Latest / Love Letters to Troublemakers / E11. Are White Collar Workers to Blame?

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E11. Are White Collar Workers to Blame? · Love Letters to Troublemakers

0:00
Someone read a piece I wrote recently and shared this in
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response, and the piece was on progressive philanthropy and
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this is what he says and he hits the nail exactly on the head
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verbatim. Please, please, I beg of you,
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don't reach for the easy exit by qualifying it.
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She's only talking about American nonprofits, or it's
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only about emergency response, or it's about traditional
0:22
giving. Don't find a reason this doesn't
0:26
apply to you. Sit with what she's saying.
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The institution isn't failing in spite of us.
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It's failing because we keep it going the way it is.
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Oh, don't find a reason this doesn't apply to you.
0:40
That note is basically this whole episode.
0:43
That note is basically this whole episode.
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Welcome back to the Circle Back Club.
0:56
I'm Lars Galleon. And I'm a partner, Ray, and
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today it is just us. It's just a snow guess, nowhere
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to hide, although I hope you know from this podcast we are
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not trying to hide at all. And today's episode is
1:14
structured around 2 core concepts that we will be
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defining as we spend our time together.
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The 1st is symbolic capitalism, which is coined by a sociologist
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who we love named Musa L Garbi, whose work we have referenced
1:30
throughout the season and we highly recommend reading his
1:33
book. We Have Never Been Woke.
1:35
And the second term we're going to focus on is the professional
1:39
managerial class or PMC for short, popularized by cultural
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theorists who we love, Catherine Liu, who is another person
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again, we just have learned so much from.
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And if you're listening to this episode and you participate in
1:55
white collar work, you are probably a symbolic capitalist
1:58
and part of the professional managerial class.
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So our intention today is to hold the mirror up and talk
2:05
about what is real for us. OK, because the question for us
2:10
for today isn't just what is wrong with the system, it's what
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role each one of us is playing and keeping it exactly as it is.
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Whoa, we super chill, Super chill.
2:23
So before we go anywhere, let's check in.
2:27
Aparna, how are you sitting in this?
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This is a different episode for us in in a couple different
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ways. How does it feel?
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Honestly, I would say a little exposed.
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I've been sitting, you know, we knew we were going to record
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this episode all the way in December when we planned our
2:44
like the arc of the first season.
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And I've been saving quotes everywhere.
2:49
I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos until late at
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night. And we'll get to who.
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But every time I pull on a thread, I find myself in it like
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I'm in this framework and I am a symbolic capitalist.
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And honestly, that's actually really uncomfortable for me to
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sit with. Yeah, yeah, I, I feel that so
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deeply. I'm really grateful for all the
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paradigm shifts that happened in my life where all of a sudden
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I'm seeing the world differently.
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And being introduced to symbolic capitalism is absolutely one of
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them. This feels like a confessional,
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like I am a symbolic capitalist. It's true.
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Like, and we're going to talk about it, right?
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I exist in the symbols of knowledge work and have 15 years
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inside of corporations. I know the language, the
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signaling, the importance of my network as my capital, and also
3:46
the belief that we are good and that we are doing good and how
3:49
important that belief is into. Yeah, existing.
3:55
And the other side of it is moral credentialing of the fact
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that we are credentialing ourselves through this bubble of
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goodness that we're trying to create, which I think is really
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interesting because I've always been aware of it.
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I've always known moral credentialing, but there's kind
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of a Russian doll effect with our position in this work, and
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that's something that is uncomfortable and important.
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So yeah, here we are. OK, so I want folks to sit with
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the phrase moral credentialing. We'll dig into that in a little
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bit. But I thought it would be
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important, Lars, that we define some terms first because these
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are non casual concepts, right? And I want to start with Moussa
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Al Garbi. He describes symbolic
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capitalists as people who work in fields of education, finance,
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consulting, media, tech, law, human resources, work that
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primarily deals and symbols, ideas, knowledge, narrative, you
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know, people essentially with desk jobs.
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And these are workers like us who gain their capital through
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the similar symbolism of prestige, credentials.
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You already talked about that social connections.
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You already talked about that to maintain their power and
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influence, which is what they know and who they know is the
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capital. And given that symbolic reliance
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on access to capital, this is a class of workers who also tend
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to define themselves in terms of doing moral good and people who
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should be trusted with this moral good.
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And we are right. You and I and so many of our
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listeners in all garbies framings were the Americans that
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are most likely also to self identify as feminist, anti
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racist, environmentalist, my least favorite word these days,
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progressives. And we are not lying when we say
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those things. We generally we mean them.
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I know you and I, we mean them, and so do many of our listeners.
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And here's the cultural contradiction that he names so
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precisely, which is why I think you and I have both been
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obsessed with his writing. It is that while we believe in
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all of those things, we also want to be very comfortable, and
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a lot of us have dreamt of climbing the ladder you and I
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have both climbed and having a great deal of material safety.
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I hear conversations in our social circles about making and
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saving your first million, and we believe that our preferences,
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our expertise, should count for more because of our performance
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of goodness. Oh, so let's take a breath.
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We're going to be offering a lot of paradigm shifting or maybe
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it's something you already know and we're going to pause and
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just ask the simple question. So be with us.
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Try to be in your body and not your head because you might say
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I'm not a symbolic capitalist. I'm not a capitalist.
