People who think unions should just be inherently good organizations that function perfectly in the interest of the working class without them having to participate in any way 🤝 People who think political parties should just be inherently good organizations that function perfectly in the interest of the working class without them having to participate in any way 🤝 Making my life just like, one thousand times harder than it needs to be

Every time someone posts about how the Democrats need to run on a firm, unapologetic populist left platform I think about how bitter I still am that Cynthia Nixon did exactly that in the 2018 NY gubernatorial race and still lost to Andrew fucking Cuomo because nobody in this fucking country votes in primaries

People who want to push the Dems left: primaries are the most direct mechanism available to do that!

Left-wing populism is, and always was, the answer

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

There's a disconnect happening here because the primary function of social media for most casual users is to form a circle of friends around the usual things that friendships are built on: shared interests and lifestyles and ideas of what is important and what is unacceptable. When people are mainly doing leftism on social media, this encourages thinking of leftism as centered around establishing high-minded social clubs.

For anyone who still isn't getting it from someone who helps people IRL: There's a difference between whom you're helping to feed at the mealshare and whom you're choosing to hang out with for fun after the mealshare. You don't have to invite a hungry person with opinions you don't like to play board games with you, but you do have to help keep them from starving if you're serious about leftist organizing.

[...]

7 November 2024

I feel like what's most galling to a lot of us about the election is that, due to the monopoly inherent in the two-party system + first-past-the-post, there's basically no way for us to punish center-dems; and especially those in the higher party structure specifically, for their bullshit without fucking ourselves with a Republican hellscape.

It's basically "Fuck over your base, get a prize," with zero accountability because it's a hostage situation. The people who need so much they refuse to fight for, things like healthcare; housing; not letting us all fucking die to climate change; are pulled back by the fact that it's either them or the fascist death cult, and they never lose their fucking jobs over it when they fail us whether they win or lose the election.

And, even as someone fucking terrified of Project 2025, I can still get why someone would want to take the only route they know how to make these bastards face actual consequences for their actions and let them burn.

The trouble is, as I implied before, the idea that Dems will actually learn something when they lose has never fucking worked in the modern era.

They didn't learn shit with Gore, they didn't learn shit with Kerry, they certainly didn't learn shit with Hillary. Obama's actual wins could've taught them something, but they flushed those lessons right down the toilet as soon as Obama's first day in office!

Most of the haggard Skeksis who haven't had the decency to die that made those decisions are still setting the tempo of the party, even as it's fucked them, and they have a network of pundits at places like the Atlantic and the NYT insulating them from their base when they're not actively shitting on it.

So letting Trump win won't even work as a form of consequences! And I don't think a third party's going to work because like... we couldn't even get Bernie past their hegemony, do you think we'll be able to get something that's even more fucked over by both parties off the ground? Not without something like ranked choice voting, that's for sure!

But, on the flipside, the problem with the "Vote Blue No Matter Who" side of things is, and I speak as someone who again is terrified of Project 2025, that mindset gives no actual ideas on how to change this.

The closest we got was the "we can push him left" narrative, which people pooh-pooh as something they dropped the ball on, but I think the tragedy of it was not that it didn't happen, but that it actually did.

Like, Biden's views were pushed left of where he's been before, he's taken some policies from the progressive wing (The big ones being in the realm of antitrust IMO) but, as current events have shown, there's extensive limits to that and we hit them hard way earlier than anyone was hoping, because there's only so much you can polish a turd.

So like, I offer a question: If we're not pushed into Donnie's Fascist Coup Plan in 2025, what would longterm, organized action to force accountability on the Dems look like?

What would an organization to chase out the Skeksis inhabiting both their media apparatus and the party itself that have been failing us for over 30 years, a movement saying "Enough is enough" at us being used as props to be milked for votes then ignored at a strength and volume we never have before, look like?

I may as well tag in @afloweroutofstone, but the question is open to the rest of y'all too.

I think a lot of people are going to dislike hearing this, but I suspect if we can't get structural reform like ranked choice voting the best hope of pushing the Democrats left is to give the Democrats victories.

1) The Dems are definitely more left-adjacent than the Republicans, Dem victories are likely to lead to implementation of some leftist policies and move the Overton Window leftward (partially by the successful implementation of left-adjacent policies that improve people's lives).

