You Can't Rebrand a Class War

Move left, just to stay standing.

We see you. (Photo: Getty)

This week, a federal judge blocked the largest proposed grocery merger in history, between Albertson’s and Kroger. The merger, which would have further consolidated the industry, raised prices for consumers, and hurt the power of workers, was strenuously opposed by unions. It was brought down by a lawsuit filed by Lina Khan, the Biden administration’s crusading FTC chair, who fought against the consolidation of corporate power harder than any of her predecessors. Khan said that it was “the first time the FTC has ever sought to block a merger not just because it’s gonna be bad for consumers, but also for workers.”

Also this week, the Trump administration announced the Khan would be fired and replaced with Andrew Ferguson, a Republican FTC commissioner. In Ferguson’s own pitch for the job, he wrote that his goal would be to “Reverse Lina Khan’s Anti-Business Agenda,” “Stop Lina Khan’s war on mergers,” “Protect Freedom of Speech and Fight Wokeness,” and “Fight back against the trans agenda.”

Also this week, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—two real pieces of shit—blocked an effort to reconfirm Lauren McFerran to the National Labor Relations Board, which would have ensured that the board had a Democratic majority for the first two years of Trump’s term, which would have served to hold off the Trump administration’s incoming efforts to roll back all of the progress on worker-friendly labor regulation that has been made over the past four years. Now, thanks to these two scumbags, Trump will not only replace NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abbruzzo—the single most pro-union official in the federal government—with an anti-union crusader; he will also be able to ensure that the entire agency is actively weaponized against union power. Because changing regulations takes time, those extra two years will be critical for the Republican effort to erase the Biden administration’s gains in making the government friendly to the task of union organizing, rather than hostile.

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Also this week, the world’s richest man, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to on the president-elect’s campaign, and who has threatened to fund primary challengers to any Republicans who oppose the president-elect’s agenda, saw his net worth hit $447 billion, on the strength of the rising value of his company SpaceX, a government contractor that stands to gain thanks in part to the fact that the president-elect just appointed a SpaceX-loving billionaire as the next head of NASA. Elon Musk is confident enough to publicly taunt the SEC’s ongoing attempts to regulate his activity, which is probably safe, since the president-elect that he got elected has ensured that the SEC chair who is trying to regulate him is on the way out. Though Musk is not formally a member of the president-elect’s cabinet, at least nine other billionaires are. They and their fellow members of the plutocracy will soon be rewarded with a tax cut of more than $4 trillion. The corporations that made a big deal about cutting ties with Trump’s allies after January 6 are about to break their arms patting Trump on the back as he slashes the corporate tax rate to 15%.

The first and most obvious thing to be said about all of this is: If you are one of the many analysts seduced by the idea that the Trump administration would be in some way friendly towards the “working class” or would in some way advance the concept of antitrust enforcement in the public good, you are a god damn idiot. Please stop analyzing politics for the general public. Horseshoe theory has poisoned your brains and blinded you to reality. The total melding of the federal government with the interests of the ultrarich and a strongman leader who conducts federal policy in service of only those who bow to him is not “populism.” It is fascism. I would love to stop entertaining this charade so that I do not have to periodically rewrite this for the next four years. “Hey, Lina Khan’s replacement has vowed to focus antitrust enforcement against big tech monopolies!” Yes and his motivations are not “economic equality” or “the public good” but the fact that he and other right wingers are pissed that their accounts got censored and that big tech companies are too “woke” and so the tech companies will take exaggerated steps to cancel their DEI programs and what not in order to placate the right wing and we will ultimately get neither true antimonopoly enforcement or trivial social progress. Oh, he’s against “big tech?” I wonder why big tech’s richest megabillionaire Elon Musk would be copacetic with him, then? Could it be because the government is going to be run not according to philosophical principles but instead in the way that a thin-skinned mob boss runs his empire, so that everyone will be able to buy their way out of everything with flattery and legalized bribery? Great stuff. What a victory for The People.