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You may want to have a push back.
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So first question, how important is demonstrating your knowledge
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and network to gaining access to capital?
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For me, that's my entire existence is knowledge network.
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So check what is it for you. Second, how important is showing
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people that you are good is to the success of your career?
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I can answer that too. Extremely important, always has
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been. So be with that, be with those
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questions. OK, maybe I'm a symbolic
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capitalist. Cool.
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What does that mean? Why are we talking about this?
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There's these two drives that we're existing in, in this,
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right? Is this this sense of
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egalitarianism, right? The pursuit of goodness to rid
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inequality, the belief in equity and preserving or having elite
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status, preserving our position and what we have.
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These two things are fundamentally incompatible.
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And when they come into conflict, we're asking, which
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decisions do we actually make for ourselves and our networks?
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So as Musal Garbi really puts it in a plain way, he says that
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symbolic capitalists tend to pursue social justice actions
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that don't cost us anything, don't risk anything for us,
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don't require us to change our lifestyles, our plans for our
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children, for our families. So what the push is and what
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we're asking ourselves is where's the moral positionality
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without the introspection or interest in real mutuality,
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which would mean that we change. So if we compromise, that we
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share resources with each other, it's the Black Lives Matter sign
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in an affluent, majority white neighborhood.
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What we're asking is who is that symbol for and how do you versus
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the community you claim actually benefit from it?
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So what we are talking about is there's a a particular type of
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avoidance if we're not asking who are we actually serving?
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That's the question. So again, for us as you're
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digesting that you just took another spoonful of a drop when
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you are demonstrating your goodness, who is it directed to?
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Is it to the people in your same socio economic network or is it
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to the people who maintain your access to capital?
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Or is it outside of that? So again, I'll answer this
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question for myself. My goodness has been primarily
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directed to the people who I share social economic class
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with. Period.
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It's the truth, yeah. I mean, same, right?
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It's who you're getting work from.
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Who is going to say your name in rooms and who is not saying my
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real name in any room is the grocery store person that I see
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every week? You know, it's not the folks
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that come help us with yard maintenance, right?
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Gardening. It's not those people, right?
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Like it's not for them. And this is where I think the
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work of Catherine Lu comes in. Doctor and Professor Catherine
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Lu, she writes about the professional managerial class.
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And honestly, when I read her book, which conveniently is
10:19
sitting on my desk right now, I'll just hold it up for people
10:21
that are watching this podcast, Virtual Quarters.
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I got this book maybe 3 or 4 years ago, and I think it really
10:29
broke my head because one of the things that she talks about is
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that the professional managerial class is a class of workers has
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abandoned the working classes, not out of malice, but out of
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vanity, out of sort of this obsessive cultivation of salt.
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And she argues that PMC has replaced solidarity, like real
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solidarity, which means you're willing to give something up for
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collective good with self improvement, and has replaced
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collective politics with sort of this therapeutic self
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actualization. And I think that, you know, I
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could talk all day long about the influencer culture,
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especially in the last like, 5 to 10 years around self
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improvement, self actualization, self leadership with 0 grounding
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in the collective. And it's just me, me, me, me,
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me, me, me, me all day long. Right.
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And that makes sense, right? Think about, well, OK, let's say
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who are the PMCS really like? Who is the professional
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managerial class? We are the workers who don't own
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the means of production. You know, we're all mad at the
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bad billionaires, right? The owners.
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That's that's a place where we can go, but we control the
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production process and the mainstream culture of
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capitalism. So we sit between the owning and
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working class. That's also a really, really
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important part of the PMC engine.
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And probably why me, me, me is really important because it
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feels pretty precarious. And just to bring in and and
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geek a little bit on the semantics part of this, just
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take a second of like, what does that feel like?
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My job is to be between the billionaires who are profiting
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off of our labor and the working class people who are
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experiencing the worst K shape economy there is.
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We sit in the middle of that. What emotions do we have access
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to in this? What does that feel like in our
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bodies? What I see is we're angry at
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billionaires. That's clear, right?
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We're mad. We're looking up and we say tax
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the rich, at least the very rich, maybe not us.
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Well, definitely not us, right? Because we've talked about how
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in Washington we just passed a millionaire's tax, which is only
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impacts like 20,000 people in the entire state of Washington.
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Like it's not actually the majority of the state and the
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ultra wealthy are not having it. Yeah, right.
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Yeah. And I'm like, if you're making
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$1,000,000 a year, you can be a little bit more.
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Please, please help. Please help.
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And OK, so we're looking up and we're angry.
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We have we have access to that emotion.
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What are our emotions around the working class?
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Because what I don't hear PMC peers yelling is tax to the
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corporation. I don't hear PMC peers yelling
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raise the minimum wage. And of course, not all you can.
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Yes, there are people who who care.
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I hear you. It's OK but I will tell you as
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an example living in the Bay Area the amount of Teslas I see
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with signs that say I bought this before I knew Elon Musk was
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bad. There is literally 5000 versions
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of the sticker. An entire economy has been made
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based off of the moral credentialing that it is.
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Really Like what are you saying more than anything we need to
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say to our community? I know Elon is bad and what's
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going on? Who does that serve besides
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yourself? So there's this obvious again,
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coming back to the body, energetic, protective energy to
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sit in this positionality without looking, looking down,
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looking across, right? There's a there's a holding,
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which is why the episode with Giulio Brunini was so important.
