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Palliative Liberalism Can't Cure Our Ailing Working Class

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  • Palliative Liberalism Can't Cure Our Ailing Working Class

    Good story that sounds like it is on our side.
    https://www.theamericanconservative....working-class/

    The premise has been that U.S. corporations like Apple did not offshore production to China to take advantage of low-wage, unfree workers and state subsidies of various kinds. No, it is often implied, the poor Chinese workers migrating from rural areas to make iPhones in sweatshop factories in southern China in degrading conditions for a pittance had superior STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) skills unmatched among ignorant American or European workers. Provide these “left-behind” workers in the West with appropriate skills (“human capital” in the pseudoeconomic jargon of neoliberalism) and their earnings will increase.
    On the basis of SBTC theory, school curricula in the U.S. and elsewhere have been reconfigured to focus on STEM skills. For a generation, the conventional wisdom has held that the “jobs of the future” are “knowledge economy” jobs like software coding. But is this really true?

    For working-class Americans and Europeans, the jobs of the future are mostly low-wage jobs, many of them in health care. In most of these jobs, the low wages are caused not by a lack of university education, which is not needed, nor by a lack of vocational skills, but by a lack of bargaining power on the part of workers.
    The American writer Daniel McCarthy has aptly called approaches like the ones I have criticized in this essay “palliative liberalism.” However popular these miracle cures may be among the managerial elite and the overclass intelligentsia, as remedies for working-class distress in the deindustrialized heartlands of the Western world the panaceas of redistributionism, education, and antimonopolism are like prescriptions of aspirin for cancer. They may ameliorate the symptoms, but they do not cure the disease—the imbalance of power, within Western nation-states, between the overclass and the working class as a whole, including many exploited immigrant workers who labor for the affluent in the metropolitan hubs.

    If banana republicanism is to be avoided as the fate of the Western democracies, reformers in America and Europe will have to do far more than buy off the population with a subsidy here or an antitrust lawsuit there. Indeed, if a package of minor, ameliorative reforms is handed down from the mountaintops of Davos or Aspen by a claque of benevolent billionaires and the technocrats and the politicians and intellectuals whom the billionaires subsidize, with little or no public participation or debate, the lack of voice and agency of most citizens will be made apparent in the most humiliating way.

    What the racially and religiously diverse working-class majorities in the Western nations need is what they once possessed and no longer have: countervailing power. In the absence of mass-membership institutions comparable to the older grassroots parties, labor unions, and religious organizations, which can provide ordinary citizens with the collective power to check the abuses of the managerial elite, palliative reform at most can create oligarchy with a human face.
    He goes through a bunch of stuff. You'll have to read it to see what he is saying.
    At least somebody from American Conservative is looking at it....thats a start.......other than saying the other stuff that he points out which has been said for decades.
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