2) I think establishments Dems are fundamentally Like That for structural class politics reasons that are only tractable through structural reform, but I suspect a secondary reason they're Like That is because a lot of them are deeply brainwormed by the belief that they're still living in the country that gave Ronald Reagan a 49 state landslide. They're not; that happened about 40 years ago now, it's a different country now, the culture has changed and the economic conditions have changed and the demographics have changed, but a lot of Dem politicians are old and are kind of mentally stuck in the Reagan to George W. Bush years (i.e. the nadir of leftist power and prestige). I think a decade of victory might go a long way toward getting them to realize that they don't need to obsequiously placate center-right culturally conservative white people anymore. Related: the Biden admin has actually done some half-decent policies notably to the left of business as usual IIRC, if Harris loses the Dem political class are likely to interpret that as a repudiation of that and pivot to the right, if she wins they might take it as a sign there's a popular appetite for that.

3) A stronger Democratic Party means the left can better afford to punish the Dems with Republican wins when the Dems are insufficiently left-wing. As you say, right now the establishment Dems benefit from basically a hostage situation; "bend your knee or the far-right wins." The not-far-right party having some padding of expendable political power would make the hostage situation less life-or-death. I think we'd be in a better position to push the Dems left if punishing them with a bunch of Congressional Republican wins meant the difference between a solid Dem majority and a razor-thin Dem majority, instead of the difference between a razor-thin Dem majority and the Project 2025 people getting to do what they want. And, more generally, the left will have a lot more energy and resources for fighting the center-right if they aren't having most of their energy and resources absorbed by fighting the far-right.

4) Dem victories are likely to lead to policies that transfer wealth downward instead of upward, giving poor people more resources to leverage into economic and political pressure campaigns. Better and less conditional welfare and better minimum wage means workers are less afraid to strike, better welfare means people are more empowered to withhold their labor, etc.. I suspect this is a big part of the reason oligarch classes tend to hate and fear "bread and circuses"; it's not just that they resent wealth being transferred downward instead of upward (though, of course, that's a big part of it), it's that they sense that resources available to the lower classes are likely to be leveraged into more demands for equality.

I suspect if you're a US citizen and live in a swing state one of the most effective low-effort cheap things you can do to set the stage for a leftist resurgence in the USA is vote straight Democrat for at least the next election or five.

This response has been sitting in my drafts for a long time now, this seemed like a timely night to post it.

3 September 2024

In Tale of Two Pegasi, I said:

I mention one of the simplest and oldest solutions to the problem of the distribution of capital ownership: worker co-operatives. After investigating the literature on co-operatives, I don’t think they serve as a sufficient solution. Here’s why:

A co-operative is an enterprise where the workers and the owners are the same people. Each individual contributes their labor-power to the firm, as well as an equal share of the firm’s capital. Capital income is thus distributed evenly across the firm’s members, rather than accruing to distant capitalists. Let’s assume the following co-operative into existence: one with one hundred employees and ten million dollars worth of capital. Each employee provides 50,000 dollars worth of labor a year, and owns a share of the company equal to 100,000 dollars, paying some yearly dividend, which the firm votes on whether to reinvest or to distribute as income.

If the firm is considering hiring a new worker, a dilemma suddenly arises: Where does the new worker’s share come from? If the firm chooses the first horn of the dilemma, it gives the new worker an equal share of the firm’s capital, meaning that now each of the 101 employees has a share worth 99,009.90. Each employee lost a thousand dollars in order to hire this new employee. So the firm is incentivized not to hire new workers, even if it would increase the total revenue of the firm, because it would dilute the capital share of each pre-existing member of the co-operative. This is not a problem of democracy mind you. The issue is that the workers are required to give away something valuable for free. It’s the same issue as taxing capital income at 100%. Capital is not being priced, so it’s not being allocated effectively. Its owner can only ever either give it away for free, or keep it for themselves, so they will always do the latter unless taken by a fit of altruism. Jaroslav Vanek is pretty confident that this “never-employ force” was responsible for the chronic extremely high unemployment rate in Yugoslavia, which had an economy consisting of worker co-operatives. I think he is probably right.

