The Left as a Hope Industry
Beyond Quixotic Socialism
A Tale of Two Lefts
One of the frustrating things about our period – one of the things that people today struggle to grasp about it – is that it is caught between two different modes of life. We no longer live in what might be called “early capitalism” – the period where factories employed tens of thousands of workers. To get a “good” job, it is now increasingly necessary to go to college and obtain a degree. But manual labor has not disappeared. An enormous number of people still have jobs that involve manipulating objects in physical space – they work in food service, retail, hospitality, and especially logistics. The working class is gone in one sense, but here in another. It is impossible to organize it in the way we might have done in 1917. The factories are no longer here, and in so far as they are here, they employ only a fraction of the people they used to employ. But it is also impossible to act as if the traditional working class has disappeared. It’s still here, but it’s been weakened in a permanent and irreversible way. It’s traditional – it’s both of our time and not.
People want to deny one side of this or the other. They either want to pretend the working class can be strong again, or they want to pretend that the working class is gone and can be safely ignored. In attempting to overcome one kind of denial, they often slip into the other. To assert that the working class isn’t gone, they pretend it is strong. To assert that the working class isn’t strong, they pretend it is gone.
The result is two kinds of politics that cannot work today – one belongs to the past, while the other belongs to a time that has never existed. These two phantoms have struggled with each other for a long time. The question of the continued relevance of manual laborers was already in play in the 1960s.[1] A person born at the beginning of this debate is today ready to collect Social Security. This is not to say that nothing has changed in the last 70 years. But the changes that have taken place have not resolved this debate. Manual laborers have neither been restored to the place of honor nor pushed into history’s trash heap. And since left-wing political strategies have been based largely on the possibility of one or the other, they have, all of them, come repeatedly to grief.
The struggle between the two false visions is a struggle between the old “workerist” left and the new “post-work” left. Both lefts contain their reformist and revolutionary instantiations. The workerist left has its democratic socialists and its Bolshevists. The post-work left has its progressives, its radical democrats, its Postonians.[2] Often the split is treated culturally – we see it framed as a debate between “conservative” and “progressive” socialists, between “red” and “green” socialists, between “anti-woke” and “woke” socialists. Each side also accuses the other of being on the right. The workerists accuse the post-work crowd of being aligned with neoliberal globalization. The post-work left replies by accusing the workerists of being reactionaries.
But it’s my contention that all of these disputes – conservative/progressive, red/green, anti-woke/woke, neoliberal/reactionary – are downstream from this more fundamental problem.[3] The left is divided between two worlds, neither of which exist. And because this split is not a new development – it occurred at least 70 years ago – it has had many years to do its work. Even for the oldest active members of the left, the split has always been there. It’s in the water, in the air. It’s rooted in the material reality of what I call “middle capitalism” – a capitalism that is neither workerist nor post-work.
There is a deep reluctance to theorize about middle capitalism, to treat middle capitalism as a condition that might be with us for a very long time. The expression implies that late capitalism has not yet come – that it is what will follow. The notion that capitalism will be followed by yet another kind of capitalism is not pleasant. It deprives us of the promise of immediate relief. Most people who have taken the view that our situation might be long-lasting have begun to naturalize and reify it, and therefore to begin to defend it. To accept that this situation might be with us for a long time, but that it is still nonetheless a situation of enormous human suffering, in which all people live blighted lives, never meeting anything like their full potential – nobody wants to swallow this black pill. It takes a strong stomach to remain committed to overcoming capitalism without any fantasy of immediate remedy.
But we must remember that, from the point of view of the 1960s, our world is a dystopia. A lifetime has gone by without realizing either the socialism of the workers or the socialism in which the workers abolish work. The two lefts argued with each other continuously while the world of the 1960s became our world. They didn’t just fail to change the world, they were part of why it has become what it is. They have diverted timenergy that could have been put to good use into projects that presuppose realities in which we do not live.[4] When they experience defeat, as they inevitably do, they do not respond by overcoming their one-sidedness. Instead, they claim they did the best they could, that the world is harder to change than it seemed, that reality has to be accommodated, even rationalized. In practice, they become apologists for the existing system. They sell out.
