It Could Happen Here - Class and the Culture War Part 2: Abstract Value, Concrete Genocide

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

In part 2 of Mia's look at the history of class discourse, a technical argument about productive workers is warped by the Nazis and later Ronald Reagan into the ideological basis of fascismSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers

as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. It's me, James, and I'm coming at you today sweaty, smelly, and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the desert where I have been spending the weekend trying my best to help along with lots of other dedicated mutual aid workers to mitigate the damage done by an entirely preventable humanitarian crisis at the United States southern border. People are being held

in the open desert in Hukumba where it gets hot in the day, gets very cold at night and there are children, there are old. And there are children, there are old people, there are young people. All the support they're getting is from mutual aid workers that maybe get some water from Border Patrol, from federal government and not much else. And I'm here before your podcast to ask you if you can to help. We've all spent all of our time and most of our money the last few days, week trying to help. And we're all spent all of our time and most of our money the last few days week trying to help and we're all pretty broke and we're all pretty tired but i could really do with your support and i'm going to give the venmo's and cash apps and paypal information for two organizations who i dearly

love and whose work i have seen is extremely effective and is the only thing keeping this situation from being a lot worse. And please don't think that if you don't have much money that you shouldn't give. We can work, do a lot with little. So if you only have five bucks, that is great. Five bucks is a tarp for someone to sleep under or a few hot meals. And what we're going to buy is food, blankets, tarps, water. The things that stop people dying in the desert.

Those two organizations, Border Kindness and Free Shit Collective, can be found online at borderkindness and at freeshitpb on Twitter. For Border Kindness, the Venmo is at border-kindness. The Cash App is $borderkindnesscash. And the Zelle and PayPal information is info at borderkindness.org. Free Shit Collective are at FreeShip Collective on Cash App and PayPal and at FreeShipPB on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about why everything absolutely sucks. I'm your host,

Neil Wong. I'm back again. And last episode, we talked about the problems with conceiving of all of labor as production from a sort of macrofeminist perspective of, you know, thinking about how, you know, thinking of all labor as production doesn't actually capture what most labor is. And, you know, we looked at how this allowed patriarchy to become a wedge to pry the workers movement apart. But there's another sort of more micro problem with thinking about productive labor. And that micro problem is that people are just absolutely unable to think about productivity in anything other than moral terms as to, know why this is the case i'm not going to put forward an answer um i've seen every theory from like it's christianity to like it's a structural feature of capitalism to its human nature or whatever um i'm i i don't know did pick pick pick your pick your theory about why everyone is incapable of being normal about productivity but this turns out to be a real problem for anyone who is trying to use productive versus unproductive labor in a purely technical sense.

Now, the most famous person to do this is, as some of you probably know, one Karl Marx. And, you know, I was hard on Marx last episode, but this one and the stuff that's going to follow isn't really his fault. Marx here is actually doing one of the times where he's being very reasonable and he's being very specific about what productive labor is and everyone else is being extremely unreasonable. is being extremely unreasonable. And, you know, given the incredibly dark places this is going to go, maybe this is one of those things where like, I don't know,

you need to pick different words that aren't as emotionally charged as like productive and unproductive labor. But all in all, like this, the catastrophe that's about to unfold is not Marx's fault. There was really no way that he could have known how not everyone was going to go over this.

So what actually is the distinction between productive and unproductive labor for Marx? So first off, and this is very important, productive versus unproductive labor is a technical term. It has no moral content at all. All it means is that some labor produces capital for the capital-owning class, and some labor doesn't. That's literally it. Here's Marx. The commodities the capitalist buys for his own private consumption are not consumed productively. They do not become factors of capital. Just as little do the services he buys for his consumption, voluntarily or through compulsion from the state, etc., for the sake of their use value. They do not become a factor of capital. They are not,

therefore, productive kinds of labor, and those who perform them are not productive workers. As you can see, this has literally nothing to do with the content of the labor itself or morality whatsoever. If a dancer works for a production company and gives a performance, you know, working for the company, that's productive labor because the company has turned their capital into more capital by using the dancer to produce a commodity, which is, you know, the performance and then selling it, right? If that same dancer puts on the same performance in the same place for a crowd of just like their friends or even the same people, but who aren't paying a production company for it, suddenly the dancer who, again, is doing the same thing in the same place, like even could be on the same day,

