Why Don't The Poor Rise Up?

The title question was on Thomas B. Edsall's mind in his New York Times editorial of the same name.

Why are today’s working poor so quiescent? I’m not the only one posing this question.

“Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” asks The Economist. “Why don’t voters demand more redistribution?” wonders David Samuels, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. The headline on an April 7 National Catholic Reporter article reads: “Why aren’t Americans doing more to protest inequality?”

There are legitimate grounds for grievance. For those in the bottom quintile, household income in inflation-adjusted dollars has dropped sharply, from $13,787 in 2000 to $11,651 in 2013. According to the Census Bureau, 64 million Americans currently live in the bottom quintile.

Before we can answer today's question, we must first ask "is it in the nature of things for the poor to rise up?" The human assumption in all cases seems to be that it is. After all, they're getting screwed, right? Why don't they do something about it? Well, maybe it's not in their nature to do that, unless they're starving.

Historically, people point to the rise of the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but if you think about it, when was the last time the poor rebelled against their greedy masters? Those 19th and 20th century workers were actual wage slaves. We have something similar now, but 21st century wage slavery is much subtler than it used to be. Yeah, the poor rose up in Egypt recently, but that's because they were starving. Those 18th century peasants in France were starving.

You know, human monkeys in social hierarchies and all the rest. Even if the American poor did rise up, they would quickly find themselves on the business end of a {gun, taser, fire hose, tear gas cannister etc.}. I mean, police are already killing people in America for no reason at all. An actual rebellion in the streets would be a golden opportunity for them.

Here's a challenge for you — name some instances where the poor rose up just because they were poor and a very few people were rich. That's the American case now. Strictly political revolutions don't count (e.g. the 18th century American Revolution, the Russian Revolution).

But for the purposes of this article, I will grant the dubious premise. So, why don't the poor rise up?

I looked at the title question in my essay The End Of History. You might review it, and you might also look at my Flatland perspective on capitalism. But let's get back to Edsall's essay.

Society has drastically changed since the high-water mark of the 1930s and 1960s when collective movements captured the public imagination. Now, there is an inexorable pressure on individuals to, in effect, fly solo. There is very little social support for class-based protest – what used to be called solidarity.

Describing a process that sociologists have termed “individualization,” Christopher Ray, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in England, makes the point that individualization is, on one hand,

a positive, enabling and democratic phenomenon. On the other hand, the same dynamic generates the conditions of omnipresent and ever-changing risk, perceived as new obligations or burdens, and new forces bearing down on the individual and on local life.

People today, Ray continues, “are not only able to make choices in an ever-expanding range of situations, but they are also compelled to do so.”

In effect, individualization is a double-edged sword. In exchange for new personal freedoms and rights, beneficiaries are agreeing to, if not being forced to, assume new risks and responsibilities.

In addition to opening the door to self-fulfillment, “the rise of individual rights and freedoms has its price,” writes Nikolai Genov, a sociologist at the Berlin Free University in “Challenges of Individualization,” published earlier this year.

Placing an exclusive stress on the expansion of rights and freedoms of individuals by disregarding or underrating the concomitant rise of individual responsibilities brings about social pathologies. They undermine solidarity as the glue of social life.

As a result, individualization can come “at the expense of various forms of common good in general, and of various forms of solidarity in particular,” Genov observes.

Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist who died earlier this year, noted the obstructions to collective social action. In 2002, in his book “Individualization,” Beck wrote that those who in the past saw co-workers as colleagues and allies now face competitive pressures such that when “a shared background still exists, community is dissolved in the acid bath of competition.” The result is “the isolation of individuals within homogeneous social groups.”

Beck goes on to contend that in advanced nations people have been released “from traditional class ties and family supports.” That has forced people to use their own resources to determine their “fate in the labor market, with all its attendant risks, opportunities and contradictions.”

Insofar as individualization has taken hold in the United States, the prospects for collective action on behalf of the poor are dim, at best.

It is hard to disagree with any of this. There is no "glue of social life" in America because American has become a giant game of Survivor—it's every man for himself. Oh, wait! That last phrase was sexist! I should have said "it's every person for his- or her-self." Or something like that. And sometimes a "he" becomes a "she" (see below).

And that gets to Edsall's next point.