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And you all should listen to this where he talks about why
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somatics and corporations are important to us maintaining our
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humanity. There is a reason why we've
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built an entire professional culture around the management of
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discomfort or the performance of emotional fluency that doesn't
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actually require you to feel anything, which is pretty
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isolating. That has a big impact on us and
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can be really frustrating for people who are constantly
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chasing, being good, not making a mistake or saying the right
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thing. And I come from those people.
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Those are my people. That's that's what we care
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about. And as I'm saying, and I feel
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this tightness in my body, I feel this stiffness which is
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like, lol, of course we can't dance.
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You expect us to be able to dance.
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I. Mean, I think that maybe just
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because you're white. Because of this, I mean, that's
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what I'm trying to say is like, bro, we're stiff.
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And you know, I think I have some decent moves despite my
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ancestral conditioning. But the point is obsessing this
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kind of specific PMC performance has a real impact on our health,
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our relationships, and our sense of self, which you can get from
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this entire season of Circle Back Club.
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But yeah, that's the point is it makes sense.
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It feels weird. We're weird.
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We are a little bit weird. And I think that what passes as
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emotional intelligence in corporate spaces, right?
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You've named it Julio named it very loudly in that episode, but
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not actually loudly because he's very soft spoken, which is
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emotional intelligence is just a form of avoidance.
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It's the appearance of feeling without actually sitting with
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the discomfort. Yeah, yeah.
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Aparna and I have been really impacted by a conversation with
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Catherine Liu, who will will include this in the the show
16:12
notes. And she's talking about this
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other layer that we're we'll get into together today around
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commodifying, profiting off of trauma culture within the
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professional managerial class. And any time we say trauma, this
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can mean a lot of different things to people.
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And we really recommend listening and reading her work
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directly. She's even writing a book about
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this right now. And she talks about how we've
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fallen into this trap of credentialing ourselves through
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talking about trauma. So again, we're building on the
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same pattern of what and how are we serving ourselves.
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Yes, trauma happens and should be named absolutely.
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And she's saying to be human is traumatic and uncomfortable, and
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there is a lot of discomfort in being a human.
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And because it's become a tool of access, we also conflate
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discomfort and trauma. So people have become really,
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really fluent at speaking their own language of suffering but
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have no capacity to be in relationship with any anyone
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who's suffering is different from theirs.
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So we end up in this protecting the identity of the trauma
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itself, which she actually talks about trauma culture and
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identity politics all together, which we'll talk about in a
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little bit too, as it really is pushing us away from any form of
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discomfort. We're protecting the symbol
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above actual connection and what happens?
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Well, and she actually says in that that video that you sent
17:47
me, she says, you know, people just don't have empathy, right?
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And she's talking about the PMC and she is talking about the
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ultra wealthy. And when she says it in the
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video, I actually had to stop it and replay it because I was
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like, what do you mean people don't have empathy?
18:08
But Lars, you've also said this in an earlier episode for which
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we got actually, it's quite a bit of Flack on social media
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where people are like, what do you mean?
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What do you mean people? Don't have empathy?
18:22
Yeah. Yeah.
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And like, you know, again, how can you practice empathy within
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this embodied context? Discomfort is deep in the body.
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PMC's, the way that, you know, where it's described is mental
18:38
workers or knowledge workers. Our capital is produced from the
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neck up. It's all head, baby.
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And so real solidarity, empathy, you know, we don't share
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suffering, but I can feel yours too.
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I feel our inner interdependence regardless of shared experience.
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All of that requires us to feel with more than our heads.
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You know, I love the language of being moved because it tells us
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that something has happened to our bodies that moves us towards
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each other. Action, it's physical, but we
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can't be moved if we are in a hyper protective stance that we
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are avoiding to to name for the sake of keeping our own status.
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We have to be honest with ourselves about who and what we
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are protecting every day, especially because of our
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positions in this context of society.
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OK, so I want to switch gears a little bit and talk a bit about
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what exactly is it that we are avoiding.
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For sure. We're avoiding our actual
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feelings. Famously, You know, I tell
19:47
people I don't cry. And it's kind of true.
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Like, there's not a lot of crying that happens.
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Yeah. And I, and I wonder, I mean, one
19:55
of my really dear friends, you know, she's like, it's just
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better to get it out. We are also avoiding the
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discomfort of our own complicity.
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We're avoiding the bodies we live in, which if we sat in them
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for long enough, would you tell us that something is wrong?
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And so I guess a quick pause for our listeners.
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What are you avoiding and who are you protecting with that
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avoidance? 0 We.
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OK, we're avoiding and in order to, as someone who has done a
20:39
fair amount of avoiding in my life, we know that in order to
20:42
sustain avoidance, we need some distractions, right?
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There is a reason why we stay here.
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There's a reason why we don't ask ourselves these questions.
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And just to be clear, these are not bad faith distractions.
20:54
I love a good distraction. So let's start with distraction
20:59
#1 trauma culture. Love a trauma culture.
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You know, we've, we named it, but I think let's be a little
21:09
bit more specific. When everything is trauma, when
21:13
a difficult meeting is trauma, when an unwanted e-mail is harm,
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right? Imagine if somebody sent you an
21:20
e-mail and right, you experience that as harm.