Quixotic Socialism
Do you remember Don Quixote, the title character in the Spanish novel by the same name? The problem with Quixote is that he has read too many chivalric romances. He lives in early modern Spain, but because he’s obsessed with these tales, he nonetheless decides to live as a medieval knight. Quixote’s values are estranged from his context on two levels. First, because he lives in early modernity, not the Middle Ages, the values, norms, and practices of medieval knights no longer make sense to the people around him. Second, because Quixote is not from the Middle Ages, his understanding of chivalry comes entirely from romantic tales. This means his chivalry is not rooted in an experience of the historical context of medieval Spain. So, it is already highly idealized at the outset – indeed, it’s not clear that Quixote’s chivalry would have been appropriate even in medieval Spain. Nonetheless, because Quixote can’t stand life in early modern Spain, he lives anachronistically, insisting upon values that don’t make sense to the people he lives among. In this way, Quixotism is a kind of madness – an insistence on living in a way that is incompatible with the kind of society one inhabits. It's a kind of anti-social behavior, even though Quixote is himself committed to many chivalric virtues that are, at face value, highly pro-social. He wishes to defend the weak, to do good and heroic deeds. He wants to revive forms of pro-social behavior that have, in his view, been neglected. This is the paradox and the tragedy of Quixote – in trying to be the most sociable person, he becomes the least. In attempting to live for the common good in a society that lacks any notion of such a thing, he lives for nothing at all. The novel does not just criticize Quixote, it criticizes early modern Spain – this is a society that does not know how to make positive use of virtue.
For at least 70 years, we have been stuck with two varieties of quixotic socialism, of anti-social socialism. These anti-social socialisms each claim to be the most pro-social, but because they are both totally estranged from our context – middle capitalism – they are in practice escapist diversions. Most people realize, eventually, the pointlessness of these two lefts. For most of them, quixotism leads to quietism. But there are some who never get out. These people manage to turn being left-wing into a career. They are what I call the “professional left.”
The Professional Class
To understand the professional left, it is necessary to understand the professional class as a class (or, at the very least, a strata) distinct from the traditional working class, the class of manual laborers who do not go to college. To understand the professional class, we must be willing to take middle capitalism seriously as a period of capitalism in its own right.
As we moved from early capitalism to middle capitalism, it became increasingly clear that there would no longer be enough good manual jobs for workers living in the rich countries. There had been too much technological change, and capital mobility had increased too much. Too many of these jobs would be automated or moved abroad. There would still be some manual jobs – the manual jobs would not completely disappear – but an increasingly large percentage of workers would need to find some other way to get paid. To that end, there was an enormous expansion of the professions and of the bureaucracy. Sectors like healthcare, education, technology, and finance grew rapidly. The jobs in these sectors were desk jobs. They involved a lot of paperwork, and they required workers with good memories, trained in the manipulation of numbers and words.
