One of the more surprising statements in the memo is the claim that tech
employees like those at Kickstarter have it too good to merit
organizing. “Unions are historically intended to protect vulnerable
members of society, and we feel the demographics of this union undermine
this important function,” the memo states. “We’re concerned with the
misappropriation of unions for use by privileged workers.”
Management: “check your privilege, workers! Please don’t culturally appropriate techniques from less privileged workers, for instance, people who make as little as you would if we could get away with it.”
The past/future binary of The Flintstones/The Jetsons was so obvious I only just noticed how there’s also a blue collar/white collar versions of the postwar “broad middle class” going on. Flintstones was obviously based on Honeymooners, was there a similar model for Jetsons?
Thinking about how Flintstones opening credits are Fred coming home (like The Simpsons, now that I think) and Jetsons start with George going to work
Thinking about how Fred works in the most primary extraction - stone quarrying in the Neolithic age - and thereby has a full suite of modern conveniences, except the thing is they obviously don’t work cause of any value he added but through subhuman labor operating at a much lower “it’s a living” quality of life. Thinking about how his job or boss aren’t that central compared to social settings and roles like the Water Buffaloes
Thinking about how George works for a company producing a primal intermediate good – sprockets – that are essential to the whole consumer utopia, right down to his live-in mammy. But in such an alienated way that his interactions with boss Mr. Spacely and his identification against rival business Cogswell’s Cogs are central to his identity, but the product itself serves as a totally irrelevant prop for Performing Business Culture
Oh jeez I just realized something, all that “dispatch from Trump Country” genre, Chris Arnade and all that, people keeping a noble face in decaying houses they can barely heat, elegies for the glory before the world passed by, the pictures all grassy hillsides, scraggly trees, buildings with obsolete furnishings under a cloudy sky
they’re gothic portraits of a labor aristocracy in genteel decline
The worker elite has three main functions within modern imperialism.
1. First of all, it serves as an active buffer between the ruling class and the proletariat. This function has several aspects:
A. The worker elite absorbs and co-opts proletarian struggle. When proletarian insurgency grows,…
The funniest thing about the libertarian -> neoreactionary pipeline is looking at these guys being like “what we need is an elite-run government insulated from electoral demagoguery, in coalition with a tame academy, industry, priesthood, capital and civil society dedicated to patriarchy, anticommunism, skilled labor, and at least lowercase white nationalism” and thinking “man, remember when you defined your politics against the New Deal state?”