21:26
We really lose the ability to distinguish between discomfort
21:31
and structural violence. And who does that actually
21:34
serve? It serves the people who benefit
21:37
from having a workforce that is fluent in a kind of self-care,
21:42
which, you know, me, I've said it's just selfishness and a
21:47
workforce that is allergic to collective action.
21:51
Yeah, we're, you know, we don't even know what collective action
21:55
even looks and feels like. And that's also the point of
21:59
this episode is we have to be taught, we have to practice.
22:03
So the challenge for us and definitely me, I am part of
22:06
every single topic we're talking about today is that we build the
22:10
skills of of tracking our responses to discomfort.
22:15
When are we over indexing on righteousness and who our
22:19
reaction is ultimately serving? If it comes back to serving
22:24
yourself and not the collective, you may want to ask yourself, is
22:28
this a distraction? It's probably a distraction.
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OK, so the second of the three distractions I think we're going
22:35
to talk about is identity politics.
22:38
And please don't come at me with pitchforks.
22:42
I want to be really, like, very, very careful here because it's
22:47
important to distinguish between identity politics as a living
22:51
political tradition and identity politics as it is deployed in
22:56
corporate and even nonprofit spaces, which, you know, all
22:59
Garby talks about in his book. And I know that there is an
23:02
example from his book that hit you really, really hard.
23:07
And I wasn't even present to it until you brought it up.
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Yeah, it's something that it just keeps coming back to me.
23:15
And I think it's just a good example to contextualize this of
23:18
like when is there a displacement, When is there a
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disconnect from what what we're really trying to get after So
23:26
Moussa talks about? But we're on first name bases
23:28
now, OK. Well, yeah, I hope to be
23:32
someday. Moussa Al Garbi talks about who
23:36
actually participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement and
23:41
through through the research that he's anchored in.
23:44
What what we saw is what actually happened is that people
23:47
who were most involved in that movement, we're not working
23:50
class people who when we think about Occupy Wall Street are the
23:54
humans who are most impacted by this.
23:56
But rather it was people who sit closer to symbolic capitalists,
24:00
those with access to socioeconomic benefits of
24:04
education and network. And his critique was
24:07
exemplifying the way that language policing was a huge
24:11
part of the organizing dynamic, which for many of us who've been
24:15
in organizing spaces, you know, what this dance is, is tracking
24:19
actively as a large process who was using the correct
24:24
terminology about a given identity as you're organizing.
24:28
And to hold that mirror up for us.
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He is saying that a working class person walking into that
24:34
space would feel incredibly alienated because language
24:38
policing in this form of identity politics pulls us from
24:41
the class struggle. This way of engagement is not
24:46
centering class struggle, it's centering how to be right and do
24:50
things the right way. So taking that example and just
24:54
bringing to the central question that he's asking us is are we
24:58
talking about class or not? And this is not saying that
25:02
class and race are not intertwined.
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This is late stage racialized capitalism like that.
25:09
Obviously there is nuance here for us to be talking about.
25:14
And the way for us to reframe and be clear about what we're
25:16
saying is that we're asking how is the politic being used?
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How is it being used? And as white collar workers, we
25:25
need to be practice at identifying when identity
25:28
politics has been decoupled from the material reality of who has
25:33
what and why. Again, coming back to whose
25:36
interests are we actually serving.
25:39
And unfortunately, in corporations, it can end up just
25:42
serving profitability and individual gain.
25:45
Even when we were fiercely and strategically trying to undo
25:48
that, this cannot be sold. Our liberation cannot be sold.
25:54
And as long as it is, the system will remain and only we will
25:58
gain as as those who are sitting in this middle space so.
26:02
No subscription services for collective liberation.
26:05
Unfortunately, actually, fortunately not.
26:09
So OK, we're going to work. We're grooving in this and this,
26:14
these questions again, all of these Aparna and I are have to
26:18
ask ourselves an answer. We are with you in this, so
26:21
we're talking about identity politics.
26:23
The question for you is what identity is most important to
26:26
you? Obviously, there's no wrong
26:30
answer. Second question, is class
26:33
analysis part of your understanding or care for this
26:36
identity? Who are you leaving behind and
26:41
why? Yeah.
26:43
Well, you know, I have shared with you about some people that
26:47
I know in my community here in the Pacific Northwest who are
26:53
wealthy. They've grown up wealthy and
26:56
they've come to America and really positioned themselves as
27:01
a person of color and owning an identity of discrimination,
27:07
right? Owning an identity of being
27:10
under resourced when they have never, ever, not once in their
27:13
life been under resourced. And just how hollow it feels to
27:20
be in in their presence. How hollow it feels to read
27:24
their writing. How hollow it feels to see them
27:27
in places and spaces talking about how hard it is to be a
27:31
person of color in the United States without actually owning
27:35
up to the fact that they have never once gone hungry.
27:38
They've never that had a house that's not clean because there's
27:42
somebody who comes and cleans their home.
27:44
You know, they've never really suffered, but they're so deeply
27:47
steeped in that identity. And it brings me to my third
27:51
distraction, which I also want to be really careful about
27:56
because I know the pitchforks come out when I see this, which
27:59
is picking favorites from minoritized groups to make
28:04
capitalism and all of the evils that come from it palatable,
28:08
right? Women certainly have been used
28:11
for this right? Now, in this in this moment, I
28:13
see very prominent women like Mel Robbins and Reese
28:17
Witherspoon Hawking AI to other women, encouraging women to
28:22
upload their bank statements into an LLM, right?