Initially, very few workers possessed these skills. Those who did received premium wages. To increase the number of workers with the necessary skills, the university system was rapidly expanded. Between 1945 and 2015, the share of Americans in their late 20s to have finished a bachelor’s degree increased from around 5% to over 30%.[5] By 2022, nearly 40% possessed these degrees.[6]
But 40% is still well short of 50%, much less the whole working population. It’s a large enough portion of the population to have its own habits and norms. But it’s too small to dominate democratic politics by force of numbers. It can only hope to shape politics indirectly, by influencing the political behavior of traditional workers. Its members think they stand a chance at this because so many key institutions are led and staffed by professionals. Under their sway, the social sciences have largely become devoted to studying how to manipulate the less educated. Where anthropologists once studied colonial subjects in faraway places, they increasingly study the domestic working class. All the decisionmakers at all the media outlets – both corporate and independent – are college-educated professionals. Popular culture is full of their narratives, their messaging. Even leading artists now come increasingly from professional class families.[7]
As university-attendance rates have risen, the economy has failed to continue to produce enough high-income, high-status professional jobs. The professions have, one at a time, become saturated. It is now extremely difficult to get a good job as a professor.[8] It’s increasingly difficult to make good money as a lawyer.[9] Even medical doctors and engineers are finding it harder to pay down student debt or buy a house.[10] Roughly a third of people who go to college end up underemployed, in jobs that don’t require a college degree – or didn’t, until recently.[11]
You see, so many people now go to college that even jobs that shouldn’t need a degree now often require one. Requiring a degree allows you to thin your applicant pool. A degree proves you can do as you’re told. You can show up on time. You can follow the rules. It’s a useful heuristic for employers who don’t want to hire someone inconsistent.
This means that a very significant chunk of the nearly 40% of Americans who obtain a bachelors are not getting what they were promised when they made the decision to go to college. Roughly 12% of the population is college-educated but “underemployed” according to the Federal Reserve, and some unknown number of people are not technically underemployed but find that their standard of living is lower than they were led to expect. Perhaps they can’t buy a house. Perhaps they have more student debt than expected, or they were forced to take a job they don’t like or move to a place they don’t like to pay down their debt. Maybe they find they can’t afford children, or they have to pay for childcare because they need two incomes to make ends meet. The statistics on the number of people in each of these situations are not very good. It’s hard to truly get a handle on the amount of economic suffering these college graduates experience.
In my first book, I call the people in this situation “fallen professionals.”[12] They’re the professionals who didn’t get what they were expecting, in some way, shape, or form. I contrast them with the “rump professionals,” the fragment of the professional class that still gets the benefits historically associated with going to college, that gets the life that it expects. The professional left consists mainly of rump professionals. These rump professionals are a fragment of a minority – they are the small, successful rump left over when all the sufferers are shaved away. The professional left is a minority of this minority of a minority. But it claims to speak for the majority – for the workers, or even for the people.
The Professional Left
The professional left makes a living by promoting quixotic socialism, in either its workerist “old” or post-work “new” form. To make a living, it needs an audience that is enthusiastic and hopeful about one of these kinds of socialism. Since the reality of middle capitalism is depressing, it must be obscured. It must be maintained either that we still live in early capitalism or that we have already arrived in late capitalism. To this end, the effects of technology are either denied or exaggerated, exploiting the public’s limited familiarity with the natural sciences. The consequences of capital mobility are only intermittently acknowledged and rarely taken seriously. It is suggested over and over that national governments can solve supranational problems, that the challenges of international coordination can be solved with grit and determination rather than new institutions and structures.
The effect of this is that there is a constant cacophony of bullshit from the professional left. Here I use the term “bullshit” in the technical sense – the professional left is often indifferent to the truth value of the claims it makes about our situation.[13] Instead, the professional left is motivated by a matrix of commercial and psychological interests. The professional left needs to make money, but it needs to feel good about the way the money is made. On some level, the professional left retains an awareness that it is only able to make a living by writing and talking because other people do hard work. It feels, quite understandably, a need to justify itself to the workers, or at least to its image of them. But what begins as a sincere attempt to offer justification devolves into bullshit as the professional leftist becomes ever more materially removed from the working class.
This is not just something that afflicts the post-work new left, the left that consciously rejects the working class – it also afflicts the professionals who ally themselves in name with the workerist old left. Consider the professionals who pester the labor unions, urging the workers to be “militant” even when militancy is not at all in their interests. They insist that everything the workers need to know is in the texts of Lenin or Trotsky or Mao. They lord their textualism over the workers, making cults out of books. Or, conversely, consider the professionals who fetishize the workers, who treat every utterance that comes from a member of the working class as divinely inspired, who insist that it is the task of socialist intellectuals to submit to whatever concepts and frameworks the workers happen to be using at any given time.
