Virtue Hoarders

The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

2021

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Author: 

Catherine Liu

MANIFOLD EDITION

THE JACOBIN SHOW: WHAT IS THE PROFESSIONAL-MANAGERIAL CLASS AND HOW IS IT STANDING IN THE WAY OF ECONOMIC REDISTRIBUTION?

A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism

Author Catherine Liu shows how Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers who labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling stand in the way of social justice and economic redistribution. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virtue-hoarders

$10 PB  $4.95 E-BOOK

What is the professional-managerial class and how is it standing in the way of economic redistribution? Catherine Liu explains how this group of elite workers has come to serve capitalism while insisting on their own virtue.
Catherine Liu is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class:

ROFLMAO

Perhaps We Should Regulate Deranged Billionaires Like Elon Musk

BYLUKE SAVAGE

02.05.2021

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
RICH PEOPLE

By one estimate, Elon Musk owns more than a quarter of all active satellites orbiting Earth. Though his fantasy of becoming emperor of Mars probably won't materialize, we have to scale back the unchecked power of deranged Bond villain types like Musk before it extends from Earth to the skies.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveils the company's manned spacecraft, The Dragon V2, on May 29, 2014, in Hawthorne, CA. (Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)

Last month, Elon Musk officially became the world’s richest man. Though it sounds like the plot of a decidedly down-market Bond flick, he’s now also the world’s most powerful space baron.

That’s according to a new analysis, which finds that the SpaceX CEO now controls more than 27 percent of all active satellites currently orbiting Earth — roughly one thousand out of 3,500. Musk’s stake is almost certain to get even bigger in the coming years, with physicist Alastair Isaacs estimating the share could grow to 50 percent as early as 2022 based on the number of launches currently associated with SpaceX. The greatest proportion of those launches are related to Starlink — an initiative the company says will bring “near global” high-speed internet coverage this year.

Given Musk’s well-established penchant for absurd and often cringeworthy self-promotion, this claim can probably be taken with a grain of salt. Just a few short years ago, after all, the billionaire was confidently telling a technology conference that he would begin sending rockets to Mars in 2018 and would be able to start colonization efforts within a decade. Pure hokum, as it usually turns out to be, Musk’s techno-utopian hype has nevertheless given him an image more like that of a Promethean creator than a garden-variety capitalist — more vanguard of humanity’s interstellar future than telecom monopolist in its present.


Whether SpaceX is ultimately capable of sending people to Mars or not, even a cursory glance at Musk’s vision for space travel is a warning about the dangers of allowing billionaires to extend their grip beyond the atmosphere. Last year, the company published updated terms of service for its Starlink project, announcing that it would not recognize international law on the Red Planet. Instead, Musk envisions a kind of off-world Randianism in which “self-governing principles” (i.e., those determined by his company) form the rules of the road. Though his stated blueprint for Martian colonization looks like a textbook case of obvious nonsense (involving, among other things, some truly absurd math) we should, at any rate, read this as a genuine statement of intent. If a new life ever actually does await in the off-world colonies, prospective space monopolists are determined to shape it themselves, free of constraint. Given how companies like Tesla already treat their workers, it takes little imagination to picture what that might look like.

In fact, what Musk himself envisioned during a Twitter Q&A last summer was more or less explicitly a kind of space feudalism. As Gizmodo’s Tom McKay observed at the time, even the idealized Martian future of the billionaire’s social media PR imagined putting hypothetical interstellar pilgrims to work for SpaceX upon their arrival:


Oh, and anyone who wishes to go along for the ride will have to pay for it, despite the fact that Mars would arguably be SpaceX’s job site.

Can’t afford it? Take out a loan and pay it off by working for SpaceX when you’re there, which is definitely not indentured servitude because . . . Mars? Because it happens on Mars. That appears to be the logic.

For the time being, at least, Musk remains just a regular, exorbitantly rich corporate oligarch with a uniquely cringeworthy social media presence. But even if his vision of becoming Martian god-emperor never comes to fruition, the billionaire is already on course to control a vital piece of global infrastructure in the decades ahead. Just as the robber barons of the Gilded Age monopolized railways, steel, oil, and other commodities, those of the twentyi-first century now largely own the internet, the digital public square, and other crucial architecture of modern social, cultural, and economic life.

The world’s richest man now controls nearly 30 percent of earth’s satellites: What could possibly go wrong? In the future, it may be necessary to prevent the planet’s richest people from extending their power into the solar system. For now, it’s long past time we broke their grip on the infrastructure of everyday life. The space beyond Earth’s atmosphere must be protected from Elon Musk.

