the economy through shutting off the coal supply, through

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Speaker 2: strikes and sabotage, which workers you know, were workers at

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Speaker 2: the time, Like think of like the strike as a

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Speaker 2: kind of sabotage. And it's it's this capability that informs

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Speaker 2: a lot of the sort of politics and sense of

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Speaker 2: possibility of the twentieth century workers movements. And you know,

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Speaker 2: given what, but you know, like given what what the

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Speaker 2: people who are like, you know, working in a coal mine,

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Speaker 2: or like you know, are are like a doc worker

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Speaker 2: or you know, it's like if you are working in

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Speaker 2: a factory, right, it makes sense that these people believe, right,

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Speaker 2: you know, in terms in terms of you know, if

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Speaker 2: if if you're looking at something like you know, workers

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Speaker 2: are building the new world with their hands, right, or

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Speaker 2: like we're you know, we're the only social group that's expanding.

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Speaker 2: We're the only people who are like capable of like

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Speaker 2: managing the new world according to its own logic. This

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Speaker 2: makes a lot of sense if you are one of

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Speaker 2: the people who live in a world that has effectively disappeared,

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Speaker 2: now you know, and that and that is a world

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Speaker 2: where you literally are watching cities be constructed out of

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Speaker 2: like you know, the tiny shells of villages, right. The

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Speaker 2: only way you can sort of experience that now is

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Speaker 2: if you were one of the people in sort of

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Speaker 2: the late the nineties and the two thousands in China

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Speaker 2: who you know, like watch shen z En turn from

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Speaker 2: a fishing village into one of the largest cities in

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Speaker 2: the world. But that's not really a thing anymore. But

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Speaker 2: on the other hand, like, this is what these people

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Speaker 2: are experiencing. And this is a group of people who

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Speaker 2: can literally feel in their hands the sort of the

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Speaker 2: power or in the value of the labor in what

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Speaker 2: they're producing. They can, you know, they can see commodities

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Speaker 2: appear in the world, and they can know that it was,

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Speaker 2: you know, by their hands that the world was built.

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Speaker 2: And this is not you know, this is not purely

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Speaker 2: a metaphor, right, These are people who are literally creating

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Speaker 2: the world around them. To quote one of the verses

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Speaker 2: of Solidarity Forever that modern trade unions hilariously notably do

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Speaker 2: not include in the version of In the version of

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Speaker 2: the song that they tend to sing at things, the

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Speaker 2: trade union version drops a bunch of verses, and one

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Speaker 2: of those verses is in our hands is placed to

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Speaker 2: power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might

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Speaker 2: of armies multiplied a thousandfold. We can bring to birth

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Speaker 2: a new world from the ashes of the old. For

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Speaker 2: the union makes us strong. And this is both the

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Speaker 2: positive vision of the workers movement and its own sort

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Speaker 2: of theoretical self conception wrapped into one. It is the

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Speaker 2: sort of rosy romantic picture of what the Worker's movement is. However, Comma,

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Speaker 2: this is the incredibly romantic version of this. And before

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Speaker 2: we sort of leave the world of pure romance and

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Speaker 2: go into these sort of dirty and grimy worlds of

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Speaker 2: reality where everything kind of sucks and things are not

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Speaker 2: what they normally seem, we are going to take an

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Speaker 2: ad break and we're back now. There are a lot

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Speaker 2: of things about this workers movement that if you just

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Speaker 2: sort of look at it theoretically, or if you know

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Speaker 2: you're looking at these one of the sort of like

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Speaker 2: incredibly sort of rosy self caricatures. I guess if you're

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Speaker 2: purely looking at the kind of propaganda that the movement

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Speaker 2: produces in order to create itself, you were going to

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Speaker 2: get a very distorted picture of sort of what was

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Speaker 2: actually going on on the ground. And this also makes

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Speaker 2: it very very difficult to understand what happened, because you know,

