I recently found out that a statistic I’ve been using to support my arguments about how much the American people’s conditions have deteriorated—this being that over 60% of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck—is in need of more context. You’d think this means essentially all of those within this category are economically struggling. Yet a sizable minority of them are not working class but upper income, and only live paycheck to paycheck because of how expensive their consuming habits are.
The majority of the country’s people are still effectively living in poverty, and this is apparent from looking at how there are also many Americans who don’t technically fall within that “paycheck to paycheck” category yet are quite economically dispossessed. There are the 22% of Americans who fall within what the Ludwig Institute for Economic Prosperity calls the “real unemployment” category, which encapsulates anyone within the U.S. labor force who “does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes.” This includes people who can’t live paycheck to paycheck, since they aren’t exactly “living,” only existing. Existing in a paycheck-free situation where they lack access to sufficient food, the financial resources to be able to keep up with their bills, or even housing.
By the time the pandemic began, 43% of American households couldn’t afford a budget that includes housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and a cellphone. With the damage that our government’s mismanagement of the pandemic has since done to the working class, as well as the effects of the inflation crisis on those who aren’t upper income, this living standard crisis has absolutely come to be felt by a bigger proportion of the people. Much of the former workforce has been shoved into early retirement, and not even all of those affected by this shift are older people; many of them are long Covid victims who’ve been made disabled. Then there’s the further disappearance of opportunities for those who are physically able, or who aren’t having to take care of disabled relatives (as many others are). As U.S. News & World Report observed last year, prior to when the Ukraine proxy war had had its full effects on the inflation crisis:
Although there have been some signs in the past two months of strong hiring that the labor market is loosening somewhat, the overall picture of a tight job market is here for a while. The retired baby boomers, especially those in the 65-74 age range, have also cut into the labor supply. “These were people with degrees, probably successful,” says Ron Hetrick, a labor economist at Emsi Burning Glass. “They’re not coming back.” Restrictive immigration policies that have shaped national politics throughout the past several years show no signs of easing and are another drag on the labor market, reducing supply by around 1 million or more workers. And COVID-19, whether through death, illness or long-term disability, has further reduced the available supply of labor.
These pieces of evidence that the U.S. population has now mostly been pushed to the economy’s margins vindicate the decades-old predictions that at some point, the U.S. empire would force a majority of its own people into poverty. Which makes the attitude among our insular “Marxist” radical liberals that most Americans are labor aristocrats, and should be morally judged by the same standards one would judge labor aristocrats, more absurd than ever. At the same time that the people within our conditions are being subjected to a process of engineered social collapse, which merely represents an acceleration of the one that began with neoliberalism, it’s totally anti-materialist to blankedly condemn the people as synonymous with their government or their ruling class.
What I’ve realized from reading Parenti, who stopped making commentary years before the pandemic or the Ukraine war, is that America’s living standard crisis didn’t even have to get this widespread for U.S. workers to deserve such respect. All the way back in 1989, Parenti wrote:
Americans are victimized by economic imperialism not only as workers but as taxpayers and consumers. The billions of tax dollars that corporations escape paying because of their overseas shelters must be made up by the rest of us. Additional billions of our tax dollars go into foreign-aid programs to governments that maintain the cheap labor markets that lure away American jobs—$13.6 billion in 1986, of which two-thirds was military aid. Our tax money also serves as hidden subsidies to the big companies when used as foreign aid to finance the kind of infrastructure (roads, plants, ports) needed to support extractive industries in the Third World. Nor do the benefits of this empire trickle down to the American consumer in any appreciable way. Generally the big companies sell the goods made abroad at as high a price as possible on American markets. Corporations move to Asia and Africa to increase their profits, not to produce lower-priced goods that will save money for American consumers. They pay as little as they can in wages abroad but still charge as much as they can when they sell the goods at home.
This harm that maintaining an imperialist military does to the imperial center’s people was present prior to the War on Terror and the cold war on China, which have only worsened U.S. austerity by multiplying the military budget. Then there are the environmental damages Americans suffer as a consequence of living under an imperial state, which under our conditions is by definition a capitalist state:
Other injustices inflicted by the empire upon poorer nations come home to take a toll upon ordinary AMericans. For years now the poisonous pesticides and hazardous pharmaceuticals that were banned in this country have been sold by their producers to Third World nations where regulations are weaker or nonexistent…The absence of environmental protections throughout most of the Third World affects the health and welfare of Americans in other ways (along with the well-being of other peoples and the earth’s entire ecology). The chemical toxins and other industrial effusions poured into the world’s rivers, oceans, and atmosphere by fast-profit, unrestricted multinational corporations operating in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the devastation of Third World lands by mining and timber companies and by agribusiness, are seriously affecting the quality of the air we all breathe, the water we all drink and the food we all eat…
The dumping of industrial effusions and radioactive wastes also may be killing our oceans. If the oceans die, so do we, since they produce most of the earth’s oxygen. Over half the world’s forests are gone compared to earlier centuries. The forests are nature’s main means of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Today, the carbon dioxide buildup is transforming the chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere, accelerating the “greenhouse effect” by melting the earth’s polar ice caps and causing a variety of other climatic destabilizations. While the imperialists are free to roam the world and plunder it at will, we are left to suffer the immediate and long-term consequences.
