Yes, everybody talks inequality – but it’s a very abstract thing. It’s very difficult for us to estimate the degree of inequality. Inequality cannot really be a driver… what people feel is what becomes a driver. And there are several factors driving inequality, but let’s start with the first one. We call it popular immiseration, [in other words where] the well-being of a large proportion of the population is stagnating or even declining. This well-being has many dimensions: there is economic well-being such as wages and incomes, but also biological well-being such as life expectancy, and freedom from disease and other things, or even height. Height has a strong genetic component, but when you look at the whole population over time, it turns out to be a very sensitive indicator of declining living standards when people’s height shrinks. For example, in the United States the population height stopped growing over the past 30 or 40 years, and for some, especially disadvantaged parts of the population, it has even declined in the last decade.
Complex dynamics don't need to have complex causes
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Instead of never-ending progress, today’s kids face a world on the edge of collapse. What next?
Marx’s “immiseration thesis” is an idea that’s pretty easy to summarize: Since capitalists make money from every hour of workers’ labor, they will get increasingly rich over time, while workers won’t because they’re too busy making money for capitalists. A rising tide lifts only big boats; everyone else has to swim for it.
If technology reduced the need for work, Marx figured, workers would simply be made to work longer, harder, more efficiently, or on other things. Technology would create a population of the desperate unemployed who could be put to work making luxury goods, for which there would be an ever growing market—though growing only in terms of money, not in terms of the number of people wealthy enough to buy. Instead of the common good increasing, it’s inequality, exploitation, and misery that accumulate. What workers have been building this whole time is their own subordination, and they’ve been doing a good job.
After decades on the outs even among self-described Marxists, the immiseration thesis is looking empirically strong—especially when compared with Keynes’s vision of increasingly large groups of people graduating from the burden of economic need into the paradise of full-time leisure, or with Friedman’s belief that greater wealth at the top turns into greater wealth for everyone.
And workers weren’t the only thing Marx saw getting used up: “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil,” he wrote. “All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.” Environmentalism was not a basic tenet of Marx’s thought, but unlike the economists, he understood intuitively that extractive production had natural limits. The only answer for this species on this planet is to scrap the whole form of production, with its workers and capitalists, its cities and rural areas, its big piles of stuff and hollowed-out globe.
The tax sharks are back and they’re coming for your home
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One of my weirder and more rewarding hobbies is collecting definitions of "conservativism," and one of the jewels of that collection comes from Corey Robin's must-read book The Reactionary Mind:
Robin's definition of conservativism has enormous explanatory power and I'm always finding fresh ways in which it clarifies my understand of events in the world: a conservative is someone who believes that a minority of people were born to rule, and that everyone else was born to follow their rules, and that the world is in harmony when the born rulers are in charge.
This definition unifies the otherwise very odd grab-bag of ideologies that we identify with conservativism: a Christian Dominionist believes in the rule of Christians over others; a "men's rights advocate" thinks men should rule over women; a US imperialist thinks America should rule over the world; a white nationalist thinks white people should rule over racialized people; a libertarian believes in bosses dominating workers and a Hindu nationalist believes in Hindu domination over Muslims.
These people all disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people are ordained to rule, and that any "artificial" attempt to overturn the "natural" order throws society into chaos. This is the entire basis of the panic over DEI, and the brainless reflex to blame the Francis Scott Key bridge disaster on the possibility that someone had been unjustly promoted to ship's captain due to their membership in a disfavored racial group or gender.
This definition is also useful because it cleanly cleaves progressives from conservatives. If conservatives think there's a natural order in which the few dominate the many, progressivism is a belief in pluralism and inclusion, the idea that disparate perspectives and experiences all have something to contribute to society. Progressives see a world in which only a small number of people rise to public life, rarified professions, and cultural prominence and assume that this is terrible waste of the talents and contributions of people whose accidents of birth keep them from participating in the same way.
This is why progressives are committed to class mobility, broad access to education, and active programs to bring traditionally underrepresented groups into arenas that once excluded them. The "some are born to rule, and most to be ruled over" conservative credo rejects this as not just wrong, but dangerous, the kind of thing that leads to bridges being demolished by cargo ships.
The progressive reforms from the New Deal until the Reagan revolution were a series of efforts to broaden participation in every part of society by successively broader groups of people. A movement that started with inclusive housing and education for white men and votes for white women grew to encompass universal suffrage, racial struggles for equality, workplace protections for a widening group of people, rights for people with disabilities, truth and reconciliation with indigenous people and so on.
The conservative project of the past 40 years has been to reverse this: to return the great majority of us to the status of desperate, forelock-tugging plebs who know our places. Hence the return of child labor, the tradwife movement, and of course the attacks on labor unions and voting rights:
Arguably the most potent symbol of this struggle is the fight over homes. The New Deal offered (some) working people a twofold path to prosperity: subsidized home-ownership and strong labor protections. This insulated (mostly white) workers from the two most potent threats to working peoples' lives and wellbeing: the cruel boss and the greedy landlord.