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Speaker 2: if you want to understand how this movement was defeated

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Speaker 2: and how the like all of the sort of branches

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Speaker 2: of the worker's movements, like all of his different ideologies,

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Speaker 2: all of those different manifestations, are essentially destroyed. You have

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Speaker 2: to get to the point where you are you start

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Speaker 2: to realize that the ideological conception of productivity, right of

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Speaker 2: of the producer, of you know, like of of what

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Speaker 2: the worker is, was never as sort of dry and

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Speaker 2: objective as theorists wanted us. And you know, you got

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Speaker 2: the sense that they wanted like themselves to believe. Case

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Speaker 2: in point is the nature of what Marx calls the

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Speaker 2: lump and proletariat. So here's from endnotes again, who were

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Speaker 2: these lump and proletarians preaching anarchy? Attempts to spell that

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Speaker 2: out usually took the form not of structural analysis, but

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Speaker 2: rather of long lists of shady characters, lists which collapsed

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Speaker 2: in on themselves in a frenzied incoherence. Here is Marx's

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Speaker 2: paradigmatic discussion of the lump and proletariat from the eighteenth

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Speaker 2: through mayor of Louis Bonaparte, on the pretext of founding

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Speaker 2: a benevolent society, The lump and proletariat of Paris had

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Speaker 2: been organized into secret sections, each section led by bonapartist agents.

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Speaker 2: These lumpins supposedly consisted of quote, vagabonds, discharged soldiers and jailbirds,

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Speaker 2: escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mounton bunks, lazaraini, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps,

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Speaker 2: brothel keepers, porters, litter roddy, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.

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Speaker 2: In short, the whole indefinite, disintegrating mass thrown hither and

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Speaker 2: thither from which the front call Labohm. Is there any

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Speaker 2: truth in this paranoid fantasy? Do escaped convicts and organ

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Speaker 2: grinders share a common counter revolutionary interest with beggars, which

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Speaker 2: distinguishes them from the common mass worker, who are apparently

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Speaker 2: revolutionary by nature. To think so is insane. The lumpen

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Speaker 2: proletariat was a specter haunting the worker's movements. If that

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Speaker 2: movement constituted itself for the dignity of workers, then the

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Speaker 2: lumpen was the figure of the undignified worker, or miraculoately,

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Speaker 2: the lumpen was one of its figurations. All of the

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Speaker 2: movement's efforts to give dignity of the class were supposedly

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Speaker 2: undermined by these dissolute figures drunk singing in the streets,

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Speaker 2: petty criminals, and prostitutes. References to a lumpen proletariat registered

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Speaker 2: what was a simple truth. It was difficult to convince

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Speaker 2: workers to organize as workers, since mostly they didn't care

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Speaker 2: about socialism. A great many of the poor, especially the

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Speaker 2: very poor, did not think or behave themselves as proletarians,

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Speaker 2: or find the organizations and modes of actions of the

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Speaker 2: movement as applicable or relevant to them. In their fear

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Speaker 2: of time, they'd rather go to the pub than sing workers' songs.

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Speaker 2: In the figure of the lumpin we discover the dark

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Speaker 2: underside of the affirmation of the working class. It was

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Speaker 2: a biting class hatred. Workers saw themselves as originating out

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Speaker 2: of a stinking morass from Kotsky's The Class Struggle quote.

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Speaker 2: At the time of the beginning of modern industry, the

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Speaker 2: term proletariat implied absolute degeneracy, and there are persons who

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Speaker 2: believe this is still the case. Moreover, capitalism was trying

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Speaker 2: to push them back into the muck. Thus, the crisis

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Speaker 2: tendencies of capitalism could only be resolved in one of

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Speaker 2: two ways, the victory of the working class or in

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Speaker 2: its becoming lumpen. Now you can see a couple of

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Speaker 2: things very clearly here. One is there's been a lot

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Speaker 2: of attempts to resuscitate the lump and proletariat as like

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Speaker 2: a functional class, especially see this especially in the seventies.