The second horn of the dilemma is if the co-operative tries to price capital, and says, fine, we’re not giving away capital for free. From now on, new members must buy their share of capital. This is how Mondragon, the largest and most successful co-operative in the world, operates. Here is how the system is described in “Making Mondragon”:

A similar system is in place in most other successful co-operatives. In the worker-owned pickle company Real Pickles, each employee has to buy a whopping 6,000 dollar membership share to join the co-operative. The problems with this horn are obvious. It’s no surprise that this system of corporate governance has not seen much success. Most unemployed people looking for work don’t have 6,000 dollars to spend. And the ones that do would be much wiser to invest that money in a different firm, to reduce risk. Worse still, the member-owner cannot sell their share until after they leave the company. They can’t just sell it on a secondary market and use the money gained for consumption like any other stockholder can. The second horn, if scaled up to a whole economy, would be nothing more than just capitalism again, except people are forbidden from buying shares in any company unless they work for said company, in which case buying a share is now mandatory. There is no benefit to this system whatsoever to anybody.

Except for this: management in worker co-operatives is elected by the workers, rather than by shareholders, meaning that the firm is run in the interest of the workers rather than the capitalists. In the spherical cow textbook economic model, this shouldn’t make any difference at all, because in the spherical cow world labor and capital are on entirely equal footing. In the real world however, the capitalists hold an enormous amount of market power that the workers don’t have. It's very easy to switch investments if you don’t like the returns a firm is giving you. It’s much harder to switch jobs when you don’t like how your boss is treating you. Selling labor has much much higher transaction costs. There is clearly an enormous advantage in providing management rights to those who provide labor to the firm rather than those who provide capital, even as a social-democratic reform in a capitalist society. The capital market could look the same as it does now, except all shares of companies would be non-controlling shares. This would accomplish the same things unions accomplish, but more elegantly. The workers would no longer even need to bargain for better conditions and pay. They could make the decision themselves, democratically, if doing so was in their interest. Also, economic profit and schumpeterian rents exist, and in a labor managed firm those rents would go to the workers, which is Good For Utility. This wouldn’t be socialism, but I think it would be an improvement over the current state of things.

This seems equivalent to saying that the co-operative isn't incentivized to hire a new worker if hiring a new worker isn't profitable. If the new worker consumes $100,000 worth of pay, benefits, enabling capital, etc. it only makes sense to hire them if they increase productivity by <$100,000, in which case the incumbent members would lose $1000 but get back <$1000 from the return on the increased productivity being spread equally around the co-op. At face value this seems like the system working the way we'd want it to?

This discussion is talking about "capital" as if it's some kind of easily divisible liquid unit, like money, but a very important thing about capital is precisely that most of it isn't that, and if I stop thinking of capital as like money the idea that workers would benefit from keeping capital idle so they can own more of it starts feeling a lot less credible. Like, if the co-op is a cafe and they all own a 20% share in the blender, yeah, you could say in a sense hiring a new worker makes them less rich cause the blender is now shared among six people instead of five, but nobody actually benefits from owning 20% of an idle blender instead of 16% of a working blender (and thus nobody actually loses anything they're likely to care about by trading a 20% share in an idle blender for a 16% share in a working blender), capital sitting unused is basically just a straight-up loss unless your plan is to sell it or use it for speculation or if you're trading off productivity for leisure, and the last thing would create the opposite incentive (maintaining a high worker to capital ratio). The same would apply to industrial machinery and so on.

These are very basic objections, so I assume I'm missing something?

Once you give money it’s a gift and it’s not yours anymore and you shouldn’t care that much, just have faith they’ll get what they need.

I think my main exception to the "if you give somebody money it's now theirs, not yours" principle is if you give somebody money to benefit their child (as in a minor they have guardianship over) or somebody else who's similarly dependent on them and they use it selfishly instead. Like, if you give somebody money to buy food for their child and they spend it on booze for themselves and let their child go hungry instead. Or if you give somebody money to pay for their child's college education and they pour it all into their failing attempt to turn their passion project into a small business instead. I think it's legitimate to get pissed off by that. Because you didn't really want to give them the money, you were entrusting them with the money that you really wanted to give to their child (and they only reason you gave the money to the parent instead of the child is because the nature of adult privilege and perhaps the cognitive limitations of small children basically forced you to do it that way), but they chose to leverage their parental power to selfishly appropriate it and spend it on something they wanted instead.

I'm mostly pretty firmly on the side of "let people do what they want, and yes, one implication of that is public assistance and charity should primarily try to help and empower people, not control them," but a parent of a minor (especially a very young minor) isn't just acting as an individual, they're acting as somebody with enormous power over another, extremely vulnerable human being, and they should be regarded and treated accordingly. Responsibility and accountability should be prices of having power over other people, and that applies to parental power too.