The Left Can Take Back Power in Ecuador
AN INTERVIEW WITHANDRÉS ARAUZ

From 2007 to 2017, Ecuador was a beacon of hope on the Latin American left, but the last four years have seen a neoliberal regime imposing IMF-driven austerity. The front-runner in polls for today’s presidential election, left-winger Andrés Arauz, told Jacobin how he’ll continue the Citizen Revolution — and build on his ally Rafael Correa’s legacy

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02.07.2021
Andrés Arauz, an economist and a former minister in the government of Rafael Correa, is seen as the favorite to win today's Ecuadorian election. (Andrés Arauz / Facebook)

HE WON


INTERVIEW BY  Denis Rogatyuk

As the race for the presidency of Ecuador entered its final stages, the desperation on the part of both the neoliberal government of Lenín Moreno and the country’s right-wing political parties to avoid the victory of the Left reached fever pitch.

Since the beginning of the right-wing turn by Moreno’s government and the political persecution of the key leaders of the Citizen Revolution Movement — most notably Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas — countless attempts have been made to prevent the participation in the elections of either Correa himself or any other political leader affiliated with his movement.

This has included preventing the registration of the Citizen Revolution Movement as a political party, a ban on the Fuerza Compromiso Social (FCS) electoral movement used by them to run in the 2019 local elections, a ban on Correa running as a vice presidential candidate, and several attempts to prevent the registration of the Andrés Arauz-Carlos Rabascall presidential ticket. Although these attempts at blocking the reemergence of the Left on the political landscape ultimately failed, the electoral process itself has come under threat.

The desperation on the part of elites can be contrasted with the desperation of ordinary Ecuadorians. The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed nearly fifteen thousand lives, the unemployment level has hit double digits for the first time in almost two decades, and IMF-sanctioned austerity continues to be implemented. In this environment, the workers of Ecuador are once again embracing revolutionary change.

Andrés Arauz, an economist and a former minister in the government of Rafael Correa, is seen as the favorite to win the Ecuadorian election, with the majority of polls from the period of December 2020 to January 2021 giving him between 35 and 42 percent of the valid votes. That places him ahead of the Right’s preferred candidate, Guillermo Lasso — also the country’s most notorious corporate banker — who has 18 to 36 percent.

Andrés Arauz sat down with Denis Rogatyuk of Jacobin América Latina to discuss his candidacy — and what Ecuador and the world could expect from his future presidency.
DR


What measures are you planning to implement to resolve the issue of unemployment and begin the economic recovery in Ecuador?
AA


Our main priority, in the short term, is economic recovery. This also depends on the recovery of the health care system.

We can do many things, but economic activity needs to resume. That is why we consider acquiring vaccines a priority. We know that until vaccination is implemented in Ecuador, until work is generated, until the state recovers its strength to resume public works, we need to give immediate help. We have proposed a program to give $1000 to a million Ecuadorian families in our first week of government.

In this way, we boost the families’ economy (la economía familiar). The money can cover debt repayments, buy medicines, food, and clothing, and if there is a little left over, it can even be used to start a small business venture. With this, we reactivate the entire national economy: the mother or father of the family goes out to the market, to the store, to the commercial premises, and the money circulation increases.

DR


How do you plan on renegotiating both sovereign debt and its terms with the IMF?

AA


We are first going to use the resources that already exist in Ecuador, but that [the current] government has allowed to be taken out of the country and stored abroad, in Miami, in Panama, in Switzerland. That money has to return to Ecuador to finance our development — not the war adventures of other countries but our interests.If the IMF wants to help us with that Ecuadorian plan, they are welcome — but as the agreement with the IMF is now, we are not going to comply with it.

After that, we will establish dignified conditions with our sovereign economic plan that seeks economic growth, and that seeks to solve the problem of unemployment by generating work and restarting public works and services. If the IMF wants to help us with that Ecuadorian plan, they are welcome — but as the agreement with the IMF is now, we are not going to comply with it.

DR
What will be the great project in Ecuador that goes down in history bearing the stamp of Andrés Arauz?

AA

The great challenge we have is to successfully emerge from the pandemic. Right now, we cannot plan for great milestones, because we have to get out of our crisis first. To be honest with you, the great achievement that we are going to have in our government is to show that there can be a government that respects the dignity of the people, that does not take advantage of the crisis to give more power to the rich, and that does not take advantage of the crisis to be able to kick the people. On the contrary — we are going to show that there can be a government of the people.

When we get out of the pandemic, the first years, maybe the first two years, will be centered on recovering the future and putting education at the forefront of society’s transformation. My dream is that we can have the best education system in Latin America. We will use science, technology, innovation, knowledge, universal connectivity, and the internet to show that young Ecuadorians are the protagonists of their society and can bring about the change that our country requires.

