The problems that America faces, that cause so much frustration and rage, are now deep and persistent, and will require solutions that will be very radical in the American context. But they'll have to be, as the man said , as radical as reality. American workers are not suffering just because of trade agreements and offshoring. By some measures , 88% of jobs were lost to robots and other labor-saving devices. Tax incentive might bring some factories come back, but neither the Donald nor the Democrats can bring back jobs from China that don't exist. China now has " zero labor " factories that run 24/7 with the lights off . When thousands of truck drivers lose their jobs, those self-driving Uber vehicles will still be zipping around American interstates, and the profits will be driven into pockets in Silicon Valley, without a pit stop in Beijing. As Barry Lando points out , we are in the midst of a "perfect storm of technology" that "will lead to a net loss of over 5 million jobs in 15 major developed and emerging economies by 2020."
So it's the entire architecture of capitalism that has to be questioned--the whole issue of who produces wealth and who appropriates it, and what kind of social order would do that justice. All the issues raised by that pesky guy who keeps returning , " yesterday and today ." There is no avoiding it. This is a moment requiring very radical thinking and action. No more half-assed tinkering.
The radicalism will come, either from the right or from the left, but it will come. Correction: It is coming from the right; the left better make another kind of radicalism real. And this is going to require--not, pace Barack, an "intramural scrimmage," but a knock-down fight on behalf of everybody in the bottom 90% of the country, a fight in which we must force the ruling class to lose wealth and power.
That's also going to require the American left, such as it is, to make a serious examination of the relationship between identity politics and class politics--a relationship that, for the last thirty years, has been a function of most of the American left's management by, and submission to, the Democratic Party as a party of capital. The effective hegemony of the Democratic Party over left-liberal discourse and strategizing has created and enforced, as Adolph Reed, Jr. puts it, a "moral economy" that implicitly accepts as just: "a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources", provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people." This is equal-opportunity capitalist identity politics, and it's been pursued--time to be honest--at the expense of class politics. Or, as Reed puts it more sharply: "it is [itself] a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism."
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