One of the mistakes that Karl Marx made was in predicting that the proletariats would rise up to supersede the bourgeois. The proletariats do not act as one body. Within the proletariat class, individuals make their own choices and move on their own timing. Some individuals aim to become part of the bourgeois. Some individuals have no ambitions about raising their own status or raising up their cohort. The possibilities for individuals are just so numerous and the class as a whole could never rise up to dominate the employers, land-owners and business elite.
McGhee does a splendid job of describing and narrating some
individual choices made by white citizens in the United States who continue to confound
analysts. She notes that white citizens do not seem to understand the economic
and social costs they are creating for themselves, hyper-exemplified by the
filling in of swimming pools when communities decided to prevent Blacks from
attending those community venues rather than allowing integration. McGhee has
realized the limits of research and numbers in convincing people to act in
their own best interests. The neo-classical economics view of rational decision
making to maximize utility has been dashed against American rocks.
Philosophers, writers and researchers need to pursue some other understanding
of American consumer/voter’s psychology. “…questions of belonging, competition,
and status {are} questions that in this country keep returning to race.” (page
9) Joe Bageant in his 2008 book Deer Hunting with Jesus and in
other essays added other insights on the ways so many white citizens make
purchase decisions, will campaign, rally and vote in ways that are
counter-productive to their own best interests. I can highly recommend Bageant
to McGhee!
So very similar to Michelle Alexander’s historical prespective
in The New Jim Crow, McGhee identifies that the plantation owners
and employers of the 1600s antagonized the distrust between racial cultures in
order to have those of European descent accept lower and lower pay, and to
marginalize those of African and of Native American descent into enslavement.
”Whatever form these rationales took, colonizers shaped their racist ideologies
to fit the bill. The motive was greed; cultivated hatred followed.” (p. 23) Surprisingly,
she also finds a contemporary of Cassius M. Clay (1810 – 1903) to argue against
the institution of slavery. While Clay is praised as an abolitionist, McGhee’s
example in Hinton Rowan Helper was an outspoke racist. In 1857 Helper noted in
his publications that the Northern states invested a multiple times more in
public goods and community services, enhancing the life of Northern citizens.
Comparing the number and character to those public goods for Southern states,
Helper blamed the institution of slavery for sapping the desire to improve
their communities with libraries, public schools, transportation improvements
and other ventures. Since the plantation owners had free labor through
enslavement, under-educated white citizens who did not participate civically,
and their only markets were international, the Southern decision makers and
politicians could ignore public improvement efforts. McGhee draws to a conclusion that the mindset
seems to have continued into the 21st century.
As a counter point, in the 1850s, Cassius M. Clay (as
described by Ronald White, Jr. in the book A. Lincoln: A Biography)
saw slavery as leading to a strange monopolization of valuable skills. When
Clay returned from New England where he amassed his own fortune, he saw in
Kentucky that the poor whites were being offered no marketable skills, the
Black enslaved people were becoming the master craftsmen in all arts, and the
plantation owners were ignorant of these ramifications from their dependency on
slavery. Clay then marshalled his academic skills and found that the US
Declaration of Independence needed to be revived and brought it’s democratic
principles to the forefront in his arguments for abolition. Clay’s thinking and
arguments impressed Abraham Lincoln so much that he too adopted the Declaration
of Independence as the base for his arguments against spreading slavery into
the territories west of the Mississippi River.
Unfortunately as her thesis question, McGhee might have
better pursued multiple causes and multiple answers instead of early on in her
book asking for one answer, “what is the stubborn belief that needs to shift
now for us to make progress against inequality?” (page 10) There is not only
one stubborn belief. According to the vote count for Trump in 2020, there may
be as many as 75 million stubborn beliefs to identify and rectify.
She did find some value in the concept of a zero-sum game.
Yes, according to the evidence presented by
Michelle Alexander and by McGhee, the early plantation owners did set up
a belief system that persists today. If one class of the population gains, then
another class is losing to the same degree. Academically and historically and
statistically we can dismiss such an absolute view of trade-offs. Yet many of
those white citizens can not dismiss it so easily. Many are still of the
mindset that status can be more important than financial well-being. Many of
McGhee’s stories demonstrate how whites will sacrifice financially/economically
in the hopes of maintaining their perceived status above the racial minorities.
This zero-sum game means that if whites can not advance in
some way for themselves, they must at least hold back the progress for the
fuller society as a way of ensuring the racial minorities do not have greater
opportunities to advance. Plus, McGhee’s evidence can be explained by a
defensive nature to the actions of white individuals. More and more stubborn
beliefs can be found and compound the complexity of these racial issues that
McGhee uncovers throughout her book.
Meanwhile, I suggest that the Plutocrats and the
extravagantly rich in the United States are still framing political problems as
a zero-sum game to the conservative voters and to those economically struggling
white citizens. The owning class still benefits from having the racial classes
in clashing culturally, morally and physically against each other. Yet, that zero-sum
could be turned against the Plutocrats. Our GDP has grown by less than 6
percent per year since 1985. For the foreseeable future, the GDP can not grow
at any faster pace. There will be no exponential growth in the near-term. So
our economic situation is a zero-sum game. If the top 10% of households take
home 50% and then 52% and then 54% of the GDP in successive years, then the
bottom 90% of households must be getting lower and lower proportions year after
year. Based on such a seemingly-endless fear of losing out more and more every
year, then the 90% can concentrate on the singular topic of income inequality and
find ways to rectify that injustice.
Why is it an injustice?? According to McGhee and Michelle
Alexander, the inequality in the Americas was started by plantation owners
pitting racial groups against each other. Much of the racial strife we have
experienced can be traced back to that zero-sum game invented by the earliest
colonial Plutocrats. If we can place the racial groups on equal terms
economically and remove the perceived threat for the white citizens, then
possibly we can remove much of the future racial injustice. That is one facet
of the injustice.
Another facet of the injustice is that the richest people
can only claim such high incomes when they take advantage of and even exploit the
employees who actually create the values that are sold by the businesses. I
have identified this as Capillary Action in Micro-Economics. When a business
hires an employee, that employee must create value in order to keep the
employment. Specifically, each employee must over time create more value than the
dollar value of one’s paycheck. If a particular employee is creating less value
than one’s paycheck, then the business is losing money on that one employee.
Every business owner knows that such a scenario is financially unstainable and such
employees will need to be replaced or else the employer will go out of
business. When employees coordinate with each other and equipment and inputs to
create more value than the business’s costs, then the employer gets to
accumulate the extra value as profits to be reinvested in the business or to be
pocketed by the employer, owners and investors. That kind of advantage is
acceptable because in a sense employees are taking advantage of the owners and
investors who are facing the financial risks involved in running a business. The
exploitation comes when employees are mistreated and denied fair compensation
for the value they are creating, which leads to excessive earnings for owners
and investors. Society could define what is excessive and exploitative, and how
it rises to the level of injustice.
Eccentric incomes are also possible when customers and
natural resources and financial systems are exploited. The Plutocrats usually
are not being paid based on the value they create, but rather based upon their
capital investments leveraging opportunities for exploitation.
In light of such injustices, the moral fight can be to
#RegulateGreed with an income cap on all individuals. Or we might
#RegulateGreed by setting an enforceable ratio so that top earners in any
company can not earn more than say 300 times that of the lowest paid employee.
If the top earners want to take home more money, then they will have to raise
the pay of the lowest paid employees by the same proportion. Or other ideas can
surface to #RegulateGreed. These types of direct actions to combat income
inequality may eliminate the references to zero-sum games as employers and
employees see their combined success as tied to each individual’s success.