DR

Do you feel part of the original peoples of Ecuador? How do you feel about the Sumak Kawsay ideology and how do you hope to apply its principles in your future government?

AA

I feel part of the plurinational and intercultural state that is constitutionally established in Ecuador. All of our Latin America is plurinational and intercultural, and it’s important that we learn to recognize what the constitution says. It’s important that we recognize the diverse actors that are part of our culture. We have to get out of the colonial or neocolonial logic and begin to recognize our diversity as our main source of wealth.We are going to show that there can be a government of the people.

I have been close to the indigenous peoples, but also with the Afro communities — the Montubio people of Ecuador — because we need to make a call for unity now. This country can no longer bear fights between politicians, and it can no longer bear to live with the repressive policies that caused so much pain and damage to our society, as in October 2019.

We need to reconcile as a country on the basis of a future project, such as the Constitution of Good Living. That utopia should mark the field for all of Ecuador, regardless of the ethnicity or nationality to which we belong. We need to build that unity.

DR

How do you see the future of the relationship with the Confederation of the Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and other indigenous movements?

AA

I see excellent opportunities to build and implement the plurinational and intercultural state with the CONAIE, but also with each of the indigenous peoples and nationalities of our country, with the bases of indigenous organizations, and with the communities that are in each of Ecuador’s territories. We have to advance in terms of irrigation, productive projects, credit, and support in savings and credit for the indigenous cooperatives of our country, in terms of being able to have an education system of the highest quality that preserves our ancestral languages.

We are going to declare the ancestral languages to be in a state of emergency on the first day of our government, which will help to preserve an indigenous justice system — not only for political acts, but also to help administrative procedures in our communities, so that individuals don’t have to travel to the capital to solve their problems.

The implementation of the plurinational and intercultural state will be administered by a plurinational and intercultural team.

DR

Do you think that the electoral sabotage against your candidacy has weakened your campaign? If so, in what way?

AA

They have tried to weaken the strength of our campaign among the Ecuadorian people, but it has not worked. The Ecuadorian people have immense solidarity and sympathy with our proposals, which represent them in the majority. Our identity is first patriotic, then democratic, and then progressive — so those who tried to set the traps did nothing but project us further into the hearts of Ecuadorians.

DR
But the Ecuadorian people have a rebellious heart, too.

AA
There’s much more critical awareness of the role of politics in our society, and that will allow us to recover the future with dignity.

Of course, and it’s a justified rebellion after centuries of oppression, and years of a nefarious government that has mistreated us. I do want to thank the Moreno government for one thing, though — he reawakened that energy, that youthful outrage that was hidden for several years and that reemerged in October of last year. Now there’s much more critical awareness of the role of politics in our society, and that will allow us, together with the youth, together with the people, together with the women of our country, and together with the workers, to recover the future with dignity.

DR
The current minister of health got the vaccine even before the medics on the front lines of the pandemic. What do you think about that?

AA

It’s outrageous — not only that they have bought only eight thousand doses, which are four thousand vaccines, but that they did not dedicate it to frontline personnel. Instead, the government passed it to their friends and their relatives, scamming the Ecuadorian people. That’s unforgivable. I believe that they will face harsh consequences for cheating the Ecuadorian people, and the Minister of Health, for having violated his own oath as a doctor.

Andrés Arauz campaigning recently in Manabí, Ecuador. 

(Andrés Arauz / Facebook)

But I think we need to advance considerably in the matter of vaccinations. Our priority is that the Ecuadorian people have the vaccine first — our health personnel, our soldiers, our policemen, and our teachers — so that the youth, the children, can return to school. In societies like ours, we also need to rebalance the roles of men and women. Women, and mothers particularly, have been hit the hardest by the effects of the pandemic, because they have had to become teachers, nurses, caregivers, rectors, janitors, and administrators, in addition to their professional and household work.

So the vaccine is essential. We need to diversify the supply of the vaccine, and we have made initial efforts with the Oxford vaccine, produced in Argentina, so that it can reach the entire Ecuadorian territory.

DR
How do you see the future of Ecuador in Latin America and the multipolar world? What kind of a relationship do you hope to build with China and the new administration in the United States?

AA

We want to continue building diversified relationships with all countries of the world. We want to build exchanges in terms of educational experiences, in terms of science and technology, in terms of inventions and innovation, in order to contribute to Ecuadorian development. Our principles will be peace, democracy, and development. These are the same principles on which the United Nations were built.We need to move away from the hegemony of the single country, especially in the western hemisphere.

