Articles and interviews discussed:

Who Really Counts as Working Class

What Is Class?

The Last Identity

Starbucks Workers Are Calling for a Nationwide Boycott

We cover the things at the top of everyone’s mind: Why does the professional-managerial class talk like that? How does this harm the left’s project of relinking with working people? How does good messaging work in union organizing? What are the priorities for white- and blue-collar organizers? How is Country’s cat Bosie doing?

Articles discussed:

What's Wrong With the American Left: Captured by the Professional Class

The Left Has a Language Problem

The dislocation between the PMC and the rest of the working class

On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class

‘Til next time! 🐁

See you next week.

Do you ever wake up on a Monday morning and think to yourself, “you know what the world needs? Another podcast!”

Maybe not this morning, but we did sometime this afternoon come up with the idea to podcast about labor organizing and some of the cultural tensions between white- and blue-collar workers. You might be able to figure out which one of us is Town and Country from the title: Town (me) and Country are “labor organizers,” white- and blue-collar, respectively. I scare quote it because the designation to me invokes a degree of seriousness and authenticity that feels undeserved (I’ll let Country speak for himself). Still, both of us are elected leaders in our respective unions. And both of us got somethin’ to say!

Broadly, we want to explore what is going on with the remains of the labor movement and how to revitalize it through analysis of what seems like an emergent proletarianization of white-collar workers, and how incoming white-collar workers, many of whom might have been ascendant or aspirant to the professional-managerial class, clash culturally with the traditional left’s dwindling blue-collar base. We’ll try to suss out the existential utility of white-collar organizing in a broader labor movement, why blue-collar organizing has stalled for so many decades, and the challenges we’ll face on the cultural front.

Also, as two gay gays, we’ll examine how liberal identitarianism has shaped our politics, for better or for worse, over the years, how it was deployed by liberals against our ability to cohere working class identification, and how it has demobilized working class movement-building in the past. Oh, we’ll also figure out whether Town is even in the working class (Country says “no”).

Stay tuned Thursday for our inaugural episode!

The other day a video resurfaced showing Zohran being confronted by another emotional display by a Palestine advocate. This is all righteous and good, I guess… but what was the point, again? I’m beginning to think post-industrial society really does work by simulating everything.

Adventurism is nothing new, of course; this is defined as reckless, individualized actions meant to provoke, and it can backfire, as it has with early American labor organizing. I’m wondering if this new era of symbolic protest is nothing but a salve designed to soothe and placate individuals.

Still, different kinds of BLM protest had some effect with public opinion, positive and negative. Public opinion sorta kinda matters when you’re trying to do mass movement stuff, right? Anyway, the apex of this movement was in 2020, and we can see where perceived “rioting” and “protest” respectively harmed and helped the cause. Cities with substantial damage to businesses did not take kindly to messaging, and mostly unaffected cities did. The question of whether police reform was long-lasting or even wise as a “single issue” focus for the left isn’t the point here; my question is: which was more effective in furthering stated goals? The latter, but that requires message discipline, coherence, political education, and so on.

Social movements in the social media era are largely so vapid they can seem dispiriting particularly to the seriously politically attuned. Eric Blanc calls these mobilizations, instead of protests, and argues that social media makes it easy to mobilize lots of people, but these displays are detached from meaningful political organizing; they’re orphaned rituals of catharsis more than pre-Internet demonstrations that signaled movement coherence and overall power. These images also just meant more in the past.

This all brings me back to catharsis and social cohesion: adventurist displays and broader mobilization efforts are nothing more than the sad gasps of a social animal running out of breath. From Aaron Bushnell to now, these exhibitions serve the activists participating in and viewing them as a kind of new, insidious entertainment. The participants, being both the viewers and the “performer,” if you will, have just attended a charismatic church service, have just excised their demons. They will now be welcomed into social justice heaven, I guess. It’s sad because it’s clearly an attempt to sublimate profound loneliness and nigh-total social atomization into meaningful political action.