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Speaker 2: And I really, I really would recommend those people go

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Speaker 2: back and read what Marks actually wrote about the love

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Speaker 2: and proletariat, because it makes no sense. It is just

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Speaker 2: like absolute sort of blithering nonsense. And the reason it's

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Speaker 2: this kind of like incredibly bizarre, like paranoid, you know,

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Speaker 2: list of fantasies is that beneath the sort of like

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Speaker 2: foe of scientific objectiveness of the workers' movement is this

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Speaker 2: incredibly petty moralism and a set of sort of Victorian

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Speaker 2: social values with all of the sort of cruelty of

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Speaker 2: their aristocratic masters. And I want to sort of point

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Speaker 2: out here like this this kind of thinking, you know,

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Speaker 2: this kind of like we are the movement that is

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Speaker 2: a liberation of the class. But in order to do that,

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Speaker 2: we need to prove that like we are like actually

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Speaker 2: sort of like real dignified human beings, and that there's

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Speaker 2: another group of people who are just us, but we

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Speaker 2: hate them because they don't behave the way that we

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Speaker 2: think they're supposed to. This is a very very common

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Speaker 2: thing that you see in basically all social movements, especially

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Speaker 2: in their earliest and like shittiest iterations. You see this

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Speaker 2: in the early feminist movement. I mean, you see this

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Speaker 2: still in the feminist movement, but there are sections of

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Speaker 2: it that do this too. There's a really good piece

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Speaker 2: called some Like It Hot by Sophie Lewis about the

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Speaker 2: sort of feminist reaction to Marilyn Monroe, and I'm gonna

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Speaker 2: read a little bit from it. One of the things

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Speaker 2: that you get this sense of is that people like

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Speaker 2: Gloria Steinem just absolutely hate Marilyn Monroe, and you know,

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Speaker 2: the stuff they write about her is stuff that, like

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Speaker 2: you just will be like almost incomprehensible to imagine any

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Speaker 2: of these people or even just sort of like you know,

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Speaker 2: not even like like a modern sort of like conservative

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Speaker 2: like writing on purpose about a woman and being allowed

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Speaker 2: to sort of get away with it. I mean, they're right,

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Speaker 2: just horrible things about her. I'm gonna read a little

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Speaker 2: bit from the piece. Perhaps it was Monroe's dumping of

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Speaker 2: three husbands. Two of them were famous and powerful. That

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Speaker 2: posed quote no adult challenge to Steinem's mind. Or perhaps

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Speaker 2: Steinem's comments closed nothing so much as her own inability

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Speaker 2: to see high fem people as subjects. Here, in case

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Speaker 2: it might pierce the vail is Monroe Apagem written on

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Speaker 2: walderf a story a letter paper in nineteen fifty five,

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Speaker 2: quote everyone has violence in themselves. I am violent. Here

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Speaker 2: is another spoken to photographer Bruno Bernard in nineteen fifty six.

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Speaker 2: Both the anti communists on the House Committee on Un

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Speaker 2: American Activities and the movie censors on the production board

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Speaker 2: should be buried alive. Perhaps Steinem, who proudly worked for

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Speaker 2: the CIA in the fifties and sixties, would not appreciate

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Speaker 2: this kind of courage, the courage of one Norma, who,

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Speaker 2: when notified by the police at Los Angeles roadblock in

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Speaker 2: nineteen forty nine that a nearby house was being monitored

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Speaker 2: for ties to communists, shouted the officer's ear off and

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Speaker 2: went straight to tip off blacklisted screenwriters Norma and Ben Bauersman.

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Speaker 2: And so you can sort of see what's happening here, right.

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Speaker 2: It's a very similar thing where there are these sort

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Speaker 2: of like, you know, you have these very sort of

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Speaker 2: like like respectable mainstream feminists who look at someone like

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Speaker 2: Marilyn Monroe, who you know, and they just fucking hate her.