We believe in multilateralism. We are against the unipolar world. We need to move away from the hegemony of the single country, especially in the western hemisphere. We will continue to build relationships with our friends in China, and in Asia in general. We want to have good relations with all countries of the world — with the United States, Europe, Canada, Eurasian countries, and Russia as well.

Our priority, though, is Latin American integration. We need our own bloc [of countries] — the Latin American bloc. I will personally be in charge of reconstituting regional integration in our country.

DR
During Rafael Correa’s administration, Ecuador was considered the capital of South America, because you have the main office of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).

AA

Lenín Moreno decided to resign Ecuador’s status as the capital of South America — something unforgivable. We hope to return to UNASUR. We hope to improve it, too, so it is not only a project of integration among governments or politicians, but also of integration among people. That means making an effort to include a program of educational exchange, like the European Erasmus program, where students across Latin American countries can study one semester abroad in any other country of the region. That will help to build relationships among Latin Americans that will last for decades.

DR
One of the main criticisms we have heard from the opposition is that you are a clone of Rafael Correa. What do you think about these comparisons?

AA

Rafael is a friend, a colleague, a coleader. He and I agree politically on the needs of our country, but we are the improved version. I am of a new generation. We have that principle of generational renewal: we are going to inject energy, youth, innovation, creativity, and contemporaneity into the political proposal of the Citizen Revolution.

DR
If elected, who will govern — you or Correa?

AA
On May 24, when I swear to respect and enforce the Constitution of Ecuador, I will adhere to what the constitution says, which is that the one who makes the decisions is the President of the Republic. The President of the Republic will be me; Rafael will be one of my main advisers.

For Spanish language coverage of Latin America from the Left, visit Jacobin América Latina.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrés Arauz is the Ecuadorian presidential candidate for the Citizen Revolution Movement.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Denis Rogatyuk is a writer, journalist, and researcher based in London. He's written for Tribune, Green Left Weekly, TeleSUR, LINKS, International Viewpoint, and other publications.

You’re Not Lazy — But Your Boss Wants You to Think You Are
BYCHUCK MCKEEVER

So many of us feel exhausted and inadequate, lacking joy in our work and beating ourselves up over our supposed laziness. But we’re not lazy — we just live under an economic system that wants to wring more and more work out of us.

In their new book Laziness Does Not Exist, social psychologist Dr Devon Price seeks to explain to readers that their exhaustion, their feelings of inadequacy, and their lack of joy in their work are not born of their own moral failings, but are the inevitable consequences of living and working under capitalism. (Sam Solomon / Unsplash)


Review of Laziness Does Not Exist, by Devon Price (Atria Books, 2021).

In George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie has died and exists in a sort of purgatory alongside the souls of others who, like Willie, do not know or cannot admit that they are dead. The story culminates with Willie’s realization, having witnessed his own funeral and his father’s life-altering grief, that he has died. His brave refusal to hide from that fact ultimately sets him and all the other souls in limbo free.


You are not sick, [Willie] said.

Stop talking, Mr. Vollman said. You will kindly stop talking at once.

There is a name for what ails us, [Willie] said. Do you not know it? Do you really not know it? …Dead, the boy said. Everyone, we are dead!”

In the world of Willie Lincoln and the other tortured souls conjured by Saunders, it is only by recognizing and naming their condition that they can free themselves. If they can’t name what ails them, they will be stuck in an eternal, hopeless present.

For many workers under capitalism, the problem is the same. We lack the name for what ails us, believing ourselves temporarily stuck instead of perpetually exploited. Without being able to name and confront what ails us, we lack the first fundamental tool for freeing ourselves. Attempts to explain this problem to people have filled libraries’ worth of Marxist texts and serve as the raison d’être for publications like this one. Where you’d be less likely to find any such explanation is the self-help section of your local bookstore.

That has changed with Laziness Does Not Exist, in which social psychologist Dr Devon Price seeks to explain to readers that their exhaustion, their feelings of inadequacy, and their lack of joy in their work are not born of their own moral failings, but are the inevitable consequences of living and working under capitalism. Self-help books, as a rule, exist to preach to readers that they can and should be doing more: more work, more exercise, more self-care, more self-advocacy. Our lives can be transformed, these books tell us, by making better individual choices.


Price takes a different approach, positing that the entire logic of self-help is backward. We aren’t miserable because we aren’t working hard enough at happiness, we’re miserable because we’re all working too hard at everything. What’s more, no one seems to believe it, including ourselves.

Price focuses specifically on one aspect of this phenomenon, what they call the “Laziness Lie.” According to Price, the Laziness Lie has three central tenets: our worth is our productivity, we cannot trust our own feelings and limits, and there is always more we could be doing.