Finally, consider the desperate attempts by social democrats to return to the post-war era, invoking images of the New Deal, the Great Society, or the old Labour Party in Britain. These people always assure us that we could have the post-war era again if only we would make minor tweaks to the democratic procedures. In my book, I give Luke Savage a particularly hard time.[14] Savage argued in Jacobin that Americans can’t have socialism because of the influence of dark money in politics.[15] If socialists can’t win elections because of dark money, and they need to win elections to change the campaign finance rules, how are they ever meant to accomplish anything? To make matters even worse, Savage argued just a few months earlier that countries that have stronger campaign finance laws also have declining public services.[16] This implies a totally hopeless situation for democratic socialism – it can’t win without campaign finance reform, it can’t do campaign finance reform without winning, and as it turns out doing campaign finance reform wouldn’t be enough to deliver real change, anyway.
But Savage never takes this argument where it goes. Instead, he selectively deploys different parts of the argument to defend the commercial interests of the professional left in different situations. When the democratic socialists experience electoral defeat, he can argue that this proves that the procedures are corrupt and need to change. When the democratic socialists win and fail to deliver on substantive reforms in other countries, Savage instead emphasizes the importance of altering “the ideological preferences of those who traditionally staff the halls of power.” If electoralism were a viable strategy, you would expect that if you had the necessary consciousness, that would enable you to change the procedures. Conversely, you would expect that if you had the right procedures, that would enable you to alter consciousness. But instead for Savage it works the opposite way. It’s a problem of procedures until it’s a problem of consciousness, and it’s a problem of consciousness until it’s a problem of procedures. If you lose elections, you never had a chance. If you win elections, they were always already insufficient.
I call this kind of argument a “double bailey.” In the standard motte and bailey argument, the sophist adopts a provocative position that is difficult to defend – the “bailey.” When this position is attacked, the sophist retreats to a position that is much easier to defend – the “motte.” Often the sophist protests that they’ve been misunderstood – their position was always already the motte. But in reality, the motte provides cover for the bailey, it exploits the willingness of the audience to believe the speaker operates in good faith. In a “double bailey,” this is taken one step further. Both arguments are provocative and difficult to defend. Neither is a more moderate version of the other. Instead, they’re both looney toons, and they both sharply conflict. The conflict is never acknowledged by the sophist, who simply switches positions while pretending there’s no tension between them. A double bailey is the opposite of a dialectical approach – where the dialectician mediates between multiple positions, finding the rational kernel in each, this sophist hops from one bad take to another, ignoring completely the terrain where truth is to be found. This is the sense in which the double bailey is a kind of bullshit – by hopping over the terrain of the truth, it reveals a total disregard for it.
I feel bad about picking on Luke Savage, because I can’t be certain he really means to argue in such a deceptive way. Perhaps he’s just making a lot of honest mistakes. Or perhaps he’s rationalizing or lying to himself; maybe he sincerely believes he’s being honest. I have these worries about all of the professional leftists – they might really believe the things they say. It’s for this reason that when I criticize the professional left, I am always deeply reluctant to make it personal. If Luke Savage ever reads this and feels I’ve been unfair to him, I’m sorry. But even if the professional leftists have the best motivations, even if they are really doing their level best to help emancipate us, their best isn’t good enough and hasn’t been good enough for a very long time.
In truth, what we have is not a problem primarily of democratic procedures or even of consciousness in the narrow sense. It’s a problem of capital mobility, of technology, and of the modern state as an inadequate political form. We’re in middle capitalism, so the strategies and tactics we used in early capitalism – new procedures, new ideological narratives – are inadequate without new structures.