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Speaker 2: They absolutely despise her because she is sort of she

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Speaker 2: she is the image of what they sort of think

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Speaker 2: that they're fighting against, right, Like they're they're, they're, they're,

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Speaker 2: they're what liberation looks like for them is to like

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Speaker 2: not be this kind of woman. And that's, you know,

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Speaker 2: and this is that's the sort of unspoken or so

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Speaker 2: sometimes just overtly spoken core of what a lot of

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Speaker 2: this stuff is. And you know, and this is how

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Speaker 2: these people like can justify like working for the fucking CIA,

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Speaker 2: right and you know, somehow claiming to themselves to be

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Speaker 2: like superior feminists feminists to Marilyn Monroe, who you know,

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Speaker 2: at like great personal costs and at great danger, like

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Speaker 2: you know, fought Hugh wac and shit. So you know,

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Speaker 2: this kind of like we are the group who is

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Speaker 2: going to free our own group. We're also not like

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Speaker 2: because we're not like those other people who are literally

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Speaker 2: the same as us, but we don't like them because

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Speaker 2: we don't think they're respectable enough. This is a very

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00:22:06,600 --> 00:22:10,560
Speaker 2: very old sort of trend, but it has real social consequences,

387
00:22:10,560 --> 00:22:13,119
Speaker 2: and it's you know, it's it's a really disastrous strategy

388
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Speaker 2: because it means that all of these movements have these

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Speaker 2: sort of flanks from which they can be attacked. One

390
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Speaker 2: of these flanks for the workers movements, and one that's

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Speaker 2: become increasingly important now, is the kind of producer's conception

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Speaker 2: of what a worker is. You know, this is the

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Speaker 2: man sort of creating the new world with his bare hands.

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Speaker 2: The problem is that, you know, this is never what

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Speaker 2: most labor actually was. Here's David Graeber again. In fact,

396
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Speaker 2: there was never a time when most workers worked in

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Speaker 2: a factory, Even in the days of Karl Marx or

398
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Speaker 2: Charles Dickens. Working class neighborhoods housed far more maids, boot blacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies,

399
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Speaker 2: school teachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees and coal mines,

400
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Speaker 2: textile mills or iron foundries. Are these former jobs productive

401
00:23:15,680 --> 00:23:18,960
Speaker 2: in what sense? And for whom? Who produces? Us who flay?

402
00:23:19,800 --> 00:23:22,720
Speaker 2: Is because of these ambiguities that such issues are typically

403
00:23:22,760 --> 00:23:26,520
Speaker 2: brushed aside when people are arguing about value but doing

404
00:23:26,560 --> 00:23:29,919
Speaker 2: so blinds us to the reality that most working class labor,

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00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:33,679
Speaker 2: whether you're carried out by men or women, actually resembles

406
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Speaker 2: what we are typically think of as women's work. Looking

407
00:23:36,920 --> 00:23:41,159
Speaker 2: after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring,

408
00:23:41,200 --> 00:23:44,880
Speaker 2: anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention,

409
00:23:45,080 --> 00:23:49,480
Speaker 2: caring for, monitoring and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects.

410
00:23:49,920 --> 00:23:54,520
Speaker 2: Then it involves hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things. And

411
00:23:54,600 --> 00:23:57,680
Speaker 2: you know, you can see in this sort of issue, right,

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00:23:58,560 --> 00:24:01,399
Speaker 2: you can see the axis upon which the workers movement

413
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Speaker 2: is going to be split in the eighties and nineties.