But the neoliberal era dispensed with labor rights, leaving the descendants of those lucky workers with just one tool for securing their American dream: home-ownership. As wages stagnated, your home – so essential to your ability to simply live – became your most important asset first, and a home second. So long as property values rose – and property taxes didn't – your home could be the backstop for debt-fueled consumption that filled the gap left by stagnating wages. Liquidating your family home might someday provide for your retirement, your kids' college loans and your emergency medical bills.
For conservatives who want to restore Gilded Age class rule, this was a very canny move. It pitted lucky workers with homes against their unlucky brethren – the more housing supply there was, the less your house was worth. The more protections tenants had, the less your house was worth. The more equitably municipal services (like schools) were distributed, the less your house was worth:
And now that the long game is over, they're coming for your house. It started with the foreclosure epidemic after the 2008 financial crisis, first under GW Bush, but then in earnest under Obama, who accepted the advice of his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who insisted that homeowners should be liquidated to "foam the runways" for the crashing banks:
Then there are scams like "We Buy Ugly Houses," a nationwide mass-fraud outfit that steals houses out from under elderly, vulnerable and desperate people:
The more we lose our houses, the more single-family homes Wall Street gets to snap up and convert into slum properties, aslosh with a toxic stew of black mold, junk fees and eviction threats:
Now there's a new way for finance barons the steal our houses out from under us – or rather, a very old way that had lain dormant since the last time child labor was legal – "tax lien investing."
Across the country, counties and cities have programs that allow investment funds to buy up overdue tax-bills from homeowners in financial hardship. These "investors" are entitled to be paid the missing property taxes, and if the homeowner can't afford to make that payment, the "investor" gets to kick them out of their homes and take possession of them, for a tiny fraction of their value.
As Andrew Kahrl writes for The American Prospect, tax lien investing was common in the 19th century, until the fundamental ugliness of the business made it unattractive even to the robber barons of the day:
The "tax sharks" of Chicago and New York were deemed "too merciless" by their peers. One exec who got out of the business compared it to "picking pennies off a dead man’s eyes." The very idea of outsourcing municipal tax collection to merciless debt-hounds fell aroused public ire.
Today – as the conservative project to restore the "natural" order of the ruled and the ruled-over builds momentum – tax lien investing is attracting some of America's most rapacious investors – and they're making a killing. In Chicago, Alden Capital just spent a measly $1.75m to acquire the tax liens on 600 family homes in Cook County. They now get to charge escalating fees and penalties and usurious interest to those unlucky homeowners. Any homeowner that can't pay loses their home.
The first targets for tax-lien investing are the people who were the last people to benefit from the New Deal and its successors: Black and Latino families, elderly and disabled people and others who got the smallest share of America's experiment in shared prosperity are the first to lose the small slice of the American dream that they were grudgingly given.
This is the very definition of "structural racism." Redlining meant that families of color were shut out of the federal loan guarantees that benefited white workers. Rather than building intergenerational wealth, these families were forced to rent (building some other family's intergenerational wealth), and had a harder time saving for downpayments. That meant that they went into homeownership with "nontraditional" or "nonconforming" mortgages with higher interest rates and penalties, which made them more vulnerable to economic volatility, and thus more likely to fall behind on their taxes. Now that they're delinquent on their property taxes, they're in hock to a private equity fund that's charging them even more to live in their family home, and the second they fail to pay, they'll be evicted, rendered homeless and dispossessed of all the equity they built in their (former) home.
It's very on-brand for Alden Capital to be destroying the lives of Chicagoans. Alden is most notorious for buying up and destroying America's most beloved newspapers. It was Alden who bought up the Chicago Tribune, gutted its workforce, sold off its iconic downtown tower, and moved its few remaining reporters to an outer suburban, windowless brick building "the size of a Chipotle":
Before the ghastly hotel baroness Leona Helmsley went to prison for tax evasion, she famously said, "We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes." Helmsley wasn't wrong – she was just a little ahead of schedule. As Propublica's IRS Files taught us, America's 400 richest people pay less tax than you do:
When billionaires don't pay their taxes, they get to buy sports franchises. When poor people don't pay their taxes, billionaires get to steal their houses after paying the local government an insultingly small amount of money.
It's all going according to plan. We weren't meant to have houses, or job security, or retirement funds. We weren't meant to go to university, or even high school, and our kids were always supposed to be in harness at a local meat-packer or fast food kitchen, not wasting time with their high school chess club or sports team. They don't need high school: that's for the people who were born to rule. They – we – were meant to be ruled over.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Bill Gates is one of the richest people in world history. His net worth, at $100 billion, is greater than that of the annual GDP of the 138 poorest countries when considered individually. In early April 2017, he and his wife Melinda issued their annual public letter, which told of great news: the fight against global poverty is being won, as those living on less than $1.25 a day (the UN’s definition of extreme poverty) have been halved since 1990.
But there is an extensive scholarly consensus that the threshold for poverty should be $5 a day, in fact the US Department of Agriculture concluded a decade ago it is the bare minimum needed for people to simply maintain homeostasis. In adjusted terms that means today the poverty line should be $7.40 a day. Using this well-founded revised number, 4.2 billion people are living in poverty, more than 60% of humanity. But Marx’s immiseration thesis is such that it requires the variable of time in order to be proven correct.