But this must not be construed as an excuse to run to the other bailey and adopt the post-work perspective. For instance, proponents of universal basic income too often neglect that in real life, basic income proposals never take the form preferred by, e.g., André Gorz.[17] Instead, they take the form preferred by Andrew Yang – who proposed UBI as a mechanism for legitimating entitlement and welfare reform.[18] His UBI (roughly $1,000 per month) was never high enough to provide workers with a genuine alternative to work. It raised this possibility only as a chimera – as a dazzling image with which to captivate those who did not look closely at what was really being proposed. The real function of UBI proposals has instead been to provide a humanitarian cover under which austerity can be pursued. Proposals like Gorz’s UBI can never work unless and until the tax base exists for them.[19] That tax base has been steadily eroded by a lifetime of increased capital mobility. Modern territorial states are desperate to attract mobile capital and so have to offer it favorable terms to persuade it to visit their territory. They cut taxes and stifle wage growth. The only way to capture this capital and put it to civic or social use is to create a political form that can govern flows of money. In the absence of these structures, basic income proposals necessarily take a Yangian form.
When pressed, Yang operated a double bailey – he would switch between framing his UBI as the basis for a post-work system and framing it as a device for cutting the administrative state down to size. [20] Under the bright lights of the 2020 presidential campaign, the post-work left and the libertarian right inevitably caught him making arguments in the terms of the other. They both came to view him as an untrustworthy figure. When he tried to launch a third party in 2021, there was little interest. By 2022, he was forced to merge his operation with several other struggling centrist groups.[21]
We might think the professional left would face a similar fate – its bullshit should come to look like grifting over time. I believe most traditional workers do recognize most of the time that the quixotic socialists are not really capable of helping them. It’s difficult to demonstrate this empirically without engaging in anthropologizing and fetishizing. The working class struggles to make itself heard these days. There’s always someone trying to whisper on its behalf, as even I am doing here. In academic papers, workers’ perspectives are always mediated through the deeply imperfect methodologies of social science. The best evidence for the claim that the workers don’t buy this malarkey is their conspicuous absence from left-wing organizations and spaces.
The Fallen Customers
Yet, the professional left never goes away. Who then is buying what the professional left is selling? The rump professionals increasingly make content for the fallen professionals, for the college-educated workers who are less successful than themselves. These fallen professionals rightly resent a system that promised them premium jobs and then condemned them to a standard of living no better than – and, arguably, significantly lower than – that of a 1970s factory worker.[22]
The fallen professionals aspire to be like the rump professionals – to enjoy the same level of success, or, failing that, to acquire the same tastes. At the same time, the fallen professionals hope to differentiate themselves from the traditional workers, the workers who didn’t go to college. The rump professionals reinforce the division between the fallen professionals and the traditional workers by inviting the fallen professionals to participate vicariously in their discourse and lifestyle. It’s an aesthetic that professionals acquire in college and which they maintain by habitually consuming the media that reinforces it. Often the aesthetic is covered in a moralizing glaze, so that the workers who do not know the lingo and norms can be bullied not merely for being uncool but for being deplorable. This allows them to be driven out of left organizations with a self-righteous fervor. The fallen professionals not only bully the workers into quitting, they pat themselves on the back while they bully them. More importantly, they imagine themselves being patted on the back by their mentors and role models – by the rump professionals who teach and guide them.
Rump professionals always have something to gain, commercially, from inviting the fallen professionals to join them in sneering at the poorly educated workers. The rump professionals that have succumbed to these market incentives most totally have been fabulously successful in the narrowest possible sense. At the risk of making a single person bear the face of this trend, I offer as an example the one they call “Vaush.” Vaush – whose real name is Ian Kochinski – operates an enormously popular YouTube channel that thrives on controversy and agonism. Vaush continuously polices the discourse for his customers, telling them what’s cool and what’s not cool, who is okay and who is not. What he really sells is smugness and contempt. The further he goes with this routine, the more he is utterly dominated by it. He has completely lost the ability to think for himself – he is constantly seeking to have the right line on every bit of political and cultural minutiae the algorithm commands him to discuss. He cannot choose his own topics or even take his own positions on the topics he discusses. He is a slave of the market, of the audience, of the algorithms. There is perhaps no one today who is less free – even wage laborers in desperately poor circumstances have more freedom to think for themselves than he does.[23]
The more the rump professionals sell to the fallen professionals, the more each brings out the worst in the other. The demands of the fallen professionals reduce the rump professionals, compelling them to produce content that is beneath them. At the same time, because this sordid content has been stamped with the approval of the rump professionals, the fallen professionals feel they’ve been given permission to sneer.
