Blogs > Cliopatria > Contemporary History

Feb 23, 2011

Contemporary History


by Cliopatria


Tim Burke,"History Swallowed Whole," Easily Distracted, 22 February, tackles Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro on copyright and causation.

Anne Applebaum,"In the Arab world, it's 1848 -- not 1989," Washington Post, 21 February, argues for a mid-19th century parallel. Robert Darnton,"1789–2011?" NYR Blog, 22 February, explores an earlier analog.

Adam Kirsch,"Alternate Route," Tablet, 22 February, reviews Michael Weingrad's American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States.

Eric Foner,"Return of the Class Struggle," LRB blog, 22 February, puts the Wisconsin struggle in historical perspective.

Brian Urquhart,"Revolution without Violence," NYRB, 10 March, reviews Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present and Ash's Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.


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Chris Bray - 2/23/2011

Adding: I can't prove this, but my sense is that we're in the middle of one of the several great waves of proletarianization that have taken place in the U.S. and in the world. People like airline pilots who were well-paid professionals are becoming wage laborers, and seeing their pensions vanish. (Okay, people like airline pilots and university professors, and I'm personally approaching the bottom end of the indescribably dismal academic job market.)

So as people in the private sector see their economic security withering toward death, they'll be enraged by large public pensions and effectively tenured civil service employees who complain about things like the prospect of lower annual pay raises. There's surely an argument to be made about class conflict and false consciousness in that exchange. I just don't think public employees make a cleanly delineated underclass in that narrative.

Chris Bray - 2/23/2011

Please start with this article in the New York Times, built around interviews with middle class people in the private sector.

There's a class difference between the upper class and middle class, absolutely. But it's not at all clear to me that the conflict in Wisconsin is rich people versus the petit bourgeoisie, and I don't see any evidence for that structure in Foner's piece.

With apologies, I'm Californian, so I understand all of this stuff from this perspective: we pay a (spectacularly regressive) ten percent sales tax, the highest gasoline tax in the country, and state income tax that hits a marginal rate of ten percent at $40,000, in a state with a pair of badly underfunded public pension funds that are consuming funding for things like state universities. The top public pensioner in the state is a retired city manager (for the City of Vernon, population 91) whose pension payments exceed $500,000 a year.

Middle class people pay for the salaries and benefits of middle class public employees. My middle class parents live, in part, on a state pension. They're also furious to see public employees retiring at 50 with six-figure pensions. Where are the rich people in that picture? Where's the class conflict?

If you're looking for conflict between the upper class and the middle class, come to UCLA and talk to undergrads about tuition increases and the UC administrators who make high six-figure salaries -- and are threatening to sue the university over their parsimonious pension plans, which are capped at a meager $245,000 a year. There's a perfect example of middle class people in conflict with the upper class.

About your next question: my impression is that the Tea Party, or at least much of the Tea Party, is disgusted by government gifts to private corporations. So no, I don't think they identify with monopoly capitalists. I think many Tea Party followers understand the implications of corporate rent-seeking and regulatory capture, at least broadly.

I've compared the Tea Party to the regulator movements of the American past, and I still think it's a good comparison. I think we're seeing producerist anger, directed at the members of what are at least perceived as extractive classes. I place popular anger right at the center of the middle class. Scott Walker was not elected in a referendum conducted among a narrow selection of plutocrats.

I know I'll be hearing about the Koch brothers soon, and I don't care about them anymore than I care about George Soros, the mirror image bogeyman on the opposite flank. They didn't switch on the conflict in Wisconsin.

Jonathan Dresner - 2/23/2011

You don't think there's a class difference between middle class and upper class? That Tea Party activists aren't operating under a false consciousness which makes them identify with the monopoly capitalists?

I'm not committed to a marxist, or even marxisant, analysis here, but I don't see how lumping everyone from our parents to the Koch brothers in a single economic class provides any understanding

Chris Bray - 2/23/2011

Lindsey Lohan in court, has CLASS STRUGGLE with judge! If there's a template....

Ralph E. Luker - 2/23/2011

But if it's Eric Foner publishing in the Guardian, isn't it *bound* to be "class struggle"? What else *could* it be?

Chris Bray - 2/23/2011

That Foner thing is really odd. How do you turn a state trooper into the proletariat? If there's a "class struggle" in Wisconsin, it's between the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie.

In California, where I live, police officers and firefighters have a "3 at 50" retirement plan: 3 percent of salary for each year on the job, with retirement eligibility at the age of 50. So you become a police cadet at 20, and retire at 50 with 90% of your salary. If you live to 90, that means you worked 30 years and get 40 years of (often six-figure) retirement benefits.

My mother is a retired social worker and public school teacher, and my father spent fifteen years working for the state prisons and public hospitals before he left for the private sector. I never perceived myself as the child of the Dickensian proletariat. Where's the "class struggle" in a dispute over government salaries and benefits?