Has the number of people living on less than $7.40 a day decreased over time? Unfortunately not. Over 1 billion more people fall below this line than they did 35 years, meaning that global poverty is actually increasing. This fact stands in direct contradiction to the self-congratulatory proclamations of the supranational organizations and billionaire “philanthropists” like Bill Gates (who lives in a 125 million dollar mansion).
Gabriel Palcic, The Actuality of Marx’s Immiseration Thesis in the 21st Century
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This is not the only way to think the particularity of the present, the way that riot has returned with a difference. The world of 1700 is not the one we now inhabit. The fundamental changes are manifold, down to the structure of states and economies as such. The economy was once near, with most subsistence goods produced nearby. Conversely the state was far, so to speak; modern policing did not exist. Now the situation is reversed. Everything is produced elsewhere; there’s a cop around every corner. The idea that one could make one’s way via the sacking of the shopping district is absurd on the face of it; you might get subsistence goods for a week, two, a month, and then what? […] Survival, reproduction of the immiserated classes can no longer be obtained in the market — can longer even be imagined there. It is this that our anonymous tweeter knows. And it is because of this desperate situation that we can imagine circulation struggles breaking their attachment to the market, turning toward struggles over reproduction beyond wage and price.
J. Clover, “Baltimore Riot. Baltimore Commune?”, 25 April 2016, <http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2614-baltimore-riot-baltimore-commune>
My bud Ben asked me if Marx had much to say about inequality having any relationship with The Revolution
I'm not really qualified to have much of an answer, but here's the quick and dirty of what I said on facebook, which you might or might not be interested in.
So it's not really inequality - but immiseration.
That wiki does a good job but the idea was that capitalism is supposed to dialectically get worse and worse for workers with capitalists accumulating more and more. In the process workers keep getting less and less as more of their surplus labour power is expropriated. Marx never said TOO much on when exactly the revolution would come, but generally it was just that conditions would get so bad for the workers (and again, Marx is looking at the working class in 19th century Manchester, which was like, a horror show) that they would revolt out of the pure reason that SHIT WAS HORRIBLE.
So it IS inequality, but entirely between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and if you read Marx's work through a purely economic lens as some of the writers of the Second International did (Rosa Luxemburg, Kautsky,) they generally thought that revolution was entirely predicated on this immiseration. More and more people join the proletariat, they are exploited, they are reduced to "a fragment of man" and the revolution, whatever it is, happens. These people were mostly concerned with maintaining the unity of the working class so when that point came, when things got so bad, they were READY for the revolution with a vanguard of elite thinkers ready to lead them, they were conscious of their class position. People like Lenin broke with this tradition. Lenin believed in tactical politics - mostly because when the Russian bourgeoisie failed to take control of Russia and institute liberal reform, Lenin thought the proletariat had to TAKE OVER the historically necessary tasks of the bourgeoisie. By taking over these tasks Lenin's Bolshevism was all about gaining political hegemony and developing the means of production. He found a tactical political moment (the Germans let him back into Russia to foment revolution, after all) to exploit and was able to get control. As far as Marxist thinkers of the 19th century were concerned, the 1917 revolution there should never have happened. It had nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with contingent politics.
Generally ever since Lenin, and especially since the fall of Actually Existing Socialism, dialectical Marxists in the west have maintained that over long periods of time workers WILL be immiserated and the revolution will come, but that it will take the entire enclosure of the world under capitalist processes. Hardt & Negri's work, as well as Laclau & Mouffe are both thinkers that directly addressed this problem for Marxists suggesting that things might not be so simple. It's also really complicated because I don't think that Marx's work itself isn't actually reducible to cheap vulgar economism in the way the Second International made popular.
One year of domestic peace and tranquility with a loving girlfriend has come to an end. I am officially moving back to the former meat-packing warehouse that has come to be known as "The Ox," a space that 10 of us first conquered about two years ago.
My philosophy is shifting toward what I would like to term self-immiserative technomadism. The old Marxian hypothesis about the increasing immiseration of the working classes under capitalism has not fared well. The lowest classes apparently have more to lose than their chains, and thus one of the key revolutionary mechanisms theorized in the Marxist tradition is irrelevant in the advanced liberal democracies. I think an attractive solution is the self-immiseration of the disillusioned factions of the bourgeoisie. That is, I am increasingly convinced that to see the world clearly and to avoid all of the social investments that make us conservative and reactionary, we need to opt for a calculated kind of squalor. Not the demoralizing, unprovocative kind of squalor too often associated with traditional drifters, dropouts, and squatters, but an intellectually, artistically, politically radical kind of squalor. Technomadism is the name for just one component of this calculated squalor: it implies minimizing everything that keeps us anchored in the status quo (and thus blind to and invested in the status quo) in order to maximize the freedom, effectivity, and productivity of our connections to increasingly dominant technological desiring machines.