414
00:24:04,240 --> 00:24:06,200
Speaker 2: If you can convince a set of workers that what

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Speaker 2: they're doing is you know, masculine productive labor, right, and

416
00:24:10,320 --> 00:24:12,280
Speaker 2: that you know what those other people are doing, is

417
00:24:12,320 --> 00:24:15,840
Speaker 2: this like feminine care labor that doesn't produce anything. You

418
00:24:15,920 --> 00:24:19,240
Speaker 2: can turn the entire ideology of the workers movement on

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Speaker 2: its head and transform it from a liberatory ideology about

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Speaker 2: the end of the class system to a patriarchal ideology

421
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Speaker 2: about the necessity of labor to sort of manhood and masculinity.

422
00:24:30,080 --> 00:24:33,320
Speaker 2: And once that ideological shift is made, you can start

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Speaker 2: writing off entire fields of laborers as being insufficiently quote

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Speaker 2: unquote productive or you know, as the right wing shift

425
00:24:40,720 --> 00:24:45,240
Speaker 2: renders it, you can say productive and mean insufficiently masculine

426
00:24:45,240 --> 00:24:49,840
Speaker 2: account as part of like the working class TM. This problem,

427
00:24:50,280 --> 00:24:53,359
Speaker 2: Graver argues, is the consequence of the sort of maniacal

428
00:24:53,440 --> 00:24:56,959
Speaker 2: focus on production that defined the workers movement, because it

429
00:24:56,960 --> 00:25:00,520
Speaker 2: obscures the fact that, again, most of actual labor is labor.

430
00:25:01,320 --> 00:25:03,840
Speaker 2: And this is something we've discussed at length on this

431
00:25:04,000 --> 00:25:06,959
Speaker 2: show in sort of ethnic graphic, if not theoretical terms.

432
00:25:07,640 --> 00:25:11,119
Speaker 2: While talking to Starbucks workers and in these conversations, it

433
00:25:11,160 --> 00:25:13,639
Speaker 2: becomes almost immediately clear that a huge part of the

434
00:25:13,760 --> 00:25:16,040
Speaker 2: job has you know, very little to do with making

435
00:25:16,080 --> 00:25:20,439
Speaker 2: coffee or even sort of classical customer management, and like

436
00:25:20,480 --> 00:25:23,600
Speaker 2: the interpretive and emotional labor of doing service work, what

437
00:25:23,680 --> 00:25:26,520
Speaker 2: these workers are actually doing is acting as a replacement

438
00:25:26,560 --> 00:25:28,600
Speaker 2: for the collapsing American social safety net.

439
00:25:28,680 --> 00:25:28,840
Speaker 1: Right.

440
00:25:29,080 --> 00:25:32,320
Speaker 2: They are taking care of and literally saving the lives

441
00:25:32,359 --> 00:25:35,760
Speaker 2: of people who capitalism has spat out and left to die.

442
00:25:35,880 --> 00:25:40,680
Speaker 2: And this is by by any like any actual you know,

443
00:25:40,720 --> 00:25:42,560
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna say objective standard, because I don't like

444
00:25:42,600 --> 00:25:45,080
Speaker 2: there is an objective standard for what we're like how

445
00:25:45,160 --> 00:25:47,639
Speaker 2: much work something is. But you know, in terms of

446
00:25:47,760 --> 00:25:50,080
Speaker 2: the amount of labor, in terms of the difficulty of labor,

447
00:25:50,119 --> 00:25:54,040
Speaker 2: in terms of like what he is being expected of

448
00:25:54,200 --> 00:25:58,840
Speaker 2: expected of these workers, this is incredibly intense difficult labor.

449
00:25:59,560 --> 00:26:03,520
Speaker 2: But you know, because of the sort of patriarchal like

450
00:26:04,359 --> 00:26:09,280
Speaker 2: idea and conception that has sort of consumed what our

451
00:26:09,520 --> 00:26:12,560
Speaker 2: sort of collective conception of what a quote unquote real

452
00:26:12,640 --> 00:26:15,760
Speaker 2: job is, the enormous amount of care labor that bariss

453
00:26:15,800 --> 00:26:17,560
Speaker 2: do every day. And you know, there's there's a good

454
00:26:17,640 --> 00:26:20,160
Speaker 2: argument Graber makes a very similar argument to this, that

455
00:26:21,320 --> 00:26:22,840
Speaker 2: you can look at the entire job, and you can

456
00:26:22,840 --> 00:26:26,320
Speaker 2: look at like most economic production as care labor, right,

457
00:26:26,359 --> 00:26:29,080
Speaker 2: because you're producing this coffee in order to care for someone.