Collective action on behalf of the poor requires a shared belief in the obligation of the state to secure the well-being of the citizenry. That belief has been undermined by what Beck calls the “insourcing” of risk, transferring obligations from the state to the individual. This reallocation of responsibility has been studied from various angles.

In his book “The Great Risk Shift,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, joins the argument by documenting the economic pressures on individuals resulting from the widespread erosion of social insurance. “For decades, Americans and their government upheld a powerful set of ideals that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity,” Hacker writes. “Today that message is starkly different: You are on your own.”

Emphasis added below.

Collective social action, in turn, has been supplanted by a different kind of revolt. David A. Snow, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, noted that the top priorities of the specific movements associated with individualization – “the feminist movement, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender movements, the black power movement, the disability rights movement, and, most recently, the fat-acceptance movement” – do not lend themselves to broad economic demands on behalf of the less well off.

Instead, Snow wrote in a chapter of the 2013 book “The Future of Social Movement Research,”

concern with distributional inequities and injustices tends to take a back seat to procedural issues and injustices bearing on rights and associated matters of inclusion and exclusion and to group reputational issues.

I have been puzzled by this behavior for some time now. Do I need to say it? I do!

Used to be "Bruce", now "Caitlyn" Jenner

Consider just how bat-shit crazy the situation in the United States has become. We have lately been inundated with preserving the sacred fucking rights of transgender people at a time when income and wealth inequality is worse than it was in the Roaring Twenties. We live in a new Gilded Age! Nobody cares! The poor do not rebel, but the media prattles on and on about Caitlyn Fucking Jenner.

The idiots at National Public Radio have never been busier and happier than they are right now defending the sacred fucking rights of this "social group" or that one. Are fat obese pleasantly plump people a social group? Sorry, I meant the "fat-acceptance" movement.

When I was younger, I had no idea humans could get this confused. Humans (whatever form they take) have fundamental rights or they don't. That rule must applied universally or the rule doesn't exist. Have humans ever acted as though all other humans have inviolable basic rights? Hell, no! Case closed.

Apparently, the sacred rights of humans do not extend to being fucked up the ass economically. But don't fuck with Caitlyn! She has rights!

Talk about barking up the wrong tree.

One might even go so far to say that all this talk about the rights of transgenders is one of many, many necessary distractions meant to prevent people from thinking about how fucked they are and what they might do about it. But that implies a vast conspiracy of some sort and humans don't work that way. The distractions are certainly real, but the cognition underlying them resides in the unconscious.

The contrast Edsall draws below is well taken (emphasis added again).

The most recent example of the populace’s rising up to substantially change the course of legislation was not in support of raising the minimum wage or of making the tax system more progressive. It was the enormous and successful outcry – three million emails to Congress, a petition with 4.5 million signatures, 2.4 million tweets and 10 million calls to members of Congress — over the attempted enactment of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012. Supporters of the net neutrality movement saw free or low-cost access to music and video resources on the Internet threatened by the measure. Their complaints, backed by tech firms whose profits depend on open access to the Internet — Google, Facebook, eBay, Twitter etc. — defeated the bill backed by their commercial adversaries, the music, motion picture and cable industries.

Compare the SOPA protest to the sole organized attempt to challenge the flow of wealth to the top 1 percent and the profits funneled to the finance industry: Occupy Wall Street, which collapsed in less than a year, despite intensive, generally favorable media coverage.

Yes, everyone protested threats to net neutrality, but Occupy went belly-up in the noonday sun. That certainly tells you something important about what's happening in the United States.

Well, have we learned anything about why the poor do not rise up? Not much, but I got to talk about Caitlyn Jenner! And that's the important thing

Edsall finishes up like this (emphasis added).

All of which brings us back to the question of why there is so little rebellion against entrenched social and economic injustice.

The answer is that those bearing the most severe costs of inequality are irrelevant to the agenda-setters in both parties. They are political orphans in the new order. They may have a voice in urban politics, but on the national scene they no longer fit into the schema of the left or the right. They are pushed to the periphery except for a brief moment on Election Day when one party wants their votes counted, and the other doesn’t.

The poor are "irrelevant to the agenda-setters in both parties."

I think we can all agree about that, so I will finish up on a high note.

Comments

[David Laskaris]

"Socialism" aside, I think John Steinbeck was on the right track when he said, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”