Jesus, sternly: he who lives by the sword will die by the sword

knights: uh yeah I sure hope I do

This sounds like the Medieval equivalent of those people who think "Biblical economics" means the economic policies favored by the USA Republican Party.

why are british people always so mad when people make jokes about their accents. sorry you say yewchube. it’s funny though innit

This is something I’ve been dying to talk about.

There’s something called culture. People (especially USAmericans) think of culture as cultural dress, cultural food, cultural music. These are culture, but they are only the very superficial aspects of it. Like the icing on your cake. Far more deep rooted is the more meaty bits of culture: the attitudes, the ideas, the taboos.

There’s a guy on tiktok who has done a series that shows this very well, of Germans Vs Irish. In one video the German offers the Irish person two kinds of tea, green or black. The Irish person keeps putting off the choice with things like “Oh sure whatever is easiest”, “Which have you more of?” and, “Ah sure I don’t want to cause a fuss” whereas the German just wants a straight answer. This is a cultural difference of politeness.

Here in the UK, accents mark your class very openly. They let everyone know where you’re from (though this has become less pronounced in the last 50 years,) and what your background is. A lot of people (especially northerners, but also a fair contingent of working class southerners) face discrimination on the basis of their accents.

Some of us (myself included) even change register (though I believe USAmericans call it code switching) in and out of our regional accent and a close approximation of RP. We learn to do it because it makes us seem more intelligent (even though it shouldn’t) and helps us be taken more seriously.

Thus, our country carries a lot of baggage when it comes to accents. Especially those of the working class who have had their accents made fun of, or have faced discrimination based on it.

So when someone outside the country (usually USAmericans) makes fun of our accents they’re stepping on a lot of cultural taboos and boundaries. Especially because the “It’s Chewsday, gonnae wot-ch sum yewchube innit” is a working class accent.

Now, that’s not to say we can’t take a joke, but this is the kind of joke you share with someone who you have been friends with for a while. My boyfriend often will pick up on the way I say certain words, in much the same fashion I pick up on his idiosyncrasies of speech (English isn’t his first language so he says stuff like close the lights, which is adorable.) If we aren’t predisposed to liking you, then the joke you’re trying to make is more like an insult.

The way I like to think of it is if you were in a pub, and made those sorts of jokes to someone. If they knew you, and they liked you, they’d probably laugh along. If they didn’t like you or know you, they would punch you in the jaw.

HOWEVER: I recognise this post as a joke. I don’t personally find these jokes offensive, but then no one really makes fun of me or considers me stupid because of my accent.

Oh that actually makes a lot of sense! It’s like how it’s assumed in media that the southeastern Appalachian (‘hick’ or ‘redneck’) accent is audible shorthand for ‘this American character is stupid.’ That sentiment reinforces negative stereotypes about that region which has historically been home to a large working class population that has suffered from an underfunded education system and other systematic abuses. It is ultimately an underhanded joke, but not everyone from America (or even the region necessarily) considers it to be offensive despite its classist nature.

yes, that’s basically it! it grinds my gears when certain Very Online Americans will quite rightly say that europeans have no right to mock the us’ lack of healthcare/gun control and working-class accents…but then turn around and act like working-class british accents and foods are hilarious and should be mocked ‘bc of colonialism and the bp oil spill’ as though all british people are directly responsible for the oil spill. and then some of them conveniently forget that there are in fact british people of colour - in the wake of brexit, a smug american blog defended saying that british people upset by the referendum were getting ‘karma’ for the british empire, even when british poc pointed out that they were the ones most likely to be negatively affected by brexit, by saying ‘obviously i don’t mean you’, to which said british poc responded ‘THEN WHY DID YOU SAY BRITISH PEOPLE’

The hatred, by the privileged of England, towards Scotland and any Scottish accent was so pervasive that my mother wouldn’t let my brother and I develop a Scottish accent. She was born in Jamaica but her family moved to London when she was 11. She moved to Scotland when she was pregnant with me. Both my brother and I were born in Scotland and spent out entire childhood there. Mum was adamant that neither of us would have the local accent. It was “common” and “low class” and “would hinder us in the future”. She used to fine us half our pocket money if we used any Scottish slang or said anything in a Scottish accent. I got bullied at school for having a “posh English accent” but she thought my job prospects were more important than a modicum of happiness at school. My outsider status was doubled by that. I was brown and “English”.

Even now, after decades in Scotland, I still don’t sound Scottish. The English hear a slight lilt but that disappears as soon as I spend any time with them.