28:26
No, thank you. Like, that's a really bad idea.
28:28
If you thought of doing that or your medical records, please
28:30
don't do that. People of color, queer folks,
28:34
right? Like, I don't want the beehive
28:37
to come for me. But there are a lot of people
28:39
who, for instance, think Beyoncé stands for collective
28:43
liberation. And I'm just like, well, Beyoncé
28:45
stands for Beyoncé. And being a billionaire, she's
28:50
not, she's not coming to save anybody, right?
28:53
And yeah. I I just found out that Sam
29:01
Altman is gay. Your text message when you
29:03
found. That.
29:06
I think I laughed out loud. OK.
29:10
And obviously like it's not that.
29:12
I don't think that he has used his identity to like create any
29:16
gain and positionality. I didn't even know that he was
29:19
not that. That's a marker for like, is he
29:21
benefiting from it or not? But wow, was that a surprise.
29:25
Well, it was Peter Thiel. Right.
29:28
Well, these people are building surveillance technology to
29:31
surveil and harm queer and trans folks.
29:37
Sorry. Yeah, Sam Altman met his future
29:41
husband in Peter Thiel's hot tub.
29:44
I wonder what? The you want deep on this.
29:47
Dude, I couldn't. I mean, that's just gossip.
29:49
I don't even I don't even know, but I'm just like what were they
29:52
taught it just the way what that makes me feel best Anyways, I'm
30:03
sorry. It's OK.
30:07
I don't even. Know you have the words.
30:09
A lot of words. A lot of words.
30:13
Where do we go from here? Well, OK, I wanna this is this
30:19
is my peaks and symbolic capitalist moment, which is I
30:23
learn new things and then I have to show them off because I'm
30:28
like, I learned a new concept. I know a new framework.
30:30
I read a report. I mean, you know, you know this
30:32
about me. I think like it's really sad.
30:36
OK, so it's a gift. Is that a gift?
30:39
I think once you praised me for having incredible recall around,
30:43
random reports. And you know what, I would
30:46
actually like to have really incredible recall around, like
30:51
knitting or, you know, things that I have to watch a YouTube
30:56
video to do, cooking certain things, gardening.
31:01
I'm like which plant gets the egg shells and which plant gets
31:05
the coffee? I don't know.
31:07
But I would like to know. I would like to not have to, you
31:10
know, go to YouTube to find that.
31:13
But. There is there is a new thing
31:16
that I learned pretty recently and I want to share that with
31:19
folks. And it's the concept of a mote.
31:24
And there is an elder in philanthropy who brought this
31:27
concept to me. And and I said to her, I said,
31:31
oh, this sounds like gatekeeping, which is another
31:34
jargony term that I think many people are familiar with.
31:38
And she says, no, a Moat is not like gig keeping a Moat is way
31:43
worse. A Moat is really like, it's a
31:48
thing that's hard to breach, right?
31:51
You cannot breach an invite to Davos.
31:53
You cannot breach an invite only grant structured that is
31:59
designed only to reward the kind of organizing that poses 0
32:03
threat to the funding organization or their living
32:07
donors. Right.
32:08
And I've really been sitting with this concept of a Moat, and
32:16
I'm wondering if you will help make the connection between that
32:20
and Garbi's points around redistribution and
32:26
predistribution. Learning, right, So, so right.
32:33
If we are if we are hoarding, what do we need to be doing?
32:36
We need to redistribute and what does that actually mean?
32:38
It's a deliberate transfer of income, wealth, property, power
32:42
to one group, let's say PMC to another, say working class
32:46
people. And what Al Garvey is saying to
32:49
us is that symbolic capitalists love to take from the rich,
32:53
right. So there is some kind of not a
32:55
lot of redistribution, but something's happening between,
32:58
you know, the top owning class to the professional managerial
33:02
class and we are much less reliable about actually giving
33:07
to others. We, the PMC, maybe to an
33:10
institution, to a nonprofit, but sparingly when you look at the
33:13
data are a lot. And at the same time, we have
33:17
this long standing fantasy that if we tax again, like we talked
33:20
about earlier, if we tax people like Elon Musk hard enough, we
33:24
can solve the world's problems without any imposition on people
33:27
like us. And so again, coming back to to
33:32
us, the listeners, the people are part of this.
33:36
Do you think we will actually solve class inequality through
33:39
taxing billionaires? Do you want economic inequality
33:43
to change without your wealth to be impacted?
33:48
And this is not a judgement. These are just the questions we
33:51
need to be asking ourselves. And I will say first hand, of
33:53
course I have wanted that in my life like I and I've seen small
33:58
and big ways that myself protection has existed.
34:01
It's uncomfortable and it's by design.
34:04
We are people who genuinely want good.
34:07
And remember that this, this section, what we're talking
34:10
about is what is distracting us. We're asking how are we being
34:15
distracted? And this is another form of
34:18
distraction. Is wanting things to be exactly
34:21
this way. There is an influencer who she's
34:27
a young woman who is making content for younger millennials
34:32
and Gen. Z around building wealth.