is doing non-productive labor because no capital is being created from it. Or as, you know, here's how Marx puts it, labor with the same content can therefore be both productive and unproductive. Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hack work for his publisher was a productive worker. Later on, Milton sold the product for $5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendium political economy, at the instruction of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker. Insofar as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter's valorization this is a valorization of capital which is like having capital make more

capital a singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker if she sells her singing for money she is to that extent a wage laborer or a commodity dealer but the same singer when she is engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money is a productive worker for she directly produces capital a school master who educates others is not a productive worker but a school master who is engaged as a wage laborer in an institution alongside along with others in order to make in order through his labor to valorize the money of the entrepreneur of the knowledge-mongering institution is a productive worker now okay i'm reading a lot of marks here i'm focusing on marks you know because whether or

not someone in in you know the 1800s is a marxist or not and if you pick just like a random worker in the period when this is being written, the odds are really bad that they're going to be a Marxist. Marx was enormously influential, particularly in Europe as sort of social democracy swept through the Germanys and then communism sort of swept back through Europe and the US. And Marx is also, and this is something that Marx himself like takes great pains to conceal a lot of the time. Marx is a kind of medium through which the broad cultural consensus on labor was transformed into like capital T theory. And in this capital T theory, productive versus unproductive labor is not a moral claim at all.

It's a measure of whether any given labor produces capital for the bourgeoisie. at all. It's a measure of whether any given labor produces capital for the bourgeoisie. Now, part of what Marx is trying to do here is to intervene in existing discourse about productive and unproductive labor to turn it into useful theory instead of people just yelling stuff at each other. And Marx, I feel you, buddy. Oh, boy. I'm taking this as a validation of what I'm doing. Here's an example I'm just going to put in here of Marx being very mad about this. The self-employed laborer, for example, is his own wage laborer, and his own means of production confront him in his own mind as capital. As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage laborer. Anomalies of this type then offer a favorable field for outpourings of drivel about

productive and unproductive labor so you know even in the 1800s people are people are being incredibly normal about this they're saying things that are great and good and only only that they're being they're being exceptionally good marx isn't slowly being driven mad by reading it all. But, you know, when it's being used as a technical category, the sort of productive versus unproductive distinction, you know, it can tell you a lot of stuff about how a capitalist economy functions. But when it inevitably becomes a moral category, things get very bad very quickly. And so we're going to go into two times that this has gone

very badly. The Nazis and Ronald Reagan. Now, the Nazis and Reagan aren't quite doing the same thing, although there's a lot of similarities, you know to be expected from a band who went to a nazi cemetery that included a bunch of ss dudes and then gave a speech defending his actions where he said and i quote they which is referring to nazi soldiers quote they were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps which i i i camps, which I, I, what the fuck, what are you even supposed to do with that? Like, I just, this guy was the president of the United States. I mean, I like, I don't know. It makes sense, but like, it never even crossed my mind that it was like, it would even be possible to have a take that is people in the Nazi army are actually just as much victims as the people in the concentration camps. Like, I don't know.

Baffling stuff by Reagan. I mean, I guess not baffling considering how closely his administration is tied to a bunch of sort of Nazis who became like anti-communists. Well, he were always anti-communists, but who became part of sort of like institutional anti-communism and like the the post-war era but god what a what a terrible thing um i'm getting my shots in at reagan now because this is about to get so incredibly bleak so yay so okay so the the right is able to sort of – very successful, in fact, in transforming this distinction between productive and nonproductive labor into a moral category. And then they infuse it with anti-Semitism. I don't know, the horror of antisemitism, productive labor is transformed into productive and unproductive members of society. And this is one of the origins of Nazi race science and racecraft. They have their attempt to, quote unquote, purify their race, which relies on a distinction between sort of productive and nonproductive members of society, who's like, quote unquote, value and productive know come to be seen as like genetically heritable which you know from the nazi perspective

they are like oh this is stuff this is heritable uh we need to do eugenics and mass exterminations of you know increasing numbers of disabled queer communists and especially jewish and roma people to ensure that only the quote unquoteunquote productive members decided to remain and pass down their traits. And this is fucking horrible, but this is also too simple of an explanation for what actually happens. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. The horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better

Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Or wherever you get your podcasts. specifically looking at anti-Semitism. And in order to do this, I'm going to turn to the great social theorist, Moish Pistone, rest in peace, died a few years ago. Apparently a great guy, I don't know. But yeah, Pistone and his essay, Anti-Semitism and National Socialism. This is something I recommend people read it in full. It's a bit theoretically intense. It's also one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. But I think it's important to understand what national socialism actually was and what it's what it's sort of ideological basis was because it. Oh, boy.