Yelling at pundits, unfortunately, is not going to fix the downward spiral that we are in. This is not just some minor issue of policy preference. America’s grand situation is this: Fifty years of rising economic inequality has sapped the public trust (for good reason!) and destroyed faith in our institutions and consolidated political and economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer rich people. Turning around this long-term trend of inequality will require A) the strengthening of organized labor, in order to pull more of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of workers, and balance out the ability of the rich to purchase political influence, and B) aggressive work by the federal government and the courts to restrict corporate power and break up monopolies and create a friendly atmosphere for the large scale labor organizing that will be necessary. As demonstrated by the handful of items above, and by common sense, the Trump administration is going to the opposite of those things.

The problem with this is not just an “aw shucks I would prefer if we went the other way” type of thing. The problem is that the long-term trends—inequality, concentration of wealth and power, and the resulting inability of the political system to reflect the interests of regular people—is destroying America. It means the nation is not, in a very straightforward sense, working. If democracy is a machine meant to ensure that the government serves the will and the interests of the people, ours is broken, and instead of fixing it, it is being further stripped for parts. The fact that people across the political spectrum reacted with glee to the murder of an evil health insurance CEO is a big tell. If there is great inequality, and great unfairness, and power is too concentrated, and instead of opening the system up to regular people so that they can reverse those things, you come in and make the system operate more towards the interests of the rich and well-connected, the people will, inevitably, get more angry. Crazy things happen when many people get very angry and have no legitimate political outlets for their legitimate rage. If we, collectively, do not want more crazy things to happen, we must reform the system. The Trump administration is not going to do that. So consider what is left.

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The Democratic Party is such a dispiriting collection of careerists that it can be frustrating to continually speak about what they should be doing, while watching them always choose to instead continue the things that serve the careerists. But let us speak rationally here, regardless. We have a two-party system and the Democratic Party is the opposition. We know what needs to be done and we know that the Republicans are going to do the opposite. The only move for the Democratic Party—the rational move, the reasonable move—is to get more radical. Pundits will call this “going further left” but really what we are talking about is pulling harder in the direction of where the nation needs to go, in response to a Republican Party that is pulling harder towards plutocracy. If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise. The failure of the Democratic Party, institutionally, to grasp the reality that it needs to be running left as hard as possible is a pathetic thing to watch. When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs.

And if the decline of labor unions is robbing the working class of its most powerful tool and undermining the general health of society, the reasonable thing for the labor movement to do is not to play footsie with a political party that has shown repeatedly through words and deeds that it stands against the existence of organized labor. The answer is spend every last dollar we have to organize and organize and strike and strike. Women are workers. Immigrants are workers. The poor are workers. A party that is banning abortion and violently deporting immigrants and economically assaulting the poor is not a friend to the labor movement, ever. (An opposition party that cannot rouse itself to participate on the correct side of the ongoing class war is not our friend, either—the difference is that the fascists will always try to actively destroy unions, while the Democrats will just not do enough to help us, a distinction that is important to understand.) In other words, don’t be the Teamster that is flattering the fascist on stage at the RNC. Be the Teamster that is getting ready to strike at Amazon this weekend.

When political pundits and strategists and party operatives anchor their sense of reality in a bygone era that no longer exists, they are bound to misjudge what is happening now. They are bound to fail to recognize the reorientation of the national landscape, the tilting of the ground that requires a lean left in order to keep things stable. There is a class war, it is being won by the rich, and they are about to stage an enormous offensive for the next four years. Position yourselves accordingly. It is one thing to fight against great power and lose. That is part of fighting. That is forgivable. What is not forgivable is to see all this coming, and to choose to continue to stand in the same place and say the same things and advocate for the status quo and pretend that America just needs to “get back to normal.” “Normal” has been broken for the lifetimes of most of the people alive today. Radicalism is only getting more and more correct. Recognize it or get run over.

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• Related reading: Radical Is Now Rational; Radical Capital; What it Means to Be “A Tad Radical.”

• Last week, dozens of workers at Vox Media and Thrillist were laid off, just in time for the holidays. The Vox Media Union and Thrillist Union are fundraising for laid off members. You can donate here.

• I wrote a book called “The Hammer,” about the labor movement, and how it can save us, and what is happening to it and to America right now. You can order it wherever books are sold. If you’re in Florida, come out and see me at The Lynx Books in Gainesville on Saturday, December 28 at 6 pm, in conversation with Sara Nelson.

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