We internalize this logic to such a degree that we learn to believe that “our skills and talents don’t really belong to us; they exist to be used. If we don’t gladly give our time, our talents, and even our lives to others, we aren’t heroic or good.” And we’re certainly more fireable.

From the Archives: "The Right to Be Lazy" | Dissent Magazine

www.dissentmagazine.org › blog › from-the-archives-t...

In 1883, Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, wrote The Right to Be Lazy, a political pamphlet that argued for liberation from the obligation to work

The Birth of “Laziness”

Where does this belief system come from? Price (who, full disclosure, I have corresponded with about the ideas in the book over the years with but never met) traces the Laziness Lie across American history, unpacking its roots in the Christianity of the country’s settlers and its utility in rationalizing slavery, indentured servitude, and child labor. By the time of the industrial revolution, Price writes, “Laziness had officially become not only a personal failing but a social ill to be defeated — and it has remained that way ever since.”

It seems fitting that the United States just inaugurated a president who campaigned in part on the idea that millennials deserve no empathy for their generation’s immiseration, and who shut down a pointed political question from a town hall attendee by challenging him to a pushup contest. Obviously, the idea that struggling people deserve no sympathy is bullshit. That our new president scoffs at the people ruined by a debt crisis he helped engineer over a long, pro-banking Senate career is just extra cruelty sprinkled on top. But even the savviest Biden-hating socialist is not immune to the ways these attitudes seep into our lives and our attitudes toward ourselves and others.

Capitalism demands that we function in a constant state of “speed up” at work, needing to cram ever more into the waking hours of our days regardless of our actual efficiency or productivity. What Price calls the “Laziness Lie” is really this demand for “speed up” taken to its inevitable extreme, such that it permeates all aspects of one’s life on or off the clock.Self-help doesn’t just perpetuate capitalist ideology by peddling the myth that every individual is capable of and responsible for changing their own conditions. It does so by insisting that our very human desire to live for something other than work is simply a challenge to be overcome.

We repeat and reify the logic of our bosses in our own lives through social media and other avenues where the “hustle” is expected to be never-ending, even at home. Influencer culture, in Price’s view, has amplified the “Laziness Lie”: our meals must be Instagram-worthy, our living spaces minimalist and tidy, our bodies well-toned and well-dressed. As a result we treat fatness, tackiness, nonconformity, and other seeming imperfections as contemptible rather than default states of being.

Perversely, this phenomenon can even absorb its apparent opposite. No influencer’s Instagram grid is complete without a smattering of confessional posts. Look y’all, today was a hard day, I’m blessed by this life but it’s not as glamorous as it seems. Just gotta keep smiling… These humanizing offerings don’t dismantle the logic of hustle culture, they reinforce it — because the implicit conclusion to each of them is …and I’m still getting up and doing it every day, so why aren’t you?

The ceaseless demands put upon us by our own belief in this pernicious myth — and the attendant expectations of being an open and available friend, a politically and socially conscious member of society, a generous and committed romantic partner, and so forth — combine to put a crushing weight on just about everyone who works for a living.

Price relates anecdotes and data about the ways that particular populations, such as people with mental illnesses, are compoundingly harmed by our societal contempt for laziness. But their analysis also includes the harm done to those with no particularly remarkable barriers who still don’t rise to the occasion as students or employees or voters. In other words, the laziness myth hurts the vast majority of us.
Laziness Is Fake, Disenfranchisement Is Real

It is disenfranchisement, not laziness, Price argues, that makes even relatively healthy people step back from challenges and check out from the world. If we don’t see the point of our schoolwork or any meaning in the jobs we’ve considered applying to, we’re not likely to complete those tasks.

If we don’t vote even when shamed by others about doing our civic duty, we’re not too lazy to bother, we probably had to work that day and didn’t have the energy to go stand in line at the polls for a few extra hours (to say nothing of the pitiful options on offer, though Price doesn’t mention that).

On top of all this, most other people we know are going through some version of these problems, too, meaning that the exhausting demands on our time don’t end when our professional or academic obligations do. We need help, and so do our friends and family, and we’re all using each other for it.(

Ben Blennerhassett / Unsplash)

A more explicitly socialist text would probably unpack these same phenomena as products of capitalist alienation, not just a general form of disenfranchisement. But Price has not leaned on the most obvious layers of the working class to make the bulk of their argument (though retail workers, health care workers, and bartenders do appear in their interviews).

Instead we get a diverse cross-section of people whose time is not their own, from people experiencing homelessness to overwhelmed grad students to semi-professional streamers to working moms still wondering if they can “have it all.”

