The most essential issues seem to be straightforwardly dichotomous . . . either/or. One is:
Do you want to live in a class-divided society or a classless society?
Consider: You’re in kindergarten. 25 kids. They each have distinctive personalities, of course. You pretty much know them all. Now someone says: “When you grow up a few of you will be in the upper class and the rest of you will not.” You say: “WTF. Aren’t all kids created equal?”
And, of course, you’ve got a point. Class division of society is scandalous. If the issue is: Do you want to live in a class-divided society or a classless society? of course the answer is: classless.
The seemingly straightforward dichotomy can be thought of in another, related, way:
Should the productive assets of society be owned privately or socially?
Simple: It’s scandalous for an entity that’s as socially significant as, say, Ford Motor Company, to be owned by a person or a small team of people who can treat it as their private property. Henry Ford owned a house. It was his private property and he could paint it any color he wanted to. The Ford Motor Company has hundreds of thousands of employees, millions of customers, affects the fate of dozens of communities, etc. Everything about it is vastly social and should not be subject to or guided by the whims of a single individual or a small team of private-interest individuals. It’s a social entity.
Class divided or classless? Private ownership or public? Capitalism or socialism? Thinking about the essential issues seems to simplify the question of our allegiance. Which side we need to advocate for seems straightforward. Yet:
Our society is not just unjust. Our society is insane and the insanity is a consequence of other issues: Scale and disorientation.
Class division, wealth accumulation, empires (political and economic), war, conquest, wage labor, over-exploitation of people and the environment, urbanization, mass production and consumption … are insane phenomena. They are the result of being socially and ecologically ungrounded.
The kids in kindergarten would find it insane to hear that they will wind up being class-stratified in society. They can see that they’re all “just us” similar. What’s straightforward to them is that class division, empires, war, conquest, over-exploitation, urbanization, massification, etc. . . . are insane phenomena. Adults are crazy to countenance those things.
But the adults became disoriented when they lost their grounding in community and earth-based culture.
Until their traumatic transition into our cultural insanity the kids live more grounded. We need to hope that they will save us.
Amazing how some change to become oligarchs.
J.D.Vance , I hope he has some sympathy for the people he grew up with, but he knows he is superior to them and is willing to use that.
1) If I were in kindergarten, and I were asked “Do you want to live in a class-divided society or a classless society?”, I’d ask “What is class?”. If I were asked “Should the productive assets of society be owned privately or socially?” I would ask “What are productive forces?”, etc.
I say this not to be flippant or facetious, but rather to say most American adults, in addition to not being familiar with the meaning of these terms in socialist theory, have internalized a false understanding of these terms instilled through education and culture. Specifically, many American adults understand class in terms of income brackets or cultural values, rather than a relationship to the means of production. This is the only understanding they’ve been taught. Kindergarteners are not born with an inherent understanding of Marxist theory, and we can see in the US public school system many students are accepting of class-adjacent forms of stratification such as academic/performance tracking. Political education is important, and the ruling class has invested and innovated heavily in that area. It is folly to hope absent our own political education and counter-messaging efforts, the kids will be alright, organically recognize the contradictions in capitalism, and “will save us”.
2) Houses are strange things, and not what I would choose for an analogy about private vs. personal property — which is the concept it seems is being driven at, although I may be mistaken about that. In Marxist theory, private property typically refers to the means of production or profit-producing assets, whereas personal property typically refers to possessions used for individual or household needs, not for profit making. It is a difference of kind, not degree or scale. Identifying both the house, and the Ford Motor Company as “private property”, but categorizing the latter as a “social entity” based on its size makes it sound as if smaller businesses are not “social entities” and therefore can be “subject to or guided by the whims of a single individual or a small team of private-interest individuals”.
That being said, houses can be said to straddle the line between personal property, and an asset. On one hand, a house is undeniably a place to live which fulfills the personal needs of individuals and families. On the other, housing is treated as a financial asset that appreciates value over time and historically has served as a primary vehicle of wealth accumulation for the American middle class. Some socialists critique this arrangement as wedding the interests of the middle class (who sell labor for wages), with the ruling class (who extract profit through ownership).
3) In the final third of the article, the author heavily applies the label of insanity. “Insane” or “insanity” are used six times. “Class division”, “wealth accumulation”, “empires (political and economic)”, “war”, “conquest”, “wage labor”, “over-exploitation of people and the environment”, “urbanization”, “mass production and consumption”, and “massification” are referred to as “insane phenomena”, in some cases twice. This is concerning for a couple reasons. A) It contributes to the stigmatization of mental illness, (Gosselin, Abigail. “Responding to Sanist Microaggressions with Acts of Epistemic Resistance.” Hypatia 37, no. 2 (2022): 293–314. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2022.9.). Which is not a cause of any one of the phenomena listed. B) It obscures the common basis for all the phenomena listed in the logic of capitalism.
This is particularly remarkable in the context of how “craziness”, “insanity”, “madness”, and related categories (e.g. “heresy”) have been, and are weaponized by ruling classes to enforce hegemonic ideologies.