If neoliberal capitalism isn’t working for average Americans, how are they responding?

The neoliberal Great Transformation has massively changed the workplace, and as workers are increasingly squeezed by anxiety over personal economic prospects, they are responding with sullen acquiescence in that they just do the bare minimum, and sometimes not even that much, as they go about their “bull-shit jobs”. As the US increasingly resembles the late USSR a similar dynamic is playing out where–they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

Indeed, our milieu is marked by the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything–life in America keeps getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.

I know the feeling. I’ve watched the America I grew up in be demolished by neoliberal looters, cheered on by the corporate press.

Political scientist Wendy Brown assesses the damage. “Decades of neoliberal devastations of middle- and working-class prospects set the ground for our politics today. The dismantling of social states – the social provisions and social commitments that put a floor under working- and middle-class people when things go wrong – is key. That floor is gone. At the same time, wages became stagnant or worse. Unions became so severely weakened that they lost their capacity to work against capital, and states largely gave up regulating capital. The rise of finance capital which spikes the cost of everything from housing to health care made things worse.“

The science fiction I grew up with promised a future where technology provided fulfilling and meaningful jobs and a life of mostly leisure, where people, families and communities could flourish.

Looking around at our present milieu it’s amazing how naive it all sounded.

I’m not scared of technology, I’m scared of the sociopaths that wield said technology. And the same technology that could be used to ensure the sci-fi future I read about as a kid, is instead utilized to create more billionaires while workers are used up and tossed away like soiled rags.

The problem is political in that the billionaires control government and they like a desperate, surplus population that’s too cowed to rebel just fine. A big part of the blame goes to the political party that used to represents workers. The Democrats have been hemorrhaging support after abandoning nearly all of their former working class platform in favor of identity politics. The Democrats increasingly stand for neoliberal, pro-war and anti-Russia policies.

You’ve heard me drone on for years about the dangers of neoliberalism and the pronounced effect on American society but it’s gotten worse. The way in which government interacts with average Americans is a case in point. Instead of providing material benefits like during the New Deal era, neoliberal governance celebrates inequality and punishes those who resist.

In An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner states that the poor require criminal law to keep them within the confines of the “market.” “The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange.”

The flip-side of Posner’s theory was that unlike the poor, the wealthy required only tort law to ensure their proper behavior. “…Criminal law is designed primarily for the non-affluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.”

What’s so frustrating about American society is that it could be so much better, and we have almost everything we need to thrive. But we’re stuck in path dependence and power games, unable to imagine or build the good world our technology makes possible.

Reduce work. Let people find other, meaningful things to do with their lives. The worship of work is a relatively recent thing, coming mostly out of the Protestant revolution: virtually no one before that believed that work was a good thing: it was necessary, but the good life was about art, learning, athletics, civic involvement and so on.

To create this sort of world we need to do away with wealth humping. I can’t believe that I’m the only one to find it deeply embarrassing. You can get wealthy: say have four or five times as much as the median, but not billionaire rich and able to dominate the political space. Focus competition towards status and prestige, and towards living a good life and contributing towards others.

There is much work to be done. Meaningful work, not the least of which is fixing the environment. There will always be meaningful labour to do, just not bull-shit jobs so the rich elite can have another vacation home in Deer Valley.