The Other Red Pill: the Desert of the Real

In the previous installment of The Other Red Pill, we broke down the basics of economic relations and class and how ownership of capital, or lack thereof, was crucial to that.  While many factors and variables play into things, higher levels of ownership of capital translate into being higher on the class totem pole (bourgeoisie as opposed to proletariat, in Marx's admittedly antiquated terminology) and thus into more wealth, privilege and political influence.

It's important to keep in mind that class structure, even when framed in these concrete terms, is surprisingly complex.  The small shopkeeper and the majority shareholders in the world's largest banks are both, technically, bourgeoisie, but exist worlds apart from one another in terms of actual wealth and influence.  Ditto for unskilled and uneducated laborers vs. highly trained professionals who own their own tools but are still employed by others.  To say nothing of the role of government and its employees.  If you have any kind of investment portfolio or even a savings account, you are, to however limited an extent, the owner of productive capital.  So go straight to gulag, enemy of the people!

Marx was sharply critical of the class structure of his day, perhaps because it was so stark: there was the bourgeoisie who grew fat off the toil of the laborers.  Before this, the emerging middle class first acquired the capital needed at the dawn of the industrial revolution through such niceties as the enclosure of agricultural lands, acquiring large stocks of precious metals, usually by force from foreign cultures, wars with rival powers and the notorious Atlantic slave trade, among others.  By the time Adam Smith's famous theories of market theory and the industrial revolution came along, they were - believe it or not, surprisingly progressive doctrines.  Probably not to poor sods toiling away in textile mills for fifteen hours a day in early 19th century England, mind you.  Nor to the poor sods similarly toiling away in China today, so that you can buy stuff on a mixture of high interest credit and wages not high enough to be at all interesting.  The gravy train chugs along.  For the bourgeoisie, at least.

So if your boss is a prick, take heart in the fact that he's not unusual, and that his boss is probably a bigger prick still.  Bosses have a very long history of being jerks.  That's not likely to change soon.  If yours isn't, you're the exception rather than the rule.  Count yourself lucky.

So what does all of this have to do with anything, you might ask?

A great deal, as a matter of fact.

Not in the sense that there's going to be a revolution, as Marx predicted and hoped, to overthrow the class structure and bring about a classless society.  That's not politically feasible, obviously, and may not even be desirable.  The real issue today is that class, in the historical materialist sense of the term, has largely faded from the public mind, even among anti-capitalists.  This has resulted in distortions in the way a lot of social issues are perceived.

It is no secret, for example, that income inequality has risen sharply in the past several decades.  It is no coincidence that this has occurred alongside a steady withering of the "old left" - a way of analyzing inequality in terms of class and a subsequent rise of the "new left", which emphasizes identity and culture as driving forces of inequality.

A lot of factors have fueled this trend, beginning with the Frankfurt School in Europe prior to WW2, and the proliferation of their theories in postwar academia.  Then came the new social movements emergent in the 1960s, and as a parallel development beginning in the 1970s and 80s, the demise of socialism.  In the early 1990s the USSR dissolved, driving the final nail into the coffin of Marxist credibility in the eyes of many.  The unions grew weaker as a result of manufacturing jobs moving to more repressive, low wage environments.

Leftist parties, desperate for new bases of political support, turned to an emergent class of urban knowledge workers, cosmopolitan in it s racial and gender composition and educated in an academia that cared much more for cultural critical theory, postmodern philosophy and identity politics than the dry, antiquated theory of Marxist materialism.  Leftist ideology gradually forgot how essential economic relations were to the concept of class, and began to see inequality through lenses of culture and identity instead, casting white males in the role once reserved for the bourgeoisie and women, people of color and LGBT people in the role once reserved for the proletariat - often with little regard for the actual class of the people in question.  Academically trained "leftists" attributed privilege to even poor and working class white males that they would not attribute to "marginalized" CEOs, however less common they may have been.

Conservative parties also cashed in on the changes that were taking place.  They appealed to white male working class voters through appeal to their own identities, and with union stewards far less likely to be on hand to advise the white proletariat of its true class interests, they were more likely to cast their lot in with right wing parties.  This did little good, as these parties merely exacerbated the economic inequalities already long on the rise.  Much of the voting middle class were sitting ducks for right wing politicians in the 1990s and early 2000s who framed capitalist economics in terms of morality and individualism instead of class relations.  The left, for its part, now cared much more about culture than about economics, and it was along these lines that political battle lines have since been drawn.