Not only has it not gone away, it, you know, it's it's it's it's it's doing it's doing a lot of the sort of work that we've been sort of discussing. Okay, so what is Pistone actually talking about? So Pistone sees Nazi antisemitism not just as the sort of socialism of fools where Jewish people get substituted for capitalists to deceive the worker. And okay, yeah, it serves this function to some extent. But for Pistone, Nazi

anti-Semitism is its own sort of horrific, incomplete anti-capitalist system. It's this sort of ghastly Aryan mirror of Marxism. To get an understanding of what he means by this because this is something that is you know like it's it's it's deeply it's kind of theoretically intense but it's worth it so in in marxism this the central mystery of the commodity is that a commodity is a, well, I mean,

central mystery isn't the right word, but this is one of the opening things in Capital is that, you know, this is this thing called the commodity fetish. You have a commodity. A commodity is simultaneously a concrete physical object that nonetheless contains within it an abstract social relation.

It has at the same time a use value, which is like, you know, the thing that makes it useful, right? Like take a pencil, right? Pencil, it has a use value. The use value is that you can like use it to write things, right? And you can use it to erase things. But the pencil also has an exchange value. And the exchange value is the value, quote unquote, that you use to compare it to other commodities, right? It's like, how much is this thing worth? How much is this compared to other commodities? This is an enormous, that's kind of a simplification of it. But what's happening here is that the exchange value that lets you compare how much a pencil is worth, how much a bracelet is worth, right?

That's not an actual characteristic of the pencil or the bracelet. That is a serious, you know, that's an embedded social relation, right? It's an embedded capitalist social relation that allows a commodity to be compared to all of the commodities by, again, like embedding this capitalist social relation into it. The important part for our purposes is that the commodity has at the same time a concrete component, which is the physical object, and an abstract component, which is the sort of capitalist social relation embedded in the pencil that makes it appear to have value. Here's Pistone. In the pencil that makes it appear to have value. Here's Pistone. As indicated above, on the logical level of the analysis of the commodity, the quote, double character allows the commodity to appear as a purely material entity rather than as an objectification of mediated social relations. So this is a more complicated way of saying what I've sort of been trying to get at,

which is that the commodity, because it's a physical object, right? The commodity fetish allows the commodity to appear as if it's just a pure physical object instead of something that is produced by capitalism and contains within it capitalist social relations that give it value. So we'll back back back to pistone relatedly it allows concrete labor to appear as a purely material creative process separate from capitalist social relations on the logical level of capital

the double character labor process and valorization process and by valorization process he means the process that turns you know capital into more capital so the fact that there's both a labor process and a valorization process allows industrial production to appear as a purely material creative process separable from capital the manifest form of the concrete is now more organic. Industrial capital can then appear as linear descendant of quote natural artisanal labor as quote organically rooted in opposition to rootless quote parasitic finance capital. You can see here where the whole sort of productive versus unproductive labor distinction has ended up, right? It's been transformed into the organic concrete rooted productive national worker and entrepreneur versus

rootless parasitic finance capital. This is unbelievably dangerous because now having set the concrete against the abstract, the fascist proceeds to turn the abstract into a people, which is Jewish people. The result of this is that in the fascist mind, the sort of concrete productive worker and the entrepreneur stand against the abstract anti-national finance capital, personified in the figure of the Jew. Here's Pistone again at what happened next. Here's Pistone again at what happened next The extermination of European Jewry is the indication that it is far too simple to deal with Nazism as a mass movement with anti-capitalist overtones would shed that husk in the 1934 Rome push At the latest, once it had served its purpose, its state power had been seized In the first place, ideological forms of thought are not simply conscious manipulations. In the second place, this view misunderstands the nature of Nazi

anti-capitalism, the extent to which it was intrinsically bound to the anti-Semitic worldview. Auschwitz indicates that connection. It is true that the somewhat too concrete and plebeian anti-capitalism of the SA was dispensed with by 1934. Not, however, the anti-Semitic thrust, the knowledge, quote-unquote, that the source of evil is abstract, the Jew. A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced, which, unfortunately, has to take the form of the production of goods, of use values. Unfortunately, has to take the form of the production of goods, of use values. The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier of the abstract.