458
00:26:29,119 --> 00:26:32,320
Speaker 2: You make a bridge in order to like, like in

459
00:26:32,400 --> 00:26:33,600
Speaker 2: order so that people can use it.

460
00:26:33,680 --> 00:26:33,880
Speaker 3: Right.

461
00:26:35,600 --> 00:26:38,440
Speaker 2: But you know, there's a good argument that like all

462
00:26:38,560 --> 00:26:43,720
Speaker 2: everything in Barista does is care labor. But because you know,

463
00:26:43,840 --> 00:26:46,280
Speaker 2: it's not like making cars or being one of the

464
00:26:46,359 --> 00:26:49,040
Speaker 2: last fifty thousand coal miners left in the US, it's

465
00:26:49,080 --> 00:26:54,639
Speaker 2: not considered real labor. And this, all of this is

466
00:26:54,800 --> 00:26:58,080
Speaker 2: just a bomb that is left sitting under the ideological

467
00:26:58,119 --> 00:27:03,320
Speaker 2: core of the workers' movements, and that bomb probably would

468
00:27:03,359 --> 00:27:06,119
Speaker 2: have just gone off on its own, you know what

469
00:27:06,280 --> 00:27:08,679
Speaker 2: I say, on its own, that bomb probably would have

470
00:27:08,760 --> 00:27:12,200
Speaker 2: been set off by something we're going to talk about

471
00:27:12,440 --> 00:27:14,800
Speaker 2: or tomorrow, which is the shift in the labor's force

472
00:27:15,000 --> 00:27:17,280
Speaker 2: in a lot of countries that sort of de industrialized

473
00:27:17,720 --> 00:27:20,600
Speaker 2: towards this kind of labor being the sort of standard like,

474
00:27:20,640 --> 00:27:24,120
Speaker 2: you know, being just even more obviously the standard form

475
00:27:24,160 --> 00:27:28,480
Speaker 2: of labor. But the ruling class figured out a way

476
00:27:28,600 --> 00:27:32,080
Speaker 2: to sort of set this bomb off and ensure that,

477
00:27:33,240 --> 00:27:36,400
Speaker 2: you know, and ensure that it would like just detonate

478
00:27:36,400 --> 00:27:38,720
Speaker 2: the workers movement immediately. And the thing that they figured

479
00:27:38,760 --> 00:27:42,440
Speaker 2: out to set this bomb off is racism. And that

480
00:27:42,600 --> 00:27:45,639
Speaker 2: is what I'm going to talk about tomorrow, the story

481
00:27:45,680 --> 00:27:49,240
Speaker 2: of how the fusion of racism and sexism that may

482
00:27:49,320 --> 00:27:51,919
Speaker 2: well be remembered by historians is the force that burned

483
00:27:51,920 --> 00:27:55,200
Speaker 2: the entire world, consumed what was left of the workers movement,

484
00:27:55,359 --> 00:27:58,240
Speaker 2: and turned this country into neoliberal Reagan hell.

485
00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:05,480
Speaker 3: It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.

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00:28:05,600 --> 00:28:08,280
Speaker 3: For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website

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00:28:08,280 --> 00:28:11,400
Speaker 3: coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

488
00:28:11,440 --> 00:28:14,800
Speaker 3: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can

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00:28:14,800 --> 00:28:17,520
Speaker 3: find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at

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00:28:17,560 --> 00:28:20,800
Speaker 3: coolzonemedia dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening.