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To the extent that Republicans cut the benefits their base relies upon, they do risk legislative consequences — presuming those benefits are sufficiently obvious. Not every fight is going to play out like the aborted effort at AC A repeal, however. Much of our welfare state is “submerged,” as Suzanne Mettler describes it, so it is often hard for Americans to perceive the ways they benefit from government — for instance, via tax benefits rather than direct spending. [...]
this is a really good term. from The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy by Suzanne Mettler
[...] starting in the 1940s, the US auto industry gave up on the system of “flexible production,” originally installed by Henry Ford, in order to implement a new production system that aimed to defeat the unions and assure management’s dictatorship over the labor process. Flexible production had not ceased to deliver record rates of profit and increases in productivity, but it had become unbearable to the Big Three employers because of the leverage it provided workers. It depended for an important part of its productive efficiency on locating factories close to one another in order to facilitate coordination between them, relied on a single source (“mother plant”) to provide key components for the whole system, and employed just-in-time methods of delivering inventories, all of which made for pressure points that workers could attack in order to disrupt production.
The new system of “dispersed production,” according to Murray and Schwartz, sought to shift the balance of power by depriving workers of precisely these pressure points, opening the way for managers to step up class struggle to intensify labor and hold down wages. The Big Three accomplished this by dispersing factories over wide geographical areas, building redundant plants that duplicated one another’s output, and dismantling just-in-time delivery. They therefore chose to step up control over the labor process and directly assault workers rather than enhance labor-management collaboration to create a faster-growing “pie” that could simultaneously support higher profits and better compensation to workers.
he challenges their portrayal of the Toyotism alternative as "collaborative" later on (he says it's really more about extracting more surplus value) but this is a useful summary
[...] Management has long understood that using the iron fist is best only as a last resort. It is far cheaper to try to induce workers to cooperate through manipulating their fears and dreams. This is done through programs to foster identification with the company, as against other companies and the world; programs to reward individual contributions (even if they result in others losing their jobs); fostering competition between workers; and keeping open hopes for advancement. In order to fight unionization and maintain workforce stability, the model flexible plants do pay near the top of the industry scale, which is usually more than the average wage in the surrounding area because the companies locate in lowwage areas. But these plants also rely on speed-ups, outsourcing, automation, and extensive use of temporary workers to limit the total number of their higher-paid workers and keep up hopes among the lower-paid workers that they will be selected to move into the higher-paid group.
The likes of Murray and Vance are not wrong to discern a cultural chasm between the white elite and the increasingly immiserated ranks of the white poor. Clear divergences in marriage and divorce rates, out-of-wedlock births, church attendance, and drug abuse are all observable phenomena and appear to have intensified in recent years. But that’s to be expected when almost all the growth in new income accrues to the top, while real wages and living standards collapse at the bottom. It would be quite an achievement if working-class communities and family structures held up under such enormous economic strain. But they have not, and the fallout from these developments should not come as a surprise. Vance’s grandparents could relocate from their corner of eastern Kentucky to Ohio for well-paid work at a unionized steel plant. How many people can follow the same strategy today? Who in their right mind would uproot themselves to drive an Uber or pack boxes at an Amazon warehouse for low wages and no benefits? Under these circumstances, staying home to collect disability checks or sell meth looks like a much more rational decision.
This relentless focus on intersubjective, interpersonal relations between individual members of different classes completely overlooks the ways in which capitalism operates as a system of objective social relationships. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued, the universal market dependence that defines capitalism necessarily imposes certain imperatives on economic activity: competition, profit maximization, accumulation, productivity growth. Workers and capitalists alike are subject to the constraints of the market and are forced to comply with its demands in order to survive. They simply have no choice but to do so, regardless of their personal beliefs, attitudes, and values. Exploitation occurs not because owners and employers are prejudiced against workers but because the whip of competition constantly forces them to cut costs, intensify workers’ labor, and reduce wages. Even if prejudicial attitudes toward working-class people were eradicated tomorrow, class exploitation would still continue. What’s more, those attitudes would likely resurface because abusing and mistreating other human beings always requires a justification.
link this to meritocracy
post-racialism is in step with postwar liberalism’s tendency to treat racial inequities as if they exist in a world apart from the economic processes that generate them. Coates’s conceptualization of racism as the engine of history not only blinds him to this fact, but his commitment to racial ontology is every bit as conservative and counterproductive as the post-racialism he despises.
[...] if Coates merits recognition for introducing the ill effects of specific policies to a popular audience, his insistence that race is a force that operates independently from political economy leads him to the erroneous conclusion that modern liberalism’s failures are owed to a refusal to acknowledge that racism is a distinct evil that warrants its own solutions. Contrary to Coates’s characterization of US history, postwar liberalism was actually typified by a tendency to divorce race from class. Coates’s fundamental claim is, therefore, incorrect.
idk why i care tbh but the phrasing around political economy may be useful
While it is safe to assume that most southern farm owners in the 1930s were racist, the fact that farm-owning proprietors generally opposed SSA coverage for farm laborers — black and white alike — as well as for themselves makes clear that their motives owed less to the “original sin of racism” than a desire to keep their labor costs down and retain control over the operation of their farms. To be sure, Jim Crow buttressed the system of debt peonage REED that made the sharecropping system a palatable alternative to slavery for planters. But the wholesale disfranchisement of African Americans that had undercut the Populist insurgency of the last decade of the nineteenth century facilitated the expansion of a sharecropping system that, unlike slavery, exploited both black and white farm laborers.
In the early 1960s, many civil rights leaders were clear that antidiscrimination policies alone were incapable of closing the economic divide separating blacks and whites. Though Coates claims that A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin — the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — gave up their demands for race-specific remedies to black poverty when confronted with the Johnson administration’s preference for class-oriented anti-poverty measures, Coates’s characterization actually misrepresents both sides. Simply put, the black organizers of 1963 rally identified social-democratic policies as essential to redressing racial disparities in employment, income, housing, and wealth, while the liberal white president opted for prescriptions that presumed the distinctiveness of black poverty and ignored the structural transformation of the economy. Indeed, even as Randolph declared his support for a fair employment practices act at the March on Washington, he stated plainly that antidiscrimination alone would do African Americans little good in the face of “profit-geared automation” that was destroying “the jobs of millions of workers black and white.” Randolph and Rustin thus identified public works, full-employment policies, and a minimum-wage hike as essential to
closing the racial economic gap. [...]
The correlation between economic inequality and both violent and nonviolent crime has been well documented. However, poverty and neoliberal retrenchment have contributed to mass incarceration in other ways that are often obscured by a tendency to focus on racial disparities alone. While racism certainly plays a role in sentencing disparities, according to political scientist Marie Gottschalk, a perpetrator’s class background appears to exert greater influence over incarceration rates than race. Incarceration disparities in states with comparatively poor white populations, for example, are less pronounced than in states with more affluent white populations. Likewise, racial disparities tend to be greater in states that reserve incarceration for individuals convicted of the most serious crimes, such as drug and violent offenses — the types of crimes that are more commonly committed by poor people and, by extension, blacks.16 Since African Americans are overrepresented among the poor, budget cuts to state public defenders’ offices further contribute to incarceration disparities. The decline in funding to state indigent legal services has led to a system in which 95 percent of criminal cases are settled by plea bargain. Finally, mass incarceration has functioned as a dystopian accommodation to many of the problems wrought by deindustrialization and public-sector retrenchment. Large prisons not only “house” the reserve army of unemployed and — thanks to the stigma of a felony conviction — unemployable workers, but jails and penitentiaries have become major employers, particularly in rural communities. Indeed, penal Keynesianism is the lifeblood of towns like Forrest City, AR , Susanville, CA , and Marion, IL .