While the stories and conditions vary, a single thread runs through them all: no one has really escaped the self-loathing and other harmful behaviors we have absorbed as we try to work and survive in a capitalist society. Price correctly describes the normalization of overwork as a public health crisis, and their interviews bear out this diagnosis — marriages, bright futures, and, in the case of one memorable interviewee who was so overworked that he began vomiting blood, internal organs all get damaged by workers’ inability to say no to the demands of a capitalist society.

In this regard, Laziness is something like a fox in the henhouse: Price tells readers that we are not alone in feeling profoundly ill-used and sick because of the demands of our economy and culture, and makes their radical arguments broadly appealing by casting such a wide net in their interview pool. (It also doesn’t hurt that the book’s title is ambiguous enough to disguise its intent. Were your boss to see you reading it, she might think you a particularly motivated employee looking for tips on how to quit slacking.)
Collective Action, Not “Self-Help”

This trick of Laziness — to exist as an anti-capitalist manifesto posing as a self-help book — gives Price a tough needle to thread. Self-help books are by nature dedicated to improving, well, the self. But the full-scale societal transformation required to liberate the overworked world from capitalism can only come through sustained, organized mass action.

Price is clearly aware of this contradiction, as one of the book’s currents is that precious few individuals are capable of maintaining anything resembling a decent life under the demands of capitalism, much less saving the world.

This is not a book designed to teach downtrodden Americans how to throw off the yoke of their exploiters, though Price does repeatedly plug collective workplace action and unionization as tools. Rather, Laziness Does Not exist tells its readers, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that they are being exploited, and there is a name for what ails them: capitalism. And while the book’s prescriptions for dismantling entire systems are thin, it is a useful compendium of anecdotes, insights, and data that might help more people survive under those systems.

“Sometimes,” Price opines, “the best thing good people can do is hunker down, care for one another, and survive.” Plain survival is not enough to change the world. But changing the world requires that masses of people understand their conditions more fully and have the time and energy to fight.Self-help books are by nature dedicated to improving, well, the self. But the full-scale societal transformation required to liberate the overworked world from capitalism can only come through sustained, organized mass action.

This is a drastic departure from the usual offerings in the self-help section, which often start in the same place — What you feel about your situation is okay to feel — but head in the opposite direction — and here’s how to push past those feelings to go produce, earn, and do more!

Self-help doesn’t just perpetuate capitalist ideology by peddling the myth that every individual is capable of and responsible for changing their own conditions. It does so by insisting that our very human desire to live for something other than work is simply a challenge to be overcome.

Contrast Price’s book with two recent self-help bestsellers by Rachel Hollis, Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing, in which the author “encourages, entertains, and even kicks a little butt, all to convince you to do whatever it takes to get real… Because you really can live with passion and hustle.”


She “identifies the excuses to let go of, the behaviors to adopt, and the skills to acquire on the path to growth, confidence, and believing in yourself.” Hollis isn’t teaching her readers that their feelings and experiences matter simply because they are human beings with emotional needs, but that they matter because they can be catalogued for use or disposal in service of one’s ambition.

The ultimate irony of Laziness is that it could actually be a useful tool for employers, as it contains reams of research on the ways that making people work less actually makes them work better — if not on their boss’s terms, at least on workers’ own. Abolishing overwork and other abusive practices might increase many companies’ productivity, and certainly employee longevity.

But overwork is not just about profit or productivity, it’s about control. Companies are incentivized to own as much of an employee’s time as possible for what they’re paid, whether by extending the salaried work week into nights and weekends or reducing the break time of hourly wage-earners.

Laziness Does Not Exist is the rare self-help book that understands the basic truth that the majority of our problems are not of our individual making, and therefore cannot be solved individually. Accordingly, Price does not promise tools for salvation, but tools for survival, and permission to forgive oneself for not being able to change the world alone.

There can be no real “self-help” without collective work to understand and dismantle the system under which we all labor. Like Lincoln in the Bardo’s dead, we must be able to name what ails us before we can get free. It’s capitalism, not laziness.

  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chuck McKeever is a community college instructor and union organizer living in Seattle. He is the author of A Good Place for Maniacs: Dispatches from the Pacific Crest Trail.

FURTHER READING

We Need Five Days’ Pay for Four Days’ Work

• Aidan Harper

Americans Work Too Damn Much

• Jamie McCallum

More Free Time — for Everyone

• Stan De Spiegelaere

Living, Not Just Surviving

• Alyssa Battistoni

Why Cable News Hates Medicare for All
BY LUKE SAVAGE  
JACOBIN

02.06.2021

From last year’s Democratic primaries to this year’s Biden agenda, TV news coverage of the health care debate is outrageously skewed against single-payer reform. To understand why, we need look no further than their business model

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Bernie Sanders speaks while Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg listen during the Democratic presidential debate at the Fox Theatre on July 30, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

If you watched any number of last year’s Democratic primary debates, there’s a good chance you noticed one of their most overt and recurring patterns: namely, a near total hostility toward the idea of a universal, single-payer health care system.