34:36
And she built her social media empire paying $4.00 an hour to
34:44
workers in the Philippines, right?
34:51
There are, I mean, all across the US, but I think certainly in
34:56
places like the Bay Area, the like the Seattle area, there are
34:59
all of these conversations about the restaurant owners who are
35:04
fighting the minimum wage increases.
35:12
And I think about examples like that a lot because those are the
35:16
things where I'm like, well, taxing the ultra wealthy isn't
35:20
going to change that, right? You just want to find a way to
35:26
outsource the what you think is the burden of paying living,
35:35
living wages. And there's another author I
35:40
want to bring in. I actually found his work even
35:43
before Doctor Catherine Lewis, Jason Hickel.
35:47
He's got a really great accent too.
35:48
So if you listen to him on Podcast A+, and I think that his
35:53
work is very useful to make sense of all of these concepts
35:57
as well that we've been talking about.
35:58
And he says that capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic.
36:04
And there was recently AOC did an interview.
36:06
And I know like people have a lot of those beef with AOC for
36:09
lots of different reasons. But one of the things that she
36:11
says in this interview is nobody can earn their way into becoming
36:16
a billionaire, right? Because becoming a billionaire
36:19
requires cheating. It requires cheating.
36:23
You have to pay people less. You have to manipulate markets.
36:27
You have to spend money on lobbying to get certain laws
36:30
passed that take accountability and responsibility away from you
36:35
for providing, even at a minimum, a humane or working
36:39
condition. Right, like we constantly seem
36:44
stories about Amazon warehouse workers who are peeing in
36:48
plastic bottles because they don't get breaks or the bathroom
36:51
is too far away from wherever they are or even like something
36:55
so horrible in heinous. And I think at least every year
36:57
there is one of these moments where somebody has died or
37:01
passed out on the warehouse floor and the managers are just
37:05
telling workers to work around that person's body, which is
37:08
horrible, right? And so, and I'll connect the
37:11
dots here, right? Because under capitalism,
37:15
production, which is like the sum of what is getting made and
37:18
sold, products and services both is controlled by the interests
37:22
of capital, which is the billionaires, the ultra rich,
37:24
the CEOs, the philanthropists, the VCs and workers rarely get a
37:31
voice or even the financial benefit of generating all of
37:36
that wealth, all of that money. And the result is overproduction
37:39
of profitable things. And you know, the example that
37:42
always comes to me, and I joke about this a lot, is buying
37:45
another $25 lipstick, right? Because it's made by a South
37:49
Asian woman. And you know, I should be
37:50
supporting women of color owned businesses.
37:53
I don't need another lipstick. But the chronic under production
37:59
of things that we actually need, we actually need more renewable
38:04
energy. We actually need better public
38:05
transportation. We actually need affordable
38:08
housing and all of his research, I mean, there's one bit of
38:12
research from a couple of years ago where he says that we could
38:16
meet the basic needs of everybody in the world with 30%
38:20
of current production and resource allocation, which to me
38:24
was wild, right? But that would include it
38:27
producing things that we need, not producing a bunch of garbage
38:31
that's going to end up in a landfill by way of a yard sale
38:35
and goodwill. And what he has written most
38:40
recently, right, like his paper that came out last year in 2025,
38:43
he said that capitalist growth systematically misallocates
38:47
resources towards countries that already have more than enough,
38:51
while half of the countries in the world have too few resources
38:54
to even make meet basic needs. And I just want folks to stick
38:58
with what that's saying. What that's saying is half of
39:01
all countries in the world, they're the people that live in
39:05
them. They don't have access to enough
39:08
food, enough calories, They don't have access to clean
39:12
drinking water. They are not stably housed.
39:16
And I don't mean like can they pay rent or mortgage.
39:19
They probably don't even live in permanent housing like an actual
39:23
building, which is kind of wild. Half of the world.
39:29
It's, it's like it's so much to take in and, and also not at the
39:34
same time because we professional, managerial, class,
39:38
symbolic capitalists are not outside of that system.
39:41
Everything that a partner just said, we are actually really,
39:45
really important to making it happen.
39:47
We are the managerial and narrative layer that makes it
39:50
possible, that makes it feel reasonable, that makes it feel
39:55
sometimes progressive. Look at the ESG, look at our
39:59
policies. Let us be the facilitators of
40:01
good, and we are told to be that.
40:04
And that is a distraction. We are distracted by the
40:07
performance of our own goodness. I mean, yeah, I am working
40:17
really hard on shedding that. OK.
40:18
So I feel like we've been pretty hard on ourselves and on people
40:22
like us. So let's talk about what do we
40:25
need to do differently? Yeah, yeah.
40:27
And also, just what do we want? So, like, what do we really
40:30
want? So Jason Hickel research also
40:34
talks about this eco socialist transformation, a meaning, a
40:40
meaningful structural change in how economies are organized.
40:45
When asking who wants this, 72% in the United States say yes we
40:54
want eco socialist transformation, 82% in the
40:57
United Kingdom, 72% in the United States.
41:01
This is not a fringe position. The people who are telling you
41:05
that material structural change is unrealistic are wrong.
41:10
Look at the polling. If people want this the most,
41:14
they are protecting something other than us, and that's good
41:20
news for us. And also the point of this
41:22
episode. We do want change.
41:25
Even when we're stuck in this position, we want change.