It is no secret that the left/right divide has grown more bitter in the last fifteen or so years.  From social conservatism and liberalism, we now have the emergence of the identitarian determinism of the Social Justice Warriors on the left and its shadow counterpart, the Alt-Right - both of which are the terminal points for class-blind politics on both ends of the spectrum.  From here, the frustration and militancy on both ends are only going to get worse so long as the class relations that are the real causes of inequality and alienation remain invisible and the resulting social problems blamed on identity groups - white males for the SJWs and Jews and other minorities for the alt-right.  And for added instability, toss mass Islamic immigration into the mix.  One need but look at the state of race, religious and gender relations as reflected in any social media outlet to see the consequences.  Intersectional feminists will not be losing their taste for white male tears any time soon, and that, quite frankly, is the least of our worries.

All the while, wealth inequality and its consequent effects on politics from the local to the global are only going to get worse.

As Morpheus so bluntly put it to Neo in that iconic moment in The Matrix - "Welcome to the Desert of the Real."

The Other Red Pill: Tense Relations

In the previous installment of the other red pill, we looked briefly at the overarching premise of the material conception of history, which is that the way in which people sustain themselves economically form the basis of society and culture.  More or less.  Nothing is ever so simple as that, of course, and it would be a mistake to believe that it is, but I'm sure its importance is indisputable to any honest historian, economist or sociologist.

There's no real way of sugar coating what is to come now.  And that's Marxist terminology and a fair bit of it.  And a few general accounting and financial management principles on top of that.  In my four plus decades on this Earth, I've studied a fair bit of both.  So keep this page bookmarked for those nights when you really need something to put you to sleep.  But it's useful stuff to know because, for reasons that will be explained in subsequent installments of the other red pill, this is going to be an important way to look at social issues for people interested in being able to lock horns with right wingers and regressive leftists with any hope of obtaining decisively positive results.  So here goes:

As mentioned in the previous section, we evolved to be social animals and productive animals.  Some of us more than others, no doubt.  Groups of people have advantages over lone individuals in that they can have a division of labor that allows for things to get done more efficiently.  Anyone who's ever done work in a group can be forgiven for believing otherwise.  But we take for granted just how much this is done already.  If you actually have a job, besides being lucky these days, you have a recognizably specialized niche in the overall economy.  No one person does it all.

So let's say you're one of the lucky ones and you work full time these days.  You're a wage earning schmuck somewhere.   We're going to follow you around a bit to get a glimpse of how this whole system works.  Once at work - in a plant, warehouse or office you don't own, situated on land you don't own, you typically use tools of some sort - machines, computers and so on.  You don't own those either.  These Marx referred to as the means or instruments of labor.  So that they don't sound too Marxist, the guys you work for probably refer to the same things as capital assets, or something similar.

While at work, you utilize your labor power along with the means of labor to act upon what are called the subjects of labor - raw materials, raw data, inventory and so on, with the intent of adding value somehow.  You don't own any of this either.  If this doesn't sound terribly exciting, that's because it usually isn't.  That's why a lot of people, yourself possibly among them, spend a fair bit of your day watching the clock.  Or reading blogs like this.  Don't let your boss catch you, or you'll end up in what Marx called the Industrial Reserve Army.

Now pay attention, because this is central to it all: The instruments of labor, labor power and the subjects of labor together are referred to as the means of production.  Did I mention you don't own any of it?

Since you don't own any of this, who does?  This is a more complex question.  Chances are, it's not the guy yelling at you to get back to work.  He's probably got somebody looking over him telling him to not to goof off as much as he does either.  Not that you feel sorry for him, of course.  He's still a jerk.  But he's not the tophat and tails capitalist that Marxist jargon brings to mind.  Business ownership structures are complex and varied, but at some point a bank expecting repayment or shareholders expecting growth or dividends are the ultimate owners.  Taken together, all of the kinds of relationships that people enter into for productive purposes are the relations of production, and they vary largely by ownership, or lack thereof, of capital.

Now pay attention again, because another important concept here: all of the people in any society whose jobs have the same or very similar relations of production are what is really meant by the term class.  And all this time you thought it referred to something along the lines of taste or decorum.  Marx's most famous examples of classes were the bourgeoisie - those who owned the means of production, and the proletariat - those who did not.