I feel alienated on two fronts now, skin colour and accent. And one of those was avoidable if it hadn’t been for the prejudice against against perceived lower class accents. Even in Jamaica Mum learnt to speak in an English accent like the white girls at her school. She could switch between the two. Jamaican with her parents, posh English everywhere else. Why couldn’t I have had that?

The fact that a lot of regional actors are expected to code-switch their accent patterns the a kind of neutral English accent in Britain shows how pervasive the classism is.

When Christopher Eccleston was cast as the Doctor in Doctor Who, people were surprised that he used his own northern accent, instead of performing with an accent like every Doctor before him. That was only 15-ish years ago.

Even now, this still happens - James McAvoy made a very vocal protest a couple of years back about a critic who complained about the use of Scots accents and only applauded the “plummy English” accent of one character in a play.

Regional and working class accents were used as joke accents for decades in British media. Look up old broadcasts and notice how many people only speak RP English (ie. the formal pronunciation that smacks of elocution lessons and enunciation). As media accessibility and productions expanded, there have been more regional accents showing up, but it’s still a big problem.

Putsimply when you mock “innit” you’re mocking poor people and often people of colour. Boris Johnson doesn’t say “innit bruv”.

I would like to add that there was a study by the Worcester College that found that people talking with a Birmingham accent were twice as likely to be accused of a crime as people who speak RP. Accents carry huge baggage in Britain.

Oh, it's real bad.

that would be one of the best things that could happen right now, but it seems unlikely, especially if youre hoping for the selection of the replacement to be democratic

You really should not care if the replacement selection is democratic - this isn't a government election, it is a private org. The point of the democratic party is to win elections, not hold them. To the extent that primaries are a good way to do that - and they often are, as they give disparate factions a voice and bind them to the results - then they are good. To the extent that they do not, they should be discarded.

The extent to which the Democratic party has been fumbling easy passes over and over in the face authoritarian backsliding via "well this is just how we do things" should hopefully be making them question how they do things. We clearly need a much more active leadership laser focused on the "winning elections" thing.

The two-party duopoly means how internally democratic the two major political parties are is a primary factor of how democratic the US political system as a whole is; the internal party primaries are one of the primary mechanisms voters have for exerting political pressure on their leaders. In that context I think it's pretty legitimate to care a lot about how internally democratic the Democratic Party is and strongly value the Democratic Party doing things by mass participation elections. The major political parties selecting nominees by mass participation primaries is an important victory of the American people!

Those arguments about "well, social media companies may legally be private companies that can arbitrarily control their platforms like despots, but maybe they shouldn't be, because they're basically a giant chunk of the public square at this point," apply even harder to the idea that the Democratic Party is a "private org." Half of the political system of the most powerful country in the world absolutely should not be run like Bob's corner shop that Bob gets to do more-or-less whatever he wants with because he's the owner (I don't even think Bob's corner shop should be run like that if he's got employees, but one of the most politically influential organizations on the planet definitely shouldn't be).

I mean, at this point if they replaced Joe Biden with Kamala Harris or somebody like that at the top of the ticket in a backroom deal I wouldn't mind much, it's probably better than the disruption of trying to hold a proper primary four months before the election, it's not like Biden's replacement is likely to be much worse than him, and I do think Trump is a uniquely dangerous Presidential candidate (Trump really does seem to have an unusual talent for mobilizing the most evil parts of the Republican coalition) and first priority should be making sure Trump doesn't get a second term (if we keep Trump out of the Oval Office this time odds are pretty good we've kept him out of the Oval Office for good; he's pretty old, he's likely to be too old to run or dead by 2028, and two defeats is likely to take the shine off him). But I strongly disagree with the idea that people shouldn't care about how internally democratic the Democratic Party is.

So because I tend to be described as "center-left" by the forces all that is evil and unpure assailed against me in their limitless and merciless cruelty, the way the far-right in the US misuses economic statistics tends to find no sympathy from me, in ways that I find difficult to even engage with. (Also, for balance's sake, true libertarians tend to be the ones who make this mistake the least, a solid W for them - they average the highest on this kind of economic literacy alongside the technocratic left). I am more sympathetic to the reasons some on the left have for this mistake - but it is still unproductively misguided.

The idea from far-left is is essentially that the US economy is and must always be broken in all ways, because that is a premise that implies the platform of reform they endorse. This is a stance that, imo, most leftists will have because they want to help the poor. They will discuss child poverty and homelessness in the same breath as "living paycheck to paycheck" and the "immiserated middle class". They see these things as united, both causally but also practically - that the solution for the homeless and for the working class are the same, the bonds that will form a united front strong enough to cut the chains of capital in one fell swoop.