41:29
And whether it's being fully felt in your system or not, even
41:33
just knowing that there is avoidance means that there is
41:36
something that we all need and we have to trust that.
41:40
So the first thing that we're going to say, and you've heard
41:43
us say this before, is that we need to get serious about
41:45
organizing. And I want to be really specific
41:47
about what that means because that word gets used pretty
41:51
loosely. This week.
41:53
I was really lucky to spend some time with an author and my
41:58
personal hero, Jazz Brazzak. They're 28 years old.
42:04
They've salted at Starbucks, which means they got a job
42:07
specifically for the purpose of organizing a store.
42:10
They've organized, they've organized in a lot of different
42:12
industry. And they they've been teaching
42:14
an organizer school here in Seattle this week.
42:17
They also wrote a book called Get on the Job and Organize.
42:22
And, you know, things that I've learned from them in their book.
42:25
And what Lars, you and I have also learned from Jennifer Pan,
42:29
whose episode we both listened to on NPR's Code Switch
42:32
recently, is that decades of multiracial labor organizing
42:38
data tells us that unions have done more to advance the
42:43
material well-being of non white people.
42:45
And when I wrote that, you actually pointed out to me that
42:48
it's actually all people. And it's important to say that
42:51
because the point is that we need to be advancing people's
42:55
needs agnostic of identity, that unions have done more to advance
43:01
the material needs of people that work in them, regardless of
43:05
race, gender, other aspects of identity, than any DEI program
43:11
anywhere. And not some unions, You write.
43:14
Unions as a structure of collective power have delivered
43:19
what billions of dollars spent every year on DEI have not, and
43:24
I would say will not. And I think when we when we talk
43:28
about why, there's just there's a couple of things that feel
43:30
really important to name, to contextualize this one.
43:33
When we organized it together, whether it is in a union OR not,
43:38
what we are saying is that we trust each other to know what we
43:41
need, and it gives us the room to actually participate.
43:47
And as a tech worker said to me recently at the Mayday March,
43:51
it's negotiation. There's dignity there that when
43:55
we get to participate, when we get to sit next to each other
43:58
and say I need this, can you help me?
44:00
Can you help me have access? The person next to me needs
44:03
this. How can we help each other get
44:04
access? That in itself if you just
44:07
outside of the union formalization or not, that's a
44:10
value that we should be living and breathing into our lives.
44:16
And this is not a statement against DI strategy necessarily,
44:21
but rather saying that if what we really want is job security,
44:26
fair wages, better working condition, maintaining human
44:29
dignity, labor organizing is the best path.
44:33
And now for those who have been with us and are in white collar
44:38
jobs where that doesn't feel feasible, just know, well, you
44:42
know what we're going to say because you've been with us,
44:44
Start with a conversation. Just be honest about what you
44:47
need and get involved in efforts that are outside of your
44:51
socioeconomic cluster. Be curious and learn.
44:54
Go back to that question we asked around identity and class
44:58
and start to fill in your own gaps.
45:00
We can absolutely break our patterns.
45:02
We have to, and it starts with just talking to each other that
45:06
we want to do it and what do we care about?
45:09
Move towards it. Yeah, I spent a day this week
45:12
with Jazz and their team at at the union hall this this week.
45:18
And somebody asked me, they're like, what's, you know, you're
45:21
not in a union or what are, what's, what are you organizing
45:24
towards? And I was like, my personal
45:28
mission is to radicalize every tech worker.
45:31
I know. That's it, right?
45:34
And so I'll say that one of the things that we can do, and you
45:39
know, Glenn Block on our episode from a couple of weeks ago said
45:43
this as well. They were like, you don't feel
45:45
like you can do this at work, do this outsider work, right?
45:49
And so much of that is about developing real race and class
45:56
consciousness, not diversity literacy.
45:59
A lot of us have diversity literacy, but race and class
46:03
consciousness, which means understanding the history of how
46:07
race was constructed to serve capital, especially in North
46:12
America and Western Europe. It means understanding who built
46:17
the material conditions we benefit from it and who was
46:20
excluded from accumulating wealth across generations and
46:24
who was still excluded from accumulating wealth across
46:27
generations. It means understanding that the
46:30
gains of working class white workers historically has comment
46:35
at the expense of workers of color.
46:37
It's still happening. The gains of white women have
46:40
come on the backs of women of color.
46:42
None of this is accidental. It is a policy outcome.
46:46
And it means that at some point, you know, we have to be willing
46:51
to redistribute and work in ways that actually costs us
46:56
something. Yeah, yeah.
46:59
And that's, you know, coming back to Moussel Garvey who's
47:02
saying that symbolic capitalists pursue justice through past that
47:06
don't cost us that don't risk anything or or or require us to
47:09
change our lifestyles. And So what we're asking what
47:12
the question we're bringing in today is, are we willing to
47:15
change that and not in a guilt spiral way, in a structural way,
47:20
What are you willing to give up? And I again want to just role
47:25
model that this is a question that I have a lot to learn.
47:29
Even answering the question for real.
47:31
What am I willing to give up is not a simple question to answer.
47:35
And maybe a better question might be what do I need to be
47:40
able to share more with others? What do I need to share and rely
47:44
on others more? What do I need to release my
47:47
idea of the specific form of class safety, right?
47:51
There's something that needs to be filled.