Zohran’s interlocutor, and his supporters, in the absence of a meaningful, effective political life, have soothed themselves, their hurt and anger, more than build something like justice and liberation for the Palestinians they believe themselves to be fighting for. The otherwise righteous motivation, better spent on boring tactical discussions and focused, one-on-one talks with neighbors and coworkers, is now extinguished, the itch scratched.

But in the end nothing is built. And Palestinians are still dying.

At some point I have to implore these people to set aside their emotions and not forget their faculties of reason. Our enemies haven’t; they calmly, coolly, dispassionately architect their evils throughout the world to great effect. No amount of yelling is going to stop it.

What struck me was the difference in protocols of etiquette, traditionally the concern of Victorian philanthropists and Gilded Age old money suffragettes. On the pro side I saw a rag tag group, a libertarian, a reactionary, an old school Marxist dressed in punk pumps. On the opposing side I saw cranky, dour institutionalists: a board member of a charity, a department chair staple, and a young student who could easily be mistaken for a American College Republican. The optics weren’t there for the anti-offense side. The ideas weren’t either, and it showed.

They are representative of the establishment oppositional party, our elite managers, the ones divinely chosen to safeguard the Our Democracy. They are an unmoneyed yet austere, artless vestige of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, deputized to scold, and tut tut, and keep the rowdy masses in line. I guess the difference is the Right uses the state for that. The liberal left uses institutions, lame optics, and shame to keep the masses in line. One is provocative and violent, the other is insidious and annoying.

But most surprising about the “Nays” in this debate was their silence on the UK ban on Palestine Action!

Minor digression, but curiously, over the past decade many involved in Palestinian liberation had also previously been involved the online censorship activity “cancel culture”… and yes, it’s sooo trite to still be talking about this, sorry, but it’s yet another reminder, in light of the very recent overturning of the UK ban on Palestine Action, that the Left (or those who call themselves that) can never abandon the principles of free speech and freedom of expression it had historically fought for. Those principles prevailed!

What is offensive is of course held in the hearts of the offendee, and when you have an ethno-supremacist project like Zionism having been the hegemonic ideology for decades (despite its contradiction to liberal democracy), you’re going to have a lot of people who will be offended when you question the idea of a Jewish supremacist state! It might even be called hate speech!

I can picture some objecting to this framing of Zionism as a mischievous rhetorical tactic but to me, there is Jewish ethnicity, Israel is regarded as a Jewish state, and legally the political representation must remain majority Jewish. You can make historical arguments in favor of that as a matter of necessity, but it’s ethno-nationalism, ethno-supremacy. Japan is majority Japanese, but, well, it’s a little older than Israel, isn’t it? If geopolitics could be reconfigured by God, and Japan were the hegemonic ruler of the globe, I wouldn’t be surprised if it experienced enormous immigration that would spark political crises that test its devotion to liberal democracy much like the US. It’d still at least nominally be a liberal democracy. You couldn’t say that about Israel.

Regardless, these are topics that need to be sussed out, all of them offensive to at least one person. Norman Finkelstein, who talks slowly and deliberately yet is still hilarious and charming, makes this point about his classroom discussions:

So, what is the “right to offend”? It’s not really a right, is it? But the speech that provokes those feelings is protected by a right… unless it’s “hate speech,” which must also be negotiated culturally, I guess. To borrow from Norm, the question for me is whether or not that speech advances a legitimate argument that must be answered to. I’ll leave it to you the reader to imagine what kinds of speech do and do not have legitimate, argumentative content.

This brings me back to Palestine liberation. Palestinians might not care as much about these prissy little debates over rights because their most basic human rights are violently ignored. But those who do care about destroying the imperialist rule that brings about genocide should think carefully about these issues because our mishandling of them is constantly weaponized against us.