This is not only not true, but it is the opposite of true. A middle class that believes itself immiserated and struggling is one least likely to support the redistributive policies necessary to address chronic poverty because they are in fact very different problems. Those people are going to ask for tax cuts! They have jobs, they don't think they need welfare checks, but they do (correctly!) think lower taxes will help them. Cheaper grocery prices means cheaper wages for workers in the grocery industry, the current economy has been really good for the lower income working classes as the tight labor market has boosted their relative wages. Which middle class white collar people haaaaate, because it raises their prices. And since you want lower taxes but the money has to come from somewhere, you are more willing to cut things like welfare to pay for them.

When the problems are real they can align - like yes the housing market in the US is pretty busted, "everyone" will benefit from just making more houses. But even then, the "everyone" doesn't include all the incumbent upper-middle class housing owners, and it particularly doesn't help new home owners who have a mortgage to pay off that are banking on rising real estate prices. All these policies have real tradeoffs. Opportunities for solidarity do exist, don't get me wrong, but its not the default state. You think America won't raise taxes on the rich just to expand the mortgage tax deduction? In your heart you know we would.

Obviously none of this applies to you if you think the world is corrupted root to stem and only the blood of the capitalist class can water the soil of revolution and birth the flower of a new age, or whatever. But unless you want that you are gonna need accurate policy analysis to actually solve the problems within the system, and they will have tradeoffs. And a middle class that thinks itself too poor to help is not an asset in that.

This has insight, I'm glad I read it and I'm happy to spread it, but I think it's incomplete.

Yes, if you want to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the poor, you will face less resistance from a middle class who feel they have plenty to spare. This is probably relevant to the political viability of a lot of welfare policies. But, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the end-goal of leftism isn't to arrange for the poor to receive a kindly dole, it's for the masses to be seated at the board where political-economic decisions are made.

Most middle class people are working class, in the sense that they survive by selling their labor to capital-owners. In this, they share an important political interest with the poor that leftism seeks to mobilize; they would be benefited by a transfer of ownership of the means of production from the bourgeoisie to the working class, and if that can't be arranged, they would be benefited by a shift of leverage from capital-owners to workers. Concretely, this means most middle class people would probably be better off if their workplaces were run democratically, and more immediately, they are benefited by unionization, a stronger labor movement, laws that shift advantage from owners to workers, etc.. A lot of the things that harm the poor also harm the middle class, and a lot of the things that would improve the lives of the poor would also improve the lives of the middle class. The left sees the woes of the middle class and the poor as united because to a considerable extent they are united; the middle class are mostly basically just the most fortunate segments of the working class.

Also, the middle class also benefit a lot from tax-funded government largesse and would plausibly net benefit from many proposed welfare schemes, e.g. they benefit from being able to drive on public roads which are maintained on the taxpayer dime and many middle class people would plausibly net benefit from free college for all (this is actually one of the talking points against free college for all, that it might primarily benefit the middle class instead of the poor!).

So I think there's a lot of potential for mobilizing middle class discontentment and poor discontentment in the same direction for leftist ends.

And yes, middle class economic discontentment can be corrosive to class solidarity in exactly the ways you describe. But the middle class feeling they're doing great can also be corrosive to class solidarity: affluent workers who feel they're doing well often fall into "I don't need a union or any of that stuff, the capitalist meritocracy rightfully rewards my hard work and talent and value to society and if those less well-off than me want to have what I have, well, maybe they should just become more like me," complacency and punching down class opposition.

I think the most productive tack for building solidarity between the middle class and the rest of the working class (including the reserve army of labor i.e. the "unemployed") is to emphasize that the middle class are by-in-large basically working class, with the same basic interest in the democratization of the economy as the rest of the working class, and that middle class privilege is fundamentally contingent and fragile in capitalism, vulnerable to being eroded by automation, deskilling, successful political pushes for policies that transfer wealth upward by capital owners, etc..

if we're like, showing graphs and stuff, this is the type that i think a lot of people on tumblr are thinking of when they think about the economy.

Only one third of people with family incomes below $50k spent less than their income each month. I would guess that a lot of people on tumblr who get aggro about this topic (and the vast majority of people on r/povertyfinance, who discuss this sort of thing a lot) fall into this earning category.