That all of these evils have worsened since 1989, as well as been joined by additional evils like police militarization, techno-dystopian censorship of dissent, and destructive banking concentration, makes Parenti’s argument more correct than ever. And as I said, even if the American people were still living in the comparative “good times” of the pre-2008 crisis world, all those things he pointed out would still be true.
The idea Parenti was aiming to get across is that to simplify the American people to being “bad” because they’re complicit in the imperial order would be anti-materialist. There’s no way to describe such a perspective other than as infantile. We all know Americans are complicit in imperialism, the question is what should we do with this information. Should we, the minority of Americans who’ve so far gained class consciousness, smugly cast judgment on everyone else around us for not yet having come to our perspective? Should we hate and perpetually punish ourselves for having been born in a certain place? Should we all move away? By the insular American left’s reasoning, there’s nothing constructive we in the core are capable of doing. And therefore no reason to take responsibility for our circumstances, and do the work necessary for winning workers victory where we are.
In pre-revolutionary Russia, the people absolutely had contradictions. Many of them held beliefs that were backwards, and by czarist Russia’s imperialist nature, many of them held allegiance to the imperial order. Did this stop the Bolsheviks from building a relationship with them? Did it cause the Bolsheviks to overstate the proportion of Russians who were invested in imperialism? Lenin assessed that it was a “privileged minority” of the people who were labor aristocrats with an obstinate desire to maintain imperial extraction. The same is true for the people under our conditions. The obstinate liberals, who make up the primary element of the people that are solidly invested in the neocon ideology, are not most Americans. Most of the people only believe imperialism’s psyops at present because they haven’t yet been exposed to the anti-imperialist accounts of events surrounding Ukraine, Taiwan, Serbia, Ethiopia, and so on.
When confronted with these realities about our conditions, the “Americans are bad” leftists will claim that they’re aware of such realities, even though it doesn’t seem like they are from looking at their rhetoric. These leftists will say that even though they feel the character of the people is reducible to such a simplistic and villifying label, they intend to bring the people to a revolutionary consciousness. Yet just by making these blanket statements, these leftists have already proven that they themselves lack a genuinely revolutionary outlook. Nobody who knows how to win workers victory would be going around denouncing the people. And how can somebody who fundamentally lacks the knowledge necessary to be the people’s teacher take on that role?
To those within the “left” online circles and organizing spaces, it can look like these insular types of leftists have that kind of capability. But they don’t, because getting a lot of likes on social media doesn’t equate to winning the people. A niche minority of the people are familiar with these spaces. That’s the extent of the following somebody can gain while operating under the radical liberal ideology, which is conducive to vilifying the people. We know this because at no point in history have revolutionary movements won when their leaders have viewed the same people they’re trying to liberate with scorn. “Revolutionary” leaders who think like that always end up detaching themselves from the people, therefore rendering their own victory impossible.
We’re seeing this now in the ways the USA’s established “left” orgs are refusing to become active agents in the anti-imperialist movement, the front of the struggle that we need to advance in order to make all other fronts winnable. Instead of helping build a sustainable and principled anti-NATO movement, like the country’s pro-Russian communist orgs are, the orgs that exclusively seek to appeal to those within the “left” niche are acting apathetic about the international struggle.
They’re acting apathetic about anti-imperialism for the same reason they view the people as inherently reactionary: because the idea set they base their practice in is not materialist, but idealist. It’s based in a mentality that blames the people for the failure of the revolutionary movement, as if radicals are already doing everything right and have no reasons to reexamine their beliefs. If these beliefs include an apathetic view of geopolitics, then in their minds that view isn’t worth giving up. The insular left believes it’s the people, not those who aspire to lead the people, who need to correct themselves.
The hubris of this mindset is obvious. For decades, it’s held back the rebuilding of the communist movement in the United States. It lets developing radicals rationalize not taking responsibility for any pro-imperialist or otherwise liberal beliefs they hold, blaming the people for their own inability to build a connection with the people. If we want to win, we have to gain a love for the people. A love that motivates us to correct anything wrong with our own views and practices, for the sake of bringing our society to socialism.
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