"The presidency is not a fucking butcher counter! You don't get to take a number and wait your turn. This is the leader of the most powerful country on Earth! This person is entrusted to safeguard the future of the free world! The best the Democrats can do is to promote the next person in line? We're all doomed." smdh 🤦♂️
Years later, another friend of a friend, a white woman, 'paid her dues' and was hoping for a promotion. Except her place of employment has an explicit policy to promote minorities over white people. She got passed over in favor of a less qualified minority candidate and was salty about it. Lol wat? Why would you work somewhere like that? She still works there AFAIK.
I now understand it's because she is a precarious elite, struggling financially in a low-paying job, under a crushing debt load taken on to pay for her prestigious degree, exploited by her employer, and simultaneously unwilling to do 'lower' forms of labor for better working conditions.
These are the folks trying to tell us how to run things. These are the folks who cannot comprehend why they lost the election so badly. I'm suddenly feeling better about my decision to get out of academia and get a real job.
quoting
naddr1qq…hvyyThe shift of the American working class from the Democratic to the Republican Party in this last election, and the outrage it has generated among many leftist American academics, has led me to reflect on why so many academics become strong socialists or even communists, while the vast majority of the American “working class” do not.
They would likely call it “false consciousness” on the part of the American worker. By I see it as false consciousness among elites: they do not recognize that they are elites, and that their social status motivates them differently from how the typical American worker is motivated. In short, there is a difference between economic class (being a “worker”) and social status (being an “elite”). In this I am convinced that Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory continues to have explanatory power. (I won’t go into that here, but do check out his work.)
Socialism and even communism carry strong appeal for a specific kind of highly educated, young elite today: the kind that needs to work for a living, but still sees itself as elite. These are not “white collar workers;” they are “precarious elites.” They are subject to a dynamic that few want to talk about:
Some of the worst labor exploitation in this country occurs in so-called “prestige industries.” These include education (higher and lower), entertainment, journalism, publishing, art, philanthropy—even, on the higher-paid end, investment banking and other financial services.
You want to help a celebrity launch a new brand or product? Prepare to make $35,000 a year and work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, doing countless frenzied tasks that have nothing to do with your job description.
You want to teach philosophy at a University? Get ready to make $17,500 a year, if you’re lucky. If you’re an international graduate student, your visa to stay in the U.S. is also completely contingent on your advisor’s approval; as a result, abuse is rampant.
You want to write for The Atlantic or The New Yorker? You can maybe get a few hundred bucks per article as a freelancer; $60K per year as a staff writer, if you’re lucky.
You want to become a powerful banker? You may start at $150K per year right out of college, but you will work 80-120 hours a week at the expense of everything else in your life, no telling how long—certainly for years. Your mental and even physical health are the price you pay for this “opportunity.”
These are the jobs that children of elites want. They want these jobs so much that they are willing to subject themselves to highly fragmented, authoritarian, and toxic work environments, with such high turnover, particularly of junior workers, that it’s socially a war of all against all. These jobs are different from working at a factory or an established company—there is a “musical chairs” dynamic, authority is exercised arbitrarily and chaotically, the job tasks can change daily and even moment to moment, most relationships are based on dominance/submission, and there is no “solidarity.” Employers believe it’s a “privilege” for anyone to have these jobs, and that therefore no one in them has the right to complain. Their refrain: “There are always 100 more candidates ready to take your place.”
In addition, there is the psychology of being an elite: you expect to be treated better by virtue of your education and social status, so it can be shameful to admit that you are being abused and might need to fight for better working conditions. Young elites may even want to organize and collectively bargain, but they don’t know how—they’ve been carried along by their social status in extremely authoritarian and chaotic environments and may never have really built anything with others over time.
For many young precarious elites, therefore, socialism becomes a kind of dream of not only of a good workplace but of a good society—one where they get what they believe is their “due.”
These “precarious elites” do see their exploitation as a structural problem, but they blame “capitalism” instead of the brute fact of supply and demand: there are just too many of them competing for the same few prestige jobs. While the American worker imagines a path to better pay and working conditions through organizing, the precarious elite sees no such path—because for them status is just as, if not more, important than pay and benefits, and that is something much harder to negotiate. Elites insist that they should be able to do exactly the (prestigious) jobs that they want to do. They are also educated enough to have read the socialist and communist literatures. That combination leads to the fantasy that the government could force their employers not only to pay them more and treat them with dignity—which in some cases it could, certainly—but also to guarantee these conditions in prestige jobs for everyone who wants them.
There likely is a legitimate case to be made that some of these prestige employers are violating labor laws and should be held accountable. In other cases, there are certainly opportunities to pass new laws prohibiting what amounts to indentured servitude. But actually enforcing these laws will only reveal what is already plain as day: that there are far fewer prestige jobs than there are elites who want them.
The double bind for elites is that the prospect of taking a “lower status” job—even one that pays a lot more, where workers are treated significantly better—is even worse than being a de facto slave with a prestigious role. This leads precarious elites to demand a magical solution: the state. The state must not only protect workers, but guarantee certain kinds of jobs at certain levels of pay and benefits for anyone who wants them. Needless to say, this demand can never be fulfilled, and the cycle of partisanship is then retrenched: precarious elites blame American workers for having the gall to vote and organize based on self-interest, rather than to crusade for an idyllic state of affairs that will not come.
Originally published on twitter https://x.com/NSmolenski/status/1854347409012203687
Reposted to nostr without permission. Sorry not sorry. u Natalie!