Real wage increases only matter if you got a raise (one third of workers got a raise last year, which means that 2/3rds didn't - included in the economic wellbeing report linked above). Whether or not rent is outpacing wages only matters if you're not going to be rent burdened (more than a third of renter households are cost burdened in every state and 12 million rental households spend more than half their income on rent). Employment rates lose a lot of meaning when you're working multiple jobs to make ends meet (the percentage of multiply employed workers was falling in the US from 1996 to the 2010s, when it plateaued, then it started rising slightly then collapsed in 2020 and has been rising steeply since then and it's too soon to tell if it's going to go back to the plateau or keep going up).

Four in ten adults in the US is carrying some level of medical debt (even people who are insured) and 60% of people with medical debt have cut back on food, clothes or household items; about 50% of people with medical debt have used up all their savings.

Tumblr is the broke people website and yeah, people who are working two jobs to afford $900 for one room and utilities in a three bedroom apartment are not going to feel great about the economy even if real wages are raising and inflation-adjusted rents are actually pretty stable. "The Rent is too Damn High" has been a meme for 14 years so, like, yeah. Even if it's pretty stable when adjusted for inflation it is stable and HIGH.

It's hard to feel good about the economy when you're spending the last few days of the pay period hoping nothing unexpected hits your account, and it's VERY frustrating to be told that the economy's doing well when you've had to start selling blood to buy groceries.

Sure, unemployment is low, that's neat. It's good that inflation has stabilized (it genuinely has; prices are not likely to fall back to pre-inflation rates and eventually you'll likely be paid enough to reach equilibrium, but a lot of people aren't there yet).

But, like, it costs eight thousand dollars a year out of pocket to keep my spouse alive. I'd guess that we've paid off about a third of the 40-ish thousands of dollars he's racked up since his heart attack. His medical debt is why I don't have a retirement plan beyond "I guess I'll die?" So talking about how good the economy is kind of feels like being chained in the bottom of a pit that is slowly filling with water while people on the surface talk about the fact that the rain is tapering off. Neat! That's good! But I can't really see it from where I'm standing.

Inflation really is getting better. My state just enacted a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers. The Biden administration has worked hard to reduce many kinds of healthcare costs. A lot of people have had significant portions of their student debt cancelled.

But a lot of people are still having trouble affording groceries and it doesn't seem helpful to say "your perception of the economy is decoupled from the reality of the economy" on the "can I get a few dollars for food today?" website.

Like, 72% of people said that they're "doing okay" but also 65% of people said that the price increases from the previous year had made their lives at least somewhat worse.

79% of people changed their behavior in some way (from delaying purchases to switching products to getting another job to reducing savings) in response to price increases. That's down from 83% the year before, but there absolutely exists an overlap between people who are "doing okay financially" and who "delayed a major purchase because of price increases" or "reduced savings because of price increases" and just because they're doing okay doesn't mean they're going to feel great about delaying that purchase or reducing their savings.

And I am, like "doing okay" in the sense of please don't try to give me money I have secure housing and health insurance and am not at risk of a financial catastrophe, but am "not okay" in the sense of "I haven't been able to sell blood this month because of scheduling conflicts so we've been eating lentils and rice instead of buying groceries."

I feel like the "starving artist" mentality is essentially an obstacle to class consciousness, because rather than think of themselves as exploited workers in food service or retail or whatever industry they actually work in that allows them to make rent, the "starving artist" thinks of themselves as someone who has been wronged by society because they don't receive what they see as just compensation for their skilled work as artists.

And so despite their apparent support for communism, these people are only incidentally leftists as a result of living under capitalism, which has failed to deliver what they want, and so they latch on to communism as an alternative; it's hard to imagine any economic system that gives what they really want, which is not the luxury to not have to work and to be able to pursue art in their free time, but an economic system where their art skills are rewarded as labor.

And they can't believe the truth, that no one valued this work as labor in the first place, so they have to believe instead that someone has intervened somehow to devalue their work, and that this is the reason why they've been blocked out of free admission to the petit bourgeoisie. Which is why they always fall for the most reactionary politics with a bare veneer of leftist language, or support massive increase on copyright and intellectual property; they harbor resentment towards those who they believe have denied them of what they were entitled to, and so they want to hurt those they believe wronged them as much as possible, no matter the consequences to themselves!

This is pretty easy for me to imagine, actually! Just do the same kind of government subsidization of art that happened as part of the New Deal, but on a bigger scale, to the point that you basically approach an UBI or jobs guarantee society this way.