At times, this hostility could be almost baroque, with one voice or another invariably shouting it from the TV screen any time the subject of health care was broached. This extended not only to most of the candidates themselves (Bernie Sanders being the sole contender to unequivocally champion Medicare for All) but also to the panelists and commentators featured on the cable networks that hosted the debates. As Sanders himself pointed out during a Detroit event hosted by CNN, even the ad breaks generally offered no solace to those hoping for even a momentary cessation of the barrage: health insurance and pharmaceutical companies seizing every opportunity to bombard viewers with misleading industry agitprop about the breathtaking wonders of profit-driven health care.

On its face, the existence of this advertising effort likely surprised no one. Wherever their politics happen to sit, and whether they sympathize or not, most Americans probably grasp the idea of an industry using ad space to protect its business model. Even the hostility toward Medicare for All then expressed (and still expressed) by many Democratic politicians has a fairly straightforward explanation: a whopping majority of voters, after all, favor campaign finance reform and believe donations from corporations and special interests have a direct influence on the decisions those running for office make. It requires no great leap of the imagination to understand that politicians raising funds from figures in the very industry threatened by a particular policy aren’t going to be its most vocal champions.

This is what arguably makes the hostility directed toward Medicare for All by figures at the cable networks themselves the most insidious of all. Consider the following question, posed to Sanders during the Detroit debate by CNN’s Jake Tapper:


Let’s start the debate with the number-one issue for Democratic voters, health care. And Senator Sanders, let’s start with you. You support Medicare for All, which would eventually take private health insurance away for more than 150 million Americans in exchange for government-sponsored health care for everyone.

Despite his attempt at a somewhat balanced framing, and whether he realized it or not, Tapper was essentially regurgitating a talking point seeded by the insurance industry and its lobbyists (just take it from former Cigna-executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter). Regardless, a question from a journalist tends to carry a lot more weight than a TV ad or even a spiel from a warm-and-fuzzy-sounding liberal politician.

We can’t know, obviously, how Tapper genuinely feels about the issue or even what role he played in writing the question. Given the near total uniformity of hostility to Medicare for All expressed on large cable networks, it’s far less relevant than the disjuncture between the perspectives they tend to showcase and majority public opinion — which consistently favors the creation of a universal, single-payer model.

The existence of media bubbles, of course, is one obvious explanation: exorbitantly well-paid and often politically insular communities of pundits and cable hosts inhabiting a completely different socioeconomic reality and being far better served by the current health care system than most Americans. To really understand why cable networks were so hostile toward Medicare for All throughout the Democratic primaries (and why they almost certainly will be for the foreseeable future), however, we have to ultimately look at their business model. Consider the following point made by Institute for New Economic Thinking executive director Rob Johnson during a recent interview when asked about Medicare for All:


Public opinion polls show more than 70 percent of the population is in favor of Medicare for All. It’s not the population that doesn’t want it, and they’re the ultimate voters. It’s vested interests and the struggle that has to do with the relationship between money-raising campaign war chests and the probability of re-election and what you might call the refractory influence of the mainstream media, where pharmaceutical companies in particular and insurance companies as well are very big advertisers. [emphasis added]

Concise though it is, Johnson’s remark is fairly close to a comprehensive explanation of why Medicare for All remains so marginal throughout the political class, despite the overwhelming popular support it boasts. What he calls the “refractory influence” of the mainstream media is arguably the most crucial factor involved: given the dependence of large networks on health insurance and pharma companies for advertising revenue, it’s really no wonder the astroturfed effort to discredit socialized medicine enjoys something approaching full-spectrum dominance on cable TV. As Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman wrote in their famous study Manufacturing Consent: “The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for programs — they are the ‘patrons’ who provide the media subsidy.”

CNN’s Detroit debate is a case in point; the network was demanding at least $300,000 from companies advertising, with a single thirty-second spot costing an estimated $110,000 — and groups like the so-called Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (in practice, a front for various corporate interests), filled out many of the slots. Regardless of how anchors or hosts think about an issue like health care, the networks’ basic model essentially precludes meaningful critique of the status quo by design. As long as it persists, don’t expect to see the public interest or popular opinion reflected anywhere on cable TV.

Medicare for All the 'Only Way Forward,' Concludes Lancet Panel in Study Detailing Death and Misery Inflicted by Trump

"Trump's disastrous actions compounded longstanding failures in health policy in the USA. We know what it will take to create a healthy society. We just need the political will to do it."