Anecdotally, I saw this play out in a nasty way in my own union. Some of us were involved in Palestine organizing; we were sharing arguments against the Zionist aspects of the Israeli state. Many Jewish union members were gravely offended by this! Some wanted to embrace and enforce a definition of anti-Semitism that included criticism of Israel and Zionism, all in the name of offense! Look, I can sorta see that: when you grow up believing the core of your identity is tied to a nationstate established in the name of your ancestry, you’re going to get defensive. Of course this is why the ADL and AIPAC are so interested in conflating Jewish identity with a nationalist project. Hilariously, I find the sentiment no different from the kinds of nativist American reactionaries weeping for the “erosion” of white America. And so on.

So, feel free to start those little non-profits and NGOs and advocacy groups against hate speech, offense, and so on. Wield the power of institutions, as many liberals prefer as their weapon of choice. But the Right will just up the ante and use the state instead, they’ll just inflate the definitions of hate speech. I promise you state violence is going to hurt more than being offended.

What does socialism have to do with the weather? Well, the response to Mamdani’s handling of the most recent storm has provoked the usual refrains about the shortcomings of “socialism.” Sure, emergency management is a serious governance challenge for any elected, and any socialist worth their salt should deliver publicly-operated safety and stability to working people. You can’t have sewer socialism if the pipes are bursting.

However, the posture that socialism was meant to end weather reminds me of other common straw men from conservative populists and lefties alike, smugly chiding that we were foolish to support the most exciting development in American left wing politics since Bernie’s run 10 years ago, or that we really believed Mamdani was some kind of revolutionary force. No one in NYC-DSA thought this! No one knocking doors thought they were Bolsheviks, guys.

Electoral projects are collective exercises meant to build organizing capacity and instill working class confidence. Winning the election is a huge boon to those priorities. Now we have an elected in a powerful position, among others! They have become yet another powerful tool at our disposal. But organizers don’t just drop everything and go home.

People like Zohran shouldn’t be evaluated from an individualistic, moralistic lens. He didn’t “betray” you… he doesn’t even know you! This is politics, not an interpersonal psychodrama playing out in your head.

The task ahead is to ensure that the political calculus still makes sense from the perspective of an elected: you can wield them as a tool by continuing assertion of that organized power. That’s politics in bad weather. If that power dwindles, the math stops making sense to these people. That’s the game! You won a bunch of hearts and minds in that election. Time to log off twitter, hop on to some boring Zoom calls, and get your hands dirty even if it’s a little cringe. I’m not saying it has to be DSA. But the point is finding where one fits in all of this.

Look, the real goal is to build confident working class power, forcing business to the negotiating table, withholding labor or else. The people making and doing the stuff should run the society. No one in my union meetings is saying Mamdani was the objective. He’s just some guy! But we still live in a liberal democracy with a capitalist mode of production. The weather will still be bad, but the tools available to us aren’t just street protests and Instagram posts anymore.

Much has been said about the right-wing ascendance into popular culture, so I won’t belabor it, but this exchange struck me as a funhouse mirror reflection of the bygone era of “virtue-signaling".

Now, I think there are a few problems with the concept of “signaling virtue” in general. Let’s suppose it means simply the empty exhibition of personal morality to advance one’s status in an organization or social setting. The problem with the accusation is that it depends a bit on mind-reading; now anyone can accuse an interlocutor of “virtue-signaling” if they are leveraging an appeal to some principle. But how do we know their true motives? Does the virtue-signaling Voight Kampff test reveal something? Does the accuser have some special telepathic access the rest of us don’t? It’s all a little bit woo-woo, like people who think they’re “empaths.”

Still, I do think there’s some evidence that it’s a real phenomenon. You can probably point to it in the aggregate. But you’re going to have a hard time nailing down any one individual guilty of doing it.

I digress. The point here is after so much right-wing agonizing over certain progressive-coded rhetorical tendencies (cancel culture, standpoint theory), the Tucker-Piers exchange underscores yet another cynical right-wing defection to these tactics. Tucker’s vice-signaling is undoubtedly earning him some cred with fans, old and new. Signaling vice pays!

