How the Working Man got stabbed in the back

It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer".  It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular.  Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.

It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club.  Man is that different now.  I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.

Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics.  You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark.  An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:

Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.

Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.

I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.

The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.

Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.

Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen?  No?  Better to kill 10 million of them?  Oooooh kaaay.

Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.

And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.

During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.

Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists!  Don't look at the wall decorations!  I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!

Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.

So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys.  What to do, what to do?

Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs.  Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right?  Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.

Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense.  These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats.  Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.

I wrote about that at length here.

And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland.  And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago?  How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century?  Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?

Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:

This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.

To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.

Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.

Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?

Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants?  Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty.  Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.

This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime.  I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street.  Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg.  Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).

It's all upside down.  And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason.  On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really.  They sure must have had some powerful motivation.

I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.