The Working Class, the Left, the Right, & Out-of-Touch Socialists

Marxists and anarchists seem woefully out of touch with the working class. The working class isn't concerned with who owns the means of production. They have very little interest in managing industry themselves. What they are really concerned about is putting food on the table, a roof overhead, and having time to relax with family and friends. They’re worried about survival and wellbeing, not necessarily with the abolition of private ownership or the democratization of the workplace. The immediate concerns of the working class are addressed most directly by more social democratic reforms, like universal healthcare, universal basic income, minimum income guarantee, job guarantee, a mandate for employers to provide workers with a minimum amount of vacation time per year, etc. Most people in the working class don't really want to be in charge of making decisions in the workplace. They just don't want to be dominated by managerial types. Again, this can be directly addressed by more social democratic reforms, like making it illegal to fire employees arbitrarily. We already have this with federal employment. You can be fired for a variety of reasons (theft, repeatedly being AWOL, refusal to work, etc.), but they can't fire you simply because the boss doesn't like your haircut, sexual orientation, or political views.

Similarly, the working class doesn't care about direct democracy in politics per se. They don't want to be involved in the decision-making process, but they do want to be able to contest decisions that they disagree with. They want road maintenance, city planning, and legislation to be done behind the scenes, such that everything just works out without them having to exert any mental effort. But they want to be able to challenge legislation and decisions that they strongly dislike. These desires of the working class could be addressed with liquid democracy and the citizen’s veto.

The working class isn't opposed to taxation really. They may say they are, but they're really just opposed to being taxed themselves. They often oppose social welfare because they mistakenly think it will result in more taxes for themselves. Their concerns here are easily addressed by progressive taxation. They only oppose progressive taxation because they do not understand it. They don't oppose money per se, but oppose money in politics. They don't want people buying politicians. They aren't, in principle, opposed to corporations, but they are opposed to “crony capitalism” and tax dollars going to big businesses. Again, those are concerns that are more directly addressed by social democratic reforms than by socialism or anarchism. They don't want to own their own business or help manage a co-operative company as much as they want security. They want stability, the comfort of knowing that their job isn't going anywhere in the near future. The working class, left and right, has the same concerns. This goes for Berniecrats and Trumpists.

The difference between the right and the left is that the right is generally regressive, clinging to prejudices from the past. They are also, generally speaking, less educated and more easily duped by racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and misogynistic propaganda. The Alt-Right convinced them that women demanding equal pay, immigrants taking all the jobs, and free international trade are the real reasons that jobs are going away. If we simply close the border, impose high tariffs, and fight back against the left, then all will be good. The left—and the mainstream Democratic Party is just the moderate right, not the left—, on the other hand, recognizes that out of control laissez-faire capitalism is the real problem. Unregulated banks and corporations have wrecked the economy in the pursuit of profit. That's why there are fewer jobs. They put profit over people and that's why they send jobs overseas. As GDP goes up, the wealthy are allowed to hoard all the new wealth while the wages of the workers who produce all the wealth have been declining in real terms. This isn't because we have too many immigrants or because we don't impose high tariffs on China. No, this is because we don't tax the wealthy enough, which results in the bulk of profits going to the top rather than to the workers. If increased profits just raised wages for the workers rather than enriching the wealthy, companies wouldn't decide to move overseas to increase profits. Right-wing economic policies allowed the wealthy to accumulate wealth without limits. This unchecked pursuit of wealth led corporations to move overseas. This, perhaps, could make a good case for giving workers some share of ownership, which is quite different from worker self-management, but I digress. I'll just note that no employee-owned business would fire its employees in order to replace them with cheap foreign labor.

Herein lies the real fundamental difference between the left and the right. The right believes in bunk economics and pseudo-science that plays into and reaffirms their existing biases. The left, generally speaking, has a more realistic view of the world. There is, of course, the hippie subculture and the New Age quackery subculture on the left, but this is the exception rather than the rule. On the right, the quacks are the mainstream and the moderates with realistic perspectives are on the fringe.