Even in my own circles I’ve observed it; drop an R-bomb here or there. We’re “cool.” We can let our guards down, say something bad about identity politics. No one’s getting in trouble! But how do I know that?! I don’t! I’m speculating, I’m mind-reading (and failing). It’s a pointless exercise but the suspicion remains.

Another similar rhetorical development in progressive social media is the use of “performativity,” most recently with the “performative male.” This isn’t totally new; I can recall during Infographic Summer 2020 that virtually every apology made in response to some accusation of violating woke etiquette was reflexively met with cries of “performative” this or that. Everyone was a mind-reader then.

Now the “performative male” is here, and any fella reading a book in public is at risk of being accused of doing the “performative” thing. (The long-running Instagram account @hotdudesreading might be having a hard time.) And, again, are we all mind-readers now?! That’s not to say I don’t think it’s real. There’s social capital when you’re well-read, when you read books, when you talk about them. There’s an incentive to read books and be seen reading them.

A lot of this reminds me of Mark Fisher’s Vampire Castle metaphor — the dominant discursive mode of the progressive left for the past 15 years — and an insight I ran across in ’ Canceling Comedians:

…people […] have set up shop in the basement of the Vampire Castle, replicating all the toxic features of standard left-wing cancel culture while telling themselves that they’re vampire hunters.

Although they are strange bedfellows, vice-signalers and critics of the “performative male” have both decamped into the Vampire’s basement, aping the very rhetorical tactics they’ve decried. They are both behaving as anxious expressions of the PMC’s fixation on virtue:

Members of the PMC believe themselves to be virtuous vanguardists, floating above historical forms and conditions, transgressing boundaries and inventing new ways of being and seeing. It is hard to argue with them, because they do not accept debate as a meaningful form of the advancement of knowledge. For them, every conflict is moral, not intellectual or political.

They are now the anxious high priests of an emerging discursive mode, interpreting the truly authentic and virtuous modes of being and expression. For our moral superiors, outing the performative signaler is a divine revelation made possible via their privileged connection to virtue and morality!

But, then again, maybe it’s just not that serious. Cheers!

I’m a fan of Sawant and her accomplishments; her uncompromising pro-worker and anti-billionaire posture is refreshing, and her delivery of minimum wage increases in a deep blue district in Seattle is admirable. These achievements are admittedly modest but still reasonable for city council. She is a deeply committed ideological socialist, formerly of Socialist Alternative (my old college-age socialist affiliation).

However, most of her criticism has been fixated on Mamdani’s rhetoric and his overall strategy of realpolitik. Fair enough. But her preferred approach — rallies, mass demonstration, and gestures toward revolutionary politics — seems to not take into account how little it has achieved for the American left over the past decade. I don’t think I can point to a single surviving policy achievement that emerged from BLM.

This is not to say they aren’t valuable: they do have a discursive effect, forcing certain conversations, and they drive up participation in left organizations. But it’s not clear what her approach would have achieved in place of this rather surreal Trump-Mamdani meeting. Anecdotally, I’d say, the meeting was a total freebie that may have bought Mamdani some time and earned some credibility among normies and working class people. Sorry to say that persuasion is still necessary for the “working class” to turn to us again.

She goes on to criticize Mamdani’s Jeffries endorsement:

Mamdani’s agenda depends on the governor as much as it does his organized base. If I had to speculate, I’d say this “unequivocal endorsement” was an olive branch to the centrist Democrats who dominate much of the state’s party machinery.

puts it this way in NYMag:

Though Jeffries would have little say over whether the state can cough up enough cash to fund a universal-child-care program or make buses free, Kathy Hochul does, and she very much wants Jeffries left alone.

[…] The Hochul-Jeffries relationship will matter even more if, come 2028, Hochul has an opportunity to create a Democratic House gerrymander to counter Texas and other Republican states.