47:53
It's not just I give up and that's it.
47:56
But there's an entire relational dynamic that needs to change in
48:00
our lives for us to be able to actually answer that question.
48:03
And you probably shouldn't answer the question alone.
48:05
And similarly, you know, with redistribution, I think I can
48:10
understand it at a high level, but the depth of economic
48:13
planning participation that's needed, the way that, you know,
48:18
leftists who have studied this in such depth and understand
48:23
what this economic participation looks like is a place where I'm
48:26
also learning, learning with you.
48:28
And local mutual aid is a really good place to start.
48:32
Listening to people saying what they need and responding to it
48:35
is also a really good place to start and go.
48:38
So we need to get out of our heads and literally get outside
48:42
together. And I'm speaking to myself too,
48:45
as I say that we can do that. Let's take those steps.
48:48
I love that, OK, But I'm going to ask people to come back into
48:51
their head for the the last little thing, no pun intended,
48:57
with all of the head comments. So the last thing that I think
49:02
we want to chat about is AI. And I don't want to spend, you
49:04
know, we're not going to do a whole episode on this because
49:06
there are lots of really great conversations happening already
49:09
with AI ethicists. And I encourage folks to please
49:12
find them, but also please stop making like dumb little like,
49:17
you know, art on Claude or Gemini or Chachi PT, right?
49:22
Like just stop doing that. You're giving your data to other
49:26
companies. We have to have some serious
49:30
conversations about what is happening to our white collar
49:34
workforce right now. AI is not a productivity tool
49:39
for your team. It is a structural
49:41
reorganization of who gets paid for what and we are not exempt
49:46
and a lot of us have been feeling that for the past year.
49:49
We are next, and if we do not understand that, we are going to
49:53
be blindsided in exactly the way working class Americans were
49:58
blindsided by deindustrialization, where so
50:02
many working class folks were blindsided by offshoring That's
50:06
happened in the last 20 or 30 years.
50:09
And that's really the frame we want to leave you with is that
50:13
the institution isn't failing in spite of us, It's failing
50:17
because we are keeping it going. This is the Moat that we are
50:20
building. This is the Moat that we built.
50:23
And that was Quran writing about philanthropy at the start of
50:28
this episode. It is also true about our
50:32
organizations, our industries, our comfortable insistence that
50:37
the right language, the right hires, the rant, the right grant
50:40
will be enough. Also the right brand and it
50:46
won't be. We know it won't be enough and I
50:49
think some of us have known that for a little while.
50:55
Well, shall we? Rapid fire.
50:59
Let's rapid fire, yeah. And it'll be of course, theme
51:03
for today. You know, I hope you know where
51:07
our our source material was for this episode.
51:10
So Aparna, Catherine Liu or Musa L Garvey, who would you want to
51:16
Co host an episode? Catherine Liu, her depth is just
51:21
incredible, unmatched. And her affect, you can't even
51:25
tell. It's incredible.
51:27
Yeah. OK, symbolic capitalism or
51:31
professional managerial class. Which label are you more willing
51:36
to put on yourself? So it used to be PMCI was very
51:39
comfortable sitting in that. But I think now symbolic
51:42
capitalist because capitalism names the structure.
51:45
PMC definitely names the class, and I want to get more
51:49
comfortable locating myself in the structure.
51:53
Beautiful. What is one thing white collar
51:56
workers could do tomorrow that actually cost them something?
52:02
Give to an organization they did not personally select as a
52:07
change maker. Yeah, move.
52:11
Move your money. One thing we are not doing
52:17
enough on this show. Talking about money
52:20
specifically, who has it, how much, how they keep it.
52:23
Yeah, we've not had any money conversations.
52:28
These are my confessions, so if you're sitting in discomfort
52:34
right now, I want to say that is the right response.
52:37
That is your nervous system telling you something that is
52:40
true. Don't feel like you need to
52:44
manage it. Stay in it for a minute.
52:47
We're with you. This is our open door.
52:50
The institution isn't failing in spite of us.
52:53
Karen said that, and I keep coming to that because it's the
52:56
sentence that dissolves the distance.
52:58
There is no them building the Moat.
53:01
We are right. We're right here with the
53:04
shovels. So thank you for being with us
53:09
today. Resources from this episode, as
53:12
always, are in the show notes, including links to Al Garbi
53:15
Substax, specifically his piece on and Smart people and
53:19
tribalism, and on redistribution and predistribution taken, Jason
53:23
Hickel's work on capitalism and economic democracy, and
53:27
Katherine Lew's YouTube conversation on the monetization
53:30
of trauma. All of these are well worth your
53:33
full attention. Yeah, And if this episode landed
53:37
for you, send it to a person in your life whose, Yeah, uses the
53:42
most stressless language, maybe has never been to an organizing
53:45
meeting. Be the invitation for them
53:48
accurate. And we look forward to seeing
53:52
you next week on our final episode of Season 1, which is
53:56
unbelievable to say. And this is a special episode
53:59
because we are hearing from you all.
54:02
So many amazing white collar workers shared with us what
54:06
dignity means to them at work. For real.
54:08
And we are leaving you all with a hopeful path ahead that we
54:13
have all that we need to make this change.
54:15
We've just seen it created together.
54:18
Thank you for being with us and we will circle back for one last
54:21
time this season next week.