In a different world, we might expect the rump professionals to be good role models, to help the fallen professionals restrain themselves. That doesn’t happen for two reasons. First, many rump professionals work for oligarchs and large corporations. These entities have no interest in helping fallen professionals and traditional workers achieve any kind of shared understanding. Second, many independent rump professionals have a precarious existence. They have good reason to be anxious about their futures. Many of the outlets they write and talk for are on an insecure footing. The most effective way to shore up the financial situation of such outlets is to acquiesce to the audience’s id. If this capitulation can be dressed up in moralism, it can be presented as an injunction of the superego, preserving the air of authority and expertise of the rump professional who has been reduced to a mere performer.
In this way, intellectualism itself becomes associated in the minds of the workers with sneering. Standards, rigor, discernment – all become associated with those who look down upon them. This culminates not merely in the ruining of the professionals, but in the ruining of the traditional workers, who become anti-intellectual in response. Now it is not just that the workers have been excluded from intellectual pursuits – they defensively and reflexively disdain those pursuits, to protect themselves from the professionals who bully them. This, of course, only makes them appear to the professionals to be all the more deserving of ridicule. And that, of course, only hardens the workers against intellectual things.
But there is nothing intellectual about the marketized sludge that emanates from rump professionals bound in service to the market. It is an entirely debased activity imposed upon the professionals by the logic of middle capitalism, a capitalism that holds out the promise of the college degree but only occasionally delivers on that promise, in three senses. First, it doesn’t ensure universal access to the degree. Second, it doesn’t ensure that everyone who gets the degree enjoys the standard of living associated with it. Third, the degree is increasingly just a job coupon – except in increasingly rare situations, it has nothing to do with spiritual and intellectual growth. Nevertheless, the degree steals valor from the spiritual and intellectual pursuits it cannibalizes, bestowing on those who possess it a false expertise, both moral and epistemic, that is deployed in the service of maintaining a hierarchy of coolness. That hierarchy inflicts humiliation on the working class, over and over, alienating that class ever further from the professions and from the professional left.
Beyond Anti-Social Socialism
This, then, is the sense in which quixotic socialism is today anti-social socialism. Instead of creating the conditions for working class solidarity across the traditional/professional divide, it destroys those conditions and reinforces their destruction. It generates a culture war, which is a “war” in the sense that those who participate in it are barbarized by their participation. They become worse people, more caught up in themselves, in their human weaknesses, less able to connect with abstract unities – with the family and with social and political organizations, let alone the unmediated good. These people claim that they would like to engage in the forms of social and political activity people engaged in during the 1960s, or during the interwar period, or in the 19th century. But in practice, they are crippled with a kind of madness – with a quixotism – that makes these forms of activity impossible or counterproductive. They aren’t able to grasp their situation in its fullness, because they are unable to tolerate its bleakness; they need psycho-social palliatives. So, they adopt strategies and tactics suited to early capitalism or to what they imagine to be late capitalism, with no regard for their long history of failure. They repeat, over and over, those same failed approaches, succeeding only in furthering enmities, in worsening the conditions for cooperation. Each decade the practical possibility of traditional workers and college-educated professionals participating in the same organizations recedes ever further from view.
This is not a problem that can be solved with moral exhortation to do better, to be more tolerant. In the 2010s, I often criticized the left in the hopes that it might improve, that the rump professionals might provide better leadership. This was borne of urgency – I believed at that time that we might have a rare opportunity to challenge and perhaps even overcome the structural power of the healthcare sector in the United States.[24] Precisely because I operated in urgency, I did not then entertain what must now be entertained – new institutional forms that take this division into account instead of trying to blow it away with a barrage of words.