Would a live, televised rebuke of Jeffries by Mamdani have been emotionally satisfying for his base? Yes! But I don’t think working people care all that much about the theatrics at this point. Unlike many of Sawant’s online sycophants, most American workers aren’t steeped to the neck in political media entertainment the way fans of spectator sports are. So, he won the election; can he play ball?

Some replied to Sawant’s comments:

Setting aside the wrong-headed, implicit charge that Mamdani is not a “truly left” politician, I think this is basically correct. From the start, DSA’s electoral project and broader entryist approach anticipates seeing their candidates, upon being lobbed into the Democratic Party snake pit, befriend and flatter people the base does not like. Did we instead want a protest candidate to run a protest administration instead, humiliating the democratic socialist approaches to governance? If that’s the preferred strategy, fine, I guess, but seems like a losing one.

Sawant seems to operate as if we are living through the same crises seen during the ‘30s or the Russian Empire during the turn of the century. Those crises were profound opportunities for revolutionary leftists to mobilize people. But absent those conditions, I’m not sure how far a revolutionary approach can go here inside the capital of capitalism of the “imperial core.”

Mamdani’s slow-and-steady reformist approach, focused on material outcomes, can better earn trust in socialism from working people. Further, advancing this agenda creates practical organizing opportunities for leftists who are otherwise so used to running book clubs such that, when the next capitalist crisis comes, they’ll actually be ready to advance Sawant’s revolutionary dreams.

Current AI coverage is both a mix of breathless, horny utopianism or maximalist, still-horny dystopianism, and nothing in-between, so, it’s jarring to encounter Yascha Mounk’s thin take on AI coverage that just misses the entire AI-product-advertising-campaign-laundered-as-news-coverage over the past few years:

Here, Mounk, a fairly standard academic liberal who’s normally restrained when it comes to literally anything outside the status quo (especially socialism), insists that there’s just not enough acceptance and celebration of AI in the discourse, and that anything stating otherwise is reactionary.

Yet, we have such trembling theatrics like the following, courtesy of Gary Marcus’s sober take on AI agents:

In January, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei told the Financial Times, “I think 2025 is going to be the year that AI can do what, like, a PhD student or an early degree professional in a field is able to do.” Around the same time, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman wrote “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.” Google somewhat more modestly announced Project Astra, “a project on the way to building a universal AI assistant.”

Who’s even getting paid to talk like this? I guess Altman is, so he definitely has a vested interest. Fair enough. May be worth some skepticism from the latest darling of Silicon Valley given its track record. But is Mounk? Or the scores of AI defenders crankily attributing even the most tepid skepticism to “very low intellectual ability"? They could just call their interlocutors “stupid” and move on (no need to launder insults in this fake diagnostic tone).

What’s worse about the reasoning from Mounk is that he equates railways — which are at least materially useful and can compare to things like, idk, indoor plumbing — with fucking LLMs (CHAT BOTS, specifically, a smarterer SmarterChild), which can’t even correctly summarize news articles, which invents reviews about entirely fake products if you ask it, which still can’t really code except for the most obvious StackOverflow copy-pasta (my job is to code, btw, I wish it could fix the shit I have to deal with, and it can’t), which functions as a slightly different way of engaging with Google’s long-available autocomplete feature. This is the revolutionary technology we’re just gleefully denying like superstitious religious zealots afraid of electricity?

Sorry, but it’s just that Silicon Valley’s latest product is just kinda fine, I guess, certainly better than blockchain or VR (remember that, folks?) or Juicero, but not nearly as good as the Internet or telephones or vaccines or Pasteurization or, again, the technology powering the toilet in my apartment.

So, where does it all come from? I can recall during the Obama era this profound sense of liberal techno-optimism led by PMC “thought leaders,” back when the Valley oligarchs were still darlings of the DNC. These people were salivating at any opportunity to digitize any problem still occurring in the icky ol’ realm of “meatspace.” In retrospect, it all just looks like boyhood wish-fulfillment, like living in the world of Blade Runner was the objective.

I think these people read Neuromancer as a utopian vision, and now they’re mad it’s not coming to fruition.