Think e.g. basically UBI but you have to show an eligibility worker some new fanfiction or furry vore inflation art or whatever your artistic passion motivates you to produce every few months to keep the deposits coming. Yes, this is basically just UBI with an extra layer of inefficiency and gatekeeping, but the question was whether you could give "starving artists" who want to be able to think of themselves as paid for their art what they want, and this is an obvious way to do it.

For that matter, I suspect most "starving artists" would be more-or-less satisfied with regular UBI high enough for decent material quality of life where they get the same thing everyone else gets + basking in the occasional positive comment on their fanfiction or whatever + getting occasional donations to their PayPal-equivalent that basically serve as "human economy" signals of appreciation rather than financial incentives. That with an UBI high enough for me to have OK material conditions and some fun would be pretty much the dream for me! When I try to imagine what my life would be like in some utopian future society like the Star Trek United Federation of Planets I imagine basically a materially very comfortable version of that! Like, I think you (OP) may be overestimating how hard to please most of these people actually are!

We can, of course, debate the feasibility of something like this, but that basically just gets us to regular debates about the feasibility of UBI.

You can quibble about whether this is really "their art skills [being] rewarded as labor" and say this would really be just welfare disguised to not look like welfare, but, like, I don't think these people are driven by some burning philosophical conviction that they need to be getting some sort of cosmically ordained Just Price for their art, I think by-in-large they just want to 1) be able to make a living doing their art, 2) be able to feel like community members in good standing while they're doing that. An "artist's stipend" that's basically a backdoor UBI could totally do 1) if it could be made big enough and in many possible cultures would be part of the satisfaction of 2).

I expect there are a bunch of possible criticisms you could make of such a hypothetical institution "from the left," but it seems kind of structurally directionally leftist compared to present society, in the same way race-neutral welfare programs are structurally anti-racist cause lots of non-white people are poor, wages for childcare would be structurally feminist even if it isn't legally restricted to women, etc.. If you could get even just a not-great but OK UBI by doing something like knitting some mid quality novelty scarves, caps, and sweaters every few months the "lash of hunger" would be weakened, capital owners would lose leverage, and the working class would gain leverage.

"i just don't think i can bring a child into this world" said person in a developed country whose child would have a greater life expectancy and more resources than 99% of humans throughout history

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the implicit argument here feels very "life always takes the side of life." Yes, we're all here because most of our ancestors reproduced in conditions materially much worse than modern First World countries, but that's likely because choosing to reproduce even under quite miserable conditions was selected for in human evolution. "The people who choose reproduction are the ones who have descendants and pass on any congenital biases toward choosing reproduction" is pretty detached from considerations of the well-being of the people being produced this way.

Also, worth pointing out that it's questionable to what degree it was "our ancestors chose to reproduce" vs. "a lot our ancestors were heavily incentivized or outright coerced into reproduction." Pregnancy-avoidance was more costly in quality of life terms before modern birth control. Younger adult near-relatives were often the primary caretakers for the elderly, creating a massive selfish incentive to make children (I mean, yeah, the same thing is still happening less directly, it's an inevitable consequence of having to constantly refill the holes senescence-related deaths are ripping in our social fabric, but the "less directly" part is potentially significant to how much people weight their own well-being in old age vs. the potential well-being of their hypothetical direct descendants). If you're reading this probably most of your ancestors in the last few millennia were born under patriarchy, i.e. a massive apparatus of reproductive coercion, and likely many of them were born to slaves who were involuntarily impregnated by their masters or women in other situations of similarly severe reproductive coercion. The fact that there's a massive negative correlation between how rich and free a society is and how high its fertility rate is seems potentially suggestive here.

I think it's probably basically a good thing that a lot of modern parents have much higher standards for what sort of life they think is worth bringing kids into than their nineteenth century great-great-grandparents did; I suspect it reflects a shift away from reproductive decision-making being dominated by considerations like "I need to make kids so they'll take care of me when I'm old, I need to make sons to perpetuate my patrilineage, I need to make daughters so I can use them as basically transactional goods in marital politics with other patriarchal families" and toward reproductive decision-making in which the potential well-being of the potential child is given more weight.

Also, insofar as below replacement rate fertility is actually a poverty/dissatisfaction issue, it strikes me as a modern variant of the same kind of diffuse passive resistance James C. Scott talks about in The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain, i.e. as a diffuse implicit demand for better conditions backed up by the implicit threat of slow long-term shrinking of the state's tax and labor base, i.e. as good and cool.