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Jake Johnson, staff writer

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Common Dreams

Members of National Nurses United observe a moment of silence for nurses who died from Covid-19 while demonstrating in Lafayette Park across from the White House on May 7, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

A panel of policy experts and medical professionals convened to examine the healthcare legacy of Donald Trump concluded in a detailed report released Thursday morning that the former president's sweeping regulatory rollbacks and full-scale assault on America's already decimated public health infrastructure severely undermined the nation's fight against Covid-19 and caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

Described as the first comprehensive look at the consequences of the former president's four years of corporate-friendly privatization efforts, deep cuts to public health programs, and abandonment of international cooperation in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the new study by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era argues that while the Republican's tenure was in some ways uniquely destructive, his agenda built upon years of "damaging neoliberal policies" pursued by his predecessors.

"While the wealthy have thrived, most Americans have lost ground, both economically and medically. The Biden administration must reboot democracy and implement the progressive social and health policies needed to put the country on the road to better health."
—Dr. Steffie Woolhandler

"The disturbing truth is that many of President Trump's policies do not represent a radical break with the past but have merely accelerated the decades-long trend of lagging life expectancy that reflects deep and long-standing flaws in U.S. economic, health, and social policy," reads the report, the product of years of research by dozens of leading health experts from the U.S., U.K., and Canada.

The 49-page assessment notes that while Trump and his GOP allies failed in their effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the number of U.S. residents without health insurance coverage soared by 2.3 million during the former president's first three years in office largely due to his assault on Medicaid, a program that has long been in the crosshairs of Republican lawmakers.

"Over the past four years," the report notes, "the Trump administration gradually advanced its market-based agenda, including efforts to divert funds from the Veterans Health Administration (VA) to purchase private care for veterans and, most prominently, by pushing forward the creeping privatization of Medicare that started with the Reagan administration."

The Trump administration's sprawling attack on America's public health programs helped set the stage for the White House's disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic, which hit the nation after many of the former president's healthcare rollbacks had taken their toll, leaving millions of additional Americans vulnerable to the virus and its widespread economic consequences. As of this writing, the virus has killed more than 471,000 people in the U.S.

"Instead of galvanizing the U.S. populace to fight the pandemic," the report states, "President Trump publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation. His refusal to develop a national strategy worsened shortages of personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests."

Stressing that the Trump administration impacted public health through a variety of means, the Lancet panel's study estimates that the former president's gutting of environmental regulations was responsible for 22,000 excess deaths in 2019 alone.

Trump's massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations, moreover, contributed to decades of soaring income and wealth inequality, a trend that has further stratified U.S. society and left large segments of the population unable to afford the basic necessities of life—including adequate healthcare, food, and housing. The commission also pointed to the president's racism, xenophobia, and attacks on women's reproductive rights as immensely damaging to U.S. public health.

Beginning to undo some of the devastation inflicted by Trump and those who laid the groundwork for his ascendancy will require much more than a return to a status quo under which tens of millions were uninsured, hungry, and poor, the experts behind the study argue.

"Trump's disastrous actions compounded longstanding failures in health policy in the USA," said panel member Dr. Kevin Grumbach, Hellman Endowed Professor and Chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "We know what it will take to create a healthy society. We just need the political will to do it."

Among the panel's list of policy recommendations is Medicare for All, a system that would "cover all residents under a single, federally financed plan providing comprehensive coverage" at a lower cost than the current fragmented, for-profit system. President Joe Biden opposes Medicare for All and has instead proposed more incremental reforms like a public option, an approach the commission warns would leave many with "onerous  co-pays... and deductibles, and millions of people would remain uninsured."

"Our ICU is the last stop for many patients harmed by Trump's disdain for facts, science, and compassion," commission member Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, said in a statement. "But decades of health care inequality, privatization, and profiteering set the stage for these tragedies. Our commission has concluded that single-payer, Medicare for All reform is the only way forward."

The commission's list of policy recommendations also includes:

• Repealing Trump's tax cuts and raising taxes on the wealthy;
• Slashing military spending;
• Passage of a Green New Deal ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry;
• Reversing cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health agencies;
• Making school meals free and universal;
• Raising the federal minimum wage; and
• Eliminating "patents, trade agreement restrictions, and treaties that impede global access to vital generic drugs."

"Americans' health was deteriorating even as our economy was booming," said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and a distinguished professor of public health at City University of New York at Hunter College.

"This unprecedented decoupling of health from national wealth signals that our society is sick," added Woolhandler, a co-chair of the Lancet commission. "While the wealthy have thrived, most Americans have lost ground, both economically and medically. The Biden administration must reboot democracy and implement the progressive social and health policies needed to put the country on the road to better health."

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