As mentioned above, things are more complicated than that in actuality.  Bourgeoisie and proletariat are best thought of us a spectrum rather than mutually exclusive absolutes, though they can be.  For example, you can have a "functional" capitalist, who manages the means of production but is also herself an "employee" of a higher level executive or board of directors, and a "rentier" capitalist, who profits entirely off of  ownership.

But as concepts, a class that makes its living entirely from profits generated due to ownership of capital, and a class that completely lacks capital and has no choice but to sell its time and labor in exchange for a wage, are useful to us.  The class structure of society together with its means of production are what is meant by the term mode of production.  Capitalism is so called because it is capital - the above mentioned means of labor - are what really makes the world go round.

As you can probably imagine, capitalism is a better deal for the bourgeoisie than it is for the proletariat.

You're a lucky fellow if your relations of production are a source of happiness in your life.  If your employees are smart and productive, if your boss is decent and appreciative, if your banker or landlord is a someone you'd love to have a glass of wine with or anything like that, consider yourself fortunate.  Oftentimes they're not, but not because they're fundamentally bad people, although they can be.  The economic relations of production naturally make a lot of these relationships antagonistic.

Our full time worker, however nice he is and however decent his supervisor may be, is ultimately listed as an expense on the company income statement.  Expenses are things that people like to keep low, and not because they're greedy evil capitalists, or for that matter, (((greedy evil capitalists.)))  It's about something much simpler than that: nobody likes to spend more than they have to for the things they need.  Especially if their boss expects frugality on their part.

Which is not to say that you - the worker - have no value to your employers.  Okay, maybe you personally have no value to them, but the job you do does.  This is because labor power is needed in order to make all those shiny capital assets do what they're there to do.  Which is to make people other than you rich.  Isn't it nice to feel useful?  But it's not a total bust - you do get a wage for it, and so long as you're producing more than you're costing the company, you're fine.

Contrast this with the above mentioned means of labor, or capital assets.  Accountants, managers and other fascinating people of that sort like these things, because they add value to the business.  They look good on balance sheets, and balance sheets that don't look good cause problems.

To get balance sheets looking good, bossy types of people want to have revenues exceed expense (and keep in mind that you are an expense) so that the company can post a net income.  Net income can then be used to either pay debt, acquire more assets (of which you are not) or increase the owner or shareholder equity in the business.  Balance sheets are evaluated largely by how much debt the company has compared to its assets and/or its equity - the less the better, generally.  They don't achieve this by giving you a raise.

Like the good German he was, Karl Marx had a word for everything.  The money you as a proletariat need to generate over and above your salary in order to make sure that income statement looks good is referred to as surplus value.  Which, for reasons we'll explore in future installments - is not necessarily always a bad thing.  The tense and conflicting interests of various classes, compounded by the lack of power and control that the lower classes suffered he referred to as alienation.

That's been your daily dose of the other red pill.  Now get back to work, you prole!

The Other Red Pill. And I do mean red.

We're all familiar with the iconic scene in the first Matrix film where Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the blue and red pills.  This has since become a cultural metaphor for any choice between the acceptance of blissful ignorance and hard reality.  Between continued acceptance of vs. initiation into rebellion against the "world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth ... that you are slave.  Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.  Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch.  A prison for your mind," in Morpheus's compelling words.

This metaphor is most common in underground caverns of the internet, where it connotes a rejection of mainstream liberal narratives on racial and gender equality, and a subsequent initiation into some kind of race realist or manosphere concepts.  You are then "redpilled" on race or gender.

It's time to reboot the Matrix yet again.

The agents caught up to Morpheus this time, so it's up to me to present you with a choice.  This is your last chance.  After this, there is no turning back.  You take the blue pill, the story ends.  You wake up in your bed and believe that power and privilege are all about race and gender.  Or that racial and gender equality are lies hoisted on you by the politically correct establishment.  Or that people are unequal only because some people just work harder than others, are innately superior somehow or another, talented in unique ways or are just lucky.  Or whatever.

Or ... you take the red pill, and you stay in Wonderland, and I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole really goes.  Remember: all I'm offering is the truth.  Nothing more.

Red pill it is.