The extermination camps were not a terrible version of such a factory, but rather should be seen as its grotesque, Aryan, quote, anti-capitalist negation. Auschwitz was a factory to, quote-unquote, destroy value, that is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract. Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to liberate the concrete from the abstract. The first step was to dehumanize, that is to rip away the quote-unquote mask of humanity, of qualitative specificity, and reveal the Jews for quote, what they really are,

shadows, ciphers, numbered abstractions. The second step was to then eradicate that abstractness, to transform it into smoke, trying in the process to rest away the last remains of the concrete material, use value, clothes, gold, hair, soap. Auschwitz, not the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, was the real German revolution, the attempted overthrow, not merely of a political order order but of the existing social formation by this one deed the world was to be made safe from the tyranny of the abstract in the process the nazis quote-unquote liberated themselves from humanity

the nazis lost the war against the soviet union america and britain They won their war, their revolution against the European Jews. And this ideology, this pitting of the abstract against the concrete is so powerful that it was never defeated. By the time the Nazis were defeated militarily, they had, by the combined might of five of the largest empires in human history, they had already won. And their ideology never went away. If you look closely, you can still see it moving throughout the world. You can see it in the left making exactly the same mistakes it made before, waging war against the abstract in the name of an anti-capitalism that can never end with the actual destruction of capitalism in that specific form. You can see it in a right that openly espouses these exact same ideas

in the form of pitting their nationalists and patriots against the globalists in the way it pits national American or Russian or Hungarian workers against George Soros. It is the basis of all modern right-wing thought. And when we come back from ads, we are going to talk about right-wing thoughts, other basis, Ronald Reagan's rampant racism.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Would you join me at the fire and dare enter? Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts. We've now seen one way that the productive and unproductive worker distinction can be turned into unfathomable right-wing violence. And now we're going to take a look at another one,

which is the myth of the welfare queen. So one of the ways that Reagan eventually took power was by, I mean, literally he was doing this for like a decade and he does it for like 20 fucking years. It's insufferable. He's screaming about the myth of the welfare queen. So the welfare queen for people who like,

I don't know, we're too young to like, remember what the, I mean, I wasn't around for the original height of it, but, like, I fucking remember it from when I was a kid. It's this sort of, like, mythical racist caricature of, like, a black woman who lives off of scamming the welfare system. And you can see what's happening here pretty clearly, right? This is not, like, a particularly subtle political maneuver. The plan is to pit, you know, sort of so-called like productive workers and entrepreneurs versus people on welfare. And through the sort of incredible power of racism and specifically misogynoir, which is, you know, through the power of America's just like specific abiding hatred of black women, the identity of the worker is transformed into a racial category. So what you're actually dealing

with is this opposition Reagan is trying to create between quote unquote, like productive white people who like work for a living or whatever. And, you know, black welfare queens, quote unquote, who are dependent on the state and don't work. And this is sort of Reagan's framing of it. Now, if you go back to the sort of older Marxist conception of class, right, like unemployed black people are like unambiguously part of the working class. Part of what was going on here actually was Reagan attempting to sort of crack down on black welfare activists who were doing a lot of really incredible organizing, ranging from sort of like organizing mass protests to like doing squats to doing like full on building occupations. around Reagan by the end because by like term two, Reagan has basically checked out. But the people around Reagan can see which way the wind is blowing. And they are busy sort of like lining up every fan they can find to make the wind blow a bit stronger. And the way that the winds are blowing is that a bunch of people are about to be spat

out of the capitalist system into increasingly precarious service jobs or just no jobs at all. And as the sort of crisis dynamics emerged and intensified, and people tend to forget this, but Reagan's term started with him nuking the economy, setting off a recession and jacking employment up to 10%. But as this unfolds, Reagan sees a perfect opportunity to sever what Marx would call the industrial reserve army, who are all the people who've been spat out of the capitalist system and forced to face sort of precarity and unemployment. He sees an opportunity to split these people from workers who held on to their jobs. And the way you do this is by talking about class in a way that's really about race. This new sort of moral division of productive and non-productive worker is incredibly racialized, which is to say that, like, I mean, it's just really racist. There's no sort of – I don't know.

