Category: Class (Page 15 of 24)

Eye of a Needle: Class Politics and the Wealthy

January 25, 2021 / baseblogger

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19: 23-24)*

Contrary to ‘prosperity theology‘ trends we find among some right-wing Christians, most Christians long upheld the virtues of the marginalized (not to mention a skeptical attitude toward work). We find the injunction to do so most clearly in Bible passages like the one above. And we find a similar tradition in leftist politics – positing the working class as the main agent for social and political change.

Are these the same ideas? Can the wealthy play a positive role in society?

senior executives talk about work elon musk

Do Executives Work Or Talk About Work?

January 4, 2021 / baseblogger

Senior executives claim they work a lot. How much? On average, they report working 62 hours per week. If we expand to studies including middle management, we come up with average work weeks up to a whopping 72 hours. Talk about work!

Well, yes. As we’ll see, that’s the idea. Are senior executives and other managers some new proletariat, as they want us to believe? Do they toil away at work all day like real life hero-leaders from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged? Would the world fall apart if they quit doing what they do – if the people working under them took over their roles?

Not exactly.

Karl Marx and the ‘Rights of Man’

October 19, 2020 / baseblogger

It’s a bit trendy these days for leftists to dismiss talk of ‘human rights’ – or the ‘rights of man,’ as people once knew them. In truth, Marxists went even further. But it’s surging again in the last few years. In the older days, leftists dismissed all this as talk of ‘bourgeois rights’ or ‘freedom.’ Now they frame it more in terms of privilege or the ‘rights of man’ being only for white…well, men.

Where did all this come from? I’ll give an overview of Marx’s critique of human rights and the rights of man. This stuff comes from his early political philosophy. And I haven’t written a lot about that. I’ve focused in this blog mostly on Marx’s later work.

Roseanne and the Working Class

October 12, 2020 / baseblogger

Roseanne Barr is no stranger to controversy. She’s upset people on all parts of the political landscape, though more recently she’s leaned toward conspiracy theories and racism. And so, U.S. liberals didn’t enjoy the return of Roseanne – the TV show – for a 10th season in 2018. And by the end of that season, the show booted Barr and the network renamed it The Conners.

I recently watched Season 10 – along with a selection of episodes from the first nine seasons. My sense is that most of the show’s critics either didn’t watch it or didn’t get it. Many American liberals and progressives want their TV shows to practice prefigurative politics – they want TV to reflect their ideal visions of the world. In some rare cases, as with liberals and The West Wing, this degenerates into complete fantasy politics.

Roseanne never did that, and it certainly didn’t do that in Season 10. The show engaged with the world as it is, with the world’s biases, prejudices, and bad systems. And it often criticized those biases, prejudices, and systems in helpful ways.

Essential Workers and Wages

September 28, 2020 / baseblogger

Let’s talk about essential workers. But first, let’s take a look back. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how wages get assigned in the capitalist system. The short version? Capitalism assigns wages to people according to, roughly, the ‘social worth’ it assigns to them. Society makes certain judgments about the acceptable standard of living for certain people. Or, in Marxist terms, the accepted value of their labor power. By contrast, the value workers add has nothing to do with wages.

What’s that got to do with essential workers? Glad you asked.

Category: Class (Page 15 of 24)

Eye of a Needle: Class Politics and the Wealthy

Do Executives Work Or Talk About Work?

Karl Marx and the ‘Rights of Man’

Roseanne and the Working Class

Essential Workers and Wages

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