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points by 10111001 3 days ago | 0 comments
> There is a reason nobody is willing to capitulate on the “culture war” positions they care about to “unify the working class.” People aren’t fungible economic automatons pursing material gain and they don’t believe policy is self-executing. If people have fundamental differences in how they view the world, what they value, what they think “good” is, they’re not going to capitulate on those in support of paper economic policies that may or may not work anyway.

I'm not saying capitulate, I'm saying set aside, as in table them to focus on more pressing issues.

Preserving some working class power in the face of the kind of automation being imagined now is going to take a large, unified political coalition that can prioritize effectively. Precisely because "nobody is willing to capitulate" on those issues, make them very useful in fracturing that coalition into non-existence or ineffectiveness.

[–] amanaplanacanal 3 days ago
If the "other side" doesn't put aside the culture war issues too, then "our side" will lose on them.

If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.

[–] 10111001 2 days ago
> If the "other side" doesn't put aside the culture war issues too, then "our side" will lose on them.

You can't have it all. Would you rather burn your energy to make little progress on them and lose on working class economic issues?

Call a truce, aim for a stalemate. Tolerate people from the "other side" to make more progress on other issues. AI has drastically changed the situation, and it's a massive fuck-up to continue to run the same strategy.

> If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.

The normal list: abortion, gun control, LGB and especially T stuff, etc.

[–] amanaplanacanal 2 days ago
I doubt many on the left would be willing to throw their brothers and sisters under the bus to fight against AI. I wouldn't ask them to.

Part of the complexity here is pitting current obviously visible specific harms, vs vague future potential harms.

I could be wrong about this, though.

[–] 10111001 2 days ago
> I doubt many on the left would be willing to throw their brothers and sisters under the bus to fight against AI. I wouldn't ask them to.

And IMHO, that mentality is the problem: they want to have it all, on every issue, so they'd rather drive the bus (and everyone in it) off the cliff than tolerate an ally who is not in total agreement.

[–] amanaplanacanal 1 day ago
So will you volunteer to be the one that should be sacrificed? Or will you choose someone else?
[–] rayiner 3 days ago
You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals. Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.
[–] 10111001 2 days ago
> You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals.

What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues.

> Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.

It's not a top down effort, but I wouldn't but it past oligarchical economic interests to fan those flames a bit. These issues fracture the working class coalition nonetheless.

And it's not like this is some kind of impossible ask: the Democrats of the 1980s (say) did a far better job of it than the Democrats of the 2020s.

[–] hollerith 2 days ago
It seemed to me that the Democrats of the 1980s achieved almost nothing to stop or to slow down the biggest threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely low-skilled immigration and offshoring (then called "globalization").
[–] 10111001 2 days ago
> The Democrats (in the US) of the 1980s did very little to stop or to slow down the big threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely automation and offshoring (then called "globalization").

Wasn't that the 90s? IIRC, globalization was mainly a Republican big-business project, and the Democrats of that era were the biggest source of opposition, and it only got passed because of some defections.

Also globalization was sold as a bill of goods. IIRC, it was claimed (probably by many economists) that it would increase domestic manufacturing, but when that was shown to be a lie, there was no course-correction, and the sales pitch was changed to "but you got cheap stuff." I hope people have learned their lesson from that, to not trust economists.

But that wasn't really my point. My point was they were better able to handle divisive culture war issues, so you had lots of Democratic representatives from "red" states, even with popular Republican presidents. Today, the only way Democrats can hope to win those seats is if they're handed them through abject Republican incompetence.

[–] hollerith 2 days ago
My recollection is that "globalization" was a buzzword in the early 1980s although there is a possibility I am not accurately assigning my memories to the right range of years.

It was often paired with another term which I cannot confidently recall, maybe "the information economy".

Although Chinese imports didn't become an important factor in the US economy till the 1990s, Deng's rise to power happened in 1978 and his famous "Southern Tour" happened in 1982. Both events committed China to a course of economic modernization, welcoming Western investment and special economic zones designed to boost exports, which the US media did not fail to notice.

Trump was the first president in the modern era to try to stem the flow of factory jobs overseas. Clinton for example was all-in on globalization.

[–] rayiner 2 days ago
> What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues

This is like saying “people should grow up and learn to solve their disagreements without war.” I’d argue that view is the one that exhibits a childish utopianism. It overlooks what actually drives the formation of coalitions.