There's no – I'm not going to do the circumlocution on that shit. It is really racist, and it's specifically designed to pit white workers against black workers. And it's also, this is something we should point out here. Like reality has no effect on the sort of like the actual propaganda value. But like the people who are on welfare who are working, like they're off, they're working a lot. They're working really shit jobs. They're working more than the people who aren't on welfare in a lot of cases. What's happening here, right, is this entire thing is very specifically designed to pit white workers against black workers by invoking racial prejudice and slightly more subtly, it's designed to remove black workers from the category of labor altogether through you know the sort of means of

america's like deep and abiding hatred of black women now back in sort of reality and again bearing in mind reality has no effect on this bullshit but you know back in reality like the actual biggest welfare cheat of the modern era is uh brett farr former quarterback of the minnesota vikings please send all complaints to i write okay on twitter farv managed to spend 77 million dollars of welfare money on a bunch of bullshit that includes like trying to get a multi-million dollar volleyball facility built at his daughter's school uh the actual woman who was like the model for the first like welfare queen thing like may have stolen eight thousand dollars but you know this this doesn't matter at all because again like reality's ability to combat propaganda is incredibly weak

and you know and the other the other thing that's that's important to understand about this right is this was never actually about the money and this is something that people use to try to combat this stuff right which people will point out and they're right that like yeah like you know in order in order to like quote-unquote combat welfare fraud like you spend more money trying to combat the fraud that you save on the fraud but that's not the point that's not the point at all the point is again like turning white workers against black workers happen to be unemployed and it works incredibly well because they tap into two just really powerful wells of emotion racism and they happen to do a second one which is people hating work but because this is the right the way they tap into people hating work was they transform it into the

seething hatred and resentment at the possibility of someone not having to have the suffering that you have and doing the thing that you always want to do, which is not work. And then tying that to, Oh, these people don't have to suffer the way that I do because they're living off of like

the product of my labor and you know you you can you can see the sort of ghosts right of like an anti-capitalist critique of labor which is like yeah there are a bunch of people who like don't work a fucking day in their lives off the process proceeds of our labor it. They wear a bunch of suits and they're like 17th generation, like descendants of the Walton family or whatever. But this is the sort of right-wing version of it. And so through the sort of lens of racism and through the sort of transformation of class and productivity into sort of like pure race race discourse they've managed to sort of

you know they've managed to completely transform the way people think about class and this is a this is a big part of the reason why the way americans think about class is so absolutely so incredibly messed up it's a big part of the reason why you know the United States has spent I mean spent the next 50 years doing this unbelievably merciless like ruthless

purge and just like mass infliction of suffering on the poorest people in the US it's because of this shit and this is also the reason that no one you know if you're fucking reading the new york times right you will never hear anybody talk about black workers they will only ever talk about white workers and this is because that ideological project the ideological project that reagan

was attempting to do, was a big part of it was, again, about an attempt to expel black workers from the popular collective imagination of the working class. And it fucking worked. If you're a white pundit, you can do this thing. You can make an entire career off of studying, quote

unquote, the working class, only ever talk to white people because that's the only part of the working class that exists to these people that they even will pretend matters and then you know never mention black workers even existing at all much less like engage with black workers is like core of the workers movements and no one outside of like actual leftist circles were even bad and i know no one even thinks this is fucking weird right and you can get away with this shit because you know 80 of all discourse about class is really about race or gender and you know 80 of all discourse about race is fucking white people talking to other white people and that's what we're going to end for today uh we will we will come back to

the sort of ruling class reaction to this another time. But in the meantime, this has been Naked App and Here. Go out into the world and make something that's not this one. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

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