In “The Idea of the Monastery,” I discuss what I believe we should be doing as intellectuals. In working class organizations, the division between college-educated and traditional workers needs, unfortunately, to be explicitly acknowledged on an institutional level. Workers’ organizations need to heavily regulate the degree to which they allow college-educated workers to participate. They need to have their own discussions about what to do, so that they can develop an ability to think independently, to produce working class intellectuals who can play meaningful leadership roles, without the oversight of a professional mentor.
For this to happen, working class people need a way of accessing intellectual traditions without going to college. This requires that intellectuals be willing to teach workers without trying to dictate to them. We need to help workers access intellectual material without forcing them to adopt our perspectives, terminology, and mores. They must have the right to visit with us, to hear what we are up to, to question us, without any obligation to obey or follow. And while they ought to have the right to make demands of us, we should enjoy no reciprocal rights. For if we have found a way to write and talk and study for a living free of fear, we already have everything we need from them. Our obligation – our sacred task, the task of history – is to share with them what is always already theirs by right, to empower them to take what already belongs to them. That being, of course, the entire human tradition, in all its branching forms.
In time, it may be possible for an alliance between true intellectuals and traditional workers to raise the workers up to a level that forces the professionals to reckon with them. But in the meantime, workers and intellectuals need to find ways to weather the storm of middle capitalism, a storm we are each too weak to face alone. We have, for a lifetime now, waited for the professional class to stand up or step aside, to put up or shut up. It has done neither. We’ve tried begging and pleading, but because late capitalism never came, the professionals never became the new class, the class capable of delivering meaningful change.
It may yet happen. Perhaps in a generation or two, 70% or 80% of the population will graduate with a bachelor’s. The culture war will end, the progressives will win, and the new left will finally prevail. But by the time that happens, if it ever does, we will very likely all be dead.
Let the professionals wait for the arrival of their demographic destiny. We can work today to generate capacities in actual, existing people. We can create other kinds of education, other kinds of consciousness, apart from the market-subject the university system creates. If we are to ever come up with a way of governing capital mobility, if we are to ever find a way out of middle capitalism, it will require us to become people who have the capacity to create and build and act. It will require us to become people who can tolerate middle capitalism, who can be social within it, who can grasp not just its deficiencies but also its potentialities. Enough quixotism – it’s time to drop the lance, dismount the horse, and tarry with the world around us.
[1] For a thorough discussion of the intellectual history of this debate, see Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas’ excellent book, Welfare for Markets, published by University of Chicago Press in 2023.
[2] If you’re unfamiliar with Moishe Postone, you might consider having a look at Time, Labor, and Social Domination, published by Cambridge University Press in 1993.
[3] One division that is not downstream from the workerist/post-work distinction is the division between authoritarianism and anarchism. There are authoritarians and anarchists on both sides.
[4] “Timenergy” refers to energy-infused time (as opposed to free time at the end of the work day, when one only has the energy to, e.g., sit in front of a screen and vegetate). See David McKerracher, Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, published by Theory Underground Publishing in 2023.
[5] Camille L. Ryan and Kurt Bauman, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015,” US Census Bureau. Published in March 2016, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf
[6] “CPS Historical Time Series Tables,” US Census Bureau. Published in 2023, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/educational-attainment/cps-historical-time-series.html
[7] Orian Brook, Andrew Miles, Dave O’Brien, and Mark Taylor, “Social Mobility and ‘Openness’ in Creative Occupations since the 1970s,” Sociology 57, no. 4 (2023): 789-810.
[8] Richard C. Larson, Navid Ghaffarzadegan, and Yi Xue, “Too Many PhD Graduates or Too Few Academic Job Openings: The Basic Reproductive Number R0 in Academia,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 31, no. 6 (2014): 745-750.
