Once upon a time, Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi were driving a car through a spooky forest. It was spooky, in the sense that it was dark and mysterious and full of who knows what. Marx was behind the wheel, and Gandhi was in the passenger’s seat. Gandhi was looking nervous.
There’s a piece by Miguel Salazar in The New Republic that’s been doing the rounds for the last week or so. As a political theorist, I find it a very strange piece. Salazar seems to think historical materialism is racist but refuses to provide any arguments for this. When pushed, he maintains that he is simply reporting the views of people in and around DSA outlets. But this isn’t what his piece says–he very clearly portrays historical materialism and Marxism more generally as a “hardline”, fringe thing and then vaguely and non-specifically associates that position with racism.
People get mad at individual corporations a lot. The other week, a famous shoe company started running ads with a controversial football player in them, and that made some people very happy with the shoe company and other people very angry with it. These people wrote about the shoe company a lot, and by writing about the shoe company they gave it $43 million in free advertising. See, it didn’t matter to the shoe company which stance it took on the controversial football player–by taking any stance, it could induce the media to give it free attention, and that free attention translated into sales for the company. People thought the shoe company was taking a stand because of some kind of commitment to social responsibility–but this is a shoe company which has happily, for years, employed child labourers in sweat shops, stolen their wages, and verbally and physically abused them. But this isn’t because the shoe company is especially immoral–it’s because all companies are subject to a set of structural incentives which, by design, prevent them from taking moral considerations into account independently of their ability to contribute to revenue.
You’ve probably seen this chart before. It’s everywhere now. I’ve used it more than a few times over the years. It’s the chart from the Economic Policy Institute that shows that while US productivity has continued to increased over the last few decades, real inflation-adjusted wages haven’t kept pace:
I’ve seen two bad misreadings of this chart lately, and I want to clear them up.
Benjamin Studebaker 