[9] See Deborah L. Rhode, The Trouble with Lawyers, published by Oxford University Press in 2015.
[10] E.g., Melanie Hanson, “Average medical school debt,” Education Data Initiative, https://educationdata.org/average-medical-school-debt; Tekla S. Perry, “Inflation Bites U.S. Engineering Salaries,” IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/electrical-engineer-salary-2023.
[11] “The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:underemployment
[12] Benjamin M. Studebaker, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut, published by Palgrave in 2023. On the professional class, see pp. 9-12. On the left as a hope industry, see pp. 37-41.
[13] Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit, published by Princeton University Press in 2005.
[14] Studebaker, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut, pp. 38-39.
[15] Luke Savage, “Nina Turner’s Defeat Shows that Big Money Still Rules in US Politics,” Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2021/08/nina-turner-ohio-11th-defeat-shontel-brown
[16] Luke Savage, “Campaign Finance Reform Won’t by Itself End Elite Control of Politics,” Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2021/03/campaign-finance-reform-canada-united-states-politics
[17] André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, published in translation by Verso in 1989.
[18] Benjamin Studebaker, “Andrew Yang’s Basic Income is Stealth Welfare Reform,” BenjaminStudebaker.com, https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2019/03/20/andrew-yangs-basic-income-is-stealth-welfare-reform/.
[19] While it’s possible to print money to fund one-off stimulus measures, permanent programs cannot be sustainably funded in this way. Cash injections can benefit the economy during a liquidity shortage if they are used to fund appropriate programs, but become inflationary if they are used imprudently, with no regard for context. This would be the crux of my response to e.g., Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Brith of the People’s Economy, published by PublicAffairs in 2020.
[20] Benjamin Studebaker, “Andrew Yang is Playing Hide and Seek with the Left Press,” BenjaminStudebaker.com, https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2019/08/14/andrew-yang-is-playing-hide-and-seek-with-the-left-press/.
[21] Shawna Chen, “Yang Announces new Forward party with other centrist groups,” Axios, https://www.axios.com/2022/07/28/andrew-yang-forward-party-merger
[22] It must be remembered that a 1970s factory worker could afford a detached house and multiple children on a single income. Very few college-educated workers today can do either. The factory workers also enjoyed defined benefit pensions. At the same time, it must also be remembered that this world is gone – in many cases the pensions were subsequently stolen. E.g., Wilbur Ross – President Trump’s Secretary of Commerce – was involved in gutting steelworkers’ pensions in the early 00s. See Lee Sustar, “Steel retirees get shafted,” Socialist Worker, https://socialistworker.org/2003-1/440/440_11_SteelRetirees.php
[23] I sincerely pray Ian Kochinski finds a way to free himself from the personage of Vaush and from the marketized digital hell he has constructed for himself under that name. I also pray never to end up in a situation that compels me do what he did – for we are, all of us, human; we are all part of the world that made Kochinski become Vaush.
[24] It’s not just a question of healthcare as a civic or human right or of the horrifying levels of medical debt the sector regularly inflicts on Americans. It’s also the case that the sector is too politically powerful and too economically inefficient. The healthcare sector in the United States accounts for more than 17% of GDP, compared to 9-12% in other developed countries. Yet life expectancy in the United States trails many of these other countries. See e.g., Benjamin Studebaker, “The American Healthcare System is the Least Efficient by Far,” BenjaminStudebaker.com, https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/10/15/the-american-healthcare-system-is-the-least-efficient-by-far/. For the most part, healthcare is not a tradeable sector – it should in principle be possible to reform the healthcare system even within the confines of the modern state under middle capitalism. Reforms would free up timenergy, in that they would alleviate stress about healthcare, reduce dependence on employers for health insurance, and free up at least $1 trillion per year. Instead of using that money to pay bureaucrats to assign us medical debt, we could use that money to support new research.